Bone Rattler amoca-1

by Eliot Pattison

  In the stillness that suddenly seized the room, Duncan heard the distant bellow of an ox. Ramsey rose, stepped to the window, staring at the forest a moment, then turned toward Duncan with an expectant look.

  “We will direct the report only to the governor,” Duncan continued. “If you sent it directly to the general he would be suspicious. The governor will want Calder to secretly see it, both to put the general in obligation for the favor and to gauge his reaction to it. They must both be aware that what happened at Stony Run is unresolved. We will suggest the murderers’ work is not complete, that the intrigue begun at Stony Run has not run its course, that someone apparently seeks to stop the Ramsey Company’s work on the frontier, and that the only reason must be that they do not want an English victory in the war. The governor will have to thank you for bringing this to his attention. The general will have to volunteer that the army will address the matter. The military has its own courts, private courts. The weight of a hanging is lifted from the Company.”

  “What if Lister is the killer after all?” Ramsey asked in a tentative voice. “You have directed attention away from him. Yet you have not proven he is innocent.”

  “It is not the role of a court to prove the innocence of every man, only the guilt of one. Mr. Lister had no real evidence against him except his unexplained appearance in Evering’s cabin. A sworn statement with the report explains he was there at someone else’s request.”

  “Your statement. Your request,” Arnold pointed out.

  “The statement of your scientific expert, saying he was there to assist with the science of Evering’s death. You cannot accept my statements for one purpose and reject them for another. I would pledge my life on his innocence.”

  “Or at least your liberty,” Arnold rejoined in a smoldering tone. The vicar turned to Ramsey. “Surely this is too inflammatory, my lord. To incite the army unnecessarily serves no purpose.”

  But Ramsey was staring again at the red-coated trespassers past his barn. “Why would the army dance to your song?” he asked. His eyes were working fast now, studying Duncan one moment, Arnold the next.

  “The proposal only succeeds,” Duncan said, silently thanking the patron for providing the opening he had been longing for, “if the general does indeed know a black deed was hidden at Stony Run. Then he knows that continuing to obscure it will cloud his political aspirations. Calder thought he would intimidate the Ramsey Company by suggesting that I would trip over the events at Stony Run, as if we, too, had something to hide. But we are not so frightened by the truth as he should be. He will never expect the Company to be so bold as to shift the play back to him. As the ancient Greeks showed us,” Duncan declared, his sober gaze on Ramsey, “in war, surprise is everything. This is a shrewd and defiant move declaring to those who matter in this colony that the Ramsey Company shall be neither subordinate nor beholden to the army.”

  Ramsey leaned back into his chair with a distant expression as he gazed out the window toward the dark forest beyond the river. Arnold stepped to the tea tray and hastily poured himself a cup.

  “You have reason to resent the army, if I am not mistaken,” Ramsey observed in a tentative tone. He rose and slowly paced along his bookshelves.

  “I will not shy from embarrassing them.”

  “But what you suggest could be construed as practicing trickery on the army.” A dangerous smile grew on Ramsey’s face. “The governor may wonder about our motives.”

  “You will provide proof of the army’s motive by pointing out that the war hinges on the loyalty of the Iroquois, that the death of so many of them at Stony Run needs to be resolved. The obvious conclusion is that secret French agents were at work. It would not be exaggeration to suggest a traitor is at work. It would be motive enough for the army to lie, to keep their actions in shadow, clearly motive enough for more lives to be taken.

  “You will prove your loyalty,” Duncan continued, “by pledging that you will not speak publicly of this embarrassment to His Majesty’s government, by assuring him that you would never openly suggest someone in Calder’s command is capable of hiding traitorous activity. It takes a powerful man to keep a powerful secret.”

  Ramsey stopped his pacing and turned to face Duncan again, his eyes lit with a new energy. “If I were Calder learning of this report, what would I do?”

  “I would end my preoccupation with the Ramsey Company,” Duncan said. “Because any act against the Company’s interest only strengthens our allegations. I would take steps to assure the governor that the king’s enemies are the sole focus of my efforts, lest anyone suspect that personal ambition was afoot.”

  Ramsey absently ran his fingers along the spines of his leather-bound books. “To call upon you to teach my children,” he said in a contemplative tone, “that is the greatest test of your own loyalty.”

  “Sir?” Something in the atmosphere had shifted. There was a scent of invitation in Ramsey’s words.

  Ramsey faced Duncan. “We do the work of empire here. We are the empire here. Great things shall be done, great rewards bestowed. The world I give to my children will be vastly different from what you see here. England the way it should be, without any of its faults or ambiguities. I will share with you a secret few understand. The name of Ramsey will soon ring throughout the land. The Ramseys and those who stood by them shall be celebrated in histories read by generations to come.”

  Duncan glanced at Arnold, half expecting the vicar to utter an Amen. “We shall provide answers about human nature,” Arnold said instead.

  “The savages must be driven from the land, must they not?” Ramsey demanded.

  The question hung in the air as Duncan tried to make sense of the abrupt shifts in their conversation. “Yes, sir,” he said at last.

  “The science of man must be brought to the land,” Ramsey said.

  “Yes, sir,” Duncan repeated in a tight voice.

  “And the rule of God and his laws.”

  “Yes, sir,” Duncan echoed, grasping his part in Ramsey’s liturgy.

  “I asked Reverend Arnold to explain every detail of that day in the storm. You were surely a dead man when you leapt into the sea. But you reappeared, with the eldest of my children in your arms. What did you see, what did you feel in that dark water? Did you not sense the fingers of God cradling you?” Ramsey asked with an odd glint of hope in his voice.

  “All I remember,” Duncan said, “is waking in a prison cell, cold and shivering.”

  Ramsey seemed to relish the answer. “Job, too, had to endure great suffering to appreciate the role the Almighty had granted him. Eventually you shall recall what happened to you in the water, when destiny put its hand upon you, and you must record it for the Company archives.”

  Duncan found his gaze drifting out the window, toward the men laboring in the muddy fields. He would never feel so unclean as he did now, standing there in Lord Ramsey’s library. There were two other new arrivals, for that morning McGregor had appeared, escorting one of the Company men who had also gone with Hawkins into the forest, a younger man wearing a crazed, hollow expression. The man had become useless in the forest, his sensibilities in some kind of shock. Duncan clenched his jaw and fixed the patron with a level stare. He may not know his role in the drama that was unfolding, but he certainly knew what Ramsey wanted to hear, and it was no struggle to speak ill of the army. “We will not allow mere generals the upper hand in the events of the day,” he declared.

  Ramsey’s eyes narrowed. Arnold, seeming to sense a cue, rose and shut the library door.

  “When you issue your report to the governor, you will show him that one company of Ramsey men is more effective than ten companies of soldiers,” Duncan concluded, beating down his shame.

  Ramsey stepped to the big desk, gesturing Duncan to turn away as he opened its hinged top. Duncan heard a series of drawers slide open. The patron was accessing a locked compartment, he knew, a paper safe often built into such desks and opened by positioning the small i
nterior drawers in a designated arrangement. After a moment Ramsey cleared his throat, and Duncan turned to see him holding a rolled sheet of vellum. With a triumphant look, he motioned Duncan closer and unrolled the document on the desk. Its script was elegant, the scrollwork along its borders intricate and colored with rich hues, like an illuminated manuscript. But Duncan’s gaze quickly settled on the huge ribboned seal at the bottom, beside a date only three months earlier.

  “The king himself,” Ramsey declared with a conspiratorial air, lifting a map from the desktop and laying it on the arm of his desk chair. A massive tract was outlined in red. “Ten thousand square miles. Much of the colony to the west, all the way to the great inland seas that feed the Saint Lawrence. The king wants it to be ours.”

  Duncan’s heart seemed to wither as he watched the thin smile form on Ramsey’s face.

  “I am impressed with your usages of death,” the English lord declared to him, then stepped back to the tray and poured another cup. “Would you prefer sugar in your tea, Professor McCallum?”

  “Carolina.” It was the first word Lister spoke when Duncan found him working at one of the new cabins. “It is our answer,” the old sailor said, gesturing Duncan out of earshot of his companions. “Hundreds of Scots are there, in the mountains. I hear there are even towns where they speak only the old tongue. Sometimes the smith talks as he works. Last year some Scots in thrall to Ramsey fled south and made it, out of the reach of his dogs. Scots go there to be free, far from the law. Cameron’s been collecting canoes on the river above town. We can take one, get to the Delaware, and follow it to Philadelphia, work a ship to Charleston.”

  “You mean us to flee?”

  “I mean for us to live. Yesterday a wagon arrived at the carpenter’s shed. I watched them unload fifty muskets. Bars of lead, powder horns, bullet molds, all stowed and locked in the shed. Lord Ramsey, he is taking us into the war somehow.”

  Duncan studied the great house. There was movement in an upstairs window. The woman using Sarah Ramsey’s name was staring into the forest again. He had begun to feel somehow victimized by her. He had saved an impostor. “Woolford’s pack is on a bench in the barn,” he said. The ranger had disappeared two days earlier. “I must speak with him.”

  “He ate by the south well with Fitch, then walked into the woods near there.”

  Duncan followed the perimeter of the fields below the house, pausing frequently to peer uneasily into the forest. This was not the western bank, he kept telling himself, this was a thinned, tamed forest. Lifting a heavy stick for a weapon, he ventured slowly under the trees, turning frequently to assure he kept the huge barn in sight. It took nearly an hour of nervous forays into the shadows for him to discover the clearing, three hundred yards beyond the fields. Under the boughs of several huge beech trees, four logs had been arranged in a square, in the center of which was not a fire pit, as Duncan expected, but a three-foot-high platform made of long, flat stones stacked on top of one another. The scene had been set many years earlier. The benches showed signs of rot; the stones of the cairn were covered with lichen. Seedlings sprouted in the square around the cairn.

  A solitary figure in green sat on one of the logs, his rifle beside him, staring at the stacked stones as if waiting for something to climb out of them. Woolford, looking exhausted, did not glance up until Duncan was a few feet away, then reacted with a small frown and gazed back at the cairn.

  “They say that in the last century, the tribes and early settlers made places like this near every settlement.” The ranger’s voice seemed drained of emotion. “They say old Penn and the Quakers visited them often, to speak with the chiefs. Few could speak both English and the tongues of the tribes, but there was far less blood-shed. Now that we can speak with one another, all we want to do is kill one another.”

  “It is a meeting place, then?” Duncan asked as he sat beside Woolford.

  “The Edge of the Woods place is what the tribes call it. Old Jacob and Hendrick used to tell of such ceremonies they joined as young warriors. It is where those who came out of the woods met those not of the woods. Those who came from afar would talk about the difficulties of their journey, to show the sacrifice made for the sake of discourse among peoples, speaking loudly so the messengers in the trees would hear.

  “Each chief would hold a wampum belt to underscore the importance, to show the truth of his words. It was also done between tribes, before Europeans came. The host would symbolically wipe the sweat from the traveler’s limbs and pretend to pull thorns from his feet, then clean the eyes and ears and mouth, to be certain all would be clearly understood. Sometimes evil spirits would follow from deep in the woods, and words had to be said to drive them away.”

  Duncan looked about again. He had arrived at the edge of the woods, Sarah had said when Duncan had arrived, and earned the unspoken censure of her father for using the words. “A wampum belt?” he asked, not sure why he was whispering. He gazed upward, into the dense, glittering canopy supported by the broad grey columns of the beeches. It was as if they were in a cathedral.

  Woolford replied by standing and stepping to the stone platform. With both hands he pushed back the heavy stone on top, and Duncan joined to help lean it against the stack. The long, narrow stones underneath had been crisscrossed to form a hollow in the center. From the compartment Woolford lifted a bundle of leather, unfolded it, and extracted a four-inch-wide belt of small beads, strung in intricate patterns. As he unfolded it to its full three-foot length, Duncan saw that the background of one half was made of white beads, its many figures depicted in purple, and the other half was of purple background, with white figures. Between the two squares at either end were the shapes of men and women, houses, deer, and axes, with a tree at the center.

  “It is their way of saying important things, of sending important messages,” the ranger explained. “When they hold such a belt, they can only speak the truth.”

  “What does this one say?” Duncan realized he had seen such beads before, or one such bead, in the empty sack on Old Jacob’s belt, and recalled the alarmed way Woolford had stared at the single purple bead.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen one like it.” Woolford seemed shaken, more worried than Duncan had seen him yet.

  In the silence that followed, Duncan recalled the reason he had sought Woolford. “Hawkins took several of the men. Where did they go?”

  For once, the ranger offered a direct answer. “We followed their tracks ten miles upriver. They joined others, with three canoes. Not far north, one man climbed out on the opposite bank. Fitch started to follow him, but then two more bodies came floating down the river. Settlers, dead several days. We dug graves instead.”

  Duncan found himself looking toward the river. It was like wilderness kept coughing up the dead. “They call Hawkins a trapper.”

  “He started making his living by taking fur pelts, years ago. Mink, otter, beaver, marten. He would boast about how he devised traps that did not kill right away, that would only pin them, sometimes for days, until he had the time to personally cut their throats. Now he sells his finely honed skills to the highest bidder.”

  “Including the army?”

  “The highest bidder,” Woolford repeated.

  “Is he going to Stony Run?”

  Woolford offered no reply.

  “If you seek the murderers from Stony Run, Captain, tell me why you keep coming back to Edentown?”

  “This belt,” Woolford replied in a voice gone melancholy, “may be the closest I’ve come to an answer. The tribes are very wary of words, and whom they give them to. They believe in showing, not telling,” he added as he studied the belt again.

  “Last night in my classroom I made two lists on my slateboard,” Duncan revealed after a long silence. “On the one side it said salt, evil eye, bee, iron, Scottish cross, deiseal circuit.”

  “Deiseal?”

  Duncan paused to explain the meaning of each in Highland tradition. “Beside that list
I wrote another: bird skulls, wolf clan arrow, beaver, crooked man, crooked tree, painted feather, bear. I could add wampum beads.” He explained what Jonathan had shown him that morning.

  Woolford grew very quiet.

  “Since the day Evering died, a dialogue has been under way, using mystical signs of the Highlands and the Iroquois. It isn’t so much the pattern of violence that holds the key, it is the pattern of that conversation.”

  Woolford had closed his eyes. “A bear,” he said. “Why did you list a bear?”

  Duncan was not ready to speak about the stone bear that had been rescued by Adam from Woolford’s trunk, or the nightmare he had suffered the night before, of Adam tossing the stone bear between blood-soaked hands. “On the road past the inn,” he said instead, “a baby bear was executed on a rope, the day Jacob died.”

  Woolford looked as if he had been struck. “Why did you not tell me this?”

  “Why,” Duncan rejoined, “would I think you needed to know? What is it about a bear that frightens those who have fought in the wilderness?”

  Duncan watched with unsettling confusion as the ranger closed his hand into a fist, tapped his heart, then, with two fingers pointed up, made a spiraling motion toward the sky. “What it is about a bear,” Woolford whispered, “can never be spoken.”

  Duncan pulled out the brass cylinder he had taken from Ramsey’s safe room and dangled it before Woolford. “Then speak about this.”

  “A case for slow match,” the ranger said absently, his gaze back on the wampum belt. “Grenadiers carry them, usually on their chest straps. Not many grenade bombs are used over here, but grenadiers still carry the cases. It’s part of their tradition, part of their official uniform.” Duncan’s inquiry finally seemed to register with him, and he looked up. “Where did you find it?”