Eliot Pattison - Eye of the Raven

Duncan sighed with disappointment. "But in Philadelphia there are people who know such codes, other learned men?"

"Assuredly. But their codes are secret, and a man's use of such codes always so as well."

The pigpen. It aptly described the morass of clues in front of Duncan.

As Duncan now lifted the carving knife and a fork to work on the ham, Marston watched with interest. "You cut with the precision of a surgeon."

"I completed three years of my medical studies at Edinburgh."

"Edinburgh! Why, it is the capital of all medical science! This is destiny!" Marston exclaimed. "You can assist me. I need-"

"The treaty," Duncan reminded him.

"Forgive me," their host apologized. "Where was I? … The governor assumes that eventually the Grand Council of the Six Nations will come around to the compromise since they will be shamed if they go home without his bounty."

"Compromise?"

"It has been the talk of my friends' dining tables ever since we heard of the convoy reaching Lancaster. Virginia receives no land but has its revenge by the hanging. The Iroquois avoid having the covenant chain broken by agreeing that the crime was the work of one man, not an act of war. Pennsylvania maintains the peace, getting all to agree the killings were contrived by the French, emphasizing the need for us all to stay together in common cause. And confirming need for troops at Fort Pitt. That," Marston said with a bitter flourish, "is the stuff of statecraft. It is how we deal with friends of the French."

The words brought an unexpected sound from the shadows, a choked-off sob. The maid had lingered in the hallway.

"Catherine!" Marston gasped. "I meant no-" He fumbled with his words, then gestured the woman forward. She was a plain, sturdy woman in her thirties, her careworn face averted as she inched into the room.

"Do you require anything further, sirs?" she asked in a brittle voice. "Some more claret perhaps?"

She was, Duncan realized, trying desperately to control her emotions. He looked in confusion at Marston, understanding neither what had aggrieved the woman nor what caused the scientist's discomfort.

"What I would like most of all," Duncan ventured, "is to ask if you are acquainted with other serving women in the city. I am looking for an unmarried woman, the sister of Mr. Townsend."

Catherine burst into tears. "I believe, Duncan," Conawago said as he guided her to a chair, "that we have found her."

Duncan flushed with embarrassment. He should have known. Marston had taken in his partner's sister when Townsend was lost.

"As Catherine steadfastly reminds me," Marston said, "there is no proof certain that her good brother is dead."

Duncan sighed and looked away for a moment, dreading the pain of the words he had to say. "Your brother had an elegant wooden box, with a clever sliding lid and an inlaid pattern of diamonds on the front."

"I gave it to him when he finished his schooling!" Miss Townsend exclaimed.

"I have that box in my pack. It was returned to me by some Iroquois. With tribal markings scratched on the cover."

The woman quickly turned away. She brought her apron to her face.

"No one has produced his body," Marston asserted.

"I fear the wilderness swallows up bodies," Conawago observed.

The woman, Duncan reminded himself, had first reacted not when Duncan had mentioned her brother but when Marston had mentioned the French. "Many good souls have fallen in the western country these past months," Duncan said. "Captain Burke. A surveyor named Cooper and his Indian wife. Mr. Bythe."

At the mention of the Quaker's name the woman's grief disappeared. "The devil collected that one at last," she spat, and for the first time Duncan heard a hint of Irish in her voice.

"Bythe had been investigating secret French involvement in the killings," Duncan told her.

"A pox on him! My brother was no traitor! He was a leader of men, hired to assure the others it was safe and honest work. He was only being a good Christian when he helped the others get hired."

Marston handed the woman a glass of wine.

Duncan lifted one of the ladder-back chairs and sat close to her. "Mr. Bythe," he explained, "has suffered the same fate as Captain Burke. Those particular bodies I have seen. What exactly was Mr. Bythe suggesting?" Duncan asked.

The reluctant answer came from Marston. "When surveyors began disappearing there was a meeting called by justice Brindle. It was just the war, he told us, the price we all pay when kings feud. We should just stay away from the frontier until the hostilities end, he warned. But someone asked how Philadelphia surveyors were marked for death by the French, how the French could know them all. It was as if half a dozen particular birds had been scattered across the wide wilderness, someone said, yet each one found and dropped by the French. The meeting grew unruly. Men started shouting that the French were being told, the surveyors were being betrayed.

"Some trader pointed out that the French could slip in and out of Shamokin with impunity. A trapper pointed out that Townsend had been moving in and out of Shamokin, that he was the very one to have arranged for the first surveyors to venture west, the only one to know them all."

"Simpletons!" Miss Townsend cried. "Francis never so much as whispered against the king!"

Marston, in obvious discomfort now, quickly finished his tale. "Bythe's appointment to the trading post at Fort Pitt allowed him to investigate. Some say it was why he was given the appointment in the first place. He held rank as a militia officer, took out militia patrols sometimes hoping to capture the raiders who worked with his suspected spy, make one talk. There were reports, even in the Gazette, of runaway slaves carrying messages for the French. A clever ploy, that. A runaway would already have great incentive to avoid notice. Bounty men from Virginia are known to keep watch even in Shamokin sometimes."

"Would your brother have reason to speak with such runaways?" Conawago asked.

The woman shook her head from side to side.

"Then tell me something else," Conawago continued. "Your brother arranged for other surveyors. But who arranged for him?"

"There's a Virginia merchant," Marston said. "He runs tobacco and timber ships up Delaware Bay."

Marston had not answered the question. "Did he hire your brother, Miss Townsend?" Duncan pressed.

"Not that merchant. He but takes messages. All of the surveyors were hired directly by the company, by one of the gentlemen directly," she replied. "He even invited us to dine at his booth in the City Tavern. Francis was the key. He knew the wilderness, had just come back from it, told everyone how safe it was, how the Iroquois had behaved like perfect gentlemen, how our burned house was a different matter altogether. Francis was hesitating at leaving us so soon after his return, but we had lost the house, and the gentleman said he would publish one of his works on American birds after the survey was complete."

"Which gentleman?"

"An owner of the Monongahela Company, the Virginia land venture. Winston Burke. After my brother agreed, they sat together to interview the others. A young man from Connecticut. A Dutchman with two watches. One or two others."

Duncan stared at the woman, then stepped to the tray, poured himself another glass of claret, and drained it. He wasn't fitting pieces of the puzzle together, he was simply finding more impossible pieces.

"There is a small band of tribesmen," Conawago inserted after a heavy silence. "Banded together to no good purpose. Where would such men shelter in the city?"

Marston shrugged. "The ones on respectable business visit me or stay at a government house. The others could be anywhere."

"I have heard of places," Miss Townsend put in. "Especially one. Most unsavory. I heard a gentleman say it was a blight, as bad as an opium den in London, but he was grateful to have a den that drew the drunken savages from our streets."