Abigail looked at Samuel and Hester. Very slowly she caught the necklace that was hidden beneath her dressing gown and cloak. Inch by inch she pulled the pendant up until it was free of the clothing. Slipping it from her neck, she dangled it in front of the candle. The multifaceted cut of the stone captured the golden candlelight and shattered it into a rainbow that fell across the table.
“What is it?” Hester asked.
“I don’t know,” Abigail admitted. “I’ve always worn it, that’s all I know. And it has some power.”
Familiar swatted it toward the light. Swinging wildly, the crystal sent the rainbow hues dancing across the table.
“If Silas Grayson had found that trinket around your neck…” Samuel didn’t finish. He saw no harm in pretty adornments, but to the stern pilgrims of Salem Village, such foolishness was against all of their religious creeds. Abigail was courting destruction on so many fronts he didn’t know where to begin to try to save her.
“Now that you’ve told us your wild story, are you ready to leave?” Hester hadn’t given up on making a run for it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Abigail answered. There was no room for argument in her voice.
“Please, Abigail, consider what will happen. As sure as dawn comes, Silas will be back. And he will arrest you.”
Abigail looked at Samuel. “And you will defend me, correct?”
The impact of her words was like a blow to his chest. “I will try, but I’ve not been able to do much to save the other women, and their charges were so much milder than yours.”
“But you will try?”
The taste of doom was so thick in his throat that Samuel could not answer, only nod.
“I believe I have been sent here for a purpose.” Abigail went to the cat and pulled him into her arms. “Familiar and I are here because we have to stop these trials and the death of innocent people.”
“You will accomplish nothing from a dungeon cell, Abigail.” Hester’s voice was cold. “Remember, I’ve been imprisoned. You are helpless there.”
Abigail looked at them. “It is my destiny.”
Chapter Four
Dawn was almost at hand. The fire had burned into dull red embers, yet Samuel lingered. Hester and Pearl were asleep in the loft bedroom, and Abigail had finally worn herself down. She took the last sip of precious coffee from her cup and replaced it on the table. Her voice was tired. “I know it sounds like I’m lying,” she said finally.
“It’s a strange story.” Samuel also drained his cup and put the thick mug beside hers. It was time for him to go—before they both suffered for it. Besides, he had a lot of sorting out to do. The wild and strange story Abigail had spun throughout the long hours of the night had aroused a host of different emotions in him. Some things he did not understand, but one thing that he was clear about troubled him greatly. He was drawn to Abigail West in a strange and compelling manner. Part of it was physical—just to look at her made him desire to touch her. But there was something else, too, something more elusive yet much deeper. Was it possible she’d actually cast a spell on him? He didn’t believe in witches or witchcraft, but the woman had a powerful effect on him. Enough to make him edgy.
“Do you believe me?” Abigail asked. Once she had begun to comprehend what had happened to her, she’d been eager to pour out the details of her trip from the future. But looking at Samuel’s face, she had to take into account the fact that he was a stranger to her. Spilling her guts to him might have been a miscalculation. One with deadly consequences. As she’d watched the firelight flicker over the strong planes of his face, she’d forgotten that Samuel’s accusations could send her to the hanging tree as quickly as those made by Silas Grayson or the young girls of the village. She felt a terrible constriction near her heart as she watched concern and anxiety play across his face. What if he thought her mad? Or a witch?
“I need some time to think all of this over. It’s hard to grasp. You’re a challenging woman, Abigail.” His gaze held hers briefly, then fell to stare at her hands.
“I don’t know what else to say.” Abigail stroked the black cat who’d fallen asleep in her lap. “I had to tell all of this to someone, Samuel. I’ve had this terrible feeling for the past three days that I was caught up in something much bigger than me.” She tugged the cap off her hair, freeing the unruly curls. “I don’t know how I came to be here, or why, but I know I’m not from here.” She looked around the house. “These are not my things. This isn’t my home.”
Samuel wanted to reach out and touch her hair, but he didn’t. For more than four hours he’d sat at her table and listened to the fantastic and damning words spill from her lips. And now all he could think was that her hair was too beautiful to be true. He was indeed bewitched.
Sighing, he spoke again. “You should get out of here with your friend. Make an escape while the getting’s good.”
As he talked with Abigail, he was finding it easier and easier to fall into the same diction that she used. Even more troubling was the fact that her own stories had brought up matching images in his own mind. If Abigail had the same effect on others in Salem Village, she would definitely hang.
She would hang by her own words and deeds. And the black cat she persisted in defending would hang beside her.
“I can’t leave….”
“I can go into Salem Town at daybreak and find a…clipper.” He fought to keep his language uncluttered with her unusual words. Whether she had captured him in her spell or whether it was simple mimicry, he couldn’t begin to say. But if he started talking and acting like her—he’d hang just as quickly.
“Flight is your only salvation,” he said with determination.
“I’m not leaving.”
Her gaze was direct, level. Nothing at all like the gaze of a proper woman. “You have to leave, Abigail. They’ll hang you as sure as you’re sitting here.”
She leaned forward, her mismatched eyes begging him to listen. “Don’t you see? If I’ve come from the future, as I believe, then I’m here for a purpose.”
Samuel saw the single candle that still burned reflected in her intense eyes. “You think you came back in time over three hundred years to die at the end of a rope?” Before she could answer, Samuel continued. All of the concern and anger he’d bottled up inside demanded release. “You speak, with all sincerity, about a future that sounds like something Satan made in one of the pits of hell. Your eyes shine as you describe it. You fairly beg to be called a witch. You’ve not seen the prisons. The suffering of those accused is not imaginable to you. They stand in cells not big enough to allow them to lie down. They stand! And they starve, with the rats at their feet.” He turned away. The horrors he’d seen in the past three days were almost too much.
Abigail’s hand went to her chest, her fingers finding the pendant beneath the multiple layers of her clothing. His words frightened her. She wasn’t foolish, or a martyr. “What you say only makes me believe more strongly that I’ve been sent here to stop all of this.”
“And how do you intend to stop it?” He stood, then turned back to face her. “Once you’re in that hellhole of a prison, exactly what do you intend to do, provoke the occupants there to riot? Or do you think you can somehow unlock their chains and deliver them to safety?” Shocked at his own words, he sat down.
Abigail’s gaze on him was like a touch, and when he looked up at her he was surprised by the gleam of amusement in her eyes. “What puts that expression in your eyes?” he demanded.
“And all this time I thought you were so cool and in control. It’s nice to see you spit fire.” She leaned forward. “Where were you born, Samuel?”
The innocent question made him pause. He’d known her only a single night, but he understood that Abigail was not a woman who wasted her time with idle conversation. “London.”
“Oh, really. Strange that you don’t have a British accent.” Her smile widened.
“I’ve been in the States since I finished my schooling.
”
Abigail’s grin was wolfish. “Oh, and where exactly might ‘the States’ be?”
Samuel opened his mouth, then shut it. He knew. The United States of America. But he also knew there was no such place. Had she somehow put that phrase in his mind, given him a picture of a vast map cut into different-colored shapes called “states”?
“You’re from the future, aren’t you?” Abigail leaned across the table and took his hand. “I’ve suspected as much for the past hour.” She turned his hand palm up, concentrating on the lines in the dim candlelight.
Part of him wanted to withdraw his hand, to hide it in his pocket—until he realized his pants had no pockets. With that he gave in to the pleasure of her soft fingers tracing the lines of his hand. Pleasure spiced with a sense of intense longing, and a thimbleful of dread. What manner of craft was she practicing now? Was she a mortal woman, to elicit such hungers in him?
“You have the mark of the traveler,” she said, bending closer to study his palm. “Right there.” She pressed into the pad at the base of his index finger. “Your entire life is a journey.” She traced a line down his palm. “Tell me about your sister.”
“I have no sister,” he answered without thinking. But then the memory of a tall, slender girl with dark gray eyes came to him. She was reaching up to touch a flower in the lapel of his suit, a smile on her solemn face as she stood on tiptoe to whisper something in his ear. Something scandalous—and funny. Karen. That was her name.
“Ah, but you do. She lives in the future.” Abigail closed his hand into a fist and yet she still held it, her fingers stroking the skin on the back of his hand and wrist.
“God had better be on your side, Abigail.” Her touch was so potent that it was almost painful. He wanted to pull his hand back, as he would from a fire. But he could not. Just as he could not break the gaze they shared as the candle flickered between them.
“It’ll be light soon.” Abigail lowered his hand to the table, her fingers dancing lightly across it as she released him.
“Please, go with your friend. If it’s the trials you hope to stop, I promise you that I’ll do everything in my power to protect the accused.”
“You could give your life and not save a single one of them.” Abigail put her fingers to her temples as if struck by a sudden, intense pain.
“Abigail, are you injured?” He got up and went to her, putting his hands over hers on her temples. “What ails you?”
“There’s something I have to remember. I can almost catch it, sometimes. Something just there, and it’s very important.” She squeezed her eyes shut more tightly, in concentration. “But I can’t remember.” Her eyes were closed and she was bent forward over her knees. Very slowly she straightened, shaking her head. “It slips away from me whenever I try to catch it.”
The pink gold of a summer morning had begun to climb the windows of Abigail’s house. Samuel slowly rose, reluctant to leave the woman beside him. “My presence here is another danger to you. They’ll be more than glad to add a charge of fornication to one of witchcraft.”
“Then I can wear a bright red F on my dress when they hang me.” Abigail hadn’t meant the words to sound so bitter or so fatalistic. But she saw the results of her retort in Samuel’s gray eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said, rising, also. “You’re right. For your own safety, you should leave.”
Nodding, Samuel made his way to the door. With a quick movement he lifted the wooden bar and opened it wide. “Silas will be back. If not today, then tomorrow. What will you do?”
“I don’t know.” She felt once again the tiny bud of knowledge that she needed to capture. Once again, it eluded her. “I have to think. Before he gets here. I have to have a plan.”
“You can count on me to help in any way that I can.”
She stood motionless. “Can I?” She’d revealed so much that she hoped she could.
He nodded.
“Good. Meet me tonight, down by the stream. I want to know what happens at Goodwife Nurse’s trial today. I doubt I’d be welcome in the meetinghouse, and I don’t think it’s wise for you to come here again.”
“What about Hester and Pearl?”
“I hope to see them on a ship tomorrow. The West Indies may be just the place for them. There are people here, in this village, who would accuse Hester for no reason.”
He started to urge her to go, also, but he knew she wouldn’t leave. Was she a witch? She’d captured him with her stories and visions. Yet he could detect no single trace of malice or evil in her. “Tonight at nine o’clock.” He ducked his head, stepped through the door and strode across the yard to the gray sand of the path that had begun to glow faintly pink in the dawn.
ABIGAIL SIGNED her name to the document with a flourish, then scattered sand across the signature.
“I believe you act in haste.” Hester Prynne held both of her hands behind her back.
“If you aren’t going to the islands, the least you can do is take this to the governor of Massachusetts. The man has a right to know that citizens under his charge are being brutalized and murdered.”
Hester took the paper and rolled it into a tight scroll without reading it. “The governor will not put much credence in a document delivered by a woman who wears the scarlet A on her chest.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, Hester, wear a cloak.”
“Abby! The letter is my punishment.”
“And what letter does Dimmsdale wear? C for coward?” Abigail grabbed hold of her temper. “Sorry. It’s just that you’ve served your sentence. If you didn’t wear the A, people would forget.”
“Which is the point, I believe.” Hester’s mouth twisted into a wry line. “Perhaps the governor will appreciate a hint of scandal in his life. In this time that you come from, do men in authority abide a woman interfering in the business of justice or government?”
Abigail turned to her. “Fiddle dee dee, Hester.” She smiled at her own imitation of Scarlett O’Hara. “You’re a resourceful woman. I’m sure you can get the message to him whether he ‘abides’ the idea or not.” Abigail’s thoughts had already moved on. “Now, I have to determine what to do in the meantime.”
“The sound of that is ominous.” Hester’s brow furrowed. “Where is my Pearl?”
“She went to the stream.”
Hester nodded. She’d given up her plans to go to the West Indies. Her friend’s life was in jeopardy—even if Abigail was too hardheaded to believe it. Instead she’d agreed to try to deliver a message to the governor of Massachusetts Colony. A desperate letter urging the governor to intercede in the judicial proceedings that were passing as trials in Salem Village. Hester didn’t believe it would do any good, but it was part of Abigail’s new personality that women had a right to have a voice in how things were run. That kind of talk was blasphemy, if not sorcery.
“Promise me that you’ll be careful, Hester. You’ve had enough sorrow in your life. You and little Pearl.”
As if by magic Pearl’s footsteps could be heard running along the hard-packed path to the front door. Three seconds later the door burst open and Pearl stood, ribs heaving.
“Abigail, hurry!”
For only a second Abigail froze. “What is it?”
“The cat.” Pearl swallowed and gasped for air. “He saved my life! But she saw him, and now she’s gone to get that horrible old man who was here last night.”
While Hester put her hands on Pearl’s shoulders to calm her, Abigail knelt beside her. “What happened?”
“I was sitting by the stream, and this stick came floating by. Or at least, I thought it was a stick. When I reached for it, it struck at me.”
“A snake!” Hester’s hands tightened.
“It was,” Pearl agreed. “But Familiar jumped into the shallow water and slapped the snake away from me.”
“And then?” Abigail prompted.
“I saw the girl hiding in the bushes, watching. She said that the cat was a playmate of the d
evil’s, and that I was an evil child and that she was going to get that mean man and have us all taken to the dungeon.” Pearl started to cry. “She said we’d hang as witches, all of us.”
Abigail wiped the tears away. “Where is the cat?” she asked gently.
“He was hissing at her.” Pearl struggled to regain her composure. “He was so brave. He saved me, and that girl wants to have him killed.”
Abigail looked up into Hester’s eyes. “There’s no time to waste. You must take Pearl and get out of here. And the cat.”
Hester pulled her child into her arms and held her tightly. After a few seconds she released her, pushing her toward the ladder to the loft. “Get our things. And be quick. Abigail is right, we have to get out of here.”
Abigail went to the kitchen area and wrapped a hunk of cheese, bread and salted meat in a cloth, then put it all in a coarse cloth sack. “It isn’t much, but it will do until you can find other provisions.” She went to a small jar and poured half of the coins into her palm, then gave them to Hester.
“I can’t take your savings.”
“For the cat,” Abigail said. “Take care of him for me.”
Hester nodded, then hurried to tie Pearl’s cape and bonnet. Her fingers shook but she finished the task. Standing, she grabbed Abigail’s hands. “How can we leave you here in this godforsaken place?”
Abigail’s smile was tinged with determination. “You aren’t leaving me. I’ve chosen to stay. And as soon as I come up with a plan, you’ll see that I made the right choice.” Even as she spoke she tried to quell her own self-doubts. Could she make a difference to the villagers accused of witchcraft? Or would she die beside them? Her fingers strayed to the pendant that hung between her breasts. She had to believe—in herself and in her mission.
She turned to the door and went in search of the cat. Familiar was a fine companion, and she would miss him. For his own safety, he had to go with Hester and Pearl. Her friends would take good care of him, of that she had no doubt. But after ten minutes of frantic search, she had to give up the idea of sending the feline to safety.
Bewitching Familiar Page 5
