sharp listen, ’fore we go in for the beasts.”
They trudged in silence. Though Abigail fought to keep her concentration sharp, cold, hunger, daylong fatigue, and bone-deep exhaustion dragged at her thoughts, which kept returning to a gnawing anxiety about where John and the others might be. She found herself a dozen times obsessively calculating how many hours had passed since she’d sent off her notes—good heavens, did any of those notes actually arrive? Had ill befallen Shim, or Jed Paley, or the others in carrying them? Had Orion accomplished Pentyre’s murder after all? Had John and the others all been arrested?
For that matter, had their arrest (if it had taken place) triggered rioting? Was there fighting in Boston? Her mind fretted at the memory of cries and gunfire barely a street away in winter twilight, of running to King Street in the icy night four years ago, to see the bodies lying in the churned-up snow, of the stink of gunfire hanging in the raw air.
Abigail, stop it! she told herself firmly. They’ve just got lost.
A more prosaic and likely reason, and one which just as surely condemned her and her companions to wandering in darkness until the witch-hunters found them. But at least it didn’t involve British cannon opening fire on Boston.
“Bide here.” She heard the rustle of Muldoon’s cloak, and the blanket as he lowered Rebecca to the ground. He took the musket from Abigail’s hand. “The beasts should be hereabouts, t’other side of the road. If I call, Mrs. Adams, you cross the road, follow my voice. If I call, Mrs. Malvern, you know they’re there and they’ve got me.”
“You’re very good at this,” Abigail whispered admiringly.
“Saints, m’am, I spent the whole of me boyhood poachin’ Lord Semphill’s rabbits. Me an’ the other lads, we had it worked to fare-thee-well, how to keep from gettin’ a thrashin’.” With barely a rustle he moved off through the trees. Rebecca’s hand closed over hers, cold as ice, and Abigail groped around them in the darkness until she found what felt like the remains of a deadfall tree. To this she guided her friend, and sat beside her, unbuckling her belt to bring the shuttered lantern between them. She hadn’t dared crack the slide so much as a half inch for light, for most of their flight, but the hot metal was a comfort to fingers nearly frozen.
Above the wind in the trees it was nearly impossible to distinguish smaller sounds.
Then a gun fired like the breaking of Doom, and Muldoon yelled, “Mrs. Malvern, run for it!”
And at half a dozen points around them, dark-lanterns shone out suddenly among the trees.
Thirty-three
Knowing exactly how far the light of her own lantern illuminated the darkness around her—which was not at all—Abigail immediately shoved Rebecca backwards off the log where they sat, snapped open the slide of her lantern, and got to her feet, holding the lantern before her to illuminate her own face and plunge everything around her into still blacker night. At the same time she faced into the woods and shouted, “Rebecca, don’t come any closer!” Rather to her astonishment, five of the dozen or so men coming toward them out of the woods immediately whirled and raced off in that direction, lanterns aloft, shouting, “I see her! I see the witch! Hark how her eyes glow!”
Rebecca, under Muldoon’s dark army cloak, had the good sense to lie perfectly still as Abigail strode away from her to intercept her captors.
“I suppose the Chosen of the Lord is waiting courageously back in the safety of the village?” Abigail demanded briskly. “While you blunder about in the woods to face an armed man? Get your hand off me, sir,” she added, as one of the men moved to seize her arm. “Now that my friend has fled to safety I have no reason to flee from you. You can’t murder every outsider who passes through your village, you know.”
“ ’Tis no crime, to exterminate a witch.” The very tall, very young farmer who faced her seemed to be the leader of this portion of the mob. He had narrow-set eyes, thin mousy hair, and a mouth like an ill-natured dog’s.
“Not according to the Book of Leviticus,” agreed Abigail. “How awkward that the Bible doesn’t give similar instructions for identifying them.”
“By their deeds shall ye know them,” replied Dog-Mouth darkly. “All these days, that the hag’s been lyin’ in the Devil’s sleep, we’ve known. We seen our Reverend growin’ sicker an’ sicker; seen