Bone Rattler (41 page)

Woolford’s brow knitted, then he shook his head again. He had no answer. “Mr. Fitch always liked to camp near running water,” the ranger said after a moment. “If you’d bury him near the river I’d be obliged.”

Crispin nodded soberly.

“His Christian name was Ezekiel. He was born in ’oh-seven. In his pack you’ll find a scrap of silk that belonged to his wife, who died of cholera years ago. Put it near his heart.”

“Where are you going?” Duncan asked.

Woolford’s gaze was filled with foreboding. “The crooked man comes from a crooked tree,” he said, then turned and climbed down the ladder.

 

 

Ramsey was in no mood for one of his long speeches when the Company was finally assembled. His message was short, and the icy determination in his eyes seemed to unnerve many of those who watched. “I want six men, no more,” he announced from his perch on a wooden crate in the barnyard. “It is an old game they play. For thousands of years, enemies have sought to steal princesses to use against a king. The way such villains are beaten is through wit and stealth.” Cameron appeared at his side, bearing one of the big muskets.

“I am not empowered to change the duration of your servitude, for that is by order of the courts in England. But those who come back with my daughter,” Ramsey continued, “and the parchment they stole from my office, shall have an extra hundred acres of bottomland at the end of their term.”

Cameron pushed past Ramsey and stood in front of the crate. The assembly withdrew a step, eyeing the big keeper uneasily.

“As the first members of the Edentown militia, you will each be equipped with a musket, knife, and tomahawk,” Ramsey added. “And all the ammunition and other supplies you can carry.”

Two men pushed through the line, the red-bearded McGregor and another of the rough men who had accosted Duncan in the bilges of the
Anna Rose.

“You will be led by my strong right hand, whom I have appointed major of our glorious new troop.”

Duncan leaned forward, confused, and was shocked as Reverend Arnold emerged from behind Ramsey. Arnold was attired in the white shirt he usually wore, but over it he had donned a pocketed hunter’s frock, opened to reveal one of the old metal breastplates Duncan had seen in the library. He carried Ramsey’s engraved fowling piece. On his head he wore a new tricorn hat; on his feet, high-topped riding boots.

“We shall smite the heathen with the power of God in our hearts and in our weapons,” Arnold declared in a loud but unsteady voice. He could not conceal the fear in his eyes. Had Ramsey forced the vicar to venture into the forest?

“It’s work for soldiers!” a man called from the back of the crowd. “The captain’s gone for help!”

“This is Company work!” Ramsey barked. “Every hour we wait, the greater the risk to our Sarah! Three more men is all I ask. With the prayers of Major Arnold and the strength of Mr. Cameron, you shall be invincible! Two hundred acres then!” Excitement rippled through the crowd. Within a minute, the ranks of the party were complete.

Duncan gave Ramsey ten minutes before following him inside the great house. Ramsey stood at his collection of arms, swinging a long saber through the air with grim determination.

“I am joining the search party,” Duncan announced.

Ramsey returned the saber to its rack and raised another for testing. “Do you know much about Major Pike?” he asked in an absent tone.

“All I need to.”

“He was stationed in Ireland once. A local conscript deserted and Pike went to his village, to his thatched farmhouse. Somehow a sister, a young maiden, died. Pike hid at the funeral and arrested him. The man was hanged and buried beside his sister before the sun set.” Ramsey, sensing he had Duncan’s attention, continued. “Pike only hated you before. I have made certain he knows you had a hand in the report to the governor. Take a step out of Edentown, and his agents will soon know it. There is probably nothing more he wants right now than to run a sword through your breast. He will then carefully spread word through the colony so your brother will know, before you are buried.”

Despite what Crispin and Woolford had said about Jamie fleeing to Carolina, Ramsey and Pike seemed to think he was still in New York. “I know the Company sought me out because of my connection to my brother. I just can’t understand why.”

“Surely you can see we have more finesse, more humanity, than the army.”

“Meaning that you won’t kill me first?”

“You don’t understand, McCallum. We are but advancing our plan. The party that leaves today is just to beat the brush, drive the game as it were, the vanguard of the Ramsey militia. You and I will march in two days with the remainder of the men to intercept the prey.”

“The prey? Is that what Sarah is to you?”

“You are young and impatient. Let me teach you the ways of the world. I love my daughter, more than she knows. Having her in this house is like having my beloved wife back. But we act on the field of empire. She will soldier this out like the rest of us, and then we will see to her malady. She is not the one in imminent danger. And when we recover her, she shall have new physicians, the best in America.”

“If you wish me to accompany you, then release Mr. Lister.”

“You must read more Plato,” Ramsey rejoined, lifting another sword before fixing Duncan with a cool gaze. “There are a handful who are destined to run society. All the others serve.”

“Hawkins was seen arguing with Frasier, striking him, the evening before he was killed. He fled the next morning.”

“Hawkins is not available for your purposes. His is the most important element in our strategy. His is the hand that will strike the final coup. And our victory will taste that much sweeter for having deprived General Calder of his glory. You and Hawkins will make it all possible.”

Duncan turned to the window a moment, his heart in his throat. “You will use me to lure my brother, and Hawkins will kill him,” he said in a hoarse voice. There was nothing mysterious about Ramsey after all. Everything he did was about his battle with General Calder for the governorship.

“Your brother’s life is already forfeit.”

Duncan fought to control his emotions. “But how does that return Sarah to us?”

Ramsey studied the ruin on Duncan’s face and smiled. “A good tutor understands the basics of astronomy. There are days once every few years when all the planets are lined up.”

Duncan collapsed into a chair and buried his head in his hands, images flashing through his mind. Lister rotting in his cell. Sarah weeping on his shoulder. Adam apologetically pressing the black bear stone into his hand. Jamie, always now at the edge of his consciousness, Jamie, whom Duncan had loved, cursed, and probably betrayed with his fiery letters, who probably didn’t even know Duncan was in America but now was going to die because of it. He rose as if in a daze and found his way to the pantry closet by the dining room, selecting one of the fine linen tablecloths, warning away a protesting maid with a fiery glare. Edentown could afford the best of shrouds for its dead heroes.

 

 

As the vanguard of the Ramsey militia, led by Cameron and Arnold, slipped across the river an hour later, Crispin and Duncan explored the riverbank below the house, shovels on their shoulders.

“This will do,” Duncan said after they had walked a quarter mile, and sank his shovel into the sandy soil at his feet. They were in a small clearing at the center of a grove of towering hemlocks, ringed with ferns. Small white flowers grew out of low, heart-shaped leaves. Water sang over the rocks of a small stream that entered the river a hundred feet away.

Crispin’s only reply was a thrust of his shovel into the soft earth.

“This is the day,” the house butler declared when they were nearly finished with the long, rectangular hole. “There is a good moon tonight. Slip into the woods along the fields while Ramsey takes tea. Stay in the shadows. Those who are watching keep their eyes on the river. Circle around to the road and walk all night. You can be twenty miles away by dawn.”

“I could not. Not now.”

“Now above all. You promised her.” Crispin leaned on his shovel and wiped his brow. “The only thing I know for certain about those savages is that it is right for us to fear them. But I think she is in no physical danger. Why would they go to such trouble to steal her away if they meant her harm? To them she is just a runaway slave.
Slaves,” Crispin said in a pained voice, “are property to be protected. There is only one thing you can do for her now. You promised her. I saw the relief in her eyes when you vowed it, an instant of contentment such as I haven’t seen since she came back to us. She will be found, in a month, in a year. And a minute after I see her she will ask me about you. Do not force me to disappoint her. I would not have you betray her hope. Her hope is my hope. Do not betray
us
.”

Duncan had no answer. He knew well about hope, and hope betrayed. He gazed across the river for perhaps the tenth time in as many minutes, then resumed his digging.

Only a dozen men gathered to lower the old soldier, wrapped in the Ramsey linen, into his grave. Crispin extended a Bible to Duncan, reminding him that Reverend Arnold was gone. Duncan recited a Psalm in a thin, tentative voice, then retreated to a rock, where he sat as the men closed the grave. He stared at the mound of earth, so lost in his thoughts he did not notice the men leave, rousing to his senses only in time to help Crispin finish laying small stones along the edge of the new-turned soil.

He stood, hesitated as Crispin headed back toward the town, then bent over the grave. With a stick he drew two waving lines on the grave, connected at the ends.

The Company crews were hard at work, cleaning the wreckage of the night before, as Duncan approached the rear of the charcoal crib, where Lister hummed one of his sea chanteys. When Duncan whispered his name, the old Scot crawled toward him.

“Did Mr. Fitch speak with you last night?” Duncan asked.

“An owl called, then another not far away. I saw Fitch run to the shed where the guns were stored, heard him curse when he found the door locked. Then the cabins caught fire. After that I saw him no more. He was a good man. May God have mercy on his thick-skinned soul. Pray for him in Carolina, Clan McCallum,” Lister added.

“He’s the last,” Duncan vowed, an unexpected vehemence in his voice. “No more are going to die. Not by hammers, not by axes, not by nooses.”

“We done fair by each other, you and me. Ye let me be me own man again, after pretending for too many years. No regrets.” Lister shifted his chains and crawled to the far side of the crib. “Now I need ye to make that journey and start our cabin in Carolina. By the time the trial’s done, I’ll be fit to join ye. I’ve been thinkin’ on it. I’ll get a Percheron, a big gray plow horse like me father had. I’ll buy one in Charleston and trot up to meet ye, grand as a prince.”

“We’ll need a cow,” Duncan heard himself say in a dry, cracking voice.

“Aye, and some sheep. But ye’ll be the one for the milking in the dawn.”

Duncan jammed his hand through the slats, futilely trying to reach the old man. He had not felt the black thing that now grew inside him since the day of the storm when he had climbed the mast and decided to die.
We done fair by each other.
Since Lister had pledged himself to Duncan, the old man had been whipped, arrested, beaten, reviled, arrested again, and now, despite their banter, they both knew he was going to hang.

Lister began a sailor’s song in a subdued, doleful voice. Duncan sat still, not sure he could summon the strength to move. “Good moon tonight,” Lister observed when he finished his song.

“What do you mean?”

“Crispin and I spoke. When the great lord settles into his library for tea, Crispin will appear on the kitchen step and leave a broom leaning by the door.”

“A broom?”

“My signal. Five minutes later I will start shouting that I see savages on the far bank. That’s when ye break away. A few miles to the east and quick as Jack Puddin’ y’er a free man. May God and Mary protect ye.”

Duncan seemed to watch himself from a distance as he stepped to the schoolhouse, then rolled his papers into his spare shirt. Minutes later he was at the little cemetery, uncovering the pack and inserting the pipes. He had moved away ten paces when he paused and turned
back to Sarah’s gravestone. It took but a few moments to locate and clean the stone bear, which he pushed down beside his pipes. He slipped on the pack and made his way into the shadows. Ten minutes later he reached the Edge of the Woods place, where he sat staring grimly at the stone pedestal, as Woolford had done days earlier.

Images swirled in his mind again, the strange dreams that sometimes boiled out of despair. He would go to Carolina and send for Sarah. He saw her laughing and dancing with Crispin over the news that Duncan was in the southern mountains. Jamie and he were building a cabin as Lister plowed fields with a big grey mare. At a Highlands festival, Lister told old tales to freckled, kilted children. But then, like a frigid wave, reality broke over him and he found the words that had been squeezing against his heart. Sarah was a slave again, probably lying beaten and bloody that very moment in some squalid camp. He could only save her by breaking the solemn vow he had given her. And Lister could only be saved if Duncan preserved Hawkins, the man who was going to kill his brother.

He glanced at the map she had given him, and the name of the farmer who would act as go-between. William Wells. No one had told Sarah that the settler had been hacked to death the week before. The savages were close. The savages were everywhere. But slowly the realization had been building that there was another way to save Lister, as impossible as using Hawkins. There had been a witness to Frasier’s murder, lingering in the shadows by the alder bushes, laying another message on the riverbank. Somewhere in the vast wilderness was a savage who had seen Frasier’s killing.