Bone Rattler (20 page)

“What did they desire from you?” Crispin asked.

“I do not know,” Duncan admitted after a moment’s reflection. “I am being played on a hook and I cannot see who holds the line. But I must get to Edentown,” he added in an urgent tone. “I need a horse. Just a horse and a map.”

Instead of answering, Crispin extended a rag to him.

“The blood,” the big man said.

Suddenly Duncan saw the stains on the front of his shirt. Blood was dripping from his jaw.

“We’ll put honey on that tonight,” Crispin said. “Ease the pain, help the healing.” He clucked at the horses to urge them around a man guiding a loaded oxcart.

“I cannot return to Ramsey House,” Duncan pressed. He found himself watching the trees, the rocks. With a mixture of shame and fear, he realized that he was watching for savages.

Crispin pointed ahead, toward the brilliant fields of ripening wheat that were coming into view. Duncan was about to renew his plea for a horse, then hesitated and examined the bed of the wagon. Although a canvas was tied over its contents, he recognized the outlines of trunks. He saw, too, that a coach was steadily gaining on them, steered by the same man who had driven them from the harbor.

“With luck,” Crispin said, “we’ll make the ferry with enough light to reach the inn on the far side of the river.”

“And then?”

“Miss Sarah decided she could not wait to reunite with her father.”

Duncan’s heart leapt at the news. “Edentown? Sarah is in the coach?”

“And Miss Virginia and Master Jonathan,” Crispin said in an oddly defensive tone, then chirruped to the horses again and fixed his eyes on the road.

Duncan looked back at the wagon’s cargo and the coach. He had been in the custody of the army two hours at most, but in that time Sarah Ramsey, still obviously suffering from her sickness, had decided to flee the comfort of Ramsey House.

“You neglected to bring Reverend Arnold,” he observed, “and these trunks mean no brief visit. She is planning to stay.”

The comment caused a shudder in his companion.

“Have you been there, Crispin? The frontier?”

“I’ve been there, and I vowed to myself never to return.” The butler clenched his jaw and looked toward the far side of the Hudson, which seemed lined with cliffs capped by an impenetrable wall of trees.

Crispin jerked his thumb over his shoulder, explaining that in the front corner of the wagon was a pile of rolled pallets where Duncan could rest. Duncan readily accepted the suggestion and stretched out on the soft mound. Before shutting his eyes, he extracted the pages he had torn from Evering’s journal, turning to the tiny cramped words at the bottom of the last page—Evering’s last entry. The professor’s lack of punctuation had caused him to misread the words. Duncan had taken the notes to mean Evering was planning to compose another of his poems, one about a heart which was like a stony creek or about someone with a heart of oak withering to bones. But in his hastily scrawled notes, Evering, who had never been to the New World, had been alluding to Stony Run, where a battle had taken place the year before. It could only mean that Evering had learned it from Adam, who had been in America, who
had fought in the militia there. The army’s map had included other words.
Ghostwalkers.
And why would the army write of the ancient Roman Seneca, he asked himself as his eyelids grew heavy, and he folded the paper back inside his shirt. And why, he wondered as he surrendered to his exhaustion, with all of his knowledge of history, would Duncan not know of King Hendrick?

When he awoke two hours later, they were moving through rich green hills populated with grazing cows, interspersed with rolling fields where sturdy men and women bent over rows of maize with long cutting knives. Jonathan sat beside the driver of the coach behind them, and eagerly returned Duncan’s wave. Virginia leaned out of the coach window, pointing out birds and butterflies.

“Do you know Lieutenant Woolford?” Duncan asked as he climbed to Crispin’s side.

“Everyone in the colony is acquainted with Lieutenant Woolford, if not in person, then from accounts in the newspapers.”

“You mean he is famous?”

Crispin hesitated. “What do you know about this war?”

“English kill French. French kill English. It’s been going on for centuries.”

“Mr. Ramsey says this war is different from any ever fought. He says this is the first time war is being fought all over the world. North America, Europe, India. The coasts of Africa and South America.” The big man grew silent again. The discussion seemed to bring him pain. “My mother used to teach me about war,” he continued after a moment. “Armies are supposed to face each other in lines and shoot bows or muskets or crossbows at each other.”

“If wars were always so pretty,” Duncan said, absently touching the long gouge on his cheek, “I’d still have my family.”

“Here,” Crispin continued, “the war is waged in the forest mostly, in the unmapped wilderness. Soldiers go into the forest and are never seen again. Settlers go in, entire families, and disappear. Sometimes it’s French troops, but mostly it’s the red savages raiding from the north, Huron and Abenaki, the French allies. The lucky
ones are killed. You can read the stories of what the Indians do to prisoners, and hear more in the markets. Men hung over fires and roasted alive, fathers butchered alive in front of their children. They cut away scalps. Some say when a man loses his scalp, his spirit just spills out into the dirt and dries up,” he added in a hollow tone.

“What does this have to do with Woolford?”

“The only way the Indians can be beaten back is to meet them in the forest on their terms. That is what the rangers do.”

“Rangers?”

“Wilderness fighters. Frontiersmen mostly, trappers and farmers who were burnt out, looking to even the score, others trying to keep the fight away from their homesteads. Many of them are nigh savages themselves. Led by army officers. Captain Rogers in New England, he’s the best known. But Lieutenant Woolford does the same in the lands west of here, in the New York and Pennsylvania colonies. Most of the victories in the war have been delivered by rangers.”

“Woolford fights Indians?” Even as he asked the question something acrid seemed to settle on his tongue. With a shudder he remembered the two savages in the army headquarters. They had adorned themselves with his blood. He could not connect the glib officer he had known on the ship to such creatures.

“Been doing it so long they say he’s half Indian himself. He disappears into the forest, too, but he always comes back.”

Duncan fought another shudder. The savages he had encountered seemed not so much human as wild animals in the shapes of humans. “You’re a butler in a great house, Crispin,” Duncan observed, sensing his companion’s dread of the Indians. “Surely you need not be going into the wilderness.”

“Someone had to come to drive this wagon. . . .” Crispin’s voice faded. “But I won’t go into the wilderness. Don’t ever go into the wilderness. There are farms between here and there, and a few villages. Rough country, sure enough, but Edentown, that marks the edge of the world. As far as anyone can go and still be safe.”

It was Sarah. Crispin had come, against his better judgment,
against all his fears, to protect Sarah. “She was drugged, Crispin,” Duncan said after a moment. “She was kept unconscious by opium, all the way across the Atlantic.”

Crispin’s eyes welled with moisture and he looked away. When he finally spoke, it was toward the horizon. “I used to bounce her on my knee and she would laugh, how she would laugh. Everyone in the room couldn’t help but join in. She and her mother spread joy like birds in spring. I haven’t heard her laugh for more than a dozen years,” he added in a voice gone desolate. “Maybe that’s all I want, just to hear her laugh.” He glanced at Duncan. “She goes into her spells and doesn’t seem to see any of us. It’s a disease of the spirit, the Reverend says.”

A disease of the spirit. But Sarah had not only fled the city, she had fled Reverend Arnold, her spiritual keeper. She had tried to put an ocean between herself and Arnold.

“She found one of her old porcelain dolls when she first arrived off the ship, and carried it around for hours, speaking to it. Then last night in the moonlight I found her burying it in the garden.” The words hung in the air a long time, seemed to follow the wagon like a cold fog.

Suddenly Duncan remembered that Woolford had left the ship early, with a cloaked companion. Sarah.

The sun was still two hours above the horizon when Crispin pulled the wagon to a halt by the edge of the wide river, onto a ramp of mud and clay strengthened with mats of dried reeds. A rail-thin man with a ragged beard slept against a huge willow tree, before a decaying platform of logs floating in the water.

Duncan scanned the opposite bank, over a mile distant. “When is the ferry due then?” he asked. The driver of the coach, already on the ground beside them, uttered a low laugh. Crispin, too, grinned, then jumped out of the wagon, pausing to toss a pebble at the napping figure before stepping to the coach. The sleeping man sat up in alarm, lifting from his side an old musket that looked as if it had lain in the grass for years. He rubbed his eyes and moaned. Beside him a duck stirred in the grass, bending its neck to watch him. It was tied to a stake, a strap tight around its neck.

“Finished for the day,” the bearded man warned as he began picking at his teeth with a twig. “Done took over enough wagons for three days’ work already. Come back on the morrow.”

“The Ramsey Company’s business today is not completed,” Crispin observed in a stern voice.

The ferryman looked as if he had bit into something sour. “The Ramsey Company,” he sighed, “be multiplying like rabbits.” He rose, leaning on the musket.

Duncan saw the fresh, muddy ruts of wagon wheels leading down the bank and, with a flutter of hope, surveyed the opposite shore. They were on the same path as the prisoner wagons, though many hours behind.

A large woman, at least six feet tall and twice the circumference of the man, appeared at the head of a path. She turned toward the trees, emitted a whistle so loud the horses started, then grabbed up a handful of her mud-stained dress and made an ungainly stooping motion that Duncan took to be her imitation of a curtsy. “A fine eve to be on the waters, y’er honors,” she declared with a grin. The few teeth in her mouth were yellow and crooked.

As Duncan watched in disbelief, two strapping boys appeared and began laying planks from the ramp to the decrepit wooden platform and arranging long oars along its sides. “Surely you do not mean to convey us on that pile of sticks?” he asked as he climbed down from the wagon.

“She’s given good service these twenty years, and before that was a grand Dutch coaster,” the man said with a hurt expression. “Generals have used her, and great lords, too,” He straightened, smoothing his clothes with a nervous expression as the young Ramsey children descended from the coach.

Duncan now saw that the top platform of logs was built over a sturdy, broad hull, probably built in the prior century, its railings and deck furniture now cut away.

Two more youths emerged from behind the tree and began arranging long sweeps into brackets at the side of the ferry.

“Only one vehicle each crossing, y’er honor,” the ferryman announced. “Ease y’er team onto—” The man’s words died and his jaw hung open as he stared in alarm over Duncan’s shoulder. “Bloody Christ!” he moaned and jerked on his wife’s arm. Her face darkened.

“When did that happen?” Duncan heard the woman ask the man as she snatched up the old gun.

Duncan turned in alarm. Nothing had changed, except that Sarah had emerged from the coach. Her chin was up, but her eyes were filling with pain. She silently stepped to the ferryman’s wife and put her hand on the barrel of the weapon. The woman’s face drained of color. As everyone watched, strangely paralyzed, Sarah lifted the heavy gun from the woman’s hands and set it against a tree, then silently bent, rested her hand on the back of the duck, which cowered, as stricken by her presence as the humans, and released the strap from its neck. She nudged the bird toward the water, and in an explosion of movement it burst into the air. With a whistle of wings it disappeared down the river. The spell broke.

“She had no right,” the woman muttered as if Sarah were not six feet in front of her. The only one of her company not subdued by Sarah’s strange actions was the tallest of the oarsmen, a lanky youth who advanced on her with anger in his eyes, a hand uplifted as though to strike her. His foray was cut off as a furious figure materialized on his back, a small fist pounding his shoulder, a thin arm ensnaring his neck. In an instant Duncan and Crispin were beside the pair, Duncan trying to pull the boy away, Crispin restraining the ferryman, who seemed ready to pound the boy with a fist.

“Jonathan Ramsey!” Sarah’s voice cracked like a whip, stilling both her brother and the young oarsman, who suddenly seemed frightened.

“I never meant . . .” the oarsman sputtered. “Dear Jesus, I wouldn’t have . . . .” His face dropped. “Only we was going to roast it for Sunday dinner.”

The coachman hurried to the ferryman’s side and stuffed a coin in the man’s palm, which revived his spirits sufficiently for him to
turn and begin barking orders to his crew. A moment later, the vessel ready, he turned and gestured toward it. The four boys each had one of the sweeps in their hands. “My wife be pleased to make tea for them that’s waitin’,” he added, with an uncertain glance toward Sarah.

Crispin leaned toward Duncan’s ear. “You’ll have to take the wagon across yourself.”

Duncan was about to protest when he saw the worried way the big man studied Sarah. “Of course,” he said, then stepped to the first team and guided them onto the vessel.

“You took three wagons across, loaded with men?” he inquired as the ferry glided away from the bank.