A Spell for the Revolution (32 page)

“Until we reach someplace safe where the army can re-supply and regroup,” Proctor said.

The wounded soldier groaned and held his arm across his belly. “I can’t wait that much longer. Do you two mind waiting here for me while I do my business?”

Deborah turned her head away. “Of course we will.”

“Do you need help?” Proctor asked.

The soldier shook his head, grimacing. “There are still some things a man has to do himself.”

“Well, sure,” Proctor admitted.

Deborah grabbed a fallen branch from the side of the road for the soldier to use as a crutch. He accepted it with
a thank-you and hobbled off behind a thick mound of brush and trees. The darkness was so thick they couldn’t see him.

Proctor shifted his head to speak to Deborah and she turned her body away, not so far as to be rude, but enough to prevent him from speaking. He could get so angry at her for the way she made the simplest things difficult for him. But she had her arms wrapped tight to her chest, shivering, and looked so cold and comfortless that all he wanted to do was reach out to help her.

They stood there in awkward silence, watching the line of soldiers pass. It stretched out like an earthworm, growing thinner the longer it became. As the men marched—no, Proctor realized, he couldn’t call it marching. They plodded on. The mud clumped heavy on their shoes, those who had them, for some were barefoot. He imagined that they felt much as he did. The wet air seeped through all their clothes, and the natural cold settled into their skin like ice forming on a lake. Their bellies were empty, and though damp was everywhere, their throats were dry.

On top of that, every one of them carried a dark and unwilling passenger, a spirit meant to do nothing more than drive a wedge between them and the cause of independence. As the stragglers passed them, the spirits showed more energy than the men.

“How do they keep going?” Proctor asked.

Deborah shook her head. “I don’t know.” The catch in her voice as she spoke made him think that she might have been referring to herself.

He wanted to tell her that he could forgive her for turning him into a witch-slave, that all he wanted was to hear the apology from her directly. But it was hard to find the words. “Deborah—”

“Don’t.” Her voice sounded on the verge of a sob. “Just don’t. Proctor, I—”

Whatever she was going to say was drowned out by the
approach of a horse. Proctor stepped in front of her and pulled her back to the side of the road. William Lee, Washington’s slave, rode past them and down the road just out of sight, then turned and came back, reining in his horse as he approached them.

“You’re end of the line,” he said, giving Proctor a nod of recognition. “We’re camping for the night in the village of Hackensack, about a mile ahead.”

“That’s it?” Proctor asked, looking back down the road. “But there were so many more.”

“I figure about one in three thinks they can do better on their own if they go home,” Lee said. “If that’s your plan, this’d be the time to go.”

Proctor had been thinking about just that. Neither he nor Deborah had enlisted. They could leave, use their connections along the Quaker Highway, making their way back to Salem and to The Farm. He wondered how Magdalena was doing with all the other witches, how their training was coming. With everything he and Deborah had learned, they might be able to work with them to find a way to break the curse.

Lee’s horse was restless. He circled it, pointing the way they had just come. “Back that way half a mile is a turnoff that will take you north back toward New England.”

“No, friend,” Deborah said. “We’ll join you at the camp.”

“The fight’s not over yet, is it?” Proctor asked.

Lee shrugged, as if maybe it was. “See you in camp then.” He spurred his horse, bending low over its neck as it leapt down the road.

“Why do you want to stay?” Proctor asked Deborah.

“If I can’t defeat the Covenant by myself, I can at least help those who are fighting against it. If all I can do is save one life, or help one man heal to fight again, that’s what I’ll do.”

“We can do more than that,” Proctor said. “You see how
General Washington carries on, despite the burden he carries. You see the strength that some men have to keep fighting despite the curse. As long as a few men remain free, we’ve not lost completely.”

Deborah shook her head as if she disagreed, as if she’d already accepted defeat, but she said, “We’ll do what we can to give strength to those who still wish to carry on the fight.” She called out the wounded soldier’s name, leaving the road to follow him into the brush. “They’ve set up camp ahead,” she explained. “There will be fires for warmth, and maybe something to eat.”

Proctor eased around her and pushed farther off the road, calling the man’s name, but the dark returned no answer. He searched for a body, thinking the man might have passed out or fallen sick. But when he bent close to the ground, his fingertips found footprints in the mud leading away from the road. “I think he’s deserted.”

“But how?” Deborah asked. “He could barely stand, much less walk.”

“When he’s marching with the army, the curse holds him back and weakens him. The moment he decides to run, it gives him strength and purpose.”

“But escape doesn’t break the curse. We know that from the farmhand at Gravesend.”

“It’s meant to break the will of the Americans to fight, not just now, but forever.”

“We have to find a way to lift it.”

“I know.” They had climbed back onto the road and were hurrying toward the camp. He thought about the man he’d found at Fort Lee, and the strength of the spirit that had almost torn his soul from him. He had freed the man from the curse, but he was sure it had killed him.

When they entered the camp, Deborah was ready to stop at the first fire where she saw some of the other women, but Proctor told her no. “We have to find the man I was telling you about.”

They weaved through the campfires scattered around the village, with Proctor searching men’s faces. Everywhere he saw signs of despair, mixed with a sort of grim determination to fight on anyway. That was a rare trait, but not so rare among frontier farmers who planted their fields again every year despite the storms, frosts, and pests that attacked the previous year’s crop. The sounds were quiet for a camp this large: just the crackle of the fires, the occasional clink of metal on metal. There was no laughter, and only whispered conversations. This was the whole army, what was left of it, and it was smaller than the garrison at Fort Washington had been.

“Is that him over there?” Deborah asked.

She pointed toward a fire where men in full uniform gathered around artillery they had carried with them on retreat when other men dropped their muskets. A slight young man, head cocked to one side, stood beside a cannon, caressing it the way a man might stroke the neck of a favorite horse. He carried no cursed ghost, but a dark shadow flowed around him, independent of the firelight.

“No, that’s Captain Hamilton,” Proctor said. “The one who already carries a ghost. Whatever that is attached to him, it gives him strength, and lends courage to those around him. But it makes me uneasy.”

Deborah unconsciously and wearily slipped her hand around Proctor’s arm. He was afraid to say anything or draw her attention to it, but for a moment he felt closer to her. They walked through the camp, circling Hamilton. “It is not a good spirit. But he does not seem to be a bad man.”

“It’s your Quaker ways,” Proctor said. “You think no one is, at heart, a bad man. It’s so opposite of what I was brought up to believe, that we are all sinners.”

“We are all broken,” she said. “But that is something different. Even a broken lamp can still hold oil to give light.”

“Or spill it everywhere, setting the house ablaze and burning it to the ground.”

He covered her hand with his, and she pulled away startled, crossing her arms. He was confused, unsure whether she reacted to his gesture or his words, and angry—even Emily, when they had their differences, didn’t withdraw from him so completely. But when he opened his mouth to confront Deborah, she whispered.

“Oh, my.”

She was staring at a man who sat alone at a small fire. A group of three soldiers had approached him, and instantly an angel appeared as a numinous light in the dark, driving back their cursed spirits. The men fled.

“That’s him,” Proctor said, called away from his own dark thoughts and back to their greater task. “Let me introduce you.”

The fire had been built in the shelter of an old corncrib that offered some slight protection from the wind. Thomas Paine sat beside it on a log, with a drum for a writing table propped between his knees. He was wadding up the pages of his manuscript and tossing them into the fire, one by one.

“Hello, friend,” Proctor said.

Paine looked up, startled to be spoken to. Despite his guardian, he appeared to be as worn as the other men, if only by the force of seeing his hopes crushed. “You’re the young man from headquarters, just last night. Proctor, right?”

“Yes. This is my friend Deborah Walcott.”

“Tom Paine. I’m pleased to meet you.” He belatedly shifted his work aside and started to rise.

“Please don’t bother yourself on my account,” she said, sitting down instantly across from him. “Are you the author who wrote
Common Sense?”

“That would be me,” he said. He wadded up another
page of writing and flung it into the fire, where it crackled and curled as it was consumed.

“You wrote that ‘The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,’” Deborah said. Her eyes glittered with thought, and Proctor could see that she was thinking of the Covenant. The words were even truer than Paine realized. “Your words inspired the whole country.”

Paine offered her a weak smile. “I have been fortunate to have your whole country to inspire me.”

“What are you doing now?” Proctor asked him, gesturing to the manuscript.

Paine crumpled another sheet. “I’ve been working on a new pamphlet, but everything I’ve written so far is inadequate to the crisis we now face. I need to throw it all away and start over again. Everyone has been thoughtful about interruptions, leaving me in solitude to write, but I don’t even know where to begin.”

They were all so beaten down that no one knew where to begin. Paine grabbed the rest of the sheaf of papers and spilled them all into the flames at once. The sheets writhed like tortured souls, disappearing in a fountain of ash and sparks.

Deborah tilted her head toward the rest of the camp, where cursed spirits hovered over the dark humps of the exhausted men.
“Crisis
is the only word for it,” she said. “Those poor souls.”

Paine followed her gaze and nodded thoughtfully. “These are times that try men’s souls.”

The fire crackled, filling the silence left in the absence of words.

A second later Paine grabbed a half-burned sheet of paper from the edge of the fire and hurriedly put out the smoldering flame. He took out his pen and ink, setting them on the drumhead between his legs. Smoothing out the sheet of paper, he began to write.

Proctor looked at Deborah, expecting to exchange a
glance of wonder. Instead he saw her pouring her strength and power into him, the way she’d poured it into the soldier before. She was drained, exhausted, but somehow she had discovered extra reserves and was giving them away.

Paine lifted his head, his eyes alight. “I’ll need more paper.”

It took Proctor a second to realize he was being asked to help. “I’ll go get some from Washington’s secretary.”

“Thank you,” Paine said, bending back over his work.

Deborah could not break her focus long enough to say a word to him. The angel that protected Paine shone in him as a light, leaning over him and placing its hand upon his shoulder as he wrote. Deborah took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

Something wet landed on Proctor’s cheek. Snow flurries swirled through the air.

He walked off into the camp alone.

Washington had set up his headquarters in an open-sided tent. If the rest of the army was exhausted and defeated, the men around Washington were busy enough for all of them. A row of makeshift tables had been erected, and men sat at all of them, inscribing letters that Washington dictated rapidly one after another. Couriers stood at the ready, cleaning their horses and readying them for departure.

Under the tent canopy, Washington was surrounded by his “family,” the men he trusted most. Colonel Robert Harrison, the well-born Marylander, and Colonels Meade and Webb had maps spread across one end of a table. They argued about the army’s next location with Washington even as he was sending out letters to all the states calling for volunteers and supplies. Proctor recognized the three men by their voices: Harrison’s southern enunciation, Meade’s deep bass, and Webb’s blunt language. It was hard for him to make out individual men in the tent. He saw the cursed spirits crowded everywhere, making the whole of it a confused and jangled mob of double images. He finally glimpsed a pair of white silk stockings—spattered with mud—among the legs of the other men. Pushing through the crowd, he found the man he sought seated at a table, sealing a letter. The man handed the sealed letter to a courier; the lantern light caught his full cheeks and high, thoughtful forehead.