“So you’ve decided to just let go of the illusion of control?” Agatha nodded. “Good for you.”
“Not quite,” I said hastily. “But Matthew and I agreed long ago that we weren’t going to hide who we were from the children. I don’t want them learning what magic is from television and the movies.”
“Goddess forbid.” Sarah shuddered. “All those wands.”
“I’m more concerned about the fact that magic is so often portrayed as a shortcut around something tedious, time-consuming, or both.” I’d grown up on reruns of Bewitched, and though my professorial mother did sometimes say a spell to fold the laundry while she was reviewing her lecture notes, these were by no means daily occurrences.
“So long as we establish clear rules around doing magic, I think they’ll be fine,” I continued, taking a sip of wine and picking at the platter of greens that was sitting in the center of the table.
“The fewer rules the better,” Marcus said. He was staring into the candle flames and checking his phone every five minutes for news from Paris. “My childhood was planted so thick with rules I never took a step without running into one. There were rules about going to church and swearing. Rules about minding my father, and my elders, and my social betters. Rules about how to eat, and how to talk, and how to greet people in the street, and how to treat women like fine china, and how to take care of animals. Rules for planting, and rules for harvesting, and rules for storing food so you didn’t starve in the winter.
“Rules may teach you to be blindly obedient, but they’re no real protection against the world,” Marcus continued. “Because one day you will knock so hard against a rule you’ll break it—and you’ll have nothing standing between yourself and disaster then. I found that out when I ran away from Hadley to join the first fighting in Boston in 1775.”
“You were at Lexington and Concord?” I knew that Marcus was a patriot because of his copy of Common Sense. He might have answered the call to arms when the first shots of the war were fired.
“No. In April, I was still obeying my father’s rules. He had forbidden me to go to war,” Marcus said. “I ran away in June.”
Matthew sent a lump of misshapen metal spinning across the table. It was dark, almost singed in places. Marcus caught it.
“A musket ball—an old one.” Marcus looked up with a quizzical expression. “Where did you get this?”
“In the library, among Philippe’s books and papers. I was looking for something else, but I found a letter from Gallowglass.” Matthew reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded packet of paper. The handwriting on the outside was scrawling and went up and down like the waves.
We didn’t often talk about the big Gael who had disappeared more than a year ago. I missed his easy charm and wicked sense of humor, but understood why watching Matthew and me raise our children and settle into our life as a family might be difficult. Gallowglass had known his feelings for me were unrequited, but until Matthew and I had returned to the present where we belonged, he had remained devoted to the job Philippe had given him, namely to ensure my safety.
“I didn’t know Gallowglass was in New England when I was a boy,” Marcus said.
“He was working for Philippe.” Matthew passed him the letter. Marcus read it aloud.
“‘Grandsire,’” Marcus began, “‘I was at the Old South Meeting House this morning when Dr. Warren spoke on the fifth anniversary of the late massacre in Boston. The crowds were very large, and the doctor draped himself in a white toga, following the Roman style. The Sons of Liberty greeted this spectacle with cheers.’”
Marcus looked up from the page, a smile on his face. “I remember people in Northampton talking about Dr. Warren’s speech. Then, we still thought the massacre had marked the low point in our troubles with the king, and that we would be able to mend our differences. We had no way of knowing that a permanent break with England was still to come.”
Here, at last, was some history I could use to properly frame Marcus’s account of his life.
“May I?” I held out my hand, eager to see the letter for myself.
Reluctantly, Marcus parted with it.
“‘The numerous links of small and great events, which form the chain on which the fate of kings and nations is suspended,’” I said, reading one of the lines from the letter. It reminded me of what Matthew had said about a vampire’s memory, and how it was often ordinary occurrences that were preserved there. I thought back to my afternoon playing with the twins, and wondered again whether today I had planted some future remembrance for them.
“Whoever would have imagined that little more than a month after Gallowglass wrote this letter, a shot fired on a bridge in a small town outside Boston would become Emerson’s ‘shot heard around the world,’” Marcus mused. “The day we decided that King George had mistreated us long enough started out just like any other April day. I was coming home from Northampton. It had been a warm spring, and the ground was soft. On that day, though, the winds from the east blew cold.”
Marcus’s eyes were unfocused, his tone almost dreamy as he remembered that long-ago time.
“And with them came a rider.”
Les Revenants, Letters and Papers of the Americas
No. 1
Gallowglass to Philippe de Clermont
Cambridge, Massachusetts
6 March 1775
Grandsire:
I was at the Old South Meeting House this morning when Dr. Warren spoke on the fifth anniversary of the late massacre in Boston. The crowds were very large, and the doctor draped himself in a white toga, following the Roman style. The Sons of Liberty greeted this spectacle with cheers.
Dr. Warren stirred the assembly with mention of his bleeding country and calls to stand up to a tyrant’s power. To avoid war, Warren said, the British army must withdraw from Boston.
It will take only a spark to set rebellion alight. “Short-sighted mortals see not the numerous links of small and great events, which form the chain on which the fate of kings and nations is suspended,” Dr. Warren said. I wrote it down in the moment, for it struck me as wise.
I have placed this letter in the hands of Davy Hancock, who will see it safe delivered by the swiftest route. I have returned to Cambridge on your other business. I await your wishes with respect to the Sons of Liberty, but predict that your response will not arrive in time for me to alter what now seems inevitable: The oak and the ivy will not grow stronger together, but will be torn asunder.
Written in haste from the town of Cambridge by your dutiful servant,
Eric
Postscript: I enclose a curious item that was given to me as a memento by one of the Sons of Liberty. He said it was the remains of a musket ball fired by the British into a house on King Street when the citizens were attacked in 1770. There were many tales of that dreadful day shared by those in attendance at Dr. Warren’s oration, which further inflamed the passions of those who desire liberty.
9
Crown
APRIL–JUNE 1775
Marcus juggled the pail of fish between his hands and pushed open the door to Thomas Buckland’s Northampton surgery. Buckland was one of the few medical men west of Worcester, and though he was neither the most prosperous nor the best educated, he was by far the safest choice if you wanted to survive a visit to the doctor. The metal bell that hung over the door tinkled brightly, announcing Marcus’s arrival.
The surgeon’s wife was working in the front room, where Buckland’s equipment—forceps, teeth-pullers, and cauterization irons—lay in a gleaming row on a clean towel. Pots of herbs, medicines, and salves were displayed on the shelves. The surgery’s windows overlooked Northampton’s main street so that interested passersby could witness the pain and suffering going on inside as Buckland set bones, peered into mouths and ears, drew teeth, and examined aching limbs.