Savage Liberty

by Eliot Pattison

  The colonel made an awkward gesture with the skull and seemed about to decline, then gave a gasp of delight as the vicar opened the top drawer of the cabinet, revealing a score of bird skins, all with the feathers intact, each with a small card in Bougainville’s writing indicating the species. The vicar turned one over, that of a wood duck. “You can see he signed each one after preparing it. He was a skilled commander of soldiers, but I do believe this was his real passion. If you will allow me,” the vicar said, opening the second drawer, of small skulls, then the third, of snakeskins and turtle shells.

  “Heavens, sir, how you do tantalize me!” Hazlitt exclaimed. “But I don’t understand why you honor me with this invitation.”

  “Someday,” Conawago said over his shoulder, “I will take you to see a fisher on its hunt.”

  Hazlitt spun about. “Sir! How could you be . . . McCallum!” he exclaimed as Duncan approached, pushing down his hood. Hazlitt’s hand went to his belt, but he had not brought his pistol.

  “We ask only that you give us a few minutes, Colonel,” Duncan said. “We have a tale you will want to hear. If you prefer to leave this instant, you are free to do so. If you wish to send troops to try to find us, that will be your choice, though we will not be here. We have alarming news.”

  “Most irregular!” Hazlitt groused, but the anger quickly faded from his eyes.

  The vicar pointed to a decanter on a side table. “Colonel Bougainville always sipped on brandywine when studying his animals here.” Without asking, the vicar poured four glasses, extending one to the colonel. “Our mute friar always accompanied him on his expeditions and still keeps his forest retreat for him. They would bring back specimens and sit here for hours, preparing the skins and making drawings.”

  Hazlitt’s eyes drifted longingly toward the cabinet of specimens, then caught himself. “You are a fugitive from the king’s justice, McCallum.” He frowned at Conawago. “As are all those who helped you escape.”

  “I am a fugitive from a clandestine agent who manipulates charges and truths however they may suit him,” Duncan replied. “We will not play his game. And we will not dishonor this house of God with falsehoods.”

  Hazlitt sighed. “I was content not to hang you, McCallum, but there are others who will exercise no discretion in that regard.”

  “There is an invisible war under way, sir,” Conawago explained, “with invisible foes gathered here in Montreal.”

  The colonel grimaced. “We’ve had a taste of it, I fear. Corporal Buchanan was set upon by that brute Mallory. Mallory wanted to know where you were. Most likely the bottom of Lake Champlain, Buchanan said, and Mallory did not find the answer to his liking. Buchanan had to spend two days in the infirmary and was released just this morning.” Hazlitt paused, silently studying Duncan. “But despite your obvious inclination for self-destruction, you apparently have some Celtic angel hovering over you.” He turned at the sound of marching boots and watched as a patrol of soldiers passed the rectory, and for a moment Duncan feared he would open the sash and call out to them. Then he faced Duncan with a frown. “I make no promise other than that I will listen,” he declared, and sat down.

  THE RED-JACKETED GUARD AT THE door of the old arsenal was expecting two visitors, though clearly not one wearing the uniform of a captain of rangers. He rose to stiff attention, saluted Woolford, and nodded uncertainly to Duncan, who wore an austere suit of clothes borrowed from the rectory.

  “Colonel says an hour, sir, no more,” the guard said.

  “How fares the prisoner?” Woolford asked.

  “At first he would readily converse with us, speaking about his campaigns in the war and such. But now his tongue is stilled. He spends most days just staring out one of the windows.”

  The man inside the cell seemed disinterested in visitors. As they walked in, he did not turn from the small iron-barred window over the river. The chamber had been used for storing powder and shells during the war, and a hint of sulfur and saltpeter hung in the air. The furnishings consisted of a small cot with a straw pallet and blankets, three stools, and a table holding two candlesticks, several books, paper, and writing quills with a chipped pot of ink. The small hearth was empty, and the stone walls gave the room a dank chill.

  “The winters at Michilimackinac are long, I hear,” Woolford said to the prisoner’s back.

  Duncan had briefly met Robert Rogers and knew him to be fiercely strong, not only in body but also in mind, known for the intense determination that burned in his eyes. But the man who turned to face his visitors was haggard and dull-eyed. He seemed to have aged decades.

  “The frigid air makes for good pelts,” Rogers replied in a distant voice. He looked at the blank paper as he spoke, and Duncan realized that the man’s usual visitors came to coerce written confessions.

  “It’s Patrick Woolford, sir,” Woolford said. “I brought some Mohawk venison sticks.” He dropped onto the table several pieces of the smoked venison that was a favorite of rangers when running the forests.

  Rogers blinked; then gradually his face lit and his eyes found their focus. “Captain Woolford!” he exclaimed. “By Jehovah, Patrick, it is you!” The ranger sprang to Woolford’s side and seemed about to embrace him but at the last moment halted and collected himself, straightening his soiled uniform and extending a hand. “I heard you took a civilian post with Sir William.”

  “Seconded, sir. I still maintain my captaincy and still run a dozen rangers for . . .” Woolford caught himself. “Special errands,” he concluded with a grin.

  Rogers still pumped his hand.

  “I have brought an old acquaintance. You met Mr. McCallum years ago, I recollect.”

  Rogers cocked his head. “I confess to confusion. I do recall you, sir, but I had heard you were a fugitive on charges of treason and murder.”

  “Charges brought by the same men who have accused you, Major,” Duncan said.

  Rogers frowned, and his eyes clouded with suspicion. “If that were true, you could not be walking around this fortress as a free man. I am done being practiced on, sir.”

  “Colonel Hazlitt has granted me something of a truce.”

  Rogers lifted a piece of venison and took a bite, then retreated to the river window, where he turned his back on them. “First they brought in two grenadiers,” he began, speaking toward the river, “who stood as some snot-nosed pup of an officer read statements that they had seen me on several occasions drinking with Colonel Bougainville after the capitulation of Montreal back in ’60. I said bugger off, that he was a fine gentleman who only wanted to speak of the flora and fauna of the northern forest. They brought in some whore from a French tavern in Quebec City and read her statement that I had boasted to her of sheltering Jesuits when King Louis was suppressing them. They brought in some damned jealous Presbyterian missionary who said I had helped papist farmers of the Quebec colony move into new land along Champlain. They brought in a drunken voyageur who said I had him deliver secret messages to Frenchmen in St. Francis. Bugger them all. Bugger you if you come with more of the same filthy suggestions. An Englishman is entitled to confront the hard facts against him if he is meant to die, not just listen to the slander of drunks and whores. And now you. What do you offer, testimony that I was bedding the queen?”

  “I can see how the formation of the state of Champlain would be a noble adventure, Major,” Duncan said to his back. “But we’d rather choose to save your life.”

  Rogers went very still. He placed a hand on a bar in the window as if to steady himself, then turned, slowly stepped to the table, and sat. “On that particular subject,” he stated with a thin, bitter smile, “I am open to suggestion.”

  Duncan spoke for nearly half an hour, explaining everything he knew about the conspiracy from Paris. He did not soften his words when he reviewed the separate Saguenay scheme Rogers had launched with disgruntled Jesuits and French colonists. The major silently listened, murmuring low curses when he heard of the loss of the Arcturus and
the deaths of his former rangers.

  “They arrived at the intersection of the schemes without knowing it,” Rogers said with a sigh. “Oliver and Chisholm were gears that inadvertently clogged against that damned French machine. Oliver had declined my offer to come north, saying he had a new life at sea, though I suspect he had some hand in with Mr. Hancock’s Sons of Liberty. Chisholm received my offer and said he would come north for Saguenay in a few months after taking care of some important personal business.”

  “Getting married,” Duncan inserted. “To a woman who loved Shakespeare.”

  Rogers shook his head forlornly. “More’s the pity.” He clenched a fist. “Mog. That cunning bastard. He bragged of taking scores of scalps, of eating my friends’ hearts. We tried to snare him more than once. He was as close to the proverbial bloodthirsty savage as ever you’d meet. I told my men to keep an eye for him at St. Francis and shoot to kill if they saw him.”

  Duncan had explained the struggle in St. Francis. “A ranger got him at last,” Woolford reminded Rogers. “Somehow I think Brandt knew what would happen, as if their final encounter was predestined. Mog could have snuffed him out like a candle, but he wanted to play with Brandt. But Brandt played him too. The man didn’t know that old rangers are the most dangerous ones,” Woolford said pointedly.

  Duncan glanced at Woolford, worried that he had just added fuel to the fire that they were trying to extinguish. Emotion did indeed swirl on Rogers’s countenance. “The king knows nothing about this land,” he said as he pushed the fire down. “The tribes are its greatest resource, and he treats them like inconvenient pests to be trod underfoot. The colonists are better educated and more diligent than men in England, and he treats them no better than a feudal lord treated his serfs. He prohibits them from manufacturing most things, so our riches cannot be put to use. He never earned the right to rule this land, it fell on him like some windfall from a horse race.”

  In the silence, they could hear commands echoing across the river as a ship bound for the Atlantic got under way.

  “You would be mistaken if you thought we were here to argue those points,” Duncan finally said. Both Woolford and Rogers cocked their heads at him in surprise. These were dangerous words Duncan was endorsing, yet he felt an unexpected catharsis, as if Rogers had released the sentiment that had been building in his heart. “There is no land like this land,” he added, echoing the words he had heard from old tribesmen under a summer moon. “The king will fail if he keeps treating it like the Old World.”

  “Duncan!” Woolford warned in a whisper, glancing back at the door, as if worried that the guard might have heard.

  But Duncan had finished. “We’re not talking about the king’s rights today, Major. We are talking about the king’s power to hang you.”

  Rogers’s face darkened again.

  Duncan reached into a pocket and laid the pouch he had taken from Hahnowa’s grave on the table. “I am completing Corporal Brandt’s mission.”

  Rogers seemed to stop breathing. His eyes went round; then he extracted the contents of the pouch. He stacked the papers and withdrew the necklace of red and white beads with the quillwork image of a man and a woman holding hands.

  Duncan waited with great anticipation for Rogers to consult the papers, to fully explain the mystery behind them, but he paid no attention to them at all. As the major pressed the quillwork image to his lips, realization struck Duncan. He had wanted only the necklace. Rogers was certain he was going to hang, and he wanted to wear the necklace, his link to his wife, in his death.

  “Hahnowa would not want you to end this way,” Duncan said after a long silence. “Let us take you back to her. Let us bring her Mohawk family and spirit talkers to her grave, to say the words that will bring her peace.”

  Something caught in Rogers’s throat. He pressed his fist to his mouth with one hand and clutched the beads with the other. The storm on his face had broken. “It’s too late, I fear,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  “No,” Duncan said. “Tell us where King Louis’s gold is.”

  Rogers’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know, McCallum, I swear it!”

  Duncan stared at the man who had masterminded the disappearance of the gold so many years before. “Swear it on the eternal soul of your wife, Major.”

  Rogers’s face clouded. He stared at the necklace and cupped both hands around it. “I so swear,” he whispered. “Yes, LaBrosse showed it to me the night before the raid, and we agreed that it should be hidden from the French Army, and yes, I knew it was in a cave overlooking the St. Lawrence at first. But after the war I told him to move it away from St. Francis. He sent it to Montreal.”

  “You mean to the Jesuits in Montreal.”

  “LaBrosse is a very cautious man, and the Jesuits are cunning. We agreed that I would not be told and that, if possible, he should trust it to someone else, who would hide it without his own knowledge and shift it again later. Later I learned that it stayed for two years in the grave of a Scot who fell in the last battle.”

  “Marked by a Celtic cross,” Duncan said.

  “Yes, but I had said that each group who hid it must not know where the next group took it. When the time came, it would be made available to LaBrosse, but only in small amounts through merchants in Montreal, so as to not arouse suspicion.”

  “Made available by Jesuits.”

  “By men who had proved they could be trusted, men who respected vows as sacred trusts. Jesuits, yes, and perhaps members of their missions. LaBrosse once told me that he knew only that it was guarded by wolves. Once, in a letter, he mentioned that our great secret was held by one who would hold it forever in silence.”

  As Woolford questioned Rogers about bankers and merchants who might have been tapped to administer the funds used for the new settlers along Champlain, Duncan chewed on the ranger’s words. They had no time to chase down every possible intermediary, as Beck was trying to do. They would be wrong, moreover, to think about the money the way the government would think about it. They had to think about it the way Jesuits and their particular allies would. A dim spark kindled in his mind and he grinned as it grew in brightness. He knew where the French gold was.

  21

  HAYES WAS PLAYING THE RELUCTANT but polite companion as Duncan and Conawago escorted him down the shadowed streets. The tinker—for Duncan still thought of him as such—seemed to have melancholy permanently etched on his features, and Duncan worried that the man he had come to admire for his intelligence and compassion would now endure only as a hollow shell of his former self. The night before, Duncan had awakened to the smell of smoke and found Hayes in the kitchen, his beard gone. He had revived the fire in the large hearth and was feeding his letters to Rebecca, carried for years as a sign of his devotion, into the flames.

  “Voyageurs!” Will Sterret exclaimed from behind them now, not for the first time, as they passed a group of compact, bearded men in leather tunics who wore their hair Indian fashion in braids woven with beads and fur. Duncan often felt a stir of excitement when he saw the spirited adventurers who traveled to far western reaches never seen by other Europeans, but he reminded himself that at least one voyageur was a brute who worked for the French spies and had tortured Father Andre.

  As had become his habit, Hayes responded with a silent nod, then extended a hand into the pouch under his shoulder to stroke Sadie, who had become even more precious to him since the terrible blow he received in St. Francis and her own brush with death.

  “This way,” Conawago said, and they followed him down a cobbled alley to what looked like a sturdy but disused stable built of stone and timber. Conawago opened the heavy door as if familiar with the building, and they found themselves in an entryway that was filled with the scent of sawdust. A girl of perhaps thirteen years with a scarf wrapped around her head was on her knees, pounding wooden trunnels into fresh oak floorboards as a middle-aged tribesman stood by with an auger. The girl rose, swept dust from her long apron, and cheerful
ly greeted Conawago. She pushed a lock of brunette hair under her scarf and studied Solomon Hayes with an inquisitive expression, then curtsied and without introduction led them down the unfinished hallway to a newly hung set of double doors. She wiped her hands on her apron, touched a little box on the door frame, then cracked open one of the doors.

  “Papa,” she called. “Mr. Conawago is here with his friends.”

  From inside came what sounded like furniture scraping on a floor and tools being hastily put away. Hayes cast an impatient glance at his companions. He seemed to be barely tolerating this foray into Montreal’s damp streets. Conawago put a hand on Hayes’s shoulder as if to be sure he would not flee.

  “A ship arrived with a crate from Portugal,” the girl announced, as if it explained their delay. “Such places those sailors must see!”

  “Rachel, it is well,” came a tentative voice from inside, and the girl opened the door.

  Half a dozen horse stalls had been reclaimed to create a large chamber, its freshly laid oak floor covered with a dozen wooden benches facing two simple tables. A black curtain hung from a rafter to separate two of the benches from the others.

  Hayes, still uninterested, focused on Sadie.

  “Welcome!” called a thin, energetic man standing in front of a tall cabinet along the back wall. He lifted a candelabra from a table beside the cabinet and brought it forward in one hand as he self-consciously adjusted the small cap on the crown of his head and straightened the fringed shawl draped around his waist.

  “Honored, sir,” the man said as Conawago introduced Duncan. “I am Jacob Cohen. As you see, we are still completing our little establishment and have received very few guests to date.” Cohen turned to Hayes. “Shalom,” he said in cheerful greeting, and extended a hand.

  Hayes blinked, as if awakening from a deep sleep. His eyes fixed on the candelabra Cohen had set on one of the front tables. It was a menorah. A strangled gasp came from Hayes’s throat. He seemed unable to reply.