Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

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.

“Aye,” the ferryman replied. “Each poor soul looking more scared than the one before. Lord Ramsey’s folly, they’re calling that Company of his.”

“And later,” Duncan ventured, “a rider, a thin man with a dispatch case?”

“Hawkins.” The man pronounced the name like an epithet. “Hell-bent, he was, clutching that case like it was gold. Mounted his horse and leapt off before we was proper docked. Ramseys,” the ferryman spat in a crestfallen voice as they pulled into the river. “The day be more than full of Ramseys and their flocks. A punishing crew, eh?” He studied the shallow waves a moment, then barked out an order. Two of the youths began fitting a spar into a hole in the deck, onto which a small, much-patched sail was rigged.

“I am but recently employed,” Duncan replied, reluctant to admit that he had been in the New World less than twelve hours. “It seems a rigid household,” he offered.

“The musket!” the ferryman suddenly shouted, and began frantically yelling for his wife to toss the weapon to him. When she refused, glancing toward Sarah, the man turned, crestfallen, and studied the western shore with worried eyes.

“What frightens you so?” Duncan asked.

“The savages, boy. They want to kill you.”

Not for the first time that day, Duncan’s mouth went suddenly dry. “Me?”

“You. Me. All of us. Neighbor of ours packed up to take free land in the west. Indians wouldn’t have it. Burnt his cabin. Gave him to the squaws. They took three days to kill him, with pointed sticks and such.”

“But there are settlements on the western shore. Edentown.”

“You don’t know them tribes. They appear quick as spit and are gone just as fast. This very morning there was an attack in the city itself. An arrow right into a man’s heart, blood everywhere, the savages casting a spell so’s no one sees them.”

Duncan opened his mouth to correct the ferryman, but no words came out. But for a few inches of wood the man would have been speaking the truth.

The ferryman busied himself with the sail for several minutes, returned to Duncan’s side in front of the team, then frowned, studying the sky, and reset the sail. “Used to be, I had a hand who could read the wind like words on a page.” The farther they moved from shore, the more relaxed the man became. “Y’er Ramseys cost me my best mate ever. Worked for me for nigh twenty years. One bad crossing and he’s under the tyrant’s thumb.”