Hazlitt stopped before her. “Is she safe?” His green eyes—his mother’s eyes—were sane. Sane, and very tired.
“She’s in the woods. We’ll—”
“May I?” Orion bent down, took the pistol from Muldoon’s hand—it was John’s, Abigail noted—turned around, and shot Bargest between the eyes. “Don’t fear,” he said, handing the weapon back to the startled Muldoon. “I won’t”—he stopped, took a deep breath—“I didn’t kill Pentyre,” he said. “I couldn’t get near him. I—there were—Sons of Liberty—on Castle Island. Everywhere I looked, among the crowd. Someone must have—They were watching for me—”
Softly, Abigail said, “They know.”
He closed his eyes. The breath went out of him in a sigh. “Rebecca, too?”
“Yes.”
“Everything?” His eyes opened, went to Muldoon, who was busily reloading the gun.
“Everything about you.” Her mind screamed, How could you not have known? and along with Perdita Pentyre’s slashed-up body she seemed to see the black cat Pirate, cleaning himself with the stump of his cut-off paw. To read again the horrible verses about slitting the throat of a red-haired devil so that she would not tempt him again, as he was tempted by the dark-skinned succubus who haunted his dreams.
How could I have sat at Rebecca’s table with this man? Shoulder to shoulder with him, not just one night but dozens? How could I have talked politics with him, commiserated with him about servant-girls, made dinners for him—for him and for the mother he murdered not forty-eight hours ago? How could I not have seen and smelled and felt all that horror inside him?
She knew she should feel something—fear? Rage? Disgust? Hatred? But all she felt was strange, separated from herself, as if she were coming down with fever. For a moment she thought that she stood on the threshold of Hell, speaking to someone just within its doors.
Orion Hazlitt drew breath again, and let it out. “Would that anyone,” he whispered, “knew everything about me.” He turned away.
A part of her wanted only for him to leave. Muldoon, with the blood soaking into his jacket and his eyebrows 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 time,” he stammered, “that God never does things without a reason, and therefore, it was God’s will, that I am what I am. That I am seized with—That there are times when it is as if my soul goes into another world, where nothing looks the same, and God’s commands are different. In that world, I hear those commands shouting at me out of my heart. I did fight it,” he added, as another trooper brought up horses for them both. “The second time, when I woke up in the woods, and came back to the village and everyone talking about the Banister girl’s death, and I knew it wasn’t a dream . . .”
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 . . .”