Traitor to the Crown The Patriot Witch

by C. C. Finlay

  “Yes, sir,” he said, ducking his head, and hurried away.

  When his feet hit the main road, he began to wonder if Emerson was right. Did he really have to choose? What if he wanted a life with Emily and also wanted to understand his talent? Why couldn't he have both, one helping the other?

  He had to understand his talent better, if only to make Emily understand it. He had to prove to her that his talent was God-given, meant to be used.

  These thoughts were still marching through his head when he arrived at the Lathrops' farm. They were glad to see him. Mrs. Lathrop, Amos's mother, wanted to know about Proctor's wound, and then both parents and Amos's two unmarried sisters joined them at the table while he had a cup of cider and listened to them share the same news from Boston he'd already heard from the old farmer. Proctor made agreeable noises around mouthfuls of beans and pork fat, delivered his message to Amos, and begged to be excused because he still had a long walk home.

  Amos followed him out to the porch, which sagged beneath their weight. His sisters stood at the window, smiling and waving at Proctor. The younger one kept trying to pull off the cap of the older one.

  “Did the Reverend Emerson say exactly what he wanted me for?” Amos asked.

  Proctor rubbed his nose, looked away. “I'm not sure. Best that he tells you himself.”

  Amos nodded. “All right. You go get rested up. And Proctor?”

  He paused, already half turned to go. “Yes?”

  “I heard that Emily Rucke and her father went over to the other side. If you're ready to start looking for another sweetheart, I might know a couple girls who'd return your interest, if you were serious.”

  Behind the glass, the older girl covered her mouth and the younger one giggled. Amos winked at them.

  “I'm sure it'll work out fine with Miss Rucke,” Proctor said. “We just have to give it a chance. But thanks, Amos.”

  Amos grinned. “Things change in ways we don't expect. Just keep an open mind.”

  Proctor assured him that he would, but as he headed cross-country for home, he rehearsed the things he planned to say to Emily next time he saw her. To that end, his own ignorance frustrated him again and again. The closer he came to his home, the angrier he grew. How much did his mother really know about witchcraft? What had she been keeping from him all these years?

  He climbed over the stone wall and cut across the pasture toward their house. Blankets hung outside on the line to dry, still too heavy to stir with the breeze. Wild ducks milled in the yard with the chickens; they all scattered, quacking and clucking, as he walked through them to the door. He stopped to peer inside before he entered.

  His mother must have been cleaning for days. Their normally tidy house was immaculate, every surface clean, every item in its place. His father sat propped by the open window, his face clean-shaven, his hair washed and brushed back to dry, revealing the scar where he'd been scalped.

  Proctor went inside and leaned his musket against the wall, hanging up his powder horn and bag. There was something he needed to say, but he was finding himself too choked up. He forced the words out.

  “Robert Munroe,” he said. The veteran who had served with his father, and the man who had the misfortune to be standing next to Proctor on Lexington Green when he shot at Pitcairn.

  His father continued to rock, eyes unfocused.

  “He said, what Munroe said was, he said you were a good man in a fight.”

  The door creaked open and his mother entered one step, pausing as soon as she saw Proctor. She looked away from him and carried the bucket of water over to the table, where she splashed some into their brass cooking pot and scrubbed at it, even though it was already so clean it gleamed.

  He cleared his throat. “I'm home, Mother.”

  Chapter 9

  His mother stood there, scrubbing the pot even harder than before. “I see that,” she said finally without looking up. “You're home. You're home after running off to play soldier, after being gone for days. After you went all the way to Concord and back, marching right past your own mother's house without stopping. Don't lie or tell me different. Mister Leary saw you on the road this morning.”

  “I had to go see the Reverend Emerson. He sends his regards.” When she didn't answer him, he went over to the hearth and tipped lids on the kettles to see if there was any food left. “We have to talk, Mother. About the scrying. About our talent.”

  She banged the pot on the table. “We never talk about it! Never! Do you want them to hang me? Do you want them to burn me alive?”

  “Of course I don't want anyone to burn—”

  She cut off his sentence by banging the pot on the table again. This time his father stirred out of his ordinary half sleep and blinked in vacuous agitation at the room.

  “Now see what you've done,” she said. “You've gone and woken your father. Today exhausted him and he needs his rest, but you had to wake him up.”

  Instead of moving to comfort her husband, as she usually did when he woke, she put the pot back in its place by the hearth, hung the rag up to dry, and slammed out the door.

  Proctor went over to soothe his father, patting the old man's shoulder until he smiled and slurred some sentence Proctor pretended to comprehend. He explained that he needed to go help his mother, and his father nodded. When his eyes drifted shut again, Proctor followed her outside. He wasn't sure if she was just afraid or if she was deliberately hiding something from him.

  Although the light was fading, she was in the garden with the hoe, where she slashed at the heavy soil and turned it over for planting. “What are you doing?” Proctor asked, trying to control the anger he felt.

  “Everything,” she said with another slash. “I have to do everything. Your father's too sick to work, and you're running off to wars you have no business with, coming near to getting yourself killed. If I'm going to be here all by myself, I'll have to work twice as hard. Even though I'm at an age where I ought to be mostly taking care of grandchildren.”

  “Mother, I'm not going anywhere.”

  “You think you aren't, but I can tell differently,” she said, punctuating her sentence with three ferocious slashes of the hoe. She stopped and turned to him. “When you first came to me with your … your talent”—she made the word sound like a curse—“that day your friend was shot by British soldiers, what did I tell you?”

  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 towa
rd 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?”