Traitor to the Crown (42 page)

“It’s called Rosewell. My master Thomas Jefferson stayed there in ’seventy-six, when he was writing the Declaration of Independence.”

Proctor’s skin goose-pimpled with anticipation. The residence where Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence would be exactly the kind of place where the Covenant would seek to destroy that Independence. Crush freedom at its source.

“Can you take me there?” Proctor asked.

Jacob nodded. They all set out together, but as they passed the crossroads, Proctor noticed the others turn away. “They don’t want to go this way,” Jacob said.

Proctor didn’t ask them why. He didn’t have the right. “If you don’t want to go on, just point the way,” he said. “I’ll find it myself.”

Jacob tipped his felt hat. “Thank you for that. I’m going to follow the Dragon to freedom myself, I think.”

“Follow the dragon?”

“Dragon Swamp,” Jacob said. “We want to get a head start on that way west.”

He turned and ran after the others without further good-bye. Proctor looked at Lydia. “Do you want to go as well?”

“I can’t explain it,” she said. “I feel a strong urge to go the other way. But I won’t. I came to see this through.”

Odd, but he didn’t feel that at all. Instead, he felt drawn onward, as if he was headed to the place he was appointed to reach.

The road was dark and silent, curving through the
woods. The green smell of fresh water tinged the air. The trees grew thicker as they went, at least until Proctor stepped on a stick in the road. The branches were filled with hundreds of black crows that he had mistaken for leaves—at the loud snap, they flapped their wings and swirled into the sky before settling down again where they had started.

“Is that normal?” Proctor asked.

“I’ve never seen it before,” Lydia whispered in reply. “But they’re carrion birds, and there is a battle just across the river.”

As if in response to her mention, the sound of cannons echoed over the water from miles away. The wind that carried the sound rummaged through the trees, ruffling feathers and sending autumn leaves tumbling to the ground.

This was the place. Proctor was certain.

They pushed on, down a long lane lined with trees. The woods were full of saplings, thick as a thumb, as if the clearing and mowing had been neglected. When the road opened out on acres of broad lawn, Proctor recognized the place at once.

A brick mansion on a foundation six feet tall, rising three stories, with each story twelve feet high, was framed by four massive chimneys, one at each of the corners. There were five windows across each floor, including the windows framing the entry door, and a light shone in every window. They spilled out over the structure, illuminating the fine brickwork and the elegant proportions. It was as if a building had been lifted from the London street where Lord Gordon lived, or even the neighborhood of Lord Shelburne, and dropped in the middle of the Virginia woods. The door was cracked open, and the sounds of stringed instruments came from within, and people whirled in the light as if dancing. Laughter echoed out across the grass.

A single figure stood on the doorstep.

He had long gray robes and a ruffled collar. He reached back and pushed the door open, saying something to those inside. Then he walked down the wide stairs to the lawn. A large man blocked the light streaming through the doorway. He was followed by a petite woman in an elaborate dress. They were both followed by a priest. The priest was followed by a beautiful young woman in a black dress of foreign, almost Oriental, cut.

One by one they walked down the steps and faced Proctor across the lawn.

John Dee. The prince-bishop, Philipp Adolph von Ehrenberg. Cecily Sumpter Pinckney. William Weston, the English Jesuit. Proctor thought the fifth one might be Erzebet Nádasdy. That was the only other name Gordon had given him that he remembered.

A blond boy in a tattered red coat skipped out of the woods laughing hilariously, slapping his chest and spinning around. The sleeves of his jacket hung down over his hands, but his pants were too short, and his ankles stuck out of the bottom. His hair was wild and un-brushed. As he stepped into the light cast by the house, Proctor recognized him.

“William.”

William Reed. The orphan boy whom Proctor had lost to the prince-bishop at Trenton. The boy lifted his head at the sound of his name, even whispered from a hundred yards away. His eyes glowed like fire. He ran over to the prince-bishop, who wrapped an arm around him and stroked his head like a man with a favorite pet.

“Behold, the herald of Balfri, come in advance of his master,” John Dee said with a sweeping motion of his hand. Though he spoke in a normal tone, his voice carried, just as Gordon’s had, clear to Proctor’s ear.

Four hooves thundered on the dark road behind Proctor. A man in a worn green jacket, faded and torn like the leaves in autumn, with a black cap upon his head,
galloped past. A woman in a gray dress—gray like the color of Dee’s robes—sat behind him. She glowed with a numinous light.
Deborah.

Proctor had waited, frozen, too long.

He spread out his arm toward the hundreds of saplings growing in the woods. With one slash of his hand, all the branches and leaves were stripped bare. A second gesture—a spin of his fingers—whirled around the tops, sharpening them to pointed stakes. A third motion, his hands raised up, snapped all of them off at the ground and brought them up in the air like spears.

With a roar, he pulled both arms back and flung them forward. The spears flew toward the tiny group of witches and the little demon boy.

The woman in the gray dress—Proctor tried not to look at her; he didn’t want to fight her—slipped off the back of the horse and passed her hand through the air.

The spears hit in an invisible shield just short of the witches and fell to the ground.

“No, Deborah, not like this,” Proctor whispered.

But he ran forward, already launching his next attack. He saw two large boulders on either side of the lawn, amid other small ones.

He lifted the boulders, dripping dirt and grass, and sent them hurling toward each other like two mortar stones, big enough to grind the Covenant to bone and meal between them.

Deborah reached into the air and cast the boulders aside. They flew high up into the night sky across the river and out toward the bay. They boomed, cracking the air as thunder did, and then caught fire as they burned up like shooting stars. He had never seen that kind of power from her before.

“Don’t stop me, Deborah,” Proctor whispered.

He whirled his hand in the air, calling forth every piece of metal and silver from the house. There were knives
and sabers, awls and saws, every kind of sharp tool or blade you would find on a large plantation. They flew out of the door like a nest of hornets. He spun the mass in a circle and sent it whipping toward the Covenant, too fast to deflect and toss away.

Deborah dropped her hands to her sides and walked into the path of the blades, blocking the way to the Covenant.

It wasn’t Deborah, Proctor told himself.

She had been possessed by the demon Balfri.

Balfri must be destroyed. He was the only one who could do it. He had been prepared for it by his journey, brought by steps to a greater power than he had ever dreamed possible. Balfri had to be stopped, and he was the instrument of its destruction.

But he couldn’t do it, not even if Deborah was only the shell of herself.

When the whirling blades were inches from cutting her to shreds, he flung them to the ground. He dropped to his knees a second later, exhausted. He had drained himself and accomplished nothing. He covered his face, and said he was sorry over and over again, not sure whether he was apologizing to Deborah for failing or for nearly chopping her to pieces.

The orphan boy—what did Dee call him? Balfri’s herald—capered and laughed, clapping his hands with glee.

“Make way for Balfri,” he shouted. “Lord of the red coat, the purifying flame, the scorching wind. Balfri, the bond and the fetter. Balfri, the covenant fulfilled and the master of mighty legions. Make way!”

Deborah walked across the lawn toward Proctor. She always seemed to glide, so sure and steady was her step. He could not lift his head to look at her face as she approached. When she stopped in front of him, he saw only the hem of her dress.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding the same as she ever had. “I cannot let you harm them while they possess my daughter—”

He had turned his face toward her when she mentioned their daughter. She was the same Deborah he had always known. Her cap had fallen off, and her hair tumbled down around her shoulders. But she had the same determined set to her mouth, the same large eyes, the same numinous inner light.

“… Proctor?” She reached out to him.

Words would not come to him, but he reached back. Their hands touched and, after a moment’s hesitation, clasped. A pure light flowed through their grip. He jumped to his feet and wrapped his arms around her. She fit in his embrace, the way she had before. He pressed his face against her head—she smelled wonderful, familiar. There were bits of dried flowers falling from her hair.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “I thought you were—”

She threw her arms around his neck. “I didn’t recognize you,” she said. “I thought you were … I thought you were dead, that you were never coming back, that you had run off to Russia with that countess.”

“What—? No!”

She held his head in her hands and started kissing his face, his eyes, his lips. He kissed her in return, feeling the tears roll down his cheeks.

“I would never leave you,” he said. “I thought you had been possessed … I … I thought … I was wrong, I was so wrong …”

She didn’t stop kissing him so he stopped speaking instead. He could feel the tears on her cheeks, mixing with his where their faces pressed against each other.

A shadow fell over them.

“Now that we are all reunited,” Dee said, “it’s time for us to begin. Balfri has already waited too long.”

Ropes slithered across the ground like snakes, tying them up. They were both too weak to resist. The ropes wound around them, binding them to each other, and then a single strand climbed straight into the air, as rigid as a pole, and looped itself over an invisible branch. The two of them dangled there.

“Why didn’t you recognize me?” Proctor asked as he struggled against the ropes.

“You’ve changed—so powerful, the black clothes—I thought you were a rival witch.”

“They have Maggie?”

“I sent her into hiding with Abigail, but they found them.”

“What … where were you?”

“I had stopped their herald, and held him a prisoner—I was healing him, or so I thought—until tonight he escaped.”

Dee moved like a mathematician writing out an equation. He stood in the center of the great lawn and spun slowly with his hand outstretched. Fire leapt from his fingertip, scorching a large circle in the grass. When the circle was complete, he slashed his hand in a series of five sharp motions, completing the pentagram.

The same symbol he had drawn in fire in London during the riots.

“The two of you might have been good students,” Dee said. “If only you hadn’t been born in this wilderness. The
star is a powerful symbol to astronomer and astrologer, to the mathematician and the necromancer alike. It is from the Greek word
pentagrammon
, meaning ‘five-lined,’ but it is associated with the Roman word
lucifer
, meaning ‘bringer of light and knowledge.’ I consider myself a bringer of light and knowledge to this dark world.”

“I know you wanted to speak to the angels,” Proctor called to Dee. “But listen to yourself—only demons answered your call.”

“Call them what you will, but one man’s demons are another man’s angels,” Dee replied.

The Jesuit carried the rosary in his hand. He looked up, startled, mouth half open, as if interrupted in his prayers. His eyes were milky white, and he turned his ears toward them rather than his face. “God is in all things,” he said. “Whether you call the beings of spirit angels or demons matters not at all, because God is present.”

Deborah could not accept that answer. “But—”

“Would you find it easier to stay silent if I stuffed rags in your mouth?” Cecily said. She cupped her hands and wiggled her fingers.

Proctor felt the hem of his shirt unravel, with threads crawling under the rope like an army of worms intent on filling his throat. He kicked and strained, hoping to give them less room to move over his skin. Deborah choked off a cry and began to kick and struggle just as hard.

Dee waved his hand impatiently and the worms stopped. “It is not yet the darkest part of the night. We have a moment or two.”

The prince-bishop stepped onto the point of a star, followed by the three other witches at three other points. “You are too much the professor,” he said to Dee impatiently.

“And yet how much have you learned from me because of that, my friend?” Dee said. He never took his
eyes off Proctor and Deborah when he spoke, as though they were either curiosities or dangers—
Please, God, let us be a danger
, Proctor prayed. “Did Thomas Digges tell you his proof, that the universe is infinite and all the stars are suns?” Dee asked.

Deborah looked puzzled, but Proctor knew that the longer they kept Dee talking, the better the chance they had to reconnect with their source of power and find a way to escape. “Yes,” he said. “It must make you feel very small and insignificant.”

“Not at all,” Dee said, smiling. “Consider it mathematically. If the universe extends infinitely in every direction, then it forms a sphere, and I am the center of that sphere. The universe and everything in it revolves around me. If I am the center of the universe, then why should I not do exactly as I please?”

“We are all at the center of the universe,” grumbled the prince-bishop.

“The universe is the sacred heart of God, and He holds all of us at the center of it,” said the blind priest.

Dee nodded acceptance of these remarks. Cecily held her tongue, perhaps as the newest member of this group. Proctor wondered if she replaced the widow Nance. The fifth member—Erzebet Nádasdy—he was beginning to think of as the silent woman. Perhaps she had her doubts, just as the Countess Cagliostro had. Somewhere there had to be a crack.