The boy bravely extended his head around the ox’s neck. “Is it some kind of weasel?” Both the boy and the ox seemed to watch in wonder as Sadie curled around Hayes’s arm and climbed onto his shoulder. “I’ve seen martens and minks before, but never such a being as that!”
“Well, lad,” the old Scot solemnly intoned, “we put my old auntie in a coffin for her wake and next morning that’s what crawled out.”
“Munro!” Hayes chided, but not before the boy had let out a squeal and fled toward the fort.
The establishment at Township Number Four was more of a fortified village than a military structure. Rows of sturdy cabins with shared walls flanked a large two-story building at the rear, with a taller tower built onto its southwestern corner. Conawago had explained that the fort had a noble history, for within its walls a tiny garrison had withstood a siege by a vastly larger French and Indian force in 1747 and then provided the sanctuary desperately needed by Rogers’s rangers on their flight from their famous St. Francis raid in 1759. Duncan was convinced that that night in October nearly ten years earlier had only triggered a different confrontation, one that had been slowly playing out in all the years since. Had Rogers simply inflicted a wound that continued to seep, Duncan kept wondering, or had he somehow cracked open a secret that was suddenly coveted by kings?
The gathering along the road outside the fort’s broad, open gate seemed less a fair than an extended picnic that wound around the packed earth roads of the village known as Charlestown. A collection of settlers behind a gaunt-looking clapboard church was singing hymns. In front of the church two elderly women stood at a table made of planks and trestles, serving out slices of pie on shingles. Half a dozen young men competed at throwing tomahawks at wooden slabs. Older men in plain homespun were examining the hooves and teeth of several draft horses tied to a picket line. As Duncan approached the gate, several children called out, some in glee, others in fear, and he turned to follow their gaze. Even those with the tomahawks stopped and were looking behind him. Will was parading Molly, with Sadie perched on the dog’s back, her head held high like some queen of the wilds.
“So much for an unobtrusive entrance,” Conawago muttered.
Duncan kept his head down as he passed through the high gate into the inner yard of the fort. He had assumed he could just ask a guard on duty where to find Corporal Ebenezer Brandt, but there was no guard. There was in fact no garrison. The famous old fort had more of the air of a shantytown, with laundry hanging on lines stretched between buildings and chickens scratching at the weeds around a flagpole from which a tattered Union Jack flew. By the stable, swallows darted at flies hovering over a pile of manure that almost reached the roof. Only two inhabitants were visible—an aged, toothless man on the porch of a house who hummed loudly as he worked his rocking chair, and a spindly woman stoking a fire under a kettle of foul-smelling lye, in the early stage of soap making.
The old crone cackled when Munro asked for Corporal Brandt, as if the Scot had told a good joke, then began stirring the contents of the kettle with what looked like a salvaged canoe paddle. When he asked again, she scowled.
“Great Ebenezer. ‘Samuel took up a stone and set it between Mizpah and Shen.’ He named it Ebenezer,” she declared with a grin that revealed gums with only three teeth. “Says so right in the Book of Samuel.”
“We’re just looking for a former Indian fighter, not a biblical lesson, ma’am,” Munro patiently replied.
She offered her disturbing grin again; then her gaze drifted to Conawago, who had tucked a duck feather in his hair, and she straightened her dirty calico dress. “A lass likes a pretty feather,” she declared with mischief in her eyes, patting her tangled coif. Conawago nervously handed her the feather, and she pointed with her paddle toward the upper floor of the two-story structure.
They warily climbed the stairs of the watchtower that adjoined the building, pausing at the landing to listen to the military drumbeats coming from the second story.
“Form up, ye lazy stoats!” came an angry, high-pitched voice from inside. “Shoulder those arms. On yer right shoulder, ye ignorant sot! Ye call yerself a soldier? If the king saw ye, he would weep his eyes out. God help the women and children of this colony if this be the best the governor can send!”
Munro, in the lead, inched up the stairs to the slightly ajar door, then pointed to a new broadside fastened to the door with a horseshoe nail.
INDIAN RAID! the sheet announced in large, bold type, under which was a report of the recent bloody raid on Worcester by a party of savages from the north. Governor Bernard had petitioned Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire to allow him to send a company of militia up the Connecticut.
They stared in silence at the paper.
“Sounds like the company’s arrived,” Munro whispered, then motioned to Duncan and edged open the door.
The only occupant of the cavernous hall was in fact a short, stick-thin man at the far end of the room, holding a musket on his shoulder. He jerked, starting with surprise as he spied them, then marched double time to a rack of arms in the center of the wall. Duncan reached him as he leaned the musket into an empty place on the rack.
“Exercising the guns. Got to exercise the guns,” the scrawny stranger declared in his high voice. The stubble on his jaw was a salt-and-pepper mixture that matched the color of his unkempt hair. His waistcoat and britches were much repaired, with patches of various colors.
“Corporal Brandt?” Duncan asked as the man stepped to a workbench where a musket had been disassembled for repair.
He fixed Duncan with a hopeful expression, then straightened, tucked the powder horn that hung from his neck into his shirt, and tapped his forehead with a knuckle.
Duncan realized the man’s assumption and shook his head. “Not the militia.” As Brandt sagged, he added, “I served in Woolford’s rangers.”
Brandt brightened. “Cat in the night, we used to call Captain Woolford. The major’s favorite officer for night scouts—said the Mohawks taught him well. He and the major would get drunk together whenever they returned from a mission. Never in the field, never touched a drop in the field. Cat in the night. Who comes to kill, who comes to kill,” he cackled.
With a chill Duncan remembered the call, used by some rangers in the night, mimicking the rhythm of the barred owl’s call, which he had learned as who drank my tea, who drank my tea.
“Major Rogers, you mean?” Munro asked.
“In the field,” Brandt said with a distant expression. “That’s where we do the killing. Got to wait for it, the major would say. Wait for it. Most men will shoot as soon as they see the enemy, but not us. We wait until they are almost on us.” Brandt gestured to a tattered paper nailed to the wall, bearing a list of numbered items. “Rule thirteen. Reserve your fire ’til the enemy be near, then discharge and rush with hatchet or tomahawk.” Rogers’s twenty-eight rules of ranging had proved so effective that the British army had reprinted and distributed them to all its units in America. “Wait ’til ye smell the stink of sour wine on Frenchie’s breath before ye announce yer presence, he would tell us, though he never wrote that one down,” the jittery man said with a cackling laugh.
Brandt lifted a twist of tobacco, stained with gun oil, from the bench and bit off a piece. “They say those pretty white flowers grow where a man bleeds out. Bloodroot.” Brown tobacco juice dribbled down his grizzled jaw. “We left snow-white flowers all over the north. No need to keep night watch anymore, I says to the major, cause the ghosts will keep ’em all away.”
Munro stepped forward. “Do you know Josiah Chisholm?”
Brandt eyed the badge on Munro’s waistcoat. “Forty-Second of Foot,” he declared. “I came back to Ticonderoga from a scout that day in ’57. Gawd, we dropped a lot of black-and-green plaid into holes that week. Took days to bury ’em all.”
“I almost filled a hole myself,” Munro announced.
Brandt’s drifting, almost deranged demeanor suddenly disappear
ed, and his pale gray eyes took on a more calculating look. “I knew Chisholm, sure, made sergeant by the end of the war. The only one killed in that Worcester raid, folks say. Saved a lot of men on our flight from St. Francis.” Brandt spat into a ceramic pot on the workbench, then, as if forgetting they were there, turned and set to work, lifting a cocking mechanism out of a tub of oil.
“I’d like to hear about St. Francis, Corporal,” Duncan said to his back.
Brandt paused, but did not turn from the bench. “Two hundred fifteen of the enemy killed. One of us killed. Except for those eaten, hacked, or burned on the way back. They say that Italian fella Dante described all the levels of hell, but we discovered a whole new one that October. That’s the telling of it.”
“I was hoping for a bit more detail,” Duncan observed.
Oddly, Brandt’s hand felt for the powder horn he had stuffed inside his waistcoat. “That’s the telling of it,” he repeated, as if that was all a stranger deserved to hear.
Duncan extracted the strip of cloth with embroidered leaves and fish he had recovered in Worcester and dropped it in front of Brandt. “This was stuffed in Chisholm’s mouth. Another one in the mouth of Daniel Oliver the week before. An Abenaki from St. Francis killed them both.”
The corporal stared at the cloth for a moment; then his gaze drifted, and his eyes lost their focus. “No good. Just a town of death.”
“Mog.” Munro’s single syllable sent Brandt instantly into a fighting crouch.
The former ranger slowly straightened, spat out his wad of his tobacco, and once more tightened his arm against his powder horn. “He be the animal we sought more than any, he be the reason why the major privately said the raid wasn’t over even after we returned.”
“He is the one who killed Chisholm and Oliver,” Duncan explained.
“T’ain’t a story for daylight.”
“There must be a tavern near,” Conawago suggested.
Brandt finally turned back to face them. “They call it the Bear’s Tooth. Bring a bear tooth to the proprietor and he gives a free ale. A bear chewed off two of his fingers onc’t. At the end of the street past the church. Don’t kill the doves flying inside, they be pets of his wife.”
“An hour after sunset, then,” Conawago suggested.
Munro, who had been studying Brandt with an intense curiosity, hesitated as Duncan and Conawago headed toward the door. “Reckon I’ll stay and help with the guns,” he said, and the old infantryman lifted one of the dirty muskets from the rack.
Outside, the grounds inside the fort were still deserted except for the soap maker and the scarecrow on the porch, still rocking. Beyond the gate, however, the modest fair had become more festive. Will and Molly were on the steps of the mercantile, messily sharing a piece of blueberry pie. Two young men, wood chips clinging to their bare backs, were competing in a rail-splitting contest to hoots of encouragement from onlookers. Brawny farmers and their sons were engaged in a friendly tug-of-war. The older men, several smoking pipes now, still clustered around the draft horses, apparently engaged in trading. Duncan felt a pang of regret for not having Goliath as half a dozen younger men, and younger horses, assembled at a line of flour laid on the grass, readying to race. “A penny on the chestnut mare,” he offered.
Conawago made no reply. Duncan followed his gaze toward a large pine, in the shade of which several men were gathered around someone sitting on a blanket. As he stepped with his friend toward the tree, he saw that several of the standing men wore their long hair in braids. They were natives, all but two wearing European clothing. At the edge of the group stood Noah, Occom’s stoic elder. They were all listening to Solomon Hayes.
It was, he realized, the perfect venue for obtaining and sharing secrets from the north. His anger at Hayes rose like a slow fire in his belly. The likelihood that the tinker’s nighttime code writing was for the benefit of the French had been gnawing at him all day. Duncan had been ill used for too long. He might not understand the strange game Hayes played, but he knew without a doubt the man had been deceiving them. Sarah was no longer there to protect the tinker.
He had begun inching toward Hayes when Conawago placed a restraining hand on his arm. “No,” the old Nipmuc said in a surprisingly insistent voice. “Let him go about his business.”
“He mocks us!” Duncan protested. “He keeps secrets from us!”
“As do we all,” Conawago observed.
“He pretends to be impoverished, with patches on his waistcoat and holes in his shoes, but then he hands out guineas as if they were buttons.” He saw now that Hayes had laid out goods on his blanket and was describing the redeeming qualities of his frying pans, sewing needles, writing quills, penknives, pewter thimbles, colorful ribbons, and strands of glass beads.
“He is a wretched soul who has lost his family,” Conawago pointed out.
“He writes secretly at night, writes what Will says is gibberish. They are coded papers, I am certain.”
A strange pain crossed Conawago’s countenance. “Duncan, you don’t—”
“Noah! You sorry piece of weasel gristle!” The thunderous voice that interrupted them belonged to an ox of a man who now pushed past them, his thick arms spread wide as he approached the native elder. Noah, standing straight and somber, betrayed his acquaintance with the stranger with only a momentary flash of amusement in his eyes. The big, black-bearded man pounded his back, then turned with exaggerated surprise toward Hayes. “God’s teeth, boys!” he exclaimed to his two companions. “T’is the king of wanderers hisself!”
Duncan cocked his head at the rough-looking newcomer who, like his two companions, was clad in the leather jerkin favored more by wilderness trappers than by farmers. All three wore tomahawks and knives in their belts, and ornately decorated powder horns hung from their shoulders.
The bearded man turned back to Noah. “Is it true? Your soul snatcher has made it back across the Atlantic?”
Duncan saw both amusement and regret in the elder’s eyes as he nodded toward the knot of worshippers behind the church. Occom and his own band of elders, split off from Wheelock, had arrived at Charlestown. He wondered why Noah was separated from the others, and as Conawago pushed forward to meet the strangers, Duncan retreated a few steps, then slipped away toward the church.
He worked his way inconspicuously along the street leading to the church, pausing at a table that was dispensing cider, then exchanging pleasantries with an old tribal woman who was selling exquisitely worked baskets. Something heavy pressed against his leg, and he looked down to see Molly nudging a greeting. He knelt and wiped away shreds of blueberry pie from her thick neck hair, and they both waited while Will approached, cradling a familiar bulge in his shirt.
“She’s asleep,” the boy said of Sadie. “Everyone loved her, gave us pie for free and cider for free, and I was thinking of charging a ha’penny for people to pet her when some old witch of a woman pointed at her and squawked that she was the imp of Lucifer. People began backing away; then she said she knew a prayer from the mountains of Wales that could turn the beast to dust. No one stayed then.”
“Best get the princess back to Hayes,” Duncan advised, the tinker’s name bitter on his tongue.
Will nodded, but did not move. “Funny, ain’t it. All the Indians are with the tinker, and the Indian preacher only speaks to Europeans.”
Duncan hesitated and studied the two assemblies. The boy was right. “Best get her back,” he said again, and gestured the boy toward Hayes. As Will hurried away, Duncan spied a fallen log on which articles of clothing had been left by the men stripped down for the tug-of-war. He glanced about, then borrowed a large tricorn hat and stepped around the little clapboard church.
Pulling the hat low, he stood at the edge of Occom’s makeshift congregation. It wasn’t a liturgy Occom was reciting, but something rather like the pitch of a merchant. Joining midstream in what was apparently a long speech, Duncan couldn’t quite grasp what the native pastor was asking of his
listeners. Occom spoke of the land to the north, the blessings of nature, and the importance of strong backs in building strong minds. Only when Occom summoned an Indian youth who had been sitting on a bench along the rear wall of the church did Duncan understand.
The boy began singing. “Ehstehn yayan deh tsaun we jisus ahattonia,” he sang in a surprisingly rich tenor. “One watch wado-kwi norrwa ndasqua entri.”
The words were Huron, but so many Christians along the St. Lawrence had adopted the song that Duncan had frequently heard it in northern longhouses.
The boy switched to English. “ ‘Within a lodge of broken bark the tender babe was found, a ragged robe of rabbit skin enwrapped his beauty round.’ ” It was called the Huron Carol and written by a Jesuit missionary living among the northern tribes in the prior century.
A woman near Duncan dabbed at a tear. “So beautiful,” another whispered.
Occom laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder as he finished. “The savage in all of us can be tamed,” he declared. “The once-wild spirit can be a messenger of the Lord. Luke here would stand with your sons in the classrooms you will build on the banks of the Connecticut.”
Wheelock’s college. This was all about Wheelock’s college, Duncan realized. Another man would have felt betrayed when the pious Wheelock proclaimed that Occom’s dream for the funds he so painstakingly collected had been superseded by Wheelock’s own dream, but Samson Occom had swallowed his bitterness and was now plowing the ground for Wheelock’s college of the north, readying it for the seeds Wheelock would plant. He was also preparing the local population for the integration of at least a few tribal students with their own offspring. Occom had lost his war but was hoping to win at least one battle.
Duncan pulled his hat still lower as Occom surveyed his audience. “There will be a good living made for years by those who join in the construction of the great college,” the pastor pointed out, “and opportunities for Christian charity at every step. There will be orphans of both red and white skin, like Luke here, who will be candidates for admission if they could but find good families to support them.”
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