Bone Rattler (23 page)

“I mean no one would ever expect such two to be acquainted. The Pennsylvania dirt farmer and the silk-gowned heiress.”

The truth, in the hands of a man like Woolford, was not necessarily a helpful thing. “I take it they met in the New World. Why were they both on the
Anna Rose
?” But Duncan needed no answer, not after considering what he had learned about Adam. Adam had been on board because of Sarah Ramsey, had been so desperate to sail on the prison ship with Sarah that he had threatened to assault soldiers, and had ultimately bought his passage with news about Duncan.

The scars on Woolford’s neck blanched again as he clenched his jaw. “No one,” he said slowly, “expected Sarah to stir from her cabin.”

“No one,” Duncan shot back, “expected Evering to become a channel between them.”

“No one expected the
Anna Rose
to become a death ship,” Woolford countered. Sarah abruptly rose, pulling Jonathan onto the dance floor, swinging his arm in time to the unseen fiddle. “She only survived because of you,” he added after a moment. “That
water was certain death. In England people would say it puts her forever in your debt.”

“And here?”

The ranger shrugged. “I know Indians who would say it makes you forever responsible for her. That because you interfered with the spirits’ plans for her, there is no spirit to watch over her now.”

“Were they lovers?”

“Of course not. She is . . . .” Woolford struggled for words, then gave up. “Adam was married.”

“Impossible. He would have told me.” Duncan’s mind swirled. Pursuing Adam, even in death, was like chasing a ship in a changing wind.

“In my experience, McCallum, the secrets of the heart are always the most difficult to put into words. I met his bride. A wild but gentle beauty. You would never find two who adored each other more.”

“What happened to her?”

“They were driven apart,” Woolford said in a tight voice.

“If it was not passion that drove Sarah to Adam in Argyll, then what? Her family is here.”

The ranger offered only a small, ironic frown, as if to say Duncan had answered his own question.

“Did you know Evering wrote about her in his journal?”

Woolford’s brow knitted. “What journal? Where is it?” he demanded.

“At the house in New York,” Duncan said. “Why would he write about Stony Run? What happened at Stony Run? How could he know?”

Woolford seemed to shudder. He turned to gaze out the darkened window. “It’s a place in the forest nearly a hundred miles north of Edentown. There was a council of Iroquois tribes led by a great priest, a powerful shaman. Something happened when the shaman met the other chiefs. Many died. At headquarters they listed it as a battle. But I believe there were no enemy there.” Woolford grew very still. When he spoke again it was in a near-whisper. “Sergeant Fitch and I arrived a few hours later. It was no battle. It was a series of murders, a massacre first of friendly Indians, then of my rangers
when they followed the killers.” Woolford turned away to stare at the crackling fire.

“God’s breath!” Duncan gasped as realization flooded over him. “You’re trying to find the murderers.”

The ranger kept his gaze on the flames. “They were good men. Each one like a brother to me.” He could not conceal the pain in his eyes when he looked up at Duncan. “Evering couldn’t have known about Stony Run,” he said. “It was not something the army wished to publicize.”

“He knew,” Duncan said, “because he spoke with Adam.”

The ranger lowered his head into his hands a moment. “Guilt can often loosen a man’s tongue. Sad cases, Munroe and Evering. If it is possible to die of confusion, then perhaps they died of the same cause.” Woolford poured himself another applejack and drained it in one gulp.

“And where does King Hendrick fit into the tragedy you are scripting?” Duncan asked. “Evering connected him to Stony Run.”

“An old Mohawk chief. Teyonhehkwen was his tribal name. Visited England nearly fifty years ago, when they labeled him a king to ease his introductions in court. One of our strongest allies. Died fighting the French in ’fifty-five at Lake George. Over eighty years old. He stood up with bullets flying around him, shouted out, ‘Who wants to live forever,’ and charged a line of French infantry with a war club.”

“You speak of him as of a friend.”

“I am proud to name him so. If he had been a soldier, he’d have been in the Black Watch. If he had been a king of old, he would have been a pillar of chivalry.”

“Evering wrote of him, yet he’s been dead these four years.”

“He had a band of zealous warriors, mostly related to him by blood, who still fight in his name. Good men, brave men, who perform rituals to keep pure, like knights of old. Half were killed at Stony Run without their weapons at hand. Hendrick was tossing in his grave that day.”

The pieces of this puzzle were not fitting together, but at least they were coming into better focus. Duncan fell into a deep silence, working over each fragment again in his mind. He found himself looking out the window into the darkness. He had not forgotten Adam’s warning about the army. His resentment of Woolford, built over weeks at sea, lingered like a bitter taste in his throat. He poured himself another drink. “They took Lister for the murder,” he said. “They beat him within an inch of his life.”

The ranger offered a grim nod. “Arnold made sure I knew. For now your friend is safer than any man in the Company, I daresay. The guards know they must preserve him,” Woolford declared in a sober voice. “He is to be the star of Ramsey’s first pageant of justice.”

The words tore at Duncan’s heart. Somewhere ahead, along a frontier road, Lister lay beaten and bound in the night, probably convinced that Duncan had abandoned him.

Eventually he became aware that they were both watching Sarah. She had begun a waltz with her little brother, whose face shone bright as a candle.

“Do you have intentions with respect to Miss Ramsey?” Duncan asked.

The question made his companion wince again and break his gaze from Sarah. “In my life I have known a handful of women who had the power to disturb my sleep. I will admit to you she is one of them. But she is different. It is not the beauty of Sarah Ramsey that disturbs my rest, it is the enigma.”

They watched in silence for several minutes. Woolford stepped behind the bar a moment, found a writing lead and a scrap of paper and quickly scrawled something, then leaned on the bar and gazed into the dining room again. Several dancers began staring at Sarah, and pointed at her. They began to separate, leaving a wide space around her as if she held some kind of contagion. She kept dancing, her smile more strained. It would be impossible for her not to sense that the others were shunning her.

Woolford cursed under his breath, tossed the paper across the
bar, and stepped into the dining chamber, sweeping little Virginia into his arms and taking to the dance floor at Sarah’s side. Duncan sat listening to the crackle of the logs in the huge stone fireplace, watching uneasily as Sergeant Fitch appeared outside the window and sat on the porch, studying the darkness. His gaze drifted toward the paper left by Woolford. The ranger had heard his request for Shakespeare after all. His quote for the New World was from Hamlet.
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king,
Woolford had written,
and eat of the fish that fed of that worm.

The strains of the fiddle cut through the voices in the dining chamber, and several diners began clapping the beat of a new, livelier tune as tables were pushed back with Woolford’s encouragement and others joined in the dancing. Duncan stepped to the open door and stared out over the broad Hudson, lit by a quarter moon. The river was a divider of sorts, between civilization and the beginnings of something that was the opposite. Strangely, he remembered the scene set in the corner of Lord Ramsey’s portrait, the simple cabin with the dying man cradled by a woman. In his mind, the scene had become the central feature of the painting, as if the aristocrat were there just to give it context.

His apprehension began to fade as the fire crackling behind him and the moonlit water glistening outside transported him to the evenings of his youth. Drifting into a fatigued reverie, he could almost hear the old songs that his uncles would play on fiddle and pipes.

No. The sound was real. He turned toward the dining room. The clapping had stopped as a sad, stirring song played, then the fiddler sang without accompaniment. In disbelief Duncan stepped to the entrance of the dining chamber.
Mo Ghile Mear,
the song was called. Our Hero. Its words might have applied to the brave defeated heroes of any people. But anyone from the Highlands knew it was not a song about any hero, for it had been written to honor Bonnie Prince Charlie, the leader of Duncan’s father and the other Scottish rebels who had so valiantly stood at Culloden. As Duncan strode
into the chamber, the red-haired fiddler began the next verse in the original Gaelic. After a moment, Duncan joined him in the Highland tongue as the two stared at each other with fire in their eyes. Duncan found his heart hammering. In Scotland they could have been arrested for such a display.

The others in the room stared, some grinning, some with their eyes misting, until suddenly there were heavy footsteps behind him, and Duncan turned to see Woolford standing at his shoulder, fixing him with a smoldering gaze. The musician immediately raised the fiddle to his shoulder and began to play an energetic reel, walking among the tables, gesturing more dancers onto the floor.

“You have no idea of the dangers you touch upon, McCallum,” Woolford warned. “I don’t know where you’re bound in the end, but you’ll not get there by walking backward.”

“It’s just a simple song.”

“Don’t take me for a fool. And don’t be so reckless with your own life. Or do you need ask which of the great lords you wish to serve, Ramsey or Calder?”

“I don’t understand.”

Woolford eyes narrowed. “You think for a second that Calder would have released you if it did not serve him?”

“I owe nothing to the army.”

The officer shot him an impatient glare and pushed him back into the dark, unoccupied barroom. “The Romans wrote about how the legions would trap wolves that were preying on their camps,” he declared when they reached the shadows. “They would tie a goat out in the forest and lie in wait.”

Duncan knitted his brow in confusion.

“Calder can’t take a chance that Pike is wrong in believing Jamie and his Scots are aiding the French in a new campaign. He has to snatch Jamie or risk another season of defeats. And you, McCallum, are his goat.”

The words fell heavier than the chains the army had put on Duncan. It seemed the fitting conclusion to his first day in America.
The New World was a sham after all. The oppressors and aristocrats of the Old World had found their way across the Atlantic.

“Of course,” Woolford added in a harsh voice, with an inclination of his head toward the Scottish bard, “if the wolves became wise to the ways of the Romans, they would just kill the goat before it could be used against them.”

Duncan turned away, about to flee outside, more desperate than ever to find the old ferryman Jacob, whose message for the Ramsey tutor would finally put sense around the chaos of the day. But suddenly Sergeant Fitch was in front of them, leaning toward Woolford. The sergeant had his hand on his blade and was watching the night through the open door as he spoke to his captain.

“Our Indian, sir,” Fitch announced in a low, urgent voice. “Dead in the summer kitchen.”

W
OOLFORD DARTED OUT THE FRONT door. Duncan ran into the dining chamber, frantically looking for the children among the small crowd of dancers. He found Crispin in a chair in the corner, each of the small children on a knee, each sleeping on a broad shoulder. Sarah was nowhere to be seen. Crispin himself was leaning against the wall, his eyelids heavy until Duncan conveyed Fitch’s news.

The butler shot up, clutching the children to his shoulders. “She’s gone!” he gasped. “Went into the kitchen several minutes ago.”

Duncan lifted Jonathan into his own arms and followed Crispin through the throng into the adjoining kitchen. The chamber was empty except for a sturdy girl swabbing dishes in a wooden tub. Fitch and Woolford had not chosen to spread the alarm, Duncan realized, though the proprietor and his wife had also vanished.

They searched the other downstairs chambers of the inn to no avail, then carried the children to the upstairs bedroom where their traveling trunks awaited. The two men laid the children side by side under a coverlet. “One of us must stay,” Duncan observed, looking out the window at the moonlit grounds. Someone moved along the edge of the forest with a torch.

Crispin said nothing but lifted a ladder-back chair from the peg
where it hung on the wall, set it sideways by the window, where he could survey both the barnyard and the door, and then sat.