Eye of the Raven (38 page)

"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."

"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."

"I must beg your forgiveness," Duncan said. "You were caught in Ramsey's trap for me."

Marston raised a dismissive hand. "We have survived. It was an illuminating experience to be on the other side of the jars. Illuminating," he repeated with a shallow laugh at his pun.

"Perhaps you could use less severe charges in the future."

Marston flushed. "I have already decided that the larger jars will no longer leave my premises."

"Your equipment is lost. I regret having dragged you into my problems."

"As I recollect it was I who sought you out that night," Marston said. "I have already written to Dr. Franklin. He will relish the exciting news from stale old Philadelphia. And the Benevolent Society has agreed to bear the cost of replacements."

Duncan could not help but grin at the scientist's good will. "I fear I have another request. Might you roll up your left sleeve?"

"Pardon?"

"Your sleeve. In the . . . in the confusion I thought I saw a mark. Like a bolt of lightning."

Marston grimaced, but began rolling up the cuff of the linen shirt he wore under his sleeveless waistcoat. "Our badge." He exposed his upper arm, extending the mark with what Duncan took to be pride.

It was a scar, a raised red scar in the shape of a jagged streak of lightning.

"This is identical to one I saw on the arm of Captain Burke when I examined his body."

"There are perhaps twenty of us in the Leyden Society. Natural philosophers interested in the advancement of the study of electrical fluids. Several of us," he added, "helped Dr. Franklin with his kites and lightning rods. We meet on the full moon and often send a kite up in a storm."

Duncan's mind raced. "How could Captain Burke of Virginia be a member?"

"He studied here. His father discouraged him, wanted him home, said his academics would be useless in running their estates. Once, when he was visiting, his father had him forcibly removed from one of our meetings. I think that's why he came back and joined us, an act of defiance."

"Came back when?"

"Last month Burke entertained us with that very story at our meeting. He was supposed to pick up maps in Baltimore and rendezvous with his troops at Fort Ligonier, supposed to take a boat from the James up the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore. Instead he found a captain going up the Delaware Bay to Philadelphia, where better maps were available in any event."

"He came back to join your Leyden Society?"

Marston grinned awkwardly. "He came back to set the foundations for his new life, as he said to us. There was a party, where he drank and told us of his plans, perhaps more than he intended. His father also did not know he had a mistress here, did not know he had secretly accumulated enough money to buy a house in the city. He was a man of refined tastes, sent to boarding school in London as a boy, and after was never comfortable with the Virginia country life." He gazed down at his scar. "Joining the Society was his official welcome to Philadelphia. We have a little ceremony with a molded brass plate strapped to the arm through which we send a strong charge of electrical fluid. When we remove the plate the skin has been excited enough to produce the scar."

Duncan looked at his own bandages. "It would be painful."

"There is brandy involved."

"Where did he get such a large amount of money?"

"I don't know. It wasn't just the cost of a house. He was steadily buying shares in a merchant company, with the intention of supplying the frontier, was making regular payments to the owner."