by C. C. Finlay
Alexandra nearly wept as she rowed. The private at the front of the boat cried openly as he pulled on his oar.
The loose flag whipped against Proctor’s face, and he shoved it angrily aside. He had to do something to help Deborah’s spell. He needed a focus—
He needed the flag. Deborah had poured magic into it while Betsy sewed, creating a focus to sustain men’s spirits. Thirteen stripes and thirteen stars, meant to represent all the states. Just as the men and woman in the boat came from every part of the country.
The flag snapped against his face again. This time, Proctor grabbed a fistful of the fabric and jammed it down into the spot where the spectral shackles wrapped around Washington’s ankles.
“Let my people go.”
He felt power surge through him as he had never felt before, as if he were drawing not just on his own source but also, through the flag, on Deborah and Magdalena and all the other witches of the circle. It ran through him like fire set to a trail of oil leading to a gunpowder keg, and it hit the shackle and the shackle shattered.
The first ghost turned and looked at Proctor, the eyes in his ruined face a mixture of relief and dismay. Still he held on to Washington’s shoulders, and the ghosts behind clung to him. They would not go so easily.
The wind swirled like mad, spinning the loosely rolled flag out of ice-numbed Monroe’s hands. It whipped out of the young lieutenant’s grasp, snapping between the ghosts and Washington. Only Proctor still held on, one end knotted in his fist.
He raised his fist to the face of Washington’s first ghost, the Virginia gentleman with his jaw shot away. He looked at the bully blacksmith’s ghost looming over his shoulder, at the Connecticut minuteman still trying to stuff his organs back into his torso. The flag whipped in the wind, beating against all of them. Proctor stared down the long line of ghosts and thought about the friends he’d lost in the war, the men he’d seen die, Amos Lathrop and Joseph Warren and David Livingston. He thought of all the men still fighting—from men like Cuff and Alex’s brothers to officers like Tench Tilghman and Paul Revere.
“Take my talent,” Alex whispered, in tears. “Do it.”
The flag threatened to rip out of his hand. This was his only chance. He opened himself to Alex’s talent and let her power flow through him. But it wasn’t only her power. He was connected to Deborah and Magdalena, Esther and Sukey, Abby and Lydia and all their power. He was connected, through the flag, to Betsy Ross and every other man and woman who still believed in the cause of liberty. He was connected, by their presence, to the men in the boat, and to General Washington. And through Washington, he was connected to every man still in the Continental army, every man who kept the faith and kept on fighting despite the defeats, the deprivations, the terrible odds.
All that power flowed into Proctor Brown and through him. He held his fist up to the ghost at Washington’s back, the speechless Virginian mutilated by the war.
And he said, “Let my people go.”
His words were snatched away by the howl of the wind, but it was a howl of despair. All around them, ghosts thrashed in the fog, ripped from their human hosts. Their screeches filled the night. But Washington’s ghosts still hung on. The flag flapped one way, then the other in Proctor’s fist, wrapping around the ghosts. Washington turned his head as if he felt something. The voiceless Virginian with the ruined face, pale as the moonlight, brittle as ice, stared down at Proctor as though he wanted to speak. Proctor clutched the flag with both hands, gritting his teeth as he struggled to hold tight.
The wind gusted, tearing the banner out of his fists. He grabbed for it and missed.
The flag flew away into the dark. But it had twisted around Washington’s ghosts and carried them away. The Virginian’s spirit reached out to Proctor with an open hand before he disappeared. The other ghosts in the boat let go and flew up into the icy fog, and then all the spirits abandoned the fog at once and followed Washington’s ghosts toward a bright light that hung like a haze-covered moon above the western shore.
Proctor caught his breath.
The Jersey farmer with the bandages lifted his head. He felt the difference instantly. Alex stared at Proctor, her eyes dry and full of wonder.
The wind swirled again but this time it lifted the fog, revealing the other boats. Men all across the river saw Washington standing, and they shouted and pointed at him. Henry Knox’s great voice boomed out instructions across the water, indistinct like the roll of thunder. Up and down the river, men bent to their oars with new vigor. The makeshift armada, frozen in place on the icy river, surged forward as one toward the far shore.
Proctor fell back to his seat, his hands in the ice water. He didn’t notice the cold. His heart was pounding, and he felt light-headed and exhausted and full of joy. He’d done it. With Deborah and the other witches and Alex, he’d broken the curse.
Victory or death. They might have a chance at the former after all.
“Sir,” Monroe said apologetically to Washington, gazing toward the lost flag. “I—”
“Never you mind, Lieutenant,” Washington said. “We’ll requisition another from Missus Ross as soon as we have the opportunity. There’s our shore.”
Alex laughed aloud in relief. The Marblehead captain at the helm began calling out the stroke, and the rowers bent into their oars, shoving ice aside each time they pulled. The dark line resolved into a bank, where the men who had already landed had fires waiting.
“You did it,” Alex whispered to Proctor. “I saw you, you did it.”
“We did it,” Proctor said. It was all of them—Deborah, Magdalena, the others. It was Betsy Ross and Thomas Paine. It was all the men in the boat, all the men in all the boats who defied the despair of the curse and kept on fighting. It was Washington at their head. “We all did it.”
The boat landed and they disembarked. He and Alex ran up the shore to the nearest fire, which was fed with wood stolen from the fences that lined the roads in this part of the country instead of stone. The air was so bitter that the side facing the fire would get warm while the other side froze. Men turned around and around, like meat on a spit, trying to dry their wet clothes and keep from freezing. Proctor copied their motion.
The rest of the horses and artillery still had to be brought over before they could march. But despite the cold and the delays, Proctor felt a sense of joy for the men around them. It was as if the entire army had set down a heavy burden. Men were laughing while they stomped their soaked feet to stave off frostbite. Even if they didn’t understand why, they could feel that the curse had lifted.
“So we’ve won, right?” Alex said. “We broke the curse.”
“We broke the curse,” Proctor said, glancing around to make sure no one had overheard her. “But we haven’t won.”
“Deborah is fine,” Alex said. “We broke the curse.”
Proctor hoped Deborah was fine. He wanted to believe that she and the others were fine. But he was thinking about Zoe and the boy, William.
“Bootzamon and Nance are still out there somewhere,” he said. “Cecily escaped and who knows where she is. The German is in Trenton, surrounded by Hessians. If we don’t defeat them—if we don’t defeat him—he’ll just do it all over again.”
And he’d use the blood of the children to do it.
The wind picked up, raging like a drunk. It spit needles of ice at them. Alex’s teeth chattered. She turned to the fire and rubbed her hands together while Proctor stared into the dark toward Trenton, miles away.
Proctor and Alex and the other wet-footed soldiers fresh off the boats tried to warm themselves, while all around them the army moved with purpose. Adam Stephen’s Virginia brigade fanned out into the woods, setting up sentry points around the landing. Other units formed a line of march. The artillery was landed and moved into positions where it could be used to provide support to the infantry. It was hours past midnight already, but men moved with energy and purpose they had not shown in months.
Through t
he dark and the swirling snow, Proctor recognized the familiar silhouette of Washington’s slave, William Lee, as he led horses to the general. He recognized one of the horses as well.
“Excuse me,” he said to Alex. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’m coming with you,” she said, picking up her rifle and falling in behind. He was in no mood to argue. He pulled his hat down over his face and folded his arms tight to his chest against the cold.
“—they never left my sight,” Lee told Washington as Proctor approached. Lieutenant Monroe and the other junior officers from the boat still surrounded Washington. “I liked the look of this one and brought it along,” Lee added.
“A bit small, but I like the cut of him,” Washington said. More than any other man, he’d carried the burden of the curse without revealing it. Proctor could see the difference in him now, a difference that he suspected had as much to do with seizing the initiative of battle as it did with letting go of the chain he’d carried. There was delight in Washington’s eyes as he considered the horse. “If he had another hand or two, I’d want to try him myself.”
“This one, I wager she’d carry you fine,” Lee said.
“That’s my horse,” Proctor interrupted as he pushed his way between the horses. He rubbed Singer on the withers and checked his gear. Singer snorted, blowing a cloud of frosted air out her nose, and shook the sleet off her back. “I didn’t realize she was going to be brought over.”
“I wasn’t leaving this fine an animal on the far shore,” Lee said. “Not with what’s at stake tonight.”
“Where’d you get her?” Washington asked Brown before anyone questioned Lee’s forwardness.
“From a music teacher in Massachusetts, name of Morgan,” Proctor said. “He’s got a wild-air dam that breeds well, and is trying different stallions with her. This one’s not quite the horse he’s looking for yet, but she does fine for me.”
“He’s got a better eye for horses than any music teacher I’ve known,” Washington said, meeting Proctor eye-to-eye. “We can find a use for this pony tonight.”
Proctor knew that Washington was asking to use the animal, and that most men in the army wouldn’t refuse their general. But he needed to reach the German, ahead of the fighting if he could, to rescue Zoe and the orphan and put a stop to the Covenant’s plan. And the fact was, the army still respected a man’s individual will and his individual rights. “I’m not willing to give her up.”
The junior officers behind Washington bristled. But the general adapted instantly, as he had a way of doing.
“Then we can find a use for you.”
“Anything you need of me, I’m willing to do,” Proctor said. The closer to the front, the better, he might have added, but he didn’t want to seem too pushy.
“You’re from the North, and I daresay you’ve seen a blizzard or two before. Can you handle yourself in the snow and ice, and ride quickly if you need to?”
“I have, and I can, and she can too.”
Washington nodded toward the young Monroe for a moment. “I’m sending the Third Virginia out as scouts. Go with the lieutenant here. If you encounter the enemy, or any surprises at all not of our making, you carry the news back as fast as that pony can carry you.”
“Yes, sir,” Proctor said. Washington had given him a direct order, and he responded out of reflex, forgetting his Quaker guise.
Washington laughed. “You see,” he said. “We’ll get a musket in your hands before you know it.”
The junior officers laughed then too. They all felt the relief of the curse lifted off them. Proctor hoped it didn’t make them too foolhardy or blind to danger.
Lee handed him Singer’s bridle, giving the animal one last pat of appreciation, then turned his attention to preparing Washington’s horse, the large sorrel he liked to ride when he expected there to be shooting. Proctor led the horse away, following Monroe, who glanced once, twice, at Alex without saying a word. It was clear that Monroe didn’t think he needed Proctor assigned to their company, and that he was even more skeptical of the tagalong who appeared younger than himself.
“He’s with me,” Proctor said. He might ruin his own counterfeit as a Quaker, but he wouldn’t wreck Alex’s disguise. “I promised his brothers I’d look after him.”
“I’m the one with the gun,” Alex said. “We’ll see who looks after who.”
Monroe let the matter go. “We’ll be in Captain Washington’s company.”
“William Washington?” asked Proctor. The general’s cousin had been wounded during the battle at Harlem Heights. “Has he returned to duty?”
“You couldn’t keep him out of this fight,” Monroe said. “We’ll have about forty men, and we’re to move ahead of the main company, securing the road and making sure no travelers go into or out of Trenton.” He glanced at Proctor and Alex one more time. “If anything goes wrong and the Hessians discover us, we’ll be on the sharp edge.”
Alex shielded her face against the raging wind. “It’s hard to imagine anyone leaving their quarters in weather like this.”
“Hopefully, the Hessians are thinking the same thing,” Proctor said.
At that point, Monroe seemed to accept that he could not discourage them. “Let’s go report.”
William Washington was a large man, though not so tall as his cousin, and inclined to fat despite the hardship of the campaign and the scarcity of supplies. He had a round face, and the cold make his cheeks more red than the last time Proctor had seen him. Monroe gave him General Washington’s orders. Captain Washington accepted Proctor and Alex as two more volunteers, much like the Jersey farmers who were going to lead the way across miles of frozen country.
They were the first group to set out. Proctor’s intention to ride Singer quickly faded. The weather, bad enough for the crossing, intensified as though a malevolent will drove it like a pack of dogs against them. They marched uphill into a fierce gale, which hounded them through the bare trunks of the thick woods. Noticing Alex sheltering behind Singer as they walked, Proctor dismounted and used the horse as a moving windbreak.
It proved a wise decision. The trail was steep, and the path icy and uneven, so that they slipped despite going slowly. The storm came at them over the heights like a barrage from battlements, intended to drive back an enemy’s attack. The snow, which had been falling steadily, turning to stinging sleet again and then, for a few agonizing minutes when they had no place to shelter, into hail that hit them like icy rounds of buckshot.
But the storm could not sustain that fury. Once they crested the hill and turned south, the ice and hail abated. It started to snow again, big, wet flakes like scrapings off a block of ice. In a short while those flakes turned into fat drops. Rain fell, as cold as ice, turning the road to a morass of mud so that they had to make their way single file along the edges. A second group of forty men, many of them local militia, followed behind and found the going no easier.
They came to a crossroads at a little hamlet, where Captain Washington met briefly with the commander of the second group. The other unit took the lower road, toward the river, while Washington led their group eastward. “It’s up to us to cut off the road to Princeton before they send for or receive reinforcements,” Monroe explained.
The British had a large garrison at Princeton. If they came down at the right moment, the Americans would be crushed between the pincers. “Are forty men enough to do that?” Proctor asked.
“They’ll have to be,” he said.
As they continued the march, Alex approached Proctor, lifting her musket just enough to draw his eye. “It’s too wet to fire,” she said under her breath.
Proctor looked around. The other men’s weapons could not be in better condition.
Even if the army failed in its attack on the Hessian units, he dare not fail in his own, private mission. But he would have to get closer to the city before he tried to get inside.
Despite the weather, the roads were busy. The first man they caught w
as a farm boy about Proctor’s age, sneaking home shamefully after falling asleep at the home of some girl he was courting. The second was a woodcutter old enough to be the first one’s grandfather; he said he was out trying to pick up the windblown branches before some other fellow got them. The third was a haggard old woman in clothes little better than rags. She said she was a midwife, going to attend a birth, but she stank of witchcraft to Proctor. When she was taken prisoner with the others and forced to join their party, she grew belligerent, hurling epithets and threats of doom at the soldiers, reminding Proctor of Cecily or the widow Nance.
Proctor reached for the knife he carried under his jacket. Alex’s hand, cold even through her gloves, fell on his.
“Careful,” she said. “Sometimes a crone is just a crone.”
It was his fear for Deborah taking hold. He had no idea where she was or what she was doing, whether she was safe or not. “The German is going to attack us again, I can feel it,” he said.
“But she’s not,” Alex said.
After a moment’s pause, he withdrew his hand and thrust it into his pocket again for warmth. As they continued walking, he looked east. Dawn was starting to show on the horizon, like a redheaded child rising from the dark blankets of his bed. Any minute could bring an alarm.
Ahead of them, dogs started barking angrily. Dogs had barked at them from a distance all night, but it had been one or two, and their voices curious. This sounded like a hunter’s kennel loosed on a fox. A large house sat beside the road just ahead of them. A lantern lit the window, and a door banged open.
“For God’s sake,” yelled the man. “Stay off the road, damn you! If you won’t go back to Hesse, at least go back to Trenton and give me a single night’s decent sleep.”
Through these and other words, it became clear that the man thought they were either a British or Hessian force, both of which had frequently been on patrol of late. This was the crossroads they’d been aiming for, the road connecting Trenton to Princeton. When Washington finally conveyed their true nature to him, the man immediately ran to silence his dogs. He grabbed a coat before he rejoined them, maybe taking it for granted they would hold him prisoner.