This Side of Heaven
Page 34
“John, no!” she cried. “Run! Get help!”
She was silenced then by a hand clapping over her mouth.
“Get the boy! Get the boy!”
A shot rang out, and Caroline’s blood froze.
“Deuce take you, Will, you knocked my aim off!”
“ ’Twas apurpose, fool! We don’t wish to harm the lad! ’Tis not he who’s done wrong!”
“But he’ll fetch his blasted pa, and the rest of ’em too, and we’ll have a bloody war on our hands!”
“By the time he can get them here, we’ll be done with what we’ve come to do. Hurry, now, and let’s get on.”
They were dragging her with them as they argued, her hands bound behind her, a blindfold over her eyes. She kicked and found herself lifted clear off her feet. Then, with hands beneath her armpits and others circling her ankles, she was carried into the forest. She could tell that that was where they were by the rustling of the leaves, the sound of clothing brushing against rough tree trunks, and the cries of night animals coming out to hunt and be hunted.
It was horribly clear that the mob that held her intended evil.
“Oh, please,” she begged, terror hoarsening her voice. “Please, I’m no witch! Please don’t hurt me!”
For she had recognized, or thought she recognized, the voice of one of the men carrying her. ’Twas Mr. Peters, Lissie’s father, and she thought he was a fair man.
“Mr. Peters, please …”
“ ’Tis no one of that name about. Hush, girl! Here, someone stuff something in her mouth.”
Someone did, a woolen scarf that almost suffocated her and made her gag.
“We’d best hurry …!”
“Aye.”
“Lift your torch over here. Is this the tree?”
“Aye, this is it, the one she carved her devil’s words in! Look out that you don’t touch the writing!”
“Pooh, writing can’t hurt you!”
“How do you know that? ’Twould seem likely that it could. Anyway, why chance it?”
“Set her there, then.”
Caroline was put upon her feet again, and felt the rough trunk of a tree at her back. She tried to kick at her captors and run, but in only a few moments they had her fast, bound to the tree.
They were piling things around her feet.
“Hurry up!”
“Quick, now!”
“ ’Tis fitting that she should meet her end tied to the very tree that she marked with her evil. She can take her spells with her to the Devil!”
“Do you think we should take the gag from her mouth, so that she might pray?”
“Witches don’t pray!”
“Maybe the fire will cleanse her soul before the Devil can claim it! Should that happen, I would not deny her the chance to pray!”
Fire! Caroline’s blood ran cold as she realized what they meant to do: burn her at the stake!
“Do you wish to pray, girl?”
Caroline nodded weakly. The gag was removed, and she ran her tongue around her dry mouth.
“Why do you do this to me?” she asked piteously. The rope that bound her was tight, cutting into her arms and breasts and thighs. She struggled against it, but the knots were firm, and she knew that it would not be loosed by any efforts of hers. Tears filled her eyes, ran down past the blindfold, and wet her cheeks. Was it possible that she would meet her end like this? It could not happen so, not when supper was still cooking in her kitchen and her men would be coming in at any moment to eat and …
“I told you she wouldn’t pray!”
“Do not think to sway us with tears!”
“ ’Tis a devil’s trick, to make us doubt! The evidence against her is ironclad!”
“Stop talking and light the faggots! We’ll be here all night at this rate!”
“I am no witch! I pray you, you must believe me!” Caroline was sobbing with fear.
“Pay no heed to her entreaties! We all know that she practices alchemy, and the writing of her spells is carved into the very tree above her!”
“When a mad dog ran through the village, she turned it away with her eyes!”
“She looked at my Faith, and the next day the child contracted the sickness!”
“At night she sends her spirit into the soul of that cat, and roams the woods doing evil!”
“Light the faggots!”
“The cat is her familiar spirit! It looks like her!”
“Light the faggots!”
“She is a witch, and the sister of a witch!”
“Light the faggots!”
“No, please, you must listen …!”
“Ahhh!” It was a sound of satisfaction from the multitude, as if a large predator had just drawn first blood.
“Please …!”
Caroline was near hysteria. The crackle of fire reached her ears. The smell of burning pine tar rose to her nostrils. A sensation of heat attacked her feet, and she knew that the faggots had been lighted.
How long would it be before the flames spread to her skirt? When that happened she would be done for.…
Caroline screamed, long and shrill and loud, her head falling back against the tree. Watching, the crowd began to chant, first one voice, then another and then many.
“Burn, witch, burn!”
“Our Father, who art in heaven …” Caroline writhed against her bonds, against the heat that was increasing with every second, against the agony that she knew would soon be hers, against the impossibility of terrible, impending death.
“Burn, witch, burn!”
“Hallowed be thy name.…”
Her head scraped the tree, and her blindfold was dislodged. She could see the flames now, dancing ever closer, crackling with glee as they came to claim her, their prey.…
The crowd was almost gleeful now, swaying as they chanted, eyes gleaming at her like feral beasts’ in the dark. They watched her panic with panting avidity.
They would enjoy watching her burn.…
The flames reached her feet, licked at the edge of her skirt, caught. The dark-blue homespun went up like a torch. Smoke seared her lungs, as the flames shot past her face, and Caroline opened her mouth for one last, terrified scream.
Shots sounded in the darkness. Men yelled, women screamed, people scattered. With the flames eating her, Caroline was aware of no more than this until a huge dark body attached to a hand holding a knife burst through the conflagration, sliced the ropes that held her, jerked her free. Stumbling forward, her dress still aflame, she was tumbled to the wet ground, rolled over and over as her burning dress was ripped away.
Through all that she never ceased to scream.
“Caroline!” It was Matt’s voice that finally got through to her, Matt’s face that impinged itself on the red fog of terror that filled her eyes, Matt’s arms that held her.
“Matt!” She recognized him with a whimper, turned into the arms that held her against his chest, shivering and quaking and sobbing and gasping his name.
“ ’Tis all right, poppet, I have you safe.” He was crooning to her as he carried her, striding along the path that led through the forest to the house, with Daniel and Robert and Thomas and John, the first three bearing muskets and the last unarmed, for grim-faced guards. The crowd had vanished, melting like wraiths into the trees, and Caroline realized that she would never know the identity of most who had wished her dead.
It came to her then what Matt had done to save her.
“The fire,” she whispered brokenly, her voice hoarse from the smoke, “you came through the fire.”
He had braved the thing he feared most for her.
Epilogue
A month later, Matt and Caroline were married by an itinerant preacher in the front room of James’s house. She wore one of her English dresses, the fine blue silk that Matt liked best, while he was in sober Puritan black. A delicate Mechlin veil that had once belonged to her mother covered her hair, and a prayer book that had been Mary’s was in her hands.
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James had given it to her, saying that Mary would have wanted her to have it. Caroline felt her friend’s spirit very close that day.
James and Daniel, Robert and Thomas, John and Davey stood with them as they took their vows. When Matt slid the ring on her finger and Caroline turned her face up for his kiss applause broke out.
“ ’Tis done, then,” Matt said as if relieved, when his brothers clapped him on the shoulder and the minister, having been paid by Daniel, bowed his way out.
Caroline, who had more than ample reason to believe in the depth of his love, gave him a tender smile.
“Are you our ma now, Aunt Caroline?” asked Davey, looking worried.
“Only if you wish me to be,” Caroline answered firmly.
“We do,” John said and hugged her. Dropping down on both knees with no thought of what it did to her dress, Caroline hugged him back, then included Davey as he threw his arms around her too.
“I love you both,” she whispered to them, and while they were too much the young men to confess to that, they submitted to a kiss each before squirming away.
The boys scampered off to play with Hope, the men turned to twitting their newlywed brother, and the bride was left to her own devices with nothing to do but observe her new family. Eyeing the five tall, handsome men—though her own husband was the tallest and the handsomest—Caroline felt a little bud of happiness burst into blooming life inside her.
She was loved, and she knew it. That night when Matt had dared the thing he feared most in the world for her sake, he had proved it without doubt. In the aftermath of saving her, he had watched over her tenderly while the doctor was fetched and her burns pronounced superficial and easily healed. In fact, she had healed, and her skin was as smooth and fine as ever it had been.
But the flames had seared a distaste for Saybrook forever into her heart.
Matt had told her of the witches who practiced their rites in the woods, and of how they had tried to recruit poor mad Elizabeth. He had examined the writing on the tree to which she had been tied, the writing she had noticed just before the Indians stole her away, and pronounced it to be composed of an alphabet of Celtic origin, called runes. The witches’ alphabet.
And so, she had learned, the mob that came for her was been as crazed as she had supposed, because there really were witches in Saybrook. Only the identity of their target was wrong.
But still, they could not rest easy in their minds knowing that the same could happen again. So they were leaving, all of them, not only Matt and herself and John and Davey but Daniel and Robert and Thomas too, and James and Hope. The farm had been sold ironically enough to Mr. Peters, for so much money that Caroline blinked whenever she thought about it. The livestock were sold, too, along with most of the furniture. Three wagons loaded with everything they now possessed in the world waited outside. Raleigh—the menfolk had refused categorically to leave him—was tied to the last wagon, while Millicent waited in her basket on the front seat of the one in which Caroline would ride.
They would go south, maybe to Maryland, maybe beyond. Someplace where they could live, all of them, untroubled by the past.
“Well, if we’re going, let’s get to it,” said James, outwardly recovered from Mary’s death but inwardly, Caroline feared, badly crippled. But healing, as she well knew, could not be hurried. Perhaps it would come to him in time.
With a whoop the boys hurried outside, excited at the adventure awaiting them. The men followed more sedately, but Caroline got the sense that they were excited too. Only Matt held back, holding her back too with a hand on her arm.
“I’ve a wedding gift for you,” he said gruffly, producing from his coat pocket a box that he handed her. For a moment Caroline stared at him rather than at it, her pleased surprise showing in her smile, her love shining from her eyes.
“Well, open it.”
She did. When she saw what was inside her eyes widened. It was a brooch, almost an exact replica of her father’s lucky peacock. Only the gems in this one were not paste.
“It’s real,” he said, confirming her guess as she looked at it, speechless. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Lifting the exquisite thing from its box, she held it up to the light. The colors glowed bright, ruby red and sapphire blue and emerald green.
“Wherever did you get it, and how did you pay for it?” she gasped, for it was impossible to imagine such a thing being made in Saybrook, and the jewels alone must have cost a fortune.
“I commissioned Tobias to buy it for me in Boston,” he answered. “And as to how I paid for it—Jacob. Tobias was more than happy to take him off my hands in exchange for your brooch.”
At the thought of the huge bull being traded for the dainty piece of jewelry, Caroline started to giggle. Matt looked at her as if she’d grown a second head for a moment, and then he too began to grin.
“How fitting,” Caroline gasped, collapsing into his arms.
“Fitting indeed,” Matt murmured, and stopped her laughter with his mouth.