Bone Rattler (33 page)

They worked without speaking, Duncan extending the splits when the young keeper reached for them.

“Did you see who made those other signs by the house?” Duncan finally asked. “Beside your cross.”

Frasier clamped his jaw as tight as the bench vise and kept working.

“A house spoon broken into pieces. There is only one member of the Company who has worked in the kitchen. One who knows the wisdom of the eggshells.” It was a very old practice, nearly forgotten by the time his grandmother was a girl, but there were still those who believed witches could magically turn eggshells into vessels that would transport them through air and water.

“I care not if I am stripped of my rank as a keeper,” Frasier proclaimed.

Duncan took a moment to understand. “I have no reason to speak to Lord Ramsey of this. All I wish is that you be sure of your demons before acting against them. The boy found the crosses. He thinks they are to keep the savages away. But I searched the front of the house. There’s iron in two trees and hidden in the piles of dirt along the porch. You weren’t aiming them at the Indians. You were trying to contain something inside the house.”

“My aunt used to explain things to me and my cousins, in a small room sealed with a ring of salt. She said people like us, we are blessed with vision that others never find. When we see the evil, we must fight it, one demon at a time.” Frasier kept working but glanced toward the great house. He wasn’t worried about being reported to Ramsey but about whether his iron would stay in place. “They say you are responsible for freeing Lister,” the youth offered in a grudging tone.

“He did not kill the professor.” Frasier had always preferred his own theory, Duncan recalled. And his banshee had moved into the great house.

“When you stole onto the second floor, what did you see?”

“Witches owe their powers to charms. My aunt told me of one who had a blue bone, another with a black hen that was the source of her powers. Destroy them and the witch shrivels to dust.”

“She’s little more than a girl, Frasier.”

“You would protect her? You did not know her true color the day you pulled her from the sea. But now—”

“I still do not know,” Duncan confessed. Though he had begun to resent the way the truth seemed to be bent around Sarah, he also could not put out of his mind the frightened, wounded way she looked at the forest. He had not forgotten the words spoken by Woolford at the tavern. Because he had saved her, he was responsible for her. “You still have not said what you found in the house.”

When Frasier did not reply, Duncan leaned closer to his ear. “Ox shoes. In the far north stall of the barn. All the oxen here have been shod. There is a box with old ox shoes. Good iron. No one will miss them. But lift no hand against the lass,” he warned.

Frasier studied him solemnly for a moment before speaking. “Cameron. What I found was Cameron going through things in Reverend Arnold’s private chamber.”

“What things?”

“At the vicar’s bedside table. Lifting his hairbrush. Going through his pockets.”

“For what?”

“Surely ye know the way of those creatures. She must have him in thrall, by some enchantment. He was helping her. He was collecting hairs and threads.”

Duncan closed his eyes a moment. A person’s hairs, like threads from their clothes, were used by witches to cast spells upon them. “You think Cameron is working against the Company?”

Frasier lowered his drawknife. “Cameron has his secrets. He tells everyone he was in the militia. He never mentions that afterwards he was in the regular army. But Sergeant Fitch remembers him, says he fought at Ticonderoga.”

“But he went back to Scotland, started a new life.”

“A tinker came through yesterday. Cameron was asking him about ships sailing to England, whether there were more in Philadelphia or New York.”

The young Scot kept working the knife along the wood. “The professor was going to show me his comet this summer, below the Big Dipper,” he said after making two more trunnels, his voice now
melancholy. “Adam was going to show me how to tan a deer hide. He said slippers of soft buckskin would be an admirable gift to send my aunt.” Frasier cast an awkward glance at Duncan.

“I miss them also,” Duncan offered.

“That last night before he died, I let him linger at the rail to watch the sunset,” the young keeper explained. “He watched the dusk like he had never seen one before. When darkness fell, I touched his arm to go below. He didn’t move at first, but he spoke toward the waves. ‘I have seen things no man ever should have to see,’ he said, then he looked at me. ‘There are promises made,’ he told me, ‘which if broken will end all good things ever again. ’Tis a rare great thing to be honored with such a bond,’ he said, and should I ever be so fortunate, I was not to shy from the blessing.” Frasier was not only the youngest of the keepers, he was the youngest of all the prisoners, and never before had he seemed so like a lost boy. His voice trembled when he spoke again. “I made a promise, too, the night after Adam died. I promised to the stars that I would find revenge. Because he saved my life, with his singing.” Frasier seemed unable to look into Duncan’s face. “The English mean for all of us to die. But I know how to slice open Ramsey’s hull now. And I know better than to stop this time.”

A chill ran down Duncan’s back.

A bell started ringing, signaling the evening meal. Without another word, Frasier rose from the bench and was gone.

 

 

The next morning before dawn, after a night of restless, uneven sleep, Duncan discovered a note pinned to his door, folded and fastened with a wax seal.
The children will be here six weeks,
it said.
I require a plan of instruction. Geography. Mathematics. Classical history. Much of philosophy and, of course, the biblical lessons. Aristotle. Aquinas. None of the atheist Hume, nor of the traitorous Swift. Prepare for us to review tomorrow at tea. R.
Under the note was a dog-eared volume of Plato’s
Republic,
in which Ramsey’s cherished philosopher described the perfect state as one run by an educated elite, supported by professional functionaries.

Duncan crumbled the paper in his hand, squeezed it into a ball, and hurled it into the cold fireplace.

He had provided for Ramsey a carefully worded version of the deaths of Evering and Old Jacob, which the great lord could exaggerate to gain leverage over the army. But Duncan was no closer to understanding what had happened to the two dead men, only more certain that the threat continued, that Ramsey was capable of turning it into a nightmare for all of them, and that even if he had been able to stop Lister’s hanging, Duncan could never serve such a man as Ramsey for seven years. He gazed out the window toward the forge, Lister’s empty cage. He had freed the old Scot, as his grandfather would have done. And now Lister had given him a way for them both to be free. Carolina. The frail hope that had entered Lister’s voice when he had mentioned the place made Duncan’s heart ache. Lister was right. They had to flee. If ever there was to be a new clan, they had to run, and elude Hawkins and the hounds.

His gaze drifted back to the crumpled note. Why would Ramsey say the children were staying for six weeks? Crispin had said they would stay through summer, twelve weeks at least. He leafed through the Plato, fighting the emotion that boiled under his skin. The Ramsey shackles could not have felt more real if there had been iron around his feet. He slammed the book shut, gazed emptily into the cold fireplace, then rose and left the building, walking away from the town, toward the open fields. He sat on a stump for several minutes, watching frolicking lambs, then absently strolled along the animal pens, pausing to gaze at the young pigs as he chewed again on Frasier’s words.
The English mean for all of us to die.
In freeing Lister he may have begun to act like a clan chief, but the Company of Scots still faced some unknown doom if he could not resolve its mysteries.

“Men say ye be like a doctor or such.” The words came like a frigid blade along his spine. He looked up into a gaunt scarecrow face over soiled buckskins.

Duncan did not move as Hawkins stepped to his side, in front of the pigs. Strangely, he held a young rabbit, small enough to fit in his
palm. Duncan recalled seeing a nest under a log at the edge of the wheat field.

“I’ve had training in—” he began, before realizing the trapper was not interested in a reply. Duncan put a step between them, placing himself out of the range of the man’s sinewy arms.

“It be truly amazin’, the things that spill out when ye gut a man.” Hawkins spoke in a level, casual voice, his narrow eyes aimed like gun barrels at Duncan. “There’s some in the tribes that collects parts, string up a necklace of ears or such. Must be of the medical persuasion, too. Onc’t I saw a string of men’s privates.” Hawkins raised the terrified rabbit and stared into its eyes. “Hell,” he said with a cold laugh, “onc’t I saw a savage cut open a prisoner’s belly, pull out his breakfast, and feed it to his dog as the man watched.” He stroked the rabbit’s neck with a finger. The creature quieted, settling into his palm.

“What do you collect, Mr. Hawkins?” Duncan asked in a brittle voice.

“Prayers,” Hawkins replied in a whisper, grinning, “the last sounds the dying make.” With that, the rabbit uttered a shuddering cry, cut off by a snap of bone.

Duncan looked down to see the little rabbit limp, its neck broken between two of the trapper’s fingers. Hawkins tossed the body into the pen. Instantly three pigs began a tug of war with the still warm creature, ripping it into pieces and devouring them. Duncan stared numbly at the little patch of blood on the dirt before looking up. Hawkins was gone.

Shaken, he found his way back to the schoolhouse, reviewing the events of the past days. He had done nothing to provoke Hawkins. Except tell Frasier to ask certain questions. Opening the book he had left on the table, he read again, read until the hairs on his neck rose and he snapped his head up. Captain Woolford had materialized ten feet away.

“Do you have any idea of the damage you have caused?” Woolford demanded. The odor of brandy reached Duncan even before the ranger advanced a step, leaning forward as if about to pounce.
Duncan had never seen such wildness in the officer’s eyes. “Major Pike only considered you a nuisance before, a possible link to your brother. Now he will revile you as much as your brother. Calder will have no choice but to send more men west. You have forced him to move the regular troops, to make a show for the governor.”

“I did not expect your reaction so quickly. How did you discover what I wrote?”

“The original was dispatched yesterday on a swift horse. Before it left a copy was transcribed.”

Duncan had seen a figure at the dining table, with quill and paper. Crispin. “Before, there was a chance of finding answers. Now you have unleashed a pack of mad dogs, banishing every chance of a ranger having a quiet dialogue with any Indian within two hundred miles. And it will take them but a few moments to realize that if the army was responsible for Evering’s death, there was only one member of the army on board the ship. If Calder decides to look for a quick solution, it will be my head he offers.”

“I am pleased to have finally gotten your attention, Captain. Perhaps you will finally admit that the paths you and I follow are the same? The murders of Evering and Jacob, the death of Adam Munroe, are all rooted in what happened at Stony Run. You are trying to find justice for the massacre at Stony Run. My mystery and yours have the same answer. And finding it is now as urgent for you as for myself.”

Woolford, suddenly unsteady, dropped onto one of the students’ stools. “You will never understand. You cannot understand.”

“I understand more than when I arrived a few days ago. I understand not to touch a bear or a snake. I understand the army and the Ramsey Company are rivals somehow. I understand that a woman pretending to be a dead girl is at the eye of the storm. I understand what it means to have your people destroyed by an oppressor.”

Woolford, elbows on the table, buried his face in his hands. “When the army first sent me to America eight years ago, no one dared go into the forests. Everyone had heard stories of savages who ripped out your liver and ate it as you died. I was ordered to join a
militia scouting party in the winter. Our leader and half the others drowned when our canoe went over a waterfall. We were lost and starving and it began to snow. One man froze to death. A Mohawk family found us more dead than alive. Two of their men lost toes to frostbite while carrying us back to their village. King Hendrick’s village. More snow came, eight or nine feet of it. We spent two months with them. They taught me their language, taught me the ways of the forest. I watched as they prayed to their spirit world. I played with their children, helped with their dead. When I came back to the settlements, I signed on as a ranger.”

“What really happened at Stony Run?”

Woolford took a long time to answer. When he finally spoke, he faced the fireplace. “The leaders of the tribes see the future hurling at them, forcing them to new ways, and they don’t know what path to take. Tashgua was arguing that the Iroquois should end their involvement in the war, that the tribes needed to go back to the old ways, before muskets and silver coins and whiskey. Ten of the most important chiefs agreed to meet him, to take part in his ceremony to reach the mother spirit. Where they went, no one was allowed to take weapons.”

Woolford fell silent, and rose to face the window before continuing. “I discovered the bodies, every chief but Tashgua, and many of those who travel with Tashgua as his guard.”

“Pike was there?”

“Came in behind me, hours later.”

“Fitch showed me a piece of tartan.”

“At least three of the dead were deserted soldiers.”

“From the Black Watch?”

Woolford nodded. “They had taken up new lives with Tashgua’s band. I saw to it they were taken back with their fellow warriors.”