“Major Pike?”
“Oh, yes,” the girl said dreamily. “On his fine white horse. He made sure Miss Ramsey got a bed, and a real dress. One of mine. I was happy to offer it.”
“And Adam Munroe?”
The girl nodded again. “When he arrived he had his hair in braids and animals painted on his skin. I thought he was playacting, like my brothers and I do sometimes among the stumps. Some play the Indians, some play our fine brave soldiers in their red tapestry.”
“Did you ever hear the boy speak?”
“Twice he spoke.”
“Only two times?”
“I mean his tongue was open, then closed, then opened once more before it went numb forever. At first, when he arrived, he wanted to tell everyone about the tribes. Then Miss Ramsey spoke to him after they beat Mr. Munroe, and he was silent.”
Duncan looked up in surprise.
“Poor Mr. Munroe, we pray for his soul. That first night Mr. Munroe and Alex escaped. But the pickets caught them because the boy fell and twisted his ankle. The soldiers dragged them both back and beat Mr. Munroe with sticks, cut off his braids, and scrubbed off his paint with rushes. Miss Ramsey, she spoke in the tribal tongue to the boy, like a mother chastising her son. But weeks later, when the great lord came, Alex talked a lot. They gave him sweets and paid my mother to make new clothes for him. He talked and talked as they made notes. Then one day while they were here, an old ranger came, asking about the men who had died, asking about the traders who come from the north, and Alex stopped again. His tongue has not worked since. My brother says when he gets older you’ll be able to put a harness on him like another ox and he won’t say a word, just mind the gees and haws.”
“An old ranger named Fitch?”
The girl nodded and smiled. “A nice man. He carved a bird for me.”
A figure emerged from the biggest cabin, Reverend Zettlemeyer, holding a Bible. As Duncan rose to follow him toward the springhouse, he pocketed the musket ball and turned back to the freckled girl. “When you playact among the stumps,” he asked, “who wins?”
“Why, the soldiers, of course. Always the soldiers.”
For the second time in a month, he entered a room filled with a woman’s quiet German prayers. But this time the man on the pallet, though asleep, was still alive. He stepped past the Reverend’s wife reading the heavy Bible, and noted for the first time a long bow with a quiver of feathered arrows beside it. He turned over the cartridge belt hanging on the peg above the pallet and froze. The knife was out of the sheaf, the cold blade expertly pressed against the artery of Duncan’s thigh.
“I don’t recollect offering to pay my butcher,” came a dry, rough voice. The Scot was awake, and surprisingly nimble.
Duncan did not release the small leather box on the belt but slowly traced the two digits of its tarnished brass adornment. “The Forty-second saw rough service at Ticonderoga.”
The man did not reply, but did not press the knife when Duncan shifted away, kneeling to inspect his sutures. “You must drink twice as much as usual. One part water, one part milk. Keep a poultice on the incision.” He paused, glancing out the window for the milkmaid. There was another question he should have asked her. How could she know Adam Munroe was dead? He turned back to his patient. “Do not try to walk for a week; then use a crutch. If you open the wound, the flesh could mortify.”
“Right,” the man muttered. “Then ye’ll be back and announce it’s time to saw it off anyway. I know doctors. I leave on the morrow, and I’ll slice anyone who tries to stop me.”
“Mrs. Zettlemeyer,” Duncan turned to address the woman in a level voice. She looked up from her Bible. “When the skin turns yellow because he has walked on it too soon, then you must take him to the woodshed and have one of the boys chop the leg off.” Duncan leaned over to the cool water in the stone trough at the head of the springhouse, moistened his fingers, and touched the moist earth. “Right here will do,” he said, and with faint marks of mud drew a broken line on the man’s skin above the knee.
His patient’s face turned white as he tried to squirm backward, out of Duncan’s reach. The woman’s hand closed around his good leg and he moved no more. “If you think that was painful,” Duncan said, “wait until the ax. By then you will scream in agony each time someone touches the skin of your leg. There will be unbearable pain for a couple hours, then you will likely die anyway.” He turned to the sturdy German woman. “Dig his grave by those of his friends the rangers.”
The Scot moved no more, just gazed abjectly at the line drawn on his skin.
“Were you at Ticonderoga?” Duncan asked.
The man accepted a drink of water from Mrs. Zettlemeyer. “All the regiment was at Ticonderoga,” he replied sullenly. “I was a sergeant. It’s sergeants who run the battle.”
“Who was on the ridge above?”
“Onondagas. Then we saw the Hurons on the ledge above them, where they could destroy the old man and the other Iroquois with five minutes of musketry.”
“Tashgua? Tashgua’s band was there?”
The Scot nodded.
“You mean the Hurons were preparing to attack Tashgua’s band?”
“That’s what we thought, that’s why we ran up there. But they weren’t attacking, they were waiting.”
“If Tashgua wasn’t there to fight, why was he there?”
The Scot’s thin mouth twisted. “You wouldn’t understand. None of us really understood for months.”
“Try me.”
“Gods get new faces.”
“Do not speak in riddles of such important things. I must know!”
It was Reverend Zettlemeyer who answered, from the shadows where he had hovered. “It is what old Tashgua does,” he said in an already strained voice. “He stands between his people and their gods, to explain to his people the demands of their spirits. If he fails, the spirits will abandon them, and the people will die. But he knows that spirits can change, just as men can change.”
Duncan searched their faces. “I still don’t understand.”
“Everyone says the French won that day,” the deserter said in a bitter voice, “with nigh on two thousand British lying dead and wounded, and no more than one-tenth that on General Montcalm’s side. But not to old Tashgua, not to all the Iroquois chiefs who came with him. To them, the British and French gods were battling it out on that field, and they had never seen anything like the British one. What else could explain thousands of men willingly throwing themselves to the cannons? He had never imagined such a powerful god. He was so shaken, his daughter had to lead him away.”
“That’s when he began doubting himself,” Duncan said.
“That’s when-Mother of Christ!” the man gasped, raising his knife again. “Look at you!”
Duncan stared in confusion. Nothing had changed about him, except he had stepped closer to the full sunlight cast by the chamber’s small window. Outside, during the surgery, the man had been blindfolded. For the first time he was seeing Duncan’s countenance in direct light.
“Step further into the light!” the man demanded. “Do it, or I swear I’ll rip your stitches out of my leg.”
Duncan took an uncertain step forward, into the pool of light.
“He said he had a brother,” the Scot declared in a suddenly wrathful voice, “an English doctor who sold out their clan, betrayed an old uncle to the gallows to please his lacy lairds.”
Duncan’s mouth went dry as tinder. “Where is he? Where is Jamie?”
The man seemed to have forgotten his pain. He studied Duncan with a cool, thin smile. “Many a night I’ve sat and listened to him recount the ways all traitors must be dealt with. Last time he said his brother the doctor would have a medical kit with cutting tools. He vowed to use each one on you before you breathed your last.”
Duncan felt the cold scalpel in his heart already. “It isn’t like that. They traced my uncle to me. I never-”
The man lurched upright and launched
a hand at Duncan, hitting his chest before collapsing in pain.
Through his own agony, Duncan saw the man had ripped the tartan sash from inside his shirt.
“You’ll not use this for your lying and cheating of true Scots.”
“I am the eldest of the Highland McCallums, I-”
“There be no English boots to lick here. Save your song for when you’re tied to the post. He’s learnt a thing or two from the tribes, about making men sing.” The deserter stuffed the plaid inside his own shirt, then seemed to brighten. “My nurse this afternoon told me ye be a Ramsey slave. The river’s up, high enough for Ramsey canoes to journey here in a day or two, with Major Pike not far behind. Ye got nowhere to run but into the arms of y’er heathen brother.” Despite the obvious pain it caused him, the man burst into a harsh, wheezing laughter.
A hand was suddenly on Duncan’s shoulder. Reverend Zettlemeyer was at his side. Duncan let himself be led out of the springhouse like one of the living dead.
Chapter Thirteen
A goat tied to a tree. Woolford’s words from the night on the Hudson echoed in Duncan’s mind as he sat on the bench where Zettlemeyer had led him. He had thought he could escape that fate, even save Lister and Sarah in doing so. But now his brother wouldn’t come for him because the army dangled Duncan like bait; he would come because he hated Duncan as much as Duncan hated the English aristocrats. Either way his brother would die; either way Duncan would be powerless to save his friends. The deserter in the springhouse was right. He didn’t deserve the piece of tartan. He was an arrogant fool to even playact as a clan chief. The Ramseys and Pikes of the world were destined to win, would always win. He would wear an iron collar around his neck for years, and every time he touched it he would think of Lister and his brother rotting in their graves, because of him.
A low, throaty rumble disturbed the still evening air. The sound of an angry ox. Duncan was on his feet before he heard the second sound, the hissing rhythm of a switch being jerked through the air. He did not pause as he reached the shed, did not hesitate as he launched himself at the Welshman, seizing his uplifted arm as it was about to slam the stick onto the boy’s back again. He thrust his foot against the man’s knee, spinning him violently backward against a post.
Quickly turning to examine Alex’s injuries, he lifted the boy’s torn shirt and froze. The ox’s tether was stretched tight, its nostrils were flared, its eyes bulging. With another ounce of effort the massive creature could snap the line and, in its current temper, could destroy anything in its path.
But Alex, without even a glance at Duncan, darted to the ox and began stroking its neck. Instantly the tether went slack and the animal’s angry breathing quieted, replaced by the gasping of the Welshman, whose breath had been knocked out of him.
Duncan ventured a step closer. The boy spread his arms and the ox buried its mighty head in them. As Duncan paused, unwilling to disturb the embrace, a slab of firewood struck a painful, glancing blow on his shoulder. A second blow knocked Duncan to the ground, and the Welshman charged forward, switch in hand. He landed another two strikes on the boy’s back before the ox hurled him aside with a thrust of its horn, then Duncan reached him, seizing his free arm, pulling it behind him, bending it until the man cried out in pain. Learning the treatment of injuries at the pugilist matches in Yorkshire also meant he had learned their causes.
“Do you feel that?” Duncan asked in a simmering voice, twisting the man’s arm. “The way the pain rises as I turn it? A little more-” the man gasped as Duncan turned it again, “-and you won’t use it for a day.”
“He gave the brute double rations,” the Welshman groaned. “He has no right.”
“Working until dusk, that is double duty,” Duncan suggested.
“You be the one! The McCallum fugitive that has the great lord so furious! Fifty pounds on your head!”
Duncan increased the pressure on the man’s arm. “If I twist some more you won’t use it for a week. And then how will you raise that musket when the savages come for you?”
“I can fix things for ye,” the Welshman groaned. “I’ll give ye to Ramsey when he comes. Then I’ll split the bounty with ye and let ye go. We can be rich!”
Duncan pressed harder, and the Welshman let Duncan pull the switch from his hand. Duncan released his hold and broke the switch on his knee. As he turned to toss the pieces into the darkness, he saw a bearded head watching from the shadows. Reverend Zettlemeyer, his body all but obscured by his black clothes, wore a sober, almost melancholy expression but offered not a word. As the Welshman followed Duncan’s gaze toward the missionary, he gave a defeated sigh. But he turned with a vindictive gleam before slipping away into the night.
“Ain’t just Ramsey who wants ye, boy. There’s a price on y’er hair. Ye be worth more to the Huron dead and scalped than presented intact to the great lord. In a few days ye’ll be begging to be turned over to Ramsey.”
Duncan stared into the darkness after the man, his heart racing. Ramsey and the French savages were competing for his head. It was impossible. Why would the French want him dead?
Duncan turned to the boy, who had taken the Welshman’s final blows like an old sailor, without breaking his embrace of the brindled beast. He lifted the boy’s tattered shirt only a few inches before Alex jerked it out of his grasp and slipped to the other side of the ox. But it was enough for Duncan to see the marks left by many such beatings in the past.
The boy’s eyes went wild as those of the ox as Duncan tried to approach him again. Duncan retreated, began stroking the opposite flank of the ox, rubbing him down with a rag that hung on a nearby peg. After a few strokes the boy pulled the rag from his hand and began using it himself.
Duncan offered greetings, offered apologies, offered to find Alex some extra food for himself, but nothing prompted so much as a glance from the former slave to the Indians. What had Reverend Zettlemeyer said? The boy had lost all the talents of society.
When Duncan finally abandoned his effort and stepped out of the shed, Reverend Zettlemeyer was still standing there, watching with the same melancholy expression.
“If this is what Moravians do for orphans,” Duncan spat, “then the New World can do without your settlers.”
Zettlemeyer seemed to accept the words like a well-deserved blow. “I wake in the middle of the night thinking of Alex,” he said. “I find myself stopping amidst prayer thinking of the boy, and the Ramsey girl. I know not how to reach them.”
Duncan’s head snapped up. “Sarah? You’ve seen her?”
“Ten days ago. But ever since she first visited last year, she is in my thoughts, sometimes my nightmares.”
Duncan stepped closer to the missionary. “Sarah was here ten days ago?”
“Just for a night. She rode away at dawn, in the direction of Edentown, right toward the raiding parties. She has powerful angels over her, that one.”
“She saw Alex?”
Zettlemeyer nodded. “It was like she needed to be certain he was still alive.”
Duncan turned, looking up to the night sky, his mind racing, and stepped toward the open fields.
The German kept speaking to his back. “My wife says you saved the life of our guest in the springhouse.” Duncan kept walking. “Just a word, McCallum.”
Duncan did not respond.
“Sarah Ramsey didn’t just speak to Alex, McCallum. She spoke to me about a dead man named Evering.”
Duncan halted, slowly turned. The old Moravian gestured him toward the moonlit field above the village and began walking. He had settled onto one of the stumps near the top when Duncan reached him. When he spoke again, he had none of the confidence of a man accustomed to the pulpit.
“She told me to protect the boy, to keep him safe, away from any visitors. But the boy will have none of it. I brought him into the house to sleep the night after she left, and he climbed out the window.”
“But what of Evering?” Duncan asked.
“She said a ma
n named Evering had been given a vital message from Adam Munroe, who had known he was going to die. Evering was to have warned me, she said.”
“Warn you about what?”
“That was the source of her greatest agony. Adam Munroe had decided she could not know, that it was to be the job of the Ramsey tutor to carry the warning. She sat up here with me and wept as she watched Alex settling into the stable. She asked me strange things. She asked if I had ever met the English king. I would have thought it a jest but for her solemn expression. She asked me if I had had dreams since the massacre last year. She gave me something in a leather pouch I was to pass on as a message.”
“To whom?”
“She made me pledge not to reveal that.”
“Then what was the message?”
“I don’t know what it meant. There were no words, no writing.” Zettlemeyer sank his head into his hands a moment. “A pouch. Inside were a claw, a bear claw with little red feathers tied around it. At the bottom were a dozen purple beads.” He looked up, searched Duncan’s face. “You are the Ramsey tutor. Explain the catastrophe that comes.”
“Huron raiders. Lord Ramsey. Major Pike,” Duncan said. “We are rich in catastrophes about to break upon us.” He felt the Moravian’s gaze again. “I don’t know. Evering was murdered before he could speak with me.”
They sat in the cool stillness, gazing at the stars.
“My son leaves soon to bring back more settlers,” Zettlemeyer said at last. “He has a grand speech about property and land ownership. I told him I cannot go because of my health, but the truth is I cannot go because I don’t know what to tell them about this place, about how a good Christian goes about taming the wilderness.”
“Do you fear the wilderness?”
“We’d be fools not to. Most nights one of the children wakes up screaming from nightmares about Indian attacks. But that’s only a part of it.” The missionary went silent again. “You think you bring your old identity with you when you come as a settler,” he began at last, “your culture, your values, your knowledge of what it means to be human. But when you settle onto the new land, you soon learn that all that is gone. You are naked. You have nothing of the Old World to rely on. There is only what is in here-” Zettlemeyer tapped his chest, “and what is out there.” He gestured toward the forest. “When I first came, I met an old Indian named Conawago. I said, ‘this is Eden.’ In reply he said, ‘Yes, except it is the eighteenth century.’” The German fell silent again.
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