Eliot Pattison - Blood of the Oak

Back in the kitchen, he carefully opened the latches of the two doors to reveal a pantry and a cellar stairway. “There is no printing press in this building. Too heavy for the second floor.” He gestured to the squat brick building on the back corner of the compound that he had taken to be a boathouse.

The shutters were closed and the door of the building locked but its transom was open, and before Duncan could react, Tanaqua was in a tree, then on the roof and swinging through the narrow opening to release the latch. The air inside was laden with the scent of ink and wax. Tanaqua quickly lit a lantern and held it out to illuminate a printing press, a desk, and a large working table, below narrow shelves crammed with trays of type. Laid out on the table were three printed sheets with fresh seals affixed to them. The wax on the seals was still soft. “Tax commissions,” Duncan declared, in a low, angry voice. “Made today.”

Tanaqua picked up one of the papers. “I don’t understand. How could a tax commission be issued in Chestertown?”

Duncan held the candle closer, reading the names, written in a hand that was remarkably close to the original commissions. Jonathan Bork, Josiah Randolph, Zebediah Sturgis. They were the names revealed the day Jaho had been killed. You are directed to to deliver all proceeds to Lord Peter Ramsey, agent of the crown, the last line said . The most predictable thing about Ramsey was his insatiable greed. If commissions were stolen the government would not expect revenue collected by the commissioners, and the commissioners would never expect a commission with an official seal to be fraudulent. In the backwater and remote towns of Maryland and Virginia, Ramsey was building his own phantom kingdom.

Duncan began searching the desks. The seal stamp used on the commissions was in the top drawer, along with several blank tax commissions ready to be completed. He set them on the desk, the seal on top of them, and opened more drawers. There was a ledger book with entries for Virginia and Maryland, evidencing tax collections that totaled several hundred pounds. The bottom drawer yielded several pots of ink and a locked wooden box. He extracted his knife and pried it open to find two packs of letters tied with red ribbons.

The red ribbons were used for filing in government offices but these letters were all to Lord Ramsey and Lieutenant Kincaid. On quick review the first stack were all receipts and lists of expenses for Ramsey’s secret tax network. The second contained letters from New York, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and Charleston. The first of these, an unsigned missive from Johnson Hall, read like a military report on the movement of certain Mohawks and Oneidas known to be closely allied with Sir William Johnson. With a chill Duncan recognized some of the names, all of them members of the ranger corps. A second letter described the movements of Woolford, Red Jacob, and other named runners. Still another letter, in a rough scrawl, reported schedules of trade convoys up and down the Susquehanna. It was signed simply “Bricklin.”

There was a letter to Ramsey from the governor of Massachusetts raging over the disrespect shown by Samuel Adams, who, he haughtily pointed out, preferred the company of low farmers and sailors to that of proper gentlemen, and was rumored to be active in Boston’s insidious committee of correspondence that was trying to foment dissent across colonial borders.

Tanaqua spun about, knife in his hand, facing the shadows at the rear of the building. Duncan too heard the noise now, a strange sawing sound from the darkness. He lifted the candle and inched forward, discovering more shelves and a ladder leaning in a corner. They paused, confused, until they heard the sound again, coming from under their feet. Tanaqua pointed to a large cast-iron ring in the floor, then to a bar with a handle and a hook that, when tried, fit into the ring. The Mohawk snagged the ring and heaved up, pulling away a square section of the floor. A fetid odor of unwashed human, fish, candle smoke, ink, and rum rose up from the darkness.

They slid the ladder into the hole and descended into a storeroom. On a narrow rope bed, beside an upturned crate holding an extinguished candle, a book, and a jar of rum, lay a snoring man. Long black hair was slicked over his bald crown. His hands were stained with ink. They had found the missing printer.

Duncan lifted Prindle into a sitting position, but when he released him he dropped back onto his pillow, senseless. The smell of rum was heavy on his breath.

“Prindle!” Duncan said, as loudly as he dared, then gestured for Tanaqua to help lift him to his feet. “Prindle, we are getting you out of here.”

The drunken man’s eyes fluttered open. “Ohhhh, aye. Well met,” he slurred in a high-pitched voice, then his head sank toward his shoulder.

“Prindle!” Duncan pressed, then lifted the printer’s chin. “Do you know a man named Bowen, Jeremiah Bowen?”

“Bowen, Bowen. Got to be a’going,” Prindle chuckled.

“Where is he, man? Where is Bowen?”

“Buried like a mole,” Prindle replied with a big smile. “But no more prisoners, prithee ’cause I’m fresh out of cellars.”

They located the outside cellar door at the side of the house, shielded by rhododendron bushes, but to Duncan’s dismay it was secured with a heavy padlock. “The door inside the kitchen!” he urged Tanaqua, well aware that they could be discovered by the soldiers at any moment. They had left the inebriated printer in his underground cell but did not know if their light in the print shop had been seen. “There was a stairway down to the-” He froze as he realized the tribesman beside him was not Tanaqua or any of their Iroquois companions.

There was anger in the man’s eyes, but also curiosity. He ignored Duncan’s greeting in the Haudensaunee tongue, and just stared over Duncan’s shoulder. Tanaqua appeared beside him. “Seneca,” Tanaqua declared with a tentative tone. Although part of the Iroquois League, many of the Senecas, the westernmost of the confederated tribes, had fought against the Mohawks in the war with the French and had often been the most bloodthirsty of those raiding settlers in the recent native uprising.

“Not another step,” the Seneca stated, his voice raw with warning. “Go now and we will not draw blood.” A war ax was in his hand.

Tanaqua inched closer but kept his open hands held out. “Brother, this is not your fight.”

“Some in our village starved to death last winter,” the Seneca said. “This is how we feed our families when the next snows come.” The man was as big as Tanaqua. His grip on his ax tightened. “We do not care whose blood we take if it saves our families.”

“And who,” Tanaqua asked him, “will protect your families when the Great Council hears what you have done?”

“The Council is a circle of aging bears who have lost their teeth. Bricklin promised us flour and salted beef.”

Duncan sensed the tension in Tanaqua. The Mohawk was struggling not to react to the insult. “It is not only the Great Council you need to fear,” Tanaqua said. “There are others, in this world and the next, who will learn how you helped kill the Blooddancer.”

The fight seemed to drain from the Seneca’s face. His hand went to the totem pouch on his neck. “Do not say such things! The Blooddancer is safe in Onondaga.”

“No,” Duncan said. “He was stolen by the men you protect. Stolen to break the Mohawks who stand with us.”

“You do not know of such things!” the Seneca spat. “You are not of the Haudensaunee!”

“We have tracked the captured god,” Tanaqua stated. “He was in Virginia, just days ago. These men stole him. They would torture him and cut the chain that binds our people.”