That said, he did walk off. He’d never set himself a task he relished less.
“Sir, I shall also need to ring up Commander Hairston,” Lieutenant Green said to Woodbridge. The Navy man nodded. Then he turned to his sailors and ordered them back to the Grampus for stretchers to transport the wounded - and the dead - to the boats. “And bring Hartnett with you when you return,” he added, explaining to Bushell, “That’s the pharmacist’s mate I mentioned.”
“Very good,” Bushell said wearily. He took out his water bottle and drank from it. It wasn’t as cold and sweet as it had been when he filled it at St. Mary’s Spring in the early hours of the morning. He didn’t care. Water wasn’t what he craved. Enough whiskey to find oblivion at least for a night. . . that would be sweet. But he couldn’t even drink himself into a stupor, not now, not with so much still to do. Transferring everyone back to the Grampus took far longer than anyone would have imagined before the familiar world of law exploded in gunfire. The Royal Marines would not let the sailors load their fallen comrades onto the stretchers or carry them to the boats. “We tend to our own,” one of them said, pride in his voice. Bushell understood that; he and Stanley set Felix Crooke’s body on its stretcher. Royal Marines also put the dead Sons of Liberty on stretchers, dumping them down onto the canvas as if they were so many chunks of wood.
Hartnett fixed a fresh splint to the leg of the Marine with a shattered ankle, but otherwise pronounced himself satisfied with the treatment the wounded had received. Lieutenant Commander Woodbridge said to Bushell, “By your leave, I can wireless ahead to Port Clements so Dr. Lansing can meet us at the wharf.”
“Yes, go ahead,” Bushell said. He wished Woodbridge - and the entire world - would leave him alone: this even though he knew work, in the absence of whiskey, was the best anodyne he would find. At last the unwounded living went back aboard the Grampus. The cutter backed away from the shore, turned, and, skirting the little tree-covered island not far from Buckley Bay, sailed east across Masset Inlet toward Port Clements.
Bushell stood at the stern, staring back toward the abandoned town. Once Woodbridge made as if to approach him. He did not turn his head, he did not move in any definable way, but he made it plain he did not want anyone near. Woodbridge’s shoulders slumped, ever so slightly. He went back to his duties. Perhaps ten minutes after that, Sam Stanley came up. Bushell projected the same signal by body wireless. Taking advantage of long friendship, Stanley ignored it. He stood beside Bushell, leaning his elbows on the rail and propping his chin in his hands. “Brooding about it won’t make it better,” he observed. “Won’t make you better, either.”
“Go away,” Bushell said without turning his head.
Instead of leaving, Stanley reached into the hip pocket of his trousers and pulled out his wallet. From it he drew a purple five-pound note. He held it in front of Bushell’s nose, so close that Bushell’s eyes had to cross to focus on the small reproduction of The Two Georges on the banknote. “This is what it’s all about, Chief,” he said quietly. “Shall we start looking over the evidence we picked up? Woodbridge has given me a little compartment we can use.”
He waited. When Bushell didn’t answer, he sighed and went off. After a moment, Bushell followed him. Work did prove a pain reliever almost as potent as Jameson. Seated across a steel table in a tiny, metal room painted grey and garishly lit by a bare bulb mounted in the ceiling, Bushell and Stanley sorted through the pile of papers they’d snatched from the rubbish heap the Sons of Liberty had built up in Buckley Bay.
“We’ll do envelopes first,” Bushell declared. “They’ll have dates and postmarks on them, so we’ll know when the villains got them and where they came from.”
“Right, Chief,” Samuel Stanley said, so enthusiastically that Bushell suspected he’d have got loud agreement had he suggested sorting papers by the size and color of the stains they bore. But he was functioning again, and when he functioned, he functioned well.
“Thanks, Sam,” he murmured without looking up.
“For what?” his adjutant asked. “Here, you take this bunch while I’m going through the rest.” He pushed filthy, crumpled papers at Bushell.
Some of the envelopes were from commercial establishments in Skidegate. Bushell set those aside for the time being, since they’d been discarded unopened. Then curiosity got the better of him. He slit one and pulled out an advertising circular. Even in the back of beyond, such worthless tripe got posted. The rest of the envelopes proved more interesting. “They had friends all over the bloody place, didn’t they?” Stanley remarked.
“That they did,” Bushell said somberly. Just looking at the postmarks made him see the spiderweb of conspiracy the Sons of Liberty had spun across the NAU. The threads were thin and normally all but invisible, but no less sticky and dangerous on account of that.
He’d expected to find envelopes posted from New Liverpool, and he did. To his disappointment, none of them came from Sergei Pavlov. And he knew the Sons of Liberty were strong in Boston and Pennsylvania: Common Sense came out of the one, while the harsh lives the coal miners of the other led inclined them away from the status quo. But one envelope he discovered left him shaking his head. “Will you look at this, Sam?”
“What have you got?”
Bushell passed him the envelope. It was franked not with the usual one-florin stamps of the NAU, but with one that bore a lightning bolt, the legend HENO THE THUNDERER, and, in larger letters, the words THE SIX NATIONS. The postmark read Doshoweh.
Stanley clicked his tongue between his teeth. “If that’s not the strangest place from which to post something to the Sons of Liberty, damn me if I know what is.”
“Just what I was thinking,” Bushell answered. The Six Nations that made up the Iroquois Confederacy controlled the land just west of the province of New York, and did so for the most part under their own laws, though the NAU had charge of their dealings with foreign powers. The relationship, though (like much of the Empire’s constitution) never formally defined, had continued for more than two centuries, and satisfied most people on both sides of it.
“Doshoweh’s that town not far from Niagara Falls, isn’t it?” Stanley said.
“That’s right - capital of the Six Nations. And, as you said, a bloody odd place for the Sons of Liberty to be operating.” The liberty to which the Sons dedicated themselves was reserved for them alone, and emphatically did not include the Indians who had inhabited North America before the Sons’ fathers crossed the Atlantic.
“It might be a brilliant piece of cover,” Stanley said, passing the envelope back to Bushell. “I don’t think we’ve ever looked for the Sons of Liberty inside the Six Nations - who would? They could do just about whatever they pleased there, so long as they kept quiet about it and didn’t draw the notice of the local authorities.”
Bushell examined the postmark more closely. “Whatever they’ve been doing, they’re still at it. This was sent less than a week ago. Eighteenth June, the date is.”
“Is that a fact?” Stanley said. “Then it won’t have got to our villains much before we did. I wonder if we can find the letter that came in the envelope.”
They went through the papers they’d collected from the rubbish heap. To their frustration, none of them proved to bear the requisite date. Then Bushell said, “Maybe one of the villains still had it on him when the fighting started.”
Those papers were separate from the ones plucked off the midden. Instead of stains from tea leaves and coffee grounds, some of them were brownish-black with drying blood. Bushell carefully unfolded one.