Bone Rattler (34 page)

“Without telling Pike,” Duncan said.

“He would have strung them up for the crows. That’s when I sent a squad out for reconnaissance. They never returned. Two days later I found them dead, every man. General Calder’s report said they were killed by French Indians, Huron or Abenaki. But each of their
guns still held its priming. My men would not have faced the enemy without firing a shot.”

“But why, if you were trying to find the killers, would you suddenly leave for England?”

Resentment filled Woolford’s eyes. “I took leave because there was a surviving witness.”

Duncan grew very still. The realization came out in a hoarse whisper. “Adam Munroe.”
I have seen things no man ever should have to see,
Adam had told Frasier. He gazed back into the cold fireplace, the haunting words of Frasier echoing in his mind. He had to find the young keeper, had to make him reveal what he knew that could destroy the Company, had to make him understand the danger he was in if he spoke about Adam to anyone else. A dozen more questions for the ranger sprang to mind.

But when he looked up, Woolford was gone. A motion outside caught his eye. Cameron walked past the barn, carrying a heavy sack on his shoulder. No, Duncan saw, as he sprang to his feet, it was a limp man.

He found the big Scot in the open bay of the forge, locking the padlock of the crib. Blood stained the front of his shirt. “Will be no doubts this time,” Cameron growled as he saw Duncan. “Every man in the Company will want to see him swing.”

Duncan pushed past the keeper, struggling to see inside the makeshift cell. “Who—” Duncan began, then his tongue withered as he saw the checkerboard scars on the man’s exposed shoulder.

“Mr. Lister. The bastard killed young Frasier.”

F
rASIER’S FACE WAS FROZEN IN a twisted grin, as if the melancholy young Scot had thought his assailant had been offering a joke. But the prank had included a heavy, blunt object that had been slammed so hard into the side of his head that it had flattened the cartilage of his ear into his skull and knocked several teeth from his broken jaw.

“A commander,” came a brittle voice over Duncan’s shoulder. “That’s what they call these big hammers.” He turned to see Cameron holding one of the long-handled wooden mallets used to pound logs into place in the new cabins. Its head was a tattered cross-section of log ten inches wide.

“Look at him,” Cameron spat. “The young fool treated Lister like an uncle. Wouldn’t have suspected ill of him even when the commander was raised over his head.”

“You can’t know it was Lister.”

“Not just me. It was four of us who found him, sitting there beside the boy, muttering in the old tongue, his hands shaking, trying to put the teeth back into the boy’s jaw.”

“An act of mercy, not the act of a killer.”
I know how to slice open Ramsey’s hull now,
the youth had said hours earlier.

“At his side was the great hammer, with his own bloody handprints upon its handle. And things taken from the young one’s
pockets lying at his knee. With Mr. Evering gone, you should be the one to write the letter to his family, McCallum.”

Duncan’s gaze lingered for a moment on the heavy tool. For a second time, murder had been done with a hammer.

“What things?” Duncan asked. An angry crowd of Company men was gathering, uttering indistinct oaths, spitting toward the forge, some facing the dead keeper and making the sign of the cross on their chests.

Cameron pointed to a flat rock six feet away that held a few coins, several nails, and a set of ox shoes.

“You moved the body?”

“Mr. Lister would not let go of the boy when we approached. There was a wee struggle.”

For the first time Duncan noticed a pool of blood on the ground. Frasier had no open wound, only blood slowly oozing out of his mouth and nose. “Why was Lister away from the barracks in the night? He was under special watch.”

“The work party came in late, by torchlight. Everyone washed up in the basins by the door, grabbed food on the way to bed. When I checked, Lister was on his pallet. So I thought. But he had stuffed sacks under his blanket.”

Duncan surveyed the frightened faces before him, then fixed Cameron with a level stare. “Meet me with bandages at the forge,” he said.

“Like hell,” Cameron spat. “The murderer is proven and there’s the end to it.”

“I have not explained to Reverend Arnold who looted Woolford’s chest on the ship, but he would still listen with rapt attention. They know at least one of their trunks was also sabotaged. No doubt Lord Ramsey, too, would find it of interest. He longs to assert his powers as magistrate. And then there is the matter of your communicating with the army.”

Cameron pulled a plug of tobacco from his pocket, cut its end, and stuffed the piece into his mouth, all the while fixing Duncan
with a cold, assessing stare. Without another word, he turned and walked toward the great house.

Lister was lying on his back in the coal bin, his eyes closed. From the quick irregular breathing Duncan knew he was not sleeping. “Where are your injuries?” he asked quietly.

The hoarse laughter that came from the shadows caused Duncan to shudder. “Cameron and I had a bit of a frolic. He took it unkindly when I tripped him, so he used that commander on me ankle. A few days of idleness will be just the thing.”

“Why, Mr. Lister, why did you leave the Company quarters last night?” Duncan inquired.

“The birds. I told ye before, every day I’ve been here the birds have sung as the sun rises, and flowers open. I watched from here, all those days. ’Tis the hour the light penetrates deepest into the wall of the western forest. Yesterday, the birds there stopped singing.”

“You violated Ramsey’s orders so you could watch the sun rise?”

“’Tisn’t poetry I refer to, Clan McCallum. The sun rose, the flowers opened. No birds sang.”

Duncan’s mouth went tinder dry. “You mean someone was in the woods, watching the town,” he said in a low whisper.

“More than one, I’d say. There’s raiding parties, Indians led by French, more settlers being scalped every day. If you open the door of the barn loft, you can see from the fields to the river in the moonlight. Those who run the Company are blind. They keep all those guns locked away at night, with nary a guard along the river. From the loft door I could slide down a rope when trouble comes.”

“And do what?”

“To swing down and run to the schoolhouse would take but a moment. If we were quick about it, we could slip away in the confusion of battle, to the Delaware and Philadelphia. With luck they will think us killed in the fighting.”

“Did someone from across the river attack Frasier?” Duncan looked back toward where the body lay, now surrounded by men. From the place he had died, it was a toss of a stone to the river.

“The river had mist over it, spilling up the banks. A shadow was moving at its edge, but it never came out past the alders.”

“They found you kneeling beside him.”

“Like I said, I was in the loft. I heard low voices in the gray light before dawn. Then there was the sound like a brick on a melon, and someone gave a laugh.”

“A laugh?”

“Not exactly a laugh. More like a satisfied grunt. When I got there the lad was crumpled in the grass, his life’s breath already gone from him.”

“What did you seek in his pockets?”

Lister took a long moment to answer the question. “I told you I had been asked to prepare Evering’s body when he died. I didn’t do it alone. Frasier was with me.”

“Frasier took something of Evering’s?”

“Both of us. The professor had a box of dried flowers.”

“I saw it. I was grateful for the thistle you took from it. And Frasier?”

“A pretty thing. I think he thought to save it for his aunt.” Lister shifted, reaching into a pocket, then handed Duncan a three-inch-wide rectangular object through the slats of the crib. “The lad meant no harm. When a sailor dies on a ship, those who clean him for burial get to take some small thing from the man’s kit. But the Ramsey Company is not so forgiving. I would not have him called a thief o’er his grave. The lad was nurtured on great fears, thrown out into a harsh world too early.”

The object was covered with a yellow and red pattern of dyed porcupine quills, like Duncan’s medallion, shaped into a sheath for a small blade, but the deerskin backing was stretched over a rigid metal object. Duncan looked up at Lister, wondering if he understood. “It was taken from Woolford’s trunk,” he explained.

“I supposed as much. But it was there in Evering’s cabin, in a little hollow in the beam. I think Adam gave it to the professor.”

The lacing on the back revealed brass. Duncan grabbed a small
chisel from the anvil and worked at the leather thongs, releasing the metal into his palm. He stared at it in stunned silence. It was a brass buckle, with a
4
and a
2
set on its front. The Forty-second Regiment of Foot. Jamie’s regiment.

“Who did Frasier see yesterday?”

“He was in a state, ye might say. Always so sad, always so frightened. Yesterday, when we broke for rest at the palisade, he said Reverend Arnold was right, the Indians are spawn of the devil, that the Company be on a crusade, that the answer was for Reverend Arnold and as many other clergymen that could be found to be sent with bars of iron to a place called Stony Run.”

Duncan’s head shot up and he strained to see Lister’s face. “Why Stony Run?”

“Hawkins. Frasier spoke with him when he was here, got drunk with him in the barn that night. Hawkins told him Stony Run was where Satan himself waited. Frasier said Woolford was a ranger, which meant he had Indian friends. He said Woolford left the ship early to meet one, to arrange for Arnold and you to be murdered by that arrow. He said, saving Sergeant Fitch, every damned soldier and all the English could be butchered by the heathen and the world be better for it. He spoke with Fitch often, said Fitch was the only sane man in the army. He said the way to destroy a man like Ramsey was to destroy what he coveted most. Then at dusk last night he took a blade from the saw pit.”

“A saw? And did what with it?”

“Hid it in the barn, as best I could tell. Came out of the barn without it, then he spied Hawkins by the cooper’s shed, and the two of them argued. Why the burn?” Lister asked.

But Duncan had no answer.

Cameron appeared and unlocked the narrow crib door. Duncan made him stay to witness his work as he pulled away Lister’s bloody shoe. The skin over the ankle was scraped and bloody. The bones were shattered. Lister would never walk the same again. “I’ll need splints from the cooper’s shed.” Cameron, sensing the cold fury in Duncan’s voice, did not protest. “And a crock of rum.”

Crispin tried to stop Duncan when he approached the library an hour later, but then seemed to see something in Duncan’s eyes and relented. “There’s no need to hold him,” Duncan declared to Ramsey’s back. The manor lord was writing at his cherry desk, its folding top open, revealing its pigeonholes stuffed with papers.

“Plato. I have been giving this considerable thought,” Ramsey said, his head rising but not turning. “We must dose them heavily with the father of all philosophers. A man who understood the practical aspects of power.”

“Kneeling by a body does not make a man a killer. His bloody prints on the hammer mean nothing. The blood came from Lister, when Cameron struggled with him. You could not have Lister for the prior murders, so to ease your embarrassment you take him for this one.”

“An uncharitable suggestion,” a thin voice interjected. Arnold was sitting in the wing-backed chair by the window, reading a news journal. “Your term as administrator of murders lapsed yesterday. It is time to focus on your duties to the children.”

“You said once you could have no cloud over the Company,” Duncan said.

“Our duty to justice is unwavering,” Ramsey said with a distracted air, then paused and scribbled on a paper as if to record the thought. “Our noble philosopher reminds us that the particular expertise of those in government lies in constantly adjusting the balance of social affairs, without being seen to do so.”

“Plato wasn’t living with a company of Scottish prisoners beside a wilderness of savages,” Duncan observed in a taut voice.

Ramsey frowned. “Last week we had two challenges before us: how to keep the army out of our affairs and how to establish our moral authority over the Company. You gave us the perfect script for the first. Now young Frasier’s death gives us the perfect opportunity for the second.” Ramsey stood and paced in front of the window. “We still needed to confront the fact that Mr. Lister lied about his identity. No one would resort to such deception without a criminal motive. Whether he seeks to hurt our cause because of
Jacobite sedition or because he is paid by the French is all the same to us. In dealing with our enemies, we need look no further than the Old Testament.”