Bone Rattler (28 page)

Duncan fought to keep his voice steady. “You and I both know, Frasier, that his body was sent back to England.”

“It’s what Evering became, his punishment for defying something that lives in the forest.” Frasier’s matter-of-fact tone was as unsettling as the gruesome thing in front of Duncan. “It drew out his spirit from the ship and withered it and sent it back to watch.”

It’s what Evering became, according to Frasier, for taking the path that Duncan was now on. “Watch what?” he asked, taking a step toward the thing.

“Us. The town . . . God’s life!” Frasier cried as Duncan advanced toward the tree. “Don’t touch it!”

Instead of touching the thing, Duncan stepped to the side, studying it. The head, he saw, was a mask, expertly carved of wood and stained dark red, with horsehair fastened to the top. The teeth in the sinister mouth were made of bits of shell. It had been hung with a leather strap on a limb that jutted from the tree, with the waistcoat and arms braced in a crosspiece tied with vines.

He pried open the pockets with a twig, finding nothing. This was Evering’s good waistcoat, the one stolen along with his watch from his cabin. Directly below the effigy was a small pile of ashes. He knelt and stirred them. Tobacco had been burned.

“Who have you told?” he asked.

“No one. Lister, since he can tell no one. Lister understands these things. We’re all going to end up like this.”

Duncan turned to him, for a moment as frightened by Frasier as by the effigy.

“We should have known,” Frasier added, “after what happened to that bear.”

But as little as Duncan understood about the New World, of one thing he was certain. Whoever had made the effigy was not one who killed bears. He looked back up at the twisted countenance. What had happened here was like the ritual on the ship—part European, part not. Part Indian, he forced himself to admit. A new realization struck him as he gazed at the twisted mouth. He was looking at Old Crooked Face. Adam had gone to Old Crooked Face, and so, apparently, had Evering. With trembling fingers, he reached for the roll of paper in the bird skull and was about to read it when the cries began—the terrified screams of a child.

He burst out of the brush at the edge of the island to see Virginia standing on the bank fifty yards upstream. By the time he reached her, the screams had become silent, her jaw moving up and down, her face white as a sheet, her eyes wild with terror. Caught in the rocks midstream were bodies, mutilated bodies that had clearly been in the water several days. Suddenly Crispin was there, gathering the girl into his arms, running toward the house with her as Cameron began directing men into the water.

“Settlers, drifted down from the north,” the keeper said as the first corpse was pulled ashore, a man without hands, without eyes, without a scalp.

Duncan realized he was still clutching the paper from the bird skull. It was a page torn from a Bible, the same size that Evering had
carried. It was from Revelations.
Go,
Duncan read,
and pour out the seven bowls of God’s wrath on the earth.

 

 

Wigs. Wigs were Ramsey’s lifeline on a stormy sea.

When Duncan found Crispin at the rear of the summer kitchen, the butler was addressing what at a quick glance might have appeared to be a group of seated gentlemen. On a trestle-and-plank table were half a dozen hairpieces supported on rounded, wooden pedestals specially designed to store them. Crispin was extracting a skillet of buckles, cylinders of baked red clay, from the oven built into the wall, which with skillful and patient wrapping would restore the drooping curls.

A gentleman of modest means might have but one wig which, depending on whether it was human, goat, horse, or calf in origin, could represent a significant investment. But the Ramsey head was versatile, and wealthy to the point of opulence. An old-fashioned periwig, a grizzle wig, a campaign wig, a ramillies—the odd-looking bob wig made popular by Dr. Johnson—and even an informal bag wig were all on the table, marking Ramsey’s connection to the brocaded, lavender-scented courtesans of his habitat across the ocean.

From the shadows Duncan watched his new friend, his hands coated with powder, clad in a starched white shirt buttoned too tightly at his neck under a sleeveless brown waistcoat. He had never seen Crispin in the performance of his household duties, and the sight made Duncan so uncomfortable he was about to retreat, when Crispin spoke to him.

“These hairpieces redeemed us,” the big man reported with a glance toward Duncan. “Reverend Arnold was complaining about our abrupt departure from the city when Mr. Ramsey silenced him and announced that he had been about to send for me, because his curls were in such disarray.” A kitchen maid appeared from inside the building, wiping soot from her hands. As she began arranging the buckles in front of the periwig, a bell sounded from the kitchen
door. A look of relief shot across Crispin’s features. He straightened and gestured Duncan toward the house. “Tea,” was all he said.

“She made it safely here,” Duncan observed as they walked toward the house.

“The captain rode hard all that first day,” Crispin replied. “She kept always ahead of him, so he had never a glimpse of her. He kept riding west, toward Edentown, thinking she was still in front. But then she came trotting up behind him, not far from here, her horse worn to a shadow. Won’t breathe a word about where she had been.”

They still had no answer to the questions that had hovered over them, unspoken but conspicuous, during their journey together. Had Sarah been driven by horror at the old Indian’s murder or by fear of the report of the attack in the harbor? Or had it been something else she had seen in Jacob’s death, something that Duncan had been blind to?

Crispin led Duncan into the library in the northeast corner of the great stone house, where windows looked to the west and north. Lord Ramsey, sitting in a high-backed Windsor chair with a large tray constructed into the right arm, acknowledged him with a nod but continued reading the book perched on the tray. Behind him were shelves containing perhaps five dozen books and a large number of periodicals. Against the wall to the right was a heavy secretary desk of cherry wood, its hinged top closed. An elegant, engraved fowling piece hung on the fireplace mantel. On the north wall by the window hung a large drawing, a map of a town and the river along its edge, with buildings drawn in great detail, each labeled in an ornate hand. Another map, of the New York colony, hung on the adjacent wall, bearing notes in several hands. Several muskets leaned in one corner, beside a rack containing a dozen heavy swords and two old-style metal breastplates. The room had the air of another military office.

Studying the compound through the window, Duncan compared it to the map. Though it was labeled
Palace of Husbandry,
the barn was located as shown on the map, as were the summer kitchen, the
forge, the spinning shed, and all the other existing structures, though the map held three times the number of buildings that currently stood outside, including a church, a courthouse, and a jail. But the house was different. The house they stood in was much smaller than the three-winged mansion on the map.

When Duncan turned, Reverend Arnold was standing by the window, staring toward a plot of land beyond the barn, where whitewashed stakes outlined a broad rectangle. Duncan glanced at the map again. It was the site of the yet-unbuilt church.

“The vicar has informed me of your good service on the ship. You brought my daughter back from the dead.” Ramsey seemed to struggle to keep emotion out of his voice, and Duncan understood why he had chosen not to have the conversation in public upon his arrival. “She is so much like her mother. Uncannily like her mother. I will not forget how well you performed that day. You shall be repaid.” He stepped to a silver tray on a low table by the window and poured a cup of tea from a delicate porcelain pot painted with violets, handing it to Duncan.

Ramsey seemed to think that Duncan had saved Sarah for him, that in leaping into the black, churning sea, he had merely been performing his duty to his patron. “Miss Ramsey and I were not meant for the sea that day,” he ventured.

“Truly God has marked her,” Ramsey said, regaining the poise in his voice. “The first lady of Edentown will be needed for many tasks. The church choir must be organized, a flag for the courthouse designed and sewn. Naming of babies. The kitchens. The cellars. The gardens. The seasonal festivals. All the families will look to her. There are things only a Ramsey woman can do.” In his mind, Duncan realized, Ramsey was running not the town that existed outside but the one in the drawing. His gaze drifted back to the map. The current house wasn’t wrong, he saw now, it was merely the base. The wings still had to be constructed, on either side. The only thing not on the map was the palisade wall being built along the northern woods.

“Miss Ramsey seemed most anxious for her reunion,” Duncan
observed. He glanced out the window toward the little island. Though he could not see it, he knew the Evering effigy was staring right at the house. Before he had left the hemlock, he had paced around the tree and had found small, wrapped bundles of fur and a strange arrangement of deer antlers, more than a dozen of them, tied with vines in a circle. Now that his fear had subsided, he realized they could have been offerings, that perhaps in the world of those who had made it, the effigy wasn’t meant to frighten but to serve as a shrine.

“She was sorely missed. She is a builder of empire.”

Duncan sipped his tea, replaying the words in his mind. Just as Ramsey spoke of the Edentown in his mind, not the muddy reality outside his door, the patron seemed to be speaking of a different Sarah. “Should she not take time to recover from her illness before she embarks on carving up continents?”

“Fortunately,” Arnold interrupted, “she is in better health than we’ve seen in a year. Destiny waits for no one.”

Ramsey stepped to the window and surveyed his budding empire. “But first we must eliminate all shadows from our midst.”

Duncan’s belly tightened as Ramsey fixed him with a meaningful gaze.

“Lord Ramsey desires your report,” Reverend Arnold explained. “The record must be completed. The first case for Edentown’s magistrate must present an intellectual and moral pillar, a pristine example of logic and science.”

“Surely you understand I have had no opportunity for inquiries.”

“What possible need is there for further inquiries?” the vicar pointed out. “The evidence has all been assembled, the killer apprehended. All that is needed is the proper organization of your thoughts and the lifting of a quill.”

“My logic and science have not pointed to Mr. Lister,” Duncan said, swallowing hard. “As you say, the record must be complete. There are questions I might ask the army,” Duncan suggested, trying not to look conspicuous as he watched for Ramsey’s reaction. “There was a general who asked about the death of Evering. He
seemed to think that his death had some connection to military matters.”

Ramsey withdrew into himself a moment, then helped himself to snuff from a silver box on the side table and paced in front of the window facing the river. “You told General Calder it was none of his concern,” he said without breaking stride. Duncan thought it was an invitation, but Ramsey continued in his imperious tone. “You told him the Company is an enterprise of Edentown. You reminded him Edentown is mine, by royal charter. You vowed to yourself that the Company would emerge victorious.”

Duncan could see an ox team working the field closest to the barn. He had an overwhelming desire to be among the prisoners, plowing the earth, hauling stones, cleaning stalls ankle-deep in manure, anywhere but playing the rag puppet to such a man. “The killer is still at large among us,” Duncan said. “I think he or an accomplice killed an old Indian at the ferry inn.”

“Impossible,” Ramsey said. “As I told Captain Woolford when he mentioned it, Indians are always dying. It is a sign of our victorious God. Do not be distracted from your duties.”

“General Calder,” Duncan said, “believed I should be interested in a battle where many of our Indian allies died. At Stony Run.”

It was not exactly alarm Duncan saw in the look that passed from Ramsey to Arnold, but something like a wary resentment, as if Calder had just stolen a point in some game between them. And Calder had used Duncan to make the score.

“The Indian who died at the inn had the name of our ship,” Duncan continued. “He was trying to pass a secret to someone in the Company. Or someone he expected to be with the Company. A man who would kill Evering over a secret would have little hesitation in killing an old Indian. It could not have been Mr. Lister, for he was in chains.” Ramsey and Arnold grew very quiet, Arnold staring out the window, Ramsey at his map. “You say you will repay me for saving your daughter, sir. I ask that you release him on his parole.”

“Impossible.”

“On
my
own covenant then. He is an old man who will not stray far.”

“And what recompense will you offer when he kills again?” Arnold inquired.

“I pledge my indenture. If you find me mistaken, then put me in chains mucking out the horse stalls for seven years.”

Ramsey replied with a silent frown, then stepped closer to his map. “In England,” he offered with a gesture toward the drawing, “towns and their populations have become such random, disheveled things. Here we have the opportunity to correct all mistakes.” He fixed Duncan with a sober gaze. “Our century stands at the culmination of civilization. We are its ambassadors.”

The lord’s library, Duncan decided, was the most treacherous terrain he had yet encountered in the New World. He noticed small numbers in the lower right corner of each building sketch, the house bearing the numeral 3. Examining the numbers of each sketch and the status of the new construction, he recognized the sequence. “The very last structure to be built in your utopia is the courthouse,” he observed.