Witches (31 page)

The Indian understood that she needed to collect something before they could go. He waited for her as she entered the cellar and searched through the hidden back room with a lit candle until she found what she thought she might need. She had no idea what awaited her at the Indian village, so she took the basic medicines for whatever she might find, hoping that her limited knowledge of the healing arts would suffice. Healing had never been her strong point.

When she exited through the door, the brave tossed one glance back at her and set out through the trees at a killing pace. She had to run to keep up with him.

Amadeus galloped along behind them to protect her.

It seemed as if she followed the Indians for hours along the sweltering paths and down the dusty trails before they came to their village. It was a small one. Not more than ten or twelve round bark-covered wigwams huddled in a clearing. The thick trees spread a lush canopy of foliage overhead, covering them in shadows, hiding them. She strode behind the brave past the tepees. Even though she could see the other inhabitants of the village, standing or squatting before the other wigwams, it was strangely quiet. Their faces were blank, their eyes full of dread.

Somewhere ahead of her, someone was coughing violently.

There were no other signs of life, no children playing, no one working. They were all just watching her as she approached, her eyes down, the basket clenched nervously at her side. A huge blue-gray cat with one ear, sidling along behind her skirts.

Amanda, even without her magic, sensed something was direly wrong here.

Her guide halted before one of the dwellings, pushed the piece of hide used as a door covering to one side, and gestured for her to enter. She did.

Inside, once her eyes became accustomed to the dimness, she found a young woman lying under a fur pelt on a raised
wooden structure, moaning. She would have been lovely, but now she was obviously very sick, her
face sprinkled with sweat and angry pus-filled sores. Amanda knelt down next to the woman and felt a surge of pity, compassion. The woman could have been the brave’s wife, or even his daughter, she was so young.

The brave hovered above them like a bright-feathered bird and closely observed everything she did.

She examined the woman with her gaze. Red oozing pustules scarred her skin and fever had turned it a shiny red and coated it in a fine sheen of sweat. She knew enough not to touch her. Whatever she had could be contagious. Amanda wasn’t sure, but she feared it could be smallpox. The great killer of these times. It had wiped countless settlers and whole Indian tribes off the face of the earth. A sickness that caused a slow, repulsive death. The victims would sometime slough off whole layers of skin if you tried to so much as turn them over in the later stages of the disease. It was a hideous way to die. Amanda fretted over where the woman had contracted the disease. How. She prayed it wasn’t rampant in the village.

“I think it’s smallpox, Amadeus,” she said to her familiar, a large furry shadow crouched in the corner behind her. “It’s bad, too. How many more in the village have it?” she asked him. He meowed and shook his head.
None,
it seemed like he was saying but she couldn’t be sure. She could no longer talk to him.

She had to make the Indians understand that they were not to come near this woman. If it was smallpox, a virus, then it was highly infectious. They had to quarantine the woman, and maybe then, the village had a chance.

Tediously, she sought to make the brave understand what she wanted with hand signals and mime. Using pushing motions at him, at all beyond the wigwam, and
gesturing back at her patient, she thought perhaps she’d gotten her meaning across when he nodded and silently slipped out the door.

They expected her to heal the woman. Now she understood why the brave had given her the necklace. In their tribe it must be the sign of a healer. The brave who’d brought her there was the tribe’s medicine man, but he’d failed to save the woman and was asking for her help. They thought she was a healer. Which wasn’t really true. Without her powers, she could only do so much for the woman. All the same, she would try, as with Lizzy, using only her knowledge of the medicinal herbs and her modern day common sense.

She spent the day and that night, caring for the sick woman. Lancing the infected pox, preparing special salve for them, and a sleeping potion so the woman could get the true rest she needed. A potion to bring down the fever. She had all clean clothes and blankets brought in after she’d washed the woman’s flesh and had burned the filthy bedclothes. Amanda knew that her skills alone wouldn’t save the woman, but if she’d been healthy before the illness struck, she might yet live. If Amanda could bring down the fever and get her through the night, she might make it.

Amadeus helped all he could. He touched the sick woman on the forehead with one of his paws and instantly she calmed, the heat radiating from her skin considerably lowered. Amadeus had little of his magic left, but Amanda knew he’d given the woman some of what he’d had. Hopefully, it would be enough.

By morning the fever had broken, the woman had come to briefly and fallen back into a real sleep. She’d gotten past the worst of it, Amanda was sure. She might recover now, depending on how great her will to live was. It was in God’s hands. Amanda and Amadeus had done all they could do.

Exhausted, as dawn’s golden rays tinted the earth, Amanda left the tepee.
The brave was sleeping outside and she woke him. He offered her fresh water out of a gourd. Amanda gulped it down and nodded her head in thanks.

“I think she’s going to make it,” she spoke softly, looking back at the wigwam where the girl was sleeping, smiling at him. The smile is what got through to him.

She’s all right.

He reached out and touched her hand gently. His eyes were shining with gratitude and he said something to her in his own tongue. Amanda couldn’t understand a word, but she understood his meaning well enough. He was thanking her for saving the woman’s life.

“I had help,” she answered, still wearing her tired smile, and looked upward. “Now, take me home, please?” she asked, swaying. She was so weary she could have lain down right there and slept for a week but she had to get back to the children. They must be worried sick over her.

He led her back to the cottage, Amadeus sleeping in her arms, tired, too, and left her.

Maggie was ecstatic to see her returned alive and in one piece. Lizzy cried with happiness. Amanda, after she’d assured them both she was fine and cleaned herself up with soap and as hot of water as she could bear, fell onto her pallet and slept the rest of the day. It was good she did.

That evening as she opened the front door to Joshua’s knock, she looked down. Outside on the ground by the door there was a bundle of freshly killed rabbits and fur pelts. The Indians had left her gifts. Payment and gratitude for her services.

When she met Joshua’s eyes, she knew something was wrong.

“What is it?”

“Please, can thou come?” his voice a wretched plea. He reached out a hand toward her. “There be a terrible sickness at the farm. These last two days many of the laborers have come down with it and the physician is busy fighting it in town and will not come.”

Smallpox, Amanda thought with a heavy ache in her chest.

“Now my mother has it.” He stopped. His horse restless behind him. Animals could sense when their masters were disturbed. Sense when death was nearby.

“They say thou can cure anything. That thou hast the power...” A strange light gleamed in his troubled brown eyes.

A witch’s power, Amanda mused sadly. Joshua did still believe, in part, that she was what they said she was. What they said Rachel
was— and he was frantic enough to grasp at any straw he could. Inwardly, Amanda cringed, but kept her face impassive.

“I will come,” was all she said. She went to tell the girls she was leaving again, and to gather what she would need for her journey and the task at hand.

Joshua, already remounted, pulled her and Amadeus (who insisted on coming along) up into the saddle and they galloped into the creeping twilight away from the small cottage.

* * * *

Maggie watched them ride away, a grim set to her thin mouth. Something terrible will come of all this yet, she thought. Something terrible. She had these feelings at times. Almost visions. Most of them came true. She’d never told a soul about them, especially her absent mother, who would be jealous of her for them.

She hadn’t decided yet if or when she’d tell Amanda about them—or the other powers she’d begun to acquire these last few years. Until now, she’d always been ashamed of them. Hated them for what she thought they made her. Wicked, like her real mother. Until Amanda had come. Now she wondered if possessing powers was as
evil a thing as she’d once believed.

Standing there in the evening’s growing shadows, Maggie whispered a prayer that Amanda would return safely. Maggie had grown to love the woman from another time. She recognized a good heart and pure soul when she saw one. Unlike her true mother who could never be or see anything but blackness and spite, never be anything but bad, Amanda was different. Amanda was
good.

Too good to die a senseless death.

Chapter Ten

They’d been talking since Rebecca’s arrival and they were both fatigued, and disturbed over their absent sister’s fate. Outside, the snow was now a full-fledged blizzard descending upon a sleeping Boston, and the large house creaked and moaned as the winds tore at its outer shell. The kitchen, where Rebecca and Jessica, with bloodshot eyes, conferred over hot coffee at the kitchen table, was warm and cozy.

Rebecca had arrived about eight-thirty that evening on the last plane to slip through before the bad weather. Everything, the man at the departure desk had told her as she’d waited for Jessica to pick her up, was grounded. No more planes would fly in or out again until the weather conditions let up some. Too dangerous. Ice would form on the wings and down they’d go.

John and the girls had gone upstairs fairly soon after Rebecca had gotten to the house. The two sisters wanted to be alone so they could talk freely, and John, knowing what was going on, had taken the girls to watch a late movie on the television up in the den. He couldn’t help them with their problem; he knew nothing about witchcraft, though he’d been a believer since the day he’d met Amanda and she’d done her disappearing act right in front of him. He prayed, like them,
that they would find her. John had always liked Amanda.

By now, as silent as the upstairs was, they were probably all long asleep.

Rebecca had sat stiffly in the chair, her head in her hands, shaking it back and forth as Jessica recounted all she knew.

Tituba, Rebecca’s familiar, had paced around the table, pulling out his whiskers and acting nuts like he always did when he thought they were heading for unavoidable danger of any kind.

Mistress, sister or no, it’s too dangerous for us to be involved with. Something bigger is behind all this. Not just a renegade witch-wraith. My contacts feel so, too. Real evil is behind Amanda’s predicament. Humongous evil.

What exactly are you implying?

Rebecca had demanded to know with a tinge of sarcasm as she rolled her eyes.

Next thing you’ll be whining about will be that it’s a first-level demon or even Beelzebub himself, I suppose?

Although she hid it, it’d unnerved her when her familiar glared up at her from the tabletop with his beady coal eyes and had refused to answer, swishing his mouse tail back and forth like an angry whip. Instead, he’d gone back to pacing the rim of the table, his tiny furry body quivering and bristling with anxiety.

Rebecca had waited until he got close to the edge and then with a well-placed flick of her chubby finger, shoved him neatly off the table. An indignant squeak and then a burst of angry chattering had dwindled off into the next room.

“Now you’ve made him mad,” Jessica had said, covering her mouth so as not to laugh. She hadn’t asked what the two had disagreed about. If Rebecca felt she should know, she’d tell her.

“He’ll get over it.” Rebecca sighed. “He’s been real uptight over this whole thing.” Then she let it drop.

Jessica swiveled her head and was looking out the window at the snow, her face lit strangely by the eerie whiteness.

“You actually think that Amanda’s lost somewhere in the seventeenth century?” Rebecca’s voice was skeptical when she got back to what they’d been talking about before. “Why do you think so?”

“Abigail dreamed it. She’s always had this special connection
with Amanda.”

Rebecca’s heavy dark brows arched up. She’d known about the bond between Abigail and Amanda and she’d also suspected for quite a while that Abigail was probably psychic, so the news didn’t surprise her much. She rubbed her cheek and pushed her hair back from her face. She always took the time to curl her hair, but rarely afterward did she fuss with it, or even comb it. So usually, it was a tangled mane going every which way, giving her a wild, crazed appearance.

“I know I don’t have powers like you and Amanda, but Abby, I believe, is psychic. Early stages yet, but it’s growing. She dreamed of Amanda two nights ago and last night, she told me, and both times Amanda was dressed in long dresses—which isn’t really unusual for her—but she was surrounded by people dressed the same way. In a quaint village that was definitely not in our time, Abby said. There were horses, carriages, no cars. Men in tricorn hats with feathers on them. Abby and I went to the library and looked up the costumes for seventeenth century New England and Abby says the clothes were quite similar.”