Half an hour later they stood below the glistening spire of Christ Church, splashing their faces with water from a stone trough. Twice Duncan stopped passersby to inquire of Mr. Townsend, receiving only frowns for his trouble. Then he spied a man in a black robe weeding headstones in the small cemetery.
"Excuse me, father," Duncan began, then saw the wince on the man's face and corrected himself. "Reverend. We are travelers seeking a family named Townsend."
"I could think of a dozen who answer to that name," the pastor replied in a tentative voice.
"Our man is a surveyor. In the western country last year."
"Francis Townsend?" The pastor's face darkened. "A tragedy, that." He studied Duncan, as if suddenly suspicious. "See for yourself," he said and pointed up the street. "Three blocks up, one toward the west."
A squad of soldiers marched by as they proceeded up the street. A man in dark clothes carrying a long staff walked past them, a constable on his rounds. Reaching the intersection, they surveyed the buildings. "The Townsend residence?" Conawago inquired of an elderly woman with a cane, who used it to point before hurrying on.
They looked in confusion to where she had indicated. It was the ruins of a house, burned nearly to the ground. The few scorched timbers and mortared stones that remained were weathered, weeds growing among them. The fire had been months ago.
Conawago nodded to a tavern across the way, where they sank gratefully into chairs at a table by the front window.
"That was the Townsend place?" Duncan asked when the proprietor brought them two mugs of strong cider.
"Aye. A damned shame."
"Did the family suffer injuries?"
"Only Townsend and his maiden sister lived there, neither hurt. A sad case, always down on his luck. An educated man, you know, but forever restless. Off in the wilds and such. Trapping, prospecting, trying to get this book on birds or that on animal husbandry commissioned."
When they ordered a second round the proprietor brought them a length of dried sausage on a board with a knife. Seating himself, he cut several slices, taking one before pushing the plank toward his customers. "'Twas a night no one will soon forget. I still have nightmares. The heathen beast hallooing, the new fire brigade scrambling, the neighborhood carrying away their belongings in panic, certain the whole block would perish."
"Heathen?" Duncan asked, dreading the answer.
"Aye. The real thing." The barman twisted his face as he stared at the ruins. "Though something of playacting about it, too, it seems when I think on it. Theatrical if ye understand me."
"I'm not sure we do," Conawago said, slowly chewing on a piece of the tough, spicy meat.
"There were two of them. Indians, I mean. Why the proprietor lets them come and go in the city is beyond me. Because of our brotherly love, is why," he answered himself in a bitter tone.
"The fire?" Duncan prodded.
"The two knocked on his door in the afternoon, wearing blankets over their shoulders as if to conceal their identity. They wanted something of Townsend's, but he wouldn't admit them. He shouted from the door, something about it being locked in his desk and would remain there. Then that evening one returns. He starts stripping down to a loincloth under the corner lantern," he said, indicating the whale oil streetlight, "then daubs on paint. On his face, on his arms, on his chest, all the while chanting some gibberish. Right out of the tales you read about the savage raiders. I sent my boy for the constable. Then I see him coolly light a little torch from the lantern and start igniting little piles of kindling and branches he had stacked against the house. He opens the door and yells out for those inside to leave as if planning to ambush them on their way out, and starts prancing by the fires, making an unholy racket, calling down his war gods, they say."
"Did he? Ambush them?"
"It was damned curious. When they appeared, he quieted and just gestured them along to the street before starting his dance again. By the time the fire company arrived there wasn't much to do but water down the house next door. All the while that heathen stayed, speaking in his devilish tongue."
"They arrested him?"
"Most wanted to lynch him on the spot. But that is not the way of the Quakers who run this town. Words have to be spoken first to make things right. They trussed him up like a wild bull and held a proper trial the next week. He never resisted, never argued."
"And?"
"We hanged him, of course. Most of the town turned out. He was one of those whose neck didn't snap. He just hung there and twisted, slowly strangling."
Conawago buried his head in his hands. Duncan stared into his cup. "Did he speak in the end?"
"Nary a word. Except when he climbed the scaffold he called out, not in protest, just shouted toward the sky. One of the farmers who spoke a little heathen said he was calling his name to the spirits, to let them know he was on his way."
Duncan and Conawago exchanged a tormented glance. They needed no further explanation. It was clear that Skanawati's brother had not understood what Townsend had drawn on his map. That a white man would capture a sacred place on paper would have been unimaginable. Yet it had happened, and to prevent Skanawati from taking suicidal action he had taken his own, donning his war paint and correcting his unforgivable mistake, burning down the house to be sure the map was destroyed.
"What happened to this Townsend afterward?" Conawago ventured.
"Like I said, a restless soul. A week after the fire he came in and declared he had a new commission as a surveyor. There was new coin in his pocket. He said he would be soon gone and wanted to pay advance board for his sister to sup here twice a week, for three months, though that ran out months ago. Never saw him again. Dead in the wilderness, people say. Without his support, his sister's had to take up household service."
"Surely becoming a surveyor requires an apprenticeship," Duncan observed.
"This colony suffers from land fever. Private companies being formed every day to acquire land, usually in competition with each other. All the trained surveyors have their hands full with the local conveyancing. The companies, what they need is gross work, one might say. More like rough mapmaking, and most of that in secret. The more definite a claim the more likely it is for the courts to uphold it. Hell, at this point I think anyone who can read and write and has the spine to face the Indians can find a commission."
"Where does one go to hire such a surveyor?" Duncan asked. "Do they have a hall?"
"Lord boy, this is America. We have no guild halls." He grinned as he rose from his seat. "But we have taverns. Down near the river, below Walnut Street, that's where they go. The Broken Jug, mostly, after the supper hour."
Duncan pulled out one of the clock gears from his pouch and spun it between his fingers. "Meanwhile we seek a clockmaker."
"Which one? This be Philadelphia. Most American clocks are made here. You could spend a day and not visit all their shops."
"The nearest then," Duncan pressed.
A quarter hour later they stood by the worktable of a middleaged bespectacled man leaning over a small vise, assisted by a candle mounted with a lens that collected the light onto the gear he worked on. He had assessed them with a quick glance when they stepped into his shop, apparently concluding they were not potential customers, so he kept them waiting as he worked with a tiny file.
Finally he looked up with a barely tolerant expression that softened only when Duncan produced one of the gears and spun it like a top on his bench.
The man wiped his hand on his leather apron, snatched up the gear, and studied it a moment before passing it back. "Your complaint is not with me," he declared.
"I beg your pardon?" Conawago asked. His refined tone caused the clockmaker to hesitate.
The man frowned. "When someone appears with a piece taken from a gear works, it is to complain. They think because they have dropped the clock or suffered it to travel over rutted roads that it is the maker's fault when it fails to respond."
"How can you be so c
ertain it is not your work?" Duncan wanted to know. He extended one of the other gears, a pinion, and displayed it on his palm.
"I import most of my gears from England. Yours is meant for a farmer's clock, a crude but cheap machine. Although that one never saw the inside of a case."
"How can you know that?"
The craftsman sighed, extended his palm for the gear, then lifted an instrument like a tiny awl to point to an imperfection in the gear teeth, a place where whoever filed it had slipped, causing an irregular spacing. "An incompetent apprentice," the clockmaker groused.
"And how many incompetent apprentices are there in Philadelphia?" Duncan asked.
The clockmaker snorted. "In those workrooms making mantel instruments for the low trade? Probably one in every shop."
"Why mantel clocks?"
"The pendulum meant for this gear is nine inches long." The man saw the confusion on Duncan's face and gestured for Duncan to hand over the second gear in his palm. He held up the small one. "The pinion that fits into the wheel has six teeth-" here he set the larger gear against the pinion, meshing the teeth. "The large wheel has seventy-two teeth. That is a combination for the short, fast pendulum of a mantel clock." The man gazed at his candle a moment. "Which gives you perhaps three or four likely candidates, all in the cheaper shops along the waterfront, below Walnut."
"Near the Broken Jug?" Duncan ventured.
"All within a short walk of the old jug," the clockmaker confirmed, then cocked his head in confusion at Conawago. As they stepped out onto the cobbled street the man was still staring at the miniature cairn of gears Conawago had made on his table, topped with a yellow feather.
They had eliminated one of the likely clock shops and were approaching another when an urchin ran past, calling out details of a new hanging as he hawked a broadside. Shuddering, Duncan saw his friend staring at a large nondescript brick building on the river side of the street. It appeared to have been built as a ship chandler's storehouse, though there were no ships' masters conducting business, no sailors milling about, no heavy wagons, only a single stylish carriage parked near its door.
Without a word Conawago swiftly crossed the street and tried the front door, then began pounding on it when he found it locked. Duncan glanced at the passersby, already casting suspicious glances, then tried to pull his friend away. Instead Conawago set his face against a window and peered inside.
"You forget there are constables!" Duncan warned. They had noted a half dozen of the large men with staffs since leaving the first clockmaker. "If they see you looking into a building they will surely question you!"
Conawago paused, then let Duncan pull him away, across the street in the direction of the next clock shop. But he would not proceed without first stopping to study the two-story building as if interested in its construction. Duncan tried in vain to make sense of his strange actions. Surveying the structure himself, he noticed the strange metal spikes mounted along the roof, the cradles on the sidewalls once used for holding heavy rope, the winch under the eaves for loading cargo through an upper hatch. Conawago touched his arm and pointed to the main entrance of the building.
The frame of the main entrance had been decorated with ornate, abstract patterns of brick after the Dutch fashion, but the pattern on the lintel over the frame suddenly congealed. With purple and white paint someone had carefully depicted figures from a wampum belt, the stick figures of straight Indians and triangular Europeans holding hands in friendship. A peace belt.
As they gazed at the surprising pattern a brilliant flash erupted through the window of the upper floor, as if gunpowder had been ignited. But there was no explosion, only a long moan of pain, loud enough to be heard through the window glass. Duncan grabbed Conawago by the arm and pulled him down the street toward a line of clock shops.
The fifth shop they visited was a rundown establishment nearly in the shadow of the Broken Jug tavern. As they stepped toward the entry Duncan paused to study an establishment across the street. Coppersmith, its sign proclaimed, and at the rear was a furnace building for melting the metal, a building where small lumps of molten copper might be found.
Inside the shop, two young men sat at a table indolently working pieces of walnut with small planes, surrounded by chips of wood and several incomplete cabinets for mantel clocks. The older of the pair looked up with a sleepy expression.
"He's out for refreshment," he declared. "Three doors down, at the jug."
"I have a problem," Duncan said, producing the defective gear.
The apprentice examined the gear only when Duncan pushed it nearly under his nose, then glanced nervously toward the dimly lit room at the rear of the building. "Surely you don't mean to make your own repair," he said with a sneer. "We'll need the entire works."
"The only thing wrong is this gear that was badly cut," Duncan said in a dissatisfied manner. He extended it, pointing to the flaw. All traces of the youth's confident air melted away. He glanced at his companion, who leaned over his work without looking up, and flushed with color. "In the other shops," he complained, "they get special lanterns, even lenses, and fine tools like jewelers use."
Duncan stared at him expectantly.
"He'll have my hide if I take a gear from his good stock."
"Tell me this," Duncan tried. "Do you trade with Shamokin?"
"What, sell clocks to the damned heathens? Not bloody likely." He looked out the window toward the tavern, then watched Conawago for a moment with an uneasy expression. "I can get a new one," he offered. "Just between us, right?"
Duncan's own gaze lingered on the tavern. "How often do you bring your drinking companions back here?"
The silent youth working the wood sprouted a narrow smile.
"It's not allowed."
"But sometimes your master leaves town," Duncan suggested.
"I'll get a new one," the apprentice repeated, and he disappeared into his master's work chamber.
Duncan silently accepted the new gear from the sullen youth and was about to retreat when Conawago stepped to the table. "That old brick warehouse down the street," he said. "Who occupies it?"
"A lunatic, most say. His calling card says natural philosopher. More like Lucifer, for all his deviling with nature."
A door at the rear of the building suddenly opened and shut. The boy shot up from the table, pushing Duncan and Conawago to the door. "Those who ask too many questions get called to the constable," he warned in parting.
They walked quickly down the street, casting strangely guilty glances back at the shop, drifting with the flow of foot traffic toward a little square where a freestanding plank wall held handbills, newspapers, and notices. Duncan was gazing absently at the bill board, trying to fathom what the Library Company advertised on one sheet might be, when Conawago indicated a recently posted bill at the end of the wall. Thirty pounds sterling, it declared in large type, for the capture of a runaway. Duncan's mouth went bone dry as he read the name. Duncan McCallum, it stated, Scotsman, followed by an exact description of him and instructions to contact Ramsey House. Considered violent, the poster concluded, Keep under Restraint.
As the sun was setting they sat in the corner of the Broken jug picking slowly at miserly portions of cold shepherd's pie, one eye on the stout German proprietor, whose cooperation had been purchased with one of their last coins. He had advised them not to divulge the tract to be surveyed if they were looking to hire someone, only the length of the assignment and the fee to be paid. Retaining a surveyor in Philadelphia had apparently become an affair of intrigue. "If it's too far west," the tavernkeeper added, "they may be asking for guards as well."
The trickle of customers grew into a steady stream as the working day ended. Men with hands stained with ink from printing presses took a corner table with a pitcher of ale. Two customers shook wood shavings out of their hair as they entered, speaking of a shipment of mahogany from the Indies. Duncan found himself filled with a strange longing. It was another world these Philadelph
ians lived in, a world without murders and bounties and hands nailed to trees.
After an hour, during a lull in the evening's business, the proprietor paused to sit with them.
"What if it is Indian country?" Conawago asked abruptly, in his earnest English voice.
The man stared at Conawago intensely, leaning forward as if only now noticing his customer's bronze skin. "Don't advertise it. There's still a war on."
"We heard of a Mr. Townsend."
"Gone these many months. Some say he journeyed to the Carolinas. But he ain't sent for his sister."
"For whom was his last commission?" Duncan inquired.
"Like I said, the land companies are secretive. It's all to do with competition."
"How long after the burning of his house did he go?"
"Stayed around for the hanging of the heathen what done it. Too many drunken savages allowed on the streets, if ye ask me."
"Were you there?" Duncan asked. "At the hanging?"
The proprietor nodded, seeming to take pleasure in the turn of conversation. "A great crowd turned out. They started gathering at dawn for the best seats, even with hours to wait. I sold two barrels' worth and cursed myself for not bringing two more."
Duncan stared at the man, trying to control his emotion. "You sold ale at a hanging?"
Their host stood and wiped the table with a rag. "A city tradition. Hangings be as good as a king's holiday. Stalls with ale and little cakes. Boys blowing pennywhistles. Eggs by the dozen."
"Eggs?" Duncan asked.
"To throw, ye fool. Funny thing, when it started the only one to try to stop it was Townsend himself. He got as many yolks on him as the damned savage. Out of his mind over the loss of his home, folks said."
Over the next hour the tavern nearly filled. Duncan studied each newcomer, increasingly certain he had found the place where the dead surveyors had been hired, though not sure if he was any closer to knowing who had hired them. Several men came in and sat alone, nursing tankards of ale, some reading news journals. One played with a writing lead on his tabletop. Several others congregated at the opposite side, aiming small throwing knives at splintered planks painted with bears and wildcats, two men in tricorns performed a balancing act with a ball on the side of their feet, passing it to each other as they hopped around the tables.
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