Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  Duncan watched as the nearer launch approached another floating corpse. As one sailor prepared to throw the grapple at it, another called out, pointing to a second body wearing a blue jacket. The man with the grapple turned and snagged the second body.

  Duncan turned to Lieutenant Beck. “You are looking for the bodies of officers. Why?”

  Oddly, Beck looked to Livingston and Hancock, as if they might explain; then he answered with a cool, thin grin. “There’s a press-gang over at Castle Island. They always know how to deal with a wild Scot in need of discipline.” He turned to Duncan with an annoyed expression. “I wager they could find a berth for you on a ship bound for the yellowjack islands.”

  Duncan was only half listening to the arrogant officer. From the skiff, Munro was gesturing urgently to him. When he caught Duncan’s eye, he pointed into the water forty feet from the cutter. Something was suspended a few inches below the surface. Another body, Duncan realized, clad in one of the dark blue jackets that Livingston, like Hancock, required his fleet officers to wear.

  “Leave now,” Duncan heard Beck say to him, “or you’ll spend the night in the fort explaining why you choose to obstruct the business of the navy.”

  Duncan returned Beck’s icy gaze. As Livingston asked the officer whether any cargo had been recovered, Duncan furtively slipped out of his shoes, whistled to Enoch as he threw them into the gig, and pointed to a large fin breaking the water two hundred feet away.

  “Get down at once!” Lieutenant Beck snarled as Duncan leapt onto the rail. “You insolent dog, I will have you—” He had not finished his sentence before Duncan dove.

  Duncan had reached the spot where he saw the officer’s body when Munro gave a frightened cry. “Duncan! Forget it, I pray ye! No time! Back to me or yer in the belly of the beast!”

  Duncan twisted on the surface to see the fin speeding toward him. He marked the position of the gig and curled into a powerful body dive into the depths.

  The dead man hovered two feet below the surface now. Duncan came up under the body, hooked a hand under its shoulder, and pulled it toward the gig, breaking the surface thirty feet from Munro. Sailors on the cutter were shouting, pointing behind him. A musket fired from the cutter, then two more in quick succession, slicing the water behind him. Marines were firing at the shark. Lieutenant Beck was shouting furiously for the nearest launch to intercept him.

  Duncan was the swiftest of swimmers, more so since accepting from Conawago as his totem the spirit of the furry swimmer of Iroquois lakes, though he knew he was no match for a large, angry shark. But the creatures were dim-sighted, and although this one could scent death and blood from afar, there was such a confusion of blood and death in the cove that, Duncan prayed, the predator would be distracted in its course. His strokes were powerful but only one-handed. Salt water stung his eyes. He heard voices in the gig, terrified calls from the sailors on the cutter. The sound of the launch’s oars came close behind him.

  “Sweet bleeding Jesus!” Munro cried out as he threw a rope into the water, Livingston and Hancock beside him now. “Don’t look back, Duncan! Blessed Michael, don’t look back!”

  Shaking his head free of the surface in time to see Lieutenant Beck pushing away the barrel of a musket being aimed at the shark, Duncan grabbed the line. Several hands heaved him up as Munro violently slammed a heavy oak oar into the thrashing water just behind him. As the oar split with a sharp crack, Duncan twisted about in time to see a row of razor-sharp teeth and the bright anklebone of the foot the shark had ripped from the body. A huge black eye, fixed on Duncan, glided past.

  Suddenly, arms were pulling him and his grisly cargo into the boat. Munro stood with the split end of the oar poised in his hand, ready to launch it like a harpoon. Then, to Beck’s furious curses, the gig was drifting free and the officer of the launch was shouting at his men to board it. But not one of the seamen bent at his oars. Some stared at the big fin, some at Duncan. The sailors, ever a superstitious lot, had witnessed something extraordinary between Duncan and the shark, and they were loath to interfere.

  “You are completely mad, McCallum,” John Hancock said, still holding the oar he had used to push away from the cutter.

  Livingston gave a final shove with his own oar against the hull of the ship and turned toward Duncan with a mischievous grin. “That was most satisfying!” the New York merchant exclaimed, then motioned to the body. “Now pray tell us why this dead man is worth incurring the wrath of His Majesty’s Navy.”

  Duncan shed his waterlogged waistcoat. “I think you had already incurred that wrath,” he suggested, suddenly feeling very tired, “but until now, neither side would admit it.” Hancock and Livingston stared silently at the corpse, refusing Duncan’s bait. He knelt by the dead man, rolled him onto his side, and delivered a sharp blow to his back. Water drained from his lungs. “This one drowned, probably while trying to escape the wreck twenty fathoms down. You can confirm he was an officer on your ship, Mr. Livingston?” he asked as he pushed the long brown hair from the man’s face.

  Livingston bent to look at the ghastly face. “The ship’s sailing master, yes. For God’s sake, close his eyes.”

  “The officers expected to arrive at the harbor before midnight,” Duncan said as he pushed down the eyelids. “Why would they all have donned their uniforms at such a late hour?” He looked up at the two merchants with challenge in his eyes. They clearly had no answer. He looked back at Beck, who was shouting at the cutter’s captain now, and answered his own question. “Because the cutter was going to board her.”

  He touched the blue jacket trimmed with silver thread. “This jacket makes the dead officers readily identifiable, and the navy has a particular interest in the officers. At least Mr. Beck does. Why?” Duncan began unbuttoning the jacket. “Because,” he suggested, “he was led to believe that missing ledger is on one of them.”

  Hancock and Livingston looked at each another, and not at Duncan. “We should just take the body to shore,” Hancock said in an uneasy voice. The merchant turned and made an awkward show of helping Munro with the oars.

  Duncan straightened, noticing how neither Livingston nor Hancock would meet his gaze. “What do you mean?” he demanded. Neither man replied. In his mind’s eye he recalled what the officers in the launches had done with the bodies they had recovered. Each corpse had been spread out, his clothing slashed open to expose his chest. “You know I’m right!” he spat. “They are looking for what was taken from Jonathan Pine before he died his horrible death.”

  “Please keep your voice down,” Hancock chided.

  “You let me dive in after this body,” Duncan said, his resentment mounting, “let me recover it despite the stalking shark, all the while knowing there was no reason for me to do so.”

  To Duncan’s surprise, Hancock showed middling skill at rowing. He took several long strokes before replying. “Actually there was a very good reason. You couldn’t have played your part better had we rehearsed it. Now there is but one remaining act in the little drama you have improvised. Let Beck think you found the ledger on this man.” The merchant slipped a little account book from inside his waistcoat and covertly dropped it on the bench beside Duncan.

  Duncan pushed down his temper and saw that Beck was indeed watching, now through a telescope. He placed the body on the bench beside him, pulled open the dead man’s tunic, and with a deft movement lifted the little book—as if from the body—before stuffing it inside his own waistcoat.

  He did not have to turn back to Beck to confirm that he had seen. Beck began screaming for the launches to intercept their gig. Not a sailor moved. They were, Duncan realized, watching their commander, himself at the cutter’s stern, speaking with his officers. He seemed to have found his spine, perhaps after seeing Beck stop his marines from shooting the shark. It was as if he decided that Beck’s mission with the cutter was over. Had the cutter been stalking the Arcturus all the way from Halifax?

  Duncan turned back to Hancock
and Livingston. “You knew they sought it,” he ventured, “and you wanted to pretend that you too were trying to find it. You were toying with my life—”

  “You hardly gave us time to react, McCallum,” Livingston interjected. “As it was, we were forced into an overly hasty retreat from the ship.” Duncan had to admit the truth of Livingston’s words. “My God, man,” the New York merchant added in an admiring tone, “you swim like a fish!”

  Duncan touched the little doeskin pouch, adorned with Iroquois quill-work, that hung inside his shirt. His spirit totem was sleeker than a fish. “Why?” he asked. “Why the charade of searching for the ledger you know was stolen by Pine’s killers?” Another uneasy glance passed between the two merchants, and Duncan realized he had asked the wrong question. “Why does the navy so desperately want it?”

  “Not the navy as such,” Livingston murmured, earning a censoring glance from Hancock, who stood and tossed a line to a man standing in the shallow water of the beach, then quickly climbed out of the gig. Livingston, silver-buckled shoes in his hand, was a step behind him.

  The onlookers had gathered now and were being led in a hymn over the rows of dead by a burly man with disheveled black hair. As Duncan approached the gruesome lines of corpses, looking for Conawago and Will, he recognized Reverend Occom, the man who had stood by Pine’s body, and halted. He was not sure why the broad-shouldered pastor unsettled him. It was enough that Conawago clearly distrusted him, and it was unlikely that his friend would be anywhere near the stiff parson. He retreated to the little point where he had left Conawago and the young survivor of the Arcturus. There was no sign of them other than a few pieces of bent marsh grass leading in the direction Will Sterret had said the fugitives from the ship had taken.

  Duncan felt a tremor of fear as he recalled the boy’s description of a war cry in the night. He broke into a slow trot, then a long, loping gait over the soft ground. He passed into the thin strip of forest, then emerged on a narrow strip of land that descended into a marsh, where a wide river emptied into the bay. Standing on a fallen log, he surveyed the marsh and the clumps of trees and was about to shout for Conawago when he heard the two-tone whistle of a towhee, one of his friend’s forest calls. Following the sound, he quickly found the Nipmuc and Will standing in a grove of pines near a ring of stones that had recently been used for a campfire. They were examining a crude lean-to constructed of conifer branches. Beyond the lean-to was a small, sandy flat that opened onto the river.

  “The boy was sure the captain’s skiff came down this river,” Conawago explained. “If so, someone was waiting for them here. This camp has been used for several days, abandoned only hours ago, as if someone here was anticipating a party from the Arcturus.”

  The words sent a chill down Duncan’s spine. It seemed to confirm that the sinking had been planned well in advance. “Waiting for it to explode,” he declared, and bent to study the ground.

  “All the tracks around the camp are the same,” Conawago explained. “One pair of shoes with soft soles, perhaps moccasins. Many trips down the path to the river landing.” The Nipmuc motioned Duncan toward the edge of the little clearing. “He caught fish and at least two rabbits,” the old man said, indicating small bones tossed under a bush. He nodded toward the path to the water. “Then three men arrived by boat, all in heavier shoes.”

  “This can’t be far from farms, perhaps even a village,” Duncan observed.

  “He wanted to stay close to watch the bay,” Conawago suggested.

  Duncan silently studied the campsite and a nearby tree that showed signs of being repeatedly climbed. “He picked a site hidden by the trees and the low hills toward the mainland, cut off by the marsh. There are other places he could have kept watch, but they would have made him conspicuous.”

  “Here he could hide,” Conawago suggested, “and be ready to jump in the skiff as it traveled up the river.”

  Duncan saw that Will now stood at the landing, looking past the mouth of the river toward the bay beyond. “Not this river,” Duncan said, recalling the maps he had seen of the area. “It can’t go more than a couple miles at most, surrounded by marsh all the way.”

  “Here,” Will called from the edge of the beach, and pointed to the ground at his feet. The track of packed sand indicated the dragging of a small boat, the path of its narrow keel making a tiny trench in the still-packed sand.

  “And dragged here,” Conawago suggested, indicating a roughly circular patch where the grass had been crushed by the press of heavy weight.

  “Too uneven for a boat,” Duncan said as he reached his friend’s side. “More like stones, as if the man using the camp brought large stones here from the woods farther inshore.”

  “Stones?” Conawago asked, foreboding creeping into his voice. “But why? Where did the stones go? And why destroy the ship when they were barely an hour from anchorage in the harbor? They didn’t leave the ship for a pile of stones. Why not just meet in Boston?”

  Duncan paced along the narrow strip of sand, then squatted at the river’s edge and carefully studied its ripples and eddies. “There,” he said, and pointed to a patch of water a hundred feet away where there was a slight, unexpected twisting in the smooth water.

  “It could be anything, Duncan,” Conawago said. “An old stump, perhaps.” Duncan handed him his waistcoat. He stripped off his shirt, slipped off his shoes, and made a running dive into the river.

  Duncan had sometimes tried to explain to Sarah the exhilaration he felt when swimming underwater, but words could never capture its full magic. Even this shallow, turbid water offered another world below its surface, and he glided through it with a carefree abandon. A school of minnows scattered at his approach. He smiled as an old turtle looked up from its muddy bed. Here he experienced life in an entirely different dimension, and though he could not always understand the ways of the native spirits, he was convinced that since accepting the totem that never left his neck, he felt an added energy, even a strength of perception when gliding through the depths. In one fluid motion he exhaled a string of bubbles, surfaced only for the instant it took for a new breath and to fix his destination, then slipped underneath again.

  The captain was proud of its brightwork, Will had said of the officer’s personal boat. Something red flickered at him through the swaying river grass; then, with two more strokes, he was on it. The boat wore a yellow-and-red checkerboard pattern along its gunwale, with little black anchors painted on the yellow squares. It had been holed, then sunk with the missing stones. Duncan quickly pulled out half a dozen of the big rocks, then surfaced for another quick breath and returned to the bottom, working at the stones. After one more dive the boat rose a few inches, and with a shove he sent it coasting back toward the campsite.

  He surfaced twenty feet from the bank. Will gave him an enthusiastic wave, but his delight gave way to a startled cry as the boat ghosted to the surface beside Duncan.

  Within a few minutes Conawago and Duncan had removed the remaining stones, and with a mighty heave they pulled the boat onto the sand. As the water drained out through the hole that had been chopped in its bottom, Duncan paced around the boat. She had been a trim, sturdy vessel. The busy yellow-and-red checkerboard did not make her elegant, but it certainly made her distinctive. As he stood at the edge of the water staring at her stern, twigs snapped near the campsite and he heard someone complaining about a tear in his new linen shirt. Enoch Munro appeared from around a thicket of alders, followed a moment later by John Hancock and Robert Livingston. Brambles had been trapped in the hair of both merchants, and they wore exhausted expressions. They were not accustomed to excursions in the field.

  “They wanted to find you,” Munro reported in an apologetic tone.

  “You abandoned us, McCallum,” Livingston groused, “with all those bodies.”

  “You asked me to discover the truth,” Duncan stiffly replied. “Not to play the nanny.” Hancock, despite his wealth and frequent arrogance, was still genteel
and compassionate enough for Duncan to think of as a friend, but he was not warming to the New York aristocrat.

  Livingston swatted peevishly at the flies that were landing on his shoulders. “Prithee, sir, why do we find ourselves in this bug-infested wilderness?”

  Duncan, his britches still dripping river water, pulled the boat higher up on the sand and silently pointed to its stern.

  With low grumbling, Livingston stepped down the narrow path, Hancock at his heels. “So you found a fancy dinghy,” the New Yorker said in a chiding tone, batting at another fly. Hancock pushed past him to reach Duncan’s side.

  “Robert,” Hancock said, nodding at the boat, “if you quit complaining, you’ll find out sooner why we are here.” Across the black-painted stern, painted in bright yellow letters, was the name Arcturus.

  A small, confused sound came from Livingston’s throat. “It’s odd that it drifted here, I grant you,” he finally said. “But it is just more salvage.”

  Duncan chose to speak to Hancock. “Three men left the Arcturus after the fuse was lit in the hold. They rowed here, met someone, then staved in the boat and sank her to cover their trail.”

  Hancock’s brow furrowed. Livingston threw up his hands in exasperation. “McCallum, you can’t just conjure up wild theories. Your imagination is obviously fertile, but—”

  Duncan interrupted. “There was a witness,” he said, nodding to Will.

  Livingston’s protest died on his lips. Conawago pulled the boy to his side, as if to protect him.

  “A child?” Livingston asked.

  “The ship’s boy. A boy no longer. Will found Pine in the hold, but Pine demanded that he flee to save himself. When he was swimming to shore, he saw the captain’s skiff pulling for this inlet.”

  Hancock’s usually composed countenance twisted as confusion, then anger, and finally something like fear crossed it. “They’re here?” he asked, glancing nervously at the sandy forest.

  “Gone this past day,” Duncan explained. “The man who had been waiting for them here was their guide, I suspect.”