Angels & Patriots

by Salina B Baker

  “The name’s Linus Ames.” He offered his fat hand to Fergus.

  “Fergus Driscoll.”

  The men shook hands.

  Fergus learned that Linus was a widowed forty-two-year old merchant from Salem, Massachusetts.

  “My clipper is often in Yorktown delivering goods, therefore, I am often in this tavern,” Linus slurred. “I’ve never seen you. Where are you from?”

  Fergus took a long draw from his tankard of rum. To speak of Burkes Garden would endanger his brotherhood. He had not anticipated that being a stranger would invoke so many questions. He now understood why Colm kept a tight rein on his men when it concerned conversing with the children of man. Angels were incapable of lying. Colm, however, had refined the art of remaining silent or brief about his answer when the question didn’t suit him.

  Fergus took his cue from that, and said, “Virginia.”

  Linus’ fat cheeks quivered with laughter. “This is Virginia!”

  Fergus frowned.

  “Alright, tell me where you are going.”

  “I’m going to Boston to join the rebel army.”

  Linus narrowed his eyes and snorted. “Army? You must mean militia.”

  Fergus did not know the term, but assumed it had to be military-related. He remained silent.

  “I know a man who is a member of the Boston militia,” Linus said. “His name is William Dawes. He is a tanner.” Linus lowered his voice and stepped in closer to Fergus. “He is also a member of the Massachusetts Sons of Liberty.”

  Fergus didn’t know who the Sons of Liberty were, but decided not to speak unless he was asked a direct question.

  “Dawes and his father provide temporary safe havens for colonial rebels. I assume that may be of interest to you.” Linus took another generous gulp of the flip and spoke freely to the stranger.

  He leaned in closer to Fergus. “I must warn you. If you arrive at Dawes’ house unexpectedly with no prior introduction, he will be suspicious of you. One does not simply stride into Boston and expect the Sons of Liberty to welcome you without question.”

  Fergus had no such intentions.

  “Spend some money on proper clothing and clean yourself up,” Linus advised. “That will not make Dawes less suspicious, but it will provide you with a bit of self-esteem.” He eyed Fergus. “You seem unsure of yourself.”

  Self-esteem was a human trait Fergus didn’t understand. He drained his tankard of rum and motioned for the barkeep to bring another. He guessed he would learn what self-esteem was when he bought his new suit of clothes.

  The tailor in Yorktown was expensive. Fergus was forced to sell his horse to pay for the finery. He packed his new clothes in a small second-hand leather trunk and purchased a ticket on a schooner bound for Boston.

  On the night of January 25, 1775, an apprehensive Fergus stood on William Dawes’ doorstep. The new clothes had not provided the self-esteem Linus Ames had promised. He reminded himself why he was there—to become a general in a human army. He made a fist and raised his hand. The door swung open before he could knock. He took a startled step backward.

  “Why have you been standing on my doorstep?” William Dawes asked. He shoved the nose of a pistol into Fergus’ chest.

  Fergus glanced at the pistol.

  William Dawes quickly inspected Fergus’ fitted dark blue coat, gray silk silver-buttoned waistcoat over a fine white linen shirt, neatly bowed cravat, gray breeches, white silk stockings, and silver-buckled shoes.

  “Answer me,” William growled. He pressed the muzzle harder against Fergus’ chest.

  Fergus heard women talking inside the house.

  Twenty-nine-year-old William Dawes glanced over his shoulder at his wife, Mehitable, and her female guests, who were engaged in Sunday night Bible study. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him.

  “I will not ask you again,” William threatened. “What do you want?”

  “I want to join the Boston militia. I met a man in Yorktown who said he knew you and that you belonged to the militia here.”

  William stared at the stranger for a moment. The man’s blue eyes were bright and his forehead was smooth, which indicated, to William, there was no underlying deceit. “What is your name?”

  “Fergus Driscoll. You are William Dawes, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am,” He lowered the pistol and set the sear. “I cannot invite you inside and discuss such matters at the moment. However, if you have an inclination to speak of this further, I will be at the Green Dragon Tavern on Union Street tomorrow night.”

  Fergus offered William a small dimpled smile and nodded. Fergus turned and walked away.

  William watched him leave. A sudden chill urged him to join his wife’s Bible study group.

  The waning gibbous moon did little to illuminate Fergus’ way through the sleeping neighborhoods of Boston. The cold arms of a freezing January night gripped him. He realized that he was hungry and exhausted, and he had no idea where he was going to sleep in this unfamiliar town.

  As he skirted the southern edge of Boston Common, a small group of rowdy drunken British soldiers stumbled toward him. Fergus thought it would be wise to avoid the soldiers so he went through an alley.

  Near Faneuil Hall, he saw the warm candlelit windows of an inn. A gust of wind caught the wooden sign that hung over the door and rocked it back and forth. Fergus looked up at the swaying sign and contemplated what he had done.

  Although Colm disapproved when any of the angels ventured out of Burkes Garden alone, it was not forbidden. Fergus knew that despite Colm’s leniency, he had disobeyed his archangel by leaving his brotherhood to align with the children of man. The punishment for disobedience was a price Fergus was willing to pay.

  Four

  Charles Town, South Carolina

  Ian Keogh separated from his brotherhood after they left Burkes Garden. He followed deer trails and trekked the desolate country eastward across the Appalachian Mountains. When he smelled the salt air of the Atlantic Ocean, he knew he was entering Charles Town, South Carolina.

  He had discovered Charles Town for the first time in November 1730, on one of his solitary journeys. Ian was one of the three angels who had created the Nephilim. He had spent the past six hundred years looking for a way to fulfill the human-like lust he’d learned millenniums ago from the Grigori angels, whom his archangel once shepherded. There had to be a way in which he could fulfill his lust and avoid committing the atrocity again.

  As he walked the sparse streets on that warm November day more than forty-four years ago, he came upon a churchyard adjoined to a meetinghouse. The mere idea of human suffering and death made his angelic spirit ache.

  Ian entered the churchyard, wandered among the graves, and stopped here and there to read the inscriptions on the gravestones.

  He heard a feminine voice say, “You appear as a man, but I sense that you are not a man.”

  Ian looked around. A young couple with tear-stained cheeks stood beside a small grave. He was certain they had not spoken to him.

  “Look down,” the feminine voice said.

  He was standing on a grave. There was a skull with wings carved across the top of the slate gravestone. The epitaph read:

  Sidonie Roux Denning

  Wife of Asa

  Daughter of Lucille and Charles

  Died October 7 1730 Aged

  33 yrs 16 days

  The human body Ian had possessed also died at age thirty-three.

  “They laid you to rest only a month ago,” he said.

  “If I was at rest would I still be here?”

  Where’s her energy? he thought.

  “Look at the meetinghouse.”

  Her spiritual energy radiated a hologram of her physical form against the backdrop of the sandstone meetinghouse wall.

  “Are you Sidonie?”

  “Yes, and you are an angel of God. Say your human name.”

  “Ian Keogh.”

  “You are beautiful.”
>
  “Your spiritual energy should not be on Earth,” Ian said. “Why have you not gone to Heaven or Hell?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Did you hide from your reaper?”

  “I saw no reaper.”

  “All human souls are reaped,” Ian said. “Unless…an angel didn’t feel the struggle your soul endured as your body died.”

  “Can you help me?” Sidonie asked.

  Ian’s unseen silver wings rustled in distress. “It’s too late to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “An angel must guide a soul to its egress when the body dies. Then, we summon a reaper to take the soul to its final destination.”

  “How do you decide where a soul goes?”

  “God decides. We’re his messengers, but that message is relayed only at the moment of death. If I call your reaper now, I will not be able to tell it where you should dwell. You may end up in Hell.”

  “Do you know God?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you can ask him where I should go.”

  Ian did not intend to tell this lost soul that he was banished from Heaven, and God would never grant him an audience. He left her to face the fate of an Earthbound existence. He had a desire to fulfill, and she was a distraction.

  Twenty-one years passed before Ian thought of Sidonie Roux Denning again. He returned to Charles Town to look for her. She was there—a decaying soul dismally haunting the churchyard and the meetinghouse. Her parents were buried beside her body. Only death relieved the grief of losing their daughter to smallpox.

  Ian approached her drifting soul and asked, “Do you remember me?”

  She neither saw nor heard him.

  “Your energy is almost gone. You’re dying. I didn’t know that was possible,” he said.

  A bell tolled. A group of young men carrying a bier, on which a coffin rested, entered the churchyard. A minister and a small group of mourners followed them. Ian had seen this ritual before, but he did not understand the purpose. He watched the mourners gather around as the men placed the bier over an empty grave.

  The man bearing the pall draped the coffin in blue velvet. Tears wet the man’s cheeks, and he said, “Be with God, my daughter.”

  The woman’s grieving mother held the cause of her daughter’s death in her arms. The infant mewled and waved her tiny fists. Strands of the new grandmother’s black hair came loose from beneath her bonnet. Her pale blue eyes shed tears that soaked her face.

  Ian knew who she was and why her daughter died. The mother looks like Sidonie once looked, Ian thought. Perhaps the dead daughter does as well. I wonder if a woman who dies in childbirth can conceive an angel’s child if her body is resurrected?

  The men lowered the coffin into the ground and shoveled dirt into the open grave. The dead woman’s family sobbed. A sorrowful wind swept through the churchyard and blew dead leaves from the walkways and ruffled the mourners’ clothing.

  When the mourners were gone, Ian silently unfurled his silver wings. They showered the churchyard with silver crystals. The crystals gathered on gravestones and drifted against the meetinghouse sandstone walls. He summoned the essence of his angelic spirit—his glimmering red aura.

  He gathered Sidonie’s dying soul beneath his wings and infused it with the red light of his aura. Ian doused his light and released her soul. Charged with his spiritual essence, her luminescent soul flashed like a firefly on a summer’s night. Ian’s wings fluttered and with ethereal delicacy, they furled into obscurity. He walked to the new grave and looked down.

  An angelic spirit can resurrect a dead human body if that spirit takes sanctuary within it. Can a human soul infused with an angel’s spirit do the same? Ian wondered.

  The shovel used to bury the woman was propped against the meetinghouse wall. When night fell, Ian used the shovel to exhume the dead woman. He pulled her from her coffin and laid her on the ground at his feet.

  “I gave you the ability to possess her body,” Ian said to Sidonie’s soul. “Take it.”

  Sidonie’s glimmering soul wavered above the woman’s body, and then the luminescence went out.

  Ian carried the woman’s body inside the meetinghouse. Representations of angels, etched in the stained glass windows, wore halos above their heads of flowing hair. White gowns draped the angels’ bodies, and their small wings looked as if they belonged to birds instead of the sons of God.

  A painting, depicting a male image with long curly brown hair and the same bird-like unfurled wings, hung on the wall behind the pulpit. The male wore a breastplate, carried the scales, and brandished a sword as he trampled Lucifer under his sandaled feet. It was the human portrayal of the archangel, Michael.

  An angel’s spirit was the whole of their existence, and that was something no painting or likeness could depict. Ian supposed his human image was disappointing in contrast to the splendor the children of man bestowed on angels. He had no idea how wrong he was.

  He laid the dead woman on the floor in front of the altar and removed her clothing. Sidonie’s soul woke when the moon disappeared below the horizon. Ian straddled the naked body her soul possessed. She sighed. He undressed, and then he lay beside her until he could no longer control his lust.

  Sidonie did not remember any of those things.

  She had no choice but to take work as a kitchen maid when Ian had resurrected her soul and given her another body. Now, she worked in the house next door to the home where she lived with her parents before her body died in 1730. Twenty-four years after the resurrection of her soul, her body had not aged just as Ian’s human vessel had not aged because of the eternal energy of an angel’s spirit.

  Mr. Emory Boddington, Sidonie’s employer, knew the man who visited her once or twice a year was an angel. The first time Ian came to visit, Emory entered Sidonie’s small bedroom, uninvited and under the pretense he heard strange noises. He saw Ian unfurl his wings and radiate silver and red light as Ian had an orgasm inside Sidonie. What he saw frightened him. He spoke of it to no one, and he did not interfere with Ian’s visits.

  Ian’s visits often left Sidonie feeling lonely and melancholy. She concealed her feelings because she knew Ian did not understand those physical sensations. He never asked her how she felt, what she wanted, or what she needed. He never told her he loved her because an angel’s definition of love did not exist in terms of the spoken word or action. It simply was.

  Ian’s arrival in January surprised her. Winters were harsh on Garden Mountain, and he did not travel during those months. Tonight, his erotically tender lips kissed the back of her neck and made her forget how lonely she would be when he was gone.

  She was reminded of that loneliness when he suddenly stopped kissing her, and said, “I’m going to Boston from here. We think Fergus is already on his way there. If war breaks out, Colm wants us fighting with the patriots.”

  Sidonie turned to look at him and sighed. She had been expecting this for years, but now that the time was here, she was uneasy. The angels fought wars for centuries against the demons that pursued them. This time the angels would be fighting an evil that was also humanistic. She thought it was an evil they would not understand.

  “We think the demons’ leader, Henry, has stirred up dissent between the British and the colonists in order to draw us out of hiding,” Ian said. “If that’s true, we have to fight.”

  She studied Ian’s delicate facial features, flawless complexion, and pale blue eyes. You are so beautiful, she thought.

  “I won’t return,” he said as if it was an ordinary thing to tell someone.

  “You have come to tell me goodbye forever?”

  “Yes. If we defeat the demons, we’ll leave our human vessels. If the demons win, we’re all dead.”

  She fought off tears. She knew the consequences the angels faced, but to hear him say those things was agony.

  Ian resumed kissing her neck and luxuriating in her scent of sweet magnolia.

  She pulled a
way from him and said, “Stop for a moment.”

  He raised his head, confused. She never told him to stop doing anything.

  A lock of his long black hair came loose from its ponytail at the nape of his neck. She swept it away from his face with one dainty forefinger and said, “If you intend to never come back to me, I want you to end my life.”

  “No,” Ian said.

  “You resurrected my soul for your pleasure.”

  “I resurrected your soul to keep you from dying,” Ian whispered.

  “If you never return, it will be the same as dying.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Tears wet her cheeks.

  He never saw her cry. He didn’t understand what she was trying to tell him, but he understood tears. The sight of them aroused anguish in his angelic spirit. His wings rustled in distress. He pulled her into his arms.

  She laid her head on his chest.

  “Did I cause your tears?” he asked.

  She nodded into his chest.

  “How do I soothe you?”

  She looked up into his beautiful face. “Take me with you.”

  “Why?”

  Oh Ian, she thought. I love you as I would love a human man, and I know you cannot return that kind of love.

  She said, “So I will not suffer without you.”

  Now, he understood the source of her tears, and that he had the ability to alleviate her dismay. If found out, Ian’s archangel would put a stop to it.

  Five

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Tensions between the loyalists and the patriots were mounting throughout the colonies, but they were most acute in Massachusetts Bay Colony. For years, the patriots had been planning self-governing strategies and electing men to appointments of leadership and delegation during their formal meetings. The first Provincial Congress of Massachusetts was one such meeting. It was held in the Salem courthouse in October 1774. Three members of the patriotic group the Sons of Liberty—John Hancock, Dr. Joseph Warren, and Samuel Adams—were among the delegates.