Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Ramsey stopped his pacing and turned to face Duncan again, his eyes lit with a new energy. “If I were Calder learning of this report, what would I do?”

“I would end my preoccupation with the Ramsey Company,” Duncan said. “Because any act against the Company’s interest only strengthens our allegations. I would take steps to assure the governor that the king’s enemies are the sole focus of my efforts, lest anyone suspect that personal ambition was afoot.”

Ramsey absently ran his fingers along the spines of his leather-bound books. “To call upon you to teach my children,” he said in a contemplative tone, “that is the greatest test of your own loyalty.”

“Sir?” Something in the atmosphere had shifted. There was a scent of invitation in Ramsey’s words.

Ramsey faced Duncan. “We do the work of empire here. We are the empire here. Great things shall be done, great rewards bestowed. The world I give to my children will be vastly different from what you see here. England the way it should be, without any of its faults or ambiguities. I will share with you a secret few understand. The name of Ramsey will soon ring throughout the land. The Ramseys and those who stood by them shall be celebrated in histories read by generations to come.”

Duncan glanced at Arnold, half expecting the vicar to utter an Amen . “We shall provide answers about human nature,” Arnold said instead.

“The savages must be driven from the land, must they not?” Ramsey demanded.

The question hung in the air as Duncan tried to make sense of the abrupt shifts in their conversation. “Yes, sir,” he said at last.

“The science of man must be brought to the land,” Ramsey said.

“Yes, sir,” Duncan repeated in a tight voice.

“And the rule of God and his laws.”

“Yes, sir,” Duncan echoed, grasping his part in Ramsey’s liturgy.

“I asked Reverend Arnold to explain every detail of that day in the storm. You were surely a dead man when you leapt into the sea. But you reappeared, with the eldest of my children in your arms. What did you see, what did you feel in that dark water? Did you not sense the fingers of God cradling you?” Ramsey asked with an odd glint of hope in his voice.

“All I remember,” Duncan said, “is waking in a prison cell, cold and shivering.”

Ramsey seemed to relish the answer. “Job, too, had to endure great suffering to appreciate the role the Almighty had granted him. Eventually you shall recall what happened to you in the water, when destiny put its hand upon you, and you must record it for the Company archives.”

Duncan found his gaze drifting out the window, toward the men laboring in the muddy fields. He would never feel so unclean as he did now, standing there in Lord Ramsey’s library. There were two other new arrivals, for that morning McGregor had appeared, escorting one of the Company men who had also gone with Hawkins into the forest, a younger man wearing a crazed, hollow expression. The man had become useless in the forest, his sensibilities in some kind of shock. Duncan clenched his jaw and fixed the patron with a level stare. He may not know his role in the drama that was unfolding, but he certainly knew what Ramsey wanted to hear, and it was no struggle to speak ill of the army. “We will not allow mere generals the upper hand in the events of the day,” he declared.

Ramsey’s eyes narrowed. Arnold, seeming to sense a cue, rose and shut the library door.

“When you issue your report to the governor, you will show him that one company of Ramsey men is more effective than ten companies of soldiers,” Duncan concluded, beating down his shame.

Ramsey stepped to the big desk, gesturing Duncan to turn away as he opened its hinged top. Duncan heard a series of drawers slide open. The patron was accessing a locked compartment, he knew, a paper safe often built into such desks and opened by positioning the small interior drawers in a designated arrangement. After a moment Ramsey cleared his throat, and Duncan turned to see him holding a rolled sheet of vellum. With a triumphant look, he motioned Duncan closer and unrolled the document on the desk. Its script was elegant, the scrollwork along its borders intricate and colored with rich hues, like an illuminated manuscript. But Duncan’s gaze quickly settled on the huge ribboned seal at the bottom, beside a date only three months earlier.

“The king himself,” Ramsey declared with a conspiratorial air, lifting a map from the desktop and laying it on the arm of his desk chair. A massive tract was outlined in red. “Ten thousand square miles. Much of the colony to the west, all the way to the great inland seas that feed the Saint Lawrence. The king wants it to be ours.”

Duncan’s heart seemed to wither as he watched the thin smile form on Ramsey’s face.

“I am impressed with your usages of death,” the English lord declared to him, then stepped back to the tray and poured another cup. “Would you prefer sugar in your tea, Professor McCallum?”

“Carolina.” It was the first word Lister spoke when Duncan found him working at one of the new cabins. “It is our answer,” the old sailor said, gesturing Duncan out of earshot of his companions. “Hundreds of Scots are there, in the mountains. I hear there are even towns where they speak only the old tongue. Sometimes the smith talks as he works. Last year some Scots in thrall to Ramsey fled south and made it, out of the reach of his dogs. Scots go there to be free, far from the law. Cameron’s been collecting canoes on the river above town. We can take one, get to the Delaware, and follow it to Philadelphia, work a ship to Charleston.”

“You mean us to flee?”

“I mean for us to live. Yesterday a wagon arrived at the carpenter’s shed. I watched them unload fifty muskets. Bars of lead, powder horns, bullet molds, all stowed and locked in the shed. Lord Ramsey, he is taking us into the war somehow.”

Duncan studied the great house. There was movement in an upstairs window. The woman using Sarah Ramsey’s name was staring into the forest again. He had begun to feel somehow victimized by her. He had saved an impostor. “Woolford’s pack is on a bench in the barn,” he said. The ranger had disappeared two days earlier. “I must speak with him.”

“He ate by the south well with Fitch, then walked into the woods near there.”

Duncan followed the perimeter of the fields below the house, pausing frequently to peer uneasily into the forest. This was not the western bank, he kept telling himself, this was a thinned, tamed forest. Lifting a heavy stick for a weapon, he ventured slowly under the trees, turning frequently to assure he kept the huge barn in sight. It took nearly an hour of nervous forays into the shadows for him to discover the clearing, three hundred yards beyond the fields. Under the boughs of several huge beech trees, four logs had been arranged in a square, in the center of which was not a fire pit, as Duncan expected, but a three-foot-high platform made of long, flat stones stacked on top of one another. The scene had been set many years earlier. The benches showed signs of rot; the stones of the cairn were covered with lichen. Seedlings sprouted in the square around the cairn.

A solitary figure in green sat on one of the logs, his rifle beside him, staring at the stacked stones as if waiting for something to climb out of them. Woolford, looking exhausted, did not glance up until Duncan was a few feet away, then reacted with a small frown and gazed back at the cairn.

“They say that in the last century, the tribes and early settlers made places like this near every settlement.” The ranger’s voice seemed drained of emotion. “They say old Penn and the Quakers visited them often, to speak with the chiefs. Few could speak both English and the tongues of the tribes, but there was far less blood-shed. Now that we can speak with one another, all we want to do is kill one another.”