Bone Rattler (19 page)

“Obviously, Woolford, you are incapable of fully assessing his letter,” Pike proclaimed. “It implies there were earlier letters. We can assume they were equally full of sedition. This man is no doubt the one who turned Captain McCallum against his king.”

The words cut deeper than the crop. “Impossible!” Duncan protested. But the denial came out in a hoarse croak. He had indeed beseeched Jamie to remember the clan, and for the first year after he heard the news of his brother’s commission, he had not written at all, so reviled had he been at the thought that Jamie had joined the very army that had destroyed the Highland way of life.

As Duncan heard the click of a key behind him, Pike’s lips curled into a spiteful grin. “The Ramsey Company is doomed before it even sets foot in the wilderness,” he growled, then cast another wary glance toward the window. “In three month’s time there won’t be enough of it left to bury.”

Woolford said nothing, but released the manacles and stood. Pike watched not Woolford, but the man at the window. When the general did not react, Pike seemed to deflate. By the time Duncan staggered to his feet, rubbing his wrists, Woolford had retreated out one of the side doors.

“It matters not,” Pike declared in a frigid whisper, leaning over Duncan. “Lift a finger to help your brother, and you will hang at his side when we find him. Make no mistake, McCallum, we will find him. Our custom with traitors is to leave them hanging for a month or two, as a reminder. They are familiar with the practice in Scotland,
are they not?” he added harshly. “I hear the magpies in forty-six were too plump to fly.” The major turned for a moment toward the man at the window, who continued to stare out the window. When he turned back, there was an odd expression of defeat on his face.

The general paced the length of the window, then turned to Duncan. “What say you of the murder of Lord Ramsey’s scholar?” He had an open, honest countenance, though crows’ feet of worry had grown around his eyes.

Duncan glanced at the nearest door. “The death of a learned man is a loss to all the world.”

The officer offered Duncan a sad smile. His dark, intelligent eyes fixed him with something like deep curiosity. “To our world, yes,” he said, as if another world had been at work in Evering’s death. Pike withdrew into the shadows, then left through a side door. The new turn of conversation seemed to have frightened him.

“You are the one guiding the Ramsey Company to its painful truth,” the officer observed. “What does that make you, Mr. McCallum? High sheriff of the Company?”

“It makes me the dog they all want to kick. To save one of their own I must fight through ranks of clansmen.”

The general seemed amused at his answer. “A murder on the high seas. An investigator who is little more than a convict himself. Tedious legal questions could be raised. The Ramsey Company was allowed to be formed because of the war.”

“You think Evering a casualty of war? I can’t imagine a man further removed from it.”

The officer fixed Duncan with an intense stare, then responded by retrieving something from the shadows and dropping it on the table, an arrow with brown and white fletching and bars of brown on the shaft.

“Someone involved in the war sought to kill the Ramsey tutor today.”

Duncan drew a shuddering breath. “I was under the impression,” he said, “that the savages fought in the forests. I did not expect the army to permit an attack in the city.”

The general smiled at this taunt. “Why would an Indian want you dead?”

Duncan sank back into his chair.

“Two arrows, aimed so precisely,” the general continued. “Your assailant wasn’t satisfied with the captain taking you away—he had to be sure you were dead. The first to stop the captain, the second aimed right at your heart. But for the ship’s rail you would have died before you hit the deck.”

“Impossible. No one even knows me. . . .” The protest on Duncan’s lips faded. The cap. No one knew him, but the cap had identified him as the Ramsey tutor.

The general stepped to the front of the desk and leaned on it, studying Duncan. “How was Professor Evering connected to the savages?”

“Evering? He had never even been to America.” But even as the words came out Duncan recalled the drawing of the arrow in Evering’s cabin. He studied the projectile on the desk with new interest. It was a perfect match. The striping, the careful painting was too intricate for it to be a coincidence. Someone had drawn such an arrow for Evering on the high seas, and then one had been aimed at Duncan’s heart. It was as if someone had been toying with the tutor, warning of his destiny when he landed in America.

“You’d be surprised how far these arrows can fly,” the general mused. “We are searching. We are very interested in the man who sought to kill a second Ramsey tutor.” He stepped closer, studying Duncan, as if waiting for a reply. “He is unlikely to give up, now that you are arrived in his homeland.”

“Why?” The question came out in a hoarse whisper.

“You tell me. The Company seems overflowing with secrets.”

“Secrets worth dying for?”

“Secrets worth killing for.”

Duncan stood and stepped to the desk, his hand trembling as he lifted the arrow, running his finger along its smooth shaft, putting a finger to its sleek flint point, then suddenly looked out the window,
up the river. “If they thought Evering held a secret that was vital to them,” he said, the thought bursting on him like a cannon shell, “then learned he was murdered, they would assume his killer had it, too.”

The general said nothing, but offered another cool smile.

Lister. The old man, marked as Evering’s murderer, faced the same danger from the savages as Duncan, and he was headed toward the frontier, which teemed with natives. There had been horses outside, mounts for dragoons. If he stole one, how quickly could the army pursue?

“The tutor is part of the Ramsey Company,” the general said in a more insistent voice. “If the tutor must die, it is because of the Company. Something the Company did or is going to do.”

“I am hardly privy to Company secrets, General.”

“You are not trying hard enough, McCallum.”

Duncan looked back at the door where Pike had disappeared. Pike had wanted Duncan because of his brother. The general wanted him for something else. “Are you trying to stop the Company?”

“The Company has been authorized by the king himself,” the general replied. “Surely I would be powerless to stop it.”

The two men stared warily at each other.

“Who was Adam Munroe?” Duncan abruptly asked.

The general gave a nod of grudging respect. “A militia officer. A former prisoner whose terror drove him across the Atlantic when he was released.”

“Prisoner of the French?”

The general sighed. “I am certain we can work this out like gentlemen.”

He was offering some kind of bargain, and Duncan did not even know what was being negotiated. “Are you suggesting the army does not want Evering’s killer identified?”

“In war, the victor is the one who always keeps his eyes on the flame.”

The man was speaking in some code Duncan could not decipher. Duncan stepped to the window. In the distance he could see the square earthen slopes of batteries along the river. “If you believe
the death is connected to the war,” he asked, “why not conduct your own investigation?”

“I would not tamper with Lord Ramsey’s secret weapon.”

Duncan fought to keep his voice steady. “You mistake me, sir. I am but a bound servant.”

“Surely a man of your capacity cannot be so beguiled by coincidence.”

As he grappled with the words, Duncan looked not at the nameless general but at the bounty broadside lying on the table. Lord Ramsey would have known about his brother. Reverend Arnold and Woolford would have known when they traveled halfway across Scotland to retrieve Duncan, and only Duncan, from the prison in Edinburgh. Duncan found himself backing away as the general watched him with a narrow smile.

“We shall not decline your gratitude,” the general declared, “when you have reflected on what we have done for you today.” He made no effort to stop Duncan’s withdrawal toward an open door but lifted a hand and pointed to different door ten feet away.

Duncan hesitated then complied with the gesture. On the corridor wall opposite the door, a hand-drawn map had been pinned, marked at the top with two words that halted Duncan’s retreat.
Stony Run.

September 1758,
it said under the caption. A small, irregular shape near the center apparently represented a fortification along a river. Two rows of crudely drawn trees flanked it. To the southeast along the same meandering river was an open space marked
German Flats.
Below the map was written
King Hendrick’s band. Seneca. Mohawk. Onondaga.
Then a table that was headed
Rangers Killed
, with the names of half a dozen men and, finally,
three ghostwalkers.
Ghostwalkers. He read the words twice, in desperate confusion, then glanced back at the general. The officer had followed, was only six feet behind him, studying him with a dangerous smile.

No one confronted Duncan as he retreated down the hallway, looking for the door to the street. He had paid little attention when the soldiers had hauled him inside and dragged him to the office.
Passing a room where three officers examined a map on a table, he paused, gazing at the man on the left. Over his chest was the red tunic of an officer, but below was a kilt. The officer turned and examined Duncan with a disdainful stare. He wore the plaid of a Scot but the steely countenance of a British officer.

Duncan headed for the pool of sunlight on the floor that must mean an open door, and was moving at a near trot when he rounded the corner and collided with a half-naked figure. In an instant Duncan forgot his furor at Pike, his pain over the news of Jamie. He reeled, stumbling backward, his heart pounding, his knuckles pressed to his mouth to stifle a cry of alarm.

The man’s rich, copper skin glistened as if oiled. He wore nothing above his waist but a folded brown blanket thrown over one shoulder and tied about his middle with a braided leather strap. His skull was shaven clean save for a small patch of black hair at his crown, from which hung several narrow, foot-long braids, with red and blue glass beads strung at the tips. Triangles of silver dangled from his pierced ears, a chain of bone and shell from his neck. Over the blanket hung a powder horn, in the leather strap of which hung two small knives. His leather leggings bore long fringes along the seams, as did the edge of the soft leather slippers on his feet. From the hair at his crown, down the man’s fierce countenance, ran evenly spread rivulets of blood. No, not blood, Duncan realized, but rust-colored paint applied so that the man appeared to have just emerged from battle.

Duncan’s jaw opened and shut as he stared at the savage, who did not move, did not change his proud, disdainful expression even as his eyes focused on Duncan, studying him as he might some animal he was about to butcher and consume. For a moment Duncan thought of shouting for the soldiers, then he recalled that it was not only the French who had aboriginal allies in the great war.

As Duncan inched toward the door, the Indian’s hard black eyes flickered, as if he recognized something about Duncan. He made a soft clicking sound with his tongue and was answered with a movement in the shadows of the corridor beyond. A second savage
appeared, dressed much as the first, and studied Duncan with an intense curiosity, pointing to the blood that now dripped down Duncan’s face. With a stunningly quick motion his finger touched Duncan’s cheek, wiping blood onto his finger, gesturing with it toward the offices from which Duncan had come, his eyes lit with an intense emotion that seemed part amusement, part hunger. He muttered something to the first Indian, then drew a line with Duncan’s blood on his own cheek.

Something in Duncan wanted to protest, to fight back, but his tongue would not work. As the Indian touched his finger to his companion’s cheek, leaving a second stripe of his blood, Duncan summoned enough strength to back away several steps, then he bolted through the front door.

When a hand clamped around his arm as he reached the sunlight, Duncan lashed out, pounding the man’s wrist several times before he noticed the scarred brown knuckles.

“Crispin!” he gasped.

The big man reacted to neither Duncan’s blows nor his words, but silently led him forward, down the steps, past the stern sentries and onto the cobblestone street. They moved to a heavy open wagon pulled by two large grey horses, Crispin urgently motioning Duncan to the plank seat as he stepped to the team. The butler had traded his elegant clothes for plainer dress, covered with a brown greatcoat. Crispin checked the harness and then paused, speaking softly to each of the animals before joining Duncan on the seat and, with a tap of the reins, urging the team forward.

As Duncan turned to watch the army headquarters fade into the distance, he felt a dark, hollow thing growing inside. He did not hate Major Pike for his instinctive cruelty, nor for putting chains on him, nor even for striking him. He hated Pike for extinguishing the spark of hope that had kindled inside him since the day on the mast with Lister. He had begun to think that he could endure years of bondage, because afterward he and Jamie and Lister would build a future together, construct a farm, rebuild the clan. But now his brother was lost forever to
him. Both Jamie and Lister, the sum total of those he was blood-bound to protect, were destined to become gallows ballast long before Duncan’s servitude was up, if an arrow did not take Lister first.

Between the pangs of hatred and hopelessness, the general’s words echoed. They had been important not only for what they had revealed—the reason why Duncan had been worth the trip to Edinburgh by Arnold and Woolford—but also for what they had not. The general had not been interested in Jamie, he had been interested in the Company. He recalled Arnold’s worry that the army would open its own investigation. The Company was competing with the general in some strange quest. And Duncan was Ramsey’s secret weapon.