“They made a salve of it, yes,” Huber confirmed. “Then rubbed it on their skin before battle. A small amount would have made them ferocious but a larger dose would have immobilized them with hallucinations.”
“Maybe you can use witch hazel as a base,” Duncan said.
“Bitte?”
“I want some of that henbane salve, just one jar.”
Huber’s face showed alarm. “From what I hear about your adventure in the Thames you don’t need any drug to become battle crazed. And it will not offset your weakness for long, and probably will make it that much worse.”
The first grin in days broke on Duncan’s face. “Not for me, Heinz. One jar, just one large dose for one man. And all the rest should be ground into a fine powder for tea.”
Huber stared impassively at Duncan. “You won’t tell me more, I know,” he said with a sigh, then lifted his package. “Greta says I must witness you eat her gift. It will be a sign of your recovery, so she can stop praying for you every hour. The housework is suffering,” he added. As if on cue, Noah appeared with a small pitcher. “I requested some warm milk to help it go down.”
“I will eat some of Greta’s wonderful strudel only if the two of you share it,” Duncan declared. They offered no objection. Feeling better than he had in days, Duncan listened as they ate and his friends offered reports on routines at Bedlam. As they finished, Noah produced a note written in Woolford’s familiar handwriting. Hastings is making urgent preparations for Boston, it said. He promises War Council that the Franklin threat will be eliminated before he sails.
Duncan woke in the small of the night, feeling stronger than he had since being captured by the Horse Guards. He paced slowly along the wall of the bedchamber, once more trying to make sense of Woolford’s note. Hastings had to believe Duncan dead. But why was he so confident he could prevent Franklin from meeting with the king? And what urgent business could Hastings have in Boston?
He lingered over the belongings of Conawago that hung on the wall opposite the bed, finding some solace in their presence. His old friend always traveled with few clothes, although hanging on the last peg was his favorite velvet waistcoat, which had been in fashion decades earlier when Conawago had last visited a royal court. Clothing, however, had never been particularly significant to the Nipmuc elder. What he had packed in the small trunk loaned to him by William Johnson had been the treasures of his long life, which had started in the prior century, in the year of the Great Comet, 1680. On one peg hung strands of Nipmuc beads, given him when he had left his family as a boy to be educated by the Jesuits. He had had several more but had been gradually leaving them in places sacred to his tribe.
On another peg hung a leather lanyard with a whale charm, a gift from Ishmael brought back from a visit to Nantucket. There was the small wooden spoon which the boy Conawago had impishly purloined from his mother’s hearth as a memento when leaving with his new teachers. The young Conawago had vowed to himself to keep it until he could return it to her. Next was a small bundle of heather with a piece of the McCallum plaid sewn around it, a gift from Duncan years earlier. Then there was a small cornhusk doll with a quillwork dress given to Conawago decades earlier by a woman he would never speak of. Beside it was a bronze charm in the shape of a book that was inscribed with Holy Bible on one side and Plato on the other because, as Conawago was fond of saying, the Jesuits always hedged their bets.
Finally, hanging on a tattered ribbon, were two gold fleur-de-lis lockets, which Conawago had brought from the court of King Louis to give to his mother and aunt. Not for the first time Duncan felt the heartache of his friend’s futile decades-long search for his family that Conawago had started as a young man and ended as an aged one. On his deathbed a few years earlier, one of his Jesuit teachers had railed against Conawago for wasting his life in his search, declaring that the Jesuits and God had given him so much that could have been used to bridge the gap between the tribes and the Europeans, but that he had squandered it. Duncan looked back at the little bronze book. Conawago said his dreams compelled his voyage, but now Duncan wondered if that guilt had also driven Conawago to his desperate attempt to speak with King George.
Duncan sat on the bed, holding what he always considered the most poignant of Conawago’s treasures, the little wooden spoon. He had been a fool to be distracted by Franklin’s political adventures. Nothing mattered more than getting Conawago back to America.
He ate the last morsel of the strudel, then surrendered to an urge for a cup of milk. It was past midnight and the house was silent and dim, lit only by the beeswax candle lamps at the stair landings. He stole down the servants’ stairs, then onto the grand stairway, pausing by the painting that had caught his attention on his first visit. A sinewy, almost gaunt man gazed out at him over a brass plate that declared ALPHEUS FAULKNER. The man held a small enameled globe in one hand and dangled a bracelet of long white beads in the other. Duncan had taken the beads to be elongated pearls but now he was not so certain. He retrieved the landing lamp and studied the bracelet. They might have been pearls, but now they seemed more like wampum beads.
A whale oil lamp burned in the kitchen. Duncan turned up the wick, poured a cup from the ceramic jar used for milk, then sat at the big table. For Duncan, kitchens were usually the most comfortable room of a house, and that of the Faulkner House was no exception. The scents of yeast, wood smoke, apples, and maple syrup combined to transport him to the kitchen in Edentown, where he and Sarah often sat far into the night, sharing ideas for helping the settlement, planning sowing and harvest, reviewing the accounts, or just sitting silently in the glow of the hearth.
Maple syrup. He lifted his nose, confirming the scent. He was not aware that households in London used maple syrup, originally a product of the woodland tribes and still an important trading commodity of the Iroquois. He rose and paced along the shelves, discovering a small cask sitting upright on a back shelf. Its tap was leaking. Duncan extended a finger and tested the little brown puddle under the tap. It was a high grade of syrup, an expensive grade. Madeline Faulkner must have brought the cask with her from America as a novelty for her household, he decided, then poured another cup of milk with a dollop of syrup mixed into it. As he drank he looked out the side door of the kitchen and saw that it opened across from the library, the only other room of the mansion where he did not feel out of place.
The collection of books was impressively large but most were laden with dust, long unused. One of the expansive shelves held nothing but religious tracts, many of them published decades earlier. The dust was disturbed at only two shelves, one containing richly bound volumes of novels. He ran his finger along the spines. The Vicar of Wakefield, Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Moll Flanders, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, and a score of other popular works filled the shelf. The second shelf was an impressive collection of works on natural philosophy and mathematics, including Gilbert’s Magnetism, Napier’s Logarithms, Kepler’s Celestial Mechanics, Bacon’s Experimentation, Hooke’s Micrographia, Newton’s Opticks, and Linneas’s Systema Naturae. There was even Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity.
He paused, realizing the room presented something of a mystery. The well-worn popular novels were explained by the frivolous Madeline Faulkner, but not the heavily used much denser technical works. He paced along the shelves, seeing now a small step stool below the stacks of religious works. Without knowing why, he stood on it. Within his reach there was only one volume not laden with dust, on the high top shelf. He retrieved it and with a leap of his heart read the single word embossed on the spine. Kahnyenkehaka. It meant Mohawk, in the tongue of the tribe. He extracted a slip of faded, tattered paper that extended from the inside cover, written in a firm hand. Iken ne Yehouah egh ne s’hakonoronghkwa n’ongwe, it began. With a leap of his heart he recognized it, and the words of the full verse rose unbidden in his mind. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. It was from the book of John.
&nb
sp; Duncan leafed through the book. He had heard of translations of the Bible into the Mohawk tongue but had seen one only once before, during the last war, when he had helped negotiate a truce with the Christian Mohawks who fought for the French in Quebec. He recalled the portrait of the stern man on the stairway. The bracelet in the subject’s hand must have indeed been wampum. On the frontispiece of the book was a name inscribed in the same hand as the biblical verse. Alpheus Faulkner. It was the name from the portrait, the man who had founded the Disciples of the Forest so many years ago.
He continued to explore the library, finding another bolt of silk cloth on a chair, with a box of pins and snips of ribbon. Madeline had been using the chamber as a fitting room. The desk was still covered with papers of many sizes, and he brought the lamp closer to confirm that there were more drawings of machines, though not the same ones he had seen before. These were of flywheels and gears, with notes about weights and dimensions and the numbers of teeth in the gears. The managers sent by Madeline’s father had been busy.
A creak in the floor upstairs caused him to freeze. With a pang of guilt he darted out of the library, feeling like an intruder. A peal of laughter from the foyer brought him to an abrupt halt in the hallway.
“No, my lord, you may not come in at this hour, you naughty boy,” came Madeline’s playful voice. “Thank you for the conveyance. Now go home to your wife.”
He watched from the shadows as Madeline locked the door, then leaned against it and closed her eyes, as if collecting herself. He did not move, thinking he was well hidden in the shadows, but to his surprise she raised her head and stared directly at him.
“Why, Mr. McCallum, whatever are you doing?” Madeline asked, confusion and suspicion both in her gaze. “You really must stay in bed if you are to recover.”
“I was thirsty for milk,” he said as she draped her cloak over a bench.
“The perfect thing!” she exclaimed, as if he were making a suggestion. “I had more port this evening than was proper,” she added with a giggle. Putting her arm through his, she led him back into the kitchen, where she quickly produced two crystal goblets and ladled each full of milk, then complimented Duncan on his healthy appearance before rambling on about her evening. It had been a private party of only forty, a “rehearsal” as she described it, for the king’s royal ball. There had been too much punch, too much port, and too much horseplay between dances. “No less than three members of Parliament tried to pull the ribbons from my hair!” she reported. “One even tried to snatch my choker, the rogue,” she said, and touched the gold brocade ribbon that adorned her neck. Not for the first time she looked Duncan in the eye as if about to share something, but then quickly looked away, as if he frightened her somehow. There was an air about her that he found disingenuous, but he could not name it, and still could not name the reason Sarah saw fit to befriend this shallow socialite.
Madeline had finished her glass and was wiping the thin white line from her lip when she paused, looking at the open side door, which revealed a light coming from the library. Duncan had left the lamp on the desk. “Shame on you, Duncan McCallum,” she exclaimed in a mocking tone. “Stealing about among a lady’s private books!”
Without waiting for a reply Madeline lifted her skirts and hurried out of the kitchen. By the time Duncan caught up with her she was pacing along the rows of books. She had pushed the stool away from the shelves and draped the second bolt of silk over the drawings on the desk.
“A library always feels like home somehow,” he offered, not knowing how to explain himself. “Seeing authors from my childhood is like greeting old friends.”
“So many heavy volumes,” she said in her carefree tone. “So many heavy thoughts. How do the scholars endure it?”
Duncan motioned to the desk. “Your father’s men have been busy.”
Madeline made a fluttering motion with her hand. “They really need to stop intruding so often,” she said and shrugged. “But I promised everything would remain confidential. As if anyone could understand them. Always talking of capital and returns and doubling the value of a groat. So mundane, so devastatingly boring. Sometimes I think my father sends them just to punish me. However shall I prepare for the royal ball with so many distractions?”
“I am a simple Highlander,” Duncan said. “Such intricacies of commerce are beyond me.”
Madeline flashed a tentative glance at him as if thinking of disagreeing, but then she walked to the shelf of novels and extracted one. “This one always interests the gentlemen,” she said. “I understand at gentlemen’s clubs they sometimes hire a lady to read it aloud to them, though I doubt a genuine lady would ever do so.” She handed him Cleland’s Memories of a Woman of Pleasure.
“Fanny Hill,” Duncan observed in surprise, using the popular name for the novel.
“It will make you blush, sir,” Madeline said with an impish grin. “And give you something quite engaging to discuss with your Sarah,” she added, then laughed, for she had already made Duncan blush.
She lifted the lamp and herded him out of the room, stifling a yawn. He accompanied her up the stairs and returned to his room, but a quarter hour later stole back down to the library, borrowing the lamp from the landing. Madeline had been eager to have him out of the library, though he could not understand why. He lifted the cloth from the desk and studied the drawings she had covered. They were of a complex machine with many spindles and wheels. It made no sense that Madeline would be doing dress fittings in the chamber where her father’s men made such drawings, especially with an abundance of vacant rooms on the floor above. He turned to a chair with milliner’s tools, lifting a scrap that covered what looked like a sewing basket. To his surprise, however, there was nothing inside but cotton balls. He carried one to the lamp. No, it wasn’t cotton. It was silk. He held it closer to the light, then abruptly dropped it. It had moved. He retrieved it, pulled a chair to the lamp, and carefully inspected it, probing the intricate threads.
Inside was a thin larvae that squirmed at his touch. He had never seen one, but he had read about the sericulture experiments being conducted in England and Holland in the hope of establishing a new industry. He was looking at a silkworm cocoon. Madeline had a basket of silkworm cocoons. No, he decided, they had to belong to the men making the drawings, preparing for their own secret experiments. He returned the cocoon to the basket and wandered, deep in thought, back up the stairs. He paused again at the portrait of Alpheus Faulkner, noting the dates at the bottom of the nameplate. 1660–1722. He ascended another step and paused again, noticing for the first time a subtle difference in the shading of the wall’s wood paneling. There was a lighter square around the portrait. A larger painting had been there, probably for many years, but had been replaced by the portrait of the austere, evangelical-looking man with the wampum in his hand.
The wound in Duncan’s side began to throb. He grimaced as he adjusted the dressing, then slowly climbed up the stairs and returned the lamp to the landing table.
In the morning the door to the library was locked.
Sarah—I awoke from a dream with my heart hammering and realized something was in the darkness with me. Its breathing was unlike any I have known, slower, deeper, and more powerful than that of a bear or even a great ox. The sound came from the blackness on the far side of the chamber and I was too weak or perhaps too frightened to approach it. Eventually I realized I had nothing to fear, that whatever it was, it was just watching me. Then with a terrible thrill I knew it was the incognitum. The great beast was with me. I mustered my strength and sat up on the side of the bed. “I’m sorry,” I said to it. Then in a thunderous voice that seemed to come down a long tunnel it replied “I’m sorry.” In my struggle to understand I was suddenly awake, in a cold sweat. It had been a dream within a dream, but one that the tribes would say had been sent to me by the gods. Since awakening I have sensed a strange, calming presence just behind my shoulder. I am not sure the incognitum is entirely dead.
Duncan pulled his cloak high up around his shoulders as he knocked on the door of the brick house. Darby, who had inspected his disguise and pulled a hank of Duncan’s hair over his maimed ear, had assured him that there were no watchers nearby, but still Duncan glanced nervously down the street. It was his first foray away from the Faulkner mansion since his tumble into the Thames, and though his body had largely recovered, he was not so confident about his mind. For days his sleep had been disturbed by nightmarish visions of Conawago lying in a pool of blood, Conawago curled in a fetal position and weeping, once even of Conawago being stabbed by laughing inmates of the Immortals cell as they staged the Ides of March. Even more vivid were the dreams of being in Milbridge’s lodge, spitted through the shoulders, as Hastings cut away pieces of his flesh, to the hysterical cackles of the earl.
He had forced himself to go out to the Faulkner courtyard, sometimes just sitting in the sun, but more often helping Noah with the horses. The groom brought messages from Ishmael, and the day before the young Nipmuc had met Duncan in the stable to update him on Conawago’s condition. Ishmael had wisely chosen to stay away from Craven Street and confirmed that no Horse Guards watchers had been spotted at the Neptune, meaning that at least for now they must be assuming that Duncan had died with Nettles. As for the dead lieutenant, Woolford had reported that no one had spoken of him dying or even as missing, but in a quiet meeting in the park across from the Horse Guards Palace Lewis had reported to Woolford and Ishmael that Hastings had cleared out Nettles’s quarters and taken his name off the duty rosters. His fellow soldiers whispered that Nettles must be on one more of his clandestine missions. Lewis confided that Hastings was making preparations to leave soon on new and urgent business in Boston, news that still confused Duncan. Had Hastings decided that Franklin’s opportunity to meet with the king was past and therefore the inventor was no longer a threat to the War Council’s plans? Or did it mean Milbridge and the Council had launched a new plan against the inventor for which Hastings’s presence was not needed? Why Boston?
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