A Spell for the Revolution (9 page)

Before dawn the next morning, they gathered in the main room of the house. Deborah lined up the dolls she meant to use as a focus. She needed a hair from each person to complete the spell, and she yanked the hairs out by the roots to preserve their living essence.

“I’m certain that hurt unnecessarily,” Sukey said, rubbing her scalp.

“Complain again and I’ll take another,” Deborah said as she knotted the hairs to each doll.

Few other words were exchanged. Deborah gathered up the dolls and slipped them into her dress pockets. As they stood at the door, Magdalena said, “In a week you will be back.”

“That may be as fast as we can manage,” Deborah said.

“It will depend on how hard this orphan boy is to find,” Proctor said. “If Cecily has reached him first, we may have to locate them both and—”

“It was not a question,” Magdalena said. “In a week, you will be back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Proctor said.

Deborah faced the window. “It is almost dawn. Time to make a very noticeable departure.”

She opened the door and stepped onto the porch. Proctor followed with their biggest pan and a large wooden spoon. He banged on it as hard as he could. The sound echoed off the hills and disappeared into the trees.

“C’mon!” he bellowed. “It’s time to go! Everybody out here now!”

Deborah muttered her spell, and six other figures appeared around her. It wasn’t a convincing illusion. Up close, they were a bit gauzy, and their legs did not seem to touch the ground quite right. But as she walked off past the well, they looked solid enough.

He dropped the pan and the spoon inside the door and pulled it shut behind him. The others wouldn’t venture outside again until Proctor and Deborah were well on their way. He picked up a bag with some basic items for their journey, slung it over his shoulder, and ran to catch up with Deborah. He made a point to step around the apparitions that followed her.

“Do you have everything?” Deborah asked.

“Yes, enough for ten days,” he said. “I’d feel better with the musket.” He knew that a gun would draw too much attention on their journey, just as his tomahawk would also be hard to explain, but he carried the largest knife he owned. He walked with his hand on the hilt.

“What good would a gun do against a creature without flesh or bone? Besides, we’re supposed to be traveling as Quakers.”

“I know,” he said. “I fixed the fence out in the pasture and set the spells there. Are you ready?”

She closed her eyes for a second and nodded.

They didn’t know if Bootzamon saw and heard things as people did, or if he was sensitive to magic. The pan-banging had been in case the former was true. The latter would require a little more effort at convincing.

“You go first,” Deborah said.

Proctor nodded, and then, braced for an attack, he stepped through the gate. A few birds flew from the grass to the trees in the dawn light.

Deborah followed after him, stopping long enough to place a large flat stone against the gatepost.

“Hold out your hands,” she said. She stood directly across from him and showed him the gesture she meant. The apparitions flowed around them, completing the circle. It looked like Magdalena held his hand on the one side and Abby on the other, but he felt nothing.

Then the tingle flowed through him, the way it did when they were all joined in a true circle.

“Let the root of evil be sealed from this place,” Deborah said, using a Bible verse from Esdras for her spell. “Let weakness and the moth be hidden from here. Let all corruption flee into hell to be forgotten. Until we return.”

Proctor could feel the power bubble out from them, spreading over The Farm like a blanket covering a bed. The apparitions of the other witches began to fade, and Deborah dropped her hands. At once the images returned.

Proctor followed her gesture. He saw a bead of sweat trickle down her forehead and across her cheek. “Paradise?” he asked.

“What?” she said. She seemed dizzy, almost out of it.

He stepped over to help her, but she waved him away. “That verse. You used a protective spell that compares The Farm to paradise?”

“It is the only paradise I shall think of until we return here safely. And it was the strongest spell I could conjure to protect The Farm in our absence.” She glanced at the dark shadows of the woods around them. “Come, the … others will be stronger if we keep them moving.”

“Are you strong enough to keep moving?” he asked.

“I’ll get stronger as we go,” she said, setting off down the road toward Salem. The apparitions followed her like ducklings after their mother.

Proctor checked over his shoulder and scanned the woods for movement. Seeing so many people depart might draw Bootzamon, but then it might also make him wary enough to keep his distance. Proctor spied no sign of the creature, and he hurried to catch up with Deborah.

They had only been walking a short distance when Deborah said, “Stop looking over your shoulder so often.”

“But I want to see him coming,” Proctor said.

“So don’t give him any more reason to conceal himself.”

She was right—a wary Bootzamon would be invisible. Better to keep up the illusion that they were all leaving The Farm out of fear. Proctor bided his time, stealing glances back as the road turned, but there was no sign of Bootzamon until they came to the junction with the Salem Road.

As they joined the larger road, Proctor stepped to the side, pretending to make way for the women in their group. Fifty yards back, the shadow of a man wearing a large-brimmed hat stood just inside the trees.

“There’s someone behind us,” Proctor told Deborah.

“A farmer or a woodcutter maybe?”

Proctor glanced back just in time to see the figure leap twenty feet across the road and behind the cover of a stone wall. “No, it’s most certainly—”

“Take your hand off your knife and turn back around,” Deborah said. “We’re trying to draw him away.”

“And he’ll follow us farther if he thinks we’re not aware of him,” Proctor said. “I know—it’s just hard not to … after what he did in Virginia …”

If he felt the strain, he saw that she did too. They passed a field of wildflowers—a riot of purples and yellows and blues, with butterflies dancing from blossom to blossom. It was exactly the sort of thing that always drew Deborah’s attention and often made her stop. But she kept her eyes straight ahead on the road, and her hands in the pockets where she stored the dolls. They traveled the miles in silence, both lost to their own thoughts.

He was glancing over his shoulder when she said, “This is your family’s territory up ahead, isn’t it?”

His head whipped around. “My parents both came from Salem Village, but I don’t know which part.”

“I think the Proctors—that’s your mother’s family?”

“Yes,” he said.

“They lived farther north. This area is called Shillaber’s Plains,” she said, pointing to flatlands ahead as they came out of the hills. “Giles Corey, the man who was pressed to death with stones during the witch trials, lived there, near the lake.”

“What about the Browns?” he asked.

“The land hereabouts is thick with Browns,” she said. “Most of them descended from Goodman Brown and his wife, who lived in the village near the meetinghouse, back when it was first founded.”

“Were any of them—” He paused in his question as a farmer on a wagon loaded with milk rattled by them, heading eastward toward Salem city. The farmer looked at their little group twice, then shook his head like someone waking from a dream and turned away.

“Did any of them share our talent?” Proctor asked.

“I don’t know,” Deborah said. “They must have. Your mother has the talent, and your father must have carried it in his blood too. But my mother never spoke of others by name, not unless I’d met them. It was part of her rule, like the injunction to never write things down. We have always been afraid that if one of us was taken, all would suffer.”

If Bootzamon captured and tortured them as he had done to the Walkers, Proctor had no doubt he or Deborah would reveal their subterfuge, and then everyone still at The Farm would be in peril. The less they knew, the more danger they were in; the more they knew, the more danger they were to their allies.

The cluster of buildings and the roof of the meetinghouse loomed protectively just ahead. People moved about their daily labor—hanging out laundry, picking vegetables, painting houses. Proctor felt a little safer. Bootzamon surely wouldn’t try anything with so many about.

“He’s come closer,” Deborah said.

Proctor started to turn his head, then stopped. “What?”

“I saw him—sensed him actually, and then saw him, in the doorway of the butcher’s shop. It’s easier for him to blend in now that there are more people about.”

She was pale from the effort of maintaining the illusion. The skin of her face was as soft and delicate as the petals of lady’s slippers. “Let’s get to the docks,” Proctor said. “He can’t fly, and I don’t think he can swim. Once we’re on the ocean, we’ll leave him behind.”

The city of Salem gleamed like polished silver and smelled like fish and seawater. Proctor and Deborah walked down Derby Street, which ran the length of the small peninsula that contained the city. The left side of the street was lined with large brick houses painted shining white. They had gable-ended roofs, topped with weather vanes and gilt-railed widow’s walks. Spacious front yards overflowed with fragrant summer flowers. The right side of the road was lined with the docks that served the fishing fleets that had made Salem rich. The street was busy, and the strain of holding the illusion told on Deborah. Rather than risk a conversation or inadvertent encounter, they stepped aside for groups of young women in pink-ribboned caps, for slaves and little servant boys in rough clothes running errands, and for old men with half-empty wagons moving from dock to dock.

But the docks themselves sat empty. Small boats, none more than twenty feet in length, bobbed in the shipyard, and a few fishing boats unloaded their cargo. A fat man stood outside the customhouse at the far end of the largest pier, staring out to sea.

“We have a problem,” Proctor said. “If none of those masts at the far docks is sailing south, we may have to go to Marblehead.”

“We face a more significant problem,” Deborah whispered, turning her body aside. She pointed discreetly.

Twenty yards ahead of them, Bootzamon leaned casually against a lamppost. In the daylight, he looked like a foreign
prince, wearing an old-fashioned hat as an affectation while he puffed merrily away on his pipe.

Proctor’s hands shook. He wasn’t ready to fight Bootzamon again, not yet. Some wagons loaded with fresh cod rattled toward them. Proctor pulled Deborah to the side of the road.

“Quick, give me the doll for Zoe,” he said.

She reached into her pocket and slipped him the knotted leaves. He leaned over in front of the little girl’s image, just as if he were talking to her. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Make sure Zoe runs away—keep her running as long as you can,” he said. A wagon loaded with fish bumped by at just that point. Proctor stepped out behind it and, using his body to shield his action from Bootzamon, dropped the husk in the open back with the load.

The image of Zoe turned and skipped down the street after the wagon. The wagon picked up speed as it rounded the bend in Derby Street, and Zoe started to run after it.

“The skipping was an artful embellishment,” Proctor said.

“He’s supposed to bring back young ones alive, right?” she said. Her voice was strained, and her fist was in the pocket where she kept her hidden charm. “I had to be convincing.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “He’s gone. We’d best hurry.”

They walked toward the masts at the far end of the street. Deborah dropped the dolls one by one into trash-filled water lapping the edge of the nearly empty docks. One by one, the images turned away, appearing to enter the buildings, or step down into boats, until only the two of them were left.

A small group of men dressed like militia, in their work clothes but carrying their muskets and bags, marched past
Proctor and Deborah. Proctor checked for Bootzamon and said, “Come on, there goes our passage.”

Deborah fell in with him. “Why? Because those soldiers are headed to New York?”

“No, it’s because if Bootzamon comes back, I want to be surrounded by men with guns.” He glanced over his shoulder again. “Although the other thing had occurred to me too.”

The men thumped up a plank to a hundred-foot schooner, as long and sleek as a sturgeon. Crewmen were in the rigging of both masts, making preparation to sail—an even better sign. The name painted below the dolphin figurehead proclaimed it the
Bluejack
, out of Marblehead.

Proctor and Deborah stepped up the plank. The militiamen were storing their gear aft. The rest of the crew was small—about half a dozen men who appeared to be related, with the same sun-darkened faces, square jaws, and thick mustaches, plus a similar number of black men and Indians, including one fellow who looked like he might be either.

Proctor cupped his hands to his mouth. “Can I speak to the captain?”