“I am writing a commentary on Plato,” Ramsey announced, abruptly changing the subject. “Where else but in the New World do we have an opportunity to shape an entire society according to his esteemed principles?” The patron fixed Duncan with a level gaze. “Each of us is born to a destined duty. The ancient sage teaches that the highest reward is the fulfillment of that duty.” Ramsey had not changed the subject after all.
Duncan dared to return Ramsey’s stare for a moment, then lowered his gaze. Lister was right. He was going to have to master the skills of retreat. “I shall tirelessly strive toward my just rewards,” Duncan said in a taut voice. He placed his cup on the tray and offered a slight bow as he maneuvered toward the door.
Ramsey raised his cup toward Duncan as if in salute.
Duncan wandered about the compound, admiring the huge barn, more English than the house itself-its mortised beams joined like those of a mighty ship, with thirty stalls and central grain storage chambers and tool rooms under a cavernous hayloft-but soon found himself back in the classroom, staring at the blank slate on the wall. Checking that the door was latched, he extracted tattered pieces of paper from his pocket and arrayed them in front of him on the teacher’s table. His list of the McCallum clan chiefs. Evering’s poetry. The two messages from Jacob’s lean-to. He found a sheet of paper and began writing, one line for each event in the mystery that lay before him, then tore the list of events into slips, one line per slip, and arranged them in a row, top to bottom. Evering breaks vial of laudanum. Compass ritual, said the next. Then Evering murdered and Sarah awakens. He studied them for several minutes, then shifted the last paper to the top. Sarah awakens, Compass ritual, Evering murdered. After a moment he wrote and tore more slips. Frasier and Cameron loot Woolford’s chest. Adam barters with McGregor for the bear stone from Woolford’s chest. Woolford flees the ship with Sarah to be in port a day before the others. Adam commits suicide. Jacob the Fish receives message about ship from Socrates Moon. Old Jacob murdered. Duncan attacked in New York harbor. Woolford secretly writes Moon. Moon leaves message for Jacob. He arranged the papers in an arc before him, as he once had done with the names of the bones when memorizing the sequence of the human skeleton. As he stared at the slips, convinced that if he could only place them in the right sequence he would glimpse the truth, a terrible weight seemed to close around his shoulders. The skeleton before him was that of the monster responsible for the violence and mystery that simmered below the surface of the Ramsey Company. Here before him, in his hands, hung the life of Lister. He wrote a last slip and put it in front of all the others. Massacre at Stony Run.
He turned to his list of clan chieftains and recited each name out loud, then retrieved and unwrapped the bear stone, placing it before him, facing the paper slips, as if it might help him translate the events and the dialogue in his patron’s library. It had not been Ramsey’s words about Lister that had made Duncan’s skin crawl. There had been something else, when he had described the death of Old Jacob. Indians are always dying, Ramsey had said. It is a sign of our victorious God. In his youth, Duncan had been forced to listen to the same words spoken from English pulpits, about the destruction of the Highland Scots. He stared at the clan names again, then pushed the slips aside, unfolded the message Jacob had made in his own blood, and stared at it. It was meant for a man who understood more than Duncan did, meant for a man more conversant with the violent truths of the New World. He buried his head in his hands.
Flora is alone, with no hand to hold. The thought pounced upon him from nowhere. The guilt he felt for leaving the mad, faceless murderess on the ship would not be shaken. She was gone, condemned to slow death in the tropics, and for the rest of his life he would feel the helplessness, the pain of not being able to help her, the doubt over whether she had, like him, been unfairly convicted. He was a clan chief and was supposed to help Scots in peril. But he had failed her. Her strange words, the soft, desperate touch of her hand during the long, dark hours, had moved him more than he cared to admit. Flora, too, had been touched by the New World, he knew now, for her words had been echoed on the river and the frontier road, had been the seed of a strange, unnamable awareness that seemed to be building inside him. At night, at the edge of sleep, he sometimes sensed a warmth in his fingers, as if she were still there. She had become an invisible member of his clan, more real in a way than Sarah, who had proven an imposter. The night before, he had dreamt he had stayed with Flora, gone to Jamaica and escaped with her in a small, swift sloop on a warm, dark sea.
He became aware of a small, round face peering through the window at him and hurried to the door. “I am in need of a guide, Master Jonathan,” he declared, “Will you show me your town?”
They moved along the perimeter of the little community, past the dog kennels and pens where rotund sows suckled piglets. Some of the workers, men not of the Company, called out greetings to the boy, who answered with awkward waves. Others, familiar from the Anna Rose, glanced nervously at Duncan and looked away without speaking.
Duncan had to admire the planning that had gone into the construction of Ramsey’s town. The nucleus he was creating would have sustained a much larger community. They passed saw pits where logs were being cut into planks, a mason’s yard where large stones dragged in on ox sledges were being shaped for lintels and sills. He studied the men with the oxen, remembering Evering’s cryptic words on the sheet torn from his journal. The ghostwalker at the ox wheel, his tongue is in his heart. But Duncan saw no ox cart, no wheel of any kind among the great beasts.
Jonathan pointed out a lime kiln built into the knoll beside the northernmost pasture, even a potter’s shed where rust-colored bowls were lined up on a bench to dry in the sun. Ramsey’s fields were laid in careful squares, divided by walls of stone collected in the clearing of the fields, except for a flat acre of thicket and small trees that extended like a tongue into the fields from the south, disrupting the neat sequence.
“Where are the other children?” Duncan inquired as they watched three men hew beams to use as roof rafters, beside others spudding bark from chestnut logs.
“Virginia is at the butcher’s with Reverend Arnold, where he goes to plan the week’s meals. There are no others.”
Duncan’s gaze settled on two of the workers, not of the Company, laboring at a stump. They wore iron collars around their necks. “What sin,” he inquired in a taut voice, “did those men commit?”
Jonathan followed his gaze. “Escaped. Father sometimes goes to Philadelphia and brings back bondsmen from those arriving on the ships. They sign papers to stay. When they flee, Mr. Hawkins brings them back. He uses father’s bear dogs,” the boy declared, nodding toward the kennels. “Father says we must always keep them a little hungry in case there’s work to be done. Such men must be reminded of their sin,” he added in a flat tone. “God wills it so.” Duncan did not need to ask the origin of that particular script.
Duncan clenched his jaw and kept moving. It wasn’t so much a Greek utopia Ramsey was building as a Roman circus. “Some of these men must have families,” he said. He tried to steer toward the thicket that jutted into the fields, but Jonathan pulled him in the opposite direction, carefully avoiding looking at the thicket.
“Not here,” the boy replied. “Not yet. Father will tell them when they may bring their families from the settlements.”
“When did they start building the palisade wall?” Duncan asked after a few silent paces. He spotted another group of workers, a dozen men in two columns, walking with Cameron at the lead, holding barrel staves like muskets.