Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Lord Ramsey took one of your men?” Duncan stroked the nose of one of the big grey horses.

“Jacob the Fish, we called him. He never spoke much, but we fed and clothed him, and he returned an honest labor. He could catch fish by calling them with squeaks and grunts-the damnedest thing.”

Duncan froze a moment and looked up. The old fishspeaker will know, Evering had recorded. Show him the medallion. “How many ferries might someone bound for Edentown take?” he asked.

“Naught but this, if ye seek the quickest road to Edentown.”

The words had been Adam’s, and he had known for certain that Evering would eventually meet the man he called the fishspeaker. “Where is he, this Jacob?” Duncan asked, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice.

“That be what I was saying. Lord Ramsey came through a month ago and arrested him, declaring him an enemy of England. When I said he was an enemy of no one, Ramsey asked if I should be arrested for harboring an enemy. I asked by what authority, and he raised a hand to strike me, then after a moment just said I should consider him a magistrate of the king. When we got him across, he dropped the fee in my palm and as quickly snatched it away, saying it be my fine. Ramsey must have crossed twenty times in the last five years, seen Old Jacob every time and never said a word.”

Duncan clenched his jaw, trying to hide his disappointment. He touched the medallion under his shirt. “Then surely something was different that day,” he suggested, suddenly sensing that there was nothing more important than finding this man Jacob and showing him Adam’s amulet.

“I’ve thought on that, many a night I have thought on that. A farming family with children was taking passage. That trapper Hawkins was with Ramsey.”

“Jacob must have given offense somehow.”

“Not at all. He knew to stay away from Ramsey, just showed the children what he could do with the fish, like he did with all the children who cross, telling them to learn to see the beauty beneath the surface of the world. Never spoke much, but sometimes he had words about the natural world that made him sound like a preacher man.” The ferryman scratched his beard. “He almost fell in that day. Was leaning too far over the edge to point out a great sturgeon. I caught him, but he went in head first, nigh to his waist. He came up spurting and laughing. The children laughed-everyone laughed but Ramsey and Hawkins. He took off his shirt and wrung it out.” The ferryman shrugged. “When we reached the shore Ramsey ordered the local militia captain to seize him.”

The two men fell into a deep silence as the wind began tugging at the sail and the little ferry surged forward. The fear and foreboding that had seized Duncan began to subside as he surveyed the rugged landscape, replaced by an unexpected thrill of freedom. He found himself looking for the escaped duck. A warm breeze blew, carrying the scent of fresh-cut hay. Fish jumped. A skein of geese flew over the broad, wild river.

“This is the real earth circling about.” The words leapt from his tongue without forethought, the haunting words of Flora, who lingered at the edge of his consciousness. He glanced awkwardly at his companion, but the man seemed strangely moved by Duncan’s declaration.

The ferryman stared at Duncan, then nodded, rubbing his grizzled jaw, and turned his own gaze over the water. “On the wind it walks,” the boatman said in a sober tone.

“I’m sorry?” Duncan asked.

“On the wind it walks, come to restore the beauty,” the man added, then turned away as one of the youths called him to the tiller. As Duncan gazed after him in wonder, a solitary duck flew over the ferry, so low he could hear the whistle of its wings.

The inn on the far side of the river proved to be a tidy, spacious Dutch farmhouse with asters blooming along its long, wide front porch, and a whitewashed plank by its door proclaiming in black letters The Stag’s Head Inn under the image of a bounding deer. Several outbuildings of stone and white planks flanked the inn, with a broad oak giving shade to the barnyard. A freshly killed pig hung from one of its limbs, and a small live one rooted among the green acorns on the ground. He glanced at the retreating ferry returning to the opposite shore, then looked back at the sign. Evering had never been there, but had secretly recorded the inn’s name. Duncan was on the path meant for the murdered Ramsey tutor, with a killer stalking him, and the only way to save Lister was to stay on the path, facing the murderer to come.

The innkeeper, a sturdy ruddy-faced Dutchman with a German wife, jovially assisted Duncan with the team, leading them to a water trough carved from a single long slab of stone, its edge worn from long use. The New World, Duncan had begun to realize, was not as new as he had imagined. He probed his memory, reminding himself that the Dutch had settled the lower reaches of the Hudson more than a century before.

The Dutchman brought Duncan a pewter mug of strong applejack, then pointed out the stable where he could unhitch and feed the horses.

“What became of the old man named Jacob who was arrested last month?” Duncan inquired as they walked to the barn. “Is there a jail? I’d value a word with him.”

The Dutchman only frowned, then fidgeted with the knife on his belt and glanced toward the forest.

“Do you fear a raid?” Duncan asked.

The innkeeper glanced into the shadows. “Don’t speak of such things,” he said, “bad for business. Most of us keep dories hidden away, filled with supplies. If the alarm is raised, we will flee. No hope in fighting.” He pulled the bridle from one of the big grays, then fixed Duncan with a sober gaze. “Had to fill those Company guards with drink to halt their wagging tongues this afternoon. Scared the girls in the kitchen half to death with all their talk about Indians in New York harbor.”

“But the war is north of here.”

The Dutchman shrugged. “The French move faster than our army, stealthy as their Indians. They have small raiding parties roaming the lands west of the Hudson, all the way to Pennsylvania. Homesteaders west of here are being scalped every week, their killers disappearing like phantoms. If the French triumph over our army, every house north of the city will be burned. And if they take the Hudson, they take the continent. The only thing that keeps the French from my door is the fact that the Iroquois tribes don’t support them, and the French raiders have to come through Iroquois country. This war, it’s all about the Iroquois. Biggest mistake the Frenchies made was recruiting all those Hurons and Abenakis first, without considering how they were traditional enemies of the Iroquois. If they had had the sense to court the Iroquois, we’d all be dead by now. Even so, most of the Iroquois stay out of the fight, other than the Mohawk and a few Seneca.”

Duncan’s mug stopped in midair. “Seneca?”

“One of the six tribes of the Iroquois federation. The western-most. You got to be careful with those Seneca. Too many married into the French.”

It had been one more thing he had not understood about Evering’s cryptic message, because he had not understood the New World. Impossibly, Evering had not been referring to the ancient Roman but to one of the Indian tribes, when, just as impossibly, he had described an obscure American battle despite having never set foot in the colonies. “The ferryman seemed confused about why Old Jacob was arrested,” Duncan observed.

The Dutchman shot a glance over his shoulder as if to see who was listening. “Old Jacob is just a hermit. His people are almost all dead. Goes for days without speaking. But always smiling. He would carve little wooden creatures for the children. Every time an animal was born here, he would come and say a prayer over it. The great lord left him in the custody of the local militia. Old Jacob was dispatched by their captain.”