Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  The hatch cut into the heavy iron-studded door was eight by ten inches, big enough only to pass food through, but he discovered that if he sat on the floor at a certain angle from the hatch, he could often see the face of the sentry beside the door. During the first day, none would acknowledge him. One shoved his bayonet into the hole to discourage Duncan’s attempt at dialogue. But on the second day the guard that came after the morning muster wore a kilt.

  Duncan sat on the floor so he could see the man’s stern, ruddy countenance and began softly whistling Highland songs. Beginning with “My Bonnie Highland Laddie,” which caused the guard to turn in surprise toward the cell before returning to his sober vigilance, Duncan switched to “Charlie Is My Darling,” then the doleful “Tears of Scotland.” The guard did not react again, but his face softened with a faraway melancholy.

  Duncan asked him, in Gaelic, what his clan was. The sentry’s eyes flickered, but he would not reply. Duncan began relating tales of his own life as a boy. “My mother’s people were boatwrights and sailors,” he explained. “My father’s people were mostly cattle drovers. My favorite day of summer was when we moved the herd to the high pastures in the mountains of Skye, the Cuillin. Do you ken them? My mother and her sister would wake me up in the wee hours and we would climb up through the blooming heather to a ledge that looked out over the waters to the east and north. She called it the Shining Place, for the way the sun lit the world from there, making everything glow at dawn. We’d get there in time to watch the sunrise and we’d eat a breakfast of bread and honey and dried herring. My aunt would break out in old songs about battles of fierce warriors of our clans against giants and witches. I wonder, is there anyone still alive in the Highlands who knows those songs? Sometimes,” Duncan continued, “she’d stop in the middle of a verse and point out over the water and say, ‘There’s the old rogue his very self!’ and I’d see my grandfather’s trading sloop that he sailed among the islands. You could tell it from far away because he dyed his sails red. He told me he did that to hide all the pirate blood he had to spill, and I was young enough to believe him. I remember thinking what a grand world it was, what with me in the Shining Place and having warriors and drovers and pirate killers for kin. Once, I had a vivid dream about galloping on the back of a shaggy cow, sword in hand, charging to do battle with a pirate horde.”

  The sentry’s posture relaxed and he cocked his head toward Duncan, who began to speak of cattle drives and long sails up the remote bays, where his grandfather would anchor so they could watch for selkies, the half-human, half-seal women. “If I’d misplace something when on his boat, my grandfather would say, ‘See, your auntie selkie came up in the night and made off with it.’ He would tie a ribbon to my wrist and say that was to let the selkies know I was already claimed by this branch of the family, because otherwise they’d take me to their undersea caves and I’d have naught but raw fish to eat the rest of my days.”

  Duncan quieted, drinking from the gourd of water that was provided each morning; then he watched the rectangle of light move across the wall.

  “Buchanan,” came a whisper. “My clan is Buchanan.”

  “Then Loch Lomand’s your land,” Duncan replied. “I had a cousin who married a Buchanan. Clarior hinc honos,” he added, remembering the clan motto. “Brighter hence the honor.”

  The guard had a rich tenor voice. “I remember McCallums driving a herd of great hairy cows through the valley once. My father was in a bit of a tear over it, worried about damage to our own pastures, but when he rode off to complain, he came back with a smile on his face.”

  “My uncles always carried kegs of Highland whiskey to pay tolls along the way.”

  A tiny grin cracked the sentry’s gruff countenance.

  “Tell me, Corporal Buchanan, what a company of the Forty-Second is doing back at Ticonderoga. I thought you all had been ordered to Cork.”

  “Aye. All except us, on special detached service to the Northern Theater. The generals and colonels say we dress things up. Some days we go out and dig up Highland bones from the battlefield.”

  “Things?”

  “Ceremonies with the tribes. Parades. Courts-martial and punishments.”

  “Courts-martial, here at the fort?”

  “Aye. Lots of pomp and ceremony if it’s a high crime. Escort the judges, roll the drums before sentencing. Full-dress uniform and solemn pipes for a hanging. Colonel Hazlitt will have us go up to Montreal with him soon when he goes to preside at an important trial.”

  “I was in Loch Lomand once as a boy,” Duncan volunteered. “I remember little pockets of mist drifting over the lake, and my sister insisting they were all ghosts.”

  “ ‘As weel may I weep, o’ yet dreams in my sleep,’ ” Buchanan said.

  It took Duncan a moment to recognize the old ballad about forlorn lovers longing to meet at Loch Lomond. “ ‘But his arms and his breath were as cold as the earth and his heart’s blood ran red in the heather,’ ” he continued, singing a verse not as well as known as the one about meeting on the bonny banks of the lake. “It was about Culloden,” he ventured after a moment, knowing that the battle in which the English king had destroyed the Scottish rebels was a tender subject for many of the Highlanders who now fought for the son of that same king. “The one who wrote it was in a cell, condemned to the gallows after the battle.”

  “Aye, so I’ve heard,” Buchanan stiffly acknowledged.

  “After Culloden, it took over an hour for them to hang all the McCallum men who had survived the battle. Then they went over the mountains and finished the rest of my family. All the women. Then the children. Then the horses, the cows, and finally the dogs.”

  Buchanan had no reply.

  “One of my companions was here with the Black Watch in ’58,” Duncan mentioned after several breaths.

  “Oh, aye. Munro,” the corporal acknowledged. “He took us to the field where so many died and spoke to us of that dark day. Later, he went off by himself to say a prayer where his friend Archibald died.”

  “So he is still here?”

  Buchanan took a moment to collect his answer. “That Lieutenant Beck says he has authority from minister such-and-such in London. Says no one can see you, not even the colonel. Hazlitt’s none too happy, but Beck says it’s none of his affair. A rider came in with dispatches for Beck from Albany. He ordered that Indian reverend to leave, but the colonel says his authority does not extend so far and that order would have to come from the Indian superintendent. The reverend has set up a tent outside the gate and holds evening prayer meetings, inviting all the off-duty soldiers and giving each a mug of applejack for the trouble if they endure the whole service.”

  “You said you are going to Montreal?” Duncan asked after several minutes.

  “Aye. The colonel is on the panel chosen to conduct the trial of the famous major.”

  “Major Rogers.”

  “The very one. The toast of the army during the war, but now—” The steps of the guard coming up the stairs to relieve Buchanan interrupted him. The corporal quickly opened his cartridge box and extracted a length of sausage, which he tossed to Duncan, then tapped his musket on the floor and returned to his vigilant posture.

  LONG AFTER THE SUN HAD passed overhead and no longer lit the window, Duncan sat on the floor studying the arc he had drawn on the wall. An arc was a way of connecting things, he realized, then began writing pieces of his puzzle on the whitewashed wall above and below the arc. At its beginning, he wrote “sinking of the Arcturus,” then reconsidered, rubbing out the letters and writing “St. Francis raid.” After a moment he added “1759.” It had been a year in which worlds had been turned upside down, a year in which Englishmen rushed to buy each new edition of their newspapers for fear of missing the news of still another English victory. Quebec had fallen on September 13. Duncan stepped back a moment, trying to remember the chronology of that all-important year and what he had read in the archive files. Rogers had left for St. Francis on Se
ptember 13, the very same day. He wrote the date on the wall, and “Quebec falls” beside it. Rogers could not have known of the victory, but the French contact he had met at St. Francis before the raid would have known. Duncan stared at the date. Quebec had fallen. The French had known then that they could not prevail simply by holding on to Montreal, which they lost the next year. Any shrewd strategist would have known that all was lost in September, but Rogers had his orders—and his lust for punishing the Abenaki. St. Francis had been a sanctuary, a base for planning raids on New England, a stronghold built by Jesuits decades earlier, a place considered far from the reach of the English, where secrets and even military resources might be hidden. Someone had questioned Father LaBrosse years later, and his reply had been that there was no hidden treasure at St. Francis, then or now. It wasn’t the denial that was meaningful, it was its implicit acknowledgment that the treasure existed.

  By 1759 the Jesuits had begun to loathe King Louis for his jealous persecution of their order. Patriots of New France had begun to loathe the king in Paris for failing to send the promised soldiers and supplies and funds that could have won the war for them. Major Rogers made a connection with the French during the raid, as proved by Labrosse’s statement that he had allowed religious valuables and women and children to escape. Now Rogers was accused of collaborating with the French against the British king. But which French? The spies who sank the Arcturus had come from Paris, but those in St. Francis were a different breed of French altogether. Yet the spies from Halifax had an Abenaki assassin.

  “Damn!” Duncan threw his writing stick against the wall in frustration. He was unequal to the task of fitting the pieces together. Rogers, Beck, the French spies, the Abenaki, the Jesuits, and even Hancock and Livingston were caught up in some great game, and Duncan did not understand the rules.

  He began putting new calibrations on his wall. “Rogers learns of Quebec” came next, for he was certain that although the news did not change Rogers’s plan for the raid, it did change his mind about the secrets he had collected at St. Francis. Duncan added “Hahnowa dies.” Rogers’s wife had died just after his return from the raid. Like the seasoned woodsman who takes a kill only when necessary for survival, Rogers had decided to stand down after the raid, to lower his rifle, keep his powder dry, and cache his bounty for future use.

  Next came “Crown Point road work,” which had been a subterfuge used by Rogers to quietly take his wife’s body to their favorite place, and hide more secrets with her at a place no one would disturb. Years passed. The French became more active. Horatio Beck and his handlers became active. French farmers came back to Chevelure. Beck visited Ticonderoga to study the St. Francis files. The French agents infiltrated Livingston’s maritime operations and stalked a ledger to Boston harbor. Duncan paused, considering the sequence. There were secret offices in ministries in both Paris and London at work. Which had acted first?

  He wrote “Henri Comtois and Philippe board Arcturus in Halifax,” then “Arcturus sinks, ledger recovered, and Oliver, the first of the rangers, murdered.” Then, “theft at Hancock warehouse” and “murder of Chisholm.” He paused again, then wrote “Secret Ledger” and “King’s Treasure” in bigger letters below the entries. The ledger had come from London, and he had the sense that it had been in the works for years. It was the keystone, the linchpin that held all together, but Duncan could not make it fit. He inserted new entries: “arrest of Rogers,” “inquiries about treasure,” then “warrant for D M,” and “attempted kidnapping of Will Sterret.” Below “Secret Ledger” he wrote two names: John Hancock and Robert Livingston. Below “Hidden Treasure” he wrote the name of the only man who had mentioned it, Father LaBrosse. In a separate column, near the corner of the wall, he recorded the names of those whose powder horns had been etched with secrets and their images. “Ebenezer Brandt,” he wrote, and sketched the chimney rock beside the name. Daniel Oliver was next, with an image of a church and a canoe. Finally came Josiah Chisholm, with a map indicating Chevelure. After a moment, for no reason other than it nagged him, he wrote “Williams, Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard.”

  DUNCAN’S NIGHTMARES GREW WORSE. FOR years he had had visions of his father’s long-dead corpse hanging from the gibbet by the tollhouse in Inverness, raising its shriveled arm to point at him, accusing him of not having died for the clan. Now there was another gibbet, from which the body of Conawago hung, and the old Nipmuc too pointed at him, but Duncan never understood what Conawago was accusing him of. Sometimes Conawago was on a mountain trail, and he looked up, weeping, as he held the dead body of Ishmael. Then there was the worst dream, repeated over and over. Sarah and a strange man whom Duncan somehow knew to be her husband were being hacked to death by British bayonets.

  With a groping hand blindly exploring the narrow chimney, he found a long edge of stone and with bloody knuckles kept hitting it until it broke away. He jammed it into a seam between wall planks below the window and used it as a step so that he could stare outside for extended periods, sometimes watching stars, sometimes clawing futilely at the base of the oaken bars with his fingernails. By diffuse moonlight he went back to the chimney, and though he paid the price of a painful spider bite that kept his hand numb and swollen for an hour, he finally pulled away another stone lip that he sharpened on the hearthstone, and he went back to work on the base of the bars. Even if he did manage to knock them away so he could fit through the window, he doubted he could survive the fall on the other side. He wasn’t doing it for his freedom, he realized, he was doing it for the defiance, for the honor of the prisoner he had become.

  Corporal Buchanan, who had opened the door to retrieve Duncan’s slop pot and deliver his breakfast, paused with the bowl of porridge in one hand. Duncan, ravenous, took the bowl while Buchanan gazed at his decoration of the white plaster wall. “Ye been busy, McCallum.”

  “Tracing the mysteries that would stretch my neck,” Duncan said between mouthfuls.

  “Rogers,” Buchanan said. “St. Francis,” he added, apparently mouthing the words he recognized. “And more Scots in your puzzle, I see.”

  Duncan lowed his wooden spoon. “Sorry?”

  Buchanan pointed to the last line of the column in the corner. “Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard,” he said. “Now there’s some wild Ghaidheil.”

  “They’re Scots? With that name?”

  “Aye, because the lineage of the regiment goes back centuries, through the mists of time, as they say.” He saw Duncan’s confusion. “The Royal Scots, McCallum. Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguards, they call them, like they call us the Ladies from Hell, as if they were so old they were there at Jerusalem. Williams, he was their captain. Thought ye had him there ’cause he was a close friend of Major Rogers, went to St. Francis with him and all.”

  Duncan stepped to the wall and underlined the name of the Scottish unit, then eyed Buchanan with new curiosity. “Are you up to a little mischief, Corporal?”

  Buchanan grinned. “Life can be mighty boring here.”

  Duncan proceeded to tell him how to find the box of powder horns.

  ON THE FOURTH DAY, THE lock on the door rattled and Corporal Buchanan and another kilted soldier stepped in, then halted and pounded the butts of their muskets on the floor as Colonel Hazlitt appeared in the space between them. Duncan found himself standing as erect as the soldiers.

  The colonel made a fluttering motion with his hand. “At ease, son, at ease.” The colonel, appearing oddly uncomfortable, surveyed the room, then leaned into Buchanan’s ear, and the corporal backed out of the cell. “I don’t know whom to believe, McCallum,” Hazlittt began. “I have been beseeched almost hourly by your friends. I accept that you have done works of justice and compassion for settler and Indian alike in this inhospitable frontier, that you even gave valuable service in the war, but . . . damnit, man, you have made enemies in very high places. I may control this fort, but Beck has letters from London. There is only so much I can do.”

  “Letters from what high pl
aces?”

  Hazlitt sighed. “From the civilians the generals are beholden to. Members of Parliament, men who have the king’s ear.”

  “Men whom you would trust, Colonel?” Duncan asked.

  Hazlitt winced without reply.

  “Was it Horatio Beck who had Rogers arrested? Did you know that Beck lost a great sum of money to Rogers and has barely escaped being committed to debtors’ prison more than once?” Duncan had recalled the words Hayes had spoken in Agawam. Could it be true, could Beck himself be the fulcrum, the hinge on which all the events turned?

  The colonel eyed him with new interest. “You have proof of this?”

  Duncan reached into the waist of his britches and produced the letter from Hancock, worse for wear but still readable.

  Hazlitt read it twice. “Hancock?” he asked. “John Hancock of Boston?”

  “The same. He and Robert Livingston asked me to find those who sank the Arcturus. Beck wants the glory for himself. And if Rogers hangs, Beck’s debt to him is extinguished.”

  Hazlitt stared at the letter for several heartbeats. “I am not sure a mere letter can be taken into evidence.”

  “Send for Hancock. Send for Livingston.”

  “There’s no time, McCallum. For you or Rogers. Beck now says you were in alliance with Rogers, who is accused of conspiring with the French to help them take back the western lands.”

  “Based on what? Beck’s accusations?”

  “Apparently there is evidence of a secret meeting between Rogers and the French in the west somewhere.”

  “Meeting with the French, or meeting with some Jesuits?”