Duncan considered the words. “You mean it wasn’t Reverend Arnold wearing this.”
“They spent a night with us, the Ramsey men. One of them was so scared he just sat in the corner of the stable shaking, clutching an iron nail in his hand. That Hawkins had come in with another group, telling what the Indians would do to any man who tried to flee when they moved north. That wretch kept shaking, wouldn’t even join in Arnold’s prayer service outside. He was useless. In the morning Arnold said he needed a man to deliver a message to Lord Ramsey. The poor lug would have none of it, then Arnold said he could wear the breast plate. He took the message, put on the plate, grabbed his gun and was gone. A few hours later those two outside come in carrying the plate and the gun, asking if they could trade for a jug. They found his body less than two miles from here. The fool didn’t know the plate was made to stop arrows, not bullets.” The Welshman tightened his grip on the gun.
“And the message?”
“That be the business of the Ramsey captains.”
Duncan stepped outside, studying the little hollow, noticing for the first time a faint scent of smoke in the air, coming, judging from the wind, from over the next ridge. He stroked the horse’s back, considering the scene, then approached the rumbling millstone.
He spoke greetings to the boy, offered to get him some water, even complimented the brindled ox. The boy did not acknowledge his presence. The ox stared at Duncan with its huge black eyes.
Duncan stepped directly in front of the mill axle. “Alex,” he said, naming the boy for the first time. “I have been called a ghostwalker, too,” he ventured. “I am a friend of Sarah Ramsey,” he tried, still without result.
He paused frequently as he walked down the rough, rutted track that led out of the hollow, looking over his shoulder, unsettled by the Welshman’s expectation of imminent attack, watching the northern horizon with deep foreboding. Suddenly he stumbled over a freshly plowed furrow. He was at the edge of a cleared field, with a team raising dust on the far side, dragging a stump.
A broad-shouldered man with long blond hair, not much older than Duncan, stood with his back to him, making a speech on a low rise a hundred feet away, his black britches unbuckled at the knees, a wide-brimmed black hat on the stump beside him. Duncan hurried forward, anxious to find someone in the man’s audience to speak with, then halted as he reached the top of the little hill. There was no audience. The man was energetically addressing a field of stumps, in German. Duncan paused, not certain how to extract himself, then lowered his pack and settled onto the nearest stump as the stranger greeted him with a wave and kept speaking.
He listened awkwardly, casting about to confirm that he was the only human in the audience, then strained, able to make out a few German words. God, Duncan heard repeatedly, and beggar, and bread. As the dust began to clear, he saw a collection of buildings beyond the field. Beside a few struggling apple trees lay a pile of black material he took to be charcoal, beyond which was the roof of a building dug into the hillside with a tall stone chimney out of which a line of smoke curled. A girl in a black dress milked a cow. Children worked at a fence woven of twigs and branches that enclosed a vegetable garden. Dogs played along the bank of the meandering river.
Duncan found his hand absently rubbing his neck. If Reverend Arnold or Hawkins were at the mission, he could be in an iron collar by dusk. He became aware that someone was speaking to him. “Did you?” the stranger in the white shirt was asking, switching between German and English. “Did you think it too long?”
“I could find no fault with it,” Duncan offered.
The German worked his tongue in his cheek as he weighed Duncan’s words. “In a month I will depart for Saxony to recruit new settlers to join us. My father, the Reverend Zettlemeyer, says they will expect me to offer a sermon about faith in the New World. If we are to pay for their passage, then we must be certain they are committed to our missions.”
“This is Reverend Zettlemeyer’s mission? The Moravian mission?”
The German confirmed with a nod.
“I came about the boy.”
“We have four boys.”
“The boy with the ox.”
“Ah. He’s not a-” It almost seemed the German was going to say Alex was not a boy. He pushed the long blond hair from his brow and settled his hat on his head. “That one’s not right in the brain. I am afraid that’s all you can do, is see him.”
“He lived with the Iroquois.”
“And something of him died with them. His soul. My mother says an old Indian named Tashgua ate his soul.”
“If I cannot speak with him, I will be satisfied to have him listen.”
“We’ve tried things, for months we have tried things. There are secret ways, from the old country,” the Moravian continued. “Last month my mother read the Book of Job to him, backwards,” he added in a meaningful tone. The young Zettlemeyer surveyed his audience of stumps, offered them a mock bow, and gestured back toward the buildings. “My sisters bake bread today,” he said, and then extended his hand. “I was christened Martin.”
Duncan, shouldering his pack, reached out and took the hand that was offered, introducing himself by his Christian name only. He studied the little community as they walked toward it. “An impressive enterprise, for you to be able to pay for new settlers,” he ventured. Moravians were known for their missionary zeal, not their wealth.
Martin laughed softly. “Never a profit from our hard-scratched fields, nor even the furnace. Father has arrangements,” he said, then waved and called out to the milkmaid.
Ten minutes later Duncan sat in the shadow of the cowshed, drinking from a ladle of fresh milk as the freckled adolescent girl who had been tending the cow, one of Zettlemeyer’s younger sisters, blushed at his side. The Moravian village, consisting of ten buildings other than the furnace, seemed a world away from the bark mill. All the inhabitants he encountered as he wandered along its paths-a soot-stained man on the bank above the furnace who fed charcoal down its chimney, two woman doing laundry in a wooden tub, the children in the garden-seemed peaceful, even contented. But the graveyard by the little chapel held over three dozen graves, a third of which appeared to have been dug in recent weeks.
He walked among the graves, most of which were marked with crosses of hewn wooden slabs, whitewashed and lettered in an ornate hand, many only in German. As he straightened a leaning cross, anchoring it with a stone, he saw half a dozen markers set apart from the others, not new but perhaps only months old. Private Albert Simpson, he read, then Corporal Robert Griffin, and Ensign Bernard Atwood. Soldiers. There were some old moccasins at the base of one of the six identical crosses, a faded green cap on another. Not exactly soldiers. He had found the rangers who had been murdered the year before. As he paced along the graves, he trod upon a long, unyielding object obscured by a clump of wildflowers. A narrow slab of precious iron. He paced the graves and found four more, all embedded in the ground. Someone, a Highland Scot, had protected the graves with iron pigs, straight from the furnace.
He tidied the graves of Woolford’s men, then sat in the shade of an old maple at the edge of the cow shed, watching the track from the bark mill for signs of the ox and his keeper.
“They have a wagon to fill by the morrow,” a voice suddenly said, stirring him from a half sleep. “So they will work until the light fails. Come eat with us. You failed to mention you knew my father from Edentown.” Martin Zettlemeyer helped him to his feet, and Duncan hesitantly followed him to dine at a table of planks set on barrels under a tall tulip poplar tree. He had deliberately not mentioned it, had hoped to avoid the elder missionary, the only person in the village who could put a full name to his face, who could name him as a fugitive.