A Spell for the Revolution (19 page)

“I don’t know about your spell on the boat,” she said. “But my spell for luck, I have every confidence that it helped us, that it will continue to help us.”

*  *  *

“I’m so sorry I can’t help you,” Mary Murray said. She was a soft-spoken woman with a pretty face for her age.

They had gone to the Quaker woman’s farm, hoping for help from Deborah’s friends on the highway. But the farm had been ruined by battle. The crops had been torn up, trees chopped down, and wounded soldiers, British and American, still occupied her rooms. The house smelled like vinegar and cabbage.

“I don’t even have food to spare,” she apologized. “Right now I can barely feed the men here who are too wounded to move. You have other choices open to you. I know you understand.”

“We understand,” Deborah said, and pressed her hands around the other woman’s hand.

“There’s a tavern just down the road,” Mary said. “The proprietor is a friend. If you have a coin or two, he’ll feed you well and take care of you.”

As they walked down the road, Proctor said, “I guess it’s lucky we got that coin back after all.”

“I told you so,” Deborah said, but without conviction. Her spirits had been dashed by the reception at Mary Murray’s house.

They found the tavern where she had said. It was a small narrow room, stinking of unwashed bodies, burned food, and bitter smoke. It was crowded with twice as many people as it could safely hold. Most were other refugees from the war. Proctor was bumped from both sides at once, by men who didn’t stop to apologize. The same thing happened to Deborah. Finally, they arrived at the counter and called for the proprietor.

Deborah reached down for their single coin. She checked one pocket, then the other, then the floor.

Her eyes brimmed with tears. “My purse has been stolen.”

“What can I get for you?” the proprietor yelled, leaning over the heads of other patrons.

“Some luck,” yelled Proctor.

The proprietor cupped a hand to his ear. Proctor waved farewell to him. Taking Deborah by the elbow, he led her back out to the street.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

Proctor sighed reluctantly. “I know another person we can ask for help.”

Tired, sore, and hungry, Proctor and Deborah trudged another eight miles down Bloomingdale Road and then the Broad Way toward the Battery at the island’s southern tip.

“Who is it?” Deborah asked as they walked.

Proctor didn’t want to answer. “An old friend,” he said.

“A friend of your parents?” Her voice was sharp and curious.

“A friend of mine,” Proctor said. “But I don’t want to bring bad luck on us by talking about it. I don’t even know if we can find our way there.”

Finding their way to the right neighborhood proved easy enough. Loyalist refugees from all the colonies had gathered in the south and west wards of the city, packing too many people into wooden houses that already crowded the narrow streets. The towering steeple of Trinity Church was visible from miles away, but their slow approach to it only made their journey feel longer. It was after dark before they reached the neighborhood.

“How do you know the address?” Deborah asked.

Proctor knew the address because, while Paul Revere had always obeyed her instructions not to bring letters to The Farm, the Reverend Emerson, before he joined the army, was of a different mind. After the British evacuated Boston, Proctor received half a dozen letters sent by way of Emerson. All had the same return address in New York, in the neighborhood near Courtlandt’s Sugar House.

“Directions were given to me,” he said.

The five-story sugar house sat across the square from the church. From there he followed the directions, just as he had memorized them, through the filthy, narrow streets. People slept on front stoops, leaned out of windows in their shirtsleeves, and begged—or worse—on every other corner. Proctor and Deborah’s dirty clothes matched the dirty clothes of the refugees who jostled them in the streets. The hungry rumbles of their bellies were echoed in other bellies all around them.

When they were a block away from the address, Proctor had second thoughts. He didn’t want to do this in front of Deborah. “Can you stay here?” he asked.

“What?”

“Just wait here.” He looked up. A big wooden sign hung over the street, a carving of two cocks with spurs slashing at each other. It creaked in the wind that came off the nearby harbor. “I’ll meet you back at this tavern.”

“Don’t you know what men will take me for?”

“Please,” he begged. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

When she relented, he practically ran down the street. The address was a townhome, the nicest on the block. He hammered on the door. It was answered by a servant, who closed the door on Proctor before he even had a chance to speak.

Proctor blocked it open. “Please. I’m a friend of Mister Thomas Rucke and Miss Emily, from Boston.”

The servant regarded Proctor skeptically, but he turned to the house and called for her. “Miss Rucke—there’s a beggar at the door who claims to know you.”

Emily came to the door in a simple but elegant dress. She had changed in the past year. Her prettiness had matured into true beauty, but the lines of her eyes and mouth had lost some of their winsomeness. She looked at Proctor, puzzled.

“May I help you?” she asked.

It was clear that she didn’t recognize him, even though
they’d once had an agreement to become engaged. He took off his hat and held it in his hand. “Emily, it’s me—Proctor.”

She startled, putting a hand on her heart.

Quickly, to put her at ease, he smiled and indicated the servant who stood behind her. “Where’s Bess?”

“Father had to let her go,” she said.

“You mean sell her?”

He was, he realized, as uncomfortable as she seemed to be. He knew the question, intended only to resolve his confused reaction to her statement, was the wrong thing to ask as soon as the words slipped out of his mouth. But slavery bothered him much more now than it did a year and a half ago, and he puzzled when people spoke of slaves as servants.

“Yes, he sold her,” Emily said. Her hand fell back to her side, and she composed herself. “We couldn’t afford to keep her anymore, not with so much trade disrupted. Did you come all this way just to be critical of something perfectly legal that my father did to help provide for me?”

“No, Emily, I’m sorry,” he said, dropping his eyes. He glanced up at her again, then looked away. “I’m here in New York with a friend. Our money was stolen, there’s no work to be had. The war’s affected everybody—”

“If I recall correctly, Mister Brown, you played some part in starting this war,” she said sharply.

More than she knew …

He dropped his head. “Emily, I’m sorry. We’re in desperate circumstances. We need help. A few coins, something to eat …”

His words trailed off and he dropped his head, looking only at her feet.

She took a breath. “Permit me to be certain that I understand you correctly,” she said after a moment. “We came to an understanding and started to plan our future together. Then you ignored my earnest plea for you to obey your
lawful sovereign, and helped the rebels start this war. When my own home and security were threatened, I risked revealing myself to the mob in order to treat your injuries and save your life. You made no effort to express any appreciation. I forgave you all these things, and found you in Boston to inform you that my affection remained constant. You disappeared. Finally, I wrote you half a dozen letters, seeking only to ascertain your health and well-being, and to come to a peaceful resolution of the feelings we once, I was still certain, shared—”

“Please, Emily,” he interrupted softly.

“Let me finish!” she said, slamming her fist against her hip. “That you received my letters is made evident by your presence on this doorstep, because otherwise you would not know where to find me. And yet the first thing you do when you come to see me, after all this time, is beg for money?”

Everything she said was true, although it had seemed more complicated than that at the time. It seemed more complicated than that now. When he spoke again, his voice started to shake. “You deserved—you deserve—better treatment than I’ve ever given you. But we have turned everywhere, and have nowhere else to turn. My—”

He had started to repeat the lie
my sister and I
, only Emily knew better. She peered around him to see if anyone else was standing there.

“Good night, Mister Brown,” she said.

She slammed the door on him.

He turned away, his shoulders sagging. He didn’t know where they would turn to now for food or shelter. But he was glad Deborah had not been here to see his humiliation. Then he glanced up and thought he saw the back of her dress disappear down the next street.

She had followed him. He started to run after her, but someone else stepped out of the shadows, an old woman in rags smoking a pipe. The coal dimmed for just a second,
but in that second she looked like a sack of old clothes stuffed with straw. Then she puffed it back to life.

Just like Bootzamon.

Was there another creature like Bootzamon on the loose? She followed the same street Deborah had taken. Proctor ran after her, dodging a couple of barefoot apprentices with open sores. He rounded the corner and lost her. Then a rowdy bunch of drunken sailors moved on and he spied her again.

He stepped into a doorway and watched her small frame totter down the street. He felt the tickle of magic on the back of his neck.

The streets grew narrower, the houses more ramshackle, the smell of human habitation more intense. Raw sewage mixed in the gutters with rotted food and animal droppings, and the smell of cheap tobacco was all around. Voices came from every dwelling. Despite the late hour, children ran in and out of doors, and played games in the street. The scarecrow woman glided past them, past displaced farm wives and painted whores. Proctor edged closer to her, hiding behind a broken crate, a rain barrel, a grocer’s stall.

The scarecrow woman paused in front of a tavern to puff on her pipe. The Fighting Cocks. Where he’d left Deborah standing. His heart raced in panic. Deborah was nowhere to be seen. He turned to look back the way he had come.

A tomahawk slashed at his head and he dodged it just in time. The steel slammed into the wood of the stall.

Proctor looked at the gloved hand that still held on to the handle of the tomahawk. At the other end of the arm was a scarecrow in an old farmer’s jacket with a gunshot hole through the chest.

“Bootzamon.”

The eyes flared fire, followed a second later by the coal in the pipe.

“Not expecting me, were you?” asked the odd, disembodied voice. The creature tugged with both hands to pull the tomahawk loose.

“I thought I killed you,” Proctor said. He took a step, intending to run away, but he staggered as if all his power had been suddenly drained from him.

The tomahawk came loose.

“I was already dead,” Bootzamon said. “All you did was ruin a nice suit of clothes.”

Proctor groped for a weapon, closing on a dropped piece of firewood. The tomahawk slashed at him again, and he barely blocked the blow. A shock rippled from the firewood through his arm.

Bootzamon swung at him again and Proctor jumped back. Behind him, the street started to empty. Anxious faces peered from windows and doorways, but no one came to help.

The tomahawk slashed at him again, and again Proctor deflected the blow and retreated. The next swing bit into the wood and stuck. A low, rumbling laughter started somewhere in the hollow of Bootzamon’s body and echoed off the narrow streets.

“You should see the fear in your face—it’s marvelous,” Bootzamon said, and he blew a cloud of smoke from his inhuman mouth. Then the scarecrow shrugged his invisible sinews and tore the wood from Proctor’s hand.

Proctor searched around desperately for another weapon or any way to escape. He dodged behind a broken crate, shoving it at Bootzamon. The scarecrow leapt nimbly over the debris, casually pulling the firewood off the end of his tomahawk and tossing it aside. Proctor grabbed a rain barrel and tipped it over, splashing it across the scarecrow’s legs.

“I don’t dissolve in the rain, like some sugared candy,” Bootzamon said.

With a roar of effort, Proctor picked up the nearly empty
barrel and dumped the remaining contents over the scarecrow’s head.

He dodged the falling barrel, but his pipe was extinguished. The illusion of his human features disappeared.

“Dickon!” Bootzamon cried. “My pipe!”

There was a crackle of electricity, and the smell of brimstone and saltpeter. The horned and human-shaped demon, no bigger than a cat, popped out of the ground like he’d been shot out of a cannon from hell.

Proctor caught the creature by the throat as it flew into the air.

Dickon screeched like a rabbit caught in the teeth of a big dog. It thrashed and twisted, scorching Proctor’s hands and slashing at him with its tail. The hot coal began to burn through Dickon’s hand, and it screamed as it reached out to smash it into Bootzamon’s pipe.