by C. C. Finlay
Or was it their farm? As he helped her along, offering her his arm, steadying her when she seemed ready to topple, he wondered if it truly was their farm. Where did things stand between them now? The lie was becoming the reality. The more they pretended to be brother and sister, the more their relationship became like that of siblings, a bond of strong affection and shared experience, but no more.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” Proctor said, shaken from his reveries.
“I’ve asked you twice what we will do once we reach the coast, but you haven’t heard me. You seem so pensive.”
“I was thinking about The Farm,” Proctor said.
Deborah nodded her head. “It has been much on my mind as well.”
“How so?”
“Thinking about my students.”
“Ah,” Proctor said.
“If I’d had to worry about protecting them too when we faced that woman and the German, he might have taken us all.”
“I hope they’re safe,” Proctor said.
“Yes,” Deborah agreed.
They both fell silent as soon as she said it, and they both knew they had no way of knowing. A different vision of The Farm crossed Proctor’s mind, one more like Alexandra Walker’s farm. The fields abandoned, the doors hanging open, bodies tossed like clumps of bloody rags into corners and under tables.
Deborah knew what he was thinking, because she reached out and squeezed his arm to reassure him. At the touch of her fingertips, he felt some of that old electric spark pass between them again. “They’re safer there than they would be anywhere else,” she said. “We’ve put every protection we know into that farm.”
“But as you said yourself, is it enough? Can we really stand against the power that the Covenant possesses?” He regretted the question as soon as he asked it. While Deborah was still forming her response, he answered his own question. “Yes.”
“What?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we can stand against that power. The colonies united can stand against the king and all his might. And our school, small as it is, can stand against the power of the Covenant. This is our home. We have courage because we stand on our own doorstep and tell the unwanted guests they cannot enter. We will never be bullied at our own hearth.”
His fists were clenched by the time he finished speaking. He glanced at Deborah, almost embarrassed by his outburst, but she stared at him, suppressing a smile, her face aglow.
“I like you that way,” she said.
“What way is that? Spouting off at the mouth?” he said, feeling slightly deflated. Remembering that they were in a Loyalist stronghold, he looked quickly up and down the road to make sure no other travelers were close enough to hear them.
“No, that way you have of filling up with light until it spills over, light so bright it makes me want to shield my eyes to look at you.”
“Now you’re mocking me,” he said.
She shook her head.
“But it does make me think—maybe we’ve been wanting too little.”
“What do you mean?”
“All we want is to prevent this Covenant from doing harm to us. We want to be safe from them. That’s not enough.”
Her mouth fell open. “It seems like a tall order to me right now.”
“We ought to prevent them from doing harm to anyone. They come from overseas, from Europe. The widow, she was from London. Cecily’s new master sounds like he’s from one of the German states.”
“Hesse, maybe, like the soldiers?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. But the point is, whatever evil they mean to do here, they’re doing over there as well. When we defeat them here—and we will defeat them—we need to take the battle to the rest of them, and not let them murder or take from people the way they’ve taken from us.”
“How’re we going to do that?”
“You’ve said that you want to get through the war and then turn The Farm back into a school for healing, the way your mother ran it. But that’s not enough. All the years she ran it, the Covenant was out there, unchecked, using their unnatural talents to do the devil’s work. I think we’re called to stop them.”
“Don’t be too hasty,” she said. “Let the Light—”
“The Light already shines in it, can’t you see? Why were we introduced to the widow, and allowed to defeat her? There was providence at play, and not just luck. The same thing when I encountered Bootzamon at the Walker farm. He should have been able to kill me easily, but I turned the tables on him. And back at the Stymiests’ farm—if we’d had to depend on my spell alone, we would have been captured. Was it chance that you were in the house, or that I used the grain, or was it divine will?”
Deborah walked on silently, her head lowered. At last, she said, “I will have to think on this.”
“I know you long for a return to peace, to the old way that your mother and father did things—”
“I said, I will have to think on it.”
That would have to do for now. He let her fall silent.
The channel that separated Long Island and Manhattan was called the Narrows. It was formed by the confluence of the Harlem River and the East River. Their currents churned around an island. British ships moved up and down the channel, into both rivers, their masts as thick as the trees of the forests.
“How are we going to cross that?” Deborah asked.
“If we were squirrels, we could cross over as easy as jumping from branch to branch,” Proctor said.
She fell silent, chewing her lower lip as she stared out across the water.
“Um, you aren’t planning to transform us into squirrels, are you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Because I’m not always sure what you can and can’t do anymore.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Remember how the widow Nance made us think she was a panther and then a bear—”
“And a flock of crows. But all of those were just illusions.”
Illusions or not, the widow Nance’s transformations and escape had been Proctor’s first glimpse of the real power of magic, and it had shaken him and everything he knew. Or maybe it was just his first meeting with Deborah that had shaken him.
“Too bad illusions won’t get us across the channel,” he said. “What were you thinking about?”
She hesitated. “How important is it for us to get across there today? At all?”
“Important,” he said. “We’ve got the German and Cecily and Bootzamon behind us, and the curse on all those Continental soldiers ahead of us. We need to escape the one problem and fix the other.”
“We have another problem,” Deborah said hesitantly.
“Yes?”
“Money.”
“Do we have any friends on the other side? People who might know you from the highway?”
“My mother traded letters with a Mary Murray. I don’t know that she has a talent, but she was a correspondent of my mother and a friend to peace.”
“Where is she?”
“Somewhere near Kip’s Bay, wherever that may be.”
“That’s south of here, near where the Redcoats beat the Continentals. But I think the army’s retreating north.”
Deborah lowered her head. She looked so fragile.
“We’ll figure out a way,” Proctor said. “I’ll find work for a few days if I must. We’ll go throw ourselves on this Mary’s mercy. We’ll find someone else to call on.” He knew someone else in Manhattan now, but he didn’t want to think about calling there for mercy. Not yet. Not at all. “It’ll be all right. I can find work again.”
She released her breath and touched her heart. “Let us take nothing for our journey. Neither staffs nor scrip, neither bread nor money.”
Her knees wobbled as she spoke, and he reached out to catch her. A slight thrill ran through him again, the way it did whenever he touched her. It caught him off-guard, and he staggered a step before he
righted her again.
“Idly quoting scripture?” Proctor said.
“It’s no idle quote. I was trying to cast a spell for luck.”
“Trying?” She seldom tried things she didn’t succeed at.
“I’m too drained. But there,” she said, straightening herself and smoothing her dress. “There, I think that will do just fine.”
Seeing the strain still on her face, he said, “As long as you aren’t turning us into squirrels.”
“That would be lucky,” she suggested in the same serious tone of voice.
Proctor laughed, then felt wrong for laughing. He glanced over his shoulder at once to make sure the German or Bootzamon hadn’t stolen up on them in that instant that he let down his guard. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a large coin.
“I have a single dollar,” he said. “I’ve been saving it for an emergency.”
“Now that is lucky.”
They found a sailor to take them across in a little sixteen-foot boat with a single sail.
It tacked and dodged the bigger ships like a dog in a herd of sheep. It bounced and skipped over the wakes, fighting the churning currents as they flowed over the mass of submerged ledges, rocks, and underwater traps.
“Why is it called Hell Gate?” Proctor asked.
“Because everyone who crosses here intends to reach the other side.”
Proctor was puzzled.
“And we all know the way to hell is paved with good intentions.”
The sailor was still chortling at his joke when the boat bucked again, then cracked sharply off a rock. Deborah gasped and clutched the sides of the boat. Proctor worried too. “Is there something I can do to help?”
“No,” the man said. “She can take worse beatings than that. It’s just a little tricky when the tides change—”
He stopped talking and pushed his shoulder into the rudder as the current tried to spin them around sideways.
“Dear God,” Proctor said. “Will you please rebuke the wind and the raging of the water?”
“There you go,” the man said. “You can never go wrong with a bit of prayer.”
The waters went slack for a moment, as still as the surface of a lake on a windless morning. The sky and the clouds showed in the surface of the water, and beneath the surface lurked the ominous bulks of keel breakers.
The boat shot forward. When the sailor had landed them on the far shore, he turned to Proctor. “You got the ear of the Lord?”
“No more than any other man,” Proctor said.
“I never saw anything like that, all the years I’ve been crossing the Narrows.” He reached into his pocket and gave them their dollar back. “I was going to cross anyway. That’s for an easy voyage.”
Deborah reached out and snatched up the coin. “Thank you, friend.”
They found a road and started walking across the island. “Do you think it really made a difference?” Proctor asked. “My spell on the boat? Your spell for luck? How can we tell when our spells work, and when events have happened to fall in our favor?”
“I don’t know about your spell on the boat,” she said. “But my spell for luck, I have every confidence that it helped us, that it will continue to help us.”
* * *
“I’m so sorry I can’t help you,” Mary Murray said. She was a soft-spoken woman with a pretty face for her age.
They had gone to the Quaker woman’s farm, hoping for help from Deborah’s friends on the highway. But the farm had been ruined by battle. The crops had been torn up, trees chopped down, and wounded soldiers, British and American, still occupied her rooms. The house smelled like vinegar and cabbage.
“I don’t even have food to spare,” she apologized. “Right now I can barely feed the men here who are too wounded to move. You have other choices open to you. I know you understand.”
“We understand,” Deborah said, and pressed her hands around the other woman’s hand.
“There’s a tavern just down the road,” Mary said. “The proprietor is a friend. If you have a coin or two, he’ll feed you well and take care of you.”
As they walked down the road, Proctor said, “I guess it’s lucky we got that coin back after all.”
“I told you so,” Deborah said, but without conviction. Her spirits had been dashed by the reception at Mary Murray’s house.
They found the tavern where she had said. It was a small narrow room, stinking of unwashed bodies, burned food, and bitter smoke. It was crowded with twice as many people as it could safely hold. Most were other refugees from the war. Proctor was bumped from both sides at once, by men who didn’t stop to apologize. The same thing happened to Deborah. Finally, they arrived at the counter and called for the proprietor.
Deborah reached down for their single coin. She checked one pocket, then the other, then the floor.
Her eyes brimmed with tears. “My purse has been stolen.”
“What can I get for you?” the proprietor yelled, leaning over the heads of other patrons.
“Some luck,” yelled Proctor.
The proprietor cupped a hand to his ear. Proctor waved farewell to him. Taking Deborah by the elbow, he led her back out to the street.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
Proctor sighed reluctantly. “I know another person we can ask for help.”
Tired, sore, and hungry, Proctor and Deborah trudged another eight miles down Bloomingdale Road and then the Broad Way toward the Battery at the island’s southern tip.
“Who is it?” Deborah asked as they walked.
Proctor didn’t want to answer. “An old friend,” he said.
“A friend of your parents?” Her voice was sharp and curious.
“A friend of mine,” Proctor said. “But I don’t want to bring bad luck on us by talking about it. I don’t even know if we can find our way there.”
Finding their way to the right neighborhood proved easy enough. Loyalist refugees from all the colonies had gathered in the south and west wards of the city, packing too many people into wooden houses that already crowded the narrow streets. The towering steeple of Trinity Church was visible from miles away, but their slow approach to it only made their journey feel longer. It was after dark before they reached the neighborhood.
“How do you know the address?” Deborah asked.
Proctor knew the address because, while Paul Revere had always obeyed her instructions not to bring letters to The Farm, the Reverend Emerson, before he joined the army, was of a different mind. After the British evacuated Boston, Proctor received half a dozen letters sent by way of Emerson. All had the same return address in New York, in the neighborhood near Courtlandt’s Sugar House.
“Directions were given to me,” he said.
The five-story sugar house sat across the square from the church. From there he followed the directions, just as he had memorized them, through the filthy, narrow streets. People slept on front stoops, leaned out of windows in their shirtsleeves, and begged—or worse—on every other corner. Proctor and Deborah’s dirty clothes matched the dirty clothes of the refugees who jostled them in the streets. The hungry rumbles of their bellies were echoed in other bellies all around them.
When they were a block away from the address, Proctor had second thoughts. He didn’t want to do this in front of Deborah. “Can you stay here?” he asked.
“What?”
“Just wait here.” He looked up. A big wooden sign hung over the street, a carving of two cocks with spurs slashing at each other. It creaked in the wind that came off the nearby harbor. “I’ll meet you back at this tavern.”
“Don’t you know what men will take me for?”
“Please,” he begged. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”
When she relented, he practically ran down the street. The address was a townhome, the nicest on the block. He hammered on the door. It was answered by a servant, who closed the door on Proctor before he even had a chance to speak.
Proct
or blocked it open. “Please. I’m a friend of Mister Thomas Rucke and Miss Emily, from Boston.”
The servant regarded Proctor skeptically, but he turned to the house and called for her. “Miss Rucke—there’s a beggar at the door who claims to know you.”
Emily came to the door in a simple but elegant dress. She had changed in the past year. Her prettiness had matured into true beauty, but the lines of her eyes and mouth had lost some of their winsomeness. She looked at Proctor, puzzled.
“May I help you?” she asked.
It was clear that she didn’t recognize him, even though they’d once had an agreement to become engaged. He took off his hat and held it in his hand. “Emily, it’s me—Proctor.”
She startled, putting a hand on her heart.
Quickly, to put her at ease, he smiled and indicated the servant who stood behind her. “Where’s Bess?”
“Father had to let her go,” she said.
“You mean sell her?”
He was, he realized, as uncomfortable as she seemed to be. He knew the question, intended only to resolve his confused reaction to her statement, was the wrong thing to ask as soon as the words slipped out of his mouth. But slavery bothered him much more now than it did a year and a half ago, and he puzzled when people spoke of slaves as servants.
“Yes, he sold her,” Emily said. Her hand fell back to her side, and she composed herself. “We couldn’t afford to keep her anymore, not with so much trade disrupted. Did you come all this way just to be critical of something perfectly legal that my father did to help provide for me?”
“No, Emily, I’m sorry,” he said, dropping his eyes. He glanced up at her again, then looked away. “I’m here in New York with a friend. Our money was stolen, there’s no work to be had. The war’s affected everybody—”
“If I recall correctly, Mister Brown, you played some part in starting this war,” she said sharply.
More than she knew …
He dropped his head. “Emily, I’m sorry. We’re in desperate circumstances. We need help. A few coins, something to eat …”
His words trailed off and he dropped his head, looking only at her feet.
She took a breath. “Permit me to be certain that I understand you correctly,” she said after a moment. “We came to an understanding and started to plan our future together. Then you ignored my earnest plea for you to obey your lawful sovereign, and helped the rebels start this war. When my own home and security were threatened, I risked revealing myself to the mob in order to treat your injuries and save your life. You made no effort to express any appreciation. I forgave you all these things, and found you in Boston to inform you that my affection remained constant. You disappeared. Finally, I wrote you half a dozen letters, seeking only to ascertain your health and well-being, and to come to a peaceful resolution of the feelings we once, I was still certain, shared—”