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
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 middle-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.”
“
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