Blood of the Oak: A Mystery

by Eliot Pattison

  His belt knife and penknife were gone, but nothing else in his pockets and belt pouches seemed to have been touched by his captors. With his fingers he probed for wounds on his friends and found none, then lightly touched the torn skin on his forehead, remembering how he had fallen onto the hearthstone. He fingered the stubble on his chin and looked up at the bright light seeping through the little hole. He had been unconscious for hours, through the night and into the middle of the next day. An acrid, metallic taste lay on his tongue, and he remembered the spiced ale and the fertile beds of herbs beside the inn. In the medicinal herb beds had been nightshade, the source of belladonna, the most powerful of sedatives. A heavy dose would kill a bull. A carefully administered dose could render a man comatose for many hours, even a day or more. The turncoat Townsend at least had been fastidious in his doses. He braced himself in a corner, cradling his head on his knees, and drifted into sleep again.

  When he woke the light from the nail hole had faded into a smudge of grey. He stretched his legs.

  “Are ye fit, McCallum?” Murdo asked.

  “Fit enough.”

  “That bastard innkeeper brought out a loaf and a pitcher of ale for us in the stables. I thought you must have explained who we were and it was his way of extending hospitality to allies. We were fair parched and drank deep of his damn brew. Next thing I know we’re in this stinking black box.”

  “Tanaqua?” Duncan called into the shadows.

  “Our warrior friend still sleeps. Where are we bound?”

  “Deeper into Virginia. Toward the river lands. I saw him, Murdo, spoke with him, though I knew not whom he was until they had already drugged me. Hobart, the man who who helped the killers from Edentown.”

  “The bastard Townsend played us for fools.”

  “Aye,” Duncan said, but then recalled how the innkeeper had warned him, had even implored him to flee. “The girl?”

  “Last I knew, sleeping in the loft of that stable with our gear. Alone and unaware of the danger.”

  The words brought a long silence. Duncan had decided that Ross had drifted into sleep when the Scot’s voice reached out to him. “I was only fifteen when me and my four brothers left Ulster to return to the Highlands to fight for Prince Charlie. Killed my first Englishman at the battle of Prestonpans. At Culloden they ordered me to hold the horses and off they ran yelling the Stuart’s name. But instead of fighting like men the English bastards filled the air with grapeshot from their cannons. My clan was at the front, cut down in the first discharge of the guns. So I wound up in the dungeon at Sterling Castle. Dark like this, with just the rags on my back against the cold. Rats picked at my toes when I tried to sleep. I learned to curl up my legs close and wait for ’em. Just reach out and hope you grabbed the tail so ye could dash ’em against the stone. The guards would piss in the porridge that was our only food so those rats kept me alive for months. They hanged every man until I was the last, and ready to die, but on the gallows the laird of the castle said I was but a bairn, that he grew weary of killing. They cast me out with a loaf of bread and some new trous to cover my nakedness. I went right back to Culloden to search for the bones of my brothers.” The big man shifted, leaning his back against the wall beside Duncan. “I remember seeing brown McCallum plaid there, sticking out of the mud.”

  Neither spoke for a long time.

  “Most survived the battle,” Duncan finally whispered. “I was in Holland, sent to school where I would be safe and learn the modern ways, my father said. I didn’t know anything until the schoolmaster pulled me out of class one day and handed me a journal from Edinburgh. He said I was excused to chapel. I didn’t understand. I went outside and sat by the canal to read the paper. When I saw my father and brothers on the list of the hanged I stepped to the edge of the canal. I was going to leap in but the schoolmaster had followed me, and pulled me back inside, to the chapel. He said my duty now was to finish the education my father had wanted for me, to honor them by having a full and long life.”

  Silence descended once more. Duncan slept again. When he woke Tanaqua was whispering a low chant in his native tongue. Duncan recognized enough words to know it was one of the old prayers, the invocations to the old spirits that were being lost to the tribes as elders died. Fewer and fewer of their offspring showed an interest in learning the ancient words.

  The road they traveled was smooth, worn from heavy use. Duncan heard cows mooing, horses whinny, and curses from the driver, impatient with the slow progress of his team. His stomach ached from hunger, his tongue raged from thirst. He leaned into a corner, bracing himself again in a despairing, fitful slumber.

  Suddenly they stopped and the small hatch-like door flew open. It was the middle of the night. The man at the door tossed in half a loaf of bread, so hard it struck the floor like a stone, then a clay demijohn. Duncan and Tanaqua rushed to the opening, then fell back. Two men standing ten feet away aimed muskets at them. The man at the door gave a gloating grin and slammed it. A heavy locking bar thudded into place.

  The bread shattered when Ross tried to break it, and they had to probe the soiled straw for the pieces. “The muskets,” Murdo said as he chewed. “They had bayonets. Curious.”

  Duncan tried to visualize again what he had seen in the brief glimpse outside. Ross was right.

  “Military,” Tanaqua observed. “Only soldiers have bayonets.”

  Duncan explained to the Mohawk what he had learned from Smith about the navy secretly opposing the committees of correspondence.

  “Marines would have bayonets,” Ross said, “but there can’t be marines in the middle of Virginia.” Duncan heard him uncork the big jar then take a long swallow.

  “Even the water tastes like piss,” the big Scot grumbled.

  Duncan extended his hand in the shadows, took the jug, and wet his fingers to sample the contents.

  “It’s drugged,” he declared. “Probably the same belladonna they used on us at the inn.”

  “If they wanted us dead,” Tanaqua observed, “we would never have made it out of that village alive. A man can die of thirst,” he added, “but not from sleep.” As the Mohawk took the jug from Duncan to drink, Murdo slumped against the wall, already drifting away. Tanaqua took a long swallow. “Rest now,” he suggested, “for we are moving to where the Blooddancer wants us to be.” He handed the jug to Duncan.

  Nightmares gripped him in his stupor. Men tied to the masts of a sinking ship screamed for mercy. Sarah and Conawago stood at a fresh grave beside that of Jessica Ross, the stone marked Patrick Woolford. The dead and tortured Atticus kept riding toward him on his bloodstained horse, raising his hands to beckon Duncan. He woke with a start, his heart racing, his brow covered with sweat. Sarah’s father had vowed such a tormented death for Duncan, though Atticus’s fate would seem merciful compared to what Lord Ramsey would do to Duncan if they were ever to meet again. The aristocrat was in some far land, probably Jamaica or even England, but Duncan loathed him for the way his unnatural fear had wormed its way into his soul. When he drifted back to sleep the nightmares came again.

  “NOT THE ROPE!” DUNCAN SHOUTED AS COLD WATER ON HIS FACE woke him. He had been having another nightmare of Scotland, this time of men in chains, including himself, being herded toward a gallows.

  He spat the water from his mouth and wiped his eyes. He was in a pit, or rather a large square yard dug into the earth so that the level of the ground was chest high, with a fence of rough planks above. Three posts were sunk in the ground in the center of the yard, each with an iron ring near the top. A man was tied to one. Duncan wiped more muddy water from his eyes then leapt up as he saw it was Tanaqua. He managed two steps toward his friend before his feet were jerked out from under him. His ankles were bound by manacles, which were themselves chained to the nearest of the posts.

  Behind him someone exploded into a wheezing laugh. He turned to see a thickset man with eyes like bright pebbles whose thin black hair was combed over a balding head. With one hand the
man held his wide belly, with the other a leather-clad club as long as his arm, mounted with a stained pewter ball at the end. “What a sight!” he proclaimed in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. “You northern boys think you can just come down and have your way. But you are mine now, and your days of sassing and nosing into unwelcome places are over.”

  Four men emerged from the barn that formed one side of the enclosure, each carrying an appendage of Murdo Ross, who was obviously still groggy. With the speed of those habituated to their work they closed manacles around his ankles, hammering in the pins that clamped them tight, then pulled his arms out of his shirt, bound his wrists, tied a rope to the knot between his hands, and looped it through the iron ring of the center post. With a great heave two of them hauled him upright like a side of beef. His shirt fell away, exposing the chalky flesh of his broad back.

  “I had the good fortune,” the stout man loudly declared as he paced along the line of posts, “of being raised by an uncle who was a trainer of horses.” He paused at a brazier and pushed an iron deeper into its hot coal fire. “Some overseers just release fresh stock to the fields without their ever having felt the kiss of the cat. But my uncle taught me that you always teach respect first.” He reversed the club in his hand and untied a strap, releasing the cover to reveal long ribbons of leather. It was a flogging whip, fashioned after the cat-o’-nine-tails used on naval ships. Tanaqua instantly understood, and braced himself against his post as the tails snapped at his back.

  “You red boys are just the damnedest thing,” the man declared in his high-pitched voice as he struck Tanaqua a second time. “Ye never know when to go down. What you don’t understand is I don’t care if you stand or fall. I value the turd of my hound more than I value your life,” he declared in a matter-of-fact tone, punctuated by another wheezing laugh, then slashed the leathers down onto the Mohawk’s back again. The long welts were opening, oozing blood. The lashes glittered in the sunlight, and to his horror Duncan saw that rivets had been fastened into the tips, acting like little blades each time they struck.

  With surprising, snakelike speed the man turned and cracked the lashes against Ross’s back, leaving little threads of blood that quickly widened as the whip struck again and again. Murdo stirred with a moan and with a mighty strain of his muscles tried to pull out of his bindings.

  “Good!” the stout man screeched as two of the men hauled Duncan to his post. “The more ye struggle the quicker ye learn.” He spun again and tapped the pewter ball against Duncan’s shoulder. “My name is Gabriel. Like the angel. Angel Gabriel of Galilee. Superintendent of overseers. We have only a few rules. Never disobey me. Never disrespect me. Breakfast at the dawn bell, promptly into the fields a quarter hour later, never stopping except when the bell signals a meal. No cursing in front of me or any visitor from the manor house,” he said, gesturing to a large two-story brick and clapboard structure at the end of the long fields, nearly half a mile away. With an impatient gesture he summoned a man from the barn who led another man by a thick strap fastened around his neck. The man’s clothes were little more than rags. He did not seem to be resisting but Duncan could tell by the tension on the strap that the prisoner was not letting the man at the other end set the pace. He was tall and walked erect despite his obvious exhaustion. His black hair was matted with filth, and Duncan wondered why the hair at his crown was longer, then suddenly realized it had once been a scalp lock. The man was an Iroquois, and his flash of recognition when he saw Tanaqua was so fleeting neither Gabriel nor his escort noticed. Duncan saw now that men were attentively watching from the upper windows of the barn, some of which seemed to have sheets of cloth on them like curtains. The building had been converted into quarters for the overseers.

  “Try to escape or resist us,” Gabriel continued, “and we brand an arm with an S for slave. Try again and we brand the other arm. Then the two cheeks. Try a fifth time and we will snip your stones.” He made a cutting motion with his two fingers. “No longer a man!” he crowed. “If you survive that and are fool enough to try one last time, we will sell you to the sugar plantations in the Indies. Meaning we get paid by some fool for the right to bury you in the rot of some tropical hellhole.”

  The silent Iroquois’s forearms bore the ugly scars of the branding iron, though the mark of the branding iron on both was blurred, meaning he must have struggled when it had been applied. The handlers seemed to have learned their lesson, for now three of them pinned him to the wall with pitchforks pressed into his abdomen and chest. One of the men handed Gabriel the red-hot iron.

  “Hyanka!” Tanaqua shouted. Duncan realized he had heard the captive’s name.

  Duncan could smell the burning flesh as the iron was pressed against the Iroquois’s cheek. Hyanka did not flinch, only kept his eyes fixed on a distant cloud.

  Tanaqua turned away to hide his emotion. Gabriel mistook it for a sign of fear. “Good. Lesson understood.” He tossed his whip to one of the overseers and pointed to Duncan. “A dozen, to get better acquainted.”

  Duncan tried to twist as the whip cracked but his bindings held him tight. The first five strikes seemed endurable, but then the whip ends dug into the flesh that had already been opened. He tried to think of Sarah, of Conawago, to banish the pit from his mind. But suddenly he knew only the shrieking pain of the lash.

  THEY WERE SLAVES. AS THEY WERE SHOVED ONTO A DUSTY ROAD along the fields, Gabriel explained that the manacles would stay on for the first few days, then would be removed if they observed the rules. The superintendent mounted a big grey horse and rode behind them, laughing as the brutes who escorted them slapped rods of split cane on their raw backs to keep them at a half trot. They reached a long shed with narrow slits, a handsbreadth wide, for windows. The only entry was through a barred door in the center of the back wall, facing the fields, inside a yard defined by thick logs laid on the ground in a U against the building. In the center of the yard was a large oak tree. Along the back row of logs were two blood-stained punishment posts.

  The superintendent hummed an old hymn as he dismounted and led them into their quarters. He was clearly enjoying himself.

  Straw pallets covered in filthy sackcloth were strewn across the double-tiered platform along each wall. Sacks of personal belongings hung on pegs along the walls. The breeze that blew through the slitted windows stirred hanging sheets of tattered muslin that revealed, behind them, a bench with holes running along the far wall. “All the conveniences,” Gabriel snickered as he pointed to the latrine.

  On the walls, names and marks had been inscribed in charcoal, in many different hands. Betsy, Margaret, Rebecca, he read and also saw crude drawings of children, dogs, and horses. On one section the names of seven men had been recorded in block letters. He recognized the names of the missing Pennsylvania men. The last name, McIndoe, had a line through it. By the door were slash marks in groups of five. Twenty groups and three single lines. One hundred and three days.

  “The field overseers carry clubs and whips,” the superintendent explained with an amused expression. “But they also have lovely tin horns. One blast of the horn and my pharaohs fly down on the wind. Most have clubs and swords. Those riders are my elite guard. They are much less merciful than me,” he declared with another of his hideous laughs. He continued as he led them back outside. “Some enjoy their own particular instruments. One has a net and trident. I saw him pierce a man at forty yards with that forked spear. Lord, what a mess. What the dogs didn’t finish we gave to the pigs,” he chuckled, then quickly sobered. “Leave this stable or work crew without permission, and you become fair game.”

  Duncan, his manacles clinking as he walked, paused at the top of the steps and stared at the landscape. The breeze carried the scent of brackish water. Across the wide, flat bottomland, just beyond the compound of the manor house, the masts of two small ships could be seen. The land before them was nothing but clear fields intersected with packed earth tracks, drainage ditches, and low hedgerows. Along the edge o
f the vast fields were long buildings not unlike their own sleeping shed, with the same slit openings for windows, and he realized they had all been built as drying sheds for tobacco. In the fields, teams of mules and horses pulled harrows. Where the teams had done their work, crews were shaping the soil in mounded rows. Farther down the rows, separate crews of Africans—men, women, and a few children—bent over the long rows planting seedlings.

  “The best Oronoco on the river,” Gabriel declared, then pointed to a cluster of three long sheds on the opposite side of the fields. “Our Africans live there in the original sotweed sheds. If one of them catches an escapee, or tells of suspicious conduct by any of you, they get a pipe and a pouch of leaf. Some of those blackamoors do love a good pipe.”

  Murdo stumbled in his chains as he descended the stair. Gabriel swung his cat through the air as if he might deserve more punishment.

  As Duncan stepped in front of his friend he felt blood trickling down his own back. “Why?” he demanded of the superintendent. “Why would you treat us so?”

  “Treason tends to sour the milk of human kindness.”

  “There is no treason but that determined by a court of law,” Duncan shot back.

  Gabriel’s mouth curled up in another sneer and he pointed to the groups of workers in the fields. “We got African slaves,” he declared, then he indicated a smaller group working with the teams near the manor house. “We got a few indentured slaves. And then we got you. The slaves of the manure stables, our Judas slaves.” He nodded over Duncan’s shoulder.

  A burly man, nearly as big as Murdo Ross and thicker in the shoulders, stood grinning at the three new slaves. His head was shaven. On his neck was a tattoo of a skull. Beside him was a younger man, barely out of his teens, watching them with an impatient expression. “Trent and young Winters are your field bosses,” Gabriel explained, and nodded at the big man. “You don’t want to get Trent angry. How do they say it—” he rubbed his chin. “Ah, yes! He’ll grind your bones to make his bread. And don’t even think about running,” he reminded them, and pointed toward the big two-story barn at the base of the wooden hills, where they had been flogged.