The King's Beast Read online

  OTHER BOOKS IN THE BONE RATTLER SERIES

  Bone Rattler

  Eye of the Raven

  Original Death

  Blood of the Oak

  Savage Liberty

  The King’s Beast

  Copyright © 2020 by Eliot Pattison

  First paperback edition: 2020

  First hardcover editon: 2020

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Pattison, Eliot, author.

  Title: The king’s beast : a mystery of the American Revolution / Eliot Pattison.

  Description: First paperback edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2020. | Series: Bone rattler

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019047032 | ISBN 9781640093188 (paperback) | ISBN 9781640093195 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790—Fiction. | United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3566.A82497 K56 2020 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019047032

  Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-64009-435-2

  Cover design by Lisa Pompilio

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Author’s Note

  PREFACE

  THE REVOLUTION THAT TRANSFORMED THE thirteen colonies into the United States was in many ways one of the great mysteries of human history. This wasn’t only because no one knew what the outcome would be—there was no precedent for a successful democratic uprising against a powerful government—but also due to the extraordinary new threads being woven into the American tapestry. The period leading up to the American Revolution was a time of extraordinary intellectual exuberance. The edge of the vast American wilderness was being probed and mapped, and the boundaries of natural philosophy—which wouldn’t be called “science” until the next century—were rapidly expanding. The proliferation of printing presses, schools, and economic opportunities were empowering individuals in unprecedented ways. As important as this unleashing of knowledge was to the process of revolution, so too was the self-discovery occurring among the two million men and women of the colonies.

  Years later, looking back on the struggles that led to the birth of the United States, John Adams observed that “the Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the hearts and minds of the people.” From the perspective of 1769, when this book opens, the American colonists are already engaged in subtle forms of rebellion, as they begin to realize that their traditional British identity is less and less important to their hearts and minds. That transformation is being accelerated by an out-of-touch king who pursues policies designed to inhibit the economic and intellectual freedom of the colonies and permanently weaken the native tribes.

  As a vital bridge between the tribes and the colonists and as a secret operative of the Sons of Liberty, Duncan McCallum finds his life growing increasingly complex. The British troops occupying Boston have grown to staggering numbers, equal to nearly a fifth of the city’s population. The Townshend Parliament has imposed punishing duties on key imports, prompting the Sons of Liberty to organize pacts for the boycott of British goods and develop secret plans for the expansion of American industry. As liberty poles—rallying points for patriots—proliferate, Parliament has invoked a law from the reign of Henry VIII to order colonial dissenters transported to England for trial. The economic and intellectual pursuits of America are poised to explosively conflict with the policies embraced by the distant king, and despite being in the Ohio wilderness, Duncan unexpectedly discovers himself at their treacherous point of collision.

  As with all my books in this series, my story lines are built around actual events of the period. As the story opens in 1769, tales of the mysterious incognitum fossil creatures found in the Ohio country are stirring excitement not just in East Coast settlements but in Europe as well. Daniel Boone has just arrived in those frontier lands, foreshadowing new tensions with the tribes, which London is keen to exploit. British repression has precipitated the Virginia Resolves and the Massachusetts Circular Letter, both statements of colonial outrage at Parliament that become unifying cries throughout America. Benjamin Franklin’s role as London agent for several colonies has been jeopardized by his rift with the aristocracy. At least the transit of Venus, the greatly anticipated astronomical event of the year, is devoid of the volatile politics that contaminate everything else—until Duncan painfully learns otherwise.

  Chapter 1

  Spring 1769

  The Kentucky Wilderness

  THE CHAIN OF MEN WORKED feverishly, passing bucket after bucket of muddy water from the pit that Duncan McCallum stood in. The youngest members of their keelboat crew ran the buckets back to the pit as they were emptied, excitedly handing them down to the broad-shouldered man who stood beside Duncan, thigh-deep in the muck of the pit. Ezra’s good-natured calls to the crew above them were becoming forced, Duncan realized, for he saw an unexpected cloud on his friend’s countenance and had begun to hear whispered prayers in the tongue of his African tribe.

  “Praise God! ’Tis a miracle!” came a cry in an Irish brogue from above as Duncan once again pulled at the slippery object of their attention and it began to rise into view, raising a chorus of enthusiastic cheers. Duncan looked up at the strange gallery of keelboat crewmen and Indians standing by the hole of muddy water, then reached under the surface and with a heave lifted four more inches of the huge knobby bone into the air.

  “Magnifique!” exclaimed Pierre Dumont, the French scholar who had accompanied Duncan from Philadelphia. “A leg as stout as an oak!”

  “God protect us! Lucifer rises!” hissed the diminutive man in black homespun who hovered above Duncan. The captain of their keelboat, true to his devout Cornish roots, had agreed to accept the Reverend Podrake as a passenger exploring sites for new missions because he had hoped the man would act as chaplain for their remarkable expedition. However, the thin, sour man was proving more of a burden than a blessing.

  Duncan and Ezra found a grip on the mud-covered bone, which Duncan took to be a giant femur, and pulled together, raising it another few inches. Nearly two feet of the bone extended from the pit, and much of it was still buried in the slime. The tall, loose-limbed man in buckskin at the end of the pit gave a low whistle. “Could h
ave fed a settlement all winter,” he observed in his languid manner. He seemed to be conversing with the long rifle in his hands, which he held pointed in the direction of the forest. The frontiersman had met them at the Ohio River landing, confiding that he had been sent to aid the Sons of Liberty, but seemed more interested in the tree line around the large, sulfur-smelling clearing than in their extraordinary excavation. Duncan was not sure if the gruff man named Boone was watching for his two tribal companions who had disappeared when they had exposed the bone, or for something more menacing. Three days earlier they had steered their keelboat toward a burning farmhouse but had arrived too late to do anything but dig graves. The region had become a refuge for many displaced tribes and wandering warriors, some of whom had not accepted the terms that had ended the tribal rebellion a few years earlier.

  “Get a harness ’round the treasure!” shouted one of the excited crewmen gathered around the pit, drawing a frown from Ishmael, Duncan’s companion. The men of their keelboat spoke often of the rumors that aristocrats in London and Paris were paying fortunes for ancient relics such as Duncan was uncovering. “Worth its weight in silver, I wager!” the man crowed.

  Ishmael, nephew of Duncan’s closest friend Conawago, shouldered the man back from the edge of the pit. “This bone is for Dr. Franklin,” the young Nipmuc tribesman growled.

  “I don’t see why this particular—” The riverman’s protest was interrupted by a clap of thunder. He jerked about at the sound and his eyes widened as a bolt of lightning sliced off the limb of an oak at the far end of the clearing.

  “You must be familiar with Dr. Franklin’s work,” Ishmael said with a satisfied grin, nodding toward the smoldering limb.

  The riverman glanced with sudden worry at the smoking tree, then turned wide-eyed toward Ishmael, as if realizing the young Nipmuc was suggesting the distant Franklin had dispatched the lightning. He backed away then, as rain was beginning to fall, beat a hasty retreat toward their camp, while the others gathered around the pit laughed.

  The downpour quickly reversed the progress they had made in emptying the pit and gave poor prospects for advancing their task further that day. The crew from the keelboat soon abandoned their work, and Dumont ran off to a smaller bone that was being exposed by the torrent with the exuberant and now familiar cry, “Incognitum!” Journals in London and Paris had taken to calling the mysterious creature, its remains discovered by travelers on the Ohio, the American incognitum, the American unknown.

  Soon only Duncan, Ezra, Ishmael, and Boone remained at the pit. As the frontiersman tied a leather cover over the firing pan of his rifle, Ezra climbed out of the muck, then extended one of his huge mahogany hands to help Duncan up. Ishmael extended Duncan’s tricorn hat, grinning at the muddy water that sluiced out of his britches and down his bare calves. Duncan cuffed Ishmael with the hat and was about to make a jest about the long arm of Dr. Franklin when he noticed the surprisingly somber expressions of his other two companions. Boone was looking at the immense bone with an uneasy, almost frightened gaze. What Duncan saw on Ezra’s face was not fear, but something that hinted of shame.

  Duncan was about to speak to the African, who had been such a jovial companion on their voyage down the Ohio, when Ishmael touched his arm. He saw now that Ezra’s lips were moving, his soft words drowned by the torrent. One of his hands had slipped inside his tunic and was grasping the necklace he wore underneath.

  Ezra’s action seemed to disturb the lanky woodsman, and Boone took a step toward him, raising an arm as if to pull him away. Then Ishmael stepped between the two men. “Not your concern, Mr. Boone,” he warned.

  The woodsman cast an irate glance at the young Nipmuc, then retreated several steps and once again silently contemplated the knobby end of bone that still protruded from the rapidly filling pit. “T’ain’t worth the blood,” he declared, then turned and disappeared into the sheeting rain.

  Duncan stared after the taciturn Boone, not certain he had heard correctly, not wanting to read alarm into the strange words. He became aware of Ishmael tugging at his elbow. The Nipmuc raised an open palm toward Duncan, as if to say they must leave Ezra alone, and pulled Duncan toward their camp.

  “What did he mean about the blood?” Duncan asked as they made their way across the soft, boggy ground.

  “I don’t know. Last night when most had gone to sleep Boone freshened his powder and sharpened his knife, as if expecting trouble. I sat beside him and began sharpening my own knife. Boone nodded his approval. I thought he was worried about some of those rough characters in the village just down the river, but then he said, ‘The Shawnee know there’s ghosts in the old Lick. Ancient ghosts. First man ghosts, monster ghosts, giant buffalo ghosts. And the ghosts,’ he said, ‘ain’t altogether happy about outsiders stealing their mortal remains.’ He said the Shawnee don’t call this the Bone Lick. They call it the Gods’ Gate.”

  The chill that ran down Duncan’s spine was not from the dampness. He knew enough from his years of living among the tribes to recognize the importance they attached to relics of the dead. He never intended to be a bone stealer. He had come for the cause of freedom at the request of the Sons of Liberty.

  The cook, Ezra’s cousin Gideon, had prudently rigged a large piece of canvas over their fire and the long flat rocks they used as eating tables. The crew of the Arabella, the keelboat they had taken from Pittsburgh, were now gathered around the crackling fire with mugs of tea while Gideon prepared an early supper.

  “To hell with this,” one of the older rivermen groused. Duncan followed his gaze to the rivulet that had begun flowing under one of the tents where the crew’s bedrolls lay. “Beg pardon, parson,” the man added with a glance at Reverend Podrake, who sat reading his Bible with a smoldering expression. “But there’s dry bunks on the Arabella less than an hour’s walk from here,” he declared, then retrieved one of the bedrolls and gestured to the rest of the crewmen. “Unless ye want to spend the night like a mudpuppy, ye should head for the boat with me,” he said. He laid a soggy hat on his head, then set off at a rapid pace down the wide buffalo track that led toward the cove where the Arabella was moored.

  The remaining men laughed as the youngest of their company darted off after the man, stumbling in a calf-deep mud puddle, then they laid a blanket over one of the flat boulders and began tossing dice. The reverend cast a disapproving glance, then stared out toward the rain-veiled Lick. As Duncan poured Ishmael and himself mugs of tea, he realized Podrake wasn’t gazing at the clearing as such; he was staring toward the dim ghostlike figure who was praying over the huge bone. Ezra had now raised his outstretched hands toward the sky. As Duncan watched, he turned to address the arches of ancient ribs rising out of the boggy ground. For weeks Ezra had shared his excitement about their mission, but his joy had inexplicably disappeared after arriving at the Lick.

  Duncan retreated to the small tent he shared with Ishmael, grateful that the young tribesman had not only erected it on a ledge above the camp but had also lined the floor with dry pine boughs and moss. He sat in the entrance, nursing his tea as he watched Ezra with new foreboding. The miasma over the Lick seemed to be worming into Duncan’s brain. It was as if the appearance of the first ancient bone had jarred open a dusty chamber in his mind he had never known existed. He had been taught by one of his Highland uncles, and later by the Iroquois, that the earth had places of great spiritual power, secret sites where men encountered mysteries of the planet that were greater than themselves, where powers from under the earth could work miracles or strike terror. Duncan and Ishmael had sensed it immediately when they had arrived at the Lick at sunset the day before. In the center, casting shadows of eerie black arches down the wide clearing, had been the massive rib cage Ezra now spoke to. The creature would have been as large as a cabin. The Lick was more than just some mineral-rich clearing that attracted animals. Its deposit of massive bones could be explained by neither European nor tribal knowledge. The tribes were inclined to call such places
mysteries sent by the gods, and tended to treat them more as a miracle than a problem to be solved. Among the scholars of Europe, the Lick had begun to cast a shadow, for some suspected they were glimpsing creatures that were mightier than man, and others warned that they were witnessing the ongoing work of God, a divine workshop that no man should tamper with.

  Duncan had been struck dumb when arriving at the Lick, for he had not anticipated the strange majesty of the place, but he had also felt an icy knot in his gut. Ishmael too had halted, wordless on arrival, and had begun whispering a Nipmuc prayer. Duncan had struggled to put words around his own unexpected reaction until Ishmael had spoken. “It’s like stepping into the church of someone else’s god,” the young Nipmuc had said.

  They had assuaged their odd sense of guilt by walking reverently among the bones in the twilight of that first day and paying homage to each exposed skeleton by burning a small mound of fragrant leaves before it. A solitary buffalo had looked up from a patch of snow-white soil and stared at them with an oddly expectant expression. It was a place where the earth was reaching out, his old friend Conawago, Ishmael’s uncle, would say of the Lick. Not for the first time Duncan wished Conawago were with him, but the gentle old Nipmuc had declined to join the expedition and Duncan had not pressed him, for he had suspected his closest friend was about to leave on one of his periodic spirit quests in the deep forest.

  He desperately wished now he could ask Conawago if it was proper to remove the ancient bones, for he increasingly wondered if by pulling up the enormous bone that day they had opened an entrance to some world they did not belong in. The Lick spoke to something deep inside him, something from his clan’s primeval past, a world populated by fairies and banshees. Why had these mysterious creatures, these outliers of nature, congregated here? Was this a place of ancient butchery or ancient reverence? And why, asked the voice that had been nagging him for weeks, were the bones of the incognitum so vital to Benjamin Franklin and the Sons of Liberty that they had urgently sent him on this mission?