“Where? Where is this council?”
“If you have to ask that,” Fitch replied, “then I reckon it ain’t intended for you.” He rose and pushed the tomahawk into his belt. “Given recent events, I reckon ’tis the last place any sane Christian wants to be.”
Duncan put a hand on his arm as the sergeant took a step away. “Adam Munroe was supposed to be with the Company. He would have known how to read the beads.”
Fitch looked away. “Aye,” he confirmed in a reluctant tone.
“Because he was a ghostwalker,” Duncan ventured. “Because he was a prisoner of the Indians,” he added in a questioning tone.
Fitch frowned. “Ghostwalker’s just a name for the pitiful souls who are brought back, not Indian but no longer exactly European either. Most of them move about without purpose, having lost the way of themselves.”
“How long was he a prisoner?”
“There was an expedition of Pennsylvania militia three years ago. He was one of those who did not come back,” Fitch added, then hurried away.
Adam had trusted Duncan with the stone bear, he had said, because Duncan was becoming a ghostwalker. For a horrible instant he thought Adam meant he was to be captured by the savages, then he understood. Duncan was between worlds, too, able to see certain true things because his true people were lost. He looked down at the notched stick. It ain’t intended for you, Fitch had said. But maybe it was. The old Ramsey tutor had given it to a new one.
It was dusk when Duncan returned to the schoolroom. Dropping the paper with the drawing of the belt onto the table with his other clues, he stared at them all, arms folded on the table, until his head dropped into his arms and he slept.
When he awoke, a nearly full moon had risen. He unlatched the door and sat on the stone step, watching the sky, his thoughts constantly drawn toward the old Scot in the makeshift cell. Finally he rose and stepped inside to his bedchamber. Pulling out the sea bag he had brought from the ship, he extracted the clothing and reached into the bottom, removing the tattered, stained muslin bag that held his most precious possession. Holding the bag tightly to his chest, he stepped outside. He studied the forge a moment, then stepped away from it, walking hurriedly over the open ground, slowly finding his way through the laurel thicket until he reached the overgrown cemetery. As he reached into the sack, his heart gave a sudden lurch, and he stood unmoving, overwhelmed with emotion. The intricately crafted pipes had been handed down through his family for at least two hundred years, but they had been lovingly cared for, left to him by the old uncle who had sought refuge with Duncan, secretly kept for him by one of his Scottish professors who had visited him in prison and then appeared in the courtroom when he had been sentenced to transportation.
Slowly, methodically, sitting on one of the ruined cabin walls, Duncan prepared the instrument, flooded with memories of his grandfather playing and teaching him with the same pipes. Finally, the bladder bulging with air, the reeds wetted and reset, the drones tuned as best he could manage, he clamped the blow-stick in his teeth and grasped the chanter. He was out of practice, but the fingering came back quickly. His grandfather had taught him many lonesome ballads of the Highlands and the seafaring island folk, and Duncan played all he could recall, each song releasing him further from the guilt and hopelessness he felt in the Ramsey compound. Long-dead scenes opened in his mind, of his mother dancing with him in the kitchen as his father played small music, of his grandfather offering a solemn pibroch to bless the fishermen each spring before they set out on the treacherous Hebrides waters. His heart thundered, and a new energy reached his piping. He was rowing with his grandfather on a calm sea as the old man piped to the whales and seals. He was at one of the joyful Highland weddings, where men who smelled of heather and peat piped all night by a bonfire and girls danced over swords.
Duncan did not know how long he played, how long he had been transported to the country, and clan, of his youth, but when he had finished, he brimmed with unexpected tranquility, a lightness of heart he had not known for months, perhaps years. He returned the pipes to their sack, then carefully laid the bag inside a hollow log by Sarah’s stone, stuffing the end with moss. He entered the night-still paths of Edentown boldly, buoyed by his unexpected contentment, and had begun to circle the barn, hoping to come up on the back of the forge so he might whisper to Lister, when a murmur abruptly stopped him.
His heart seemed to shudder. Impossible, he told himself. A trick of the mind. The lack of sleep, or perhaps the lingering effect of the piping affected his senses. He pushed a hand against his temple to drive away the strange working of memory and guilt that had overtaken his brain. The voice of mad Flora had entered his mind and would not leave. He shook his head sharply once, twice, then drew in a deep breath before taking another step. The voice faded but came back, stronger, and unmistakable. Flora was speaking to him, using the alien, sibilant language that had so mesmerized him on the ship. But Flora was gone, hundreds of miles away, back on the high seas by now.
He moved through the shadows as if in a dream, until he saw a candle lantern that had been hung from a peg in the center aisle of the barn. Impossibly, the phantom was there, sitting cross-legged in the pool of light with her back to him; the heads of the horses extended beyond their stall doors, and the animals seemed to be listening attentively. It was all a dream. He had to be dreaming. His consciousness had surrendered to his guilt. Her long, dark hair flowed down the blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders. The way she spoke the strange syllables, which echoed in his memory every night, left no doubt. The phantom was Flora, his murderess, whose hand he had held in the dark.
“Haudenosaunee! Haudenosaunee!” came the chant. “Ohkwari!”
She seemed to be addressing someone, though she spoke toward the oak plank wall. Her head bent lower and lower, as if she were falling into a trance, and Duncan ventured closer, fifteen feet away, then ten, and still she spoke her strange tongue without seeming to notice him. Finally the Flora of his nightmares would have a face.
But as he took another step, a hand closed around his arm. He turned to see Crispin beside him, wearing a haunted, frightened expression. The big man gripped him so tightly it hurt, pulling him backward, not making a sound. Suddenly the chanting stopped and the woman turned, shot upright, lifting the blanket over her head, and fled into the shadows. But in that instant Duncan had glimpsed her face.
“Sarah!” he gasped.
A shadow appeared at the opposite end of the barn and intercepted the girl, pulling her toward the fields. Duncan, too, felt himself led away, his mind roiling with contradiction. He found himself seated on a low stool in one of the oak-planked tool rooms at the back of the barn, lit by a solitary candle, and looked up into the tortured countenance of Crispin.
“I’ve been so blind,” Duncan groaned, sinking his head into his hands. His slender certainties were in ashes. Everything he had concluded about the murders, everything he had done since the storm on the ship, had to be reconsidered, every piece of the puzzle dismantled. “It’s her grave out there after all,” he said. “But she didn’t die.”
“They thought so,” Crispin whispered. “They truly thought so, for a dozen years, and her mother mourned her every day, had the children pray for her soul. The bodies had been mutilated, many burnt to the bone.”
“Instead, she was taken.”
“Sometimes they make slaves of children,” Crispin’s voice cracked as he spoke.
Duncan felt again the despair he had first experienced at the grave, only deeper now. He felt as if he would weep at any moment, as he thought of the beautiful, gentle girl Sarah must have been as a six-year-old, and the horror she must have suffered with the savages, wrenched away from the world, deprived of all mercy, love, and hope. “A ghostwalker,” Duncan said with a chill, and the word had an odd, biting texture on his tongue. Sarah’s sickness had a name after all. She was one of the wretched souls who had returned from the purgatory of captivity, having lost all connection to the civilized world.