Bone Rattler (39 page)

“I could believe you wish me gone,” Duncan said.

The words seemed to hurt Sarah. “I wish you free, sir.” Her voice, though strong, swirled with emotion. He had begun to understand something about her. Pushing against her emotion, her restless spirit, was what drew out her strength. “Free and safe, and in search of the truth. Crispin and I have both known what it means to be a slave. It is in our power to make it not so for you.” She looked up and met his eyes. “I know of no other way to repay you. You must let me repay you or I will bear dishonor. A life for a life. Mr. Lister, too, insists you must go. Crispin and I have discussed things. When you arrive in the Carolinas, you must write to the name on the map. The name is a settler a few miles north of here, a kind man who will know what to do with the letter. I will have news to write you then. We can find ways to delay the trial. Perhaps Lord Ramsey will lose interest. No matter what happens, you must promise to leave.”

Duncan looked up in alarm. “What is going to happen?”

“This is the edge of the woods. The place between worlds. I died here once before.”

The casual way she spoke the words made the hairs stand on Duncan’s neck. “You mean you were taken away before.”

“My parents buried me,” Sarah said, speaking very slowly now, as if English were again causing her difficulty. She looked into her
hands and murmured to herself in her other language, the soft, swishing tongue of the forest people. “I existed only in their past. I was dead. It is the way of things for me. I die and become something else, like I did on the ship. I was once a little girl. I was once a prisoner. I was once a ghostwalker. I once lived only in dreams for two months. I lose mothers. I lose fathers. You are a
Gaidheal,
surely you understand what it is to be cut from your root.” She cupped her hands, her fingers slowly rising, like something growing, then she collapsed them and made a sharp slicing action with her hand.

Duncan glanced at Crispin and saw the same unsettling confusion he himself felt. The fear he felt from her words was unlike anything he had ever known. Something deep inside him seemed to be trembling. She was out on the mast again, and this time he knew not how to save her.

“Promise me, Duncan McCallum.” Her voice cracked, and she pressed her fist against her lips, her eyes closed for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was somber and insistent, her cheeks were flushing. “In all my life, I have never asked a thing of a man. Do me this one honor. If you value your life, if you value my soul, do this. Wherever Lord Ramsey wants you, there you must not be. If you stay or cross into the forest, he will use you. He will use you and destroy you.” He had heard almost the exact words before, from Adam. “Give me your oath you shall escape to the south.”

When Duncan finally spoke, his own voice cracked. “I promise.”

“There will be killing,” she added in an absent, weary tone. “I want you out of the killing. For me it is just the way of things. I want you never to mourn me.”

Duncan stared, so numbed by her matter-of-fact announcement that he did not resist as Sarah picked up his hand and with a sad, awkward smile shook it. “Do not lose your true skin,” she whispered, then gathered her skirt and slipped away.

“In her room,” Crispin said in a thin, frightened voice, “I found these, maybe twenty, spread out under her pillow and under the bed.” He handed Duncan several familiar slips of paper, the slips he
had written words on for Sarah. But she had used them again. On the backside of each she had drawn two squiggling lines, connected at the ends. Sarah had been retreating back into her spirit world. “She stopped and clamped my arm like a frightened kitten when we were coming here. She looked back at the great house with a tear rolling down her cheek and said they meant to cut her father into pieces and scatter them in the forest.”

When sleep came again it was full of nightmares, jumbled images of his grandfather and Lister, of Sarah and the savages he had seen at the army headquarters, of screaming animals and arms reaching up out of graves. By the time the waking nightmare began, he did not at first trust his senses. The screams were distant, the frightened neighs of horses much like the cries of the creatures that inhabited his dreams. But then, through the black night, he saw the flames of the cabins at the far side of the fields and heard the first musket shot.

A spine-wrenching howl came from the woods as he opened his door. Much closer was a second cry, from a Company man cowering at the corner of the building. “Indians!” he moaned, shaking so hard he dropped the ax from his hand.

I
N AN INSTANT DUNCAN THREW on his clothes and was out the door, running not toward the fires but toward the great house. The compound was in chaos. Men ran in every direction, some screaming in panic, some grabbing hayforks and shovels for weapons, others running with buckets to battle the fire. Ramsey appeared on the porch in nightshirt and cap, shouting for Woolford and Fitch, then another war screech from the woods caused Ramsey to clutch his heart and press against the wall.

As Duncan reached the porch Ramsey grabbed him, pulling Duncan in front of him as if he expected an arrow at any moment. More shouts came from the river, followed by victorious cries of men shouting that they had killed one, then another, of the attackers. At the door of the carpenter’s shop, Duncan saw Cameron distributing muskets and powder horns. Ramsey had allowed his secret arsenal to be opened.

Some men fumbled with the heavy weapons, others quickly huddled in a group and fired volleys into the woods, then, as Cameron pointed out a dark shape behind them, turned and fired toward the open field past the barn. Sparks flew high in the sky. Terrified animals brayed from their stalls. Ramsey disappeared into the house. As Duncan stumbled from the porch, someone put a bucket in his hand and he headed toward the fires at a slow, dazed jog.

One new barracks cabin was consumed in flames, which now licked at the unfinished palisade wall. Twenty men with brooms and wet blankets beat at the flames that had reached the second cabin. Duncan ran fifty yards to the river and filled his bucket, returned and tossed it on the flames, then picked up a smoldering broom and began beating at a tongue of fire spreading toward the hay fields. The night became a blur of frenzied work against the sparks and flame and breathless runs to the river, punctuated by terrified moments when he and his companions lay on the earth as shots whistled over their heads.

At last a glimmer of dawn appeared in the east, and the shouts faded, then ceased. Duncan heard nothing but the tired calls of work parties running buckets of water to the smoldering foundations of the cabins. As he walked back, emotionally and physically drained, he was surprised to find no wounded men on the ground, no bodies strewn about the village. But then he passed the cooper’s shed and with a groan of despair discovered a green-clad figure lying face down in a pool of blood. As he rolled the body over, the man’s hand reached out as if to throttle Duncan. But the fingers that gripped his neck had no strength left. He looked into the desolate eyes of Sergeant Fitch. Blood oozed from a gaping wound in his chest, more from his mouth. Fitch opened and shut his jaw as if trying to speak, but only coughed, choking on the blood that now began to flow more heavily over his lips. The sturdy old Indian fighter had taken a tomahawk in the chest, and they both knew he was close to his last breath. As his eyes glazed over, he raised his trembling hands and made a series of motions. With what appeared to be great effort, he ran his open hand down the side of his head to his shoulder. As bubbles of blood appeared on his lips, he clenched a fist then under it stretched two fingers of his other hand, moving them back and forth, rapidly at first, then more slowly as the strength left them.

As Duncan watched with an aching heart, the old ranger closed his eyes and drifted away, then abruptly opened them and with a heave of his chest coughed up more blood. One hand, limp as a
ragdoll’s, gripped Duncan’s as the other fumbled with something on a leather strap hanging from his neck. Fitch freed it from his tunic and closed his hand around it a moment before the light left his eyes. As Duncan hung his head in grief for the steadfast sergeant, the closed fist rolled off his chest. Fitch had been gripping the small metal badge used to identify Woolford’s rangers, around which he had fastened a dozen little yellow feathers.

Suddenly Duncan became aware of weeping behind him, and he turned to see Crispin, his clothes torn and sooty, cradling Jonathan in one arm. The boy sobbed against the big man’s shoulder.

“They’ve taken her,” Crispin declared in a tormented, cracking voice. “They’ve taken our little girl again.”

The sorrow that had overtaken Duncan transformed into something dark and angry and fearful. “Sarah?” His groan seemed to come from somewhere distant. “Which way?” he demanded.

Crispin stared at the black forest beyond the gray, dawn-lit river. “Gone,” he said with such despair Duncan thought he, too, was about to cry.

Duncan battled an impulse to race into the forest himself, then he glanced back into the forge and looked at his hands, still covered with Fitch’s blood. “Have them bring the wounded to the schoolhouse,” he directed, and stepped to the nearest water trough to scrub his hands.

A quarter hour later, having covered the school desks with linens to take the wounded, Duncan was tying a strip of cloth tightly around the ankle of a man who had twisted it running in the dark fields, having already set the broken arm of a man struck by a falling timber, when Crispin entered.

“There is no one else,” the big man announced in a puzzled tone, “only a few who need salve for their burns. No one wounded by the Indians. Only Fitch killed.” He glanced wearily toward the great house. “I must see to the children.”

At least ten men with muskets were guarding the house when Duncan entered it a few minutes later. No one stopped him at the
entrance, nor at the door to the library. Ramsey sat at the edge of his desk chair, head in his hands, a half-empty glass of gin at his side.

“The soldiers found her before,” Duncan said. “They can do it again.”

“We never expected something so foolhardy,” Ramsey said in a brittle voice. He drained the glass and slammed it into the empty fireplace, bits of glass exploding across the hearth. “We’ll have guards with guns, every hour of the day.”

“They have destroyed us.” The words came from Arnold, in a bleak, hollow voice.

The younger children are safe, Duncan was about to say, the main compound is intact.

“The house seemed secure enough,” Arnold said. “The attack was on the north side, at the cabins. We set men to watch at the south side of the house, the point nearest the forest, and I went to help at the fires. Lord Ramsey went to safety in the cellar. They came right into her bedroom, from the river. Wet footprints were all over the upstairs hall. They took wigs,” he added in a confused whisper, “half His Lordship’s hairpieces.”

“Wigs?” The news seemed so odd that Duncan almost asked Arnold to repeat himself. But then he followed Arnold’s gaze to the desk in the corner. It was in ruin. The top leaf had been levered open, splintering the wood around the lock, and the small drawers inside had been tossed on the floor, some crushed underfoot. The panel behind them—which, Duncan knew, had enclosed the paper safe—had been forced open, and bits of its wood lay strewn on the desktop.

“They stole the king’s charter?” Duncan asked, not bothering to conceal the disbelief in his voice.

For the first time since Duncan had known him, Arnold was at a loss for words. He glanced at Duncan with a helpless expression. “Our sacred grant,” he groaned.

“There must have been a hundred of the savages,” Ramsey said. “They were everywhere. It would have been a massacre but for our valiant defense.”

“No more than ten,” a deep, fuming voice interjected. Woolford stepped into the room, his face soot-stained, his clothes spattered with mud, in his hand a red-painted club that ended in a large knob with an iron spike protruding from it. “And if they had come to kill, there would be damned few of us left standing right now.”

Ramsey quickly closed the desk, then rose and stood to lean against it. “It was a pitched battle,” he protested. “You heard the gunshots. Doubtless French troops as well. My brave lads kept them at bay.”

“Every shot I heard came from an English Brown Bess. Only our guns were fired,” the ranger said. “And if you wish to know the fettle of your brave lads, look to your pasture. There are two champion milk cows lying dead by the hands of your Company marksmen. And a chestnut stump with enough lead in it to sink a boat.” When he met Duncan’s gaze, he sighed. “They took her across the river. Their tracks lead northwest.”

“My little Sarah,” Ramsey moaned. Tears erupted on his cheeks. “Dear God, my Sarah. Enslaved again . . . . Thank God her mother is not here to relive the anguish.”