Eliot Pattison - Eye of the Raven

"For the freedom of their chief?" Duncan asked hopefully.

"No. For the sale of their land."

His heart sank still lower. "The formal negotiations for this have started?"

Mrs. Bythe rose, straightening her apron. "There are no meaningful formal negotiations until the informal ones are done." The guard outside noticed the woman's preparation for departure and opened the door.

"I wish you to borrow my Bible," she said pointedly, and handed Duncan the small volume from her pocket. "Lord Ramsey knows he must tolerate us Quakers. He allows us to hold prayer sessions with his staff in his library from time to time."

He stared forlornly at the door as it sealed him in. Then Duncan gazed at the little book, setting it down on the stool to dab at the blood that began to ooze out the edge of a bandage on his arm. He rose to walk to the cell door. Halfway across the cell his knees buckled and he collapsed to the floor.

Later, after he had dragged himself back to the cot, after he had passed out with only his arm and head resting on the cot, he lifted the little book on the stool.

Inside the cover was a slip of paper with two sets of crossed double lines with a letter and a dot inside the right angles, each dot positioned differently inside its angle. On the reverse were two triangles with letters and dots likewise arranged on each side of the lines. He turned the page over and over. Every letter of the alphabet was represented.

Duncan forced himself up, staggered to the window, and collapsed under it to hold the paper in the pool of light, understanding the point of her parting words. The widow had been in Ramsey's library. Conawago had spoken to her, and she had found the pigpen code. Duncan frantically patted at his waist, then crawled to search the piles of tattered blankets at the end of the cot.

His pouch with his notes of the codes from the trees, along with everything else he had had in his possession, was gone. But the signs on the first tree were burned into his memory. With his finger he drew in the dust on the floor the signs as he had seen them, beginning with the empty open-topped box, then an open-sided right angle tilted so its angle pointed to the center of the preceding box, ending with a complete, but empty square. His hand trembled as he consulted Conawago's chart. The first symbol was a B, the next a U. He quickly transcribed each letter, staring in confusion at the result. BURKE. The killer had simply recorded the name of his victim on the tree. It made no sense.

He closed his eyes against a tremor of pain and found the fingers of one hand twitching uncontrollably, his frustration now adding to his weakness. This is how his life would end, in Ramsey's cellar, more and more of his body twitching, convulsing, as he lost control of it. Each day more of his brain would be burned away. He had bet his freedom, his very life, on finding the truth, yet each piece of the puzzle was more useless than the one before.

He closed his eyes, adrift in despair, visited by a vision of the faces of those who had died on his prison ship. In the waking nightmare the dead came to life, each bloodless face turned to him in ridicule, pointing skeleton fingers at the paper in his hand.

Four paces to the far wall, four paces back. Duncan's hours were divided into journeys from one end of his cell to the other as he struggled to restore the power of his limbs. At first it was all he could do to stagger from one wall to the other, his knees and ankles protesting every move, his toes still tingling with a strange heat. He exercised thirty minutes by the clock of the State House visible through his window, then rested for ten, eating the stale bread and cheese left by the Benevolent Society, building such an appetite that he even emptied the bowl of thin gruel shoved through his hatch twice a day.

He tried to force from his mind his destiny as Ramsey's slave, recalling long discussions in the night with Conawago about war parties facing impossible odds against enemy tribes, how the warriors were taught to push away all fear, all thought of defeat, all thought of the morrow, to simply hold in their hearts the proud deeds of their forebears and the power of their gods. It was, he knew, little different from the training of the Highland clans, who had fought so many impossible foes through the centuries.

He often glanced at Mrs. Bythe's chart of letters and paused in his travail long enough to write more signs. He could not trust his memory of the other signs on the trees, so instead he encoded in the dust by the window the names of the dead. Cooper. Bythe. Burke. Townsend. Duncan leaned on the windowsill, facing out, watching the prisoners exercise in the small yard below, watching the spiraling smoke of a hundred chimneys. If he pressed close to the bars he could see masts above rooftops, remembering there were ships half a mile away that would take on an able-bodied crewman without question, ships that could take him to the Scottish settlements in the Carolinas, to New York, to Holland, where he had friends, to Ireland, where many Highlanders had fled after the purges. He lost himself again in imaginings of a different life, of how in the night he would slip out of the cell and over the wall, then sail away from all his cares. But when night came his despair bore down on him again, the black thing pressing like a heavy weight on his heart. He fought it by recollecting conversations he had had with Conawago.

His injured fingers kept curling up, and he considered, with the eye of the medical student, how the flow of electrical fluid affected even the smallest of muscles. Unwinding their linen bandage, he winced at the sight of the raw, oozing patches where his skin had been burned away, then pushed the fingers straight against the sill and watched them curl up again as if of their own volition.

He did not know how long he was being watched, but slowly the hairs on his neck began to rise. He limped back to his cot and sat, waiting. Moments later he heard the grating of the metal in the lock, and the door swung open. Marston limped into the chamber, leaning on a cane. The scientist stared at the turnkey, who frowned but stepped back into the doorway and closed the door.

Marston hurried to the door and closed the hatch. "You must not let them see you walking about."

"Sorry?"

"The best reason we have to keep you here is your medical condition. The jailer will not release you until you are healed. Ramsey is under the impression he has no need to hurry the paperwork for your transfer to his compound. I have food from Mrs. Bythe." Duncan saw now he carried a basket, which he placed by the stool. "And a message, from the physician who looked in on Skanawati. The chief wants you to know that he could not see the faces of those who attacked you. But he believes two were turnkeys, and a third man was giving them orders from the shadows."

"I must beg your forgiveness," Duncan said. "You were caught in Ramsey's trap for me."

Marston raised a dismissive hand. "We have survived. It was an illuminating experience to be on the other side of the jars. Illuminating," he repeated with a shallow laugh at his pun.

"Perhaps you could use less severe charges in the future."

Marston flushed. "I have already decided that the larger jars will no longer leave my premises."

"Your equipment is lost. I regret having dragged you into my problems."

"As I recollect it was I who sought you out that night," Marston said. "I have already written to Dr. Franklin. He will relish the exciting news from stale old Philadelphia. And the Benevolent Society has agreed to bear the cost of replacements."

Duncan could not help but grin at the scientist's good will. "I fear I have another request. Might you roll up your left sleeve?"

"Pardon?"

"Your sleeve. In the. . in the confusion I thought I saw a mark. Like a bolt of lightning."