Eliot Pattison - Eye of the Raven

The first-floor windows of the house were cleverly rigged with dark canvas mounted on pins and pulleys, which Marston now lowered like sails to block out the glass before opening the screen on his lantern. "The owner is away," he announced. "He would not object to you borrowing the house. In fact he is certain to be delighted when I tell him the circumstances."

It was a simple, comfortable dwelling, its only trappings of luxury the scores of books in the front room. Not just a library, Duncan saw, as Marston lit more candles. Large Leyden jars stood in ranks along a table by one wall. Another table was cluttered with an odd assortment that included strange cast-iron shapes, stuffed birds, a globe, disassembled spectacles, two clocks, lenses, a dead dragonfly, and a wooden tray of lead type.

"You must not attract attention," Marston warned. "Beds are on the second floor, but no lights near the windows."

As they followed him up the stairway Duncan paused and looked at a strange leather hat hanging by the front door, shaped like a helmet but with a broad visor. "From the fire company," Marston said absently and gestured him on.

Conawago was next to pause, studying a strange device on the stairway wall. Two metal strips emerged from the ceiling and entered a wooden box, at the bottom of which was a small brass bell.

"We invented this detector several years ago. When there is a charge collecting in the atmosphere before a storm it will ring. His is likely the first in the world, though I have been trying to duplicate it in my attic."

"His?" Conawago asked, then his eyes lit with recognition, and he grinned at Duncan.

"As I said, he is in London as agent for the provincial government these three years past. What family is left has gone on a visit to Boston for several months. He asked me to watch things, lets me borrow such instruments as I may need."

Duncan's own eyes went round with awe. Conawago stared at the bell device with boyish wonder. Marston was hiding them in the home of Benjamin Franklin.

They were at a front-facing bedroom, confirming that the street outside was quiet, when Duncan recalled the books downstairs. "Is the library available to you as well, Marston?"

"Naturally. And to many of his friends. Dr. Franklin is responsible for the formation of a public lending library not ten minutes from here. He believes it is the duty of each citizen to continually improve himself."

"Mathematical books? Books on codes in particular?"

"Of course! The code on the trees!" Marston darted for the stairs, leaving Duncan and Conawago to find their way in the dark.

Franklin's peculiar organization of his books at first mystified Duncan, but Marston soon located a row of mathematical treatises on a top shelf, consisting largely of the works of Euclid, Descartes, and Leibnitz, along with a deposition on the variations in units of measurement in half a dozen European countries. But nothing on codes or cyphers.

"I am not sure he would classify the subject with mathematics," Marston said pensively. "But where. .?" he asked himself as he surveyed the shelves again. They searched through the books on religion, for Franklin believed early religious tracts contained hidden cyphers, then began a systematic search of every shelf. It was more than a quarter hour before Conawago uttered an exclamation of discovery.

"With the books on the printing press and typesetting," he explained, and he pulled out a slender volume entitled Cyphers of the Ancients. It was, to their chagrin, almost entirely about the Greek square, the numeric grid employed by Athenian battle commanders, and the Greek scytale used by the Spartans. Not a word about the pigpen cypher.

"Is there nothing else?" Duncan asked in disappointment.

Marston leaned over the shelf. "Nothing," he announced, then probed an empty space and extracted a slip of paper. "The Cryptographer's Manual," he read with new excitement. "On loan. I can just retrieve it from-" his words choked away. "It says," he announced, "that the book is at Lord Ramsey's!"

Duncan stared at the slip in disbelief. He felt the last of his hope drifting away.

"Can it truly be a coincidence?" Conawago asked after a forlorn silence.

"He is known for his great collection of books," Marston offered.

"The rot of the Ramsey house spreads to everything it touches," Duncan said grimly. Surely, he prayed, it had not come to this, surely after all he and the tribes had endured, the path of his own troubles with Ramsey had not converged with those of the murders. But in his heart Duncan realized that from the first moment he had heard Ramsey's name in Pennsylvania, something inside him had sensed the shadow of the treacherous lord, like some wraith stalking him.

"Evil finds its own," Conawago said heavily.

Duncan offered a reluctant nod of agreement. Ramsey viewed himself as above the law, in reality was above the law, and though he was one of the richest men in the colonies, his real currencies were deception and secret violence. He gazed at his old friend and considered what he had said. Conawago was pointing out there were others involved. Ramsey himself would never be touched by the law, but those who did his bidding could be stopped.

Duncan looked at the slip of paper with Ramsey's name on it. "Surely this is not the only such book in Philadelphia."

"I will make inquiries at the Library Company," Marston offered, "but it appears to be a rare volume published many years ago. Dr. Franklin often ordered single copies of works from a bookseller in London."

"Then someone must get into Lord Ramsey's library," Duncan concluded.

Marston looked startled. "Not any of us, surely. I am not of sufficient social rank to be admitted to that inner sanctum."

Duncan paced around the room, along the ranks of books and the table of Dr. Franklin's collections. His gaze lingered on an ornately carved box beside several ancient stone ax heads. "My pack," he said to Conawago. "You must retrieve it. If it falls into the wrong hands they will try to use that box of Townsend's with the turtle scratched on it to link Skanawati to his killing. Give it to Old Belt for safekeeping." He kept gazing at Franklin's little box as he spoke. "There is," he suggested in a contemplative voice, "a witness of sorts to what happened at the first murder."

"Ohio George is dead." Conawago was puzzled. "And now Red Hand."

"Burke sent Townsend into the wilderness, promised to publish his book, an offer more valuable than currency to a man like Townsend. So Townsend went to Shamokin, and out onto the Warriors Path because he trusted the Iroquois. Skanawati the elder was a warrior but no cold-blooded murderer. When he killed, he killed enemies of his tribe. He was deceived. If we understand that deception we may understand who was the deceiver."

"The only ones we know are dead," Marston pointed out again.

"The ones whose faces we know, yes. But there was at least one more."

"How do you know?"

"Because of the code carved on the trees. Townsend did not carve it as a sign of his own murder. Nor did any Indian. It was done by a European. One familiar with a code book brought to Philadelphia by Dr. Franklin. And there is a witness to what was done at that first tree, where Townsend died. He is locked in the prison not half a mile from here."

"The plunge in the river has left you daft," Conawago protested. "The Skanawati we know was not the Skanawati who killed Townsend."

"The plunge in the river reminded me of the Susquehanna. Stone Blossom said there is an essence passed from one Skanawati to the next. You have taught me that among the tribes the lives of spirits and the lives of men are intertwined." Duncan looked up at Marston. "I must see him."

His two companions stared at him as if Duncan had indeed lost his senses.