Traitor to the Crown The Patriot Witch (13 page)

He tried to take the hoe from her hand to do the work for her, but she pulled away. “That I must never tell anyone about it.”

“Yes,” she said. “We have relations who were killed at Salem, who were hanged to death, not eighty years past, because people discovered they were witches.”

“That was a long time ago. Massachusetts is nothing like that now.”

“If it isn't, it's because those of us with talents have been wise enough to hold our tongues and keep them secret. No one knows outside the family. I would never have said anything to you if you didn't have to bear the same cross.” Her voice dropped lower, and for a second he thought her secret was going to spill out. But all she said, in a whisper, was, “I
thought with a son, I would be spared.” She reached up, as if she finally noticed the bandage on his neck, and peeled it back to look at the wound. “Oh, Proctor, if that ball had been two inches the other direction, it would have killed you for certain.”

He folded his hand around hers and pulled it away from his wound. “If it had been two inches the other direction it would have missed me completely.”

She turned away, slamming the hoe into the ground again, but this time when he reached for it, she handed it to him. He slowly turned over the soil. “So when did you find out?”

Wiping her hands on her apron, she said, “When I was about the same age as you were. I kept finding things our neighbors had lost—a needle in a haystack was as obvious to me as a dog in the chicken coop—until my mother heard of it and told me what would happen if I didn't keep it secret.”

“And that's all she told you?”

She paused, turning partially away from him, before she answered. “What do you want me to tell you?”

“I want you to tell me everything. I deserve to know.”

She dropped her head. “My mother,” she started reluctantly. “She told me that our people came to America to practice our talents in freedom, away from the burnings and hangings in En gland and the rest of Europe.” Her chin came up, her eyes fierce with anger. “But then the fear spread here. And good, God-fearing people, with no more evil in them than the talents God gave them, were put to death, and all of us were forced into hiding.”

Proctor hacked the soil hard. It smelled dry and rich, ready for planting. “There was this soldier,” he said. “An officer.”

“Yes?”

“He was a Redcoat, Major Pitcairn. He had this medallion around his neck, like a golden coin.”

“Was this at Concord?”

“In Boston first, then at Lexington and Concord. No one else seemed to notice it, but it gleamed like the sun to me, and I could tell there was …” He was at a loss for words. Charm? Protection? “There was something about it that steered harm away from him.”

She bent over as he worked, scooping stones out of the soil as he turned it over. He slowed his motion to match her bending and plucking. “I don't know anything about that,” she said.

The phrase came so easily to her lips that he felt sure she would say the same thing even if she did know something.

She carried a handful of stones over to the side of the well and dropped them. When she returned, he said, “Then today, I saw this woman, when I went to see the Reverend Emerson.” He started to explain about the shape-changing—the panther and bear—and the crows. But he looked up and saw that the grief and pain in her face made her appear older than even his father instead of many years younger. After turning and starting the next row, he said, with his back to her, “She could start fire with nothing but the air and wind for flint and steel.”

His mother slammed a stone back into the dirt. “Proctor, you're the one playing with fire. I beg you, please, to stop before you are burned. Before you have me burned with you.”

He kept his eyes on the ground as he continued to hoe. “But we don't just play with fire. We use fire for cooking, for heat, for the forges that make our tools—our lives depend on fire. This is the same thing. I want to know what I'm doing so I'm
not
playing.” He lifted his head to meet her eyes. “And who else will explain it to me but you?”

“I beg you to give up your interest in this,” she said, her voice trembling.

He stopped, planted the hoe in the ground, and leaned on it. The sun dropped in the western sky, like a stone in a
pond that sent out splashes of pink and orange over the blue. She had tears in her eyes but held them dammed back by the rims of her lids, refusing to let them flow down her face.

“I'm afraid for
us
, Proctor.”

“I didn't even tell you all of what I saw yet.”

“And I don't want to hear it.”

Anger flashed through him, and he slammed the hoe into the dirt. It was always the same answer from her. If she knew something, she said she didn't. If he needed to know something, she refused to talk about it.

She dropped her head, covered her hand with her mouth for a moment. “I have prayed on this, and prayed on it, every day of my life. I have to believe that what we have is a gift from God, a blessing, but it is only a blessing if we use it to do His will.”

“I've never said I wanted to do anything else—”

“If you use it for personal gain, if you use the gift to harm another, it becomes a curse, and God will punish you for it. Like a man who has great strength, who uses it to bully the weak instead of protecting them.”

He paused until her throat stopped quivering. When he spoke, he spoke softly. “Mother, a week ago, I thought I was going to take over this farm, and get married to Emily, and have a life just like the one that you and Father had.”

“And what's wrong with that? Why can't you do that still, with someone else? Other young women find you handsome, and you're known as a hard worker. Why can't you forget about the war? Why can't you do what you were going to do before?”

She sounded so desperate, he felt sad. “That's what I want to do,” he said. “But I have to understand what's happened and what I've seen.”

“There's nothing to understand.” She knotted her fists in her apron and punched it at him, then stomped several steps away, back toward the house. “I can tell you're not
satisfied, Proctor. I can tell you want more. Well, go look for it if you must, go look at your British officer and your old woman in Concord with their medallions and fires. But you won't like what you find.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because when you turn over rocks, all you find are snakes.” She forced her hands to relax, smoothed her apron. “I know what happened before, when people with our talents tried to share them with their neighbors, when they dared to speak of them openly.”

“I'll be careful.”

She laughed, wearily, and looked away, shaking her head in exhaustion. She headed back toward the house, saying, “It's been a long day, and I need to put your father to bed. I have to do that too, just like I do everything else.”

At the door, she paused, waiting for him to offer to come help her. But for once he didn't move, and a moment later the door slammed shut behind her.

He tapped the hoe against the ground, thinking. Their conversation left him with more unanswered questions than he'd had before they talked. And one of them was this: what
was
his mother hiding from him?

Chores had their own soothing pace, giving him time to think. He cleaned up, putting the hoe away, chasing the last of the chickens into their coop, splitting tomorrow's firewood. As he worked, he considered that he might be heir to a secret that went back generations, but his mother knew little or nothing more about it than that. She carried the shame and fear of it around like a bushel full of rocks. His mother was afraid of a vision from a cracked egg when at any time she, or he, might make a man burst into flames.

The fire had been no lie—he could still smell the scent of burned wool and scorched skin. He had discovered scrying by accident. Would he discover an incendiary talent the
same way? No, it was better if he understood it, where it came from. How to use it.

Yes, how to use it. Imagine being able to start a fire in the winter without barking his numb hands against steel and flint until he struck a spark. It was almost enough to make him feel wickedly lazy.

What if he used it to defeat evil witchcraft? What if he could have undone Pitcairn's charm before a shot was ever fired on the green?

The wound in his neck throbbed. He pulled off the bandage and felt the scab with his fingers. No fresh seepage, that was good.

He went inside as the gloaming fell and found the plate of salted pork and boiled potatoes his mother had left sitting out for him. By the time he finished eating, he was surrounded by darkness and silence.

Emerson and Deborah had avoided his questions. His mother either didn't know the answers or hid them from him. But he knew where he could find someone who did.

He rose and shrugged his jacket on again. The prospect of understanding his talent chased exhaustion from him. For the second time that day, he headed across the fields toward Concord and the Reverend Emerson's great house, this time in the dark, this time in secret.

Lanterns flickered or were extinguished in various windows as he went. Dogs barked at his passing, except for the big sheepdog on the Kagey farm, which ran happily down to lick Proctor's hand and steal a scratch behind the ears. The air grew colder until his breath ghosted in front of him. He would have to lie, deliberately, to do what he wanted. Twice before he reached the Emersons' place, the fear of lying almost turned him back home.

But then he was cutting through the orchard. Near the shed, a dark shape sat across from the shed door. The silhouette of a familiar hat, one side of the brim pinned up, drooped toward its wearer's chest.

“Hello, Amos,” Proctor said softly as he came up close.

Amos started up, aiming his musket defensively. “Proctor. You alarmed me.”

“Anything happen?”

“Not a thing.” Amos lowered his musket and rubbed his eyes. “You know who they have in there?”

Proctor hesitated a moment, then shook his head.

His friend shrugged. “Me either. But I'm not supposed to tell anyone about it, on peril of betraying the patriot cause. It's an odd business.”

Proctor swallowed hard. “The Reverend Emerson asked me to come back to relieve you. Decided it was too long to have you stay here all night.”

Amos stared hard at Proctor, his expression unreadable in the dark. Proctor had his next lie ready to trot out as soon as he was challenged, but Amos said, “Fine by me. I'm glad he thought of it, because I wasn't looking forward to bedding down out here to night without so much as a tent. I'll get enough of that when I head down to the siege at Boston.”

“Are you going?”

“I reckon so. There's no way to keep the Redcoats bottled up in there, not when they control the harbor. But we can keep them from marching out into the country again.” He resituated his hat to one side. “Didn't Emerson ask you to bring your musket in case you need to sound an alarm?”

Proctor swallowed air wrong, which made him cough. “He must've forgotten to mention it.”

Amos pulled his bag and horn off his shoulder and offered them, with the musket, to Proctor. “Drop them off by the house in the morning.”

“Thank you,” Proctor said, trying not to let the straps slip through his sweaty hands.

“If you come by early enough, I'll have my sisters fix breakfast for you.”

“I don't care who fixes it, I'll eat it,” Proctor said, and then they both laughed.

“Good night, then,” Amos said. He trudged past the big house toward the road.

As soon as his shadow faded into the night, Proctor went over to the shed. He saw nails, with ribbons knotted on them, just as in the cart. It was too dark to see if there was a circle of salt on the ground, but he sat across from the door, far enough not to disturb it if there was. He listened for a long time without hearing anything, so he reached over and rapped lightly on the wood slats. “You awake in there?”

A body stirred against the other side of the door. “If I wasn't, I would be now, wouldn't I?”

A woman's voice, exhausted, but with a faint foreign lilt to it, Proctor thought—though his experience with foreigners was limited to a few people he'd overheard in Boston.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“I reclaim my previous answer—I am most definitely sleeping. Now leave me alone.” A rustling sound inside moved away from the door.

He rapped again. “How did you do that?”

Wearily, “I closed my eyes and rolled over.”

“On the wagon today—how did you create the illusion of that panther, and the bear? How did you make us see the crows? I could have sworn it was cooler beneath their shadows, that a wing brushed my face.”

A pause inside was followed by the sound of her sitting upright and the creak of wood as she pressed against the door. “You're the young one, hiding in the woods, aren't you?”

It was his turn to pause, wondering, now that he was speaking to her, how much he dare give away.

“No, it's all right, you don't need to tell me,” she said. “Now that I'm awake, I can sense you clear and fine, a fire bright as daylight, even through the door.”

Fire? That was the word Deborah had mentioned. “What does that mean?”

She chuckled. “So you have powers, do you? Talents you don't understand. And there's no one to explain them to you, no one to show you how to use them?”

“I never said that.”

“Then why did you come wake me in the middle of the night?”

“How did you do those things? Was it witchcraft?”

A sigh, not wholly muffled by the planks of wood. “Those were illusions, mere tricks of the eye.”

“The fire wasn't.”

“I had a flint and steel hidden in my sleeve.”

“All right, then, if that's how it is, good night.”

He was shaking a bit, not that he would have called it scared, what with her inside and him out here. But his skin tingled again, the way it had earlier, and he was afraid it might burst into flame, no matter what she said. So he stood up to walk away.

“Wait. Come back.”

He stopped. “Why? You told me what I wanted to know. They were tricks of the eye, and tricks hid up your sleeve. And the salt and the nails, that was all superstitious nonsense.”