Blood of the Oak: A Mystery Read online

  He looked back at the great house, reminding himself that he should check Woolford, and had taken a step in that direction when a voice, light as feathers, stopped him.

  “Yesterday in the first light young fawns were playing with the lambs.”

  The voice banished all fatigue. He turned to see a dim figure perched on a fence rail, stroking the nose of one of the Percherons.

  “And what was the mistress of the estate doing in the pastures at dawn?” he asked as he approached Sarah.

  “Watching the northern trail. You were overdue. I was thinking of taking a horse and riding a few miles north.”

  He reached out and pulled her down, into his arms. They embraced for a long, silent moment. “Thank God you didn’t,” Duncan whispered into her ear.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you in the forge. Crispin said the dead man was an Oneida. Why would he be here? Why would he be killed here?” she added, as if correcting herself.

  “He was one of Woolford’s rangers. Ranger business,” he said, knowing it was no real answer.

  “I saw the quillwork on his waistcoat. That was Adanahoe’s hand. She does that for those who serve the Great Council in some special capacity. I have heard she is dying, Duncan. We must go to her. When I was with the tribes she was like a grandmother to me. The wisest woman I have ever met.”

  “She sent for me when I was in the north, Sarah. She has other plans for me.”

  Sarah stiffened and pushed away. Duncan followed her gaze toward the forge, where a solitary candle showed Conawago bent over the corpse. He heard the low monotones of another death song.

  Duncan led her into the barn, trying to leave the death behind. “The apple orchard at Brewster Creek shows great promise,” he reported, desperate to change the subject. As he led her down the broad aisle flanked by stalls he spoke of his travels. Sarah called him her traveling superintendent, her ambassador among the far-flung farms and tiny settlements started by the families to whom she had allotted land out of her family’s vast holdings. They could keep the land if they worked it for seven years, and meanwhile she offered them seed, tools, and Duncan’s advice, though more often than not his contribution was with an ax or shovel in his hands. One of their first priorities had been getting orchards started wherever possible, an enterprise with which the Iroquois, renowned for their own fertile groves, had often lent a hand.

  The Westcotts’ milk cow had twin calves, he reported. The prize draft mare at Hay’s Landing had thrown a fine colt. Sarah played the game, asking about Mrs. Langer’s gout and the bear that had raided the Stoltz’s smokehouse. She pointed out a blazing meteor that passed over the southern woods, and pulled him to a stop, finger to her lips, so they could listen to the gobbling of the turkeys in the trees beyond the pasture. Duncan did not miss her anxious glances back toward the smithy.

  Suddenly Sarah skipped forward, pulling him toward the stile that traversed the pasture fence as if she too recognized the need to shake off their dark spell. She led him along the edge of the field, staying in the deepest shadows, and finally halted when they heard a thin but joyful bleat.

  At first Duncan saw only small shadows darting among the spring grass, but as the sky quickly brightened he could distinguish the shapes of sheep and deer. A dozen lambs and half as many speckled fawns leapt about, running in bouncing strides. The ewes lay watching from the center of the pasture, the does from the edge of the forest.

  Sarah rested her head on his shoulder, her auburn curls spilling over his waistcoat. “A new box of books arrived from Philadelphia,” she whispered. “I have been reading the great philosophers.”

  “Ohskenonton.” Duncan pronounced the word slowly, as if just learning it. “It means deer.”

  A smile bloomed on her face. Sarah had been another skittish creature of the forest when he had first met her, a prisoner of the tribes only recently recovered by the British. Duncan had started his seven-year indenture to her Scot-hating father as her tutor. She had been a reluctant student who had forgotten most of her English while being raised by the tribes, and he had coaxed her by having her teach him an Iroquois word for each English word he taught her. Crispin had taken over as teacher when Duncan had followed Conawago into the wilderness, and now Sarah Ramsey had what was no doubt the largest library on the frontier, other than in the Mohawk River manse of their friend William Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs.

  “The one I am reading says symbols are the signposts of human lives, that we rely upon and use them without knowing so.” She aimed her gaze back to the animals.

  It took several breaths for Duncan to understand. “You mean the wild and the civilized can find a way to coexist.”

  She shot him a peeved glance. “You know better than to speak in such terms.”

  Duncan flushed. “I do.” They both had repeatedly experienced the ways in which the tribes were more civilized than the Europeans. “Better I say the creatures of the forest and the creatures of the settlements.”

  “Those babes in the pasture make it look so simple,” Sarah said with a sad smile. She turned to look back at the smithy, where the mutilated corpse of an Iroquois lay. She could pass for another refined English lady if need be but her spirit would always be with the Haudensaunee, the tribes of the Iroquois. “You didn’t say what Adanahoe asked you to do.”

  Duncan watched as one of the great oxen emerged from the shadows by the barn. “A sacred mask was stolen. It has to be returned.”

  She seemed to sag. “So few words. You make it sound like she asked you to fetch some firewood.”

  “Her grandson Siyenca died trying to recover it.”

  Her fist pressed against her mouth as if to choke a sob. “A bright, energetic boy, the light of her life. And who was lost from the lodge?” The question came as a whisper.

  “Blooddancer.”

  A sound of alarm caught in her throat and she turned toward the shadowed forest as if to collect herself. “There are those who say the Confederation of the Iroquois is crumbling away, that it has no role in the world anymore. They will say that having a god abandon it is proof. Is someone trying to destroy the Iroquois?”

  He had no reply.

  A deep sorrow seemed to settle on her countenance. “Blooddancer is the Trickster of death. You can’t just track a god like some runaway animal. It needs someone who can speak with the old spirits, who knows how to listen to them. Surely she wouldn’t expect you to go alone to find such a . . .” Her words trailed off as she looked back at the smithy. “Oh. Conawago.”

  “She had a dream, Sarah. The two of us brought the mask back.” He did not speak of the rest. They would come back limping, as though from a great battle, nearly dead. “How could I say no to her?”

  “Because you are not of the Haudensaunee. Because we need you here, Duncan,” she said, then pushed herself into his arms again. “There will be time to speak of this later. You have to doctor Patrick. We have a burial to perform.”

  “They were attacked just north of Edentown. As if to stop them from arriving here. Has someone else been here? A stranger?”

  Sarah faced away, looking at the waking settlement. A dog barked. A cow lowed, asking to be milked. “We have over a hundred souls now. It means a steady stream of visitors. Trading sutlers came. An Episcopal circuit rider. Teamsters with the wagons that bring supplies.”

  “Yesterday? The past week?”

  “There was a tinker, who mended some pots. That circuit rider, who led us in hymns and moved on.”

  Threads of smoke began climbing out of village chimneys, laced with the scents of frying bacon and baking bread.

  “An Episcopal circuit man,” Duncan repeated, weighing their conversation. “A long, lonely ride over the mountains.”

  “The Scots, Duncan. Your countrymen have been flooding into these lands, all the way down the Susquehanna Valley. Those Anglican parsons can’t abide the thought that Presbyterian churches might be built.”

  They watched as Crispin
appeared, carrying a heavy tin bathtub into the woodshed, followed by Jess the cook, singing a frolicking tune as she carried two buckets of steaming water. Conawago finally emerged from the smithy, pale and drawn from his lonely vigil.

  “Messages have arrived from Jessica’s family, Duncan, down the Susquehanna. A Scottish constable seized a horse train of trade goods going west. When they found it was mostly blades and guns for the tribes they destroyed it. Tons of weapons going to the western tribes.”

  He looked at Sarah, not certain why she chose to tell this now. “In violation of the rules against such trade.”

  “Some soldiers went to arrest those who did it and were taken prisoner by the constable,” she said.

  “Soldiers?”

  “There’s talk of sending troops from Philadelphia.”

  “The constable’s a Scot named Smith,” came a quiet voice over Duncan’s shoulder. The dawning light seemed to be restoring color to Conawago’s countenance. “He speaks of John Locke, who wrote of how citizens have a right to resist their government in protection of their own life and liberty. I confess I sometimes wonder if he is writing about the tribes, for they tend to their life and liberty so much better than Europeans.”

  Duncan looked at his friend in surprise, unaccustomed to hearing such sentiments from the old Nipmuc. “Notions from some philosopher with too much time on his hands,” Duncan rejoined, now admiring the prosperous village as the sun’s first rays washed over it. Jess appeared again, hauling two more buckets of water. “Scottish settlers are more practical. They knew if those smugglers had succeeded, the renegade tribes would have used the weapons to raid their settlements.”

  “The word that comes up the river,” Sarah continued, “is that men on the council of government in Philadelphia had financed the shipment.”

  Duncan turned to her with new worry. “It does none of us good to credit idle rumors.” Crispin appeared from the barn, carrying the sleepy Iroquois boy into the woodshed as another maid from the house entered with towels. “They were thinking of the safety of their families, not of some dead philosopher.”

  “And the government is likely to hang the lot of them for asserting their rights,” Sarah retorted.

  He studied her. The hint of defiance in her voice was something new. She was watching Jessica, who now sang an old Scottish droving song as she carried a bar of lye soap and a long-handled brush into the shed. “Jess has family there, among those Susquehanna Scots,” Sarah added, then cocked her head toward Conawago, who had lit his clay pipe and was watching the shed with unexpected, though weary, amusement.

  A shrill protest exploded from the shed, in high-pitched, furious French. “Allez vous en! Idiot! Dégage d’ici!” Then the French shrieks were replaced with what sounded like an Iroquois war cry.

  Crispin burst into the morning light, a shocked expression on his wide face and his skin several shades darker than usual. The brush flew past his head. By the time Duncan reached his side Conawago was making a low wheezing sound that he realized to his surprise was laughter.

  “I never knew that a man with skin the color of walnut could blush,” the old Nipmuc exclaimed, then saw the confusion on Duncan’s face. “Did you not see it? Pierce the grime, Duncan,” he explained with a grin, “and your wild Iroquois boy becomes an even wilder French girl!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  They ate breakfast at the long table in the great house kitchen, still smiling over Crispin’s discovery. The big man took the ribbing good-naturedly and Duncan realized his friends were drawing out the incident because it was the one excuse to be lighthearted amid the death and fear that had descended on Edentown. To hear Conawago laugh after their long, despairing night had lifted all their spirits.

  Analie, their young French visitor, fidgeted in a homespun shift and tugged resentfully at her newly revealed, neatly combed blonde hair as she explained that her family had been lost in the forced evacuation of the Acadians from Nova Scotia during the great war. As she emptied her second bowl of porridge she related how she had found herself among the tribes of Maine, then had been traded as an orphan slave until she settled with the Iroquois, where Red Jacob had shown compassion and agreed to help her on her journey south to find an uncle in Virginia.

  As was the custom at kitchen meals, the house staff sat with them, and as Analie finished her porridge and began to nod off, Jess lifted her up and carried her into the little bedroom off the kitchen, cooing a Scottish lullabye. When she returned she explained how reluctant her young charge had been to yield her layers of grime. “Oh how she kicked and squirmed in the tub!” Jess exclaimed. “But I told her what I tell me own sisters. Cooperate and we’ll keep the warm water coming. Otherwise it’s into the creek with ye. And oh that hair! Can you credit it? It was bootblacking they used to make her seem like some wild Indian, and it took long scrubbing till we saw the color of autumn straw coming through. Why would you ever try to hide such a bonny head, I asked her.”

  The Scottish burr in the woman’s voice coaxed Duncan into a dull reverie. For long moments he basked in the sound of friendly voices, the welcoming smell of baking bread, and the warmth of the great stone hearth. Jess’s infectious humor joined the table in laughter as she went on to describe how the day before, a too-curious turkey had gotten its head stuck inside a crock, and how she had tangled Conawago’s hands in knots in an unsuccessful attempt at spooling yarn. She had arrived only weeks earlier but the young Scottish woman had clearly won many friends with her light heart and hard work.

  His lack of rest the night before began to take its toll, and Duncan was drifting into sleep when he heard Jess suggest that Sarah herself should take a morning nap. She saw the surprised look on Duncan’s face. “Do ye nae ken, Clan McCallum?” she asked. “Miss Ramsey was up all night, boiling your bandages and keeping vigil at the captain’s bedside.”

  Duncan had indeed not known. He rose and gestured the weary Sarah toward the stairs. “How many men can you spare from the fields?” he asked as they reached the second floor landing. “There should be patrols.”

  “Nonsense. I will not alarm the village unnecessarily.”

  “One man dead and another near death. We have reason to be alarmed.”

  “Nothing to do with Edentown. The troubles of the rest of the world do not affect us.”

  It was a discussion they’d had every few weeks for years. Sarah was fiercely determined to make Edentown an oasis, a home for orphans and outcasts of all ages, tribal and European alike. She would ask no questions of those who came, and they were welcome to stay as long as they contributed to the community.

  “The three of them were coming here. What if they were attacked to keep them from reaching Edentown?”

  “Patrick simply knew he could be sure of a hot meal here, nothing more.” She seemed to see the protest in his eyes, and pulled him down the hall toward her bedchamber door.

  “At least let me take Crispin,” he told her, “so we can search—” His words died as she pressed her fingers to his lips, then wrapped her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder. He opened his mouth to try again but gave up and embraced her tightly.

  When she pulled away, his fatigue, and his protests, were gone. With a motion that was now a habit of years, she touched the paper impaled with a knife in the lintel overhead, then closed the door behind her.

  Their feelings for one another burned deeply but that paper kept their relationship chaste. Sarah Ramsey, raised by fiercely independent Iroquois women, had asked for his hand years ago, had even suggested they could just cohabit in tribal style without a ceremony, but Duncan had refused. He had been her rescuer, her teacher, her mentor, her right hand in her little reign, but above all that he was her indentured servant. She may have coerced her father Lord Ramsey, who loathed Duncan, into transferring the indenture to her but he was still a servant. There would be no honor for either of them, he had insisted, in consummating their feelings before the seven-year indenture expired. The world
would say she had forced him as her bond servant, or that he had coaxed himself upon her to ease his servitude. “The world’s an ass,” she had fumed. He had agreed, but would not relent. That night she had furiously impaled the document above the door, and it had remained there ever since.

  Woolford, now resting in a bedroom down the hall, was breathing steadily and had more color, signs that he might yet survive his terrible wounds. But Duncan knew his friend would not abide the long convalescence he needed to recover. It would be like trying to keep a bull tied down, and in his current condition the struggle could still kill him. He had suffered a severe concussion. It could be days before Woolford was able to speak with him about what had happened, and why he and Red Jacob had been racing south.

  After checking each of the ranger’s wounds, washing them again with vinegar and then rubbing them with witch hazel, Duncan sat and studied his friend. His eyes drifted to the ancient set of Indian armor Woolford had been wearing, now hanging on a wall peg. They had been like brothers for years but much of Woolford’s life was still a mystery to him. Guilt flushed his face as he realized he was looking at his friend with the eyes of the Death Speaker. “Forgive me,” he murmured as he rose and began searching for Woolford’s secrets.

  The small pockets of the ranger’s waistcoat yielded some flints, his ranger disc, a few coins and, strangely, a broken bone cube—a half-crushed gaming dice, just as Red Jacob had carried. He looked back at the fragments of the ball he had plucked from Woolford’s ribs, then dropped several in a spoon and held it over a candle.

  “You need sleep almost as much as he does,” came a gentle voice over his shoulder. Conawago stepped beside him, looking down at the melting lead.