The Demon Redcoat

by C. C. Finlay

  “Putting on airs, are we?” Deborah asked. Her tone was amused. “What ever happened to the simple farm boy I fell in love with?”

  “I’m still that same fellow,” Proctor said, though he knew it was but a partial truth. He grabbed a towel and wiped his hands dry, feeling the still-strange scrape of the homespun fabric over the scarred nub of his missing finger. “Only now I’d like a tub indoors.”

  “There’s no room for it,” Deborah said.

  “Maybe.” Proctor smiled. He and Deborah lived in the old part of the house. Deborah loved the old house because it reminded her of her mother and father. It had one big space, which served as kitchen and common room with a hearth at one end. There were three doors: the front door, which opened onto the porch; the back door, which connected to the new addition; and the bedroom door near the hearth. The bedroom—or sleeping parlor, as they were called in old houses—was a room barely big enough for a bed.

  He glanced at the hearth near the bedroom. It had been used as a black altar by one of their enemies, which made Proctor uneasy, but if living in the old house near that tainted hearth made Deborah happy, then Proctor would do it. Someday, when she changed her mind, he would put a tub in the sleeping parlor. It would be a short journey to carry hot water from the hearth to the tub. Maybe enough water would clean away the bad memories from that attack.

  “You’re trying to change the subject,” Deborah said. “But I can tell when you’re lost in your thoughts, and you are more lost than a baby crawling through the forest. What are you thinking about?”

  He tossed the towel aside and kissed her on the forehead. “I was thinking about you.” He rested his right hand on her belly. “And our baby. But no forests.”

  She tilted her head up at him and smiled. “Are your hands clean now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you please rub my feet?”

  “But my hands are clean now,” he protested. As she gave him a mock scowl, he pulled up a chair and pressed his thumbs into her sole. Deborah leaned back and sighed. She was past nine months pregnant, due any day, and it had finally caught up with her. Today must have been an especially bad day, because she’d quit working shortly after lunch. She winced unexpectedly, and he let go of her feet.

  “No, please, keep rubbing,” she said.

  “But—” he protested.

  “Keep rubbing,” she insisted, so he cupped her foot in his hand and continued, but with a lighter touch than before. After a moment she shifted position, sighed, and relaxed again. “What’s making you pensive?” she asked.

  Her powers had grown during her pregnancy. She seemed to see farther and clearer than ever before. Although it didn’t take talent to see through him now. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

  “Is it Washington’s letter?”

  General Washington’s letter asking Proctor to serve again—and to go overseas to do it—could not have come at a worse time. Or rather, letters. There was one from Washington, another from Tallmadge, his spymaster, plus letters of introduction for Proctor to use in the mission. It was as though they took his service for granted.

  Proctor stared out the window. In the four years since he’d moved to The Farm—he heard the capital letters in his head whenever he thought the phrase—Proctor had rebuilt a run-down spread into something special. With Ezra’s help, they’d built a new addition that was bigger than the original house, repaired and repainted the barn, built a new chicken coop, and dug new privies. There were new rows of trees in the orchard on the hills in back, larger gardens stretching down the hill in front, cornstalks in the field that he had converted from fallow land, and new fences ringing the pastures. And he had done all of that in bits and pieces, in between the months that he spent serving the patriot cause.

  “I belong here with you,” Proctor said. “I’m not going across the ocean, not for Washington or anybody. Not with you expecting. I served in the militia, I did my time as a minuteman—”

  “Any man can serve in the militia, Proctor. You do things that no one else can do.”

  “I know, but—” Deborah winced again, and he realized the tension was making his grip on her feet too strong. “I’m sorry. Maybe I should stop.”

  “No, it’s all right,” Deborah said when she caught her breath. “This is helping me greatly.”

  “It’s just that there’s almost peace already,” Proctor argued, lightening his touch again. “There hasn’t been a major battle since Monmouth, and that was almost a year and a half ago. The war’s over, all but the skirmishing.”

  “And what about the raids in New York? The town that was burned?”

  The burning had shocked them all. “That was an aberration, a onetime thing.”

  She sighed and shifted again. “Maybe. But what about the Covenant?”

  They had seen very little sign of the Covenant since the battle at Trenton. At first, Proctor just assumed they had retired to regroup. But now it had been more than two years. “They’ve given up.”

  Deborah caught her breath and frowned, a sure sign she was about to disagree. After a moment’s pause, she said, “The Covenant has been around for hundreds of years, thousands if we believe what the widow Nance told us. When you spend that much time pursuing a goal, a year or two is nothing. Sometimes it takes a year or two of study to prepare a major spell. Besides, practicing witches, especially powerful witches, are good at hiding their activities. They have to be, just to survive. I know because I grew up around practicing witches.”

  Proctor always felt a little envious of Deborah’s upbringing when he thought about his own mother and the way she’d made him ashamed of being a witch, frightened of everything bad that could happen to them. He didn’t hold it against Deborah; he wanted to bring up their child in a house hold like Deborah’s. But his own background had taught him a thing or two as well.

  “Maybe I didn’t grow up around practicing witches, but I’ve spent some time around the army,” he said. “The British army is spread too thin. They’ll never be able to push inland from the coast and beat the Continental army. The Covenant can’t win the war that way. We’re too far away from Europe, for the British or the Covenant. What ever the Covenant’s grand plan is, they’ve decided to find a different way to pursue it. They don’t care what happens here.”

  “That sounds like wishful thinking.”

  “No, it’s just a cold assessment of the facts.” He reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m saving all my wishes for our baby.”

  “Are you worried?” she asked.

  He couldn’t bring himself to lie and say no or to admit the truth. She’d miscarried twice already, once when she was six months pregnant, producing a stillborn boy, small as a kitten. Luckily, they’d had Magdalena to help Deborah back to health. The old Dutch woman had a gift for helping pregnancies and for birthing. He sat there, quietly rubbing his wife’s ankles.

  “Coward,” she said. “I’m worried. There, I said it.”

  “Shhh,” he hushed her. “Don’t make bad things true by wishing them so.”

  “You could do a scrying,” she said. “That is your talent, above all others.”

  Scrying. Years ago, Proctor’s witchcraft had manifested itself unbidden as scrying. It came naturally to him and was the only thing he’d known how to do until he met other witches. With Deborah’s help, he had learned other, more powerful types of spells—how to set protective shields, how to create illusion or alter memory, how to move and transform objects. Simple, direct, unambiguous magic. When he thought about it, he was amazed at how far he’d come. The more he learned, the less he used his scrying.

  “If the news that scrying would give me is good, then there’s no need to see it,” he said. “If the news is bad, then there’s nothing I can do to change it and I would rather not know.”

  “Are you sure about that?” she asked.

  “We’ll answer the door when the fut
ure knocks and not before.”

  She lowered her feet slowly to the floor, spread them apart, and grunted uncomfortably. She made noise whenever the baby grew active. It was very active tonight.

  The back door opened, and Magdalena entered from the new addition where she lived with the other student witches. The last four years had been hard on the old Dutch woman from Pennsylvania. Already stooped with age, she had never fully recovered from the Covenant’s attack on The Farm years ago. She used a cane to steady herself. The basket she carried had only a few small apples in it, and yet she struggled with the weight. She set the basket down on the table and hobbled over to the hearth, where she pulled up a stool and held out her hands to the coals to warm them. Proctor rose and added wood to the fire, stirring the coals until the wood crackled in the flames.

  “If I wanted that, I would have done it myself,” Magdalena complained. She spoke in a thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent, her W’s sounding more like V’s, the D’s and T’s similarly swapped, and all the syllables of her words sharp and clipped.

  “I wanted it,” Proctor answered, knowing the old woman never asked for anything.

  Magdalena glared at him, but she rubbed her liver-spotted hands together and held them up to the flame until she sighed pleasantly. She shifted on her stool and looked around at Deborah.

  “You are doing how?” she asked.

  “My water has broken,” she said.

  Proctor tensed. “What? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “It just happened,” Deborah said. A puddle spread on the floor between her feet.

  Magdalena rose and hobbled over to her side. “Good, this is very good, you are past the best time,” Magdalena said. She poked her fingers against the tight end of her fist as a demonstration. “If this baby grows much larger, it won’t fit.”

  The sound of that worried Proctor. The contractions during Deborah’s last miscarriage had been horrible, racking her body. It had been a childbirth for her in everything but outcome. “What should I do?” he asked.

  “Go away,” Magdalena said. “This is women’s business.”

  Deborah held out her hand. “Don’t go yet,” she said. “The contractions started just after lunch. It may be hours.”

  So that was why she’d stopped early for the day. And of course, she hadn’t said anything.

  “Leave,” Magdalena repeated, scowling at him.

  “I’ll get Abigail and Lydia,” Proctor said, figuring out a compromise. They were women, and if this was women’s work, Magdalena couldn’t object. Then he could come back with them, which would make Deborah happy.

  He stepped out the front door. A steady wind was blowing from the east. Abigail and Lydia sat in chairs on the porch watching the sunset color the sky red and orange to match autumn leaves. The two women were different from each other in almost every way, but somehow found enough in common that they had become close friends. Abigail, a big-boned girl, had her shirtsleeves rolled up and dirt on her hands. A basket overstuffed with fall turnips from the garden sat beside her where she’d dropped it. When she came to The Farm, they had called her Abby, but she had grown up in the past couple of years. Though she didn’t show it at the moment, rocking back and forth, grinning happily, her mouth still open in mid-sentence.

  Lydia was as parsimonious with her opinions as Abigail was free with hers, though she had reasons to watch what she said. She was a black woman probably about forty, a former slave who sometimes looked even older because her life had been hard. Her face was lean, with sharp cheekbones, and her limbs knotted with muscle. She had a shawl wrapped around her shoulders to keep her warm as she worked on knitting another blanket for the baby.

  “Hey, Proctor,” Abigail said. “I was just saying to Lydia—doesn’t it seem odd to you?”

  “Doesn’t what seem odd?” he asked.

  “That we worked so hard to build up this place, adding extra rooms and gardens, and even a second outhouse—” She turned aside to Lydia and said, “There were more than a dozen of us living in the house I grew up in and we never had more than one outhouse”—then turned back to Proctor to finish her thought—“and now the whole place feels almost empty.”

  It was true. Deborah had turned The Farm into a school for witches for several years, but now most of their students were gone. Ezra and Zoe had gone back to sea. Ezra had never forgiven Proctor for allowing the Covenant to kidnap Zoe, and Zoe had never forgiven Proctor for letting the Covenant escape with the orphan boy William. The cousins—stork-like Sukey and butter-ball Esther—had returned home to heal men wounded in the war. Alexandra Walker had rejected magic and disguised herself as a young man to fight the British with her brothers in the army. Other witches had shorter stays: Jane Irwin had studied for a few months and didn’t say five words unprompted the whole time, Edwina Chase had displayed an amazing talent with animals but left because the people made her anxious, and a Mrs. Richardson had arrived from South Carolina and departed the same day when she discovered Deborah’s mother was dead. Only the five of them were left.

  Soon to be six.

  “They’re going to fill up this place with children, I expect,” Lydia said as she knitted.

  “I hope so,” Abigail said enthusiastically. “I love children.”

  “That’s my hope too,” Proctor said. He knew that witches often had trouble bearing children. He and Deborah were both only children, even though all their neighbors had ten, fifteen, even twenty offspring. “We could be starting on that real soon. Deborah’s water broke.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Abigail snapped. She jumped up and punched him in the shoulder before she ran inside. Her family was the exception rather than the rule. Abigail’s mother had given birth to nine, though the talent for witchcraft ran weak in them, even Abigail, if it showed up at all.

  “Aren’t you going to go inside to help with the childbirth?” Proctor asked. He couldn’t return to Deborah’s side until Lydia came in too, but he didn’t know how to tell her that.

  Lydia rocked back and forth in place for a moment. “I’m not that interested in helping with childbirth, to be honest,” Lydia said. “It’s an awful lot of noise and mess that I don’t know nothing about.”

  “I just assumed—” he started, and then cut himself off.

  “You just assumed that because I’m a woman, I know that sort of thing,” Lydia said. “Well, I don’t. I served Miss Cecily from the time I was a child and she had no interest in making babies. The only other babies I had the chance to see born were slaves, and it was hard for me to do anything that’d bring more souls into slavery. Miss Cecily couldn’t stand the thought of letting anyone else have control of me, so I was never forced to the spot where I had to bear children of my own. And I’m glad. I don’t know if I could have brought them up without freedom.”

  “I had no idea,” Proctor said, letting everything he’d heard sink in.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything,” she said, keeping her eyes down. “Forget I said anything.”

  “No, it’s fine, it’s better than fine,” he said. “How can I know things if you don’t tell me … Hey, hold on a minute. How could you be with Cecily since you were a child? You’re about ten years older than she is, aren’t you?”

  “No, I am not. She’s been that same age as long as I knowed her, never a day older or younger, and not just ’cause she was vain about her appearance. It wasn’t natural. Her name’s not Sumpter or Pinckney either.”

  “I remember you telling us that, but I assumed it was because she married.”

  Lydia sighed. “No, she went by Cecily Aikens when I was a child, and there was a Master Aikens too, though I don’t recall as he was a relation. Then we moved and she changed her name to Hayne. She didn’t become a Sumpter and a Pinckney until we moved north.”

  “When was that?”

  “When we came to The Farm with orders to spy on Deborah’s mother.” She folded up her blanket and tucked the needles into it.

  �
��How old is she really?” Proctor asked.

  “She’s older than I care to think about,” Lydia said, squinting off at the horizon. “When she spoke to old folks, great-grandmothers and the like, she traded stories with them as if she’d been there. I remember one …” She trailed off. The wind rustled through the orchard, sending a cascade of leaves fluttering to the ground.

  “What story?” Proctor asked.

  “Oh, there was a rebellion of slaves on the Stono River, back forty years ago, and she talked about the slave Cato, he’s the one who led it, like she know every line on his face. I listened close to the stories about slave uprisings when I had the chance.”

  “Did you have many chances?”

  “No, not really. Just whispers, here and there. Everybody afraid to talk openly about it, ’cause it might mean people could die.”

  “Sounds much like our talent, in that respect.”

  “Yes it does,” she said. Crinkles formed at the corners of her eyes, and she smiled at Proctor. He thought it might be the first time he had ever seen her genuinely smile at him that way. “It was a lot like our talent.”

  From inside the house came the sounds of furniture scraped across the floor—probably Abigail rearranging things just to have work to do. The sun had settled in the sky, taking most of the color with it. Only red remained, streaked across the horizon like blood smeared across pale white flesh.

  Now, that was a morbid thought. He tried to shake it off. “I’ve never heard you talk about those times quite so much before.”

  “You never seen me trying to put off helping with a childbirth,” Lydia said. She pushed her chair back and stood up.

  “If you go inside though, I can follow you in and see Deborah,” he admitted.

  “Why do you want to go and do that? Just so she can chase you out again?”

  “Sure. It’ll give her something to do, between contractions.”

  Lydia tucked the baby blanket under her arm and picked up Abigail’s basket of turnips. “We better go in and see how we can help.”