Original Death (8 page)

Duncan recalled how Conawago had prepared for his reunion with Hickory John. There had been joy on his face, but also reverence. Although his friend never spoke of it, Duncan had learned from others how the Nipmucs had been one of the most spiritual of all the woodland tribes, how their small tribe had evolved into keepers of sacred secrets, like the guardians of secret temples in ancient lore. If Conawago was such a guardian, then Hickory John must have been as well.

Duncan followed the shoreline with his eyes, noting the little coves, seeing now a solitary man rowing a boat in the open water a mile below the eagle's aerie, coming out from the shore near where a narrow track left the main road.

He descended to the road, then lingered to listen and watch. A northbound dispatch rider galloped by, then Duncan crossed the little intersection and followed the rutted track to the lake.

The pier of rough-hewn logs at the end of the track had been designed to accommodate wagons. Split logs laid lengthwise along the pier were splintered and torn where heavy wheels had rolled over them. Wagons were loaded here onto the bateaux used by the army for hauling supplies. The string of forts along the lakes had their own piers, but where he stood was in the longest gap between forts, a likely place to take on loads of supplies from
the nearby farms and timber camps. He cast a nervous glance toward the main road then backed into the shadows. It was also a place where patrols might be off-loaded, or where they might rendezvous. He crouched beside a large boulder, watching the still waters for a moment, studying the little isles that speckled the lake, some of them barren mounds of rock, others sprouting pines and cedars. Around the bend in the northern shoreline was the isle of the eagle and the dead soldier. Around the bend after that was where the crew of the bateau had shot Conawago. Once again he struggled with the impulse to reverse direction, to run north to find the old Nipmuc. But he knew that Conawago cared about the boy more than life itself. The youth they had never met kept the blood of his people alive. Duncan could never face his friend if after all their struggles he had let the boy's trail grow cold.

Duncan dropped to a knee as a twig snapped and brush began shaking in the thicket nearby. He cocked his rifle and began inching toward the sound.

The riderless horse, a powerful bay wearing a light saddle, had snagged its reins in an alder. Its eyes grew wild as its efforts entangled the reins further. Duncan rose and moved slowly toward the animal, speaking in low, reassuring tones.

When he had freed the horse, he led it out onto the open track. The well-polished brass and leather of its tack marked it as army property as clearly as the broad arrow brand on its rear flank. He studied the animal as it grazed. Its legs were not built for hauling wagons or caissons, nor for carrying an officer into battle. It was built for speed. He found himself looking back to the north shoreline, toward the eagle's isle. The drowned soldier had been traveling light, with neither sword on his shoulder belt nor cartridge box at his waist. He walked around the animal and saw now the stiff leather cylinder tied to the saddle, sealed with a waxed string. The man had been a dispatch rider. He had been forced onto the lake from this very dock, and his horse was still waiting for him, not knowing he would never return.

Duncan's hand lingered on the dispatch box for a moment, but he resisted the temptation to open it. The man had not been killed for his dispatches, but for challenging something suspicious. Duncan tied his rifle
and pack on the saddle and eased himself up. Taking a government horse was a hanging offense, but they could only hang him once, and with a mount he could be certain to leave the pursuing rangers behind.

The horse seemed to relish the open road and quickly settled into the long loping gait used by military messengers. As he emerged from each curve and crested each hill Duncan half expected to see the boy, but by late morning his hopes began to fade, and he realized Ishmael himself could have found a horse, or a ride on some carriage or wagon.

His strength, and that of the horse, began to flag by early afternoon, and as he approached the southern end of Lake George, he dismounted and led the horse off the road and up the ridge that ran parallel to it. He found a small high clearing overlooking the lake then removed the saddle and rubbed down the horse with dried grass before turning it loose to graze. He ate a meal of jerked meat and lay at the edge of a stream, filling his canteen before dipping his face in the cool water, then leaned back on a paper birch, listening to the songs of the thrushes, the hammering of woodpeckers, the screech of a hawk high overhead. He extracted the letter he had taken from the schoolhouse and read the return address once more.
Eldridge, Forsey's, Albany
. It had the sound of a commercial establishment. He unfolded the paper and for the first time read the message inside.

My dearest S
, the crude, uneven handwriting began. The salutation was followed by a prosaic description of affairs in Albany.

The boatyard has been busier than ever making transports for the army. The hammers keep me awake long into the evening. An Oneida brought in the pelt of a snow-white catamount and declared it had magic healing powers. A Dutchman bought it for his sick infant. You would have laughed to see the moose that walked into the open door of the Reformed Church during services. There has been no word from New York town
.

The letter was signed with a simple M. Duncan hesitated and looked
at the address again. Henry Bedford, it said, though the letter was directed to someone whose name began with an S.

He withdrew the papers he had taken from the wall of the classroom. The first had the drawing of a cat on it, followed by the simple verse

Great A, B, C and tumbledown D
.

The Cat's a blind bluff. She cannot see
.

Below it was the name Hannah Redfern. Under the drawing of a man with a fishing pole was the verse

The artful Angler baits his Hook

and throws it gently in the Brook
.

Jacob Pine had signed the page. Next came a drawing signed by Abigail Hillwater of a tree with leaves falling, with the verse

Autumn succeeds in flame Yellow clad

With Fullness smiling and with Plenty glad
.

A simpler drawing of a bird in a crude, younger hand, signed by Abraham Beaver, was over the verse

Fine Feathers make Fine Birds
.

A boy named Noah Moss had signed a drawing of a fox staring at a long-necked bird, over the words

When the Fox preaches beware of the Geese
.

Finally came a more refined drawing of a man looking up at a crescent moon over the words

Learn well the Motions of the Mind

Why you are made, for what designed
.

It was signed Ishmael Ojiwa Nipmuc.

The verses, Duncan suspected, were from the popular book of children's verse by John Newbery, a fixture in many British schools. But Ishmael had scribed another verse in much smaller writing at the bottom of his paper.
The world's a bubble
, it said,
and the life of a man less than a span. Francis Bacon
. He extracted the oval medallion that had laid by Hickory John's body. It was an exquisite carving of a deer and a bear standing like sentinels on either side of a kneeling man.

He stared at the medallion, knowing it must have held important meaning for the murdered Nipmuc, then set the papers in the grass around him, trying to understand what about them nagged him. He recounted the names on the crosses at Bethel Church. The captured children did not share the names of the dead. The children who shared the names of the adults had been killed. The Nipmuc wheelwright who lived apart from the war had a secret the raiders desperately wanted. He had kept an ancient flint knife hidden in his room that had sent Conawago rushing north. Bethel Church was built upon layers of tribal mystery.

As he stuffed the papers back into his shirt, he heard a new hammering, a staccato beat in the distance. This was no woodpecker. He lifted his rifle and found one of the ledges that broke through the cover of the trees, quickly stepping to the edge and just as quickly stepping back. He dropped to the ground and inched forward on his belly.

Fort William Henry, at the end of Lake George, was much larger than he had anticipated. He recalled reading how it had been reinforced and strengthened after the British had reclaimed it following the terrible massacre by French Indians there three years before. The parade ground inside the palisade held ranks of soldiers being drilled. Two heavily laden bateaux were rowing away as another was being loaded. On a broad flat outside the palisade more soldiers were being trained, marching, stopping, pivoting, fixing bayonets, and charging at straw figures tied to posts. They were moving through stations, sprinting up an earthen mound at one position, leaping over a trench at another, then spreading out with mechanical precision into the treacherous double line of muskets that had wreaked havoc on so many European battlefields. With grim recognition he saw the final station, a hundred feet from the gate. Troops completing the circuit were drawn into tight formation and ordered to halt to gaze upon a scaffold where the body of a man swayed at the end of a rope.

DUNCAN TOSSED SEVERAL coins on the table as the innkeeper reached to remove his breakfast dishes. He had paused on his desperate ride from Fort William Henry for a few hours' sleep, rising before dawn to cover the last few miles to Albany before releasing his horse and stopping at the first tavern on the outskirts of the town. “I'm looking for a place called Forsey's,” he ventured.

The old Dutchman eyed him in surprise. “Enlisting, are ye?”

“My brother's an officer,” he replied warily. His brother Jamie had indeed been a captain before being court-martialed as a deserter.

The innkeeper didn't seem particularly convinced, but he shrugged and pointed out the window. “Down Water Street then turn at the old elm and head toward the river. Sign's out front.”

By New World standards, Albany reeked of age and culture. For a few minutes as he walked down the cobbled street he felt he was back in Holland, where he had been a boarding school student. Stout brick houses with stepped roofs and smaller, brightly colored, tidy abodes with tall chimneys lined his passage. He reminded himself that the town had its start as the Dutch community of Fort Orange more than a century earlier. A woman tended asters in a cemetery beside a yellow building marked as the Dutch Reformed Church. A team of matched horses was being hitched to an elegant carriage before a stately house. A beefy, unshaven man led a procession of several weary-looking Indians bearing enormous bundles of furs on their shoulders. Heavy wagons loaded with barrels rumbled over the cobbles. An Indian woman sold baskets under a huge tree. He looked up, recognizing its fan-shaped branches, then turned down the cross street and descended toward the Hudson. Halfway down the street was a substantial brick building. With a sinking feeling he saw the soldiers, nearly all officers, idling near its entrance. He ventured close enough to read the sign over the front door before ducking into an alley.
Forsey Bros
, it said.
Clothiers to the Military
.

He waited in the shadow of a stable behind the building, watching women in plain work dresses carrying red and blue fabric out of a cellar door to hang on a rope stretched between two trees. When one of them inadvertently
kicked over a basket of their split-stick clothespins, scattering them across the ground, Duncan emerged into the sunlight to help her collect the pins.

She looked at him suspiciously but offered a stiff nod of gratitude when he dropped the last pin in the basket. “I was looking for Mrs. Eldridge,” he ventured.

The woman looked as if she had bitten something sour. “The old widow witch? Like as not cajoled some fool into trading a pint of rum for a fortune-telling and is passed out in her hut.”

“Fie!” the second woman snapped. “That's no Christian way!”

“Christian don't exactly describe her,” the first woman sneered.

“And thank God you have been spared the torment she has known,” the older woman chided. Her companion gave an exaggerated grimace and retreated toward the cellar.

“Hetty's life has been harder than most,” the woman explained to Duncan.

“She works here?” he asked.

“Most days. Sewing lace to officers' tunics, though I daresay she's never worn lace in her life. If she's in her way she'll not say a word to you.”

“In her way?”

The woman winced. “Her hut lies beyond the yard where they build the bateaux. Not hers exactly, but no one had the spine to put her out when she squatted in it.”

The shipyard at the bottom of the hill was a hive of activity. Wagons stacked with timber were lined up waiting to unload. Three separate boats were under construction, each braced within heavy pilings above the muddy bank down which they would slide upon completion. Mallets and hammers beat an unsteady rhythm. Rough-looking men working with planes and chisels glanced up at Duncan and seemed to dismiss him as one of the trappers or scouts who frequented Albany. Curses rose from a long deep trench in the ground where a man on the wrong end of a heavy sawblade spat out the wood dust constantly falling on him.

Duncan paused at the far edge of the yard near a massive dog with
shaggy brown hair sitting on its haunches. It possessed a wild, noble air about it, and Duncan, who had befriended several such creatures in his youth, instinctively took a step closer.