The Dakota Cipher

by William Dietrich

  ‘Has there been an illness?’

  ‘Nah, another shootin’. The garrison don’t have nobody to fight so they fights each other. The colonel, he banned duelling, but every time he tries to punish someone for it, half of them is already dead, and the other half usually cut up or wounded. Besides, he’s a fighter too. Keeps the blood up, he says.’

  ‘Good God. How many have died this way?’

  ‘Half a dozen. Hell, we lose lots more to drownin’, ague, consumption, Injuns, squaw pox, and bad water. Better to die for honour than the bloody flux, eh?’

  ‘We’re on a mission from President Jefferson,’ I said, adopting a tone I hoped expressed gravity and my own importance. ‘Will the colonel return soon?’

  ‘I suppose. Unless he don’t.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The colonel, he keeps his own schedule.’

  ‘We have a letter from the president requesting we be granted military transportation. Has no advance correspondence reached you?’

  ‘You mean letters? About you?’ He shook his head. ‘Where you goin’?’

  ‘To the head of the Great Lakes.’

  ‘Head of the lakes? Grand Portage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s redcoat country, man.’ He looked at Magnus. ‘Your friend here looks to be a Scot. Ask him. They’re the ones who run the North West Company. You a redcoat? They run all the freight canoes, too.’

  ‘Magnus is Norwegian, and we want passage on an American ship. Surely there are brigs that go to Michilimackinac.’

  ‘Canoes, mostly. No American ships.’ He looked at us as if we were daft. ‘Ain’t you seen the river? Ain’t no navy. Besides, we’s army.’

  This was getting us nowhere. ‘I suppose we’d better speak to the colonel.’

  He shrugged. ‘Won’t change things.’ He looked around, seemingly surprised there was no colonel, and no chairs, either. ‘You can wait on the porch if you like if he ever comes to wait for. Or, try again tomorrow.’ He shifted in his seat, raised a thigh, and broke wind with a pop like a signal gun. ‘Sorry. Reveille.’

  We stepped back outside, surveying the bowed logs, mossy roofs, and muddy lanes that were Detroit. ‘If that’s what’s defending us, I don’t blame our boat captain for making for the tavern,’ Magnus said. ‘Let’s join him and try again in an hour or two, when the grave’s filled. This Stone may move like one.’

  So off we strode, Magnus pointing out the magnificence and stink of drying fur pelts and I commenting on the paucity of white women. There were a few pretty Indian ones, but they had the mix of native and European clothing that marked them as brides of the French. Younger ones looked to be Métis, or half-breed.

  We’d almost reached the tavern when a voice cried, ‘Look out!’

  A man bulled us against the logs of a candle shop while a black cannon ball, a four-pounder by the look of it, shot from the intersecting lane and went hurtling where we’d been standing a moment before. It disappeared between houses and there was a crash and the sound of toppled wood.

  ‘Sorry for my rudeness,’ our saviour said, ‘but you were about to walk into a bowl-lane without looking. Broken ankles are chronic in Detroit, and the town is at odds about it. There’s talk of an ordinance.’

  ‘I didn’t hear a cannon.’

  ‘The ball wasn’t fired, it was rolled. Bowls are a mania, and the debate to ban them has exercised more gums and produced less result than your American Congress. The young men throw whenever the streets are halfway dry or frozen. Keeps them occupied, Colonel Stone says.’

  ‘The players give no warning?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘We learn to watch and hop soon enough.’ He looked at me with new interest. ‘Say! Aren’t you the hero of Acre?’

  I blinked, puzzled to be recognised. ‘Hardly a hero …’

  ‘Yes, Ethan Gage! What splendid coincidence! My employers were just speaking of you! Rumour had it that you were headed this way and tongues are wagging, as you might imagine. Who can guess what your next mission might be! And now here you are! No, don’t deny it, I was told to look for a pretty longrifle and a hulking companion!’

  ‘This is Magnus Bloodhammer, son of Norway. And who are you?’

  ‘Ah! I forgot my manners in all the excitement!’ A cheer went up and another cannon ball went bouncing by. ‘Nicholas Fitch, aide to Lord Cecil Somerset, a partner in the North West Company. He’s staying at the Duff House in Sandwich across the river, with his cousin Aurora. He’s most anxious to meet you. Damn curious about the scrape at Acre. Something of a student of ancient fortification, he is. He’s an acquaintance of Sidney Smith, who you served with.’

  ‘We’re trying to meet with Colonel Stone about transport up the lakes.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think you’ll see Stone again today. Tends to go hunting after a burial. Says it clears the mind to kill something else. And the traffic north is all British anyway. Please, be our guests – we’re having a party. Quite the gathering for these parts: traders, farmers, chiefs! And Lord Somerset is going north. Perhaps we could help each other!’ He smiled.

  Well, one of my missions was to sniff out British intentions in the west. There’s no better place than a social gathering, where tongues are loosened by drink. ‘If you don’t mind men rough from a little travelling, then certainly.’

  ‘We have a bath, too!’ He winked. ‘You’ll want to be clean for Aurora!’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Alexander Duff’s house on the Canadian shore was a three-story, whitewashed trading house that transplanted British propriety to the wilderness in order to impress French voyageurs, visiting Indians chiefs, and Scottish investors. There were grand windows and a pediment porch, and inside ostentation was achieved with massive mahogany tables, brocaded chairs, silk curtains, pewter candelabra, fine china, lead crystal, and heavy silver with ivory handles. The bric-a-brac was a claim to imperialism much more effective than planting a flag.

  Magnus and I were welcomed by Alexander Duff himself, told that our fortuitous arrival indeed coincided with a gathering of notables that evening, and were shown to an adjacent bathhouse to make ourselves presentable. By dusk we were as scoured, mended, and straightened as possible. I clipped my hair to republican fashion, while Magnus trimmed the wilder boundaries of his beard to mere prophet dimensions. Our boots were so worn by our travels that Duff gave us freshly beaded moccasins that were wonderfully soft and quiet. ‘The only things for canoes,’ he said.

  Then we were primed with scotch, lubricated with brandy, and had our appetite whetted with port. This was just as well, given the shock of the guests who arrived. I’d no hash with the English and Scottish fur captains, German Jews, and French canoe captains who first crowded in, leaving their native brides on the back porch as custom demanded. They were dressed to the frontier nines, showing up in calf-high beaded moccasins, embroidered sashes, silk vests, feathered caps, and that jaunty self-confidence earned by wresting money from the frontier.

  Rather, it was the trio who arrived when the main room was already hot and close with pressed bodies and raised laughter. There was a draft as the door opened, merriment faltered, and men backed to make a space as if these new dignitaries were either renowned or contagious. In this case – by my lights as an American – they were both.

  One was a lean, hawk-nosed, long-haired white man of sixty dressed in Indian buckskin leggings tied below the knee, savage breechclout, and a long French jacket of faded blue cloth. He wore a bright officer’s gorget at his chest, like a silver crescent moon, and a hunting knife in a beaded sheath at his waist. He was a good three days unshaven, his gaze made fiercer by a sliver of bone in his nose and silver earrings the shape of arrowheads. His yellowy eyes, small under heavy brows, had a raptor’s stare.

  The other two were Indians, both tall and of imposing bearing. One was the white man’s age but shaved bald except for a scalp lock, and dressed in a black European business suit. His pate, high cheekbones, and R
oman nose were the colour of beaten copper, setting off eyes dark as a rifle ball. His manner conveyed dignity, his posture tall and straight.

  The second native, thirty years younger, had black hair to his shoulders in the Shawnee fashion and was dressed entirely in fringed buckskin. If the first chief kept his gaze remote, this one’s bright and oddly hazel eyes took us all in with a sweep, as if examining the heart and soul of each man before flickering on. He had a string of three tiny brass moons hanging from his nose, and on his chest was an antique medal of King George, brightly polished. A single feather lay in his hair and he had that electric magnetism more inherited than learnt. It was interesting that his inspection finally rested on Magnus. He said something to his companions.

  ‘Tecumseh says that one’s different,’ the white man interpreted.

  ‘A Scandinavian giant is what he is!’ said Duff. ‘We also have an American visitor, Ethan Gage. They wish to visit the west beyond Grand Portage.’

  ‘American?’ The grey-haired, grizzled white fixed on me and spoke rapidly to his companions in the native tongue. The long-haired Indian said something more, and he translated again. ‘Tecumseh says Americans go everywhere. And stay.’

  The company laughed.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,’ I said coolly.

  ‘This is Tecumseh, a chief of the Shawnee,’ Duff introduced. ‘Born with a comet, so his name means Panther Across the Sky. He thinks your country has enough land and its people should stay where they are.’

  ‘Does he now?’

  ‘His grasp of geography and politics is quite remarkable. His companion is the famed Mohawk Joseph Brant, and their translator is frontier captain Simon Girty.’

  Girty! Everyone waited for my reaction. Here was one of the most famed villains in America, an Indian fighter who had switched sides during the Revolution and even bested Daniel Boone. Enemies claimed he delighted in the torture of white captives. He just looked like a feral old man to me, but then his war was a generation in the past. ‘What’s Girty doing here?’ I blurted.

  ‘I live here, Mr Gage,’ he replied for himself, ‘as do thousands of other loyalists forced from their rightful homes by an insane rebellion. I’m a refugee farmer.’

  ‘Brant fought for the king as well, as you know,’ Duff said. ‘He’s visiting to speak to Tecumseh. All of us think highly of the young chief.’

  I couldn’t pretend to pleasantries since Girty’s infamy had reached across the Atlantic. ‘You turned on your own people like Benedict Arnold!’

  He eyed me in turn like a piece of gristle spat out on a plate. ‘They turned on me. I mustered a company for the Continentals and they denied me a commission because I was raised captive by the Indians. Then they were going to betray the very tribes that helped them! But I don’t have to explain about switching sides to Ethan Gage, do I?’

  I flushed. It was circumstance, not betrayal, that had left me bouncing between the British and French side in the Holy Land, but it was damn difficult to explain. This was Girty’s point, of course. ‘Mr Duff,’ I managed, ‘I recognise that I’m a guest on foreign soil here in Canada, and a guest in your house. You’ve the right to invite whoever you please. But I must say that if this trio were to cross the Detroit River there is every possibility they would be hanged, or worse. Simon Girty committed the worst kind of atrocities on American captives.’

  ‘That’s a damned lie!’ Girty said.

  ‘My guests are well aware of their reputation in the United States, Ethan, which is why they are in Canada,’ Duff said. ‘But Simon is right, the rumours are untrue. They’re simply brave soldiers who fought for another cause. Mr Girty in fact tried to save captives from Indians, not torture them. He was, and is, a man of honour wronged by the foolishness of your own nation and then slandered by men embarrassed by their wrongs. We share dinner tonight as a fraternity of warriors.’

  ‘Like Valhalla,’ Magnus said. ‘Where the Viking hero goes to feast.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Duff said, glancing at my companion as if he might be daft. ‘I included you, Bloodhammer, because we’re curious about your purpose. Lord Somerset wishes to meet you, and Gage has a reputation as a man – usually – fair and broad-minded.’

  His point was obvious and it would do no good to make a scene. I took a long swallow from my cup. ‘And where is Lord Somerset?’

  ‘Here!’

  And he did look the lord, descending stairs from the bedrooms above as if stepping to a coronation. Tall, fit, and impeccably dressed in green swallowtail coat and glistening black boots, he was a handsome man in his forties, with a crown of prematurely silvered hair, eyes focused at some point just above our heads, and sensually sculpted nose and lips like those marble generals in Napoleon’s hallway. He seemed born to command, and the only ones who matched him for presence were the two Indian chiefs. There was an actor’s precision to Somerset’s movements, a sheathed rapier swinging theatrically from one hip. Something in his poise, however, made me suspect that unlike many aristocrats, he actually knew how to use the weapon.

  ‘An honour to make your acquaintance, Mr Gage.’ Somerset’s rank negated the need for him to hold out his hand. ‘My friend Sir Sidney Smith has spoken quite highly of you, despite your disappearance back into France. You are not just a warrior, but something of a wizard, I understand.’ He spoke to the others. ‘Mr Gage, by reputation at least, is an electrician!’

  ‘What’s an electrician?’ Girty said suspiciously.

  ‘A Franklin man, interested in lightning, the fire of the gods,’ Somerset replied grandly. ‘Explorer, savant, and counselor. I’m flattered, Mr Duff, by the august company you’ve assembled. Any one of these men is a hero, but to put them together – well.’

  Damn it, the man had a title, and even though I’m a solid Yankee democrat, I couldn’t help but preen. I’d caught the lightning!

  ‘Nor should we neglect notice of Mr Gage’s companion, the Norwegian adventurer Magnus Bloodhammer, scholar of history and legend. A descendant of noble blood himself, a lost prince so to speak. Am I correct, Mr Bloodhammer?’

  ‘You flatter me. I’m interested in my country’s past. And yes, I trace my ancestry to the old kings before my nation lost its independence.’

  This was the first I’d heard of that. Magnus was royalty?

  ‘Now you’re here in the American wilderness, very far from Norway and its illustrious past,’ Somerset said. ‘Or are you? We may find we all have things in common, what?’

  Tecumseh spoke again.

  ‘He says the big Norwegian has medicine eyes,’ Girty translated. ‘He sees the spirit world.’

  ‘Really?’ Somerset’s appraisal was intent as a jeweller’s. ‘You see ghosts, Magnus?’

  ‘I keep an eye out.’

  The company laughed again, except for Tecumseh.

  Cups were refilled and we began to relax, even though I half-expected Girty, Brant, or Tecumseh to pull out a tomahawk at any moment and commence howling. The frontier wars during the American Revolution had been brutal and merciless, and memory of their cruelties would linger for generations. What intrigued me this night was that the two older and notorious warriors seemed almost deferential to the younger one, Tecumseh, whom I’d never heard of. And what was an English lord doing in this corner of Canada, opposite the desultory garrison of Detroit? I sidled over to Nicholas Fitch, the aide we’d met across the river. He seemed well into his cups and might say something useful.

  ‘Mr Fitch, you did not warn of such interesting company,’ I gently chided.

  ‘Joseph Brant has long buried the hatchet.’

  ‘And the younger savage?’

  ‘A war chief who fought you Americans for the Ohio country. Beat you twice, he did, before Fallen Timbers. Hasn’t given up, either. Has an idea to outdo Pontiac by uniting every tribe east of the Mississippi. He’s an Indian Napoleon, that one.’

  ‘And you British support him in this scheme to set the frontier on fire?’

/>   ‘We British are the only ones who can properly control Indians like Tecumseh, Mr Gage,’ said Lord Somerset, coming up to my elbow. Fitch retreated like a well-trained butler. ‘We can be your nation’s closest friend or deadliest enemy, depending on your willingness to set reasonable boundaries on expansion. There’s room for all of us on this vast continent – British, Indian, and American – if we keep to our own territories. Tecumseh may threaten war, but only with our help. He could also be the key to a remarkable peace – if your new president can rein your immigrants in.’

  ‘But not room for the French?’ The British, after all, had driven the French out of Canada some thirty-eight years before.

  ‘Ah. There are rumours that France is retaking possession of Louisiana. And now you come, fresh from Napoleon’s court, reportedly headed that way. A remarkable coincidence, no?’

  ‘I’m beginning to understand why I was invited to this gathering, Lord Somerset. You’re as curious about my mission as I am about an English aristocrat in the wilderness.’

  ‘My role is no secret. I have investments and am on my way to Grand Portage to discuss a future alliance with our primary competitors, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Again, cooperation might suit better than competition. And I hear you were once in the employ of John Astor’s fur company?’

  ‘As a young labourer, nothing more.’

  ‘And that he called on you in New York?’

  ‘Good God, are you spying on me?’

  ‘No need to. This is a vast continent geographically, but a small one when it comes to rumour and dispatch, especially for those of us in the fur trade. Fact travels with each dip of the paddle, and rumour seems to fly even faster. Ethan Gage, from Syria to the Great Lakes? How curious. And rumour has it your departure from New York was in haste after a rather spectacular explosion. Not that I credit such tales.’

  He knew entirely too much. ‘I like to see new things.’

  He smiled. ‘And you will.’ He turned towards the staircase and the crowd’s conversation faltered once more. ‘My cousin, for example.’