The heavy door swung open and Woolford entered. “The sergeant has her,” he assured Crispin. “She weeps.”
“It’s how it goes,” Crispin said in a tormented voice. “She has one of her spells, then she cries, then she goes very still, as if paralyzed, nothing moving but her eyes and lips, whispering those words of hers. Usually at night, the hours before dawn. At first, last fall, she did it every night. Her father caned her until she stopped, shouting he would beat the savage out of her. Tonight I watched her door for three hours but drifted off. Then the piping started. She was at the bottom of the stairs already when I woke, disappeared into the night in the seconds it took me to reach the door.”
“You’re saying she went outside because of me?” Duncan asked. “That she. . went into her spell,” he said, borrowing Crispin’s words for lack of better, “because of the pipes?”
“I will not say why she does anything, only that the pipes sounded and she slipped away to speak those words. But why the barn? Why here, with all the woods about?” Crispin asked Woolford, who only shook his head. “Too many already call her witch,” Crispin added. “If the men find her like this. . ” His voice grew too weak to finish the sentence.
Duncan searched the ranger’s face. “You found her at Stony Run,” he ventured.
Woolford sighed, glanced at Crispin, and nodded. “She was unconscious when Pike’s men discovered her in the brush, tended by two other white captives who would not leave her. Some of the senior officers at the camp knew the Ramseys. She was the spitting image of her mother, and around her neck she still wore a Ramsey locket, wrapped in fur. She had lost nearly all her English, wouldn’t sleep on a bed the first month.”
“You should have told me.”
“No!” Crispin insisted. “Lord Ramsey forbade anyone from speaking of it. At first I did not think he could bear the shame of it. How could one of the greatest families in all the empire have it known that their eldest had been a slave to the savages for a dozen years, that she had become little more than a savage herself? How could she inherit, how could she be respected by the landed families? How could she have a life of her own? I would not speak of it, even if Lord Ramsey had said nothing, for her sake. Nor should you, by all that’s holy. God only knows the horrors they commited. . It’s bad enough without more talk of it. You’ve seen the way the people in the settlements look at her.”
“What happened after she was found?” Duncan’s confusion was quickly giving way to shame. He had begun to think of her as an impostor, had clung to his memory of the faceless Flora while resenting Sarah, when in fact the woman who had touched him so deeply on the cell deck and the troubled Ramsey daughter were one and the same.
“Some of us won’t speak of it for fear of what it will do to the girl,” Woolford confessed. “All the others won’t for fear of the girl herself.”
“Surely there is nothing to fear from Sarah,” Duncan said.
Crispin seemed surprised at Duncan’s words. “When she was brought out of the woods, she carried a stick, a club really, with bear claws fastened into it like thorns, strips of fur hanging from it. She shook it at people and they grew ill. That’s when people began calling her a witch.”
“She had been taken from the one whom even the Indians fear,” Woolford added in a low voice, fixing Duncan with a pointed gaze.
It took a moment for Duncan to understand. “Tashgua,” he said with a shudder. Sarah may not be a witch, but she had been enslaved to one.
“The army left her at the Moravian mission in the north,” Crispin explained. “She wouldn’t leave, so we went there, taught her how to be English again. Sometimes she would call out in the night, make noises like animals. We stayed with her for weeks, then took her to the city. Even then I would have to sit and hold her hand, sometimes for hours.”
Duncan remembered the way Crispin always quieted nervous horses. “Adam Munroe was one of the others with her? He was at the mission?”
“Gone by the time we arrived. He had been in the militia, captured by Hurons who traded him to some Ohio Indians, who then traded him to the band that held Sarah. The army wanted to learn secrets from him, about the tribes, but he fled.”
“And after another month in New York town, she ran away to Argyll to hide with Adam.”
“We thought she had gone north,” Crispin explained, “to be with the other Indian captive she had been rescued with, the one who had stayed at the German mission. Lord Ramsey and Reverend Arnold spent days with him, speaking about her, about their lives with the tribes, trying to understand her, to understand what she might be doing, then he had a mental collapse and stopped speaking. I stayed in New York, asking questions wherever I could. A boatman remembered rowing a woman in a cloak to a ship in the night, bound for Glasgow on a dawn tide, saying she was returning home after visiting relatives in Albany. Major Pike came to the house, demanding to know where Adam Munroe had gone. I didn’t know, I told him. But I told Reverend Arnold that Adam said his home was in a place called Argyll.”
“So Arnold went to look for her in Scotland,” he said to Woolford. “Where you were already looking for Adam.”
Woolford cracked open the door. “It is a dangerous night for such discussions,” he observed in a voice heavy with warning.
“When exactly,” Duncan asked, “did Lord Ramsey decide to recruit a company of prisoners?”
“Last autumn,” Woolford replied.
“After Sarah fled,” Duncan concluded, “after Ramsey spent time speaking with the other ghostwalker about her time with the tribes, after his hate for the Iroquois began burning as hot as his feeling for the French.”
“You are dabbling in what some would consider affairs of state. Treacherous ground for an indentured servant.”
“A danger I readily accept when others dabble with the life of an old man and an innocent girl. What is Ramsey going to do with an armed company of men?”
“Defend his land,” Woolford said.
“Fifty men for ten thousand square miles?”
“Ridiculous. He has only ten thousand acres.”
“Arnold did not only cross the Atlantic for Sarah,” Duncan explained. “I have seen the charter he brought from the king. All the lands to the great lakes in the west.”
Woolford eased the door shut and stepped to Duncan’s side. “Impossible.”
Duncan quickly explained what Ramsey had shown him.
The ranger reacted as if he had been kicked. “He and Calder both aspire to be governor,” he said in a hollow voice. “With that land Ramsey would have by far the stronger claim.” Woolford looked at Duncan. “But he can’t take the land. It belongs to the tribes.”
The chamber went deathly still. Somewhere in the distance an animal brayed.
It was Duncan who broke the silence. “Calder has his own means of taking the land, by building forts across the territory. Ramsey accomplishes things more subtly. By bargain and bribe.”
“God preserve us,” Woolford said with something like a moan. “The charter would be meaningless with the tribes still on the land. The king wants them to compete, and let the one who expands the colony westward be the victor.” A darkness fell over his face, and his warrior’s eyes returned. When the ranger spoke again it was in a worried whisper. “There was a new wampum belt this afternoon, another I had never seen before. Fitch was upset by it. He thinks it says the world is going to end at Stony Run in ten days.” He spun about and disappeared into the night.
Duncan wanted to ask who would make such a prophesy, then knew it was not necessary. There was indeed a prophet they knew, who would speak with beads. Tashgua, Sarah’s former tormenter.