“Last autumn. Eventually it will protect the entire town.”
Last autumn, Duncan reminded himself, would have been after the incident at Stony Run, after Sarah Ramsey had fled.
They paused at a stone-walled well and sat on its side to drink from the wooden ladle hung on its timbers, speaking of the geese migrating overhead. Duncan showed the boy how to turn a blade of grass into a whistle between his thumbs, and to Jonathan’s delight, a jay answered from the forest.
“Jonathan, why did your sister go to England?” Duncan abruptly asked.
The boy looked at the earth at his feet, his muscles visibly tensing.
“Father says she was sick. She needed doctors there.”
“But where was she before that?”
Jonathan clamped his hands together and began wringing his fingers. “If mother had not gone away, it would have been different. We said prayers for Sarah’s tortured soul, for all those years. Mother said when we met Sarah, it would be in heaven. But then mother went to heaven. And Sarah. . When at last she could see us, we were not allowed to speak with her. Not allowed to touch her.” Tears welled in his eyes. As Duncan put a hand on his shoulder, the boy recoiled as if he had been struck, then sprang up. Duncan was certain he would run to the house, but instead the boy took five quick steps and turned, waiting. Duncan rose and followed the boy back toward the riverbank, where he stopped at a clump of alder bushes only a hundred feet beyond the house.
At Jonathan’s feet were pebbles, scores of pebbles arranged in a shape from Duncan’s boyhood. It was a Scottish cross-a cross of equal arms, each a foot long, overlaying a circle. It was a symbol discouraged by the modern church, for the shape harkened back to the sacred circles of the blue-painted Picts and the Druids. Men like Arnold were loathe to admit how much Christianity had borrowed from the pagans. In the remote lands of Duncan’s youth, such a device had often been used as a charm, a powerful device for banishing demons.
Two inches from the bottom and top of the cross were straps of iron, probably the most precious commodity in the town. The bottom iron appeared to be the handle of a long kitchen spoon, bent and rebent until it had snapped away. At the top was a narrow, six-inch piece of strap iron. Duncan lifted each in turn. As a charm against demons, many Highlanders considered iron even more potent than a cross.
Duncan studied the position of the cross. “Are there more?” he asked the boy.
Jonathan seemed troubled by the question. “They break the eggshells, too,” he blurted out.
“Eggshells?”
“Every morning on the pile where the cook leaves the pot scrapings, the eggshells are all lined up, each with a hole cut in the bottom.”
Duncan nodded somberly. “Show me the other crosses.”
Jonathan led him along the bank to two more crosses made of pebbles, with iron arranged as at the first, one of the pieces the bowl from the broken spoon. But when the boy paused a third time, he did not gesture toward the ground. Duncan followed the boy’s shifting gaze toward the far bank, the barn, the fields, then realized the boy was simply looking everywhere but the one place he could not bear to see.
Duncan saw the ants first, a line of them leading under the shadows of a clump of alders, then stepped closer and froze. The ants were devouring a dead fish beside another cross. The fish was in the middle of a vertical row of objects and signs. The first set was the skull of a small bird with lines drawn in the earth beside it. The skull and lines had been stomped on with a heavy boot, crushing the bone and nearly obliterating the lines. Next came two sets of curving lines side by side, then the fish, then a yellow feather, then two stick figures that caused Duncan’s breath to catch-a beaver and the curving lines of the snake. Then came another feather and another skull, this one with a piece of iron jammed into its eye socket, pinning it to the ground. Finally there was a small cloth pouch, no more than two inches long, drawn with a string at the top. Beyond the signs in an arc around the top were handprints in the moist soil, of two different sizes. Past the hands, encircling the cross and objects, were lines of bootprints, all walking in the same direction around the cross and the adjacent objects. Someone had walked three times around, a deiseal or sunwise circuit, used for admonishing demons.
Duncan’s gaze drifted back to the fish. Its mouth had been forced open with a small twig. The fish had been speaking and was now dead.
The boy, still not looking at the objects, was trembling. Duncan put a hand on his arm. “When did you discover this?”
“This morning,” Jonathan replied in a quivering voice as he dared a glance toward the ground. “I was gathering stones. I thought maybe I should cover it all with dirt. Should I tell Reverend Arnold? I don’t know what he would do.” The boy leapt back, the color leaving his face. “It’s coming to life!” he gasped.
Duncan followed his stricken gaze to the little sack. It was moving.
“I think,” Duncan said, working hard to keep foreboding out of his voice, “we should just leave this the way it is.”
“Because it is a curse to keep them on the other side?”
Duncan weighed the boy’s words, gauging the position of the design, on the upside of a small swale, facing the house. The cross was not aimed at the western forest, or the island. “Because it is a curse,” he repeated. But he knew the row beside the cross was no curse, nor a ritual. They were looking at a dialogue. The cross had been made first, by a Highlander. Then the first skull of a messenger had been added, with lines of a message. Someone had then answered with the curving lines, four facing right, four left, like parentheses. They could have been claws, the number of claws on a wolf’s front paws. Then the feather, the stick men, the beaver and snake signs, the fish, the signs of Adam and Jacob, then a feather as if in acknowledgment. Finally the skull and the small, moving pouch. Duncan picked up the little bag and opened it. A large bee crawled out onto his thumb, gazed at him, then flew straight up into the sky. He stared after it a long time. Birds might be messengers to the spirits in the Iroquois world. But in the world of the Highlands, it was the bee who carried messages to the dead.
He stepped backward, taking in the entire scene. There had been a dialogue between two parties who could not, or would not, meet face to face. But a third had also participated, coming back, interrupting with a boot, a strap of iron in the skull of a messenger, and a deiseal circuit. And Duncan knew who at least one of the three was. He looked up at the boy, who stared in silent fear at the river, then with his pencil lead on a flat white stone added one more sign to the row, where the bee had been. A drawing of Adam’s she-bear.
“When I found it, I couldn’t find you. I went to tell Sergeant Fitch,” Jonathan explained. “But I changed my mind.”
Duncan pulled the boy away to the sunlight at the edge of the garden. “Why?”
“I saw Mr. Frasier lead the sergeant into the kitchen and I followed. I was in the entry and they had not seen me when I heard Mr. Frasier tell Sergeant Fitch that he would keep Cameron away while he went below, into father’s cellar. No one is to go below. Father would have them both lashed if he knew. Mr. Frasier was ordered out of the house yesterday, removed from his house duties, for going onto the second floor where none of the Company is allowed. I should tell Father. But-” Jonathan bit his lip for a moment. “Sergeant Fitch carved me a toy horse. I like the way he laughs. He taught me the songs of some birds.” The boy searched Duncan’s face. When Duncan offered no reply, he ran away, not to the house, but to the white-staked rectangle beyond the barn, where Reverend Arnold was pacing off his church.
Duncan lingered at the cross, uneasily circling it, crouching by it again, placing his own hand over one of the prints as if to assure himself that its source was human. Finally he stepped around the front of the house, searching the nearby trees and the rough-scratched, struggling flowerbeds at its foundation, and found what he had expected. He leaned against a tree, studying the town, then with grim determination moved into the shadows along the edge of the fields until he reached the thicket that interrupted the fields. A knot formed in his belly as he gazed into it, then he pushed through the mountain laurel toward the center, where young oaks and chestnuts grew over a field of boulders. He advanced warily, starting at the screech of a squirrel, tripping over a log on the ground. As he heaved himself up he saw that it was not a log but a hand-hewn timber, a charred and rotting timber. He spotted another timber, and one resting on another, then, his breath catching, he discovered why Ramsey had not cleared this patch of forest.