Eye of the Raven

by Eliot Pattison

  Duncan’s own eyes went round with awe. Conawago stared at the bell device with boyish wonder. Marston was hiding them in the home of Benjamin Franklin.

  They were at a front-facing bedroom, confirming that the street outside was quiet, when Duncan recalled the books downstairs. “Is the library available to you as well, Marston?”

  “Naturally. And to many of his friends. Dr. Franklin is responsible for the formation of a public lending library not ten minutes from here. He believes it is the duty of each citizen to continually improve himself.”

  “Mathematical books? Books on codes in particular?”

  “Of course! The code on the trees!” Marston darted for the stairs, leaving Duncan and Conawago to find their way in the dark.

  Franklin’s peculiar organization of his books at first mystified Duncan, but Marston soon located a row of mathematical treatises on a top shelf, consisting largely of the works of Euclid, Descartes, and Leibnitz, along with a deposition on the variations in units of measurement in half a dozen European countries. But nothing on codes or cyphers.

  “I am not sure he would classify the subject with mathematics,” Marston said pensively. “But where . . .?” he asked himself as he surveyed the shelves again. They searched through the books on religion, for Franklin believed early religious tracts contained hidden cyphers, then began a systematic search of every shelf. It was more than a quarter hour before Conawago uttered an exclamation of discovery.

  “With the books on the printing press and typesetting,” he explained, and he pulled out a slender volume entitled Cyphers of the Ancients. It was, to their chagrin, almost entirely about the Greek square, the numeric grid employed by Athenian battle commanders, and the Greek scytale used by the Spartans. Not a word about the pigpen cypher.

  “Is there nothing else?” Duncan asked in disappointment.

  Marston leaned over the shelf. “Nothing,” he announced, then probed an empty space and extracted a slip of paper. “The Cryptographer’s Manual,” he read with new excitement. “On loan. I can just retrieve it from—” his words choked away. “It says,” he announced, “that the book is at Lord Ramsey’s!”

  Duncan stared at the slip in disbelief. He felt the last of his hope drifting away.

  “Can it truly be a coincidence?” Conawago asked after a forlorn silence.

  “He is known for his great collection of books,” Marston offered.

  “The rot of the Ramsey house spreads to everything it touches,” Duncan said grimly. Surely, he prayed, it had not come to this, surely after all he and the tribes had endured, the path of his own troubles with Ramsey had not converged with those of the murders. But in his heart Duncan realized that from the first moment he had heard Ramsey’s name in Pennsylvania, something inside him had sensed the shadow of the treacherous lord, like some wraith stalking him.

  “Evil finds its own,” Conawago said heavily.

  Duncan offered a reluctant nod of agreement. Ramsey viewed himself as above the law, in reality was above the law, and though he was one of the richest men in the colonies, his real currencies were deception and secret violence. He gazed at his old friend and considered what he had said. Conawago was pointing out there were others involved. Ramsey himself would never be touched by the law, but those who did his bidding could be stopped.

  Duncan looked at the slip of paper with Ramsey’s name on it. “Surely this is not the only such book in Philadelphia.”

  “I will make inquiries at the Library Company,” Marston offered, “but it appears to be a rare volume published many years ago. Dr. Franklin often ordered single copies of works from a bookseller in London.”

  “Then someone must get into Lord Ramsey’s library,” Duncan concluded.

  Marston looked startled. “Not any of us, surely. I am not of sufficient social rank to be admitted to that inner sanctum.”

  Duncan paced around the room, along the ranks of books and the table of Dr. Franklin’s collections. His gaze lingered on an ornately carved box beside several ancient stone ax heads. “My pack,” he said to Conawago. “You must retrieve it. If it falls into the wrong hands they will try to use that box of Townsend’s with the turtle scratched on it to link Skanawati to his killing. Give it to Old Belt for safekeeping.” He kept gazing at Franklin’s little box as he spoke. “There is,” he suggested in a contemplative voice, “a witness of sorts to what happened at the first murder.”

  “Ohio George is dead.” Conawago was puzzled. “And now Red Hand.”

  “Burke sent Townsend into the wilderness, promised to publish his book, an offer more valuable than currency to a man like Townsend. So Townsend went to Shamokin, and out onto the Warriors Path because he trusted the Iroquois. Skanawati the elder was a warrior but no cold-blooded murderer. When he killed, he killed enemies of his tribe. He was deceived. If we understand that deception we may understand who was the deceiver.”

  “The only ones we know are dead,” Marston pointed out again.

  “The ones whose faces we know, yes. But there was at least one more.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because of the code carved on the trees. Townsend did not carve it as a sign of his own murder. Nor did any Indian. It was done by a European. One familiar with a code book brought to Philadelphia by Dr. Franklin. And there is a witness to what was done at that first tree, where Townsend died. He is locked in the prison not half a mile from here.”

  “The plunge in the river has left you daft,” Conawago protested. “The Skanawati we know was not the Skanawati who killed Townsend.”

  “The plunge in the river reminded me of the Susquehanna. Stone Blossom said there is an essence passed from one Skanawati to the next. You have taught me that among the tribes the lives of spirits and the lives of men are intertwined.” Duncan looked up at Marston. “I must see him.”

  His two companions stared at him as if Duncan had indeed lost his senses.

  “And what?” Marston asked, “you will go throw pebbles at his cell window? The moment you are seen you will be arrested. You do not want to experience our jails despite the Quakers’ best efforts.”

  Duncan looked at the scientist with new interest. “The Quakers?”

  “The Quakers have a society for the improvement of prison conditions, the Benevolent Society, they call it. They have a notion that prisoners can be reformed, not just punished, that their bad habits can be healed like a disease. They have been of great help in relieving the squalor, even of some help to me.”

  Duncan weighed Marston’s words a moment, then leaned forward. “Are you saying you have a connection to the prison?”

  “They allow me to treat some prisoners, yes. They have even set up a treatment room in an empty cell.”

  “And how often do you do so?” Duncan could see the protest already rising on Conawago’s face as Marston pondered his question. Duncan did not wait for an answer. “You are going to the prison tomorrow, and with a new assistant. I must see Skanawati.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE STENCH HIT Duncan the moment he stepped through the heavy timber gate of the Walnut Street prison. The high brick walls of the foreyard gave little ventilation for the privies that lined one wall. For a moment he thought the men that sat along the other walls had been overpowered by the smell, then he saw that the debility on most of their faces was not physical. He had spent months in a king’s prison, then a prison ship, and knew the great killer was no one disease but rather despair.

  Marston paused to open a vial from which he poured vinegar onto his handkerchief before clamping it to his nose. Duncan, declining the offer of the vial, tightened his grip on the box he was carrying for the scientist and followed him into the building.

  The Benevolent Society had cleaned out a corner cell on the top floor for Marston’s sessions, and its high barred windows provided a modicum of air and light. The jailer, responsible for the entire institution, was a devout Quaker who, though he cast wary glances at the box Duncan carr
ied, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Society. He greeted Marston courteously and gestured them toward a turnkey who silently escorted them upstairs. Though the prison was much more noisy than those Duncan had known—where outbursts were met with clubs and cudgels—as the prisoners saw Marston approach they grew silent.

  “Sorcerer!” one muttered through the barred hatch of his heavy door. The moment another saw the scientist he began gasping in a fit of asthma.

  Marston quickly unpacked the box Duncan had been carrying onto a table beside a smaller electrical machine the Society allowed him to keep in the cell. He showed his new assistant first how to line up the Leyden jars they had brought with others already there, the workings of the harness that suspended certain prisoners from the ceiling for treatment, then how to steadily turn the wheel that spun the glass ball on the machine. By the time Marston proclaimed he was ready the turnkey had the first patient at the door, an older man with a paralyzed arm. The man silently acquiesced as Marston gestured him to the wooden armchair by the machine, did not protest when the scientist tied the useless arm to the chair then carefully separated the fingers with small rolls of linen between each. Marston placed the hand close to the glass ball and nodded for Duncan to begin rotating the wheel that spun the ball. Moments later a stream of blue flame arced to the nearest finger.

  The prisoner watched with an earnest fascination and did not react even as Marston, wearing a leather glove, moved another, then another fingertip to capture the electrical fluid.

  “From the machine into your body, always from the machine,” Marston murmured quietly to his patient as he worked.

  “I think I felt something that time, doctor!” the prisoner exclaimed as he lifted his arm from the chair when Marston released him.

  Marston nodded somewhat distractedly as he adjusted his device. “From the machine,” he said again, as if it was a habitual refrain accompanying the treatment.

  “From the machine?” Duncan asked as the prisoner left the cell. “But of course it is from the machine.”

  Marston looked up with a self-conscious glance. “There have been misunderstandings, about whether this work is for science or for the devil.”

  Duncan considered the words as he helped Marston adjust the jars. “Are you saying you have been accused of taking something out of your patients?”

  Marston nodded hesitantly. “It is the inevitable burden of those who introduce new science. The immortal Galileo and Copernicus were denounced to the Inquisition.” He winced under Duncan’s inquiring stare. “There are those who say we extract a patient’s soul to store in the glass ball.” The scientist looked toward the cell door, as if hoping for his next prisoner to appear. “Fools,” he murmured.

  “Did this happen at Shamokin?” Duncan pressed.

  Marston sighed and turned back to Duncan. “I was away, having Sunday dinner with the Moravians. Some Indians, Delawares and Shawnee, decided to use my equipment. There was an old Indian who had been feeling very weak in the chest, heart problems no doubt. They decided to treat him but had no notion of how to use the device. They let a massive charge build up then touched him in the chest. I am told there were sparks, a terrible smell of burning flesh, and he was rendered unconscious. When they examined him he had a molten lump of metal on his chest. When he regained consciousness he was weaker than ever, the sounds from his lips gibberish. He had clearly suffered some kind of collapse in his heart and brain. He died a few days later. They said my machine had extracted his spirit from his heart and melted it, leaving him an empty shell. When I investigated I found he had been wearing a copper medallion. They had no notion of the energy of the higher charges and so had melted the copper. It has happened numerous times, with lightning rods, with the swords of soldiers in storms, with nails on ships’ masts. But they wouldn’t listen, at their campfires they said I was a sorcerer, that I was planning to keep them from going on to the next world by reducing their souls to metal.” Marston shrugged. “I was at the end of my work in any event.”

  The second prisoner arrived, a man with a pronounced limp. Duncan silently helped Marston prepare the man in the chair, and as he turned the wheel he listened to Marston’s words again in his mind. The Indians, at least some of them, had decided a molten lump of metal on a dead or dying man was the work of witchcraft to extract and destroy his soul. Each of the dead men had had such a lump of metal, jammed in his throat. The killer knew it would have made the dead men taboo, too frightening to touch, would have kept other Indians away from the marker trees.

  The next prisoner was the gasping youth. Introduced as a pickpocket, he shook with fear when Marston strapped him in, screamed a curse as the arc touched his hand, and screamed again as Marston touched a metal rod from one of the Leyden jars to his ear. “My patrons believe that there is part of the brain that controls criminal behavior,” Marston explained over the young man’s abject moans, “that if we can but burn it away the soul shall return to harmony.” He gave, Duncan saw, but the lightest of touches to the ear, with the lowest of charges.

  Marston stepped to the door as the pickpocket was led away, checked the corridor, and nodded to Duncan, who proceeded with a spent jar back to the waiting wagon. The jailer waved him out through the entry and waved him back in with only a glance up from reading a broadsheet.

  Duncan moved quickly from cell to cell on the ground floor, stepping closer to the open hatches on the doors where no prisoner gazed out, ignoring the open cells whose occupants were outside. He paused at the end of the corridor, noticing a shadow in the corner that resolved into a stairwell as he drew closer. With a glance along the hallway he slipped down the stairs. The cellar extended only for half the length of the building, enough for half a dozen cells. Three of the heavy doors hung open, the fourth, judging by the dim lights of the two lanterns hanging in the corridor, held crates behind its locked door.

  Duncan lifted one of the lanterns from its hook and held it closer to one of the remaining doors. A fetid smell wafted from the cell. A man growled, and another spat a curse as if Duncan was disturbing them. He moved to the next cell. The same rancid smell came from its hatch, but so, too, did a faint scent of cedar.

  He gave a low call, the whistle of a warbler, that brought movement in the shadows. “Jiyathondek,” he whispered twice in the Iroquois tongue. Hearken. Listen. “It is Duncan. Conawago is close.”

  The chiseled face of the chief appeared in the dim light. Skanawati nodded in greeting. “Niyawenhkowa kady nonwa,” he said. Great thanks that in safety you have come through the forest. “Lamentable would be the consequences had you perished,” he continued in an untroubled, solemn voice.

  To Duncan’s surprise, he recognized the words. They were from the traditional Edge of the Woods ceremony, in which Indian travelers greeted each other after traveling far to meet. He struggled to recall the words of response that Conawago and the rangers had taught him. “I have seen the footmarks of our forefathers,” he recited after a moment. “All that remains is the smoke of their pipes.”

  For the first time since Duncan had known him, Skanawati smiled, then nodded his approval. “It is true, then,” the Onondaga observed, “the forest is entering your blood.”

  This is absurd, something shouted inside Duncan. There is so much to ask, so many mysteries to penetrate, and we are acting like we are picking berries in the wilderness. But he found himself smiling back. “True enough,” he acknowledged, then quickly added, “Marston is upstairs. He helped me.”

  Skanawati nodded again. “You must let them know back in our country that he is no enemy.”

  “There are other killers, Skanawati,” Duncan blurted out. “I am gathering the truth.”

  “Truth?” the Indian asked. He grew silent, studying Duncan. “The truth is I want all surveyors to be gone from the world. They are always the beginning of the end for the land spirits.”

  “Men are not hanged for the sins nurtured in their hearts, only the sins committed by their hands.” As
he spoke Duncan looked behind him, thinking he heard the stairs creak. He lifted the lantern along the frame of the door, looking for a key. To his surprise, he found one, hanging on a post in the center of the corridor.

  Skanawati hesitated when Duncan opened the cell door. He took only two small steps and lowered himself to sit on the floor against the wall. Duncan handed him a piece of sausage, brought from Marston’s kitchen, half of which the chieftain consumed before stuffing the remainder inside his soiled waistcoat.

  “Tell me something, Scotsman,” Skanawati asked. “Is it daylight out?”

  The question brought an unexpected ache to Duncan’s heart. “It is early afternoon.”

  Skanawati nodded.

  “I wish to understand about your uncle, the last chief. Why he would kill the surveyor Townsend. Was it because he knew of Townsend drawing a map? A great chief does not kill for no reason.”

  “The map had been destroyed by then,” the Onondaga said. “It was an old feud. His wife and her family, all his children, were killed by Huron and French raiders many years ago.”

  “But Townsend was not French.”

  “My uncle often wore a scarlet soldier’s coat. He had been given a medal from the English king when he was younger, for fighting for him in one of the wars.”

  Duncan struggled to make sense of the words. “You mean Townsend was with French that day?”

  Skanawati nodded. “My uncle found them at the marker tree, saw how Townsend and the French Indians laughed and drank together. Above all, he hates traitors. It had been traitors, English trappers paid with French gold, who had led the raiders to his village all those years ago. He swore blood vengeance on all such men.”

  Duncan paced in front of the Onondaga, straining to connect Skanawati’s revelation to the murders. “Who would know of your uncle’s feud?”

  “It was no secret.”

  “But why was he there that day, just when Townsend was with the French Indians?”