A Spell for the Revolution (33 page)

“Colonel Tilghman,” Proctor said.

Tilghman seemed startled to see him. “You’ve followed
us on this folly, have you?” His smile was genuine, but his face strained.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Proctor asked.

“We’re near done with letters—”

“Tench!” It was Washington’s voice, cutting through the jumble of words like a saber. The general turned from his letters, holding up his hand to silence Harrison and the others.

“Sir!” Tilghman replied, jumping to his feet.

“While I’m thinking of it, who was that young New Yorker, looks like a schoolboy, who brought the cannons with him?”

“Captain Alexander Hamilton, sir.”

“Hamilton? He held the hill for us at White Plains when the Germans marched through that awful fire.”

“Yes, sir. He held his men together and brought off all their supplies.”

“Keep him close,” Washington said. “And see if you can’t find more like him.” With that he turned right back to Harrison, Meade, and Webb, shooting down their next suggestion for a camp because it was too easy to cut off.

Tilghman chuckled, and his ghost, as if offended by this slightest sign of merriment, reached down into his chest and twisted its fist. Tilghman’s chuckle turned into a hard, thick cough. He covered his mouth, leaning his head away from Proctor. When the coughing subsided, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

“Excuse me,” he said. “It’s this pernicious damp.”

“I just arrived in camp. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to help earlier.” He and Deborah were trying to find a way to defeat the Covenant, but the men here were also trying to win the war. Every time he reported to Tilghman, Proctor felt like he should be doing more to help them too.

“Not at all,” Tilghman said, clapping his clean hand on Proctor’s shoulder. “We’re nearly done with the despatches. Most of the men have terms of service ending before the
new year. If the states don’t send us new drafts of men, it’ll make the army we have tonight look large by comparison.”

“Is that what all these letters are?” Proctor asked.

“Those are mostly written,” Tilghman said. “But it’s no secret to say that the mood here is darker than the night around us. So some of the officers are taking this chance to revise their wills, and some are writing letters absolving their relations of any treason. A few are sending notes to their families, informing them of their safe escape, but that’s only a few. If you need to send a letter to someone, we can include it with the couriers when they go.”

Proctor looked at the dwindling supply of paper and thought about who he might write a letter to. He wondered if his mother would even read a letter from him. Was he as dead to her as she pretended? Probably so. If he had any family at all now, it was the family of witches who had gathered in Salem, and he couldn’t send them any letters—with The Farm hidden, there was no way to deliver them.

“Actually,” Proctor said. “I wonder if I might take some sheets for Mister Thomas Paine.”

“Paine? Is he here?”

“He is,” Proctor said. “He’s sought solitude away from the rest of the men so that he might work on a new pamphlet, and he asked me to bring as much paper as I might find. I know supplies are limited—”

Tilghman grabbed a stack of blank pages from the table, yanking one from beneath the pen of a young officer just beginning to write. “We’ll have more paper sent up from Morristown or Newark. Take all of this and come back if he needs more.”

“Thank you,” Proctor said.

Tilghman started to speak, but the spirit riding him shook his fist around in his chest again, and the words disappeared in a spasm of coughing.

Proctor drew power into himself and thought of a spell
he might use to sever the cursed spirit from Tilghman. Then he thought of the dead man back in the tent at Fort Lee and opened his fist, letting the power flow out of him again.

If they didn’t find enough power to break the curse soon, he doubted the army would survive until the end of the year. And if the army didn’t survive, he doubted the witches in Salem would have any chance at all. The Covenant would send Bootzamon and their other assassins to pick them off one by one. He had to pour out his worries to someone—

He turned back to Tilghman. “I would like to write a letter to a friend,” he said. “Captain Revere, of Boston. Although he may be a colonel by now.”

Tilghman cleared a space for him at the table. “Use whatever you need. We’ll send it out with the next post rider.”

Proctor breathed a sigh of relief and sat down to jot a quick letter saying that he and Deborah had been struggling in the service of the war, and the situation looked bleak unless they found help somewhere before the end of the year. He thanked Paul for his friendship and wished him well.

Innocent enough, if anyone else read it, and all true. But he trusted Revere to do the right thing with that knowledge if he could.

When he returned to the campfire, Paine was scribbling intently in the margins of salvaged sheets. He looked up at Proctor with a mixture of impatience and anger, taking the offered paper without a word of thanks, going to work instantly on a clean sheet. The drumhead vibrated with each tap of his pen to the page.

Despite Paine’s gruffness, the presence of his guardian had an instant and amazing effect on Proctor. He hadn’t realized how much being surrounded by the cursed spirits had a suffocating and corrosive impact on him. But he felt
his tension ease and his anxiety fade the moment he stepped into Paine’s presence. The angel was no longer visible to him the same way, but he could sense her there, imbuing Paine’s work.

He opened his mouth to say something, but Deborah put her finger to her lips and rose, leading him a few steps aside.

“That presence is amazing,” she whispered. “What is it?”

“I believe it’s the spirit of his wife,” Proctor said. “She died giving birth to their first child.”

“And stayed with him of her own accord, tied to the man and not the place?” She watched Paine with new regard. “Amazing,” she repeated. “I think if he were at the gallows tree, she’d find a way to save him.”

The comparison only made Proctor think of that hapless soldier pretending to be a Quaker in New York, the one they’d seen hung outside the mansion the day after the fire. He did not want to share a similar fate. “What did you do, right before I left?”

“The same thing I had been doing with the wounded soldier earlier,” she said, hiding her mouth with her hand, though Paine seemed too preoccupied to notice anything they said. “I poured my hope and strength into him. ‘But I will hope continually, and praise Thee more and more. I will go in the strength of the Lord God.’ ”

He recognized her spell as a quote from the Psalms, but he couldn’t say which one. “I’m surprised you have any left.”

“That’s the remarkable thing,” she said. “I had so little left to draw on, but everything I poured into him came back to me increased.”

“How?”

“Through her power. I’ve been thinking …”

That hardly counted as news—when did she ever stop thinking? “Yes?”

“The Covenant wants to keep the British empire together as a focus, a way of channeling magic through the symbol of the king to achieve the power they crave.”

“Right.”

“What focus do we—as Americans—have? We all belong to our separate states, follow our separate churches and faiths, identify with our separate regions.”

“We have the Declaration of Independence,” Proctor said, remembering the way it had been published in every newspaper and read in every church, at least in Massachusetts.

“And we have
Common Sense.”

“Paine’s pamphlet.”

“Yes,” she said. “That was read by people in every state. Without it, would we have had the Declaration?”

“I see what you’re saying. His new pamphlet could be a focus, allowing us to pour magic into the soldiers to break the curse.”

“I don’t know that we could break it,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know that you and I together could channel that much power.”

“But we could strengthen the army against the effects of the curse.”

“And buy us time to find a solution.” She looked at him with eager, intense eyes—a way she had not looked at him in months. “We have to find other ways to focus the good that is here and fight this evil power.”

“Why—” He bit off the question in his mouth, afraid to say too much.

“Why? I think that is self-evident. These are the people who murdered my parents, who murdered the Walker family, who would have killed you. They mean to—”

“That’s not what I was going to ask.” He took a step back, angry at himself.

“What is it? Spit it out.”

He spun on her. “Why have you been so distant from me? Why have you been holding back?”

Her own face grew dark with anger. “I know why you hid your visit to Emily Rucke from me in New York. You still have feelings for her. You like her fine clothes and scented perfumes and delicate manners. You—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, don’t I? You should have seen the puppy-dog look on your face when you stared at her. I can’t be like her, Proctor. I will never be a fine lady or own those fancy clothes. And I’ll never own slaves to tend my hair—”

“You’re a fine one to talk about slaves. You never asked my opinion, never asked my permission. You just used me like a slave.”

He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, and he wished he knew a spell to call them back. But her accusations about Emily hurt. Maybe because they were a little too close to the truth. He couldn’t say that he hadn’t thought of her at all, especially when Deborah kept him at arm’s length and made him feel so alone.

“I am sorry I did that to you,” she said tersely. “I was afraid, afraid I would have to stand against the Covenant alone, and I knew I was not strong enough. That doesn’t make the way you look at Emily Rucke a lie.”

She wiped her eye quickly, then seemed ashamed that she had done so. She turned her back to Proctor.

“Deborah—it’s not like that.”

“Save your words,” she said. “I don’t need them.”

As she walked off toward one of the fires where some of the other women gathered, Paine looked up from his work. “A very agreeable young woman,” he said. Then he picked up another sheet and bent back over the drum to continue writing.

Proctor just stared at him

He’d had thoughts of Emily, but they were idle thoughts, for a world that might have been, not for the world he lived
in. Emily could run an estate and keep order among the servants, but he couldn’t imagine her marching miles in the dark, giving all her strength to others to keep them going. She had the courage to face down cheating shopkeepers, but he couldn’t imagine her fighting for her life against a scarecrow animated by the soul of a dead witch.

Paine looked up from his work again. “You’re welcome to sleep next to the fire again, if you like. It was no trouble last night.”

Deborah had already disappeared among the campfires and shadows; Proctor could no longer make out which of the figures moving in the distance was hers. What would he say to her if he caught up with her right now? Best to give her peace tonight and try to talk to her again tomorrow.

He sat across from Paine and held his head in his hands. “Thank you,” he said.

Proctor woke late the next morning to the sound of distant gunfire. His neck was stiff and his back sore from sleeping curled up against the corncrib. He had mud plastered to his cheek, stubble rough on his fingers as he tried to brush it away. The fire was long cold, not even coals among the ashes, and Paine and his drum were both gone.

As Proctor sat up and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he saw that the camp had already woken. Far from the others, the fire dead, and Paine too distracted by his writing to remember him to anyone, it must have been easy to overlook Proctor. He entered the tiny village, hearing the distant boom of guns again.

“What’s that?” he said to one of the Maryland companies as he passed them.

“Cornwallis is attacking our rear guard at New-bridge,” answered one of them.

“Aren’t we going to provide support?” Proctor asked.

“And put the whole army at risk? Not a chance.”

“Are we going to retreat then?”

The Marylander shrugged. “Not yet. I suspect it will come to that.”

Proctor wandered through the village, which seemed startled to discover an army in its midst. Children in winter coats stood at the gates of their yards, worried looks on their faces as they watched the soldiers in their summer uniforms stand shivering in the streets. Outside barns and storefronts, local farmers argued with quartermasters over the matter of supplies.

“If we feed the army, we’ll go hungry,” one of them complained as Proctor passed.

“We’re already hungry,” the officer argued back. “You should do your patriotic duty and sell us whatever you can spare.”

“What do you have to buy it with?” the farmer said. “Patriotism? That won’t feed my children—”

Proctor continued past them, turning his head anytime he saw a woman in case it might be Deborah. Likely enough, she’d been invited into someone’s home. The women, at least, might expect to be fed and given warm blankets.

“Excuse me,” he said to a group of three soldiers when he came to the spot where he’d last seen her the night before. “There was a woman here last night, in plain clothes, she’d been nursing the wounded. Have you seen her?”

“Oh, we sent the women off first thing this morning to Morristown,” one said, wearing his ghost draped around him like a winter coat.

“Philadelphia,” mumbled a second man.

“Some went to Newark too,” said a third, chewing a plug of tobacco just like the ghost that haunted him. “Though anyplace is better than here. This is no place for women, not with the Hessians at our heels, and the Redcoats coming on theirs.” He looked north, toward the sound of the guns.

“Sweet on one of them, were you?” asked the first man.

“No,” Proctor said. “No, she was … my sister. That’s all. I want to be sure she’s safe.”

“She’s safer in Newark than she is here, that’s for certain,” the tobacco chewer said. He turned his head and spat.