A Spell for the Revolution (24 page)

The headquarters had been nearly empty that first day as a result of Washington sending out everyone to gather information about the fire in New York. On most days, there were a dozen men inside at any one time, including many young officers who were Proctor’s age. On the one hand, he felt a certain envy of them. He wanted to share their camaraderie and sense of purpose.

On the other, he didn’t want to share the curse that hung over all of them. Though he tried to shut out the presence of the ghosts, he could not. They were spirits trapped in a world that should have released them: not all were soldiers, nor had all died violent deaths. Many men carried no more than an infant, tiny spirits dead in birth or cradle. Some of those were the worst, wailing in confusion, inconsolable. Some men carried mothers or grandmothers with them; Proctor often saw those spirits fail to intrude, as if this were just one more burden in a long life of burdens they needed to bear.

But in and around the headquarters, closest to Washington, the dead were all Continental soldiers, southern militia recognizable in their hunting shirts, hundreds of Marylanders killed at the old stone house covering the retreat from Brooklyn, and other faces that looked as familiar to Proctor as the faces around him. He felt a constant coolness in their presence that had little to do with the advancing autumn, and he often lifted his head to answer someone only to realize he’d heard the whispering of the ghosts passing through the room and nothing more.

Like the men he worked with, Proctor also had a mission: to break the curse so they could fight the war. Day to day, he felt like he was making as much progress against it as they were against the British.

He and Deborah usually tried to meet in the evenings, if only for a few minutes. Her experience was similar. After
they’d been in camp a couple of weeks, he found her one night, sitting just outside the circle of a campfire’s light, dabbing tears from her eyes.

He sat down next to her and said nothing for a while. Finally, she sighed, wiping both eyes with the back of her hand, and sat up straighter.

“How do you think they’re doing on The Farm?” he asked.

“I hope that Magdalena is teaching them well,” Deborah said. “I hope that Abigail can lift big stones, that Sukey has learned to keep her mouth closed, and Esther has learned to open hers. I hope that Ezra has finished the new rooms, and stays warm inside by the fire. I hope that Zoe is …” She started to choke up before she could get out the words. “I just hope she’s still alive. I wish we had never made that rule about sending no letters.”

Proctor nodded. “I wrote to Paul Revere, but he has been stationed in Maine and unable to check on them.” He sighed. “This is the first year since I could walk that I haven’t been in the fields at harvesttime.”

“I hate this,” Deborah said. “The world is too far out of order.”

“You mean”—he looked around to make sure no one was too close, and then dropped his voice anyway—“the curse.”

“Not just the curse, the cursed war. All wars are cursed.” She covered her face with her hands again, holding them there for a second, then wiping the tears off her cheeks. “How is it going for you?”

Proctor started to tell her about his day, which included more time running menial errands than it did copying letters, and then stopped. “I haven’t learned anything new in days.”

Deborah nodded. “Only the soldiers are affected. Enlisted, militia—that doesn’t matter. The curse doesn’t lift
once they leave. I’ve seen men who’ve gone away and come back—they all look haunted.”

“Some don’t have it so bad, but others—I don’t know how they take it,” Proctor said. “Washington especially. I can’t tell how he thinks clearly with all those spirits leaning in at his shoulder and whispering to him. It’s no wonder he doesn’t sleep.”

“I have noticed something.”

“What?”

Deborah seemed to think about it for a moment. “Washington has one of his slaves with him, doesn’t he?”

“William Lee—Lee was his hunting master in Virginia, I guess. He’s a mad horseman, utterly fearless. Washington trusts him completely, more so than some of his officers.”

Deborah nodded. “Some of the common soldiers have their wives with them, especially if they’ve been serving more than a few months.”

“Some of the officers too,” Proctor said.

“The men who have somebody unaffected by the curse seem to despair less and do better than those without, no matter what kind of ghost they carry.”

Proctor shifted, scooting closer to the fire, holding out his hands to warm them. “How does that help us break the curse?”

“I don’t know how to break the curse,” Deborah said, her voice near to cracking. “I try. I spent all day today working on a man whose ghost was barely attached to him, a minister, I think, whose head was already lifted toward heaven.”

“What happened?”

She held out her hands, as if she were trying to shape something between them, then let them fall back to her lap. “Nothing. All my efforts yielded me no more than frustration.”

He rested his hand on her knee a moment in quiet sympathy. She took his fingers in her hand and stood.

“Come,” she said. “I’ll show you what I mean.”

They rose and she led him to the tents. Most of the men were sick with camp fever or similar ills—he could hear one or two turning in their blankets; another suppressed his groans of discomfort. Proctor crossed his arms, resolving to touch nothing. One whiff of the sickly smell of their bowels and bedpans, and he tried not to breathe either. In the darkness, he could not see the ghosts, but he felt their presence as a chillness.

Deborah took a candle from a table at the entrance. She murmured “Let there be light,” and fire leapt from her fingertip to the wick, setting it aflame. Proctor turned his head anxiously to either side at this casual display of witchcraft, worried that someone might have seen. But Deborah had shielded the candle with her body to prevent notice.

She looked up and saw the surprise in his eyes. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I was in a hurry. Over here.”

She took him to one cot apart from the others. As they passed the men, several faces turned hopefully toward her, and one or two smiled. She had a gentle nod, a touch on the leg or arm for each, and Proctor could sense the healing she did even in those brief seconds. He couldn’t believe how strong she had become. It almost made him lightheaded.

At the same time, he could sense the ghosts surging at them from each man’s spot. It was as if they grew stronger while the men grew sicker.

“Here is the one I was telling you about,” she said, indicating a man asleep on a cot. There was a stool at the head of the bed. She gestured for Proctor to take a seat, then fetched herself a second stool and came to sit beside him.

“What ails him?” Proctor whispered.

“That’s just it,” she replied in similar tones. “Nothing as far as I can tell. Not beyond …”

Not beyond the curse.

She held the candle over the bed. In the flickering light, even with his best skill, it was hard for Proctor to see the ghost, in large part because the ghost didn’t wish to be seen. It shifted as fast as the shadows, but from the glimpses Proctor saw it was indeed a minister in a black coat, with his arms folded like a corpse across his chest. His face was lifted toward heaven, and he strained upward as if he might reach it by sheer force of will.

“Watch this,” Deborah whispered. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and
touched the ghost’s ankle
. Saying a prayer, she gripped the ankle tight and tried to yank the ghost free of the patient. The ghost kicked and struggled to get loose.

The sick man moaned, drawing Proctor’s eye just in time to see the man’s image shift. It looked as if his spirit was attached to the ghost’s. As the ghost tried to escape, it seemed to tug the man’s spirit out of his body.

Deborah released the ghost’s ankle. It relaxed at once, and the sick man stopped moaning. His spirit sank back into his body.

“Do you see how the two spirits are tangled together?” she whispered.

“How did you do that?” Proctor asked, still stunned.

She didn’t hear his question, or chose not to answer it. “I think most of the spirits simply feel trapped or confused. They lash out, creating pain for the men. But this one has a certainty about it—he knows his destination and does not want to be deterred from reaching it. I think it’s the only thing making this soldier sick.”

The tent flap opened, and a pretty young woman in an apron entered. She went over to the side of another patient and encouraged him to drink. Proctor saw right away that the man had almost completely recovered despite the ghost attached to him.

“What do we do?” Proctor asked, with a nod at the patient on the cot between them.

“I was hoping you would have an idea,” Deborah said.

“I’ll think on it,” he said, rising.

She tucked the covers up to the man’s chin. “If we don’t come up with something soon, I’m not sure we can save him.”

Proctor thought all the following day, but he dwelled more on Deborah’s power—she had touched a ghost as if it were flesh—than he did on thinking through solutions. How had she become so powerful, when he could scarcely do any magic at all? And why, strong as she was, did she think he had any answers?

When he met her at the tent the next evening, the sick man was awake. His eyes were white and healthy, even in the light of the candle, but his face was wasted and drawn, as if the life were being pulled right out of him. The ghost hovered over him, barely visible unless Proctor looked for it.

“Hello, Miss Walcott,” the sick man said.

“Hello, friend Livingston,” she answered softly. She sat on the edge of his cot and placed her hand on his. “I brought my brother Proctor to help me pray for you. Proctor, this is David Livingston, from Philadelphia.”

“From Germantown,” Livingston said weakly. “It’s good to meet you, Mister Brown. I’d offer you my hand, but—”

Proctor sat on the opposite side of the cot and closed the man’s hand in both of his. Livingston tried to give him a strong grip, but it was shaky at best, and his palm was clammy. “You’re in the best possible care,” Proctor said.

“Oh, I know that. Your sister is an angel.”

“I thought adding another voice to our prayers couldn’t hurt,” Deborah said. “Can we all hold hands and bow our heads?”

She made eye contact with Proctor, and he understood
that she was going to show him what she had done to try to break the curse so far.

They took one another’s hands, forming a small circle. They lowered their heads to pray silently, but while Livingston’s lips moved in recitation of the Lord’s prayer, Deborah went to work with spells. The cold energy that circled through Proctor from Livingston’s hand now sparked and flowed the other way from Deborah.

She made eye contact with him, and he read her lips as she silently recited Mark, chapter 1, verse 25, where Jesus rebuked the spirit possessing a man, saying,
Hold thy peace and come out of him
.

She said it with force, with authority, and the ghost lurched upward, but as it did so it tugged Livingston’s spirit with it. A spasm racked his body, and his hands jerked out of theirs as he folded his arms back in close to his body.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just too much of a strain.”

“No, you’re fine,” Deborah said. “You should sleep. We’ll sit here and pray over you for a while.”

“You really don’t need to go to all that trouble,” he said. “I’ve seen enough men die now to know what’s coming. I’ve made my peace with the Lord.”

“And I’ve made my decision to change His mind if I can,” she said, brushing the hair back off Livingston’s forehead.

“See what she’s like,” he said to Proctor.

“Oh, I had a notion already,” Proctor replied.

“Rest now,” Deborah commanded, her hand on his forehead. The man’s eyes blinked sleepily and he smiled, then his head sagged to one side and he fell instantly asleep.

“That was another—” Proctor left the word
spell
unsaid.

Deborah stared at him challengingly as she pulled up the man’s covers and tucked in his arms. “It’s easier for us to
pray
if he’s resting.”

Some of the other men looked their way. Deborah lifted a small blanket from the end of the bed and pulled it through the air as if drawing a curtain closed around them.

“They can’t hear us now,” she told Proctor.

It was hard to believe that was true—the other men weren’t more than six feet away—but he saw how powerful she was becoming and accepted it. Nevertheless, when he spoke again, he still held his voice to a whisper.

“Is it safe, using so much … prayer?” he asked.

“I need to practice to grow stronger,” she said. “So, yes, I practice every chance I have. Most of what I do makes these men better, helps them to heal faster, gets them back on their feet. Livingston here is the exception, because there is nothing wrong with him except the curse.”

“What other …
prayers
have you tried over him?” Proctor asked.

“I’ve used every verse for casting out spirits that I can think of, but they all have a similar effect.”

“Those are for evil spirits,” Proctor said. “This may be an evil spell that ties these spirits to the soldiers, but this isn’t an evil spirit in and of itself. It looks like a pious man.”

Deborah looked at Livingston and his spirit thoughtfully. “Yes,” she admitted. “He kind of reminds me of the Reverend Emerson.”

Proctor smiled at the mention of the Concord minister who was responsible for the two of them meeting. That seemed like a lifetime ago, even though it had only been a year and a half. Not even that. He looked at the spirit and saw the resemblance. “He’s a chaplain now, serving with the army at Fort Ticonderoga.”

“I know,” she said. “If he were closer, I would ask him for help with our prayers.”

“Prayer-prayers or
prayers?”

“Both.”

“What other kinds of prayers could we try?”

Deborah folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head to think. “Are there verses for release or letting go?”

Proctor thought about it for a moment. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”