Blood of the Oak: A Mystery

by Eliot Pattison

  Rush seemed to grow gaunt. “Surely you misunderstand. I would never . . .” his words choked away. A chill gust bent the flames and he crossed his arms over his chest.

  Duncan tossed Rush the mink cap. He put it on without thinking, then hesitated and removed it with a confused expression. “But I gave this to Ralston.” He glanced up warily, and tried to be inconspicuous about checking the folds of the hat.

  “We found it on the river, on the backs of the shad.”

  “The shad! That explains it. Ralston wanted so much to observe the fabled running of the shad as Dr. Franklin had described it to us. He would have lingered to sketch them like he sketches his birds.” Rush saw the tip of a feather and pulled it out of the little brim pocket. “See! He found his ducks. Mergansers I should think. We shall laugh about all this when he returns. He will be mortified over having lost my cap.”

  “Ralston is already mortified, Benjamin.”

  The forced smile on Rush’s face disappeared but he did not otherwise react. Duncan tossed the old enameled box on the ground beside him. Rush snatched it up. “His snuffbox, from his grandfather! He’ll be so pleased you found it.”

  “It was on his body.”

  Rush kept turning the cap over and over in his hands. “We have to be in Philadelphia by the end of the month,” he said in a hollow voice. “There is a harpsichord recital we don’t want to miss. He is to attend the College of New Jersey in the autumn.”

  “His face was skinned away. His nose was cut off. The work of a medical man, some might say. Just like Peter Rohrbach and his wife who were carefully sliced and mutilated. Just like Analie’s friend Red Jacob whose arm was neatly amputated. If the crown were to bring a prosecution for repetitive murders, you would be the logical suspect.”

  Rush slowly looked up, stricken as the horror of Duncan’s words finally sank in. A tremor shook his body. “Ralston!” he cried in anguish. Tanaqua, standing guard above them, looked down in warning. Rush stared at the rebus Duncan had dropped in his lap, grabbed it and threw it in the fire, then wiped at his tears.

  Duncan said no more until he had shared out some venison jerky. As he reached for his pouch of corn balls, Analie stopped him and produced a flour sack with three fresh loaves in it, taken from the supplies Bricklin had been stockpiling that afternoon. He watched in confusion as she cut a loaf in quarters with her little belt knife. “How would you know to take those?” he asked the girl. “Our departure was too sudden.”

  “Bricklin was after you, with all those angry men,” she said with one of her innocent smiles. “I told you but you didn’t believe me the first time. But I knew you would eventually. Remember? We don’t surrender,” she reminded Duncan and tossed a piece up to Tanaqua.

  They ate in silence, then Duncan stood and studied the sky. “Two hours sleep then we push on. You’re staying right here, Rush, unless you explain yourself. You want words to release your vow? How about the words I speak to the magistrates when they swear a warrant for your arrest? A man with his belly incised, his hand amputated and buried in his intestines. A man from a prominent Philadelphia family with his face peeled away like the skin of a fruit. A God-fearing Moravian with his hair removed and his beautiful pregnant wife mutilated with something like a scalpel. In your cap you carried the names of two of the dead, and of a third nearly so lying now in Edentown. The trial will draw great crowds in Philadelphia, your hanging even more. You’ve probably been to hangings. They sell pastries and ale. People always clap when the hangman tests the trap door.”

  Rush buried his head in his hands.

  “The message in your cap. Was it from Benjamin Franklin?”

  “He was sent to London on the colony’s business,” Rush responded. “Since he embarked his wife Deborah has carried on certain . . . sensitive business for him. She sits in on committee meetings.”

  Duncan began reciting the names from the note. “Red Jacob, Patrick Woolford, Peter Rohrbach. All dead or nearly so. Were they part of the committee you speak of?”

  When Rush still did not answer Duncan reached down and roughly pulled his head up. “This is the frontier. There are those who would string you up from a tree if I explained those deaths to them and showed them your treacherous instruments.”

  “You know I did not . . . could not.”

  “I will put the rope around your neck myself if it means I can save nineteen innocent men. These killers are not going to stop.”

  Rush looked up with red-rimmed eyes. “Not one committee. A committee in Boston, one in New York, in Newport, in Philadelphia, and Williamsburg. Maybe more. They exchange ideas and sentiments. Those you cite just help with the committees. Months ago Woolford came to Philadelphia with an older, very refined gentleman from New York who was asked by Dr. Franklin about the health of William Johnson, as if they were friends. Captain Woolford brought a native ranger who stood guard outside the door, a sturdy fellow with a red ear.” Duncan and Tanaqua exchanged a grim glance. “I don’t know about the end of the world, just heard them talking about it. I am just their clerk, fetching them books or meals or anything else they want.”

  “Who from Philadelphia? Who did Woolford meet with?”

  “Dr. Franklin and his wife. The doctor I apprentice with. Jared Ralston’s father, the printer who had apprenticed Ralston. There was also Mr. Dickinson the lawyer. And a man named Webb who had just arrived from the south, a tall distinguished-looking man with a scar across his left cheek. He had led rangers in a Virginia company and had a farm in the Piedmont. And there was a printer from somewhere in Maryland.”

  “The famous scientist. An Oneida warrior. A captain in His Majesty’s army. A doctor. A lawyer. A printer. A Virginia planter. What common enterprise could they have?”

  Rush glanced up with a nervous expression. “I fear they were plotting to steal something.”

  Duncan frowned. “My friends don’t steal.”

  “I could not make out all of the words, but I heard talk of avoiding magistrates and hiding something. I’m sure it was with the best of intentions.”

  Duncan kicked a log in the fire, stirring sparks toward Rush. “It’s a rough walk to Philadelphia, Benjamin, but you can probably do it in nine or ten days. Do not tarry near bear dens. Do not anger the natives. If a rattlesnake curls up beside you in the night, just stay motionless. It will move on in a few hours when the morning sun hits it.”

  Rush stared in despair at his cap. “They are not inclined to let a mere apprentice, even a doctor’s apprentice, into their full confidence. I am not a member of the committee, McCallum, but I aspire to be. When they started talking about Ralston taking an urgent message to Shamokin station, I volunteered to escort him. Ralston had made the run before, and knew Rohrbach. We thought it would be a grand adventure, that we would have a chance to pursue our scientific studies. We agreed to share the responsibility. He would memorize a passage and I would carry two messages from Mrs. Franklin secreted in my cap. It was like a test for me, to see if I could be trusted to make the run alone next time.” The words died away and Rush pounded the cap against his knee before looking up. “He was cold when he paddled away so I just tossed him my cap, forgetting what was inside. I failed the great Franklin and his wife.”

  “I need more, Rush. Murderers are on the loose.”

  “I know nothing else. They open each meeting by reading reports, sometimes just from gazettes. The last time it was just a letter from Edmund Burke to the Parliament about colonial affairs.”

  “Peter Rohrbach had been an apprentice,” Duncan pointed out. “Why did he break his bondage?”

  “He would never bring such dishonor to his name. They asked him to move to Shamokin. He was apprenticed to Ralston’s father, but released from his work, trusted by the committee for something more important.” Rush looked down again. “How ever can I tell his parents of their son’s death? He loved it here, loved all the birds. He was going to publish his drawings.” He looked up with pleading in his eyes. “Why kill R
alston?”

  “Because the killers expected a messenger from Philadelphia. He was obviously from the city but they may have let him go. Except they found a message in his fur cap.”

  Rush went very still. He stared into the fire again, his body wracked by a long shudder. He began rocking back and forth as Duncan stretched his blanket over Analie and lay down beside her. “I cannot go home,” Rush finally said. “I will find the murderer with you or I will die trying. Peter and Rachel keep calling me in my dreams.”

  A bundle of feathers and fur dropped in front of Rush. He recoiled for a moment, then looked up into Tanaqua’s expectant eyes. The Mohawk had jumped down and was hovering over him. Rush, in his way, had been touched by the Blooddancer. “Hold that bundle and speak to me,” he told Rush. “All of it, all that you have seen in your dreams of the dead.”

  THE CRISP MORNING AIR, ALIVE WITH THE CALL OF BIRDS, GRADUALLY lifted Rush out of his despairing mood. The young man from Philadelphia had a deep curiosity about the natural world, and he pointed out nesting ducks, leaping fish, and dramatic rock formations with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. Analie joined in, motioning first toward an eagle, then a majestic heron, before breaking out in a French ditty about a drunken goose. Her voice seemed to beguile several birds, which flew beside them and even joined in at times with ragged caws, but she gradually moved from playful songs to lonely ballads and then, in a quieter voice, to the Ave Maria. Duncan glanced back at the energetic girl, wise beyond her years and battered by life. It was as if she had decided to remind them of their solemn task.

  At midmorning they rested on a river ledge shielded by trees and watched as two southbound canoes passed along the far bank. As they passed out of sight Duncan turned to see Tanaqua bent over the wooden box addressed to Mr. B. Franklin, which had remained behind in Bricklin’s dugout. Before Duncan could protest, the Mohawk had slipped off the leather strap bound around it and removed the top. Instantly Tanaqua dropped the top as if it had scalded him, and backed away. Rush darted forward with a cry of glee and lifted the largest of the black rocks from the crumpled newspaper that cushioned it.

  It was another creature rock, a fossil that reminded Duncan of one of the wood lice that scattered and curled up when decaying logs were lifted from the forest floor, only gigantic in size, as big as Duncan’s palm.

  “Magnificent!” Rush crowed. “As if the ancient Greeks were standing before us!”

  Duncan could see that Rush’s excitement was forced, but he did not want to impede his effort to push back his despair. “Greeks?” he asked.

  “Was it not Aristotle himself who recorded the first thoughts on animal stones? Did he not explain how they are formed by unnatural mineral vapors?” He pointed to the fossil in Duncan’s hand. “I have heard that called a trilobite.”

  Tanaqua stared in bewilderment at the young scientist. Analie lifted the fossils one by one, and held them in a patch of sunlight, her eyes round with wonder.

  “Among my people,” the Mohawk stated, “these are objects of great power, not to be trifled with. What does this Franklin want with them? Is he a witch then?”

  It was the first time Duncan had seen Rush smile. “I heard him describe himself as just another student of the world, obsessed with the complexity of nature.”

  “When I was a boy an old Cayuga came to our village with a black bone of stone as thick as his leg, as long as his arm, and as heavy as a log. He sometimes used it as a pillow, and when he did, he had dreams of a place on the other side with beasts like moving hills.”

  Rush’s eyes widened and he dug into his pocket for a scrap of paper. “I am convinced it is evidence of the world that existed before the Great Flood,” he declared as he scribbled.

  “The world where the first gods chose to live,” Tanaqua said. Duncan was not sure if he was disagreeing. Tanaqua turned to Duncan. “The Great Council has many such stones—seed stones—kept under the altars of the spirit masks.”

  “Seed stones?” Duncan asked.

  It was Analie who answered, in a deeply solemn voice. “One night old grandmother Adanahoe showed me such a stone, after we had seen a shower of shooting stars. She told me they are seeds left by the gods when they departed, for the new world that needs to rise when the last good men have died. They represent a trust, she said, from one world to the next.”

  Tanaqua touched the neck pouch holding his spirit totem.

  Rush seemed about to laugh, then saw the sober way his companions looked at the girl. “They are rocks, girl, most peculiar rocks I admit, but still rocks,” he pointed out.

  “And such seeds would have to be hard as rock, wouldn’t they?” the French girl replied with a tone that seemed consoling, as if she felt sorry for Rush. “Do you really think some chalk-skinned scholar from Philadelphia would know more about nature than an Iroquois?”

  Rush glanced uneasily at Tanaqua and chose not to answer.

  Duncan stepped to the box and repacked Franklin’s fossils inside their protective papers, then closed the lid and touched Rohrbach’s fossil, in his pocket. When he finished, he looked up to see the girl staring at him uneasily.

  “The picture letter from Philadelphia told of the world’s end,” she said. “Now seed stones are being sent to Philadelphia.”

  Analie’s words seemed to transport Rush back to his dark mood. The young man from Philadelphia had sent a message about the world’s end to Peter Rohrbach, and at least Rohrbach’s world had ended. When they set out again Analie did not sing but laid in the front of the dugout like a bowsprit, sometimes trailing a finger in the water, sometimes predicting, always accurately, great trees, high cliffs, or other landmarks they would encounter around the next bend. She had been that way before.

  Rush, whose short, laconic paddle strokes in the middle of the dugout did little to aid their passage, eventually stirred from his silence by taking up his anatomical queries. Had Tanaqua known any Indians with six fingers on one hand? Did his little toe hide behind the adjacent toe? Did he ever know a tribesman to burn his skin in the sun? Did Tanaqua know how many teeth he had? Did he know that the little fingers of Indians did not grow as straight as those of Europeans? Had he ever, perchance on a battlefield, seen the structure of a tribesman’s digestive tract or the pleural membrane that covered the lungs? Even better, had he ever counted the total joints in his skull plates? The Mohawk rebuffed him with short, curt syllables, and Duncan noticed that each time he gave his paddle an extra twist to splash Rush.

  “I can assure you, Mr. Rush,” Duncan finally declared, “that the temporal fossa of Tanaqua’s skull joins with the parietal and occipital plates just as it does in ours. His xiphoid process extends from his sternum to the back of the ninth thoracic vertebra, and his femur rises on his meniscus just as in our knees.”

  In the stunned silence a rumbling sound came from Tanaqua that may have been a laugh.

  “Sir?” Rush finally sputtered.

  “We are of the same species, I warrant you, though the best specimens of the species I have ever seen all wore loincloths.”

  “But you are just a . . .” Rush, for once, was at a loss for words.

  “Before I wandered the frontier, Mr. Rush, I studied at the College of Medicine in Edinburgh.” Duncan chose not to mention the intervening period he spent in the king’s chains.

  “Edinburgh?” Rush gasped. “The Edinburgh? Why it’s the best medical college in the world! I dream of matriculation there!”

  Duncan guided them around a patch of white, roiling water as he spoke. “I counted friends among the professors.” At least, he thought, those from the Highland clans. “I could write them if you like, offer my—”

  “Harris’s!” Analie interrupted.

  They cut the dugout close to the western bank as the girl pointed to the wide landing on the far side where the flat-bottomed ferry conveyed travelers from the eastern settlements onto the Great Wagon Road that led south.

  DRAINED BY THE EFFORTS OF THE LAST TWO DAYS, TH
EY MADE camp on a high flat a few hundred paces from the great river, where Tanaqua had taken only a quarter hour to catch the string of fish he was spitting for the flames. While Duncan nursed the fire, Rush had spent the time quizzing him about the famed medical college of Scotland, until Duncan impatiently instructed him to tend to the smoking kindling and pulled Analie away to gather spring greens for their pot.

  Duncan watched the ungainly apprentice doctor from the adjoining hill as he struggled with the fire. Rush had no skills for the frontier, seemed almost perversely uninterested in acquiring them. He was not a man who got dirt under his fingernails. The young doctor was intelligent yet inept, sophisticated in demeanor but shockingly naive, and would quickly become a victim if they encountered the Blooddancer. Rush had been a small link in the cryptic chain of events, an assistant to well-placed men whose dealing in codes and smuggled goods seemed to have brought the wrath of an Iroquois spirit down on them. Not for the first time Duncan puzzled over the connection between the stolen mask and the conspiracies of a Philadelphia committee.

  He turned back to Analie, who for now had sloughed off the darkness of recent days, and was softly singing a ditty she made up about her search for fiddleheads and wild onions. They had pushed hard, and would push even harder the next day to reach the family of Jessica Ross. For now they had earned a few moments of relaxation.

  When they returned to camp with their spring bounty, Rush had Tanaqua sitting on a log, his mouth stretched wide as Rush probed his teeth. The Mohawk rolled his eyes at Duncan and patiently complied as Rush turned his head this way and that to position the slender rod with its polished mirror disc. He seemed to regard Rush as not altogether right in the mind, and the tribes treated such people as reserved by the gods for some special destiny. It explained the Mohawk’s patience with the intrusive young doctor, but Duncan’s own patience was wearing thin. He would not have Tanaqua put his own life in danger out of some naive inclination to protect the awkward young interloper from Philadelphia.