“All I remember,” Duncan said, “is waking in a prison cell, cold and shivering.”
Ramsey seemed to relish the answer. “Job, too, had to endure great suffering to appreciate the role the Almighty had granted him. Eventually you shall recall what happened to you in the water, when destiny put its hand upon you, and you must record it for the Company archives.”
Duncan found his gaze drifting out the window, toward the men laboring in the muddy fields. He would never feel so unclean as he did now, standing there in Lord Ramsey’s library. There were two other new arrivals, for that morning McGregor had appeared, escorting one of the Company men who had also gone with Hawkins into the forest, a younger man wearing a crazed, hollow expression. The man had become useless in the forest, his sensibilities in some kind of shock. Duncan clenched his jaw and fixed the patron with a level stare. He may not know his role in the drama that was unfolding, but he certainly knew what Ramsey wanted to hear, and it was no struggle to speak ill of the army. “We will not allow mere generals the upper hand in the events of the day,” he declared.
Ramsey’s eyes narrowed. Arnold, seeming to sense a cue, rose and shut the library door.
“When you issue your report to the governor, you will show him that one company of Ramsey men is more effective than ten companies of soldiers,” Duncan concluded, beating down his shame.
Ramsey stepped to the big desk, gesturing Duncan to turn away as he opened its hinged top. Duncan heard a series of drawers slide open. The patron was accessing a locked compartment, he knew, a paper safe often built into such desks and opened by positioning the small interior drawers in a designated arrangement. After a moment Ramsey cleared his throat, and Duncan turned to see him holding a rolled sheet of vellum. With a triumphant look, he motioned Duncan closer and unrolled the document on the desk. Its script was elegant, the scrollwork along its borders intricate and colored with rich hues, like an illuminated manuscript. But Duncan’s gaze quickly settled on the huge ribboned seal at the bottom, beside a date only three months earlier.
“The king himself,” Ramsey declared with a conspiratorial air, lifting a map from the desktop and laying it on the arm of his desk chair. A massive tract was outlined in red. “Ten thousand square miles. Much of the colony to the west, all the way to the great inland seas that feed the Saint Lawrence. The king wants it to be ours.”
Duncan’s heart seemed to wither as he watched the thin smile form on Ramsey’s face.
“I am impressed with your usages of death,” the English lord declared to him, then stepped back to the tray and poured another cup. “Would you prefer sugar in your tea, Professor McCallum?”
“Carolina.” It was the first word Lister spoke when Duncan found him working at one of the new cabins. “It is our answer,” the old sailor said, gesturing Duncan out of earshot of his companions. “Hundreds of Scots are there, in the mountains. I hear there are even towns where they speak only the old tongue. Sometimes the smith talks as he works. Last year some Scots in thrall to Ramsey fled south and made it, out of the reach of his dogs. Scots go there to be free, far from the law. Cameron’s been collecting canoes on the river above town. We can take one, get to the Delaware, and follow it to Philadelphia, work a ship to Charleston.”
“You mean us to flee?”
“I mean for us to live. Yesterday a wagon arrived at the carpenter’s shed. I watched them unload fifty muskets. Bars of lead, powder horns, bullet molds, all stowed and locked in the shed. Lord Ramsey, he is taking us into the war somehow.”
Duncan studied the great house. There was movement in an upstairs window. The woman using Sarah Ramsey’s name was staring into the forest again. He had begun to feel somehow victimized by her. He had saved an impostor. “Woolford’s pack is on a bench in the barn,” he said. The ranger had disappeared two days earlier. “I must speak with him.”
“He ate by the south well with Fitch, then walked into the woods near there.”
Duncan followed the perimeter of the fields below the house, pausing frequently to peer uneasily into the forest. This was not the western bank, he kept telling himself, this was a thinned, tamed forest. Lifting a heavy stick for a weapon, he ventured slowly under the trees, turning frequently to assure he kept the huge barn in sight. It took nearly an hour of nervous forays into the shadows for him to discover the clearing, three hundred yards beyond the fields. Under the boughs of several huge beech trees, four logs had been arranged in a square, in the center of which was not a fire pit, as Duncan expected, but a three-foot-high platform made of long, flat stones stacked on top of one another. The scene had been set many years earlier. The benches showed signs of rot; the stones of the cairn were covered with lichen. Seedlings sprouted in the square around the cairn.
A solitary figure in green sat on one of the logs, his rifle beside him, staring at the stacked stones as if waiting for something to climb out of them. Woolford, looking exhausted, did not glance up until Duncan was a few feet away, then reacted with a small frown and gazed back at the cairn.
“They say that in the last century, the tribes and early settlers made places like this near every settlement.” The ranger’s voice seemed drained of emotion. “They say old Penn and the Quakers visited them often, to speak with the chiefs. Few could speak both English and the tongues of the tribes, but there was far less blood-shed. Now that we can speak with one another, all we want to do is kill one another.”
“It is a meeting place, then?” Duncan asked as he sat beside Woolford.
“The Edge of the Woods place is what the tribes call it. Old Jacob and Hendrick used to tell of such ceremonies they joined as young warriors. It is where those who came out of the woods met those not of the woods. Those who came from afar would talk about the difficulties of their journey, to show the sacrifice made for the sake of discourse among peoples, speaking loudly so the messengers in the trees would hear.
“Each chief would hold a wampum belt to underscore the importance, to show the truth of his words. It was also done between tribes, before Europeans came. The host would symbolically wipe the sweat from the traveler’s limbs and pretend to pull thorns from his feet, then clean the eyes and ears and mouth, to be certain all would be clearly understood. Sometimes evil spirits would follow from deep in the woods, and words had to be said to drive them away.”
Duncan looked about again. He had arrived at the edge of the woods, Sarah had said when Duncan had arrived, and earned the unspoken censure of her father for using the words. “A wampum belt?” he asked, not sure why he was whispering. He gazed upward, into the dense, glittering canopy supported by the broad grey columns of the beeches. It was as if they were in a cathedral.
Woolford replied by standing and stepping to the stone platform. With both hands he pushed back the heavy stone on top, and Duncan joined to help lean it against the stack. The long, narrow stones underneath had been crisscrossed to form a hollow in the center. From the compartment Woolford lifted a bundle of leather, unfolded it, and extracted a four-inch-wide belt of small beads, strung in intricate patterns. As he unfolded it to its full three-foot length, Duncan saw that the background of one half was made of white beads, its many figures depicted in purple, and the other half was of purple background, with white figures. Between the two squares at either end were the shapes of men and women, houses, deer, and axes, with a tree at the center.
“It is their way of saying important things, of sending important messages,” the ranger explained. “When they hold such a belt, they can only speak the truth.”