“The house seemed secure enough,” Arnold said. “The attack was on the north side, at the cabins. We set men to watch at the south side of the house, the point nearest the forest, and I went to help at the fires. Lord Ramsey went to safety in the cellar. They came right into her bedroom, from the river. Wet footprints were all over the upstairs hall. They took wigs,” he added in a confused whisper, “half His Lordship’s hairpieces.”
“Wigs?” The news seemed so odd that Duncan almost asked Arnold to repeat himself. But then he followed Arnold’s gaze to the desk in the corner. It was in ruin. The top leaf had been levered open, splintering the wood around the lock, and the small drawers inside had been tossed on the floor, some crushed underfoot. The panel behind them-which, Duncan knew, had enclosed the paper safe-had been forced open, and bits of its wood lay strewn on the desktop.
“They stole the king’s charter?” Duncan asked, not bothering to conceal the disbelief in his voice.
For the first time since Duncan had known him, Arnold was at a loss for words. He glanced at Duncan with a helpless expression. “Our sacred grant,” he groaned.
“There must have been a hundred of the savages,” Ramsey said. “They were everywhere. It would have been a massacre but for our valiant defense.”
“No more than ten,” a deep, fuming voice interjected. Woolford stepped into the room, his face soot-stained, his clothes spattered with mud, in his hand a red-painted club that ended in a large knob with an iron spike protruding from it. “And if they had come to kill, there would be damned few of us left standing right now.”
Ramsey quickly closed the desk, then rose and stood to lean against it. “It was a pitched battle,” he protested. “You heard the gunshots. Doubtless French troops as well. My brave lads kept them at bay.”
“Every shot I heard came from an English Brown Bess. Only our guns were fired,” the ranger said. “And if you wish to know the fettle of your brave lads, look to your pasture. There are two champion milk cows lying dead by the hands of your Company marksmen. And a chestnut stump with enough lead in it to sink a boat.” When he met Duncan’s gaze, he sighed. “They took her across the river. Their tracks lead northwest.”
“My little Sarah,” Ramsey moaned. Tears erupted on his cheeks. “Dear God, my Sarah. Enslaved again. . Thank God her mother is not here to relive the anguish.”
“What did they take from here?” Woolford demanded.
Duncan watched Ramsey, who even in his weeping exchanged an uneasy glance with Arnold.
“They killed your sergeant,” the vicar stated. “Destroyed our new barracks for the Company.” He advanced on Woolford, as if trying to force a retreat. “We will collect the bodies of those we killed. At least we can tell the world the price they paid for their atrocity. If we are fortunate, we may have shot a French officer or two.”
“There won’t be any bodies,” Woolford shot back. “Even if the Company bullets connected with any of them, which I doubt, they will have taken away their casualties. And you will certainly find no evidence of the French.” The ranger studied Ramsey and Arnold a moment, then cursed under his breath. “Is it truly possible you could be at the center of this maelstrom and not comprehend it?”
“We do not need the army to explain our suffering,” Ramsey rejoined icily, and turned his back on the ranger.
With a vengeful glare Woolford raised the lethal spiked club in his hand. Duncan leapt forward, for a terrible instant thinking the ranger meant to strike Ramsey. But with a blur of movement the ranger brought it down on Ramsey’s delicate porcelain teapot, the spike embedding in the refined mahogany table. Ramsey spun about, a snarl on his mouth, but as he saw Woolford’s face, white with rage, he shrank back and fixed his gaze on the shards of painted flowers that covered his carpet.
When Woolford spoke, the venom in his voice was a palpable thing. “These were no Huron, no Abenaki, no French Indians,” he hissed. “They were our friends the Iroquois!” Woolford spun on his heel and was gone.
Duncan found Jonathan near the edge of the river, gathering stones into a pile under the eye of a guard fifty feet away. His cheeks were streaked where tears had fallen, his eyes sunken and absent. Duncan watched the boy in silence, then collected a handful of pebbles and added them to the boy’s pile.
“If I had enough stones,” Jonathan said. “I could have stopped them.” His voice was halting, as if he were about to start sobbing again at any moment. “Next time I shall kill them all. I have learned to kill frogs and squirrels,” he offered with hollow bravado.
“Did you see them, Jonathan?”
“I tried to stay awake, but. . If I had been awake I could have raised the alarm, I could have thrown stones while Sarah hid.” The tears began again, and the boy collapsed to the ground, tucking his head into his folded knees as he sobbed. “When I awoke, I thought it was Crispin who held me. He was so large and strong, and he patted me on the back like Crispin.” The boy seemed to have aged years since the day before. He scrubbed his cheeks and gazed fearfully toward the far bank.
A shadow flickered across them. Woolford was there, bending, dropping more stones onto Jonathan’s pile. The boy pushed his chin out, acknowledging him with a solemn nod-the young recruit in his officer’s presence. “When he stepped to Sarah’s window, in the moonlight, I saw his hair,” he continued, raising both hands and placing them on his crown, covering all but a center patch of hair, pushed up between his fingers.
“It’s called a scalp lock,” Woolford explained, kneeling at the boy’s opposite side.
“He had stripes of paint on his face, and his eyes were big black circles. A witch, I am certain. On the side of his face was a crow. He must have cast a spell, because when I tried to scream, no sound came out. I hit him with my fists. That’s when he did it.”
“Did what?” Duncan asked in alarm. “Something to Sarah?”
Jonathan shook his head slowly. “He laughed.” The words hung in the still afternoon air. “But savages can’t laugh, can they? They kill. They scream. They invite terrible spirits to inhabit their bodies. That’s what he was doing,” the boy decided, looking back at a second-story window. “It was his way of calling a devil.”
“Where was Sarah when this happened?” Duncan asked. “Was her tongue also bewitched?”
“I don’t think she awoke until he made that sound. She leapt out of bed, calling my name, then someone else in the room spoke in the forest language and she spoke no more. I didn’t see, didn’t hear anything else. He put me on the windowsill and pointed to the moon. He meant to kill me if I didn’t keep looking at the moon, I’m sure of it.”
“Did you see her leave?”
“I think they beat her and carried her away in a blanket. I turned when I saw the cabins burning, and they were gone.”
“It was all over before it started,” Woolford concluded. “She was already in the woods by the time the cabins ignited. Just a distraction, to keep everyone here while her abductors raced away.”
“Crispin and I cleaned Fitch’s body,” Woolford reported as the boy set off to collect more stones. “When we lifted it, there was something underneath. The key to the lock on Lister’s cell.”
“You’re saying he was trying to release Lister?”
Woolford took out his knife and began rubbing the edge on a flat stone, an action Duncan had seen Fitch perform a dozen times before. “Could be he thought the buildings were all going to burn.”
“Killed by an Indian in a settlement after so many years fighting them in the wilderness,” Duncan observed. “You said he was the best Indian fighter you had ever known.”
“I thought you had seen his body.” Something close to contempt had entered Woolford’s voice.
“I did.”
“Then you looked and didn’t see.”
As the ranger continued to whet his blade, Duncan reconstructed the scene in his mind. “His belt,” Duncan said in a muted tone. “His knife and tomahawk were still in it. His attacker took him in the chest.”