The Demon Redcoat

by C. C. Finlay

  “Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” Franklin said, clapping his hands on his knees, as if this explained much to him. “But you were not initiated?”

  “No,” Proctor said. “It wasn’t clear that I could travel regularly to the meetings, nor that I could afford the dues. I didn’t want to start something that I couldn’t finish.” And then there was the fact that he carried a secret. It was a bad idea for a man with so many secrets to join a brotherhood that was supposed to be without.

  “It would make things easier here. I belong to the Nine Sisters Lodge here in Paris and have a position such that you might be initiated again if you wish to pick up where you left off.”

  Proctor wasn’t sure that would be the best use of his time. He had no desire to settle in for a long stay in Paris. He wanted a quick solution, and a ship home. “Your invitation is very gracious. May I reflect on it before I answer?”

  “Indeed, I hope you will. Clearly you have reason to be circumspect. But we must consider ways to introduce you to the groups where you’re most likely to meet those you are seeking.” He tapped the desk thoughtfully and looked at Proctor from the corner of his eye. “It might be better to introduce you to the Egyptian Rites Lodge and the followers of Count Cagliostro. But in that case, it would be best if you were already at least a magus.”

  Franklin watched him closely, but Proctor didn’t twitch. He knew already that magus was the word for one of the intermediate levels of Mason. When Proctor sat there perfectly still, offering no reaction at all, Franklin responded with a very small smile. “May I offer one additional piece of advice?”

  “I am eager to hear what ever you have to say,” Proctor replied.

  “Be forthright and direct in any letters you may write,” Franklin said.

  That surprised Proctor. “But Mister Adams just advised me to say nothing. He said that any letters I write will be read and copied before they’re sent on through the post.”

  “I suggest that you consider his reasons rather than his reasoning,” Franklin said. “He is quite correct about one thing, and that is you must assume that anything and everything you write and send through the mail will be copied and read.”

  Proctor was confused for a moment, and then he thought about the idea of hiding something in plain sight. “So if I’m known to be looking for someone, that someone may come looking for me.”

  “If I were you, I would express a serious interest in the Egyptian Rites, as practiced by the Order of the Strict Observance,” Franklin said. He stood and offered Proctor his hand. “It was a plea sure to meet you, Mister Brown. I will consider what else we may do to help you.”

  His grip was confident and strong, despite his age. Proctor held his hand for an extra second, probing to see if Franklin had any spark. He didn’t feel one and finally released his hand. “You’ve already done more than I expected.”

  Chapter 12

  Days later, Proctor sat at the desk in his room and sharpened the end of his quill. One shredded feather already lay in a pile by the inkwell. Every day the post came in, he went to check for another letter from Deborah. So far, she had kept to her promise not to write again until she heard from him.

  He held the sharpened quill above the inkwell. He had put off writing the letter to Deborah for as long as he could.

  First, he had dithered over the problem of delivery. He dared not send it by way of Tallmadge or any of his agents connected with the army, for fear of drawing attention to either the spies or Deborah. Best keep those two apart. He also did not feel he could send it care of Paul Revere, who actively served in the war. Ultimately he decided to send it by way of a friend on the Quaker Highway, the secret route that had moved accused witches from Massachusetts to places like The Farm where they could be trained to safely use and hide their talents.

  He dipped the quill in the ink and tapped his thumb on the rim of the bottle. The extra ink coalesced in a drop and fell back inside.

  Intending to write still did not give him something to write. Neither Adams’s advice to reveal nothing nor Franklin’s advice to be direct seemed helpful. Every day he left behind wads of crumpled paper from his failed attempts. He pressed the tip to the paper and began with the easiest part.

  My dear Deborah,

  We had a difficult voyage and a long journey through Spain, but have been in Paris now for some time, where we are guests of Dr. Franklin at the Hotel Valentinois. I hope to finish the business I came for and return to you soon.

  A drop of sweat beaded on his forehead and fell, smearing the ink in finish where it splashed. Why did this have to be so hard? He wiped his forehead on his sleeve and continued with the part he knew he had to write.

  I remember Magdalena’s last visit very well, and while I would welcome the opportunity to see you sooner than expected, I would never wish to put you through the hardship she experienced. Please think twice before setting out. I feel confident that I will be home by the start of summer.

  If Deborah was as drained by the visit as he had been, still assuming that it had been her attempting to draw him back, then she would just be recovering her full strength. If—no, when—the Covenant attacked again, they would both need their full strength. As much as he wanted to see her, he did not want to put either of them in any danger. Any additional danger.

  I miss you. I fear that Maggie will not know my voice when I return home.

  This is where he usually broke down and wadded up the paper. He picked up his knife, intending to resharpen the point of his quill yet again. The knife slipped and he cut the quill in half. He pushed it over to the pile with the other and picked up a third.

  Lydia has been strong and dependable as always. She sends her regards to you and Abigail, and wants me to remind Abigail to clean under her nails.

  Lydia was always teasing Abigail about forgetting to wash her hands, and even as he wrote it he could imagine Abigail just in from getting the eggs, with a straw in her hair and dirt on her fingers.

  Please remember me to her as well.

  I have met a great many people here. A Scotsman named William Alexander visits Dr. Franklin every day. He is an outspoken supporter of our patriotic cause. Dr. Bancroft, who is Dr. Franklin’s assistant, and from Connecticut and before that Westfield in Mass., took an interest in my business here but has not been able to help me. Dr. Franklin has offered to introduce me to the Masons’ lodge in Paris, which he thinks will help make suitable connections, but they only meet once per month. He has also mentioned an Egyptian RitesLodge, founded by an Italian count and countess named Cagliostro, which admits both men and women. The lodge was founded in London, but Count Cagliostro recently returned to the Continent again.

  Everything about Count Cagliostro pointed to the Covenant. Alexander and Bancroft, among others, had filled in details for Proctor. The Egyptian Rites Lodge openly embraced magic symbols. Its goal was immortality for its members. Cagliostro himself claimed to see spirits and speak to the dead. The count and countess had moved to London just a few years before—when the Covenant was increasing its activity—to start the lodge. But Cagliostro and his wife had recently fled England and had been traveling around the Continent, speaking to royalty’s dead. Rumor had it that they were on their way back to France, or headed for the tsar’s palace in Russia.

  Proctor stopped when he considered that. In America, people like him and Deborah still lived in the shadow of the Salem witch trials. Anything tainted by a hint of witchcraft was considered evil. But in Europe, it appeared there were different rules. Or maybe there were different rules for the nobility. Proctor wondered if ordinary men were tolerated as much as counts like Cagliostro.

  If the letter was read, Proctor hoped it would help scare up Cagliostro in France. He wanted to go home again.

  I will write you when I make progress, which should be any day now.

  And that was it. If he tried to write any more, he’d get overwhelmed.

  He signed it care
fully and deliberately, imagining the way that Deborah might run her fingertips over the signature just to feel connected to him. He had nearly rubbed her name off her letter, the one that he had not burned despite her request.

  Even though he had scarcely said anything personal at all, even though he wanted the letter read, so that someone would spread the word to Cagliostro, he resented the thought of someone besides Deborah opening his letter. So when he sealed it, he placed a splinter in the wax with a pinch of gunpowder. It was a trick his mother had done, to keep him out of her medicines when he was small. Deborah would notice the spell at once and render it harmless. But if anyone besides her opened it, they would get a little surprise.

  Lydia waited for him in the hall outside his door. She was wearing a much finer dress—still plain, in what Proctor was beginning to think of as “the American style,” but of excellent fabric and elegantly cut and sewn. It was a gift for her arranged by a friend of Franklin.

  She greeted him by staring at his jacket. “When are you going to let me take that and have it cleaned and repaired?”

  “Soon,” he said. “I keep thinking that we may have to leave at a moment’s notice.”

  “And go where?”

  “Wherever we will find the Covenant.” He would climb Franklin’s lightning rod and shout the word from the rooftop if it would help them move forward.

  She glanced at the walls. “Perhaps we should continue this during your walk.”

  “I was planning to go into town to the post,” he said. He held up his letter. It felt very thin in his hand, and he almost wadded it up, convinced that he should have written more. Or else nothing at all. But he resisted the urge.

  It was a short walk into town and Proctor felt silly for having taken the carriage that first day. The clerk at the post office accepted his letter and informed him, after checking, that no other mail had arrived for him.

  Lydia was holding the door for Proctor—he was still having a hard time forcing himself to allow that—when a bang sounded from the back room. Lydia jumped, and all the clerks from the counter ran to the back. They were jammed in the door and then shoved out of the way by a jowled man with thick glasses. He was sucking angrily on his thumb. The faint, sharp smell of gunpowder followed him.

  Proctor waved to the clerks. “Merci!”

  “What was that?” Lydia asked under her breath as they walked out to the street.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Proctor said. “But I imagine that the gunpowder was just for effect, to frighten whoever opened the letter. The splinter works as a sting regardless of the noise.”

  Even as he said it, he imagined a variation on the same spell, in which the splinter was coated with a poison. The wrongful letter opener would be—

  “It reminds me of Miss Cecily’s work,” Lydia said. “It smacks of delight in the hurt of another.”

  Proctor stopped and turned on her. “They’re reading my letter to Deborah.”

  “Which you knew they were going to do, and which you wanted them to do, if you included that part about the count and countess—”

  “I did,” he said. “That was the whole point, right?”

  “That poor scrivener, the one who got hurt by your prank, he doesn’t have anything against you or Deborah or maybe even America. It’s just his job, working for the court. What’s going to happen if they blame him for damaging your letter? He’ll lose his job, his family won’t be able to eat, and they’ll just find somebody else to do it for them.”

  “All right, all right.” He surrendered. “I shouldn’t have done it.”

  “We are not judged on the basis of what we should have done, but on what we actually do,” Lydia said.

  “I admitted my mistake,” he snapped.

  He was used to talking to everyone on The Farm as equals, but it was another thing to do it out in public, in a foreign country, where his every move was watched. Lydia’s questioning of him and his motives made him angry. But everything about this place and his situation was making him angry. He spun away from her and looked at the waters of the Seine, muddy and opaque. A pair of swans sat on an island in the middle. One raised its wings and flapped them menacingly as a boat passed on the river.

  “Do you feel up for a longer walk today?” Lydia asked.

  “Yes, I’m fine, I’ve fully recovered,” he said. Every day, he had been taking longer and longer walks in the garden and then the neighborhoods of Passy to regain his strength. They had been short walks, limited in part by frequent rains. The weather today was chilly but dry, and the skies were clear. “Shall we go see the gardens at the Palace of Tuileries that everyone keeps telling us about?”

  “If you wish,” Lydia said, bowing her head.

  He almost snapped at her for it, but then he saw that she was looking sideways out of her eyes at a small group that was watching them. They walked silently along the tree-lined bank. The branches were covered with a frill of green, emerging leaves.

  “What I did with the letter may have been wrong,” Proctor whispered after a long while. “But I’m not evil. I’m not trying to kill people.” Even as he said it, he started to think about the men he had killed, from the assassins on The Farm to the battles at Concord and Bunker Hill. Not to mention souls he may have condemned, like Rotenhahn when he was freed from Bootzamon’s shell. But all of those had been necessary. He didn’t do harm unless he had to. Did he? “I want to hear the truth from you,” he said. “Always.”

  “It is our first nature to give back what we are used to receiving,” Lydia said. “After a lifetime of constant correction …” She let her sentence trail off unfinished. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid to end up in a situation again like I was with Miss Cecily. Have you made any progress?”

  “None since last night. Franklin wants us to stay in Paris a little while longer.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, but he asked me to stay when he found out I hadn’t written any letters home yet. I begged him to help us find a way into England. And you, any progress?”

  She shook her head. “Even the servants have their pecking orders here, and I’m not fine enough to pass among them. To be honest, I’d be happy to go someplace where I belong.”

  “I know what you mean about not belonging here. I just want to find the Covenant, crush them, and go home again.”

  They stepped aside at the last minute to let pass a group of young French gentlemen in animated conversation. Carriages rattled by them on the street, and a man in servant’s livery cantered by on a horse. When they had gone, Lydia led Proctor across the road, following a stream of other people.

  “Have you any better idea how you’ll stop them?” Lydia asked.

  He kept hoping it would be obvious to him when the time came. “First I have to find them, don’t I? If Franklin doesn’t help me soon, I’ll go to Alexander or Bancroft and ask them to introduce me to someone who can help us reach England.”

  “How soon?”

  “It depends on how long it takes to see if my letter had any effect,” he said. The prospect of more weeks of waiting daunted him. The weeks in Paris so far had done nothing—“What’s that?”

  “The entrance to the gardens,” Lydia said.

  Two huge statues of white marble stood on either side of the street, riders on horse back, with the horses reared above shields and weapons and symbols of war. The horses had wings, so realistically and convincingly carved, from the flare of the nostrils to the tense muscles to the hair of the pinfeathers, that Proctor was convinced at once that the creatures had existed, had been captured in life and turned into stone. One of the riders was a naked boy, holding a trumpet with a stem so long and delicate it looked like a wind might snap it. The light seemed to be absorbed by the stone, which radiated it back with a cool warmth that made it seem like living skin. Proctor had seen small busts of stone and images carved of wood, but he had never seen anything like these, not even on the churches in Spain. Nothing, not the clothes or langu
age or food, had made him feel more like he was in a foreign country.

  “Those wings—who would think to put wings on a horse?” he asked.

  “There are more statues,” Lydia said, pointing toward the garden. “It’s what it’s famous for.”

  Pools of water formed an axis from the horses to a distant palace, which was wider than any building Proctor had ever seen. It formed a wall at the far end of the gardens, with a domed block directly opposite the entrance. The wings on either side of the entrance rose like the wings on the horses. Between the horses and the palace, on either side of the pools, there were sixty or seventy acres of trees and flower beds, all formally arranged amid carefully designed paths.

  “And all this is for the public?” Proctor asked. It was a reflection on the greatness of a nation, if true.

  “From what the other servants tell me, it was built for one queen,” she said.

  “But I thought the king and queen lived at Versailles,” Proctor said.

  “Oh, they don’t live here anymore, although guests might stay here. That’s why it’s open to the public now.”

  They walked into the garden, stopping at another group of statues around a pool. One was a giant man, reclining while a dozen tiny children crawled over his figure like a group of men climbing a hill. As they walked from statue to statue, Proctor felt increasing awe and greater disorientation. He did not recognize any of the images from the Bible stories he knew, and he couldn’t imagine who or what had put these ideas into the heads of the artists. He abhorred the expense of wealth, the indulgence of the nobility in building this garden, and at the same time he was delighted by it, by the order, the vividness, the focus.

  A place like this could be a powerful focus for channeling the untapped magic of a city and a nation’s people.

  He felt a prickle on the back of his neck at the thought. He turned to say something to Lydia and saw her standing, still as a statue. He touched her arm and she didn’t move. Her eyes stared straight ahead, blind to him. He spun around. All throughout the garden, people had stopped mid-movement. Even the birds had fallen silent. There was only the trickle of water.