Blood of the Oak: A Mystery

by Eliot Pattison

  “Duncan boy,” called his older cousin Angus, who was extending his staff toward the little flat below, where at least two dozen Highland cattle huddled. “Lowest count does the other’s chores tonight.”

  Duncan grinned and slipped off the cow. Angus beat him to the flat, and vaulted on top of the outermost of the long cows, standing with arms spread wide before leaping onto the next broad back, then the next. “Five, six, seven,” he shouted, leaping on twelve shaggy backs before landing in the heather on the far side as the last, a young bull, bellowed his disapproval.

  Duncan stood up on his mount, waiting until she reached the small herd, then launched himself onto the next cow. Three, four, five, six, seven—

  “Duncan Alexander Lawson McCallum!” came the furious call. Angus had tricked him, gone first because he had spotted Duncan’s mother coming up the trail. He lost his footing at the angry shout, slipped, rolled across the back of the bull, and as the animal gave a surprised snort, swung out on one of the creature’s long horns to land on his feet two short steps from his mother, who stood arms akimbo, a storm brewing on her face.

  “I gave consent to this adventure so ye’d learn the skills of the drover, not to invent new ways to break your bones!” she fumed, then glared at Angus, supposedly his guardian on the drive.

  “He’s a quick learner, Auntie m’am, sure enough,” his cousin stammered. “But most of the time he’s looking out over the sea, asking if every other sail might be grandfather’s.”

  His mother pushed a strand of brunette hair from her face and frowned toward the blue waters beyond the hills. “Ye both are going to fetch a sack of neeps from the village below,” she declared. Angus was crestfallen over another two-mile walk. As he shoved Duncan down the trail their mother called out once more. “And you, wee Duncan. Next summer y’er bound to me father on his ketch. That’ll be the end of y’er love of water.”

  DUNCAN AWOKE WITH A START, HIS HAND ON HIS KNIFE. SOMEONE was watching him. He sat up and turned to face Analie, perched on a low limb twenty feet away.

  “And how long have you been roosting like a bird?” he growled good-naturedly.

  “Long enough to hear you speaking in that dreadful Scottish tongue, sounding like a crow with his tail in a grinder. You were smiling. I didn’t know you knew how to smile.” She extended a piece of paper on her open palm and with a whimsical shrug let the wind carry it toward him.

  Duncan shot up and grabbed the paper just before it disappeared over the ledge. Seven names were written in crude block letters. He eyed the girl then read them out loud. “Ronald Buchanan, Albert Sinclair, Adam McIndoe, Henry Innes, Jonah Barlow, Mathias Carpenter, and Erskine Burns.”

  Analie swung down on the limb but did not let go. “There was a nice lady knitting on a rock below the barn,” she reported as she dangled in the air. “I asked why she was there and she said she was waiting for her husband. She held up what she knitted and I saw it was a tiny blue cap.” The girl dropped to the ground. “She said she didn’t want Erskine Burns to hear from someone else that he was to be a father. I asked how long had he been away. She said nigh ten weeks.”

  He saw now the little numeral ten penciled under Burns’s name, and that the others all had numbers as well. Six weeks, ten weeks, six weeks, ten weeks.

  “Henry Innes was the last to go. His mere is tres cross avec Monsieur Ross—says the boy was too young for such treacherous work. And Albert Sinclair”—she gave the name a French intonation—“has half an ear missing, lost to a damned Shawnee!”

  He glared at her reprovingly.

  “A cursed Shawnee?” she tried, then took his hand and led him toward the barnyard.

  He paused when he reached the door to the farmhouse, list in hand. The sun was setting and torches were being lit. The soldiers, out of their uniforms again, were bunched by the well, looking more like prisoners now. Several of the local Scots were passing around a crock of ale.

  “One of the soldiers called out that Campbells weren’t born, they just fell out of a horse’s bahooky,” Analie reported. “What does that mean?”

  “I suspect a mademoiselle of the world such as yourself needs no translation,” Duncan answered as he studied the assembly. There was a new tension in the air.

  “And the man shouted back that his people used to scrape McDonalds off the bottom of their boots.”

  It was as Smith had feared. Duncan saw that McQueen and the sergeant were moving among the men, trying to distract them, raising tankards with them, slapping some on the back. But nerves were frayed all around and many were aching for a fight.

  “Get your kit ready, girl,” Duncan said. “Put my rifle and pack in the shadows at the end of the barn. Then see if you can wake Tanaqua.” She nodded and he stepped inside.

  Young Clare lay asleep at the hearth with two cats curled against her. Two women glanced up as they played cards at the kitchen table. The sparsely furnished sitting room was empty, but voices came from a room beyond. He paused at the door, slightly ajar, long enough to confirm who was inside then pushed it open. James Smith, Murdo Ross, and his wife looked up from a small table stacked with books and papers.

  “I am searching for nineteen missing men,” he announced. “Seven of them are Pennsylvania runners.” He read Analie’s list of names. “I didn’t expect them all to be from the Conococheague.”

  “Not all from here but all out of this station,” Smith acknowledged. “All fleet of foot and trained to the forest. All eight took an oath to serve the committees.” He glanced uneasily at the Rosses. “Young Jess administered the oath, hands on the Bible.”

  “In the name of the king, Wilkes, and Almighty God,” Margaret Ross confirmed in a whisper.

  Smith nodded. “‘In the name of the king, Wilkes, and Almighty God I pledge to serve the committees of liberty and keep their secrets,’ Jessica had them recite, then some words about being a band of brothers that Captain Woolford gave her.”

  “Men of the frontier are giving oaths to serve men in distant towns they have never met?” Duncan asked. He noticed a plank leaning off the mantle, bearing words in black paint. If Liberty is taken from men without their consent, they are enslaved, it said, then James Otis.

  Smith nodded solemnly. “I suggested the oath should just be to Wilkes and Liberty.”

  Duncan, still struggling to understand, looked down at the list of names. “This shows seven. You said eight.”

  “Your seven plus Atticus,” Murdo put in. “I told you about the Africans. Atticus had started working a parcel of land I gave him up the valley, to earn the cash to free his wife and child. But when he heard of the missing runners he left, acting as if he knew where they were. He said a warrior does not turn his back on danger, then galloped off for Townsend’s Store to speak with the one-armed stationmaster. That was ten days ago.”

  “At first we thought them arrested by the army,” put in Margaret Ross. “But the sergeant says nae. We fear the worse now that you bring word of killings.”

  “Woolford said nineteen men had to be saved,” Duncan said. “Twelve are from the north. The others are yours. It must mean they are still alive. But how could they all be captured together?”

  “Not together,” Smith corrected. “As I said, each man has a section of the route, whether trail, river, or road. Between Shamokin and the Blue Ridge we are their station. There are stages and meeting points. If you start in one direction and know the right symbols you can roll them all up in sequence. Which is what must have happened. Three men on the northern route ten weeks ago, then four men going south six weeks ago.”

  Duncan gave voice to a question that had long nagged him. “Why? Why along the frontier? The committees are in the cities. The cities are all on the coasts, with harbors of their own. Why not communicate by ship?”

  “Woolford said it had to be,” Murdo said, “because the other route was compromised.” He looked uneasily at his wife. “Best check the girls, Peg,” he suggested.

  His wif
e stared at his knuckles, oozing blood again. “I best stay right here, Murdo Ross. I’d say it’s time I knew as much as our own dear Jess. Someone has to fill her shoes now.”

  Murdo sighed heavily and looked to Smith, who scratched at his unshaven whiskers, studying Duncan for a long moment before extracting a map of the colonies from under a pile of papers. As if to confirm Duncan’s words he pointed to Boston. “James Otis and Samuel Adams,” he observed, then indicated Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Williamsburg. Each was marked with a small red cross. “They used the sea for months with ne’er a problem,” he explained. “There’s merchants among the committeemen, so it seemed natural to use their boats. Small trading craft would raise no suspicions. But the letters stopped coming. Reports came in of a royal navy brig stopping boats on the lanes from Philadelphia to Boston. There were witnesses from a fishing scow sitting at the edge of a fog bank off Block Island. One of the committee boats, a fast sloop out of Boston, had been stopped by cannon fire. The crew were lashed to the mast and a keg of powder used to blow open her hull. The men screamed for mercy and the man in charge on the brig could be heard laughing. A second boat left Rhode Island and disappeared, no trace ever found, though the weather had been fair all along the coast.”

  “The navy? Surely that is not possible. The navy doesn’t attack British vessels.”

  “It does when they can call them smugglers or pirates. Dr. Franklin sent news from London, at great peril to his person. A secret office has been established in the Admiralty. The Kraken Club they call it. They justify themselves by saying their goal is to avoid embarrassment to the crown by taking very private actions in America. A lesson learned from the last war with the French, who were able to secretly interfere with so many of our plans. A small investment now to avoid costly wars in the future, they tell the few ministers who hear of their efforts.”

  “But the king would never approve of using the navy to commit cold-blooded murder.”

  “Dr. Franklin and his friends are convinced the king does not know.”

  “Surely a group of seagoing zealots have no hand in the frontier,” Duncan argued. “The killers at Edentown and Shamokin were not of the British navy, I assure you. They are wrapped up in the theft of a sacred mask from Onondaga, or at least trying to make it seem so.” He saw the confusion his declaration caused, and explained the disappearance of the Blooddancer and the grim evidence it had left on the path from Edentown.

  “You would have us believe that what is happening is part of some intrigue among the tribes?” Smith rejoined. “Surely you are aware that the western tribes were very bitter over the Iroquois not siding with them in their recent rebellion. With the Iroquois at their side they could have driven the colonists into the sea. I am sorry, but your friend Tanaqua has his own battle to fight. Peg has given him supplies and asked that he leave at dawn. We cannot be drawn into a fight among the tribes. We must not let it distract us, McCallum.”

  Tentacles. Suddenly Duncan remembered Woolford’s words. They have their tentacles around the bard. The mythical kraken had tentacles. “Woolford discovered treachery at Johnson Hall, something about these Kraken breaking the secrets of the committees I fear. He was racing south when he was ambushed.” He looked up, suddenly remembering the note from Rush’s cap. “A man named Patrick Henry must be warned.”

  “Henry? He’s a committeeman in Williamsburg. Why?”

  “There was an urgent note from Philadelphia. A warning I think. It had four names on it. Red Jacob was murdered. Patrick Woolford left for dead. Peter Rohrbach, murdered. The last name was Patrick Henry. The Krakens fear him for some reason.”

  “How could someone in Philadelphia know that?” Ross asked.

  “I don’t know. There was a second message taken by those who killed Ralston, one of the messengers from Philadelphia. Perhaps that would have explained it.”

  Murdo and Smith exchanged a worried glance.

  “The channels to the south are cut off,” Ross said.

  “But some messages get through,” Duncan suggested. “The runners have their secret ways.” He followed Smith’s gaze to the papers in the center of the table, and lifted one that lay on top of an open book.

  “There are secrets within secrets,” Smith acknowledged. “It was the way the network was set up, so one weak link would not destroy it all. The stations are given only what we need to know for our section of the route. Even then we get instructions sometimes that leave us at a loss. The key to our puzzle usually arrives with the next runner, passed from station to station—but not this time. No one knows why.”

  The words of the letter Duncan examined were garbled, nothing but incoherent groupings of letters.

  “Usually it is instructions from Johnson Hall, or Philadelphia, or Boston, for the stations, about the route, about new runners, about new procedures even,” Smith said. “But we are blind without the key.” Smith pounded the table in frustration. “We cannot continue.”

  Duncan leaned over the book. “The works of Shakespeare? Why would you . . .” he began, then, his mind racing, he answered his own question. “Patrick Woolford designed the code.”

  Smith nodded. “He had attended a special academy outside London two years ago,” he explained. “For battlefield intelligence, they called it. They taught secretive practices. He called this an alphabet shift. He said the way the army taught it was to use exactly the same book, the same edition at all times and all locations. They always used the Army List since every army commander has one. But he said the method he and William Johnson devised was better. Any edition will do. He left this one for us.”

  “An alphabet shift. You mean each letter of the alphabet just stands for another letter.”

  “The simplest of codes. If the first letter of the keyword is D then every D means A, E means B, F means C, and so on.”

  “But surely you can just try twenty-six versions to decode it.”

  “Not that simple. After every ten letters it shifts again, based on the next letter of the keyword. We are supposed to get a verse from a play. The first letter of the next line spoken by another player in the play after that verse becomes the base. And Woolford insisted on a calendar shift as an added precaution. Each month has a new verse, to be memorized by the runners working their way south and delivered to each stationmaster. I told Woolford it was too complicated for simple frontiersmen and he scoffed. He is a zealot when it comes to the bard.”

  “Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs,” Duncan recited. “Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.”

  Smith’s brow rose. “Sir?”

  “Richard the Second if I am not mistaken. For month four.”

  Murdo looked up with new interest, then frowned. “But we have just received a May letter in the girl’s pouch from Johnson Hall.”

  “Then it is King Lear. Childe Rowland to the dark tower came. His word was still Fi, fo, and fum.”

  With boyish excitement Murdo pulled the book closer.

  A quarter hour later they sat staring at the deciphered message. Kraken in New York and Philadelphia, it said. Until Woolford cuts out the rot, no one south. Stay the course until the world’s end.

  A shout from outside broke the silence. As they hurried out of the house, boisterous taunts were being flung across the barnyard. The soldiers had their own jug of ale now, and were passing it among them, swilling it down as if to catch up with their captors. As Smith called out for quiet, a farmer threw a stone at Sergeant McBain. The big man spun about and with a Gaelic curse charged toward the farmers, closely followed by his soldiers. Ross ran past Duncan to separate the men but the pot had already boiled over.

  Duncan hastened to the side of the house, where he found Tanaqua sipping a mug of hot tea, squatting beside his replenished pack. “There will be trouble,” he said to the Mohawk. “You have unfinished business at that cave. If some trace of the half king is to be found that must be where the trail li
es. Would that I could help you there but my path goes south. Let me at least tend to your injuries before I leave.”

  “The only injury was to my pride, to be led into the camp bound like a slave.” Tanaqua nodded toward the yard. “But you should look to the French lark before her feathers are pulled.”

  Duncan turned to see Analie in the center of the yard, standing as if paralyzed, as a man in front of her, one of the soldiers, was knocked flat by another leaping onto his back. Half the men in the yard were swinging their fists.

  Duncan took a step toward the girl, then paused, and instead darted around the house. Once in the woodshed he fumbled in the dark for what he was looking for, then, outside again, he raised the pipes and, murmuring a Gaelic prayer, began filling the bag.

  By the time he was ready, nearly every man was engaged in the brawl—kicking, pummeling, or wrestling on the ground. The women were at the door to the house, swatting with brooms at anyone who grew close, some calling out with curses that would have put the men to shame.

  He began with a Highland lament, playing from the shadows. The men and women closest to him hesitated, then ceased all movement as they heard the notes, raising their heads high, eyes questing toward the heavens as if some Highland god were calling down. When the men wrestling on the far side of the yard did not react, the sergeant bellowed and they paused, then helped each other up as they too heard the pipes.

  Duncan rounded the house and climbed onto the nearest bench as he began the doleful sounds of “The White Cockade,” a Jacobite anthem. Those still wearing bonnets snatched them off. One of the soldiers began to sing in a rich baritone. The company acted as if enchanted. Mrs. Ross started to weep and soon half the assembly, men and women alike, were wiping at their eyes. Analie hugged Duncan’s leg. Murdo Ross appeared at his side, wearing a sad smile, and nodded his approval.