Bone Rattler amoca-1

by Eliot Pattison

  “And then?”

  “A rider galloped up behind us. A man all in leather with a face like a shard of flint. Had words with some of the keepers. Frasier and Cameron. Showed them a piece of paper in his pocket. Took a drink from the water barrel tied to the back of my wagon, still on his horse, studying me with eyes like two black pebbles. Then he heard the bird, too, and he froze and turned toward the woods, his hand on his big skinning knife. He grinned, chewed off a cheekful of tobacco, and galloped on.”

  “The shadow in the woods?”

  “Never saw it again. Never heard the bird again.”

  “Nothing else happened?”

  “The road was full of bends, and crossed through many boulder fields that made it difficult to see the last wagon and those walking behind. I did not see Cameron, nor Frasier, for nigh an hour. But after another hour came the thing in the tree.”

  Duncan filled the cup and Lister drained it once more. When he started again his voice was low and wary. “At first I thought it was a child in a blanket, and I was going to be sick. But it was a bear, a baby bear, recently hung from a tree on a noose over the road, blood dripping from its mouth. Its little paws were caught on the rope like it had struggled to escape before dying. I didn’t like it. No one liked it. Spooked the horses, even the guards. We made a ring of big fires that night and kept them burning ’til dawn. After that first night we drove straight through, sleeping in the wagons, driving in the moonlight.”

  “What have they told you?” Duncan asked. “About what will happen here.”

  “There’s to be a trial. There’s to be a hanging.”

  Duncan fought to keep his voice steady. “Do you need something? A blanket?”

  “At night I burrow down into the coal. Cameron jokes about it, says get used to it since where I am going all there is is burning coals.”

  “Food?”

  “Mostly what I need is a bath,” Lister said with a hoarse croak, his effort at a laugh. “Get me a bath and a bottle and they can do their worst.”

  “I know you did not kill Evering.” Duncan declared.

  Lister took a long time to answer. “If I told ye I did, we would both be shamed and y’er new American clan will be for naught. If I say nay, ye’ll try something foolish.”

  “The history of my days,” Duncan said in a slow voice, “can be traced from one foolish act to another.”

  “And the most foolish would be to throw away y’er new life for a dried-up sack of bones.”

  “I seem to recall a day on a mast,” Duncan replied, “I seem to remember gripping hands. A pledge was made. It works both ways, you know. You brought me back to life. We must both endure the consequences of that bargain.”

  In the silence that followed, Duncan could hear the wheeze of Lister’s leathery lungs. A lamb bleated. A milk cow bellowed. “The Ramsey lass arrived a few hours after we did,” Lister said at last. “I can see the side of the house from here. She stands at an upstairs window and just stares at the forest. She weeps for hours, she’s so scared. Frasier works in the kitchen sometimes, helping with the meals for the men.”

  “That man in leather,” Duncan asked. “Was he here when you arrived?”

  “Aye. Hawkins be his name, I ken. Five more looking just like him walked out of the woods a few hours later, carrying muskets. Axes and heavy knives in their belts. Empty eyes. Hawkins got a keg of rum from the great house. Got drunk in the barn, carousing all night, must have slept on hay in the empty stalls. Cameron announced that Hawkins is now a keeper. Six of the Company left with him this morning, new weapons in their belts. McGregor, plus McPhee. McSween. Ross.”

  As Lister related the other three names something cold seemed to scrape across Duncan’s spine. The body snatchers. Hawkins had taken all the body snatchers. “Did Lord Ramsey speak with them?”

  Lister sighed but did not answer the question. “Surely ye ken why we Scots have survived so many centuries against the English?” he asked. “We know when to retreat. We be masters at knowing when to retreat.”

  “If you always retreat, eventually there is no ground left behind you.”

  Lister muttered a low curse and grew silent again. A soot-covered finger appeared through a gap in the planks, pointing across the river. “Do you understand where we be?” he asked.

  “The frontier.”

  “Do ye ken the old maps that warned how boats fell off the edge of the world if they sailed too far? They had the right of it, they just mixed up land and sea. On the other side of that river ye fall off the world.”

  “Some men go inside and return.”

  “Then they be different men when they return, emptied out by the blackness. Makes me feel like a cowering boy just to watch it. The darkness there is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Worse than the blackest sea in the blackest storm. Ye can read the sea, but ye can’t read that. There is no bottom to it, there is just black behind the black.” There was an unsettling edge of fear in the old sailor’s voice. “It stretches without roads for hundreds of miles. Thousands. There is no soul alive who’s been from one side to the other, who knows where the far side lies. Go into it,” the old sailor warned in a voice that began to frighten Duncan, “and the clan dies.”

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Duncan asked. “Why would you think I would be so foolish as to cross the river?”

  Lister responded by extending a long, bony finger toward a wooded island in the river. “Find Frasier. Go meet Professor Evering. Even the dead are not safe over there.”

  Duncan looked back, knowing he could not have heard correctly. “Who?”

  “The real Professor Evering. He came out of the western forest yesterday.”

  Chapter Seven

  There be old women in Scotland who would know how to send it back,” the young keeper said as he gestured Duncan toward the island. Frasier had hatred in his eyes when Duncan approached him in the kitchen garden beside the house, but something seemed to compel him to share the thing he had discovered. “We should have buried him proper, at sea. It was wrong to let him linger, force him to cross the sea twice without touching land.” He rose from the upturned earth, his eyes still sullen and resentful, and motioned Duncan to join him at the riverbank.

  Pausing across from the island, Frasier stepped into the water up to his knees. He did not speak, though his lips seemed to be moving in a silent prayer. The fear in his eyes told Duncan he meant to go no farther. Even from a hundred feet away, his hand shook when he pointed toward a tall hemlock at the south end of the island.

  Duncan chided himself for not bringing a shovel, an ax, something from the forge for a weapon, then retrieved a short limb from the ground and entered the water. He waded slowly until the water was up to his thighs, remembering Lister’s intense fear and his warning never to venture to the far side of the river, where the black forest began. The island was thick with small alders, and Duncan walked with his club upraised, recoiling as a long-beaked bird burst from some reeds, then moving warily toward the small knoll. At last he reached the clearing around the tall hemlock, and froze. A demon stood in front of the tree, staring at him.

  The left half of its hideous head was relatively benign, but the right was twisted and bent so that the haunting smile of the left turned into a grotesque open frown, showing bright white teeth below a six-inch misshapen nose.

  He raised his club and ventured closer. The demon wore a black sleeveless waistcoat, out of which arms made of sticks extended. In the twigs of one hand hung a gold watch, its chain linked through a buttonhole to a familiar gold fob, in the shape of a tiny book. In the other twig hand was the skull of a small bird; a paper had been rolled through its eyes. Around the thing’s shoulder hung the skin of a snake.

  “One of the scullery maids said I’d find berries over here,” came a thin, fearful voice behind him. “I brought a basket, had nearly backed up to the thing before I saw it. It’s Evering. His watch, his fob, his waistcoat.”

  Duncan fought to
keep his voice steady. “You and I both know, Frasier, that his body was sent back to England.”

  “It’s what Evering became, his punishment for defying something that lives in the forest.” Frasier’s matter-of-fact tone was as unsettling as the gruesome thing in front of Duncan. “It drew out his spirit from the ship and withered it and sent it back to watch.”

  It’s what Evering became, according to Frasier, for taking the path that Duncan was now on. “Watch what?” he asked, taking a step toward the thing.

  “Us. The town. . God’s life!” Frasier cried as Duncan advanced toward the tree. “Don’t touch it!”

  Instead of touching the thing, Duncan stepped to the side, studying it. The head, he saw, was a mask, expertly carved of wood and stained dark red, with horsehair fastened to the top. The teeth in the sinister mouth were made of bits of shell. It had been hung with a leather strap on a limb that jutted from the tree, with the waistcoat and arms braced in a crosspiece tied with vines.

  He pried open the pockets with a twig, finding nothing. This was Evering’s good waistcoat, the one stolen along with his watch from his cabin. Directly below the effigy was a small pile of ashes. He knelt and stirred them. Tobacco had been burned.

  “Who have you told?” he asked.

  “No one. Lister, since he can tell no one. Lister understands these things. We’re all going to end up like this.”

  Duncan turned to him, for a moment as frightened by Frasier as by the effigy.

  “We should have known,” Frasier added, “after what happened to that bear.”

  But as little as Duncan understood about the New World, of one thing he was certain. Whoever had made the effigy was not one who killed bears. He looked back up at the twisted countenance. What had happened here was like the ritual on the ship-part European, part not. Part Indian, he forced himself to admit. A new realization struck him as he gazed at the twisted mouth. He was looking at Old Crooked Face. Adam had gone to Old Crooked Face, and so, apparently, had Evering. With trembling fingers, he reached for the roll of paper in the bird skull and was about to read it when the cries began-the terrified screams of a child.

  He burst out of the brush at the edge of the island to see Virginia standing on the bank fifty yards upstream. By the time he reached her, the screams had become silent, her jaw moving up and down, her face white as a sheet, her eyes wild with terror. Caught in the rocks midstream were bodies, mutilated bodies that had clearly been in the water several days. Suddenly Crispin was there, gathering the girl into his arms, running toward the house with her as Cameron began directing men into the water.

  “Settlers, drifted down from the north,” the keeper said as the first corpse was pulled ashore, a man without hands, without eyes, without a scalp.

  Duncan realized he was still clutching the paper from the bird skull. It was a page torn from a Bible, the same size that Evering had carried. It was from Revelations. Go, Duncan read, and pour out the seven bowls of God’s wrath on the earth.

  Wigs. Wigs were Ramsey’s lifeline on a stormy sea.

  When Duncan found Crispin at the rear of the summer kitchen, the butler was addressing what at a quick glance might have appeared to be a group of seated gentlemen. On a trestle-and-plank table were half a dozen hairpieces supported on rounded, wooden pedestals specially designed to store them. Crispin was extracting a skillet of buckles, cylinders of baked red clay, from the oven built into the wall, which with skillful and patient wrapping would restore the drooping curls.

  A gentleman of modest means might have but one wig which, depending on whether it was human, goat, horse, or calf in origin, could represent a significant investment. But the Ramsey head was versatile, and wealthy to the point of opulence. An old-fashioned periwig, a grizzle wig, a campaign wig, a ramillies-the odd-looking bob wig made popular by Dr. Johnson-and even an informal bag wig were all on the table, marking Ramsey’s connection to the brocaded, lavender-scented courtesans of his habitat across the ocean.

  From the shadows Duncan watched his new friend, his hands coated with powder, clad in a starched white shirt buttoned too tightly at his neck under a sleeveless brown waistcoat. He had never seen Crispin in the performance of his household duties, and the sight made Duncan so uncomfortable he was about to retreat, when Crispin spoke to him.

  “These hairpieces redeemed us,” the big man reported with a glance toward Duncan. “Reverend Arnold was complaining about our abrupt departure from the city when Mr. Ramsey silenced him and announced that he had been about to send for me, because his curls were in such disarray.” A kitchen maid appeared from inside the building, wiping soot from her hands. As she began arranging the buckles in front of the periwig, a bell sounded from the kitchen door. A look of relief shot across Crispin’s features. He straightened and gestured Duncan toward the house. “Tea,” was all he said.

  “She made it safely here,” Duncan observed as they walked toward the house.

  “The captain rode hard all that first day,” Crispin replied. “She kept always ahead of him, so he had never a glimpse of her. He kept riding west, toward Edentown, thinking she was still in front. But then she came trotting up behind him, not far from here, her horse worn to a shadow. Won’t breathe a word about where she had been.”

  They still had no answer to the questions that had hovered over them, unspoken but conspicuous, during their journey together. Had Sarah been driven by horror at the old Indian’s murder or by fear of the report of the attack in the harbor? Or had it been something else she had seen in Jacob’s death, something that Duncan had been blind to?

  Crispin led Duncan into the library in the northeast corner of the great stone house, where windows looked to the west and north. Lord Ramsey, sitting in a high-backed Windsor chair with a large tray constructed into the right arm, acknowledged him with a nod but continued reading the book perched on the tray. Behind him were shelves containing perhaps five dozen books and a large number of periodicals. Against the wall to the right was a heavy secretary desk of cherry wood, its hinged top closed. An elegant, engraved fowling piece hung on the fireplace mantel. On the north wall by the window hung a large drawing, a map of a town and the river along its edge, with buildings drawn in great detail, each labeled in an ornate hand. Another map, of the New York colony, hung on the adjacent wall, bearing notes in several hands. Several muskets leaned in one corner, beside a rack containing a dozen heavy swords and two old-style metal breastplates. The room had the air of another military office.

  Studying the compound through the window, Duncan compared it to the map. Though it was labeled Palace of Husbandry, the barn was located as shown on the map, as were the summer kitchen, the forge, the spinning shed, and all the other existing structures, though the map held three times the number of buildings that currently stood outside, including a church, a courthouse, and a jail. But the house was different. The house they stood in was much smaller than the three-winged mansion on the map.

  When Duncan turned, Reverend Arnold was standing by the window, staring toward a plot of land beyond the barn, where whitewashed stakes outlined a broad rectangle. Duncan glanced at the map again. It was the site of the yet-unbuilt church.

  “The vicar has informed me of your good service on the ship. You brought my daughter back from the dead.” Ramsey seemed to struggle to keep emotion out of his voice, and Duncan understood why he had chosen not to have the conversation in public upon his arrival. “She is so much like her mother. Uncannily like her mother. I will not forget how well you performed that day. You shall be repaid.” He stepped to a silver tray on a low table by the window and poured a cup of tea from a delicate porcelain pot painted with violets, handing it to Duncan.

  Ramsey seemed to think that Duncan had saved Sarah for him, that in leaping into the black, churning sea, he had merely been performing his duty to his patron. “Miss Ramsey and I were not meant for the sea that day,” he ventured.

  “Truly God has marked her,” Ramsey said, regaining the poi
se in his voice. “The first lady of Edentown will be needed for many tasks. The church choir must be organized, a flag for the courthouse designed and sewn. Naming of babies. The kitchens. The cellars. The gardens. The seasonal festivals. All the families will look to her. There are things only a Ramsey woman can do.” In his mind, Duncan realized, Ramsey was running not the town that existed outside but the one in the drawing. His gaze drifted back to the map. The current house wasn’t wrong, he saw now, it was merely the base. The wings still had to be constructed, on either side. The only thing not on the map was the palisade wall being built along the northern woods.

  “Miss Ramsey seemed most anxious for her reunion,” Duncan observed. He glanced out the window toward the little island. Though he could not see it, he knew the Evering effigy was staring right at the house. Before he had left the hemlock, he had paced around the tree and had found small, wrapped bundles of fur and a strange arrangement of deer antlers, more than a dozen of them, tied with vines in a circle. Now that his fear had subsided, he realized they could have been offerings, that perhaps in the world of those who had made it, the effigy wasn’t meant to frighten but to serve as a shrine.

  “She was sorely missed. She is a builder of empire.”

  Duncan sipped his tea, replaying the words in his mind. Just as Ramsey spoke of the Edentown in his mind, not the muddy reality outside his door, the patron seemed to be speaking of a different Sarah. “Should she not take time to recover from her illness before she embarks on carving up continents?”

  “Fortunately,” Arnold interrupted, “she is in better health than we’ve seen in a year. Destiny waits for no one.”

  Ramsey stepped to the window and surveyed his budding empire. “But first we must eliminate all shadows from our midst.”

  Duncan’s belly tightened as Ramsey fixed him with a meaningful gaze.

  “Lord Ramsey desires your report,” Reverend Arnold explained. “The record must be completed. The first case for Edentown’s magistrate must present an intellectual and moral pillar, a pristine example of logic and science.”