by C. C. Finlay
Captain Smith came down the line. “Listen here, men. It's been decided that we mean to teach the Redcoats a lesson.”
There were somber murmurs at this. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Amos said.
Smith patted the ramrod attached to his musket. “They're not to make it back to Boston, not one of them if we can help it. That'll put a stop to their bullying.”
Proctor wondered how they were going to stop Pitcairn, with his protective charm. If they didn't stop Pitcairn, he'd hold his men together. “Not one?” Proctor asked.
“Not one,” Smith said. “The militia's been raised from all over. We're setting up along the road to harry the Redcoats. Our company's job is to get to the curve at the Bedford Road just past Tanner's Creek before they do.”
“That's more than three miles cross-country,” Amos said.
Proctor pushed his way to the front. “That's out toward my father's farm, and I know the paths between there and town as well as any man.”
“You lead the way then,” Smith said.
Proctor nodded. If Pitcairn had to be stopped, he was the only one who could figure out a way to do it. Proctor ran, leading the men single-file on narrow trails over rocky pastures and through the woods where the trees were leafing. A cold wind blew steady from the east, striking them every time they passed through the open trees. They saw other companies taking trails that paralleled theirs. As they crossed the old road above Merriam's Corner, fierce gunfire sounded south of them. Proctor turned aside from their path to go join it, but Captain Smith stopped him.
“There're other companies down there, that's their work, leave it to them,” he told Proctor. “We've got to be at our station on the curve to do ours.”
“Yes, sir,” Proctor said. He led the file through the little Mill Brook valley, where they splashed across the creek, and up over the hills, down into the swampy lowlands around Tanner's Creek. Gunfire echoed down the valley in the direction of Brooks Hill. The men were tired from running and eager to fight, but this time when they tried to change their path to join the battle it was Proctor who grabbed them and aimed them over the water and up the hills on the other side.
“To the curve,” he told them. “We'll get our chance—go to the hill above the curve.”
Proctor reached the top of the hill to find the Concord men taking positions among the trees. The Lincoln men joined them on the upper slopes. Proctor crouched, back pressed against a huge elm, and caught his breath. He stole a glance around the trunk. The Reading militia were strung out low on the hillsides, near the start of the curve. Brown and russet jackets shifted from tree to tree on the far side of the road. Probably men from Woburn.
He almost felt sorry for the Redcoats. Drawn out in a narrow line, penned in by stone walls, with tree-covered hills on both sides—they didn't have a chance.
They came marching around the bend in a line that was much more ragged than it had been leaving Concord.
Across the road, the Woburn men fired first, followed by the Reading militia in their positions at the bottom of the hill. The Redcoats were caught in a vicious crossfire. One or two of the men around Proctor let off a shot, but Smith shouted, “Hold your fire.”
Captain Barrett, of the Concord minutemen, shouted the same thing. “Wait till they're closer, and stagger your shots. We won't get them all with that first volley.”
Down below, some of the British were trying to fight back, but those who left the road and tried to climb over the wall to reach the men from Woburn and Reading only made themselves easier targets. The smarter Redcoats ran forward through the fire.
“Here's our chance now,” Smith said.
Proctor took aim at the Redcoat in the lead, waiting until he'd almost reached the second bend, and then fired. A dozen muskets went off around him at the same instant. There was no way to tell who shot the man, or how many times he'd been shot, but several Redcoats in the front fell.
Proctor stepped behind the tree to reload and heard bark splinter as the Redcoats returned fire. When he stepped out to shoot again, he saw that the Redcoats kept pushing forward. They had to—they were being attacked from either side, and from behind, and a man could only load and shoot so fast. As long as the Redcoats kept moving, most of them would get through safely. Through a second and third volley, they continued marching and their carriages continued to roll, until only their dead and wounded were left.
He had looked for Pitcairn and missed him, probably one of the times he was behind the tree reloading. But the British troops held together, confident in their leaders, and he knew that the British major hadn't fallen.
“Where to now, Captain?” Proctor asked.
“We're to skip ahead of them again,” Smith said.
This was Proctor's land, figuratively if not literally. He lived within a mile and knew every road and trail, every farm and pasture. “The south side of the road is too low and swampy, you get much beyond here. But we could make our way to the Bluffs outside Lexington.”
“Then that's what we'll do,” Smith said.
Proctor was off and running again without waiting for an order. Looking back, he saw they didn't have a full company anymore. Men who were wounded, or who had family wounded, stayed behind, as did men tired of the fight. Their ranks had thinned, but the Redcoats had been thinned as well.
They crossed the Bedford Road and passed through Mason's soggy pastures. This time when they heard gunfire down around Hartwell's farm, not a man turned aside. In truth, there was no place where they did not hear gunfire, and nowhere they went that they did not glimpse other groups of militia running through the fields and woods. Proctor took a twisting path over pastures strewn with granite boulders. He was panting, and several others were drenched with sweat, but they came to a hill above the road, once again ahead of the British troops.
There were only two or three dozen of them now, mixed men from Concord and Lincoln, but they saw many others hiding down among the boulders and in the ditches, waiting for the Redcoats. Proctor started to lead the men down there, thinking it would be his best chance to get at Pitcairn.
“Not there,” Smith said between breaths. “Farther up, on the hill.”
It had a steep slope, covered with rocks, and would be harder for the Redcoats to assault. He didn't have the strength left to explain all that, but the men saw it, understood, and followed. Proctor was the last to go.
Smith chose a position on the next curve in the road. A company of men already occupied the hillside, waiting for the Redcoats, but it took a moment for Proctor to recognize Captain Parker and the other Lexington men. A few wore bandages over wounds they'd taken that morning. Many more had faces black with powder.
Parker stood tall, out in the open, listening to the stuttering beat of the British drums and the distant crack of muskets, waiting for the Redcoats to appear. He coughed quietly into his palm, eyes widening in his gaunt face at the sight of Proctor.
“You look familiar,” he said, his voice hoarse.
Proctor's throat tightened. Was he going to be blamed for shooting first? “Proctor Brown, sir. Stood on the green with you this morning.”
“That'd be it,” Parker said, and stifled another consumptive cough. He looked like he was going to die soon, whether a British officer shot him in the back or not. “You look like you've been far today, son.”
“All the way to Concord and back,” Proctor said.
“That's a long way to go on a day like this,” Captain Parker said. “God bless you for coming back to help us a second time.”
“I'm sorry for the way things happened—”
Parker interrupted him with a shake of his head that might have been general or specific. “Don't think about it. The situation was bound to come to shooting sooner or later. Either way, the Redcoats owe us a debt for what they did once the shooting started, and we plan to make them pay back every cent with interest.”
Proctor stared at his feet. The sounds of drums and muskets were mu
ch closer. He opened his mouth, unsure what he wanted to say, but Amos sidled between them.
“Being that's how you are with loans,” Amos said, “I guess I shouldn't ask to borrow lead from you, though I don't have more than three shot left.”
Captain Parker laughed at that, and his laugh turned into a cough. Once his coughing stopped, he signaled for one of his men to come over. “We won't loan you shot, but we'll give it to you, how's that?”
“That'll suit just fine,” Amos said.
Proctor put his hand into his hunting bag and counted the lead balls—he could fire nine more times if he didn't double-shot. Then he checked his powder horn and saw that he didn't have nine measures left.
Gunfire peppered the road just west of them, and smoke from muskets marked the imminent arrival of British troops. Proctor scooted downslope and took cover behind a tree that none of the Lexington men had claimed yet.
The Redcoats rounded the bend, a jangled mass of men with bare bayonets followed by battle-scarred carriages bearing wounded soldiers trying to return fire despite their injuries.
Only one mounted officer proceeded as if everything were orderly, one man untouched by the hail of shot aimed at him. Even before Proctor saw the golden spark flashing near the officer's throat, he recognized Pitcairn. The major was holding the Redcoats’ retreat together by the example of his courage and the sheer force of his will.
“Fire!” Captain Parker shouted.
Proctor aimed but didn't pull his trigger. As the smoke thinned, he saw Pitcairn still untouched, though men around him had fallen.
While the militia reloaded, Pitcairn ordered his marines to take the hill. Militiamen in the first ditch screamed out as they were bayoneted. A thin red line moved into the trees.
Seeing a minuteman die on the hillside below him, Proctor thought about Munroe, and Everett, and that little blond fifer from Acton. As long as Pitcairn stayed mounted, he'd hold the British troops together and more good men would die. And it wasn't right, wasn't fair, not with Pitcairn using witchcraft to protect himself. It was the same way some bullies wrapped themselves in a title like Lord and did as they pleased, and it made Proctor's teeth clench in anger.
But Pitcairn could be stopped.
Proctor grabbed Amos by the shoulder. “Pretend you're an ax cutter and clear a lane for me through the trees. I mean to cut the head off that long red snake.”
Without waiting for Amos's answer, he started down the steep slope.
A marine, hatless, wild-haired, raging, charged up the hillside with his bloody bayonet. Amos's musket cracked behind Proctor and the Redcoat dropped, shot through the leg.
A second marine lunged at him from the right, bayonet extended, and Proctor discharged his own musket point-blank before he recognized the huge Scot from the British Coffee-House. As the other man fell, Proctor dropped his weapon, ran off the edge of a large gray boulder, and leapt into the road.
He fell short of Pitcairn's horse, stumbling and falling. A marine with a broken bayonet swung the butt of his musket at him; Proctor rolled out of the way, freeing his hatchet from his belt. When the musket butt came at him a second time, he knocked it aside and rose to his feet.
The horse snorted, stamping at Proctor, pushing between himself and the marine. Proctor grabbed the bridle with his free hand and swung the hatchet at Pitcairn; his eyes were blurry, wet from the sting of musket smoke.
Pitcairn caught Proctor's wrist on the downstroke.
Grappling face-to-face, there was nothing extraordinary about Pitcairn—he smelled of sweat and dust and powder, like anyone else. Proctor dragged him half out of his saddle, tearing at his collar. There, beneath the shirt—a gold medallion, hanging from a gold chain. The charm.
Proctor tried to rip it free, keeping his feet as the horse spun in a panic. Pitcairn let go of the hatchet and grabbed Proctor's other hand with both his own.
Fire flowed through Proctor's palm, and he felt the heat race up his arm with every pulse of his blood. He tried one last time to wrench the charm away, and glimpsed the underside of the medallion—an angel with a shield, and letters, though he didn't recognize them, just like those his mother wrote on the bowl of water.
Light flared in the medallion, and fire speared up his arm, and then it went dull the same moment that his arm went numb.
Pitcairn pried the charm free. “What did you do—?”
A musket fired, striking the horse, which whinnied in fear as it stumbled sideways, tearing Pitcairn from Proctor's grasp.
A fist grabbed Proctor's jacket, yanking him back toward the ditch, and Amos was there, one arm under Proctor's elbow, dragging him up the hillside. He was stumbling, trying to go back, yelling, “I didn't get it, I didn't get it!” But a black man was there, pulling him away, and then one of the Lexington men, and he was halfway up the hillside, with someone shoving his musket back into his hand, which closed on it, even though he couldn't feel it.
“You don't understand,” he tried to say.
“I understand you're a damned fool,” Amos said.
“Nah, I didn't care for that Lobster either,” the black man said.
Turning, Proctor saw that Pitcairn's horse was down. Pitcairn had regained his feet, and, throat naked at the collar, called the marines to him, ordering a full assault up the hill.
Proctor ducked as a round of lead whistled overhead, tearing through bark and leaves, and then it was bayonets, and one of the men dodging out of the way for safety, and Amos doing the same, and Proctor running through the trees, from cover to cover, until he was alone, unsure where he was. He paused, back against a boulder, to reload his musket, stopping in mid-action to wipe his bloody hands—where had the blood come from?—across his breeches.
He had his chance and failed. He'd done something to the charm, felt some of the power drain out of it, but Pitcairn was still standing, and the British continued their retreat.
When he peered over the boulder, he saw that he'd become separated from the other men in his company. He made his way carefully back toward the road. With their last mounted officer unhorsed, the British were routed and simply ran, leaving a trail of abandoned cases and clothes and weapons behind them.
He gave pursuit, thinking he might have one last chance at Pitcairn, but he was exhausted and the sound of gunfire always cracked ahead of him, all the way past Fiske's Hill. He made his way down to the road to follow the Redcoats into Lexington.
One Redcoat lay dead in a ditch that lined the road. He looked like a man who'd fallen down drunk on his way home, but the ground beneath him was soaked with blood.
A hundred yards farther, two wounded regulars sat abandoned by the side of the road. Their empty weapons had been dropped nearby, with the bayonets removed and thrust harmlessly into the soil. One man patched the other's bloody leg while the second bound the first one's arm. When they saw Proctor approaching, they put their hands up in the air.
“We surrender,” the first man said. “We—”
Proctor stumbled by them. Pitcairn was still ahead somewhere, and Proctor was the only one who knew his secret. He tried to explain that, but the words disappeared before they found his tongue.
A few splashes of red were still running in the distance, surrounded by the crack of gunfire.
This, he told himself, was the scene he'd scryed. His mother had been right, in seeing men dead; and he'd been right in seeing a retreat to Boston.
His legs wobbled beneath him, and he staggered to a stop. He would never catch up with them now. Thirst sandpapered his throat. He fumbled for his father's tin canteen and lifted it in his unsteady, bloody hands, uncapping it for a drink.
Nothing came out. The metal felt cool on his lips, but it was dry. He shook it, but nothing. A jagged edge snagged his sleeve. He turned it over—shot had smashed through the bottom of it. He had no idea when.
And where did that yellow ribbon come from?
Emily.
He still had to make things right with Emily.
>
Her house was just ahead, before he reached the burying ground. He willed his legs to move again, forcing himself to run despite the dizzy swimming of the world around him.
His feet pounded across her porch and he beat on the front door, calling her name, asking if she was all right. There was no answer. The windows were shuttered. He peered through them and saw sheets thrown hastily over all the furniture.
He leaned his head against the shutters, slats creased against his forehead, and hit the frame hard enough to rattle the glass. The house was shut up tight. No doubt, Bess and the rest of the house hold had packed up and headed for Boston and safety first thing that morning, after the shooting on the green.
His heart was as empty as the house.
He rolled over, back to the wall, and slid down into a sitting position. Staying upright became a challenge, and so he gave in to gravity and slumped over. The porch rose up to smack his head.
A few feet away a door opened.
“No, I tell you, it is Proctor.”
The voice was both hushed and insistent, familiar and far away.
“He's bleeding, Bess. I don't care. Come help me this instant.”
His lips moved in an attempt to explain how he'd tried to make things right. It hadn't been enough.
“Shhh, don't try to speak, not now. Hurry!”
Hands grabbed him, fists knotted in his clothes, dragging him inside. He hurried, just like she demanded, kicking his legs to help as much as he could. But he didn't seem to be moving anymore. He hoped it was enough.
Chapter 6
Proctor was aware of cushions and damp clothes, drawn curtains and whispered voices.
From the voices, he gathered that a splinter or piece of lead had cut his neck. He knew from the voices that it had missed the vital arteries though he'd still lost significant amounts of blood. He tried to explain that he was fine, that all he needed was some rest. And a good dinner. He was hungry. Now that the battle was over, he and Emily could be together. The battle happened because of his talent, because of what he saw, but he used his talent to stop Pitcairn too, so he'd tried to do the right thing, and now he could be with Emily, and they could have the farm they wanted. His voice sounded far away to him, and nobody answered him, so he spoke louder.