Bone Rattler (35 page)

“You know Evering sent letters for Lister as well,” Arnold interjected, “though we never examined them closely.”

“Because you never believed him to be a Scot.”

“Exactly,” Arnold said, as if Duncan had proven his point.

“He’s just an old sailor.” Duncan heard the helplessness in his own voice.

“Did you know the crime for which he was condemned in England?” Impatience was creeping into Arnold’s tone. “He accosted an army officer trying to stop a barroom brawl. Left him unconscious and fled. But his former captain testified to his character, leaving him a candidate for a trusted position in the Company. Only now do we realize the larger deception. A pattern of violent conduct against British authority.”

“We dispatched your excellent report,” Ramsey said. “The governor will hear of Professor McCallum. Without you, that particular victory would not have been possible. Now, as Reverend Arnold suggests, you must move to the greater challenges of the Ramsey heirs.”

The words pinched at something inside Duncan. He grew very still, and cold. “What will become of Mr. Lister?” he asked, staring toward his feet.

“A trial. First we must build a proper judge’s bench and prisoner dock. I am sending for carpenters and joiners from Philadelphia. Unfortunately, we may not break in a new gibbet without a warrant from the governor,” Ramsey noted with chagrin. “It could be two or three months before the trap door swings.”

Duncan felt numb. “But there will be a trial?”

“An excellent trial, a grand event,” Ramsey said, new enthusiasm in his voice. “Attended by all the Company, all the settlers on Ramsey lands. I shall issue a detailed judgment for publication in New York and Philadelphia. The good reverend has suggested that we open on a Sunday, after services, so the proper tone is set. I shall
read from the Greeks in my opening, about the solemn responsibilities of all citizens to stay true to their destined duties. The general, of course, will have to abstain from interfering, thanks to your insightful report, McCallum. I commend you. None of this could have been possible without you.”

Duncan was not aware of setting out for a destination, did not really understand why he went to his room and retrieved the stone bear, was so lost in his peculiar mix of shame and fury that he paid little attention to where his feet were taking him until he was passing through the thicket that walled the secret cemetery.

Strangely, for no reason he could articulate, the place had begun to take on the air of a sanctuary. He stood before the tombstone with Sarah’s name on it, feeling an inexplicable urge to say something. Here lay the real Sarah. Here was the true starting place of the mysteries that swirled about the Ramsey Company. The men of the Company were in the path of a cyclone that had been building its fury for a dozen years. He knelt and began pulling weeds from the base of the stone. When he had cleared the grave, he noticed small white flowers blooming nearby, and with a stick he dug several up and planted them on the mound. Kneeling on the fresh earth, he stared at the dates and the little angel above, touching it, clearing out the remaining dirt accumulated in the carving. Here at least was something he understood. A child cut down by mindless savages. He had had a brother, barely six years old, lost in the bloodbath after Culloden. He felt he should pray, but knew not what to pray for. At last, fighting a trembling that abruptly seized his hands, he buried the bear at the base of the grave and rose, backing away.

His gaze was on the forge all the way back to town, until, a hundred feet away from it, he saw Reverend Arnold standing at the entry to the cooper’s shed, his makeshift chapel. As he watched, Arnold took a step in, then out, and repeated the motions, an uncertain torment twisting his features.

The vicar blocked the door when Duncan tried to enter. “Lord Ramsey awaits your plan of instruction,” Arnold asserted.

“Surely he would recognize the need for divine inspiration,” Duncan shot back, and slipped through the doorway.

It was a small, dim chamber, which Duncan had visited only once before, barely large enough to hold thirty men tightly packed on the benches that lined the walls. The only light came from the narrow, rough-hewn table used as an altar, which held two candles and a small stack of prayer books. But the brass cross Duncan had seen earlier had been replaced.

“A prank,” Arnold declared in an uncertain, worried voice. “A papist Highlander prank.”

In the place of the brass cross were two long bones, joined together with a thin leather string, resting not directly on the table but on a lush animal pelt.

“I don’t recall any Catholics,” Duncan observed as he approached the table, “who use beaver fur and bone on their altars.”

“We’ve seen these pagan rites before,” Arnold said, his voice gathering strength now, “the first time a murder stained the Company.”

“Before, you agreed it was not Mr. Lister.”

Arnold turned his pale, hard face toward Duncan. “Before, I agreed it was better for the Ramsey Company to blame the army.”

Arnold, Duncan recalled, had once said they were going to provide the answers to human nature. But he had never mentioned what the questions were. “The last time, they seemed to be calling on the devil. This time, they seem to be calling on God.”

“They are mocking our God,” Arnold said. He had not moved from the doorway. “There was a Bible. Who would steal a Bible?”

Duncan warily lifted the cross, surprised by the thought that there was a simple, natural beauty to it.

“I’d say ’twas more like they wanted two gods to get acquainted,” a dry, raspy voice observed.

Duncan turned. In the corner, in the shadow behind the door, sat Sergeant Fitch. The grizzle-faced ranger looked bone tired, but his eyes were lit with a strange excitement.

“Who would do this?” Duncan asked as Fitch rose and approached.

“Like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” the ranger said. “If two spirits were coming from different worlds to meet,” he added in a contemplative tone, “I reckon this would be their Edge of the Woods place. Sometimes they seek to exchange hostages. They be offering to exchange gods as hostages.”

The words seemed to stun Arnold as much as Duncan. The vicar, his face pale as a sheet, backed out of the building.

Fitch, a look of wonder on his face, seemed not to hear when Duncan asked him if he had seen Indians in the barnyard. He left the sergeant staring at the altar and returned to the forge.

The dimly lit figure inside the coal crib kept singing until Duncan tapped a post.

“Edentown be paradise indeed,” the old Scot said, leaning toward Duncan with the clink of chains. “I lay about all day out of the hot sun.”

“You said Frasier and Hawkins argued. Could you hear about what?”

“The boy spoke softly, too low for me to hear. He was excited, seemed to want to tell Hawkins urgent news. But Hawkins cursed him, said the boy needed some rum. Frasier spoke again, something about treason. Hawkins slapped him like a misbehaving child, then left the lad staring at the ground. Later, when no one was about, the boy walked around the barn three times, sunwise.” A
deiseal
circuit. Frasier was seeing demons everywhere. But Hawkins was the wrong demon to cross.

“I’ll tell you a secret, Clan McCallum,” Lister whispered after a moment’s silence. “I got sent to the Company for a scrape with an army officer. But ten years ago I was ashore, back home visiting what was left of me family, when a lieutenant of the Royal Navy came to press me last two young cousins for service. When we argued, he drew his sword and slashed one of the boys on his arm, saying we were not
permitted to decline the king’s desire. I knocked the blade from his hand, but the fool pulled a pistol. I jumped him, the gun went off, and the ball pierced his heart. We threw his body in the sea. It were a noose for me for certain, but the boat his party came in capsized on the return with all hands lost. Everyone just assumed he was lost at sea. So I’ve been cheating the rope ever since. My account is overdue.”

“You didn’t kill Evering or Frasier. You didn’t murder anyone.”

“I see their faces in dreams, me father and those who died on Culloden moor. I never should have lied about me name, never turned me back on who I was,” Lister said in a hollow voice. “Used to be once a month, but now the dreams come every night. I was meant to die by English hands at Culloden. I cheated them all by lying and running away to sea, and that be the plain way of it.”

They had reached the truth of it, Duncan realized. It was why Lister had so readily revealed his secret Highland roots to Duncan, why he was ready to accept the noose, not for killing an English officer years earlier but for abandoning his clan and the Highland ways.

They sat in silence. Doves cooed in the barn next door.

“There’s autumn flowers sprouting along the edge of the fields,” Duncan said. “I saw thistles.” Through the slats of the crib Duncan saw a sad grin form on Lister’s lips. “One day we’re going to build a cabin on the side of a mountain in Carolina, you and me and any Scot who wants to join us. We’ll plant thistles for the joy of it and speak the old tongue all day, dance a jig all night.”

Again Lister took a long time to answer. “It’s the New World, lad,” the old sailor said in a flat voice. “Find yourself a new kind of dream.”

“I already have a dream,” Duncan said. “You gave it to me. And now it’s burnt too deep to walk away from. I vow you will not hang, Mr. Lister. You gave me my life that day on the mast. A sad wretch I would be if I did not return the favor.” What was it Adam had told Frasier?
There are promises made which, if broken, will end all good things forever.

From the shadows on the far side of the schoolhouse came the laugh of a young girl. Duncan rose. “What happened to them, your two cousins?” he asked before stepping away.

“Bonny lads, both of them. The only joy of their mother’s vexed heart. A different press gang caught up with them a month later. They both died when their frigate was sunk by the French off Brest.”

Duncan found Virginia sitting on a stump beyond the schoolhouse, watching her brother throw pebbles at pieces of broken crockery lined up on a bench. Jonathan wore a sober air as he aimed his missiles, his younger sister calling out in amusement whenever he hit one of the targets. Duncan settled beside the girl, watching her brother. It wasn’t just solemnity on the boy’s countenance. There was fear, even anguish. He did not respond with glee when he hit the crockery, but with a flash of something that might have been called hatred.

After several minutes Duncan invited them to see their new classroom. Asking which of the small tables they would choose for their own, they each took a side table, leaving the center of the three empty, each glancing at it nervously.

“Where is Sarah today?” Duncan asked.

“Father and the vicar,” Virginia offered in a grown-up voice. “They fret so about her. Reverend Arnold reads the Bible to her for an hour each day.”

As she spoke, one of the housemaids called the children’s names from the porch of the great house. “Father’s giving us music lessons,” the girl announced brightly, then gathered her skirt and skipped away, with Jonathan a few steps behind, marching like a soldier.

Duncan quickly stuffed a piece of paper and a stick of writing lead in his shirt, slipped into the barn to retrieve one of the spare ax handles leaning against the wall, and found his way to the ceremonial ground, the Edge of the Woods place. He lowered himself onto one of the log benches, his heart racing, and clutched his makeshift weapon. Never in his life had he been frightened of the wild, until now.

A twig snapped and he fought an urge to dart back to the fields, then saw it was one of the small, brown, spotted creatures Crispin called a chipmunk. He stared into the canopy, calming himself, then stepped to the stones in the center of the clearing. The Indians were
savages, but those same savages, at least some of them, held ceremonies like those of the church and seemed to have reverence for the truth, had something about them that stirred a battle-hardened man like Sergeant Fitch.

He paced about the stone platform and then, feeling like a violator in a temple, slid the stone from the top. He stared inside the compartment, then studied the forest, his heart thumping again. The wampum belt was there, but beside it someone had lain a bundle of feathers and fur tied with a single string of beads. His heart rose up in his throat as he surveyed the forest around him again. An Indian had been there, half a mile from his own bed, in the past twenty-four hours, and now he was intruding into that Indian’s secrets.

Extracting the paper, Duncan began to carefully replicate on it the shapes on the belt he had first examined with Woolford. A square at either end; figures of men holding axes; a large tree topped by a man in the center; several small
X
shapes with the top of each
X
connected, alternating with animal shapes. The figures were meaningless to him. But they meant something to someone at the settlement. When he finished, he extracted from his waistcoat the pages he had taken from Evering’s journal and read every line again, attempting to decipher even the many lines that been crossed out. The pages were mostly filled with Evering’s maudlin verses, some further describing Sarah as she slept, others reflecting what seemed to be Evering’s growing unease about landing in America. Duncan kept returning to several lines that seemed to be premises for poems never written.
If dreams transport you to the other world and you dream two months without waking, would you not try to stay on the other side forever?
the professor had asked. Then, under a series of
X
’s meant to obliterate the words, Evering’s chilling version of an old children’s rhyme.
There was a crooked man who climbed a crooked tree. He found a crooked promise and kissed the crooked sea.