Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

He stepped backward, taking in the entire scene. There had been a dialogue between two parties who could not, or would not, meet face to face. But a third had also participated, coming back, interrupting with a boot, a strap of iron in the skull of a messenger, and a deiseal circuit. And Duncan knew who at least one of the three was. He looked up at the boy, who stared in silent fear at the river, then with his pencil lead on a flat white stone added one more sign to the row, where the bee had been. A drawing of Adam’s she-bear.

“When I found it, I couldn’t find you. I went to tell Sergeant Fitch,” Jonathan explained. “But I changed my mind.”

Duncan pulled the boy away to the sunlight at the edge of the garden. “Why?”

“I saw Mr. Frasier lead the sergeant into the kitchen and I followed. I was in the entry and they had not seen me when I heard Mr. Frasier tell Sergeant Fitch that he would keep Cameron away while he went below, into father’s cellar. No one is to go below. Father would have them both lashed if he knew. Mr. Frasier was ordered out of the house yesterday, removed from his house duties, for going onto the second floor where none of the Company is allowed. I should tell Father. But-” Jonathan bit his lip for a moment. “Sergeant Fitch carved me a toy horse. I like the way he laughs. He taught me the songs of some birds.” The boy searched Duncan’s face. When Duncan offered no reply, he ran away, not to the house, but to the white-staked rectangle beyond the barn, where Reverend Arnold was pacing off his church.

Duncan lingered at the cross, uneasily circling it, crouching by it again, placing his own hand over one of the prints as if to assure himself that its source was human. Finally he stepped around the front of the house, searching the nearby trees and the rough-scratched, struggling flowerbeds at its foundation, and found what he had expected. He leaned against a tree, studying the town, then with grim determination moved into the shadows along the edge of the fields until he reached the thicket that interrupted the fields. A knot formed in his belly as he gazed into it, then he pushed through the mountain laurel toward the center, where young oaks and chestnuts grew over a field of boulders. He advanced warily, starting at the screech of a squirrel, tripping over a log on the ground. As he heaved himself up he saw that it was not a log but a hand-hewn timber, a charred and rotting timber. He spotted another timber, and one resting on another, then, his breath catching, he discovered why Ramsey had not cleared this patch of forest.

The boulders were rough-hewn tombstones, a dozen of them, for eight men and women and four children, all dead the same year, 1746. Duncan rested his hand on the largest of the stones, onto which a flying cherub had been carved.

1740–1746, he read under the angel, then his heart lurched and he sank to his knees. The name carved on the stone was Sarah Ramsey.

He did not know how long he wrestled with the despair that seized him. He watched his fingers moving across the stone as if of their own accord, trembling, peeling away the lichen growing in the carving. He scrubbed at the stone with his fingertips, then slumped against it, head in his hands, wondering at his pain. Was it just the weight of the terrible foreboding bearing down on him, he wondered, or was it also the year? It was the same year, 1746, that his parents had been taken from him-the year of Culloden.

An hour later he was back at the schoolhouse table, studying his slips of paper, fighting a new desperation that had seized him, rearranging the slips again and again, pausing for minutes at a time to stare at his quill and the blank papers before him, pausing later to gaze out the window toward the great house, seeing, as Lister had, the woman using Sarah’s name staring at the forest from the second floor. He could not escape the sense that he was being asked to strike a fire in a powder magazine.

Eventually he became aware of a presence and looked up to see Crispin holding a plate of cold beef and potatoes.

“Look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the big man said as he shoved the plate across the table.

“I did. I stepped into that thicket that juts into the fields.”

Crispin’s face sagged. “No one goes there. The ground is cursed.”

“They were the first settlers, weren’t they?”

Crispin looked longingly toward the door, as if he were thinking of retreating, then pulled up a stool and sat opposite Duncan, but spoke toward the window. “There had been a little settlement, a few cabins long abandoned when Mr. Ramsey bought the land. He hired six families to clear the first fields and came in that autumn for a month, mostly to hunt. It was warm. Indian summer they call it, because that’s a favorite time for the tribes to raid, to get plunder for their winter camps. He went out hunting stags for three days, downriver in Pennsylvania, took half the men with him. When they came back everything was burnt, all the people hacked to pieces. It was Iroquois, folks say, back when they were not all our allies.”

“You mean he left his daughter here while he hunted,” Duncan ventured. The way Cripsin broke away to stare into his folded hands was answer enough.

“I will not go near the place. Lord Ramsey has ordered briar thorns planted all around it. If he saw you there-”

“Sarah Ramsey is there.”

The houseman buried his head in his hands a moment. “’Tis wrong to be digging up old graves. With Lady Ramsey gone, there’s no one else,” he added in a voice gone hollow.

“Why can no one speak a straight word about her?” Duncan demanded. Crispin was not trying to bait Duncan, he knew, or deceive him. He was just trying to protect the strange woman whom Duncan had pulled from the Atlantic.

“Stay out of the woods,” Crispin said with sudden pleading in his voice. “No good for anyone.”

“They want to condemn Lister to hang, Crispin,” Duncan said. “And I believe the truth of it to be bound up around this woman using a dead girl’s name. Without it, all I can do is point out possibilities, explanations that could be wrong. Innocent men have already died. Another will hang if all I can find is shadows.”

“But your friend,” Crispin declared with an uncertain grin. “They released him, reduced him to the ranks of the workers. He’s in the river, singing like a boy.”

Without another word, Duncan raced out the door and moments later halted beside an oak on the bank. Half a dozen prisoners were watching the jaunty old man in the river, some grinning, others wearing uneasy, nervous expressions. Lister had stripped to his waist and was sitting on a flat rock midstream, singing something bawdy about ladies in Spain as he scrubbed his arms with sand and rushes. Thirty feet upstream stood Frasier and another keeper, armed with clubs.

“The old fool’s heart is as light as a leaf,” said a voice at his shoulder. Duncan turned to see Cameron hovering close, the keeper’s eyes full of worry and locked on Lister. “Mine would be, too, with so much brandy.”

“What happened?”

Cameron shrugged. “Order came from His Lordship, with a pint of his finest French spirits. Release him into the Company, reduced to prisoner rank, but watch him close.”

As Lister shifted on the rock, playfully skipping a pebble along the current, several of the onlookers paled and turned away. The old man’s back was a latticework of scars, overlaid with long, ugly scabs from his most recent lashing.

Had Ramsey actually taken Duncan at his word, actually accepted that he owed Duncan a debt? But then Cameron handed Duncan a cloth-wrapped bundle.

“Greetings from our patron,” the keeper declared and stepped away.

Inside were several sheets of fine white paper and four fresh-cut quills. He glanced back the house. Arnold stood on the rear porch, gazing at him expectantly. They weren’t repaying a debt. They were forcing the bargain, increasing the stakes. Duncan had to finish his report. They didn’t intend Lister to stay free for long. They were simply striking at Duncan with an invisible lash.