Eye of the Raven amoca-2

by Eliot Pattison

  Ramsey turned on the old Nipmuc now, striking him with an open hand on the jaw, shoving him so hard that Conawago tripped and fell to the ground. Duncan watched as two, then four of the Iroquois braves leapt from their blankets, reaching for their war clubs. The militia soldiers uneasily closed in front of Ramsey, who gestured one of the street bullies toward Duncan. The man pulled a set of manacles from his belt.

  "'Tis an ungodly clamor for the time of night," boomed a voice from behind them. "Ye'll have the poor inhabitants of the city thinking the Hurons have attacked." Sergeant McGregor was stepping out of the kitchen, six of his kilted men at his heels.

  "We are finished here," Ramsey spat. "I am taking my property and leaving."

  "Ye are leaving, aye," McGregor declared as he reached the circle of men. "I am charged with maintaining order and protecting the treaty delegation," he added.

  "You have no authority over me!" Ramsey spat. "McCallum belongs to me! Do not interfere!"

  "I have authority, y'er lordship, over anything that disturbs the delegations." Mockery was thick in the Scot's voice.

  Ramsey turned on the burly sergeant. "You Highland scum! We should have finished you off in the last uprising!"

  "Ye should have tried," McGregor shot back in a hot whisper.

  "I don't know what fool decided to put you kilted apes in uniform!"

  "That particular fool, y'er honor, would be the king."

  Even in the dim light of the torches Duncan could see Ramsey's face flush. "This mongrel is mine!" he insisted. "I have warrants."

  "I be not bound by warrants, y'er worship," McGregor replied in a level voice. "Only the orders of my general."

  Ramsey's eyes flared. Grabbing the manacles, he viciously slapped them across Duncan's cheek, then opened one of the wrist restraints to place on Duncan. The sword that suddenly pressed down on the chains seemed to materialize from thin air. "If ye wish to test a Scottish blade against y'er Philadelphia bulls," McGregor growled, "I'm y'er man." The militia soldiers nervously tightened the grips on their muskets. The rest of McGregor's squad pressed close, making sure the muskets would be of little use.

  Ramsey dropped the chains and retreated a step. "You are already my prisoner, McCallum," he reminded Duncan. "Take a step out of your savages' refuge and you are mine!" He grabbed one of the militiamen, shoved him toward the kitchen door, and followed him down the path.

  Duncan watched Ramsey disappear into the house, then touched his cheek. Blood was dripping down his jaw, onto the chains below.

  "You must flee, Duncan!" Conawago warned. "Now. He will have his men surrounding this place soon."

  "To where?"

  Conawago did not answer, just quickly walked to the little door in the brick wall, pushed back the bolt, and opened it. Marston stepped inside with a muffled lantern and nervously gestured for Duncan. "Our electrical friend says he has found us another sanctuary," Conawago announced.

  Ramsey's men could be seen organizing themselves on the corner near the front gate as Marston, Duncan, and Conawago darted through the shadows. Duncan lost track of where they were, was only vaguely aware that they moved away in a wide curve from the lamps of Market Street for several minutes then back toward them. At last Marston led them to the back door of a house, fumbled with a key, then opened the door.

  The first-floor windows of the house were cleverly rigged with dark canvas mounted on pins and pulleys, which Marston now lowered like sails to block out the glass before opening the screen on his lantern. "The owner is away," he announced. "He would not object to you borrowing the house. In fact he is certain to be delighted when I tell him the circumstances."

  It was a simple, comfortable dwelling, its only trappings of luxury the scores of books in the front room. Not just a library, Duncan saw, as Marston lit more candles. Large Leyden jars stood in ranks along a table by one wall. Another table was cluttered with an odd assortment that included strange cast-iron shapes, stuffed birds, a globe, disassembled spectacles, two clocks, lenses, a dead dragonfly, and a wooden tray of lead type.

  "You must not attract attention," Marston warned. "Beds are on the second floor, but no lights near the windows."

  As they followed him up the stairway Duncan paused and looked at a strange leather hat hanging by the front door, shaped like a helmet but with a broad visor. "From the fire company," Marston said absently and gestured him on.

  Conawago was next to pause, studying a strange device on the stairway wall. Two metal strips emerged from the ceiling and entered a wooden box, at the bottom of which was a small brass bell.

  "We invented this detector several years ago. When there is a charge collecting in the atmosphere before a storm it will ring. His is likely the first in the world, though I have been trying to duplicate it in my attic."

  "His?" Conawago asked, then his eyes lit with recognition, and he grinned at Duncan.

  "As I said, he is in London as agent for the provincial government these three years past. What family is left has gone on a visit to Boston for several months. He asked me to watch things, lets me borrow such instruments as I may need."

  Duncan's own eyes went round with awe. Conawago stared at the bell device with boyish wonder. Marston was hiding them in the home of Benjamin Franklin.

  They were at a front-facing bedroom, confirming that the street outside was quiet, when Duncan recalled the books downstairs. "Is the library available to you as well, Marston?"

  "Naturally. And to many of his friends. Dr. Franklin is responsible for the formation of a public lending library not ten minutes from here. He believes it is the duty of each citizen to continually improve himself."

  "Mathematical books? Books on codes in particular?"

  "Of course! The code on the trees!" Marston darted for the stairs, leaving Duncan and Conawago to find their way in the dark.

  Franklin's peculiar organization of his books at first mystified Duncan, but Marston soon located a row of mathematical treatises on a top shelf, consisting largely of the works of Euclid, Descartes, and Leibnitz, along with a deposition on the variations in units of measurement in half a dozen European countries. But nothing on codes or cyphers.

  "I am not sure he would classify the subject with mathematics," Marston said pensively. "But where. .?" he asked himself as he surveyed the shelves again. They searched through the books on religion, for Franklin believed early religious tracts contained hidden cyphers, then began a systematic search of every shelf. It was more than a quarter hour before Conawago uttered an exclamation of discovery.

  "With the books on the printing press and typesetting," he explained, and he pulled out a slender volume entitled Cyphers of the Ancients. It was, to their chagrin, almost entirely about the Greek square, the numeric grid employed by Athenian battle commanders, and the Greek scytale used by the Spartans. Not a word about the pigpen cypher.

  "Is there nothing else?" Duncan asked in disappointment.

  Marston leaned over the shelf. "Nothing," he announced, then probed an empty space and extracted a slip of paper. "The Cryptographer's Manual," he read with new excitement. "On loan. I can just retrieve it from-" his words choked away. "It says," he announced, "that the book is at Lord Ramsey's!"

  Duncan stared at the slip in disbelief. He felt the last of his hope drifting away.

  "Can it truly be a coincidence?" Conawago asked after a forlorn silence.

  "He is known for his great collection of books," Marston offered.

  "The rot of the Ramsey house spreads to everything it touches," Duncan said grimly. Surely, he prayed, it had not come to this, surely after all he and the tribes had endured, the path of his own troubles with Ramsey had not converged with those of the murders. But in his heart Duncan realized that from the first moment he had heard Ramsey's name in Pennsylvania, something inside him had sensed the shadow of the treacherous lord, like some wraith stalking him.

  "Evil finds its own," Conawago said heavily.

  Duncan offered a reluctant nod
of agreement. Ramsey viewed himself as above the law, in reality was above the law, and though he was one of the richest men in the colonies, his real currencies were deception and secret violence. He gazed at his old friend and considered what he had said. Conawago was pointing out there were others involved. Ramsey himself would never be touched by the law, but those who did his bidding could be stopped.

  Duncan looked at the slip of paper with Ramsey's name on it. "Surely this is not the only such book in Philadelphia."

  "I will make inquiries at the Library Company," Marston offered, "but it appears to be a rare volume published many years ago. Dr. Franklin often ordered single copies of works from a bookseller in London."

  "Then someone must get into Lord Ramsey's library," Duncan concluded.

  Marston looked startled. "Not any of us, surely. I am not of sufficient social rank to be admitted to that inner sanctum."

  Duncan paced around the room, along the ranks of books and the table of Dr. Franklin's collections. His gaze lingered on an ornately carved box beside several ancient stone ax heads. "My pack," he said to Conawago. "You must retrieve it. If it falls into the wrong hands they will try to use that box of Townsend's with the turtle scratched on it to link Skanawati to his killing. Give it to Old Belt for safekeeping." He kept gazing at Franklin's little box as he spoke. "There is," he suggested in a contemplative voice, "a witness of sorts to what happened at the first murder."

  "Ohio George is dead." Conawago was puzzled. "And now Red Hand."

  "Burke sent Townsend into the wilderness, promised to publish his book, an offer more valuable than currency to a man like Townsend. So Townsend went to Shamokin, and out onto the Warriors Path because he trusted the Iroquois. Skanawati the elder was a warrior but no cold-blooded murderer. When he killed, he killed enemies of his tribe. He was deceived. If we understand that deception we may understand who was the deceiver."

  "The only ones we know are dead," Marston pointed out again.

  "The ones whose faces we know, yes. But there was at least one more."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because of the code carved on the trees. Townsend did not carve it as a sign of his own murder. Nor did any Indian. It was done by a European. One familiar with a code book brought to Philadelphia by Dr. Franklin. And there is a witness to what was done at that first tree, where Townsend died. He is locked in the prison not half a mile from here."

  "The plunge in the river has left you daft," Conawago protested. "The Skanawati we know was not the Skanawati who killed Townsend."

  "The plunge in the river reminded me of the Susquehanna. Stone Blossom said there is an essence passed from one Skanawati to the next. You have taught me that among the tribes the lives of spirits and the lives of men are intertwined." Duncan looked up at Marston. "I must see him."

  His two companions stared at him as if Duncan had indeed lost his senses.

  "And what?" Marston asked, "you will go throw pebbles at his cell window? The moment you are seen you will be arrested. You do not want to experience our jails despite the Quakers' best efforts."

  Duncan looked at the scientist with new interest. "The Quakers?"

  "The Quakers have a society for the improvement of prison conditions, the Benevolent Society, they call it. They have a notion that prisoners can be reformed, not just punished, that their bad habits can be healed like a disease. They have been of great help in relieving the squalor, even of some help to me."

  Duncan weighed Marston's words a moment, then leaned forward. "Are you saying you have a connection to the prison?"

  "They allow me to treat some prisoners, yes. They have even set up a treatment room in an empty cell."

  "And how often do you do so?" Duncan could see the protest already rising on Conawago's face as Marston pondered his question. Duncan did not wait for an answer. "You are going to the prison tomorrow, and with a new assistant. I must see Skanawati."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The stench hit Duncan the moment he stepped through the heavy timber gate of the Walnut Street prison. The high brick walls of the foreyard gave little ventilation for the privies that lined one wall. For a moment he thought the men that sat along the other walls had been overpowered by the smell, then he saw that the debility on most of their faces was not physical. He had spent months in a king's prison, then a prison ship, and knew the great killer was no one disease but rather despair.

  Marston paused to open a vial from which he poured vinegar onto his handkerchief before clamping it to his nose. Duncan, declining the offer of the vial, tightened his grip on the box he was carrying for the scientist and followed him into the building.

  The Benevolent Society had cleaned out a corner cell on the top floor for Marston's sessions, and its high barred windows provided a modicum of air and light. The jailer, responsible for the entire institution, was a devout Quaker who, though he cast wary glances at the box Duncan carried, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Society. He greeted Marston courteously and gestured them toward a turnkey who silently escorted them upstairs. Though the prison was much more noisy than those Duncan had known-where outbursts were met with clubs and cudgels-as the prisoners saw Marston approach they grew silent.

  "Sorcerer!" one muttered through the barred hatch of his heavy door. The moment another saw the scientist he began gasping in a fit of asthma.

  Marston quickly unpacked the box Duncan had been carrying onto a table beside a smaller electrical machine the Society allowed him to keep in the cell. He showed his new assistant first how to line up the Leyden jars they had brought with others already there, the workings of the harness that suspended certain prisoners from the ceiling for treatment, then how to steadily turn the wheel that spun the glass ball on the machine. By the time Marston proclaimed he was ready the turnkey had the first patient at the door, an older man with a paralyzed arm. The man silently acquiesced as Marston gestured him to the wooden armchair by the machine, did not protest when the scientist tied the useless arm to the chair then carefully separated the fingers with small rolls of linen between each. Marston placed the hand close to the glass ball and nodded for Duncan to begin rotating the wheel that spun the ball. Moments later a stream of blue flame arced to the nearest finger.

  The prisoner watched with an earnest fascination and did not react even as Marston, wearing a leather glove, moved another, then another fingertip to capture the electrical fluid.

  "From the machine into your body, always from the machine," Marston murmured quietly to his patient as he worked.

  "I think I felt something that time, doctor!" the prisoner exclaimed as he lifted his arm from the chair when Marston released him.

  Marston nodded somewhat distractedly as he adjusted his device. "From the machine," he said again, as if it was a habitual refrain accompanying the treatment.

  "From the machine?" Duncan asked as the prisoner left the cell. "But of course it is from the machine."

  Marston looked up with a self-conscious glance. "There have been misunderstandings, about whether this work is for science or for the devil."

  Duncan considered the words as he helped Marston adjust the jars. "Are you saying you have been accused of taking something out of your patients?"

  Marston nodded hesitantly. "It is the inevitable burden of those who introduce new science. The immortal Galileo and Copernicus were denounced to the Inquisition." He winced under Duncan's inquiring stare. "There are those who say we extract a patient's soul to store in the glass ball." The scientist looked toward the cell door, as if hoping for his next prisoner to appear. "Fools," he murmured.

  "Did this happen at Shamokin?" Duncan pressed.

  Marston sighed and turned back to Duncan. "I was away, having Sunday dinner with the Moravians. Some Indians, Delawares and Shawnee, decided to use my equipment. There was an old Indian who had been feeling very weak in the chest, heart problems no doubt. They decided to treat him but had no notion of how to use the device. They let a massive charge build up
then touched him in the chest. I am told there were sparks, a terrible smell of burning flesh, and he was rendered unconscious. When they examined him he had a molten lump of metal on his chest. When he regained consciousness he was weaker than ever, the sounds from his lips gibberish. He had clearly suffered some kind of collapse in his heart and brain. He died a few days later. They said my machine had extracted his spirit from his heart and melted it, leaving him an empty shell. When I investigated I found he had been wearing a copper medallion. They had no notion of the energy of the higher charges and so had melted the copper. It has happened numerous times, with lightning rods, with the swords of soldiers in storms, with nails on ships' masts. But they wouldn't listen, at their campfires they said I was a sorcerer, that I was planning to keep them from going on to the next world by reducing their souls to metal." Marston shrugged. "I was at the end of my work in any event."

  The second prisoner arrived, a man with a pronounced limp. Duncan silently helped Marston prepare the man in the chair, and as he turned the wheel he listened to Marston's words again in his mind. The Indians, at least some of them, had decided a molten lump of metal on a dead or dying man was the work of witchcraft to extract and destroy his soul. Each of the dead men had had such a lump of metal, jammed in his throat. The killer knew it would have made the dead men taboo, too frightening to touch, would have kept other Indians away from the marker trees.