“Not according to the Book of Leviticus,” agreed Abigail. “How awkward that the Bible doesn’t give similar instructions for identifying them.”
“By their deeds shall ye know them,” replied Dog-Mouth darkly. “All these days, that the hag’s been lyin’ in the Devil’s sleep, we’ve known. We seen our Reverend growin’ sicker an’ sicker; seen the fires that have broke out, here and there about the town in dead of night; and the very beasts in their stalls struck by plague, since she’s been here.”
Abigail wondered whether the Hand of the Lord had used an accomplice to set the fires and mix nightshade with the fodder, but knew better than to do so aloud.
“Reverend, he wouldn’t hear word against the witch,” said another man, as they ringed Abigail and made their way toward the broken-down shanty. “Not at first, so great is his heart with love.” Torchlight flared in the cracks of the walls, the broken-out holes of what had been windows. “Yet those vexations began, the first night of her bein’ in the blockhouse, and him cryin’ out in his sleep for terror. We knew. All the village could see him weakenin’ day by day—when he’d writhe in pain, or clutch at his heart when he stood up before the Congregation at evenin’ services. When he’d cry out at the shape of the devil, flyin’ like a glowing bird, he said, about his head. We knew who that glowin’ bird was!”
Abigail raised her eyebrows. The Hand of the Lord was a more astute mountebank than she’d thought. “And is this the first time your Reverend has been set upon by demons?” she inquired. “Or have others he’s disagreed with all turned out to be witches, too?”
The young man brought his hand back to strike her. Abigail—whose younger brother had the same hot temper and ready hand in his cups—stepped back fast, turned face and body so that the blow flashed past her. “Is that all you know how to do?” she snapped, as he started to raise his hand again. “What good servants of the Lord your Reverend has taught you to be, to be sure.” She wheeled swiftly, and led the way toward the glowing doorway before he could gather himself for a response. Anything, she thought, to get them away from where Rebecca lay.
Unshaven, untidy, but giving no other evidence of spectral vexation, the Reverend Bargest stood in the restless red glare of the torches, his arms folded and his eyes like pits of shadow beneath silver brows. One of the half-dozen village men grouped behind him had a lantern, and from it the torches had been kindled, that were now thrust into cracks of the broken walls all around the little room. Farther back still in the shadows, the eyes of the horses glowed gold, and the beasts stamped and shifted at the scent of Muldoon’s blood.
Abigail ran forward to where the sergeant lay by the wall, and Dog-Mouth and Brother Mortify caught her arms, pulled her back. She could see Muldoon still breathing, though his eyes were closed and there was blood in his red hair. “Behold another of them,” proclaimed Bargest, and Abigail whirled to face him, righteous anger drowning her consternation and fear.
“Don’t be an ass,” she snapped. “Is everyone who goes against you a witch?”
“It takes but one witch to corrupt a multitude, as leaven works through a loaf, so that they do her bidding, and through her, her Master’s. Where is she?”
“Halfway to Wenham by this time, I should imagine,” retorted Abigail.
“Hear it lie,” he said, as if she were not really there. “The hag could scarce walk.”
“What?” said Abigail. “A woman who can fly? A woman who can reduce you, Reverend—Chosen though you may be—to writhing in agony on your bed? Until it’s time to do something that you really want to do, like rise up and convince people that she’s the cause of all their problems.”
“Satan is the cause of all of their problems,” replied Bargest quietly. “And Satan wears many guises. And the most deadly of his guises is that of the Anti-Christ, the False Shepherd who leads men astray with arguments that sound like reason. So don’t chop logic with me, Mrs. Adams. These my children are the tried and true remnant of the People, Gideon’s faithful Three Hundred, who remain true to the Lord’s testing when all the rest have fallen away. They know the Voice of the Lord, and they will not fall away, though you show them all the Kingdoms of the Earth.”
He turned to the men. “Satan her master has forsaken the witch,” he told them. “Yet as long as her body remains, Satan can return to her, and she will not cease to vex us, until I am dead, or she is destroyed. And when I am dead—when I am no longer able to stand between her and you with the shield of pure faith—then she will come for the rest of you. Believe this.” His deep, quiet voice filled the room with its power, and such was the force of his personality that Abigail thought, Now I can understand, how Prophets stood up to Kings . . .
“Believe it?” retorted Abigail. “The way that poor mad murderer Orion Hazlitt believed it, when you told him an innocent woman was Jezebel, only because she owned land that you want? It is you who played King Ahab, sir, not the other way about.”
“The whore was not innocent,” said Bargest quietly. “None is innocent, who raises her hand against the children of the Lord. Even as the witch Malvern”—here he raised his voice—“has lifted the Devil’s red and dripping hand to smite me down!”
“Rebecca Malvern has been barely conscious for weeks! Since when—?”
“The Devil dwells in the flesh of a witch!” thundered Bargest, and flung up his hands as if calling down the power of God from the heavens. “He never sleeps! Nor will he ever, until the Righteous lie dead in their blood! Find the woman and kill her.” His blazing eyes, the sweep of his arm, took in all his followers, and ended with one long, bony finger pointing at Abigail. “This one as well. She is the Daughter of Eve, apt to the hand of the Devil . . .”
Those were the final words of the Chosen One. A gunshot crashed from one of the holes in the crazy roof. Bargest flung up his arms as he staggered back, a red hole appearing in the white of his open shirt-front, eyes bulging with shock and an expression of astonishment that was nearly comical.
Brother Mortify grabbed Abigail’s arm as the men in the little cabin convulsed into panic movement. Abigail, furious, turned in his grip, shoved her face close to his, flung up her free arm, and screamed as loud as she could.
Taken completely by surprise, Mortify dropped her arm in shock. At the same instant Muldoon sat up, blood oozing from a wound in his shoulder, pistol in hand, barrel leveled on Dog-Mouth, who was one of the few who had a weapon ready. Abigail dived for the sergeant’s side as men began to stampede for the door. Her eyes went to the biggest of the holes in the ceiling in time to see another pistol thrust through it, nearly invisible in the shadows. The second shot cleared the room.
Bargest rolled over, gagging on blood. His hands fumbled about, trying to rise, to crawl after them. Then he fell, sobbing and groaning like a child. Abigail dragged Muldoon clear of the horses, which were rearing and stamping in fright. She thought she would have gone next to the Reverend, but there was a slither and thump outside the wall, and the next moment, Orion Hazlitt appeared in the broken doorway of the house.
At the sight of him Abigail’s nostrils seemed filled with the smell of blood. All she could see was the dishonored horror of the young woman’s body on Rebecca’s kitchen floor. Muldoon drew her close to him, pistol ready in his hand, unaware, Abigail realized, who this unshaven, exhausted stranger was.
No more than do I. No more than anyone in Boston ever has.
Hazlitt stopped before her. “Is she safe?” His green eyes—his mother’s eyes—were sane. Sane, and very tired.
“She’s in the woods. We’ll—”
“May I?” Orion bent down, took the pistol from Muldoon’s hand—it was John’s, Abigail noted—turned around, and shot Bargest between the eyes. “Don’t fear,” he said, handing the weapon back to the startled Muldoon. “I won’t”—he stopped, took a deep breath—“I didn’t kill Pentyre,” he said. “I couldn’t get near him. I—there were—Sons of Liberty—on Castle Island. Everywhere I looked, among
the crowd. Someone must have—They were watching for me—”
Softly, Abigail said, “They know.”
He closed his eyes. The breath went out of him in a sigh. “Rebecca, too?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?” His eyes opened, went to Muldoon, who was busily reloading the gun.
“Everything about you.” Her mind screamed, How could you not have known? and along with Perdita Pentyre’s slashed-up body she seemed to see the black cat Pirate, cleaning himself with the stump of his cut-off paw. To read again the horrible verses about slitting the throat of a red-haired devil so that she would not tempt him again, as he was tempted by the dark-skinned succubus who haunted his dreams.
How could I have sat at Rebecca’s table with this man? Shoulder to shoulder with him, not just one night but dozens? How could I have talked politics with him, commiserated with him about servant-girls, made dinners for him—for him and for the mother he murdered not forty-eight hours ago? How could I not have seen and smelled and felt all that horror inside him?
She knew she should feel something—fear? Rage? Disgust? Hatred? But all she felt was strange, separated from herself, as if she were coming down with fever. For a moment she thought that she stood on the threshold of Hell, speaking to someone just within its doors.
Orion Hazlitt drew breath again, and let it out. “Would that anyone,” he whispered, “knew everything about me.” He turned away.
A part of her wanted only for him to leave. Muldoon, with the blood soaking into his jacket and his eyebrows standing out ghastly in the torchlight against his waxy pallor, could not have saved her from an attack. Yet she knew Hazlitt would not raise his hand against her. She asked, “Where will you go now?”
He looked back. “I should say, to Hell,” he said softly. “Except that I am there. I was raised there. I suppose I’ll go where God sends me, who made me as I am.”
Had he not turned back to speak to her, she thought he might have gotten clear away. The night was pitch-dark, and even with a small lead, he could have been swallowed up by the native woods of his childhood, and so gone on to the West beyond the mountains. But when he looked away from her, and started again for the door, it was to find Lieutenant Coldstone standing in the aperture, his coat as red in the torchlight as the Reverend Bargest’s pooling blood and not a hair of his marble white wig out of place. He had a pistol in his hand and two very large soldiers of the Sixty-Fourth at his back. “Orion Hazlitt?”
Abigail caught the officer’s eye, and nodded, knowing that with him, she handed all his knowledge of the Sons of Liberty over into the hands of the Crown.
“I arrest you for murder, in the King’s name.”
“Don’t worry,” said Hazlitt, when they stood together while two of Coldstone’s men dug a shallow grave. “I am what I am—but I’m not a traitor to Liberty. I’ll tell them nothing.”
Seated on a tree stump, wrapped in her own cloak and Coldstone’s, too, and shivering as if her bones would shatter, Abigail looked quickly up at him.
“God made me what I am,” he repeated softly. “But I chose to fight for our rights.” He looked across the torchlit clearing, to where Coldstone knelt, talking to Rebecca. “Please tell her that.”
“Would you wish me to ask her,” said Abigail, “if she will speak to you?”
Men carried Bargest’s body out of the broken little house. There was no time, nor a horse to spare, to bear him back even as far as Salem with them, and there was no knowing whether the Gileadites would themselves return to bury him before the vermin of the woods came to feed. Coldstone had brought six men in all—enough to provide protection but by no stretch of any Patriot imagination a threat of armed force—and two of them stood on either side of Hazlitt, watching the darkness all around them with frightened eyes.
After England’s tame fields, Abigail thought, the woods of America must seem primeval beyond description, and what they’d seen recently—both in Boston and here in the hinterland—could not have been reassuring.
Across the clearing by torchlight, Coldstone pressed Rebecca’s hand, and helped her rise. Exhausted as her friend was, Abigail guessed that she would be capable of coming up with a convincing explanation of why Perdita Pentyre would have come to her house at midnight, without the slightest reference to the Sons of Liberty or insulting pamphlets about the British on Castle Island.
Orion said, “Thank you, Mrs. Adams, but no. I don’t want to upset her, and I know she would never understand. Only Mother—” He stopped himself, and turned his face away. His hands were bound behind him but Abigail guessed that the blood on his shirt-cuffs was his mother’s. “Only Mother truly understood that I don’t want to be what I am,” he finished quietly. “I wish she hadn’t seen me. Not because she’d tell, but because . . . Her good opinion . . .”
His voice broke off in a whispered laugh, and he shook his head at himself, for even thinking of such a thing. “God made me like this. The Reverend Bargest said, after I—after the first—the first time,” he stammered, “that God never does things without a reason, and therefore, it was God’s will, that I am what I am. That I am seized with—That there are times when it is as if my soul goes into another world, where nothing looks the same, and God’s commands are different. In that world, I hear those commands shouting at me out of my heart. I did fight it,” he added, as another trooper brought up horses for them both. “The second time, when I woke up in the woods, and came back to the village and everyone talking about the Banister girl’s death, and I knew it wasn’t a dream . . .”
He shook his head. “Bargest told me, to pray God to show me a different path. A different way to combat Satan. It was the saving of me, for five years. There were bad days, bad times, in Boston, but nothing I could not put aside, with the help of God.
“Knowing Rebecca helped. Knowing she . . . she cared for me, without wanting to eat my soul. I thought then, that maybe I could choose another road.” One corner of his mouth turned down, with a breath that could have been a sigh, or another, whispered, laugh at his own absurdity. “Then Mother came.”
His mother had left Gilead, and appeared on the printshop doorstep, in May of 1772, Abigail recalled. She remembered it because Rebecca’s letter spoke of seeing John, when he’d gone to the session court at Cambridge in that month.
“And Perdita? Did you . . . Did you go into this other world you speak of?”
“Not—No. Yes.” In the torchlight by the house, Coldstone helped Rebecca to mount behind a trooper, stood speaking to her for a few moments more. She did not look in Orion’s direction.
“It was the blood,” said Orion at last. “I thought I could kill her without . . . I thought I could do what the Lord commanded me to, and no more. But then I saw the blood. Smelled its smell. The Hand—Bargest,” he made himself use the man’s name. “Bargest came to Boston at the beginning of November. With more sermons for the book I was printing, but also to attend on the court. Afterwards he came to the shop, took me aside. He told me that he had proof that Pentyre and his wife were in league with the Devil, that they were the Devil’s chosen instruments to break up our Congregation and drive us from our lands. I had fought—for over a year I had fought—to put these thoughts, this terrible sense, from me, that inevitably I would go back to what I had done . . .”
“And he told you,” said Abigail softly, “that God had forged you to be His Weapon?”
Orion nodded, his face ghastly in the flickering yellow light. Soldiers came, knocking grave-dirt from their hands and boots, to help him onto a horse. Abigail wondered if the men of the Gilead Congregation would come at daybreak, to dig the Chosen of the Lord up again and bury him in Gilead itself. The energy that had kept her going through flight and confrontation, scouting the town boundaries and climbing down ropes from the burning blockhouse, was long gone. When someone brought up Balthazar to her, she could only gaze aghast at the saddle; one of the men had to help her mount. She reined him over beside the sturdy midd
le-aged trooper behind whose saddle Rebecca clung: “Will she be all right?” She was mildly astonished that Rebecca hadn’t fainted long ago.
The trooper saluted her. “I’ll look after ’er, mum, don’t you worry.” He showed her where, under his cloak, he held Rebecca’s wrists tight together against his chest with one big hand. “She starts to shift or slack, I’ll feel it ’fore she feels it ’erself, won’t I, Mrs. M?”
Her head pressed to his back, Rebecca barely had the strength to nod.
Abigail recalled one of Sam’s choice broadsides, about every redcoat being the scum of the London backstreets, whose sole wish was to bayonet every honest American woman he saw.
The little troop started away down the road, one man walking ahead with a torch to light the road. Tarry flakes of fire dripped down from it, to hiss out on the wet earth; the horses moved among rising threads of steam. The world smelled of smoke.
John and his party finally met them, halfway back to the Salem-Danvers road.
Or, rather, Coldstone’s party was intercepted by a gang of unknown men dressed up and painted to look like Indians, who stopped them at gunpoint and searched the sad dlebags on Orion’s horse, something Lieutenant Coldstone had neglected to do. As one of the Indians—who under all his paint looked suspiciously like Paul Revere—brought out of the bag a brown-backed quarto-sized notebook la beled “Household Expenses,” another—short, chubby, sitting his horse with the uncomfortable stiffness of a man who has his dignity to consider—reined up beside Abigail. Blue, slightly protuberant eyes met hers worriedly from a black-painted face.
Abigail inquired coolly, “Did you get lost?”
The Indian nodded, and said, rather unwillingly, “Ugh.”
“Ugh indeed.”
He looked as if he were struggling against strict orders not to say a word in English, and Abigail, relenting, said more quietly, “I’m quite all right,” which was not strictly the truth. She could feel fever coming on her, from chill, exertion, and clothing damp from the wet of the woods. She realized she was very lucky to be alive at all. Rebecca, slumped behind the King’s bloody-back savage, was shivering, too. The Indian reached out a hand to her, but Abigail, mindful of the soldiers watching them, kept her grip on the reins.
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