“When I found it, I couldn’t find you. I went to tell Sergeant Fitch,” Jonathan explained. “But I changed my mind.”
Duncan pulled the boy away to the sunlight at the edge of the garden. “Why?”
“I saw Mr. Frasier lead the sergeant into the kitchen and I followed. I was in the entry and they had not seen me when I heard Mr. Frasier tell Sergeant Fitch that he would keep Cameron away while he went below, into father’s cellar. No one is to go below. Father would have them both lashed if he knew. Mr. Frasier was ordered out of the house yesterday, removed from his house duties, for going onto the second floor where none of the Company is allowed. I should tell Father. But-” Jonathan bit his lip for a moment. “Sergeant Fitch carved me a toy horse. I like the way he laughs. He taught me the songs of some birds.” The boy searched Duncan’s face. When Duncan offered no reply, he ran away, not to the house, but to the white-staked rectangle beyond the barn, where Reverend Arnold was pacing off his church.
Duncan lingered at the cross, uneasily circling it, crouching by it again, placing his own hand over one of the prints as if to assure himself that its source was human. Finally he stepped around the front of the house, searching the nearby trees and the rough-scratched, struggling flowerbeds at its foundation, and found what he had expected. He leaned against a tree, studying the town, then with grim determination moved into the shadows along the edge of the fields until he reached the thicket that interrupted the fields. A knot formed in his belly as he gazed into it, then he pushed through the mountain laurel toward the center, where young oaks and chestnuts grew over a field of boulders. He advanced warily, starting at the screech of a squirrel, tripping over a log on the ground. As he heaved himself up he saw that it was not a log but a hand-hewn timber, a charred and rotting timber. He spotted another timber, and one resting on another, then, his breath catching, he discovered why Ramsey had not cleared this patch of forest.
The boulders were rough-hewn tombstones, a dozen of them, for eight men and women and four children, all dead the same year, 1746. Duncan rested his hand on the largest of the stones, onto which a flying cherub had been carved.
1740–1746, he read under the angel, then his heart lurched and he sank to his knees. The name carved on the stone was Sarah Ramsey.
He did not know how long he wrestled with the despair that seized him. He watched his fingers moving across the stone as if of their own accord, trembling, peeling away the lichen growing in the carving. He scrubbed at the stone with his fingertips, then slumped against it, head in his hands, wondering at his pain. Was it just the weight of the terrible foreboding bearing down on him, he wondered, or was it also the year? It was the same year, 1746, that his parents had been taken from him-the year of Culloden.
An hour later he was back at the schoolhouse table, studying his slips of paper, fighting a new desperation that had seized him, rearranging the slips again and again, pausing for minutes at a time to stare at his quill and the blank papers before him, pausing later to gaze out the window toward the great house, seeing, as Lister had, the woman using Sarah’s name staring at the forest from the second floor. He could not escape the sense that he was being asked to strike a fire in a powder magazine.
Eventually he became aware of a presence and looked up to see Crispin holding a plate of cold beef and potatoes.
“Look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the big man said as he shoved the plate across the table.
“I did. I stepped into that thicket that juts into the fields.”
Crispin’s face sagged. “No one goes there. The ground is cursed.”
“They were the first settlers, weren’t they?”
Crispin looked longingly toward the door, as if he were thinking of retreating, then pulled up a stool and sat opposite Duncan, but spoke toward the window. “There had been a little settlement, a few cabins long abandoned when Mr. Ramsey bought the land. He hired six families to clear the first fields and came in that autumn for a month, mostly to hunt. It was warm. Indian summer they call it, because that’s a favorite time for the tribes to raid, to get plunder for their winter camps. He went out hunting stags for three days, downriver in Pennsylvania, took half the men with him. When they came back everything was burnt, all the people hacked to pieces. It was Iroquois, folks say, back when they were not all our allies.”
“You mean he left his daughter here while he hunted,” Duncan ventured. The way Cripsin broke away to stare into his folded hands was answer enough.
“I will not go near the place. Lord Ramsey has ordered briar thorns planted all around it. If he saw you there-”
“Sarah Ramsey is there.”
The houseman buried his head in his hands a moment. “’Tis wrong to be digging up old graves. With Lady Ramsey gone, there’s no one else,” he added in a voice gone hollow.
“Why can no one speak a straight word about her?” Duncan demanded. Crispin was not trying to bait Duncan, he knew, or deceive him. He was just trying to protect the strange woman whom Duncan had pulled from the Atlantic.
“Stay out of the woods,” Crispin said with sudden pleading in his voice. “No good for anyone.”
“They want to condemn Lister to hang, Crispin,” Duncan said. “And I believe the truth of it to be bound up around this woman using a dead girl’s name. Without it, all I can do is point out possibilities, explanations that could be wrong. Innocent men have already died. Another will hang if all I can find is shadows.”
“But your friend,” Crispin declared with an uncertain grin. “They released him, reduced him to the ranks of the workers. He’s in the river, singing like a boy.”
Without another word, Duncan raced out the door and moments later halted beside an oak on the bank. Half a dozen prisoners were watching the jaunty old man in the river, some grinning, others wearing uneasy, nervous expressions. Lister had stripped to his waist and was sitting on a flat rock midstream, singing something bawdy about ladies in Spain as he scrubbed his arms with sand and rushes. Thirty feet upstream stood Frasier and another keeper, armed with clubs.
“The old fool’s heart is as light as a leaf,” said a voice at his shoulder. Duncan turned to see Cameron hovering close, the keeper’s eyes full of worry and locked on Lister. “Mine would be, too, with so much brandy.”
“What happened?”
Cameron shrugged. “Order came from His Lordship, with a pint of his finest French spirits. Release him into the Company, reduced to prisoner rank, but watch him close.”
As Lister shifted on the rock, playfully skipping a pebble along the current, several of the onlookers paled and turned away. The old man’s back was a latticework of scars, overlaid with long, ugly scabs from his most recent lashing.
Had Ramsey actually taken Duncan at his word, actually accepted that he owed Duncan a debt? But then Cameron handed Duncan a cloth-wrapped bundle.
“Greetings from our patron,” the keeper declared and stepped away.
Inside were several sheets of fine white paper and four fresh-cut quills. He glanced back the house. Arnold stood on the rear porch, gazing at him expectantly. They weren’t repaying a debt. They were forcing the bargain, increasing the stakes. Duncan had to finish his report. They didn’t intend Lister to stay free for long. They were simply striking at Duncan with an invisible lash.
At midnight Duncan arrived at the door of the great house, the report folded inside a blank sheet of paper with Lord Ramsey’s name on it. He paused and touched the iron thumb latch. The door was unlocked. With a quick survey of the yard to confirm no one watched, he stepped inside and laid the report on a side table under a flickering candle in a pewter holder. The house was still and silent. He lifted the candleholder and ventured over the wide plank floor into the kitchen in search of something to ease his mounting hunger. With guilty pleasure he discovered and quickly consumed the heel end of a loaf, dipping it in a tub of butter left on the windowsill, then saw the small door under the back stairway. He lifted its latch slowly, wary of making t
he slightest noise, then raised the candle and moved down the steps into Ramsey’s forbidden cellar.
Rows of wooden crates and barrels lined the large, dirt-floored chamber. He ventured along the nearest wall, extending the candle to read the labels. Madeira, Port, Brandy. Sugar, salt, ale, and a dozen other consumables. Across the stone flags along the opposite wall were crates and trunks bearing the Ramsey name in the black letters he had seen on the ship. It took but a few moments to verify that they were the ones he and Woolford had seen in the hold, one still smelling of tar, though its ruined coats were gone. Beyond, under a heavy canvas cover, were more kegs of rum than he could quickly count. He raised the candle and discovered in the far corner a small chamber constructed of heavy timbers and planks. Its narrow door did not yield when he tested the latch.
Such safe rooms had been used at his medical college to store habituating doses, where doctors were so numerous it was impractical to provide them all with keys. He held the candle close to the door, saw through its crack the dim shape of a wooden bar blocking the door near the top, and began exploring the planks, pushing, probing the cracks in the wall with fingers and toes. The first plank around the corner groaned as he pushed at its bottom, its top swinging out on a pin concealed at its center. The locking bar, attached to the top of the plank, pulled clear of the door, and he stepped inside.
Kegs of rum lined the front wall of the chamber. In the nearest corner stood a low bench with a rack holding four heavy horse pistols, newly flinted, each loaded and primed, ready for use, several more flints under the rack, with gun cleaning cloths. A small table against the back stone wall held a bound ledger, a house account, with records of household purchases in the front. But in the rear of the book was another list, a record of payments over several months to perhaps two dozen different men, most of the names repeating, the most frequent entry being that of Hawkins, each entry bearing a number of hash-marks beside it. They could have indicated pelts, or game for the kitchen. The most recent entries, for Hawkins and five other men, had been made three days earlier, in a different handwriting.
Beside the book was a hand-drawn map that showed the country north of Edentown, following the river north as it meandered through rough-drawn ranges. Halfway up the river was a sketch of rock formations with tall columns of stone, marked Chimney Rocks. The only other features were farther north and slightly west, two places separated by half an inch, marked in a cramped hand and underlined. German Flats and Stony Run. Below, at the bottom of the map, was a single word: Okewa.
He was about to leave when his gaze fell on two flour sacks, each with lumpish contents. Upending the first on the table, he discovered an ornate red-peaked cap, tall and military with a large 49 embroidered in gold brocade. He studied it in the dim light, putting his hand inside it, not understanding why it should be kept so secret. He stretched it over the candle. There were four small holes in its side, each big enough to insert a writing lead, spaced in two pairs four inches apart. They were too small for bullet holes, too regular to be the work of wool-eating insects. At the bottom of the flour sack was a brass cylinder, perhaps five inches long, perforated with holes and tapered at the base, topped with a hinged, domed cap.
He absently opened the second sack, upending it onto the table, then with a moan backed away. Inside were skulls, perhaps twenty skulls of birds, messengers to the gods. His hand trembling, he returned the bones to the sack, then dropped the cylinder into his pocket. He lifted the cap to return it to its sack, then paused and quickly tucked it inside his belt, pocketed the map, and jammed several of the guncloths into the empty sack.
A minute later he was out of the house, calming himself with gulps of the cool night air, heading across the plowed fields in the moonlight. He sat against a huge stump that had been too big for the oxen to extract, trying to lose himself in the deep night sky.
He turned the red cap over in his hand, uncertain why he had taken it, uncertain why it would be important to Ramsey. But somehow it seemed to be a start, a tiny step toward becoming the chieftain that Lister wanted him to be. As he studied the stars he began to sing, in quiet Gaelic, an old ballad about a Highlands warrior who battled the gods to save his clan.
Chapter Eight
Lord Ramsey sent for him before noon the next day. “I have read your report,” the patron announced from his desk chair. Duncan’s papers lay under one jeweled hand. “You confuse me, McCallum. What was it you did not understand about your task? In my experience, Reverend Arnold expresses himself more than adequately.” Arnold stood behind Ramsey, arms folded across his sleeveless waistcoat.
Duncan returned the vicar’s smoldering gaze, then addressed Ramsey. “I gave you precisely what you need, sir. A way out, a means to avoid scandal while also avoiding the harm to the Company that would come from condemning an innocent man.”
Ramsey frowned and waved the papers in front of him. “You say it is a pattern, that the same forces are at work in the deaths of Evering and some old savage, that it is connected to the battle at Stony Run. You offer a detailed scientific review of Evering’s corpse, but you decline to adopt the vicar’s view of the puzzle in the compass room. I fail to see how this restores the balance in the Company.” The patron’s gaze drifted out the window to the settlement’s newest structure, a threadbare tent, and he frowned again.
In the early morning new travelers, unwelcome to Ramsey, had arrived. A tall, gray-bearded man had stopped Duncan, asking for Reverend Arnold. After five minutes of conversation, he had introduced himself as Reverend Zettlemeyer, a Moravian missionary who had brought in survivors of raids on a dozen homesteads. Ramsey had offered them the tent, which he had ordered to be erected at the far side of the fields. With the battered settlers had come half a dozen red-coated soldiers, fresh from New York, who to Ramsey had been even less welcome than the settlers.
“The ritual at the compass,” Duncan explained, “was capable of many interpretations. The Reverend saw it as the work of a London professor, but the Reverend himself is the product of a proper English education, like Evering. He gave,” Duncan said, struggling for words, acutely aware that if pushed too far they would shut him out and decree their own solution, “the proper interpretation for a learned and moral man.” Arnold appeared confused for a moment, then offered an uncertain nod. “But what if the killer had not been blessed with such a refined education?” The ritual, he had begun to realize, hung over Arnold and Ramsey more heavily than the actual murder of Evering.
“You suggest the killer had already taken Evering’s life before performing the ghastly ritual?”
“I am suggesting the bones could represent those who died at Stony Run, the salt a sign of the salt lick near the battle site. The claw and eye could say that something powerful is still watching, still at work, set on determining the outcome. The buckle might indicate the soldiers who fell. The feather was that of a warrior, representing the Indians who died. Someone was saying the battle for Stony Run is not over. Someone was warning of retribution. Someone,” he suggested, “who had been there, at Stony Run.”
Lord Ramsey, strangely, closed his eyes for a moment, clutching the arms of his chair. “You can’t know that. You don’t know that. The feather could not have been from an Indian. The ship was coming from England, not America. And you fail to mention the bloody heart.”
“I thought it prudent not to dwell on the heart. It was a different kind of statement, against the Ramsey Company.”
“Ridiculous!” snapped Arnold.
Duncan reached into his pocket and dropped the smashed pendant on the papers in front of Ramsey. “This was stuffed in an artery.”
Arnold seemed about to protest when Ramsey picked up the piece of mangled silver and dropped it into his palm, staring at it forlornly.
“Captain Woolford would confirm it,” Duncan added, “and my words about the feather.”
The statement seemed to snap Ramsey out of his sudden melancholy. “Surely you did not tell Woolford all thi
s.”
“Not yet. But Reverend Arnold did request that I report to both him and the captain.”
“That was when we were still on board ship,” Arnold quickly amended. “The troubles began with the death of Professor Evering,” he observed. “He had no possible connection to the events at Stony Run.”
“You’re mistaken. He knew about it, knew of its secrets.”
“Impossible.”
Ramsey, pacing again, stopped at the north-facing window, gazing resentfully at the red-jacketed men now walking along his street as if on patrol.
“He wrote about it,” Duncan explained. “There was a journal.”
Arnold’s face went as stiff as his starched collar, and he advanced on Duncan, leaning so close Duncan could feel the vicar’s breath. “What journal?”
“It was not just scientific notes he kept.”
“I must have it!” Arnold demanded.
“It was left in the city,” Duncan said. “But I shall append a statement to the report. I will sign a witness oath, attesting that Professor Evering had an informant. A member of the Company gave him a secret about the army at Stony Run, then not long afterwards the professor was killed. We would be remiss not to recall that half the men in the Company served in the army.”
“We will need your real report,” Arnold interjected. “We cannot embark onto this dangerous ground on such a capricious basis. And you have neglected to reference the seditious statements of the Scottish prisoners.”
“But this is the report that serves the Company best,” Duncan urged, “one that above all you want the military to glimpse. It concludes the murders relate to military intrigue, not a concern of the Company. It allows the Company to avoid a scandal. The army has failed to explain what happened that day at Stony Run. There was a battle, but they failed to report any traces of the enemy. One could suggest they have obscured the truth. The Company is victim as much as those who have died. Someone seeks revenge for what was done there, or to correct a wrong committed there, someone with secret knowledge of what happened that day. Someone,” Duncan added, “with cause to seek out the shaman Tashgua.”
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