Eye of the Raven

by Eliot Pattison

“Some Shawnee came to him, told him he had found a traitor who needed to be stopped before he inflicted harm on the Iroquois. When I heard this I did not believe it. Townsend was not an evil man.”

  “And Townsend, did he have a guide?”

  “A Delaware called Ohio George.”

  No doubt, Duncan realized, Townsend never knew the difference between French and English Indians, had drunk with the French Indians because they had been friends of his guide. The first murder had been an elaborate trap, a test as it were.

  “Outside,” the chief asked, “have you seen a large black bird?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Duncan admitted. He noticed a water bucket, filled the ladle hanging on its side, and handed it to the Indian, struggling not to let his frustration show. He reminded himself that seldom were conversations with an Indian conducted in a straight line.

  “This cell,” Skanawati said after a moment, “it is like a cave. It makes me think of my father.”

  Duncan leaned against the post, realizing this was the most he had ever heard the man speak.

  “I never knew my father much,” Skanawati continued, “no one in the village did. He never stayed with us except sometimes during the sugar tree or green corn festivals.”

  Duncan thought he understood. “My father had many responsibilities as well.”

  “No. It wasn’t like that. He lived alone, in the woods, in the manner of what you Europeans call a hermit, except he did it to be close to the forest spirits. My people have a name for a man like that. A wild deer.”

  “It can be difficult to be raised without a father.”

  “An Iroquois boy is raised by his mother’s family, by his uncle,” Skanawati reminded Duncan. “But I find myself thinking more and more of my father. Once in a winter when I was young, he came and stole me away against my mother’s wishes, took me to a high cave where he was living, just as a terrible snowstorm arrived. The morning after the storm he took me to the mouth of the cave, where we could see for many miles. The world was white, everywhere, except for a single creature perched on an old dead tree nearby, a raven. My father said he always sat there after snowstorms, because it was a different world then, because in that world nothing moved for as far as a man could see but the eye of that raven. He said that bird was the most ancient of our gods. He said in all my life the most important thing to remember was that the raven was always watching me, seeing everything I did.” Skanawati paused to drain the ladle. “I see him sometimes, flying high above.”

  “In your village,” Duncan said in a tone of wonder, “there was a raven watching the ceremony of the dead.”

  Skanawati nodded, as if not surprised, then looked up. “Look to the trail behind,” he declared abruptly.

  Duncan paused, thinking the Indian meant he had missed something from their travels. Too late he heard the noise behind and spun about. The club slammed into the back of his knees first, so hard he collapsed onto the stone flags of the floor. Then he knew nothing but a storm of boots kicking his belly, his legs, his neck, his head.

  The spirit fire. They were draining his life force, stealing the spark that kept him alive. The odd tingling sensation in his hand exploded into a hundred stabs of pain. His head shot up, and he looked directly into the face of Lord Ramsey.

  Duncan twisted against his bindings, gradually becoming aware that he was back in the corner cell, suspended from the ceiling in the harness Marston used for his treatments.

  “In Pennsylvania,” Ramsey lectured his captive, “a man who escapes his indenture is a criminal. Worse, in the land of the Quakers, you are a sinner, for you have broken your sacred word.”

  “My indenture.” Through his spasms of pain Duncan could manage only a few syllables at a time. “Is in the name of your daughter.” He saw Marston now, slumped unconscious in a corner.

  “I have sworn out an affidavit that says otherwise.” Ramsey nodded to one of the four men who attended him, and the man touched the shaft of a Leyden jar to a bleeding cut on the back of Duncan’s hand. His head jerked back in pain. The man laughed, then touched the jar to his chin.

  When he regained consciousness they had stripped off his clothes. They used all the jars, on every part of his body. The more he cried out in pain, the more Ramsey laughed. He saw the room in short bursts of vision between explosions of pain. A man spun the glass ball at a near blinding speed, generating more blue fire. Another man tried to get the rod of a jar into Duncan’s mouth. Duncan waited until his torturer was close then jerked his shoulder violently forward, knocking the jar to the floor, shattering it as Ramsey applauded. Marston was naked from the waist up now, and a man applied one of the jars to his arms, which jerked compulsively.

  Prisoners began shouting. Ramsey muttered something to one of his lackeys, who stuffed money into the hand of the turnkey. Marston tried to beat away his assailant. There was something on his arm. A metal wire was stretched from a glass jar to Duncan’s belly, and he convulsed backward and forward. Marston’s arm. He forced himself to focus on it. On the inside of his arm, above the elbow, was a scar in the shape of a lightning bolt.

  “Burke!” he gasped, just as one of Ramsey’s men applied one of the remaining Leyden jars to the bottom of his foot.

  Ramsey slapped him into silence. “You will rot in this jail until the magistrates return you to me,” he vowed to Duncan. “Then you will rot in a cell I am building in the cellar of my house. I think,” he added, with a bemused glance at Marston’s equipment, “we shall purchase some of these remarkable devices to keep you amused.” Duncan faded in and out of consciousness. He twisted, flailed his legs. He was helpless in the harness, Ramsey’s naked puppet. He made out voices in the outside corridor. Someone punched his belly. Marston, still on the floor, moaned. Duncan struggled against the pain, feeling the sharp stabs now even though his tormentors seemed to be gone. He fought an overwhelming fatigue.

  The last thing he remembered was the fury on the face of Magistrate Brindle as he walked into the cell.

  Chapter Sixteen

  HE FELT SO assured by the tender stroking of his forehead, the soft singing near his ear, knowing his mother was at his side, that Duncan wanted to linger in the dark, quiet place. He tried to push away the painful moans from nearby, the drumming of infantry boots on cobbles, the strange tingling in his limbs, until a vision of limp bodies on a gallows invaded his dream. He pushed through his delirium, shaking his head violently, using the pain that followed to help him wake.

  Finally he was back, gazing into the soulful eyes of a middle-aged woman wearing a white apron over an austere gray dress. As she dabbed at his face with a damp cloth she hummed a hymn.

  “I always wondered what the first angel I met would look like,” Duncan offered in a hoarse voice. His throat was dry as sticks.

  The woman smiled. “You’re not in heaven yet, Mr. McCallum. Only Philadelphia.” She began checking the bandage that was wrapped tightly around three of his fingers. “All the angels I know are in the Benevolent Society for the Humane Treatment of Prisoners.”

  “Where do I join?” Duncan murmured.

  His nurse smiled again, then lifted a small clay mug of water to his lips. Duncan winced at the effort of sitting up, then took the mug and drank as he studied his surroundings. He had not left the corner cell, but was on a cot now, and Marston’s equipment, even the table that had supported it, was gone, the only sign of his experiments the ceiling hooks where the harness had hung. He looked back at his nurse, noticing a small Bible in the pocket of her apron.

  “How long?” he asked. He pulled his legs to the floor, trying to stand, then sank back in a wave of nausea. Every extremity screamed in pain.

  “You have been unconscious for nearly twenty-four hours,” the Quaker woman explained.

  “Conawa—” Duncan began then corrected himself. “Socrates Moon?”

  “Your friend is safe. Last I saw him he was in the magistrate’s library. It was he and the jailer who came to us for help.”r />
  “Was he arrested?”

  “He is safe, as I said.”

  “I mean Ramsey. Surely he must be arrested.”

  The light left the woman’s eyes. “There was no one here when the magistrate arrived. And Mr. Ramsey,” she cautioned, “is a member of the council, and of the proprietor’s private social club in London.”

  For the first time Duncan saw that the cell door was closed, with a guard outside. The despair that rose up at the sight caused more torment than all his injuries together. He was a prisoner. He would be a prisoner now for the rest of his life. When he looked back and saw the face of his nurse more fully, he realized he had seen her before.

  “You gave me a glass of milk,” he said. “How long have you been a member of the Brindle household?”

  “I was born a Brindle and became a Bythe.”

  The realization came slowly through the fog in Duncan’s brain. “Forgive me. I misunderstood. Your husband. I am so sorry.”

  “As we all are. It was his time to be gathered to God.”

  He saw the sadness in the woman’s eyes, but felt helpless to deal with it. “The man who killed your husband was not Skanawati.”

  “They call it an accident now.”

  “He was murdered,” Duncan said. “Like all the others at the boundary trees.”

  “There are teamsters who signed statements saying he fell on the rocks.”

  Duncan stared in disbelief. “Who would collect such statements?”

  “A lawyer gave them to a magistrate. Not my brother, another.”

  “A lawyer working for whom?”

  “That land venture. The Susquehanna Company.”

  Duncan closed his eyes again. “So in Philadelphia the truth has become a commodity that can be bought and sold.”

  Mrs. Bythe bit her lip but did not reply. She reached into the basket and produced a broadsheet. “Your friend from Virginia said you would want to see this.”

  The sheet was nearly covered with news of ship sailings and landed cargos. But at the bottom was a short article. Shamokin Merchant Drowns.

  Duncan’s mouth went dry as he read. The body of Matthew Waller, merchant of Shamokin, was found by a river fishing vessel. Waller had been missing for two days and is now believed to have slipped from a wharf in the night.

  “The current can be very strong,” Mrs. Bythe offered.

  “He was killed,” Duncan asserted. “He was killed because we were looking for him, because he was connected to the murders.” Every door was being slammed shut. “Dr. Marston?” he asked after a moment.

  “Recovering at his house by the river.”

  “I must see him.”

  “I can send a boy with a message, but I cannot tell if he will soon muster enough courage to return to the prison. And,” she said, lowering her voice and looking toward the floor, “there are only formalities to be addressed before you are turned over to Lord Ramsey. Some papers to be signed. Once the signatures are sealed and verified by the clerks and the doctor releases you, you will be surrendered to your bondholder.”

  Duncan buried his head in his hands. Ramsey claimed to have built a special cell in his cellar for Duncan, was going to acquire electrical devices to use on Duncan. “He is not my bondholder. The document was signed over to his daughter. There were witnesses.”

  “He has signed an affidavit that says otherwise. He is a member of the council,” she repeated, and she poured him another mug of water. She leaned closer as she handed him the mug and whispered, “It is his man on the door.”

  “The treaty,” Duncan said when he had drained the mug. “Skanawati.”

  “The Virginians threaten to leave. The Indians are considering a huge price.”

  “For the freedom of their chief?” Duncan asked hopefully.

  “No. For the sale of their land.”

  His heart sank still lower. “The formal negotiations for this have started?”

  Mrs. Bythe rose, straightening her apron. “There are no meaningful formal negotiations until the informal ones are done.” The guard outside noticed the woman’s preparation for departure and opened the door.

  “I wish you to borrow my Bible,” she said pointedly, and handed Duncan the small volume from her pocket. “Lord Ramsey knows he must tolerate us Quakers. He allows us to hold prayer sessions with his staff in his library from time to time.”

  He stared forlornly at the door as it sealed him in. Then Duncan gazed at the little book, setting it down on the stool to dab at the blood that began to ooze out the edge of a bandage on his arm. He rose to walk to the cell door. Halfway across the cell his knees buckled and he collapsed to the floor.

  Later, after he had dragged himself back to the cot, after he had passed out with only his arm and head resting on the cot, he lifted the little book on the stool.

  Inside the cover was a slip of paper with two sets of crossed double lines with a letter and a dot inside the right angles, each dot positioned differently inside its angle. On the reverse were two triangles with letters and dots likewise arranged on each side of the lines. He turned the page over and over. Every letter of the alphabet was represented.

  Duncan forced himself up, staggered to the window, and collapsed under it to hold the paper in the pool of light, understanding the point of her parting words. The widow had been in Ramsey’s library. Conawago had spoken to her, and she had found the pigpen code. Duncan frantically patted at his waist, then crawled to search the piles of tattered blankets at the end of the cot.

  His pouch with his notes of the codes from the trees, along with everything else he had had in his possession, was gone. But the signs on the first tree were burned into his memory. With his finger he drew in the dust on the floor the signs as he had seen them, beginning with the empty open-topped box, then an open-sided right angle tilted so its angle pointed to the center of the preceding box, ending with a complete, but empty square. His hand trembled as he consulted Conawago’s chart. The first symbol was a B, the next a U. He quickly transcribed each letter, staring in confusion at the result. BURKE. The killer had simply recorded the name of his victim on the tree. It made no sense.

  He closed his eyes against a tremor of pain and found the fingers of one hand twitching uncontrollably, his frustration now adding to his weakness. This is how his life would end, in Ramsey’s cellar, more and more of his body twitching, convulsing, as he lost control of it. Each day more of his brain would be burned away. He had bet his freedom, his very life, on finding the truth, yet each piece of the puzzle was more useless than the one before.

  He closed his eyes, adrift in despair, visited by a vision of the faces of those who had died on his prison ship. In the waking nightmare the dead came to life, each bloodless face turned to him in ridicule, pointing skeleton fingers at the paper in his hand.

  Four paces to the far wall, four paces back. Duncan’s hours were divided into journeys from one end of his cell to the other as he struggled to restore the power of his limbs. At first it was all he could do to stagger from one wall to the other, his knees and ankles protesting every move, his toes still tingling with a strange heat. He exercised thirty minutes by the clock of the State House visible through his window, then rested for ten, eating the stale bread and cheese left by the Benevolent Society, building such an appetite that he even emptied the bowl of thin gruel shoved through his hatch twice a day.

  He tried to force from his mind his destiny as Ramsey’s slave, recalling long discussions in the night with Conawago about war parties facing impossible odds against enemy tribes, how the warriors were taught to push away all fear, all thought of defeat, all thought of the morrow, to simply hold in their hearts the proud deeds of their forebears and the power of their gods. It was, he knew, little different from the training of the Highland clans, who had fought so many impossible foes through the centuries.

  He often glanced at Mrs. Bythe’s chart of letters and paused in his travail long enough to write more signs. He could not trust
his memory of the other signs on the trees, so instead he encoded in the dust by the window the names of the dead. Cooper. Bythe. Burke. Townsend. Duncan leaned on the windowsill, facing out, watching the prisoners exercise in the small yard below, watching the spiraling smoke of a hundred chimneys. If he pressed close to the bars he could see masts above rooftops, remembering there were ships half a mile away that would take on an able-bodied crewman without question, ships that could take him to the Scottish settlements in the Carolinas, to New York, to Holland, where he had friends, to Ireland, where many Highlanders had fled after the purges. He lost himself again in imaginings of a different life, of how in the night he would slip out of the cell and over the wall, then sail away from all his cares. But when night came his despair bore down on him again, the black thing pressing like a heavy weight on his heart. He fought it by recollecting conversations he had had with Conawago.

  His injured fingers kept curling up, and he considered, with the eye of the medical student, how the flow of electrical fluid affected even the smallest of muscles. Unwinding their linen bandage, he winced at the sight of the raw, oozing patches where his skin had been burned away, then pushed the fingers straight against the sill and watched them curl up again as if of their own volition.

  He did not know how long he was being watched, but slowly the hairs on his neck began to rise. He limped back to his cot and sat, waiting. Moments later he heard the grating of the metal in the lock, and the door swung open. Marston limped into the chamber, leaning on a cane. The scientist stared at the turnkey, who frowned but stepped back into the doorway and closed the door.

  Marston hurried to the door and closed the hatch. “You must not let them see you walking about.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The best reason we have to keep you here is your medical condition. The jailer will not release you until you are healed. Ramsey is under the impression he has no need to hurry the paperwork for your transfer to his compound. I have food from Mrs. Bythe.” Duncan saw now he carried a basket, which he placed by the stool. “And a message, from the physician who looked in on Skanawati. The chief wants you to know that he could not see the faces of those who attacked you. But he believes two were turnkeys, and a third man was giving them orders from the shadows.”