Bone Rattler (37 page)

The heavy door swung open and Woolford entered. “The sergeant has her,” he assured Crispin. “She weeps.”

“It’s how it goes,” Crispin said in a tormented voice. “She has one of her spells, then she cries, then she goes very still, as if paralyzed, nothing moving but her eyes and lips, whispering those words of hers. Usually at night, the hours before dawn. At first, last fall, she did it every night. Her father caned her until she stopped, shouting he would beat the savage out of her. Tonight I watched her door for three hours but drifted off. Then the piping started. She was at the bottom of the stairs already when I woke, disappeared into the night in the seconds it took me to reach the door.”

“You’re saying she went outside because of me?” Duncan asked. “That she . . . went into her spell,” he said, borrowing Crispin’s words for lack of better, “because of the pipes?”

“I will not say why she does anything, only that the pipes sounded and she slipped away to speak those words. But why the barn? Why here, with all the woods about?” Crispin asked Woolford, who only shook his head. “Too many already call her witch,” Crispin added. “If the men find her like this . . . .” His voice grew too weak to finish the sentence.

Duncan searched the ranger’s face. “You found her at Stony Run,” he ventured.

Woolford sighed, glanced at Crispin, and nodded. “She was unconscious when Pike’s men discovered her in the brush, tended by two other white captives who would not leave her. Some of the senior officers at the camp knew the Ramseys. She was the spitting image of her mother, and around her neck she still wore a Ramsey locket, wrapped in fur. She had lost nearly all her English, wouldn’t sleep on a bed the first month.”

“You should have told me.”

“No!” Crispin insisted. “Lord Ramsey forbade anyone from speaking of it. At first I did not think he could bear the shame of it. How could one of the greatest families in all the empire have it known that their eldest had been a slave to the savages for a dozen
years, that she had become little more than a savage herself? How could she inherit, how could she be respected by the landed families? How could she have a life of her own? I would not speak of it, even if Lord Ramsey had said nothing, for her sake. Nor should you, by all that’s holy. God only knows the horrors they commited . . . . It’s bad enough without more talk of it. You’ve seen the way the people in the settlements look at her.”

“What happened after she was found?” Duncan’s confusion was quickly giving way to shame. He had begun to think of her as an impostor, had clung to his memory of the faceless Flora while resenting Sarah, when in fact the woman who had touched him so deeply on the cell deck and the troubled Ramsey daughter were one and the same.

“Some of us won’t speak of it for fear of what it will do to the girl,” Woolford confessed. “All the others won’t for fear of the girl herself.”

“Surely there is nothing to fear from Sarah,” Duncan said.

Crispin seemed surprised at Duncan’s words. “When she was brought out of the woods, she carried a stick, a club really, with bear claws fastened into it like thorns, strips of fur hanging from it. She shook it at people and they grew ill. That’s when people began calling her a witch.”

“She had been taken from the one whom even the Indians fear,” Woolford added in a low voice, fixing Duncan with a pointed gaze.

It took a moment for Duncan to understand. “Tashgua,” he said with a shudder. Sarah may not be a witch, but she had been enslaved to one.

“The army left her at the Moravian mission in the north,” Crispin explained. “She wouldn’t leave, so we went there, taught her how to be English again. Sometimes she would call out in the night, make noises like animals. We stayed with her for weeks, then took her to the city. Even then I would have to sit and hold her hand, sometimes for hours.”

Duncan remembered the way Crispin always quieted nervous
horses. “Adam Munroe was one of the others with her? He was at the mission?”

“Gone by the time we arrived. He had been in the militia, captured by Hurons who traded him to some Ohio Indians, who then traded him to the band that held Sarah. The army wanted to learn secrets from him, about the tribes, but he fled.”

“And after another month in New York town, she ran away to Argyll to hide with Adam.”

“We thought she had gone north,” Crispin explained, “to be with the other Indian captive she had been rescued with, the one who had stayed at the German mission. Lord Ramsey and Reverend Arnold spent days with him, speaking about her, about their lives with the tribes, trying to understand her, to understand what she might be doing, then he had a mental collapse and stopped speaking. I stayed in New York, asking questions wherever I could. A boatman remembered rowing a woman in a cloak to a ship in the night, bound for Glasgow on a dawn tide, saying she was returning home after visiting relatives in Albany. Major Pike came to the house, demanding to know where Adam Munroe had gone. I didn’t know, I told him. But I told Reverend Arnold that Adam said his home was in a place called Argyll.”

“So Arnold went to look for her in Scotland,” he said to Woolford. “Where you were already looking for Adam.”

Woolford cracked open the door. “It is a dangerous night for such discussions,” he observed in a voice heavy with warning.

“When exactly,” Duncan asked, “did Lord Ramsey decide to recruit a company of prisoners?”

“Last autumn,” Woolford replied.

“After Sarah fled,” Duncan concluded, “after Ramsey spent time speaking with the other ghostwalker about her time with the tribes, after his hate for the Iroquois began burning as hot as his feeling for the French.”

“You are dabbling in what some would consider affairs of state. Treacherous ground for an indentured servant.”

“A danger I readily accept when others dabble with the life of an old man and an innocent girl. What is Ramsey going to do with an armed company of men?”

“Defend his land,” Woolford said.

“Fifty men for ten thousand square miles?”

“Ridiculous. He has only ten thousand acres.”

“Arnold did not only cross the Atlantic for Sarah,” Duncan explained. “I have seen the charter he brought from the king. All the lands to the great lakes in the west.”

Woolford eased the door shut and stepped to Duncan’s side. “Impossible.”

Duncan quickly explained what Ramsey had shown him.

The ranger reacted as if he had been kicked. “He and Calder both aspire to be governor,” he said in a hollow voice. “With that land Ramsey would have by far the stronger claim.” Woolford looked at Duncan. “But he can’t take the land. It belongs to the tribes.”

The chamber went deathly still. Somewhere in the distance an animal brayed.

It was Duncan who broke the silence. “Calder has his own means of taking the land, by building forts across the territory. Ramsey accomplishes things more subtly. By bargain and bribe.”

“God preserve us,” Woolford said with something like a moan. “The charter would be meaningless with the tribes still on the land. The king wants them to compete, and let the one who expands the colony westward be the victor.” A darkness fell over his face, and his warrior’s eyes returned. When the ranger spoke again it was in a worried whisper. “There was a new wampum belt this afternoon, another I had never seen before. Fitch was upset by it. He thinks it says the world is going to end at Stony Run in ten days.” He spun about and disappeared into the night.

Duncan wanted to ask who would make such a prophesy, then knew it was not necessary. There was indeed a prophet they knew, who would speak with beads. Tashgua, Sarah’s former tormenter.

Duncan stared into the darkness, recalling the map he had taken
from Ramsey’s secret cellar room. “What price would be put on ten thousand miles of virgin land, Crispin?” he asked after a moment.

“Not the lives of his children,” Crispin replied in a hoarse voice. “Never the lives of his children.”

Duncan stared in surprise at his friend, chilled that the thought would enter his mind. The big man’s face swelled with emotion. As his eyes moistened, he stepped into the night.

Duncan followed a moment later, wandering alone across the barnyard in the moonlight. He leaned against a rail fence, drinking in the night air, trying to reconnect the pieces that had fallen apart that night as he stroked the nose of the plow horse that came to investigate him. There could be no denying that the Company had been created by Ramsey to help cement his land claim, though Duncan could not see how, or his own role in it, despite Calder calling him Ramsey’s secret weapon. Adam and Sarah had apparently discovered their roles and flung themselves into the sea.

He had given Ramsey reason to divert his attention from the Scots in the Company, but Duncan was not so beguiled by his own words to think any of them safe. He had bought time, but seemed no closer to the truth about Jamie or Stony Run. Now his failure to find the truth had meant Frasier’s death, and Lister’s being prepared for the gallows. His emotions swirled, blocking any rational thought. Flora had been in the barn, was no longer a vague, helpless longing but a flesh-and-blood woman who lived in the great house.

The horse started and as Duncan turned to follow, shadowy forms closed about him. He ducked, twisted, and ran. As he reached the schoolhouse, hands closed on his shoulder, more hands than he could resist, and something slammed into his head. He collapsed, had a vague sense of being caught before hitting the ground, then of being carried. When he recovered his senses, he was in one of the sheds, his hands tied to a beam over his head. In his groggy state, he was not even aware of others present until a spike of pain on his spine jolted him awake.

“What are you—” His protest choked in his throat as the lash hit
him again, like a red-hot poker pressed to his skin. Again it hit, and again, shredding his shirt. Five times, ten times.

“You are fortunate,” came a slow, refined voice through the darkness, “that we could not bear to have our children’s tutor the subject of a public flogging. And we understand how a man of deep feeling can become reckless with his own life. So let us explain what will happen if you demonstrate such seditious tendencies again. We shall select the oldest Highlander remaining among the prisoners, and we shall whip him to an inch of his life. I do not expect you to cease this insolence because you fear me. You will stop because you fear causing your precious Scots more harm.” Ramsey’s silhouette was barely visible against the moonlight that seeped between the logs. “Be assured, we shall find your wretched pipes, and we shall burn them. You will soon realize how merciful we have been, out of the debt we owed you. And did we mention your Mr. Lister shall be deprived of food for two days?” Ramsey spoke no more, just stood silently as Duncan received five more lashes. He clenched his teeth, determined not to cry out, remembering how Lister had broken three splints of wood when taking forty.

At last the searing stabs ceased, and in a blur of pain Duncan saw a flash of steel as the strap that bound him was cut, heard the shuffle of feet that meant his assailants were gone. He did not know how long he stayed slumped on the ground, fighting the agony, but eventually he staggered outside and dropped beside the barn’s water trough, submerging his head, scooping water into his palm and sluicing it down his back. He sensed movement in the shadows, but did not care. If they came again he would resist, he would show Ramsey that not every Scot retreated. The thought reminded him of someone else. He found another ax handle, picked it up, and marched to the forge.

He approached stealthily, his club raised, but found no guard under the dim candle lantern. Tossing his club on the ground, he staggered onto the smith’s stool.

“’Twas a bonny thing you did this night, lad,” a hoarse voice said
through the slats. “Men were listening in the barracks, be sure of it. I ain’t felt such joy in years. I didn’t think I would ever hear a pipe again.”

“You knew it was me?”

“I gathered y’er things on the ship. I kept that brown sack hid away.”

A shudder of pain wracked Duncan’s body.

“First few hours be the worst, lad. Ye need liniment or grease. Don’t let the wounds dry and crack.” Duncan heard the sound of chains as Lister inched closer. “And listen to me, listen sharp. I told ye there be Scots, to the south, in the Carolinas. Good Highland men, living far from John Bull. The scars on y’er back will be y’er ticket. Ye must go there, lad. It’s y’er only chance. Me bum foot will hold me up, so I’ll just have to meet you there. Ye’ll n’er survive seven years under this—”

Duncan jerked about as something cold touched his back. A hand closed around his shoulder. “I have liniment,” Crispin said. “Hold still. I had prayed Mr. Ramsey had fallen asleep. He did not hear his daughter but he surely heard the music. He held his temper well with you.”

“You can be in Charleston in six weeks’ time,” the old Scot continued.

“Mr. Lister, don’t—” Duncan warned.

“This one slips pieces of bread between the logs in the rear,” Lister interrupted. “He knows the Carolinas. Black slaves go north to be free. Scottish slaves go south.”

“First time I entered one of those settlements, I was frightened,” Crispin declared. “Most of the men had hair the color of fire, wore skirts, and spoke in a babble that hurt the ears. They drank hard and laughed a lot. When I came north, I passed through another such village, having a festival. Throwing logs end over end like giants in the hills.” Duncan’s back arched as the liniment touched it, then he slowly relaxed.

“He would need a pack, Crispin,” a soft voice interjected from the shadows. “And food. As much food as he could carry, for he must not take time to stop for it.”

“Miss Ramsey!” Crispin gasped.

“Keep quiet or you will alarm the house,” Sarah said in a soft, weary voice. As she stepped forward, a pool of bright light appeared before her. She had opened the shade of a lantern in her hand. In her other hand she held a shirt. “I have brought Mr. McCallum a clean shirt from the laundry. Lord Ramsey’s, but he owes as much.” Her tone became matter-of-fact, all business, giving no evidence of the strange delirium Duncan had seen her in an hour before. Setting the lantern on the anvil, she took the tub of liniment from Crispin and began applying it to Duncan’s wounds. “Also some coins, and a tomahawk for cutting firewood,” Sarah said in her new, conspiratorial tone. “Not yet, of course. Your back must heal. A map should be made.”