Traitor to the Crown (21 page)

“How soon can you be ready to depart?” he asked.

Proctor still felt wobbly from the encounter in the
garden. Though it had only been that morning, a few scant hours before, it seemed almost a lifetime ago. He thought about Franklin’s description of chess, and he wondered whether Franklin was teaching him how to play the game or subtly informing him that he was just another pawn on a very large board.

He looked Digges in the eye. “How soon can you be ready to escort us, Mister Church?”

They departed from a small dock outside Calais, in a small boat, on a dark night. The crew was British, though Israel Potter recognized one as an American, a fellow sailor who had been captured, like him, by the British when their ship sailed out of Boston.

“William,” he exclaimed innocently. “How come you to be here?”

The other sailors, whom Proctor took for smugglers, scowled. William glanced at Digges, who refused to recognize him. “I escaped the hulk at Spithead, same as you,” he said.

“I presumed that much,” Potter replied. “No, I mean here on this boat now.”

William jerked a thumb at the other smugglers. “My mother’s brother’s sons.”

One of the men cuffed him, and he turned back to his work. Proctor considered how many families were divided by the war. English and American, they were still one people in many ways, united by a common past and present relatives despite the war and wide ocean.

The small crew worked quietly and efficiently, scarcely whispering to one another as they raised a dark sail and slipped out of the small cove. Lanterns hung from patrolling warships bobbed in the distant night, but the ship moved quickly over the waves, and even those signs of civilized life soon faded away. The dark surrounded
them, the moonless and star-spangled sky above, and the black water with its light-tipped waves below.

Digges stared at the sky. “Tell me who you are and what you mean to do, or I’ll tip you both overboard and let you swim to shore.”

Proctor started at the open threat. When he looked over and saw the crewmen’s heads sunk to their chests in apparent sleep—Potter was sleeping too—he tensed. The waves lapped the sides of the boat in an irregular rhythm.

Digges rose and moved over to the rudder, taking it in hand. “They’ll be fine that way for a while,” he went on. “My talents are small compared with some I’ve seen. Compared with the two of you, I suspect. I can persuade people, but only to do things they might already have done; I can lull men to sleep, but only if they’re already tired. What can the two of you do?”

Lydia held out her hand and closed her fist. A wind rushed at them, snapping the sail taut and tipping the boat to one side. She did not like to be threatened.

“This and that,” Proctor said. “A small talent must lead to a large fear, because the danger is the same if we are discovered, no matter our talent.”

“You have no idea what I’m afraid of,” Digges sneered.

Proctor regretted his remark, and decided it would be best to be honest and direct. “We are seeking a group called the Covenant.”

“To join them?” Digges asked tersely.

“To destroy them, if we can. They mean an end to American freedom, and they have killed our friends and our families in pursuit of their goal.” He looked down at his own scarred right hand. He left off,
They have tried to possess us with demons and have my own soul on a leash.

After a moment’s pause, Digges said, “They’re English?”

“We don’t know that they’re English,” Proctor answered, still distracted. “In fact, the members we’ve encountered have been English, American, German, and Italian. We’re told that there are thirteen, although maybe there are now only twelve. Although each member of the twelve supposedly recruits twelve more, all of them channeling their power toward a single sorcerer in an attempt to achieve immortality.”

“It wasn’t a question. I’m telling you, they’re English.” Digges stared off into the dark, drawing his fingers across the point of his beard. “The name has changed, but they are the modern version of the
pactum in saecula saeculorum
.”

“The what?”

“Pactum in saecula saeculorum,”
Digges said. “The Pact, Forever and Ever. It was mentioned in the papers of my great-great-great-great-grandfather and namesake, who was an astronomer and mathematician. And more. Two hundred years ago, he was invited to join.”

“And did he?”

“He did not. What profits it a man to gain the world and lose his soul?” By the catch in his throat, the phrase clearly had a personal meaning for him too. He pointed at the stars. “He was the best student of the best astronomer in Queen Elizabeth’s England, but he was an even greater mathematician. He proved, mathematically, that the stars lie beyond the orbit of the moon. Far beyond the orbit of the moon. He proved that the stars themselves are suns, and that there are an infinite number of them.”

Lydia sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Proctor in the small boat. She pulled a blanket around her against the cold. Proctor felt a chill go through him that no blanket would fight off.

Digges noticed their reaction. “That’s not all. He contended that all those infinite suns have worlds whirling
about them much like our own. It sounds mad, doesn’t it?”

“If I believed that, it would make me feel very small and insignificant,” Proctor said.

“Ha,” Digges laughed. “If you want to feel small and insignificant, you should have such a man in your family tree, along with poets and professors, astronomers and royal governors.” He leaned back and looked at the stars again. “Actually, I take great comfort in that thought. I fear great and powerful men much less when I think that, compared with the infinity of space, we are all small and insignificant.”

Lydia shook her head sharply in disagreement. “The human spirit is no small thing,” she said. “Every spirit burns as bright as one of them stars.”

“Can you believe that there are an infinite number of them?” Digges asked.

“God is infinite and eternal. If He created the stars, He could make an infinite number of them,” she replied. “In God all things are possible.”

“Yes,” Digges answered. “That is what I tell myself when I am confronted by people with our talent. This too comes from God, even among those who use it for evil.”

“So far our efforts to find the Covenant have been like searching for a needle in the hay field,” Proctor said.

“Then perhaps you need a larger magnet.”

The sail had slackened, and the boat drifted. It hit a larger wave side-on and bucked like a wagon jumping a rut. Cold spray came over the side, hitting their skin like ice. The three of them grabbed the sides of the craft to hold on, and the crew, along with Potter, jerked awake. The oldest smuggler cuffed the other men and cursed them for napping. He looked at the rudder in Digges’s hands and snatched it away. Within moments the ship had been righted, the sail filled, and they were zipping toward England once again.

Digges crowded into a spot next to Proctor and Lydia. He leaned back and stared at the stars. “I do know someone who fights the same fight as you, who may be able to help you find that needle.”

“Is he in London?”

“He has been traveling across the country working to this end. But I know a place we can stay just outside London, where we will pass unnoticed until he returns.”

“I would rather be in London, if that’s where we’ll find …” He glanced at the crew. “The other men we’re looking for.”

“It will be safer for you outside the city,” Digges said.

You
, not
us
.

Israel Potter grinned at them from his place near the bow. His high-heeled boots looked out of place among the other simple shoes in the wet bottom of the boat. Proctor did not think him simple, but he was clearly everyone’s earnest pawn. Digges smiled back at Potter, then pulled his hat down over his face and leaned back as if to sleep.

Proctor met Lydia’s eyes and saw reflected in them the same doubts that he felt. He gave a slight jut of his head toward Digges and quirked an eyebrow. Lydia answered with a simple shrug, as if to say,
What else can we do?

What else could they do?

Digges was hiding something from them, but he struck Proctor as a man who, despite his youth, had been hiding so many things for so long that it was second nature to him. He couldn’t help but compare him with the earnest but inept spy they’d met in New York, that poor blond boy who regretted that he but had one life to give for his country just before they hanged him. Digges was determined to hold on to his life and do something with it.

His story about the stars was fantastic and unreal, but Proctor looked up at the moonless, cloudless sky and found that he believed it. And he found that he believed
the rest of it too. Digges did oppose the Covenant, and he would introduce them to someone with the same purpose.

Despite that belief, Proctor sat there awake until the dark shape of England rose in the west. The crash of breakers pounding on the shores matched the pounding in his head. He had been trying not to think about Deborah, but the ocean of his pulse slowly wore away the wet sand of his resistance until she stood out stark and vivid in his thoughts like bright white cliffs.

The sun rose suddenly, as it did over the ocean, on a sea full of ships, hundreds of them, large and small, more than Proctor had seen off the shores of New York when the British landed thirty thousand troops on Long Island. British warships towered over them as they joined the fishing boats sliding in toward shore.

Proctor was walking through the farm house looking for Deborah and Maggie. From room to room to room he went, every room empty but for ruins. The furniture was broken, the dishes were shattered, sheets and clothing torn to shreds and scattered. The new wing opened into the upstairs opened into the barn opened into the kitchen, every room the same. He screamed their names—
Deborah, Maggie, Deborah
—until the door he had nailed shut burst open and he entered the old wing of the house.

He walked without moving his feet, gliding over the floor like a child sliding on the ice, until he stood in front of the old hearth. The one that Cecily had used for her black altar, the one the demon had come through seeking his child, the one he had bricked in. The place where he had last seen Magdalena standing guard.

Magdalena had vanished. The splinters of her cane lay scattered on the floor.

And in the hearth, the bricks were broken. The hearth stood open like a sooty mouth ringed with black and rotting teeth. The stench of smoke was everywhere, choking Proctor’s breath, and ash fell out of the air like filthy snow. Heat pressed in at him from all sides, as if he were surrounded by fire.

His head pounded, like it had been pounding for days. It pounded like the drums of approaching legions. He had to find Deborah and Maggie and escape.

Deborah?

Why did his voice sound so far away? Where was she? Why didn’t she answer him?

Deborah!

“I’m here,” replied her voice, quiet and present, with a hint of laughter, directly behind him. He spun around, filled with relief and joy, ready to embrace her and carry her away.

A demon stood there in her place, with heavy horns above its thick brow and a bloody smear across its scissored smile. A red coat draped over its broad shoulders, with a sword tucked in its waistband and a pistol in its taloned hand.

“Balfri is here,” the demon mocked in Deborah’s voice. “Send forth the herald and summon the footman to do my will.”

It opened its sooty-toothed mouth and laughed.

Proctor jerked awake.

Beware of D.

D, for Deborah. D, for demon. D, for despair. Which was it?

His head pounded, just as it had been pounding for days, only it had grown worse. To the throbbing pain had been added a sharp one, as if someone held a nail against his temple and was tapping it into place before driving it home.

Tap-tap-tap.

The sound was so real and present, it startled him a second time, and his heart, already racing from the nightmare, thumped faster. He looked over and saw an ash-black raven on the windowsill, tapping at the glass. He sat up on the edge of the bed.

The raven cocked its head to one side knowingly and stared at Proctor with an eye that glittered like a poisoned gem. It leaned over and tapped at the pane again harder,
tap-tap-tap
, and the window nudged open. In
triumph, the raven perched on its toes and bobbed along the ledge.

“Hallo, Hallo, Hallo,” the raven said, in its mockery of a human voice. “You’re a devil, You’re a saucy devil—what’s the matter here?—You’re a devil.”

“Grip, be a good boy, Grip,” called a voice from outside.

The raven beat its wings against its sides, and then against the window. It hopped off the window ledge, but not before uttering a final, “You’re a devil!”

Proctor staggered to the window and leaned on the frame. In the road outside the inn stood a balding simpleton. He laughed and clapped his hands like a delighted child, and the raven flapped its wings, hopping along the ground and then up into the air to alight on his shoulder. The raven croaked, and the simpleton nodded his head vigorously as if he understood.

“Good morning, Barnaby,” Proctor called.

“Good evening, Mister Brown,” the simpleton replied. “I do hope Grip didn’t disturb you.”

“Not at all,” Proctor said, and he squinted at the sky. It was late afternoon. He thought about Deborah, and he wondered what time it was in Salem and what she was doing. “Take care.”

Barnaby waved, and then strolled down the road, talking to the next person he saw. The eerie screech of the raven echoed down the street.

“I thought I heard your voice,” Lydia said.

Proctor turned, startled again, and saw her standing in the doorway. He sagged into a seat by the window.

“Still not feeling well?” she asked.

“My head won’t stop throbbing,” he said. Nothing had happened since they’d arrived in England except his headaches. “I finally fell asleep, but either dreams or Barnaby’s raven woke me. Have we heard any word from Digges? I mean, Church.”