Bone Rattler (40 page)

“What did they take from here?” Woolford demanded.

Duncan watched Ramsey, who even in his weeping exchanged an uneasy glance with Arnold.

“They killed your sergeant,” the vicar stated. “Destroyed our new barracks for the Company.” He advanced on Woolford, as if trying to force a retreat. “We will collect the bodies of those we killed. At least we can tell the world the price they paid for their atrocity. If we are fortunate, we may have shot a French officer or two.”

“There won’t be any bodies,” Woolford shot back. “Even if the Company bullets connected with any of them, which I doubt, they will have taken away their casualties. And you will certainly find no evidence of the French.” The ranger studied Ramsey and Arnold a moment, then cursed under his breath. “Is it truly possible you could be at the center of this maelstrom and not comprehend it?”

“We do not need the army to explain our suffering,” Ramsey rejoined icily, and turned his back on the ranger.

With a vengeful glare Woolford raised the lethal spiked club in his hand. Duncan leapt forward, for a terrible instant thinking the ranger meant to strike Ramsey. But with a blur of movement the ranger brought it down on Ramsey’s delicate porcelain teapot, the spike embedding in the refined mahogany table. Ramsey spun about, a snarl on his mouth, but as he saw Woolford’s face, white with rage, he shrank back and fixed his gaze on the shards of painted flowers that covered his carpet.

When Woolford spoke, the venom in his voice was a palpable thing. “These were no Huron, no Abenaki, no French Indians,” he hissed. “They were our friends the Iroquois!” Woolford spun on his heel and was gone.

Duncan found Jonathan near the edge of the river, gathering stones into a pile under the eye of a guard fifty feet away. His cheeks were streaked where tears had fallen, his eyes sunken and absent. Duncan watched the boy in silence, then collected a handful of pebbles and added them to the boy’s pile.

“If I had enough stones,” Jonathan said. “I could have stopped them.” His voice was halting, as if he were about to start sobbing again at any moment. “Next time I shall kill them all. I have learned to kill frogs and squirrels,” he offered with hollow bravado.

“Did you see them, Jonathan?”

“I tried to stay awake, but. . . . If I had been awake I could have raised the alarm, I could have thrown stones while Sarah hid.” The tears began again, and the boy collapsed to the ground, tucking his head into his folded knees as he sobbed. “When I awoke, I thought it was Crispin who held me. He was so large and strong, and he patted me on the back like Crispin.” The boy seemed to have aged years since the day before. He scrubbed his cheeks and gazed fearfully toward the far bank.

A shadow flickered across them. Woolford was there, bending, dropping more stones onto Jonathan’s pile. The boy pushed his chin out, acknowledging him with a solemn nod—the young recruit in his officer’s presence. “When he stepped to Sarah’s window, in the
moonlight, I saw his hair,” he continued, raising both hands and placing them on his crown, covering all but a center patch of hair, pushed up between his fingers.

“It’s called a scalp lock,” Woolford explained, kneeling at the boy’s opposite side.

“He had stripes of paint on his face, and his eyes were big black circles. A witch, I am certain. On the side of his face was a crow. He must have cast a spell, because when I tried to scream, no sound came out. I hit him with my fists. That’s when he did it.”

“Did what?” Duncan asked in alarm. “Something to Sarah?”

Jonathan shook his head slowly. “He laughed.” The words hung in the still afternoon air. “But savages can’t laugh, can they? They kill. They scream. They invite terrible spirits to inhabit their bodies. That’s what he was doing,” the boy decided, looking back at a second-story window. “It was his way of calling a devil.”

“Where was Sarah when this happened?” Duncan asked. “Was her tongue also bewitched?”

“I don’t think she awoke until he made that sound. She leapt out of bed, calling my name, then someone else in the room spoke in the forest language and she spoke no more. I didn’t see, didn’t hear anything else. He put me on the windowsill and pointed to the moon. He meant to kill me if I didn’t keep looking at the moon, I’m sure of it.”

“Did you see her leave?”

“I think they beat her and carried her away in a blanket. I turned when I saw the cabins burning, and they were gone.”

“It was all over before it started,” Woolford concluded. “She was already in the woods by the time the cabins ignited. Just a distraction, to keep everyone here while her abductors raced away.”

“Crispin and I cleaned Fitch’s body,” Woolford reported as the boy set off to collect more stones. “When we lifted it, there was something underneath. The key to the lock on Lister’s cell.”

“You’re saying he was trying to release Lister?”

Woolford took out his knife and began rubbing the edge on a flat
stone, an action Duncan had seen Fitch perform a dozen times before. “Could be he thought the buildings were all going to burn.”

“Killed by an Indian in a settlement after so many years fighting them in the wilderness,” Duncan observed. “You said he was the best Indian fighter you had ever known.”

“I thought you had seen his body.” Something close to contempt had entered Woolford’s voice.

“I did.”

“Then you looked and didn’t see.”

As the ranger continued to whet his blade, Duncan reconstructed the scene in his mind. “His belt,” Duncan said in a muted tone. “His knife and tomahawk were still in it. His attacker took him in the chest.”

“It isn’t the forest we should be watching.”

“God’s breath!” Duncan gasped. “It wasn’t an Indian who killed him.”

“It would be as likely for him to have been killed by the dowager Duchess of Kent as by one of those Iroquois. Measure the wound, McCallum. It’s five inches at least. No tomahawk did that.” A wave of emotion seemed to wrack the officer. “Fitch,” he whispered with bowed head. “I ran ten thousand miles with the man, in every kind of storm man and nature could conjure. He spoke a dozen native tongues, was welcome at every hearth, Indian or white, south of the Saint Lawrence. What do I tell his family? That he died in a make-believe battle in Ramsey’s pitiful, make-believe world?”

“I was there, in his last moments. He could not speak, but he made these motions,” Duncan said, and repeated the hand gestures Fitch had struggled to make with his last ounce of strength.

Woolford grimaced and repeated the sign of the fingers falling from head to shoulder. “The tribes use hand signals sometimes to speak with one another when they do not share a language. This means woman.” He stared with a puzzled expression as Duncan repeated the gesture of the fist with the moving fingers underneath, then sighed and looked away.

Duncan repeated the motion for himself. The fist. Something hard. A rock, a stone. The moving fingers underneath. A moving stone. A running rock. “Stony Run,” he declared. “He was saying Sarah was being taken to Stony Run. How did he know?”

Woolford ignored the question, but it seemed to trigger something in his mind. He cast a worried glance toward the forest, toward the Edge of the Woods place. “Someone could not afford to have that message spread.”

“Not want her rescued? Impossible. No one could . . . .” His voice faded, not certain how to complete the thought.

“We are in the land where all things are possible,” Woolford replied in a bitter tone.

They watched in silence as the boy gathered more stones.

“It was like a military operation,” Duncan said with grudging respect. “A precisely planned strike. The fire at the cabins was a diversion.”

“What did they take from Ramsey’s desk?”

“The most valuable thing in Edentown. The only thing that cannot be replaced.” There had been many arguments in the law courts about the nature of such charters, Duncan knew. Judges had decreed that the charter itself constituted the right, that without the piece of paper there was no right. And more than once a king had changed his mind about such charters, but was powerless to change them unless they were returned. “They must have been looking for valuables and took it on a fancy. A pretty painted piece of paper signed by the king of England.”

“The charter?” Woolford asked incredulously. “They left behind swords, hunting guns, mirrors, silver, glassware, blankets? Instead they forced his locked desk and took a hidden parchment? I was in the library, McCallum. Only the desk was touched.”

“Who is the king to them?” Duncan asked after a long, perplexed moment.

The ranger leaned forward, his eyes lit with an intense curiosity as he contemplated Duncan’s question. “A portrait at the governor’s house,” he replied. “A silhouette on peace medals and coins.”

“To the Iroquois,” Duncan said, “who is the giver of lands?”

“The Iroquois are perplexed about such things. Their old ways cannot account for men owning land.”

“You said before, many of them feel the old gods are leaving them. If they were trying to adapt the old ways,” Duncan pressed, “who would be the giver?”

Woolford swallowed hard. When he spoke his voice had gone hollow. “A god.”

Each man in turn opened his jaw as if to speak, but no words came out. They watched, mute, as Jonathan brought back another handful of pebbles and returned to his foraging on the bank.

Duncan extracted the notched council stick and dangled it in front of the ranger. Woolford’s eyes lit with sudden interest, but as he tried to grab the stick, Duncan closed his fingers around it. “Are the men who raided us from Tashgua?”

“Likely so,” Woolford replied in a simmering voice. “I must see that stick.”

“Are there Scots with Tashgua?”

“There were, months ago. The ones who survived are probably safe in Carolina by now.” Cold anger was building in the ranger’s eyes.

“Did you find my brother’s body at Stony Run?”

“No.” Woolford eyed Duncan’s hand as if he were about to pounce on it.

“Was Tashgua at Ticonderoga?”

“I would not swear it,” Woolford said in something like a hiss, “but I would guess it to be so, watching from the hillside.”

“Where my brother disappeared.” Duncan dropped the stick into the ranger’s hand. “Where would the Onondaga hold a council?”

“Not all the Onondaga, but the prophet of the Onondaga, the great seer of the Iroquois people.” Woolford bent over the little stick as he spoke, counting the notches. “And this,” he said, lifting the stick in his open palm, “guarantees that every senior chief, every medicine man from every one of the tribes who believes that the old ways must be preserved will be there.”

“Fitch had seen another message on a wampum belt,” Duncan recalled, his breath catching. “It told where the council will be, didn’t it?”

Woolford did not reply, only rose and trotted toward the barn, where he had left his pack and rifle. The message Fitch had seen hours before his murder. The council was being called at Stony Run, on the day the world was going to end.

After a moment, a shadow fell over Duncan. He turned and rose, facing Crispin. The big man, his face gaunt with melancholy, seemed to have shrunk. He said nothing, but gestured Duncan toward the barn.

“Lord Ramsey has a plan,” Crispin announced in a worried voice as Duncan arrived at his side by the entrance. “He’s called a meeting of all the town in an hour.” The butler and a handful of Company men were staring at a row of smudges six feet from the loft ladder. They were the prints of hands covered with soot, rising straight up the wall, without accompanying footprints, spaced as if some great pawed spider had scaled the high wall. Duncan pushed though the men and climbed the ladder.

The hay had been pushed back from the center of the north wall of the massive loft, forming a ten-foot-wide semicircle of bare wood, above which a hideous red face hung from a beam, its crooked black mouth upturned at one end in a haunting smile, curled down at the other in a sinister frown. It was the mask from the island, the mask that had been on the prophet Evering, with the professor’s black waistcoat suspended below it, but hung around its neck now were a dozen huge claws.

“It wasn’t there yesterday,” Crispin announced from behind him.

“But no one saw an Indian in the town during the raid. There were men watching everywhere, some with muskets.”

“No one saw them in the house,” Crispin reminded him in a bleak tone, “except the boy. Those who worship such a thing, they are creatures of the night.”

“It’s just a piece of wood, Crispin.”

“They’re bringing guns,” Crispin said over his shoulder. “They’re going to shoot it.”

A new figure appeared, from a second ladder. Woolford stared in silence at the mask, then warily approached it, pacing in front of it, never taking his eyes from it. Then he paused, reached up, and ran his hand along its cheek, as if greeting an old acquaintance.

“Pull the damned thing down!” an angry voice boomed. Duncan turned to see Cameron, a sickle raised in his hand.

“You may pull it down if you wish, Mr. Cameron,” the ranger calmly rejoined. “You can burn him. You can chop him. You can shatter him with bullets. But what happens when he reappears tomorrow morning? With another row of prints where he scaled the wall?” Woolford asked in a solemn tone. The men grew very still. “The Indians consider these masks alive, with a spirit inside. And this is a very powerful one. When it isn’t in use, offerings of food need to be given it to keep it content.”

The big keeper spat a curse but backed away to a rope at the far end of the loft, never taking his eyes from the demon. One of the Company men, watching in silence, reached into his pocket, hesitantly approached the wooden creature, and tossed a piece of sausage to the floor below it.

“Why here?” Crispin asked the ranger. “Why the barn?” Duncan recalled he had heard the same question twice before, when Sarah had chanted there and when Frasier had hidden a saw in the building.