A Spell for the Revolution (34 page)

“Bet she’s in Morristown,” insisted the first. “Safer, warmer,
and
better fed.”

Proctor marched with them across New Jersey. Every one was tense, with Cornwallis nipping at their rear guard like a dog at the seat of their pants.

Proctor stumbled to the head of the line, thinking to pursue Deborah, but Tilghman saw him and called him over. “Good to see you, Brown. We sent a lot of men off last night as couriers. Would you mind lending a hand until we get a few back?”

“I’ll be glad to,” Proctor said.

Deborah was safer away from the army, but he needed to stay here until he found a way to beat the curse. He thought he’d do it with Deborah’s help, but if she was gone for a while, he’d carry on by himself.

It was easy enough to fall into the new routine of the camp. Every day they moved locations again, sending out scouts to find the position of Howe’s troops. Proctor was busy copying letters and delivering messages.

He looked up from his desk to rub his hands together and blow on them for warmth. Through the frosted window, he saw another group of new arrivals, riflemen from Virginia’s western valleys.

All of Washington’s desperate letters for aid were beginning to have some effect. The militias had risen in both northern and southern Jersey, ambushing the Redcoats and Hessians the way the militia had beaten them at Lexington and Concord. In the main body of the army, what was left of it, soldiers were still deserting, but they were thin, hungry, and dressed in summer clothes. The new arrivals coming
in were cut from tougher leather. The bunch outside were riflemen—tall, broad-shouldered, auburn-haired, in heavy coats with heavy beards. All but one of them. He was still a boy, too small for his clothes, outsized by his own rifle. Proctor would bet that under all that dirt, his face was as smooth as a girl’s. Proctor smiled. The newcomer reminded him of Arthur Simes back home, who could have passed for twelve, tagging along with the militia to Lexington Green.

The smile faded from Proctor’s face.

Out at the edge of their camp beyond their quarters, a swirling wind kicked up veils of snow. To any other eye, that’s all it was, a mere caprice of winter.

But Proctor was in tune with the curse placed on the Americans, and he could see the truth of it: the ghosts of dead men, trapped in the mortal world, had been cursed to follow the army until they found a mortal soul, cursed to haunt that mortal until the war ended.

The newcomers were signing papers of service, reporting to duty. And the ghosts were drawn to them like crows to a carcass. Pale troops came racing over the fields, kicking up swirls of snow, eager to be the first to reach fresh souls to haunt.

It was one thing for a youngster, someone Arthur’s age, to volunteer to fight. The world was already a hard place, with injury or disease ready to strike a man down at any time. If a boy wanted to go off to war and face that, he might be no worse off than he was at home. But Proctor couldn’t let someone that young take on a cursed spirit.

Proctor bolted out the door. He heard voices in the howling wind as he walked toward the Virginians. “I beg your pardon,” he said, rounding the group of men to reach the boy hiding in the back.

A ghost shot past him, raking fingers like claws of ice along his back. He shivered and one of the Virginians laughed at him, asking, “Need a warmer coat?”

The first ghost attached itself to the leader of the group, grabbing hold of his rifle barrel like a drowning man trying to pull himself to shore. The Virginian registered the change only in his bright blue eyes, which were suddenly wary, shifting from side to side as if he’d felt someone brush against him and stick a hand into his pocket.

A second ghost stepped inside another man, who grunted as if he’d been hit. The men around chuckled at the unexplained noise, and he frowned back at them.

Proctor put his hand on the shoulder of the boy, who had watched what just happened. “I beg your pardon, friend.”

The boy spun around and his bright eyes popped wide open. “Proctor?”

Proctor’s jaw dropped. “I—”

He knew the face, the girlish curve of the jaw, the auburn curls of the hair even cut short, the bright green eyes. A mixture of surprise, shock, and relief washed over him. He had traveled so far to find her, had given up when he found her parents murdered, and now here she stood in front of him. Alexandra Walker.

“Hi, Alex—” He couldn’t say
Alexandra
, not if she had disguised herself as a man. He stumbled over his words. “Alex Walker … right?”

Anger and fear flashed across her face. She punched him in the chest, knocking him back, then turned and ran away.

Proctor started after her, but the group of men blocked his way. He tried to push through, but the biggest grabbed Proctor by the arm and tossed him back on his heels.

“What do you want with my brother Alex?” the leader said. His ghost still held on tight to the rifle, as if eager to lift it and use it.

Proctor tried to look past them. “That’s not your brother—”

His words were cut short by a bright burst of light and the taste of blood in his mouth, and he found himself on the ground. The Virginian who’d punched him towered
over him, daring him to stand up and say anything again. But the leader—Alex’s brother—knelt down beside Proctor.

“Now what were you saying about my brother?”

Proctor pushed himself up to his knees, remembering too late how Alexandra had often spoken of her over-protective brothers. He wiped the blood from his mouth and flung it onto the dirty snow that littered the ground. “Redeem their souls from deceit and violence, and let their blood be precious in your sight.”

The Virginian’s brows drew down in puzzlement.

Proctor’s mouth was still bleeding, so he swiped the blood onto his fingertips and flung it again, this time making sure to get it across Alexandra’s brother’s boots as he repeated the protective spell.

The elder Walker stood up and took a step back, and the men around him—Alex’s brothers and cousins and others from their part of the Shenandoah Valley, Proctor guessed—laughed uncertainly. They were all cursed now, every one of them carrying a spectral rider. His protective spell wouldn’t work on them all or last forever; except for the brother with blood on his boots, it would start to fade in power as soon as they walked away from this spot. But it was all he could do.

“What’s going on here?” blustered an officer’s voice.

“Nothing, friend,” Proctor said, rising up to his feet. “I misspoke, and my friend here corrected me.”

The officer looked at Proctor with a mixture of pity and disgust before he turned on the Virginian volunteers. “What’s wrong with the lot of you? Beating up on a Quaker who won’t even defend himself or name his attacker. Save it for the Redcoats.”

“Yes, sir,” Alexandra’s brother said, managing a look of genuine chagrin.

The officer looked over the group and counted them
again. “Are we one short? I thought there was one more of you.”

“No, sir, this is all of us.”

“All right then.” The officer told them where to report and yelled at them to get moving. Before they followed his orders, the oldest brother turned back to Proctor. The rest of the group formed a wedge behind him, their numbers doubled by the presence of the cursed spirits that only Proctor and other witches could see.

“I’m sorry about the misunderstanding,” Walker said.

“It’s no worry of mine,” Proctor said, running a tongue over his swollen lip and spitting the last of the blood from his mouth. “But when you see your brother Alex again, you tell him that he has a friend in headquarters who would like to see him.”

He left before the Walkers could waste any more of his time with argument or denial. Alex knew he was here. If she decided to run away, there was no way he would find her again. But surely she would come to him. Maybe the two of them could break the curse, even without Deborah’s help.

Soldiers turned their heads at the sight of his face as he walked back into headquarters and took his place at the desk where he had been copying letters. He blew on his hands to warm them once more, then picked up his pen, cleaned the tip, and resumed copying the letter where he’d left off. Men around him fell silent, which suited Proctor fine. He was deep in thought, dividing his attention between the letter and ways to break the curse, when Tilghman came over to the table and leaned close to his ear.

“If you go pack snow on that, it won’t swell as much,” he said so softly no one else could hear it.

Proctor started, pulled out of his thoughts. “Pack snow on what?” he said, for a second genuinely puzzled.

By the time he realized it was his swollen lip, Tilghman straightened up, laughed, and clapped Proctor on the back. The other men grinned and resumed their conversations in normal tones. A moment later, one of the side doors opened and Washington emerged with General Greene. His head doubled back at the sight of Proctor, and he said, “By God, if I can get just a few more Quakers to fight, we’ll win this thing yet.”

Greene, who was one of the “fighting Quakers” who’d joined the army at the beginning, laughed at Washington’s quip as they went outside to continue discussing their plans.

Proctor watched them trail the chain of ghosts behind them. It would take a lot more than fighting men to turn the tide of the war.

He looked at the window and hoped Alex Walker came to find him sooner rather than later.

In the first good sign he’d had in a while, she didn’t disappoint him. She showed up several mornings later, tapping at the door when everyone else had gone out to mess.

“Sorry,” she said without any preface of greeting as she slipped inside. “I was just surprised to see you is all.”

“There’s more to it than that,” he said.

She dipped her head and kept her eyes hidden by the brow of her hat. “I know you fought with the militia at Lexington and Concord, and I should’ve expected you’d volunteer after we abandoned The Farm. I’m glad to see you fighting for the cause of liberty too. My brothers want a free country, and I mean to help them. So I came by, ’cause … well, I hope you won’t say nothing to none of the officers here, is all.”

She finished, and when he didn’t say anything right away, she peeked out from under the brim of her hat to check his response. She’d grown a couple of inches taller in the last year and a half, and her face had lost all its baby fat. It was longer, her cheekbones more pronounced. Still, he wondered how anyone could see her and take her for a boy.

“I won’t say anything,” he promised. “I’m glad to see you safe.”

She shrugged. “We haven’t been in any danger. A few skirmishes against backcountry Tories, but nothing of consequence.”

“I meant what happened to your parents.”

She tilted her head forward, so the brim of her hat hid her face again. “Did James say something to you about the Indians?”

It was Proctor’s turn to be surprised. Remembering the tomahawk dangling in Bootzamon’s hand, he said, “It wasn’t Indians.”

She tensed up, as if she couldn’t decide whether to fight or run. He felt sorry for her, but he thought she needed to hear the truth, just to know the evil they were up against.

“They weren’t Indians, no more than it was Indians who attacked us on The Farm summer before last.” The assassins who came to kill Deborah’s parents had been dressed as Indians, a poor disguise seen up close, but there were meant to be no survivors, only witnesses from a distance.

“I knew it,” she said after a pause. “I tried to tell my brothers, but they wouldn’t listen.”

Proctor nodded. “I’m sorry.”

Her head came up, her eyes narrowed, fierce and angry. She thumped the butt of her rifle hard on the floor “I knew it. There was a hiding spell on the house. We came home from a muster upvalley, and we couldn’t find our own house until I found and broke the spell. It was primitive, something you or Deborah could have taken apart in minutes, but—”

“I was the one who made that spell.”

The anger in her face widened into mistrust, and she took another step away from him. “Why were you there?”

“I was looking for you. You hadn’t responded to any of our letters—”

“What letters?”

“Deborah had been writing you for months, asking you to return to The Farm. We needed—
we need
—your help.”

Alex waved her hand in the air and Proctor froze, thinking it was part of some spell, but it was no more than a throwaway gesture. “My mother probably burned them. I
told her I was done with the talent, done with Deborah and her kind. I want no more part of that world ever again.”

“You can’t just bury your talent,” Proctor said.

“Can’t I? It’s a poison. It gets your family killed. Look what happened to Deborah. Look what they did to Magdalena.” She looked at him suspiciously, taking a step toward him and raising her gun as if she meant to use it. “Did you bring the killers with you? Are my parents dead because of you?”

“No, they were dead when I arrived, looking for you.” He quickly revised his idea of how much to tell her. Did he dare describe Bootzamon? “The assassin was waiting for you. He’s from the Covenant. They’re trying to kill everyone with the talent.”