Traitor to the Crown The Patriot Witch (20 page)

A scrap of weeping slipped through a crack in the house's windows and reached his ears through the rain. Proctor felt bad for Elizabeth, and for Deborah too, no matter how she treated him.

Nobody, especially not Proctor, wept for either of the dead men wrapped in old horse blankets and tucked into the stall below. They were drunks and murderers, sent to kill a house full of women, and they deserved what happened to them.
The flies had already started to find them; whenever the rain lessened its patter, he noticed their buzz. The milk cow complained about the smell and the flies, banging the sideboards of her stall from time to time.

Two men dead, but one had escaped. Proctor doubted that the survivor made it very far, or would long outlive his companions. Whoever sent the widow had sent the false Indians, and next they would send somebody else. Proctor couldn't leave the women unguarded until somebody else arrived to protect them. He made up his mind to write a letter to the Reverend Emerson and find some way to post it.

These thoughts paced familiar paths in his head, like a dog leashed to a post. He fell into a fitful sleep, with dreams of fighting Indians and being scalped like his father had been. Something startled him awake, and he bolted up, plucking straw from his hair and rubbing his eyes. He heard the noise again, a dull chopping sound.

Proctor grabbed his weapons and jumped from the loft. A few steps outside the barn, he slipped to a stop. Even with the rain blurring his eyes, he recognized Deborah at the edge of the orchard behind the house. Her skirt was pinned to her knees, and she hacked away at the ground with the garden spade.

He set Jedediah's musket down in a dry spot inside the barn and went to help her. She slammed the spade into the ground over and over again.

“Miss Deborah,” he said.

Her eyes were puffy and red from crying, her face blotched, and her hair plastered to her head from the rain. But her lips were tight, her tiny chin firmly set. Without a word to him, she turned back to her work, deliberately marking out the edges of a grave.

“Let me help.”

She shook her head and slammed the spade into the ground harder.

He stood out of her way. The rain soaked through his
clothes to his skin in moments. It was bad enough feeling useless while a woman did that kind of work, but he was starting to shiver from the cold. He returned to the barn, to the spot where Jedediah hung his tools, and found a pick and shovel.

Without asking her permission, he began to scoop away the soil from the rough rectangle she had marked out. He could tell in moments that she had done physical labor on their farm before; the two of them fell into a comfortable rhythm without speaking. She moved around the edges, spading through the turf and levering up the larger stones. Proctor followed half a plot behind, breaking up the soil and shouldering shovel after shovel of rain-sodden mud into a pile beside the grave. The rocks weighed the same no matter what, and he began to be glad for them. The work warmed him enough that after a while, he unfastened the top button of his shirt.

Finally the hole grew deep enough that Deborah could no longer help without climbing down inside it. Proctor stepped into it first. There was an inch of brown water in the bottom, and the mud sucked at his shoes as he shifted position for a better angle. Deborah paused. The work and rain had washed away most of the sorrow from her face. He wasn't sure what it had left behind, beyond a certain grim determination.

He jammed the shovel into the ground, folded his hands over the top of it, and met her eyes. “Don't you have family or friends to help out with this?”

“No, there's just us.”

“What about folks from your church?” he asked. “Can't your pastor gather the deacons or someone else to help out you and your mother?”

She was silent for a long moment while he squinted against the rain and listened to its steady splash in the puddle at his feet. “We're Friends,” she said.

“Well, sure, that's why I'm out here helping you.”

She opened her mouth to explain that Friends meant Quakers, and then saw—he hoped—that he was teasing her. “The Society of Friends has no pastor or deacons for our meetings,” she said. “We all come before God equally.”

“But there's somebody like that,” he said, believing there had to be. If they came to help, whoever they were, he could pass the responsibility off for the safety of the women onto them, and he could head home. “Elders. Or somebody.”

“There isn't. The Friends aren't organized like that. But it wouldn't matter if we were—my mother and father were read out of meeting years ago.”

“Read out of meeting?”

“It means that the other members of the meeting asked them to leave.” She sighed, letting the spade drop. Her shoulders sagged. “I don't know if it had more to do with my father's beliefs that the colonies ought to be free of British rule, or with my mother's … practices. I was too young to remember and my parents never spoke of it. Are you thirsty?”

He was still trying to understand the idea of being read out of meeting. “I'm sorry.”

“I said, are you thirsty?” She lifted her head to the sky and emitted a short, sad laugh. “As if one could be thirsty in all this wet.”

“I am,” he said.

“I'll be back in a moment.” She turned and went to the house.

Proctor dug vigorously while she was gone, emptying the grave of soil and rock. The sides constantly caved in around his feet, and he had to shift from one side to the other. He was almost chest-deep when her shadow darkened the rim of the hole again.

She handed him a crust end of black bread and a slice of sharp cheese. “I put on water for coffee, but it will need another moment to steep. I thought you might be hungry too.”

He swallowed the bite of cheese that already filled his mouth and said, “Thank you kindly.”

“No, thank you.” She stood there patiently silent, soaked by the rain, while he chewed and swallowed.

He went to brush wet crumbs from his cheek and tasted the mud on his hands. He was trying to spit out the flavor when Elizabeth came and stood by her daughter with two steaming mugs in her one good hand. The older woman's face was marked with all the grief that had been written in Deborah's features, and for the first time Proctor saw more than a casual resemblance between them. Deborah handed a mug to Proctor.

He looked up at the rain. “I better drink it quick before it's watered down too far to taste.”

Deborah took her cup and tilted her chin at the rain. “Mother, you must stop this now. Our neighbors' crops will rot in their fields with all this rain.” She spoke low enough that Proctor didn't think he was supposed to hear.

Thunder rumbled in the sky beyond the trees and past the hill. “Thou art welcome,” Elizabeth said, and turned away. The rain did nothing to lessen.

After a few sips, and then one long drink from his mug, Proctor passed it up to Deborah. “I should keep working.”

“I don't know how I would've finished this without you,” she said.

“Oh, it's not finished yet,” he said. The deeper he went, the slower he worked, as he had to lift each shovelful up and over the edge of the grave. Several times the pile of mud collapsed and flowed back into the hole, and he had to toss it out all over again. By the time he had dug the hole as deep as his chest, he was soaked through to the bone, sore from shoulders to feet, and covered in a layer of mud from toe to waist. He tossed the shovel over the edge and climbed out, slipping back twice before he finally pulled himself to his feet. Standing hands on hips, he caught his breath for a moment and felt good about his work.

Deborah picked up the spade and took a few paces to one side. “Let's dig the next one here.”

“What?”

“We've got two more men to bury. If you don't keep working, we'll never be done by nightfall.”

“Shouldn't we tell the authorities?” he asked. “Have them come out and identify those men.” If he had thought to offer to do that this morning, he wouldn't be digging now. He might even be on his way home.

She marked the outline of the grave with the spade. “We don't want the attention. Not if we don't know who sent them out here.”

“Well, it's obviously the British,” he said. “Wait a minute. How do the British know you're all witches? Have you been putting curses on them?”

She stopped her work. “Let's be clear about one thing up front. No woman here, no student of my mother's, would ever use magic to make a curse or bring harm in any way to another.”

“What exactly do you do here?”

“We teach women how to use their talents to be better midwives and better healers. Sometimes we have a preacher's wife come stay with us for a while, or someone else with the talent. But we do God's work. We make sure the women use their talents to help their communities, and that's all.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets, the rough fabric sore on his work-raw knuckles. “If you say so.”

“I say so,” she said.

“So you've done nothing to draw the attention of the British?”

“My father was outspoken against the Parliament and their taxes, true. He did not want his taxes used to support any wars, and I may share some of his opinions. But we had never done anything to antagonize them. And there are many other people around here who have been eager to harm witches in the past.”

“But you said the widow came after you because of what
you did to one of their officers.” He tried to ask the question casually, as if he didn't know his own part in it. To disguise his unease, he shoveled mud out of the area she had marked.

“That's what we gleaned from the few things she said.”

“What happened?”

“We were lucky, much as we were last night. We would never have known the danger, except Cecily woke in the night and went outside. Lydia followed her and spied the widow using some kind of compulsion to force information from Cecily. That's why she was so terrified when we were attacked again last night.”

“I don't blame her,” Proctor said.

“Cecily doesn't remember anything about the widow, but Lydia heard angry questions about some British officer. She woke my mother for help, and when my mother ran to confront her, the widow tried to set the house on fire.”

“How did you escape?” This spot of soil had more rocks in it, and larger ones, and Proctor had to stop frequently to toss them out of the hole.

“My mother drew all the fire into herself and then sent it down the well.” She smiled. “Steam rose from the well for a day. Even though it took only seconds, she was badly burned.”

“And then she put a spell on the widow, to bind her?”

“No. Then my father came out of the barn and hit her on the head with a shovel while she wasn't looking. I put the binding spell on her while she was unconscious. We sent word ahead and then set out at once to see friend Emerson.”

He knew the rest of the story from there, but he couldn't shake loose thoughts of the fire. He had seen animals burned to death in a barn fire once, and the thought of that happening to this houseful of women disturbed him greatly. The thought that it might all have been his fault, because of what he did to Pitcairn, disturbed him even
more. “I saw her start fire from nothing, no steel or flint or spark, just a word from her lips and flame.”

“Yes.”

“How did she do that?”

“I don't know,” she said. The way she shuddered made him believe her.

The two of them worked with the same easy rhythm again, and the hole grew steadily deeper. When he stepped inside it, she walked over to the same spot on the opposite side of her father's hole.

Proctor stopped digging. “If we make this one big enough, we can put both men in it.”

“It's not right to elevate one man above others,” she said, indicating her father's grave.

“Seeing as how they're the ones who came to kill him, it seems just fine to me.”

She shook her head and started turning the soil with the spade. “No, we are all made equal in the eyes of the Lord. They deserve to be mourned too, as much for the loss of their souls as for the loss of their lives. I'll do it by myself, if the work's too hard for you.”

“I bet you would,” he said grudgingly and went back to work. He didn't dig the second hole quite as deep. By the time he finished digging the second grave, she was more than knee-deep in the third hole, shoveling away the mud and rocks in small, slow, steady scoops.

The rain continued steady. All three holes were filling up with water. He couldn't get any wetter. Mud coated his entire body, and his waterlogged hands had the texture of prunes.

“I can finish that,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, clearly tired. She slipped as she tried to climb out of the hole, so he offered her his hand.

“I'm sorry about the mud,” he said, seeing his handprint on her sleeve.

She looked at it, then laughed, and he laughed too. She
stood and watched him for a while, then went up to the house.

The sky, dark all day from the clouds, was descending into truer darkness by the time Proctor decided he had shoveled enough mud from the third grave. It was the shallowest hole, little more than three feet deep. His arms nearly gave out as he climbed over the edge of the pit. He sat on the ground, arms folded across his knees, head leaning on his arms.

Deborah had been moving back and forth between the house and barn, but when she saw him finished, she came over to his side. After he said nothing to her, she picked up the shovel where he had dropped it. Holding it out to him at arm's length, she said, “One more.”

He lifted his head and stared at her blankly. “What?”

“One more.”

“For who?” he said, not hiding the weariness in his voice. “Did we find the third Indian?”

“For Nimrod,” she said.

The dog. Of course, the dog had to be buried too. He pushed himself to his feet with a grunt. When he reached out for the shovel, she snatched it away.

“I was just joking,” she said. “You have no sense of humor. There's some water for you in the barn.”

He looked up at the sky, at the puddles around them, at the water standing in the graves. “I have plenty of water out here.”