Eye of the Raven

by Eliot Pattison

“Forgive me,” their host apologized. “Where was I? . . . The governor assumes that eventually the Grand Council of the Six Nations will come around to the compromise since they will be shamed if they go home without his bounty.”

  “Compromise?”

  “It has been the talk of my friends’ dining tables ever since we heard of the convoy reaching Lancaster. Virginia receives no land but has its revenge by the hanging. The Iroquois avoid having the covenant chain broken by agreeing that the crime was the work of one man, not an act of war. Pennsylvania maintains the peace, getting all to agree the killings were contrived by the French, emphasizing the need for us all to stay together in common cause. And confirming need for troops at Fort Pitt. That,” Marston said with a bitter flourish, “is the stuff of statecraft. It is how we deal with friends of the French.”

  The words brought an unexpected sound from the shadows, a choked-off sob. The maid had lingered in the hallway.

  “Catherine!” Marston gasped. “I meant no—” He fumbled with his words, then gestured the woman forward. She was a plain, sturdy woman in her thirties, her careworn face averted as she inched into the room.

  “Do you require anything further, sirs?” she asked in a brittle voice. “Some more claret perhaps?”

  She was, Duncan realized, trying desperately to control her emotions. He looked in confusion at Marston, understanding neither what had aggrieved the woman nor what caused the scientist’s discomfort.

  “What I would like most of all,” Duncan ventured, “is to ask if you are acquainted with other serving women in the city. I am looking for an unmarried woman, the sister of Mr. Townsend.”

  Catherine burst into tears. “I believe, Duncan,” Conawago said as he guided her to a chair, “that we have found her.”

  Duncan flushed with embarrassment. He should have known. Marston had taken in his partner’s sister when Townsend was lost.

  “As Catherine steadfastly reminds me,” Marston said, “there is no proof certain that her good brother is dead.”

  Duncan sighed and looked away for a moment, dreading the pain of the words he had to say. “Your brother had an elegant wooden box, with a clever sliding lid and an inlaid pattern of diamonds on the front.”

  “I gave it to him when he finished his schooling!” Miss Townsend exclaimed.

  “I have that box in my pack. It was returned to me by some Iroquois. With tribal markings scratched on the cover.”

  The woman quickly turned away. She brought her apron to her face.

  “No one has produced his body,” Marston asserted.

  “I fear the wilderness swallows up bodies,” Conawago observed.

  The woman, Duncan reminded himself, had first reacted not when Duncan had mentioned her brother but when Marston had mentioned the French. “Many good souls have fallen in the western country these past months,” Duncan said. “Captain Burke. A surveyor named Cooper and his Indian wife. Mr. Bythe.”

  At the mention of the Quaker’s name the woman’s grief disappeared. “The devil collected that one at last,” she spat, and for the first time Duncan heard a hint of Irish in her voice.

  “Bythe had been investigating secret French involvement in the killings,” Duncan told her.

  “A pox on him! My brother was no traitor! He was a leader of men, hired to assure the others it was safe and honest work. He was only being a good Christian when he helped the others get hired.”

  Marston handed the woman a glass of wine.

  Duncan lifted one of the ladder-back chairs and sat close to her. “Mr. Bythe,” he explained, “has suffered the same fate as Captain Burke. Those particular bodies I have seen. What exactly was Mr. Bythe suggesting?” Duncan asked.

  The reluctant answer came from Marston. “When surveyors began disappearing there was a meeting called by Justice Brindle. It was just the war, he told us, the price we all pay when kings feud. We should just stay away from the frontier until the hostilities end, he warned. But someone asked how Philadelphia surveyors were marked for death by the French, how the French could know them all. It was as if half a dozen particular birds had been scattered across the wide wilderness, someone said, yet each one found and dropped by the French. The meeting grew unruly. Men started shouting that the French were being told, the surveyors were being betrayed.

  “Some trader pointed out that the French could slip in and out of Shamokin with impunity. A trapper pointed out that Townsend had been moving in and out of Shamokin, that he was the very one to have arranged for the first surveyors to venture west, the only one to know them all.”

  “Simpletons!” Miss Townsend cried. “Francis never so much as whispered against the king!”

  Marston, in obvious discomfort now, quickly finished his tale. “Bythe’s appointment to the trading post at Fort Pitt allowed him to investigate. Some say it was why he was given the appointment in the first place. He held rank as a militia officer, took out militia patrols sometimes hoping to capture the raiders who worked with his suspected spy, make one talk. There were reports, even in the Gazette, of runaway slaves carrying messages for the French. A clever ploy, that. A runaway would already have great incentive to avoid notice. Bounty men from Virginia are known to keep watch even in Shamokin sometimes.”

  “Would your brother have reason to speak with such runaways?” Conawago asked.

  The woman shook her head from side to side.

  “Then tell me something else,” Conawago continued. “Your brother arranged for other surveyors. But who arranged for him?”

  “There’s a Virginia merchant,” Marston said. “He runs tobacco and timber ships up Delaware Bay.”

  Marston had not answered the question. “Did he hire your brother, Miss Townsend?” Duncan pressed.

  “Not that merchant. He but takes messages. All of the surveyors were hired directly by the company, by one of the gentlemen directly,” she replied. “He even invited us to dine at his booth in the City Tavern. Francis was the key. He knew the wilderness, had just come back from it, told everyone how safe it was, how the Iroquois had behaved like perfect gentlemen, how our burned house was a different matter altogether. Francis was hesitating at leaving us so soon after his return, but we had lost the house, and the gentleman said he would publish one of his works on American birds after the survey was complete.”

  “Which gentleman?”

  “An owner of the Monongahela Company, the Virginia land venture. Winston Burke. After my brother agreed, they sat together to interview the others. A young man from Connecticut. A Dutchman with two watches. One or two others.”

  Duncan stared at the woman, then stepped to the tray, poured himself another glass of claret, and drained it. He wasn’t fitting pieces of the puzzle together, he was simply finding more impossible pieces.

  “There is a small band of tribesmen,” Conawago inserted after a heavy silence. “Banded together to no good purpose. Where would such men shelter in the city?”

  Marston shrugged. “The ones on respectable business visit me or stay at a government house. The others could be anywhere.”

  “I have heard of places,” Miss Townsend put in. “Especially one. Most unsavory. I heard a gentleman say it was a blight, as bad as an opium den in London, but he was grateful to have a den that drew the drunken savages from our streets.”

  “You know this place, Catherine?” Marston registered disbelief.

  The woman seemed to summon up her dignity. “Acting as a housekeeper puts me in the market with many serving types. Tongues can wag.”

  “And this is a place where a fugitive might shelter? Do you hear of specific warriors? Red Hand? Ohio George?” Duncan asked.

  Her eyes now grew wide. “Ohio George? You seek Ohio George?”

  “Surely you did not know the man?”

  “There was an entertainment staged months ago. Real warriors demonstrating their savage ways, war whoops, arrow shooting, dancing about a fire in a big iron pot,” Miss Townsend blushed. “Some of the ones who sp
oke English told of attacks on other tribes. This Ohio George told of fighting fifty Hurons, of being captured and taken to a great western ocean where he fought terrible sea monsters. He pranced back and forth in his nakedness, with naught but a cloth over his loins!”

  All of which meant that Ohio George had made himself known in Philadelphia as a violent, English-speaking Iroquois, one not above engaging in deception if it put money in his pocket.

  “This place,” Duncan asked, “the lair of the tribal castaways, can you tell us where it is?”

  “A great barn in the fields above the northern docks, used for a dairy herd before they were moved farther from the city.”

  “You’re not going into that nest!” Conawago protested. “If they wanted you dead in Shamokin they have even more reason now.”

  “Red Hand has all the answers,” Duncan shot back. “I will not be a coward with Skanawati about to be hanged. We will return to the stable for our weapons. The night is yet young.”

  After a moment Conawago spoke in a slower, more contemplative voice. He looked with new query at Marston. “No. We need no weapon if our shield is strong enough.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE CONSTABLES WOULD not be looking for a family strolling back from an evening engagement, so Marston and Catherine Townsend had put on more elegant attire to join them as they walked along the Market Street cobblestones. With a tricorn hat and full waistcoat borrowed from Marston, Duncan played his part, even responding to Marston’s banter about the celebrated Dr. Franklin as they passed the compact, comfortable-looking house where the great man lived when in Philadelphia. As they approached the brick wall that surrounded the large structure that was their destination, Conawago slipped into the shadows and shed his waistcoat, letting his braids down over his shoulder, affixing a feather to one of them, even lifting his ever-present amulet from underneath his shirt. By the time they reached the squad of militia that sleepily guarded the gate, Marston and Miss Townsend had faded into the shadows and Conawago and Duncan were engaged in a lively, loud discussion in the Iroquois tongue.

  “Have we seen you in the treaty delegation?” inquired the soldier who appeared to be in command. He lifted his musket across his chest and blocked the gate.

  “God’s blood, corporal,” another guard guffawed, “they all look the same to me.”

  Conawago shot back an impatient torrent in Iroquois words, using Brindle’s name twice.

  “You’re no red man, sir,” the corporal pressed Duncan.

  “The tribal delegation is permitted advisers, corporal,” Duncan replied in an impatient tone. “It would be indeed unfortunate if we had to summon Magistrate Brindle.”

  The soldier hesitated, then stepped aside.

  The government house that had been set aside for the tribal delegation was a commodious two-story brick house, sparsely furnished but large enough to accommodate a dozen visitors. Conawago seemed to know his way around the building, leading Duncan straight through a large sitting room, then a dining room, and through a kitchen where four members of the house staff sat playing whist in a candlelit corner. They looked up but said nothing as Conawago led Duncan out the rear door.

  As Duncan should have guessed, the Indians had no use for the house. Blanket canopies had been erected against the brick wall of the rear courtyard, under which several mattresses had been dragged from the house, most of them occupied by sleeping members of the delegation. But those they sought were awake and sitting at a fire that had been lit in the center of the kitchen garden.

  Duncan waited as Conawago approached the chiefs and spoke in low, respectful tones. After several minutes Old Belt himself turned and gestured Duncan into their circle. He lowered himself onto a fragrant bed of sprouting chamomile and listened as Conawago completed the traditional exchange between travelers meeting after a long journey. Duncan studied the revered tribal leaders, saw that new lines of worry had been etched into their faces. At last Old Belt sighed. He raised an intricately carved red stone pipe, filled it from a pouch, then lifted an ember with two green sticks to light the tobacco. He drew deeply, letting the aromatic smoke waft over the little circle, before extending the pipe to Duncan.

  “Denighroghkwayen,” he offered in solemn invitation. Let us smoke together.

  “You have made hard travel since last we met,” Old Belt said when the pipe had been shared by all in the circle.

  “There is a great deal to learn and little time to do it,” Duncan replied.

  “You worry much about people who have been summoned by the spirits,” Long Wolf broke in. It was, Duncan knew, his way of reminding the Scotsman that questioning deaths was little different than questioning the gods.

  “In my clan,” Duncan said after taking another draught of the pipe, “my sisters, my brother, my mother, in all over fifty children and helpless women, were killed by the bullets and blades of my people’s enemy. They were not invited by the spirits to cross over, they were shoved into the next life without preparation, by men with evil in their hearts. Because no one stood up to stop that evil my people were destroyed. Ever since, when evil crosses my path, I resist. The spirits of my people require me to do so.”

  Long Wolf seemed to consider his words, then offered a slow, approving nod.

  “That is a heavy burden,” Old Belt observed.

  Duncan looked up at the stars before replying. “It is heavier some times than others,” was all he could say.

  “Is it true,” Old Belt asked after a long puff on the pipe, “that Stone Blossom took you to the sacred island?”

  “It is true.”

  Long Wolf reached into a pouch and solemnly laid a short belt of white beads over Duncan’s wrist. “We are willing to hear what you would speak about your journey.”

  Duncan rested his arm on his knee and extended his wrist so that the belt was plainly visible to all. It seemed to glow in the moonlight. With the wampum on his arm he could not tell a lie.

  “I have looked into the crack in the world,” he began, “and I have followed the trail of blood that flows from it.”

  More than an hour passed as Duncan and Conawago explained what they had found in the north. They answered the chiefs’ many questions, listening as Conawago asked them, too, of their own progress, listening to the account of great disruption as the delegation made camp at the army barracks in Lancaster only to break it a day later when summoned by the governor to Philadelphia. When some of the tribal delegation had complained about Skanawati’s imprisonment, the Virginians had appeased them with demijohns of rum. Old Belt had ordered the drunken Indians home.

  There was no hesitation when Duncan explained what he needed. They left the compound with Old Belt and four of his Iroquois guards, attired and equipped as if for a predawn raid.

  The huge stone-and-timber barn had once been a magnificent structure but was now in disrepair. There were still horses, but the odor from the pile of manure in the corner of the paddock made it clear that most of the barn’s occupants were human. Through the open entry way wafted the smoke of cheap tobacco, snippets of bawdy ballads in English, and slurred, drunken shouts in more than one tribal language. In the stall nearest the entry six men, four Indians and two Europeans, sat on bundles of hay covered with flour sacks, playing cards on a plank. One of the Europeans stood up, swaying as he stepped toward them.

  “Rum in the next bay, y’er honors,” he declared in a Welsh accent. “If ye got the coin, it’s by the mug or by the jug,” he added with a guffaw at his own wit.

  Old Belt whispered to his escort, and two of the men took up station at the entry. The drunken Welshman seemed about to protest but halted as he looked at the axes on the warrior’s belts and hastily retreated to his game. One of the two remaining escorts lifted a dim lantern from a peg and led Old Belt, Conawago, and Duncan down the central bay of the barn. The warriors knew Red Hand by sight, Old Belt had explained, so Duncan did not interfere as the two Iroquois led the search of the musty stalls. In the first,
half a dozen Indians lay in drunken stupor on piles of straw. The next was much the same, though two Europeans in tattered, soiled clothes were present as well, one of them performing an unsteady drunken jig to earn a swig of an Indian’s jug. In the third an angry warning snapped out, and a naked Indian woman threw a man’s shoe from her pallet as she covered the head of the European beside her with a blanket, leaving the rest of his chalky nakedness for all to see.

  The heads of two horses extended from the half wall of the last stall, and from the low moans arising from the stall before it Duncan expected to see more rum drinkers. But at the sight of the forlorn shapes in the straw he rushed forward. Three Indian women and three children lay in the dim light. One woman propped against the wall was in the discomfort of pregnancy, but she watched them silently, making no complaint. Another was clearly stricken with fever, lying between two children who held her hands, trying to console her. The third cradled a boy of four or five in her arms, rocking him back and forth, trying to make him forget his obvious pain. Duncan knelt first by the fevered woman, gesturing for the lantern to be held closer, taking her pulse, lifting an eyelid, laying a hand on her forehead, then stroking it as her body was wracked with violent shivering.

  “Hold there!” boomed an angry voice. “No one be touching the squaws but if I—” The stout, heavily whiskered man who stormed into the stall hesitated as he saw Old Belt. “This be private property,” he said more tentatively. “No one—” his protest completely died away as the two braves stepped from the shadows. These were not the city Indians, weakened from drink and sickness, that he was accustomed to, but towering warriors of the wilds, in their prime. One of the Iroquois slipped behind him, blocking the door.

  “T’ain’t no public thoroughfare is all,” the man muttered.

  Duncan fought the impulse to strike him. “You will get fresh water for these people, now! Then fresh straw.”

  “Ye have no right.”

  “Now!” Duncan repeated. Conawago quickly gave instructions to one of the braves to escort the barn’s proprietor, who lost all color when he saw the warrior remove the war ax from his belt. He nodded and backed away.