Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  “Is there a difference?”

  “I think there may be. The Jesuits have no love for King Louis after he suppressed their order.”

  “We would have to have witnesses, McCallum.”

  “We?”

  Hazlitt sighed. “I am the president of the tribunal. Three of us, charged with conducting Rogers’s trial in Montreal.”

  “You would hang us both on the word of Beck?”

  “On the word of the men Beck represents, who speak for the king. In the war, such things happened.”

  “If this is to be a new war, would you let a man like Beck start it? Beck has no honor. Finding me guilty will just bolster his case against Rogers.”

  The colonel frowned. “Innuendos. I can do nothing with them.” He noticed Duncan’s writing on the wall and paced along it in careful contemplation. He pointed to Duncan’s most recent inscription, “louis d’or.” “King Louis’s gold?” he asked.

  “A successful prosecution of Rogers may win Beck accolades in London and relieve him of a large debt,” Duncan said. “But finding the missing gold, more importantly, would make him one of the wealthiest men in London.”

  “It’s a myth!”

  Duncan shrugged. “The gold existed. It didn’t just evaporate. Beck started asking about it years ago, after he gambled with Rogers in New York.”

  “If it exists, it belongs to King George.”

  “But I wager Beck has not reported that he has caught a scent of it.”

  Hazlitt stared silently at Duncan, then called to Buchanan, waiting at the door. The corporal entered carrying a small writing table, followed by the second soldier with a chair. “There are empty quarters on this floor,” the colonel explained with a shrug. “This furniture is unused. I will have a fresh straw pallet brought.” He glanced up at Duncan and quickly looked away, instructing Buchanan on placement of the furniture. “I will send paper, ink, and a candle lantern,” he added. He took a step toward the door, then halted and extracted a small volume from a pocket and set it on the table. “Meditations in poetry,” he said. “I sometimes find them comforting.” He turned to the door.

  Duncan spoke to his back. “You would hang Rogers on the word of Beck and some faceless men in London? The ones who would have me dragged back to Boston in chains, just as they dragged Rogers in chains from Michilimakinac?”

  Hazlitt spoke over his shoulder. “No one is intending to take you to Boston,” he declared in a thick voice, then disappeared down the dark corridor.

  Left on the table was a slip of paper. Buchanan had inscribed the images from the powder horn of the officer from the Royal Scots. The corporal had helped by adding under the sketched fortress walls the scrawled word Montreal. Beside the walls he had drawn the graveyard from the horn, with several nondescript tombstones on either side of a much-larger one. It was a Scottish cross, a traditional cross intersected at its center by a circle, or nimbus, as the church called it. Duncan lifted his charred stick and drew a similar cross at the bottom of the column in the corner, by Williams’s name. He considered the images on the horns of Rogers’s confidants. The chimney rock, marking the location of Hahnowa’s grave. Chevelure, where new settlers from Quebec were building a tower. The church with the canoe, which he suspected was at St. Francis. The nimbus cross in Montreal. It was a geographic sequence, a listing, he suspected, of missions or assignments for four stealthy rangers. There had been another ranger, Branscomb, who had died in Boston of natural causes. He must have had a horn as well, and Duncan suspected it would have depicted Fort Number Four or perhaps a ship on Lake Champlain.

  Minutes later the door opened again and Buchanan gestured in a new visitor. Conawago brought his own stool, which he set in front of the table. His face was haggard and heavily lined, as if he had been sleeping no more than Duncan himself. He silently reached inside his waistcoat and in quick succession extracted a sausage, a small fresh-baked loaf, two apples, and half a dozen hard-boiled eggs.

  Duncan sat opposite the old Nipmuc and ravenously consumed half the sausage, then slowed, breaking off a piece of bread. “You look terrible,” Duncan said to his old friend.

  “I never sleep well at military establishments,” Conawago replied in a weary voice. “Are you comfortable here?”

  “I am dry, and what bedding there is isn’t infested with lice. Why haven’t you come?”

  “I tried, from that very first hour. Horatio Beck lords over everyone in this fort and placed guards not only at the cell but at the base of the stairs as well. At every change of the guard for the first two days I tried again, the last time coming with Will and Molly. That despicable Sergeant Mallory stopped us, and when Molly growled, he kicked her so hard we feared he broke a rib. He said next time the beast tries to interfere with him, he will put a bullet in her head.”

  “But you’re here now.”

  “I’m afraid Beck has gone. That’s why we’ve been able to come at last.”

  “Afraid?”

  Conawago looked down at the table as he spoke. “Beck said he had the authority to hang you, right here, that summary execution was authorized to prevent the active spread of treason. The colonel refused, said he would use force to stop such a travesty. So Beck has gone to Albany to get a tame general to sign.”

  Duncan felt a tightness in his throat. “Sign?”

  Conawago seemed to have trouble speaking. “A warrant, Duncan. When he returns in two days, he intends to hang you.”

  STANDING ON THE TABLE NOW, Duncan stared out the window, watching the moon rise over Champlain. In two days, Beck meant to hang him. He would never let an English noose choke away his life. He tested the bars. With a little more work with his shaped stone they would be ready for a blow that would break their fittings. Tomorrow at midnight, with the moon high over the water, he would knock them away and drop to the ground. If the fall didn’t kill him, they would find him dragging his broken body toward the forest, and he would resist enough for them to use their bayonets. His death, like his life, would be measured by the smallest of victories.

  A new ship had arrived that day, a two-masted sloop of eight small guns, with a square-rigged mainmast and a rear mast rigged fore and aft. She was smaller than the brig anchored nearby, but both were no doubt part of the Champlain fleet that patrolled between the Rideau River at the far north end of the lake and Ticonderoga. For a moment Duncan saw the lined, weathered face of his grandfather standing behind the wheel and laughing as wind-driven rain slashed his face, and he realized that the sleek lines of the sloop were much the same as those of his grandfather’s favorite vessel. Earlier, he had heard his mother’s voice coming down the chimney, singing one of her waulking songs used when softening the wool before weaving. Was this the way the soul prepared for the end, summoning images and sounds from earlier in life? The bones of his body would break the next day, but the bones of his soul felt like they were already breaking. Had he begun to die?

  HE HAD DOZED OFF, HIS head cradled in his arms on the table, when the sound of the shutting door stirred him. Solomon Hayes stood before him. It was past dawn, and Hayes put his porridge bowl on the table, along with a small piece of ham.

  “You are looking much recovered,” Duncan said to the Jewish tinker after drinking from the jar of barley water offered by Hayes.

  “Fully so, thanks to your assistance.”

  Duncan knew he did not deserve the tinker’s gratitude, and he did not reply.

  Hayes looked at him with an awkward expression. “The guard at the stairs finally took a shilling to give me a few minutes. The big Scot at the door declined my offer.”

  “You bribed a guard?”

  “An accommodation, they call it. The sutler by the gate explained that they accept accommodations to allow small favors to prisoners.”

  “The favor of your company?”

  To Duncan’s surprise, Hayes laughed. “More in the nature of a mutual favor,” he said, glancing nervously toward the corridor. “I sell my beads and tin cups
and buttons up and down the frontier, and I actually have become quite adept at repairing broken pots. But my real business is paying coin for information.”

  Duncan, careful not to give offense, took a moment to weigh his words. “About your wife, you mean.”

  “My first year on the trails it was always about my wife. Have you seen a woman with reddish-brown hair, my height, with hazel eyes? But then I realized that direct questions made most tribesman uncomfortable, as if I would think them complicit if they knew something. So I became more subtle. I would ask if business for my wares would be good at the slave markets in the north, for example, and what kinds of things might sell. I ask if silver brooches or yellow ribbon would sell in the north, for my Rebecca liked both, on the off chance she had a generous owner. Over time, my informants became something of a network,” Hayes confessed. “They would seek out information knowing I would pay for it. Sometimes they offer secrets that seem to have nothing to do with European captives.”

  “And?”

  “One of those informants is here. He’s been looking for me these past weeks, up and down the lake. He thought I should know about movements in the Champlain Valley.”

  “Movements. You make it sound like military intelligence.”

  “Judge for yourself. Movements of farmers, all from the old New France colony, several to Chevelure but also along other strategic points where rivers enter the lake.” Duncan recalled that one of the lists in Rogers’s secret pouch from 1759 had been of rivers that flowed into the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. “The farmers are receiving plentiful deliveries of supplies, and they’ve been given credit with certain French merchants in Montreal who commit that the debt will be forgiven if they stay on their land for a year.”

  Duncan’s brow narrowed. The girl at Chevelure had mentioned benefactors in the north, saints in St. Francis and Montreal.

  “Credit to buy supplies, even wagons and horses. They are moving south.” Hayes looked back at the door and leaned closer. “I try to keep eyes at those places, watching for signs of captives being moved. There’s a report from a river at the north of the lake, of barges being loaded with supplies. There’s a word they speak, like a secret password.”

  “Saguenay,” Duncan suggested.

  Hayes nodded. “Exactly. And then there’s this.” He reached into his waistcoat and produced a large golden coin. “My informant had worked for a month for them, and this was his pay. He asked me to change it.” He pushed the coin across the table to Duncan. It was a gold louis from France, with a mint date of 1756, identical to the one Will had received from the dead ranger. If the French treasure existed, its coins would have been minted no later than 1759.

  “He also reported that Abenaki from all the mountains and valleys are being summoned to St. Francis to speak of migrating to the west. They would travel with their captives.”

  Duncan eyed Hayes with alarm. “Surely you don’t mean to go to St. Francis?”

  “I do. I must. If Rebecca is a slave to one of those families bound for the west, she may be put forever out of my reach.”

  “You could become a slave yourself, or sliced into a stewpot.”

  “I don’t think so. That’s part of it, you see. This is being organized by a Christian, by a Jesuit.”

  Duncan’s hand went to the folded statement, hidden again inside his belt. “Tell me, Hayes,” he asked urgently, “do you know his name?”

  “Of course, for I mean to speak with him. Father Jean-Baptiste de LaBrosse.”

  For an hour after Hayes left, Duncan paced along his arc, once more trying to fit his fragments together. Every time he felt close to finding answers, it seemed the pieces were tossed into the air again, coming down in new patterns. He stared at his jumble of words on the wall, then wrote one more, Saguenay. He began drawing lines connecting to Oliver and Father LaBrosse, then Chevelure, the village whose tall windmill had been foreseen years earlier. He drew another line, connecting Robert Rogers to Saguenay. Saguenay? It was the word that linked everything together, though he could not cipher how. He paced along the wall, then gave up and climbed to the window, watching the birds and the small boats moving on the lake. Perhaps if he watched long enough, the fabled beast of the lake would rise up and free him.

  The door latch rattled, and Duncan jumped down, sitting on the table as Corporal Buchanan appeared. The big Scot stepped aside for Conawago, then returned to the corridor, locking the door behind him.

  The old Nipmuc had not taken notice of Duncan’s notes on the wall during his first visit, but he lingered over them now, finishing with a new inscription Duncan had borrowed from Hazlitt’s volume of poetry:

  Early or late,

  They stoop to fate

  And must give up their murmuring breath

  When they, pale captives, creep to death.

  “James Shirley, if I am not mistaken,” Conawago said with a sigh. “Not particularly profound, Duncan.”

  “Nothing about this feels profound. Ironic, no doubt. Tragic. Morbid, even. Perhaps I should have chosen that most Scottish of complainers, Macbeth. ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.’ ” Conawago seemed about to protest, but Duncan cut him off by raising his voice. “ ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ That’s more like it, though I’m the idiot, dying as a pawn without even knowing who is playing me.”

  The Nipmuc stared impassively at him.

  Duncan felt shamed. He had been terrified of this moment. He did not know how to say goodbye to the gentle old man.

  Conawago’s gaze turned to the crumpled papers in the hearth.

  “Letters to Sarah,” Duncan explained. He had sat for hours, his heart leaden, trying to find the right words. “I decided none is best.”

  “Surely you must write.”

  Duncan’s voice was becoming hoarse. “Write what? An apology for disappointing her on the journey? A diatribe against an unjust king? My regrets that our impossible dream could never happen? Instructions for planting the apple trees?”

  “To speak the words of your heart, of course. Those are not from your heart. She deserves better.”

  Duncan knew there no words left in the cavern of his heart. “Best for her to just continue on the course she chose in Boston.”

  “Boston? I am not sure I follow.”

  “There’s no point in shielding me anymore, old friend.”

  “Duncan, I am at a loss.”

  “She wouldn’t say goodbye to me when we parted. She thought she was coming to Boston to marry me, and I ruined that. You and I both know there is another man in her life now. The brightest man in Boston, she calls him, barely able to contain her enthusiasm. The one she met at Mrs. Pope’s on more than one occasion, though very carefully orchestrated so I was never there. The one she writes secret letters to. I may have been slow to ken it, but I am not blind. John Adams is his name. She said that if I am arrested, she can always go back to Boston, to Mr. Adams. There is no point in my standing in the way of her feelings for him, no point in pretending any longer.”

  Conawago’s jaw dropped. He stared in disbelief; then a grin slowly creased his weathered face. A sound of surprise escaped his throat, then another, until finally the sounds congealed into laughter. He laughed so hard he had to put a hand on his belly to catch his breath. “Perhaps not completely blind, but completely the fool. John Adams is a lawyer, Duncan.”

  “Another reason to loathe him.”

  Conawago still chuckled. “Sarah retained him for his counsel, to file a writ. She made me promise to keep it secret because she wanted to surprise you. She hired him to set aside the order extending your indenture. Adams said that you never left British territory because you were serving under obligation on a British ship, Mr. Hancock’s ship. So the extension to your indenture ordered because you left British territory is mistaken. He told her he is confident he will prevail once the magistrate takes u
p the case.”

  The words did not fully penetrate Duncan’s gloom. “Set aside the order?” he asked.

  “Establishing officially that your indenture is finished despite the devious efforts of Lord Ramsey. She’s doing it because she says you are a stubborn Scot who puts too much reliance on pieces of paper and she has to teach you the Mohawk way of the heart. It’s her way of fighting for you, of being the warrior for the two of you.”

  Duncan was having difficulty breaking through the chaos of his grief and anger. “I am her indentured servant.”

  “No, you will not be when Adams is finished. You will have been free for weeks. You will be free to take the marriage bonds.”

  Duncan sensed something like a dim light shining through the fog of his torment. “But surely after what I did to Hayes . . . I had never seen her so angry.”

  Conawago held up an interrupting hand. “That very night, at the little farm, she asked for a candle and stayed up long after the others to write a letter to Mr. Adams, asking him to speed up the process at whatever the cost, for she feared you were getting frustrated with her. She is prideful, Duncan, like you, but her heart has never strayed.”

  Duncan’s head seemed to spin. From outside came the echoing boom of the evening gun. He looked back at the wall, then down at the paper and quill on the desk. “Then what a terrible letter I must write her,” he said with a strangled voice. For a moment his heart had soared, but the gun had brought him back to his senses. Everything in his heart had changed, but nothing about his death had changed.

  Conawago quickly sobered. “There is still another day, Duncan.”

  “Is there word from Ishmael?”

  “I fear not. We cannot confirm that our messages intercepted him. But I hope for him every hour.”

  Despair crept back into Duncan’s heart. “Could Munro visit?” he asked.

  “I will see. He has been busy. Spends much of his time with the Highlanders.”

  The explanation hurt. Duncan thought his friendship with the old Scot had been stronger. Had Munro’s discomfort over the talk against kings indeed come between them? “Then you can tell him for me. There is a burial field at the edge of the plain where all those Highlanders died back in ’58. They were brave men, men who knew Clan McCallum. I would like to rest with them.”