by C. C. Finlay
“It’s slightly more legible than mine,” he admitted finally, and Proctor felt a tightness he wasn’t even aware of drain out of his neck and shoulders.
“Thank you,” he said, choking once again on the sir.
“You’ll do for now, as I can’t afford to have any more officers exchange their swords for pens. As a civilian, I can only permit you to work on nonmilitary correspondence.”
“I understand,” Proctor said.
“Good,” Washington said, seeming genuinely pleased. The ghosts shrank back for a moment, as far as the chain on their ankles would allow. “My compliments, miss,” he said to Deborah. “I’m delighted that you seem to know your brother better than he knows himself. Mrs. Washington provides a similar service to me on occasion.”
“Thank you,” Deborah said.
“Do you know your own talents, or should I ask your brother?”
“I’m a fair nurse,” Deborah said.
“Better than fair,” Proctor said. “Her—our mother was a midwife and a country doctor. Deborah has helped her since she was, well, big enough to walk.”
“Excellent,” Washington said. “Most of our seriously injured are being dismissed to make their way home, but if you can get any who are staying in camp back into fighting condition, I’d be obliged to you.”
“I’ll do what I can,” she said.
“Thank you for bringing these folks to me, Corporal,” Washington said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Take them to the quartermaster and have them put on the civilian rolls. He’ll find you quarters and show you where to collect your daily rations.”
“Thank you,” Proctor said.
“We’re glad to serve the cause,” Deborah said.
Surly escorted them outside. His mood, which had lifted a bit while he faced Washington, soured again the moment they stepped through the door. He frowned, and his neck knotted up as he squinted at the sky. “You’re too late for any rations today” was the first thing he said. “Not that they’ve been all too much to get excited over lately.”
Another soldier stomped up the road from the way they’d just come, aiming right for Surly. He carried an extra musket and a Continental jacket.
“Where’s Dewey?” snarled the newcomer. He had a smirking ghost on his shoulder, stroking a knife along his neck.
Surly snapped to attention. “Sir, he’s right—”
He stopped in mid-sentence and stared with a mixture of hopelessness and fury back at the way they’d originally come.
“I’ll tell you where he is—he’s gone!” He flung the jacket to the ground at Surly’s feet and shook the musket in his face. “We found these back where you were supposed to be guarding the road, and not a sight of him anywhere.”
“Sir, he can’t have gone far. It hasn’t been more than a few minutes. He had the trots something awful—maybe he’s just off somewhere private.”
“You’d better hope he is—I put him with you so you could keep an eye on him. We can’t afford any more deserters, by God. You bring him back and I won’t whip you for it.”
He tossed the musket to Surly, who snatched it out of the air. The head of the ghost lolled on his shoulder; a horrific slash cut right across its dead mouth, but it lifted its eyes toward Proctor and grinned.
The other man stomped away. Surly shifted both guns to one hand and picked up the jacket, tossing it over his shoulder. Proctor half expected it to cover the ghost’s face, but there was no such luck.
After taking a few quick steps back down the road, Surly remembered Proctor and Deborah. “The quartermaster is down thataway,” he said. “You’ll likely find him in the barn.” With those simple directions, he was gone.
“Do you think desertions are a problem?” Deborah asked.
“I think that’s what the curse is meant to do, to break men’s spirits,” Proctor answered. “When I was sitting in there, at the general’s desk, it felt like a thousand ants crawling over my skin. I wanted to run away.”
“They can’t run away from it,” Deborah said. “We saw what happened to that soldier in Gravesend—the fellow named Increase. The curse stayed with him after he went home.”
“Yes, but they don’t know that,” Proctor said. He guided Deborah out of the road as two more officers rode up and dismounted, running into Washington’s headquarters. Walking toward the quartermaster’s barn, he said in a lowered voice, “No one but us even knows there’s a curse.”
“I don’t know how to break it,” Deborah said.
“We’ll figure it out,” Proctor assured her.
She nodded. “We’ll have a better chance with you close to Washington. You’ll be able to see the effects of the curse, learn more about who it affects, how many, and how.”
“Ah,” Proctor said, suddenly understanding why she’d made a fuss about his penmanship.
“And as a nurse, I’ll have close access to men with the curse. I may learn something up close that will help me break it.” She nodded again, sharply, to herself, as if having a plan was enough to keep her going.
Maybe having a plan was enough. “Once we get our bearings again, I want to find some way to rescue that orphan boy.”
“And Lydia,” Deborah insisted. “It’s all part of the same curse. They’re using power drawn from Lydia and the orphan for the magic that’s sapping the army.”
“Whatever we’re going to do, we’d better do it soon then,” Proctor said. “It won’t be long till there’s not any army left to save.”
Proctor thought he’d never worked harder than he did in Washington’s headquarters, but he wasn’t the hardest-working man there, not by a distance.
When Proctor woke up in the mornings, Washington was already awake and on the job. When he fell asleep at night, Washington was still going over his correspondence. Most of his work seemed to consist of talking to men and writing letters, not what Proctor would have imagined at all. But as commander in chief of the army, Washington had to manage not only his own officers but also the officers of the militia who coordinated with him. He wrote volumes of letters to the governors and legislators in the states, encouraging them to raise more troops and send more supplies, often with detailed lists. His communications with the Continental Congress included all that as well as their orders to him, which he frequently pressured them to change or adjust. And he never let his personal communication slide. Every gift was acknowledged, every visit remembered, every letter answered. Washington drafted most letters himself, but his handwriting suffered as a result, and so most letters were recopied before they were sent. Any changes between the original and the copy had to be marked on the original, which was then filed and saved for reference. The amount of paper alone was staggering to Proctor. It felt like they completed a book’s worth every week. And all of it was done with this invisible curse hanging over them, this secondary army of ghosts intent on stopping their work and driving them away.
The headquarters had been nearly empty that first day as a result of Washington sending out everyone to gather information about the fire in New York. On most days, there were a dozen men inside at any one time, including many young officers who were Proctor’s age. On the one hand, he felt a certain envy of them. He wanted to share their camaraderie and sense of purpose.
On the other, he didn’t want to share the curse that hung over all of them. Though he tried to shut out the presence of the ghosts, he could not. They were spirits trapped in a world that should have released them: not all were soldiers, nor had all died violent deaths. Many men carried no more than an infant, tiny spirits dead in birth or cradle. Some of those were the worst, wailing in confusion, inconsolable. Some men carried mothers or grandmothers with them; Proctor often saw those spirits fail to intrude, as if this were just one more burden in a long life of burdens they needed to bear.
But in and around the headquarters, closest to Washington, the dead were all Continental soldiers, southern militia recognizable in their hunting shirts, hu
ndreds of Marylanders killed at the old stone house covering the retreat from Brooklyn, and other faces that looked as familiar to Proctor as the faces around him. He felt a constant coolness in their presence that had little to do with the advancing autumn, and he often lifted his head to answer someone only to realize he’d heard the whispering of the ghosts passing through the room and nothing more.
Like the men he worked with, Proctor also had a mission: to break the curse so they could fight the war. Day to day, he felt like he was making as much progress against it as they were against the British.
He and Deborah usually tried to meet in the evenings, if only for a few minutes. Her experience was similar. After they’d been in camp a couple of weeks, he found her one night, sitting just outside the circle of a campfire’s light, dabbing tears from her eyes.
He sat down next to her and said nothing for a while. Finally, she sighed, wiping both eyes with the back of her hand, and sat up straighter.
“How do you think they’re doing on The Farm?” he asked.
“I hope that Magdalena is teaching them well,” Deborah said. “I hope that Abigail can lift big stones, that Sukey has learned to keep her mouth closed, and Esther has learned to open hers. I hope that Ezra has finished the new rooms, and stays warm inside by the fire. I hope that Zoe is …” She started to choke up before she could get out the words. “I just hope she’s still alive. I wish we had never made that rule about sending no letters.”
Proctor nodded. “I wrote to Paul Revere, but he has been stationed in Maine and unable to check on them.” He sighed. “This is the first year since I could walk that I haven’t been in the fields at harvesttime.”
“I hate this,” Deborah said. “The world is too far out of order.”
“You mean”—he looked around to make sure no one was too close, and then dropped his voice anyway—“the curse.”
“Not just the curse, the cursed war. All wars are cursed.” She covered her face with her hands again, holding them there for a second, then wiping the tears off her cheeks. “How is it going for you?”
Proctor started to tell her about his day, which included more time running menial errands than it did copying letters, and then stopped. “I haven’t learned anything new in days.”
Deborah nodded. “Only the soldiers are affected. Enlisted, militia—that doesn’t matter. The curse doesn’t lift once they leave. I’ve seen men who’ve gone away and come back—they all look haunted.”
“Some don’t have it so bad, but others—I don’t know how they take it,” Proctor said. “Washington especially. I can’t tell how he thinks clearly with all those spirits leaning in at his shoulder and whispering to him. It’s no wonder he doesn’t sleep.”
“I have noticed something.”
“What?”
Deborah seemed to think about it for a moment. “Washington has one of his slaves with him, doesn’t he?”
“William Lee—Lee was his hunting master in Virginia, I guess. He’s a mad horseman, utterly fearless. Washington trusts him completely, more so than some of his officers.”
Deborah nodded. “Some of the common soldiers have their wives with them, especially if they’ve been serving more than a few months.”
“Some of the officers too,” Proctor said.
“The men who have somebody unaffected by the curse seem to despair less and do better than those without, no matter what kind of ghost they carry.”
Proctor shifted, scooting closer to the fire, holding out his hands to warm them. “How does that help us break the curse?”
“I don’t know how to break the curse,” Deborah said, her voice near to cracking. “I try. I spent all day today working on a man whose ghost was barely attached to him, a minister, I think, whose head was already lifted toward heaven.”
“What happened?”
She held out her hands, as if she were trying to shape something between them, then let them fall back to her lap. “Nothing. All my efforts yielded me no more than frustration.”
He rested his hand on her knee a moment in quiet sympathy. She took his fingers in her hand and stood.
“Come,” she said. “I’ll show you what I mean.”
They rose and she led him to the tents. Most of the men were sick with camp fever or similar ills—he could hear one or two turning in their blankets; another suppressed his groans of discomfort. Proctor crossed his arms, resolving to touch nothing. One whiff of the sickly smell of their bowels and bedpans, and he tried not to breathe either. In the darkness, he could not see the ghosts, but he felt their presence as a chillness.
Deborah took a candle from a table at the entrance. She murmured “Let there be light,” and fire leapt from her fingertip to the wick, setting it aflame. Proctor turned his head anxiously to either side at this casual display of witchcraft, worried that someone might have seen. But Deborah had shielded the candle with her body to prevent notice.
She looked up and saw the surprise in his eyes. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I was in a hurry. Over here.”
She took him to one cot apart from the others. As they passed the men, several faces turned hopefully toward her, and one or two smiled. She had a gentle nod, a touch on the leg or arm for each, and Proctor could sense the healing she did even in those brief seconds. He couldn’t believe how strong she had become. It almost made him lightheaded.
At the same time, he could sense the ghosts surging at them from each man’s spot. It was as if they grew stronger while the men grew sicker.
“Here is the one I was telling you about,” she said, indicating a man asleep on a cot. There was a stool at the head of the bed. She gestured for Proctor to take a seat, then fetched herself a second stool and came to sit beside him.
“What ails him?” Proctor whispered.
“That’s just it,” she replied in similar tones. “Nothing as far as I can tell. Not beyond …”
Not beyond the curse.
She held the candle over the bed. In the flickering light, even with his best skill, it was hard for Proctor to see the ghost, in large part because the ghost didn’t wish to be seen. It shifted as fast as the shadows, but from the glimpses Proctor saw it was indeed a minister in a black coat, with his arms folded like a corpse across his chest. His face was lifted toward heaven, and he strained upward as if he might reach it by sheer force of will.
“Watch this,” Deborah whispered. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and touched the ghost’s ankle. Saying a prayer, she gripped the ankle tight and tried to yank the ghost free of the patient. The ghost kicked and struggled to get loose.
The sick man moaned, drawing Proctor’s eye just in time to see the man’s image shift. It looked as if his spirit was attached to the ghost’s. As the ghost tried to escape, it seemed to tug the man’s spirit out of his body.
Deborah released the ghost’s ankle. It relaxed at once, and the sick man stopped moaning. His spirit sank back into his body.
“Do you see how the two spirits are tangled together?” she whispered.
“How did you do that?” Proctor asked, still stunned.
She didn’t hear his question, or chose not to answer it. “I think most of the spirits simply feel trapped or confused. They lash out, creating pain for the men. But this one has a certainty about it—he knows his destination and does not want to be deterred from reaching it. I think it’s the only thing making this soldier sick.”
The tent flap opened, and a pretty young woman in an apron entered. She went over to the side of another patient and encouraged him to drink. Proctor saw right away that the man had almost completely recovered despite the ghost attached to him.
“What do we do?” Proctor asked, with a nod at the patient on the cot between them.
“I was hoping you would have an idea,” Deborah said.
“I’ll think on it,” he said, rising.
She tucked the covers up to the man’s chin. “If we don’t come up with something soon, I’m not sure we can save hi
m.”
Proctor thought all the following day, but he dwelled more on Deborah’s power—she had touched a ghost as if it were flesh—than he did on thinking through solutions. How had she become so powerful, when he could scarcely do any magic at all? And why, strong as she was, did she think he had any answers?
When he met her at the tent the next evening, the sick man was awake. His eyes were white and healthy, even in the light of the candle, but his face was wasted and drawn, as if the life were being pulled right out of him. The ghost hovered over him, barely visible unless Proctor looked for it.
“Hello, Miss Walcott,” the sick man said.
“Hello, friend Livingston,” she answered softly. She sat on the edge of his cot and placed her hand on his. “I brought my brother Proctor to help me pray for you. Proctor, this is David Livingston, from Philadelphia.”
“From Germantown,” Livingston said weakly. “It’s good to meet you, Mister Brown. I’d offer you my hand, but—”
Proctor sat on the opposite side of the cot and closed the man’s hand in both of his. Livingston tried to give him a strong grip, but it was shaky at best, and his palm was clammy. “You’re in the best possible care,” Proctor said.
“Oh, I know that. Your sister is an angel.”
“I thought adding another voice to our prayers couldn’t hurt,” Deborah said. “Can we all hold hands and bow our heads?”
She made eye contact with Proctor, and he understood that she was going to show him what she had done to try to break the curse so far.
They took one another’s hands, forming a small circle. They lowered their heads to pray silently, but while Livingston’s lips moved in recitation of the Lord’s prayer, Deborah went to work with spells. The cold energy that circled through Proctor from Livingston’s hand now sparked and flowed the other way from Deborah.
She made eye contact with him, and he read her lips as she silently recited Mark, chapter 1, verse 25, where Jesus rebuked the spirit possessing a man, saying, Hold thy peace and come out of him.
She said it with force, with authority, and the ghost lurched upward, but as it did so it tugged Livingston’s spirit with it. A spasm racked his body, and his hands jerked out of theirs as he folded his arms back in close to his body.