“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.”
“Ugh indeed.”
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 chill, exertion, and clothing damp from the wet of the woods. She realized she was very lucky to be alive at all. Rebecca, slumped behind the King’s bloody-back savage, was shivering, too. The Indian reached out a hand to her, but Abigail, mindful of the soldiers watching them, kept her grip on the reins.
In a quiet voice she asked, “I take it you didn’t get my message until the town gates were shut for the night. Was the storm too bad to get a boat across the bay?”
“Ugh.” He looked, first at Rebecca, his eyes filled with pity, then at Orion.
“The Reverend Bargest is dead,” said Abigail. “Hazlitt shot him—goodness knows what his followers are going to do.” She coughed, fighting to still it, then gave the Indian a smile. “It is very good to see you, dearest friend.”
He smiled back, and saluted her with his tomahawk. “Ugh.”
The Indian who looked like Paul Revere slipped the account book into his own saddlebag, and signed to his men. Two of them took the reins of Orion’s horse. Orion turned in the saddle, and sought Rebecca’s eyes, but did not speak. With him among them, the whole tribe disappeared into the night.
Thirty-four
Presumably this same tribe of Indians, five nights later, boarded the three tea ships at Griffin’s Wharf—the Beaver having docked, cargo intact, the day before—and dumped some $90,000 worth of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor while six thousand armed countrymen stood around the docks. There was no attempt on Colonel Leslie’s part to interfere.
Abigail herself only heard the men go by in the street, from the bed where she lay in the weak aftermath of fever. Though her window was closed and shuttered by that time, still the tramp of their feet came to her, quiet and well-disciplined, though some of them sang. Not a mob, she thought. An army.
“And not so much as a belaying-pin on any of those three ships was stolen or damaged,” Rebecca Malvern reported the next morning, when she came after breakfast with fresh-baked scones and a hot ginger tisane. “The Indians even swept the decks clean afterwards.”
“How very tidy of them.” Abigail—dressed for the first time since being put to bed with a feverish cold—tugged her several shawls closer about her shoulders, and sipped the tisane. “Sam does nice work.”
“It makes me wish I could write a poem about it.” Rebecca smiled, and drew over to herself the papers that Thaxter had left on the big kitchen table for them: notes copied from the Essex County court records, which showed just how much of the Gilead congregation’s lands actually belonged to the Sellars family, and through them, to Richard Pentyre.
Abigail looked across at her, and raised an inquiring brow. After being sick herself for two days, nursed by Gomer Faulk in the tiny chamber from which Tommy and Charley had been temporarily evicted, Rebecca had been on her feet again and helping Gomer and Pattie nurse Abigail—thus Abigail had witnessed the meeting between her friend and Charles Malvern.
It had been awkward—no self-respecting novelist would have produced the fumbling dialog between the elderly merchant and his estranged and rescued wife—but, Abigail thought, not painful. The afternoon following—which was Wednesday—Malvern had called again, and Wednesday evening, Scipio had arrived with a light gig, to take Rebecca home.
Rebecca continued, “Perhaps I will write a poem, at that. I’ll keep it in my desk drawer, until—until we know how any of this will turn out.” She smoothed the folds of the dark wool dress she wore, a dress that bore the signs of neat refitting and was laced as close as it would draw around her wasted body. Framed in the neat dark wig she wore, her strong-boned, triangular face had a waifish look.
Still, she’d been enough herself to smile and laugh when Johnny and Nabby had greeted her back with embraces, and demanded help with their sums, at which they were working at the other end of the table: “Will you be teaching us again?” Nabby had wanted to know. “I’ve told Gomer she can come to your school, too.” And Rebecca had replied, “I would love to have you again—and you, too, Mistress Faulk—but it may not answer, now that I’m to be Mr. Malvern’s wife again.”
Now Abigail asked, “And what does Mr. Malvern say to last night’s events?”
“Everything that he always did.” Rebecca’s smile turned a little wry. “I knew his promise not to speak of politics wouldn’t hold—I think he’d go off in an apoplexy if he tried to keep it. But at least so far he does remember, that we have ‘agreed to disagree.’ Having Tamar gone helps,” she added. “She went on a great deal about prisons and convents, when her father broke it to her she was being sent to her aunt’s. But I think the prospect of living in New York cheered her, before she even got on the boat. I still keep to my own room, and Mr. Malvern to his.” She turned on her wrist the little bracelet of pearls, that Abigail did not remember among her things before. “And we will see, how it all answers, in time.”