The King's Beast

by Eliot Pattison

  “Thank God Mr. Duncan had the crates shipped out early,” Mrs. Pratt said, wiping away tears as a burning wall collapsed. “This house was built before I was born. I remember walking by hand in hand with my father, admiring its sturdy elegance. Mr. Preston must be rolling in his grave, God bless him.” When Sarah put a hand on her arm, a sob escaped her and she sank her head into Sarah’s shoulder. “I guess I am truly destined to start a new life in Edentown,” she murmured.

  Sarah patted the woman on her back, stared with grim determination at the flaming ruins, then spoke with an odd fierceness. “A warrior must be blooded,” she said.

  The words had been whispered, as if to herself, but Duncan had heard. It was a phrase of the Iroquois, a reminder that a warrior was not truly ready for the warpath until he survived his first conflict with the enemy. But why say the words here? Why would Sarah say them at all?

  She took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh before turning to Duncan. “We should give thanks that you were awake to spread the alarm in the house.”

  Thank the old gods, Duncan thought to himself, for they had kept him awake. “I can account for everyone but Ishmael,” he said, his face lined with worry.

  “Who,” came a familiar voice behind him, “do you think ran to ring the fire bell, and skinned his knees on the cobbles when he slipped?”

  Duncan turned to see the young Nipmuc approaching, tucking a tomahawk in his belt. Ishmael bent to retrieve one of the oak mallets used to beat down barrel lids. “Two men in black cloaks were running away from the flames. Near as I could tell, they threw an oil lantern through the window. I could either give chase or sound the alarm.”

  “What direction?” Duncan asked.

  Ishmael handed Duncan the heavy mallet and pointed toward the city center. There was no need for further words. “Get everyone on board that Hudson schooner!” Duncan shouted to Sarah, then sprinted away toward Dumont’s house.

  No answer came from their pounding on the professor’s door. With renewed alarm, Duncan ran to the summer kitchen in the back. Mulligan’s Irish guard stepped out of the shadows, club in hand, then relaxed as he recognized Duncan. “Professor left for Thomson’s place a good hour ago,” he reported.

  Thomson had not seen Dumont. Learning the source of the conflagration that lit up the north end of the city, he quickly donned a coat and joined the search. They began probing every alley along the six blocks separating the houses, with Thomson breaking away after the first few minutes to fetch Mulligan.

  Ten minutes later came Ishmael’s call from an alley. “Duncan,” was all he said, but Duncan recognized his despair.

  Dumont lay in a glistening pool. The gentle, ebullient French professor would never go west to find his living incognitum. His throat had been slashed from ear to ear.

  Chapter 7

  THEY SAT ON A GRANITE step, staring at the body in dazed silence. Duncan had set out for the Ohio with three friends, entrusted with their safety, and now two were murdered. The lives of Ezra and Dumont had been so full of promise. They should have grown old with decades of rich memories, surrounded by loved ones. But they had chosen to join Duncan on the Ohio. He had taken the bones and had to face the consequences, the Shawnee prophet had warned. There will be blood in the night. You will die, again and again. Was this what Catchoka had meant? With each death of a friend a little bit of Duncan died.

  “You must go back to Edentown, Duncan,” Ishmael said abruptly. “Get on that schooner that’s leaving for the Hudson.” The words almost sounded like an order.

  Duncan, numbed by Dumont’s murder, took a moment to reply. He was not used to the young Nipmuc speaking so bluntly to him, nor did he grasp why he would speak of such things while Dumont’s body was still warm. “We will all be back soon enough,” he replied, and gazed mournfully at the dead man. “His sister. What do I tell his sister?” He looked back at Ishmael and realized there was something else the Nipmuc was trying to communicate, something urgent but painful.

  “No. We will not. Did you not wonder why I was already awake before the fire, why Sarah’s room was empty and she was already dressed?”

  “It all happened so fast. No,” Duncan said, recalling now that Sarah had been fully dressed and ready to leave when he had run to warn her. “No, I did not.”

  “She had me take her trunk aboard after midnight.”

  “Aboard the schooner, you mean.”

  “Aboard one of the big square riggers. We sail at noon.”

  “An ocean ship? We?”

  “Sarah and I are going to London.”

  Surely Duncan had not heard correctly. “No. Impossible. She never said a word to me.”

  “Because she knew you would try to stop her.” Ishmael turned toward the sound of running boots. A watchman was sprinting toward them. A soft rain had begun to fall. The dark, expanding pool by Dumont’s body began to trickle through the cobblestones of the alley. “But now maybe things have changed.”

  “This is no time to go off on some lark, Ishmael.”

  “It’s my uncle, Duncan.”

  Ishmael’s stricken tone sent a new chill down Duncan’s spine. “Conawago? Is something amiss with Conawago? All the more reason to return to Edentown.”

  “Sarah swore me to secrecy. While we were gone, he suddenly departed. She thought he was going to Boston, for printing supplies. Weeks later Sarah got two letters from Conawago, the first from on board a ship in New York Harbor, saying he was sailing for England. The second was from London, saying we should not expect to see him, but not to mourn because he had lived a full life. He said do not tell Duncan until he returned to Edentown, then he wrote ‘God bless Noah.’ ”

  Duncan looked up into the dark sky. He had thought the death of Pierre had brought all the pain he could bear. He had indeed become a plaything for the gods. “Noah?” he asked in a choked whisper.

  Ishmael shrugged. “It made no sense. Nothing makes sense.”

  A new wave of despair swept over Duncan. Except for Sarah, Conawago was closer to him than anyone alive. The old Nipmuc, born in the last century, was the wisest, most compassionate man he had ever known. At the darkest times of his life, Conawago had been the steady anchor that had kept Duncan on course.

  “It isn’t possible, Ishmael. Why? He had no business in London. Did he—” His questions were choked off by a wretched groan from the shadows. Charles Thomson sank to his knees beside the body of his emissary to Benjamin Franklin.

  For the first time in Thomson’s parlor, no one knew what to say. Thomson and Mulligan sat staring into their cups of tea, occasionally murmuring low epitaphs.

  “What an active intellect,” Thomson offered.

  “He had a prodigious big heart,” Deborah Franklin said.

  “The best Frenchman I ever knew,” Mulligan whispered.

  Duncan had gone to help sort through the ruins of the Preston House, adamantly refusing Ishmael’s suggestion that he go speak with Sarah at Deborah Franklin’s house, where she had taken the unnerved Mrs. Pratt. Instead he had given Ishmael harsh orders that for the first time in all the years they had known each other had brought a look of resentment to the young Nipmuc’s countenance.

  “A night of such violence. The fire, the murder,” Thomson said. “Why last night?”

  “Because,” Mulligan replied, “as my man reports, a ship for London left at dawn carrying several army officers. That was their plan, to commit these heinous acts just before they would disappear from Philadelphia. McCallum was right. We were played for fools.”

  Their impromptu wake continued through another pot of tea. Duncan finally rose to leave. He felt shattered, adrift, not sure what direction to go in anymore. Dumont was dead. Sarah was planning to abandon him in pursuit of some impossible news about Conawago. She had known, and she had not only refused to share the news but had purposefully misled him. He rose and took a step to the door. He had to find her.

  “Duncan, prithee, wait,” Thomson said. “We need you to
stay with us. The mission to London must continue. The hopes of the Sons of Liberty ride on it.”

  “Get on with it, Charles,” Mulligan said gruffly, then outlined the preposterous plan he and Thomson had formulated since Dumont’s death.

  Duncan remained standing. “Sirs, with all due respect, I am going back to the forests. I am not your man. I will serve the Sons faithfully, but on the frontier. And for now—”

  The front door burst open and Sarah stormed inside, followed by Ishmael, looking very distraught. “How dare you, Duncan McCallum!” she shouted at him, taking no notice of the others in the parlor. “You have no right to order my trunk off that ship!”

  “You are not going to London, Sarah!” Duncan shot back. “And these are private matters best discussed elsewhere.” Never in all their years together had he ever spoken so roughly to her. Never in all their years had he been so angry at her. She had deceived him.

  “Our friends have an interest in this!” Sarah insisted. “And I am going to London, no matter what you say!”

  “Your father is in London. You are conspicuous, very noticeable. Even if you use a different name, your father will learn of you within days. He will lock you up and be certain you never return to America!”

  “I don’t care!” Sarah shot back. Tears were flowing down her cheeks. “I have to go help Conawago.”

  “Sarah,” Duncan said, pleading in his voice now, “I am speaking of Lord Ramsey, the man who killed your Iroquois father, the man who once kidnapped you so he could have surgeons tame you by slicing into your brain!”

  Thomson gasped. Mulligan rose and helped Sarah to a chair. “We were speaking of London just now, Miss Ramsey,” the New York tailor said. “Perhaps we have a solution.”

  “I told you no!” Duncan snapped.

  Mulligan ignored him. “With the professor dead, there remains only one man who can deliver the incognitum safely to Franklin. Mr. McCallum must go to London.”

  Sarah went very still, scrubbing at her cheeks as she digested Mulligan’s words. “But he mustn’t! That’s why it has to be me, why I could not tell him. Lord Ramsey has vowed to kill him, has already tried to do so. Duncan has no friends in London. He will have no protection! He will never come back.”

  Thomson rose and leaned into the kitchen, calling for more tea. “He will have Dr. Franklin,” he offered in an uncertain voice.

  Duncan didn’t speak. He sat and slowly reached to take Sarah’s hand. She recoiled at his touch, then her anger broke and she clutched his hand tightly in both her own, as if suddenly he were holding her back from an abyss. He gazed at Sarah as he spoke. “Miss Ramsey and I have business in Edentown. We are to be wed. Neither of us can go to London.”

  Sarah gave him a forlorn smile, but another tear dropped. Then she turned to Ishmael. “You must go,” she said.

  “There is no force on earth, including an angry Highlander, that can stop me,” Ishmael vowed, his voice fierce with resolve. “But you need to tell them the rest, everything about my uncle. It concerns Duncan but perhaps also the Sons and Mr. Franklin.”

  Thomson and Mulligan stared in confusion.

  Sarah accepted a cup and gazed into its steam as she spoke. “Conawago said he was going to Boston for supplies. But then notes came in the weeks following his departure. The first was from Sir William Johnson,” she reported, referring to their friend the superintendent of Indian Affairs, who lived at Johnson Hall on the Mohawk River. He reported that he had enjoyed his recent chess games with Conawago, and that he was writing to say Conawago need not trouble about returning the traveling trunk he had borrowed, that Sir William was pleased to make a gift of it. He closed by saying it was too bad Patrick Woolford had already sailed for England to attend to his father’s estate, but he was pleased that Conawago had been able to spend so much time with Patrick’s wife Hannah.

  “He lied about going to Boston,” Duncan said. “But why go to Johnson Hall before crossing the Atlantic?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I don’t know. Then more letters came, much delayed, delivered by our Mohawk friends. The first was to both of us, Duncan, written from a ship in New York Harbor before setting sail. In it Conawago apologized for leaving so abruptly but he had known if he had explained in person we would have stopped him. He said he would return in the autumn. It went on to remind us how he had visited Europe many years ago. Royalty in both France and England befriended him.” She paused as if for a loss of words.

  “Yes, go on,” Thomson encouraged her.

  She took a sip before continuing, then directed her words to Duncan. “Conawago began having dreams of terrible death, of a new war that is coming.” She turned to Thomson and Mulligan, who showed obvious confusion. “To the old tribes dreams are messages from the gods. In his letter he said the gods meant him to stop the bloodshed—that was why they sent the messages. But he could only do that by going to London.”

  “I don’t follow, lass,” Mulligan said.

  “He said that he knew that if he could only speak with him, man to man, things would be different, that bloodshed could be stopped. He said he had a token from his grandfather, the first one, who had befriended Conawago. He said it was his sacred duty.”

  “Speak to whom, dear?” Thomson asked. “What grandfather?”

  “You mean Franklin?” Mulligan inquired.

  “No, no. To him.” Sarah clutched Duncan’s hand even more tightly. “The Third. He went to London to speak with King George the Third.”

  No one spoke for a long time. Sarah finally broke the silence, speaking in short phrases as she wiped at tears. “The next message from Conawago was a desperate farewell letter written in London. The last one, written weeks later, was from someone named Noah. It said Conawago had been arrested and declared an insane person. He was condemned to the Bedlam asylum.”

  Chapter 8

  ISHMAEL WAS SO FEEBLE DUNCAN had to help him up onto the main deck of the Galileo. For nearly a week the young Nipmuc had kept nothing but watery broth down. The malady had started as a mild case of seasickness, which Ishmael had assured Duncan would soon pass, but then they had encountered a ferocious gale that had tossed their sturdy ship for days.

  Now, as they entered the huge natural harbor of Halifax, the ship had at last stopped pitching and rolling and Duncan was able to lead Ishmael into the fresh air to join the onlookers at the rail. Although the Galileo had suffered in the storm, losing a topgallant mast and several sails and stays, she was a sound ship with a seasoned crew and had fared vastly better than the other ships limping into the harbor. The crew’s only injuries had been a broken arm, a concussion, and a deep gouge in the shoulder of a sailor who had been lashed by a snapped backstay.

  “I declare,” came the plaintive voice of a seaman. “It be Poseidon’s alley. Some of those wretches be that lucky not to be on the bottom already.” He crossed himself and pointed to a battered brig that had lost nearly all her yards and her foremast, sitting dangerously low in the water. “And that one will likely never leave these Nova Scotia waters. This place be a shipknocker’s dream.”

  The broad cove before them indeed looked more like a shipbreaking yard than a working harbor. The two ships ahead of them each had only one of their masts left, and beyond them a hulk with no masts was being towed by her crew working the oars of three small boats. Another ship carried the wreckage of her mainmast alongside, listing dangerously as her crew worked to cut away the tangle of line and canvas.

  Duncan stopped counting the damaged ships after reaching fifteen. Many would be weeks in repair, assuming the navy yard was generous with her stores. Halifax was Britain’s largest naval base in the North Atlantic and no doubt had abundant supplies, but he saw three frigates anchored near the government wharf, all in need of repair, and their needs would come first.

  In the distance he saw the tall flagstaff flying the Union Jack at the top of Citadel Hill, reminding him that the killers of Ezra and Dumont were probably army officers and just as likely
had been at sea during the storm.

  “There’s two of the Philadelphia ships,” Ishmael said, pointing to a big square rigger missing two of her three masts and a heavy merchant bark with a gaping hole on her port side where a falling mast had hit the hull. He was having the same thought as Duncan. “The bastards are likely over there on one of them, if they didn’t sink to the bottom.”

  “We don’t know their real names or even their faces,” Duncan reminded him. “There are probably half a dozen ships out of Philadelphia here. And you are in no shape for a confrontation. We’ll be well away long before them, which gives us a free hand in London for a week or two. We can rescue Conawago and be back on the Atlantic before they anchor in the Thames.” He handed Ishmael a piece of the dry ship’s biscuit he had been insisting the Nipmuc chew to get some nourishment in his belly.

  Ishmael accepted the biscuit with a grimace, then studied it closely. He carefully plucked a small worm from the biscuit, held the biscuit out over the water, then dropped the biscuit and ate the worm.

  “Savage,” Duncan muttered and was relieved to see the grin on his friend’s face, the first he had seen since leaving Philadelphia.

  “Wasn’t that friend of Sarah’s on a London ship that sailed just ahead of us?” Ishmael asked after studying the repair crews swarming over several of the damaged ships. “What was her name? The frilly one with the curly hair who insisted she had to get back for the annual season of balls.”

  “Madeline Faulkner,” Duncan replied, smiling as he recalled how Sarah always seemed more mischievous in the woman’s company, although Madeline had struck him as more of a shallow socialite than most of Sarah’s friends.

  As the Galileo dropped her anchor, Ishmael pointed to one of the ships anchored nearby, a bark missing her foremast. “I recognize that mermaid figurehead,” he said. “I saw her in Philadelphia the day before the fire. She was gone the next morning.” An urgent gleam came into his eyes. “That has to be the one, Duncan, the ship they fled in. You can go over with one of the Galileo’s officers and say you are a friend of Madeline Faulkner and wanted to inquire after her safety.”