As Duncan turned to watch the army headquarters fade into the distance, he felt a dark, hollow thing growing inside. He did not hate Major Pike for his instinctive cruelty, nor for putting chains on him, nor even for striking him. He hated Pike for extinguishing the spark of hope that had kindled inside him since the day on the mast with Lister. He had begun to think that he could endure years of bondage, because afterward he and Jamie and Lister would build a future together, construct a farm, rebuild the clan. But now his brother was lost forever to him. Both Jamie and Lister, the sum total of those he was blood-bound to protect, were destined to become gallows ballast long before Duncan’s servitude was up, if an arrow did not take Lister first.
Between the pangs of hatred and hopelessness, the general’s words echoed. They had been important not only for what they had revealed-the reason why Duncan had been worth the trip to Edinburgh by Arnold and Woolford-but also for what they had not. The general had not been interested in Jamie, he had been interested in the Company. He recalled Arnold’s worry that the army would open its own investigation. The Company was competing with the general in some strange quest. And Duncan was Ramsey’s secret weapon.
“What did they desire from you?” Crispin asked.
“I do not know,” Duncan admitted after a moment’s reflection. “I am being played on a hook and I cannot see who holds the line. But I must get to Edentown,” he added in an urgent tone. “I need a horse. Just a horse and a map.”
Instead of answering, Crispin extended a rag to him.
“The blood,” the big man said.
Suddenly Duncan saw the stains on the front of his shirt. Blood was dripping from his jaw.
“We’ll put honey on that tonight,” Crispin said. “Ease the pain, help the healing.” He clucked at the horses to urge them around a man guiding a loaded oxcart.
“I cannot return to Ramsey House,” Duncan pressed. He found himself watching the trees, the rocks. With a mixture of shame and fear, he realized that he was watching for savages.
Crispin pointed ahead, toward the brilliant fields of ripening wheat that were coming into view. Duncan was about to renew his plea for a horse, then hesitated and examined the bed of the wagon. Although a canvas was tied over its contents, he recognized the outlines of trunks. He saw, too, that a coach was steadily gaining on them, steered by the same man who had driven them from the harbor.
“With luck,” Crispin said, “we’ll make the ferry with enough light to reach the inn on the far side of the river.”
“And then?”
“Miss Sarah decided she could not wait to reunite with her father.”
Duncan’s heart leapt at the news. “Edentown? Sarah is in the coach?”
“And Miss Virginia and Master Jonathan,” Crispin said in an oddly defensive tone, then chirruped to the horses again and fixed his eyes on the road.
Duncan looked back at the wagon’s cargo and the coach. He had been in the custody of the army two hours at most, but in that time Sarah Ramsey, still obviously suffering from her sickness, had decided to flee the comfort of Ramsey House.
“You neglected to bring Reverend Arnold,” he observed, “and these trunks mean no brief visit. She is planning to stay.”
The comment caused a shudder in his companion.
“Have you been there, Crispin? The frontier?”
“I’ve been there, and I vowed to myself never to return.” The butler clenched his jaw and looked toward the far side of the Hudson, which seemed lined with cliffs capped by an impenetrable wall of trees.
Crispin jerked his thumb over his shoulder, explaining that in the front corner of the wagon was a pile of rolled pallets where Duncan could rest. Duncan readily accepted the suggestion and stretched out on the soft mound. Before shutting his eyes, he extracted the pages he had torn from Evering’s journal, turning to the tiny cramped words at the bottom of the last page-Evering’s last entry. The professor’s lack of punctuation had caused him to misread the words. Duncan had taken the notes to mean Evering was planning to compose another of his poems, one about a heart which was like a stony creek or about someone with a heart of oak withering to bones. But in his hastily scrawled notes, Evering, who had never been to the New World, had been alluding to Stony Run, where a battle had taken place the year before. It could only mean that Evering had learned it from Adam, who had been in America, who had fought in the militia there. The army’s map had included other words. Ghostwalkers. And why would the army write of the ancient Roman Seneca, he asked himself as his eyelids grew heavy, and he folded the paper back inside his shirt. And why, he wondered as he surrendered to his exhaustion, with all of his knowledge of history, would Duncan not know of King Hendrick?
When he awoke two hours later, they were moving through rich green hills populated with grazing cows, interspersed with rolling fields where sturdy men and women bent over rows of maize with long cutting knives. Jonathan sat beside the driver of the coach behind them, and eagerly returned Duncan’s wave. Virginia leaned out of the coach window, pointing out birds and butterflies.
“Do you know Lieutenant Woolford?” Duncan asked as he climbed to Crispin’s side.
“Everyone in the colony is acquainted with Lieutenant Woolford, if not in person, then from accounts in the newspapers.”
“You mean he is famous?”
Crispin hesitated. “What do you know about this war?”
“English kill French. French kill English. It’s been going on for centuries.”
“Mr. Ramsey says this war is different from any ever fought. He says this is the first time war is being fought all over the world. North America, Europe, India. The coasts of Africa and South America.” The big man grew silent again. The discussion seemed to bring him pain. “My mother used to teach me about war,” he continued after a moment. “Armies are supposed to face each other in lines and shoot bows or muskets or crossbows at each other.”
“If wars were always so pretty,” Duncan said, absently touching the long gouge on his cheek, “I’d still have my family.”
“Here,” Crispin continued, “the war is waged in the forest mostly, in the unmapped wilderness. Soldiers go into the forest and are never seen again. Settlers go in, entire families, and disappear. Sometimes it’s French troops, but mostly it’s the red savages raiding from the north, Huron and Abenaki, the French allies. The lucky ones are killed. You can read the stories of what the Indians do to prisoners, and hear more in the markets. Men hung over fires and roasted alive, fathers butchered alive in front of their children. They cut away scalps. Some say when a man loses his scalp, his spirit just spills out into the dirt and dries up,” he added in a hollow tone.
“What does this have to do with Woolford?”
“The only way the Indians can be beaten back is to meet them in the forest on their terms. That is what the rangers do.”
“Rangers?”
“Wilderness fighters. Frontiersmen mostly, trappers and farmers who were burnt out, looking to even the score, others trying to keep the fight away from their homesteads. Many of them are nigh savages themselves. Led by army officers. Captain Rogers in New England, he’s the best known. But Lieutenant Woolford does the same in the lands west of here, in the New York and Pennsylvania colonies. Most of the victories in the war have been delivered by rangers.”
“Woolford fights Indians?” Even as he asked the question something acrid seemed to settle on his tongue. With a shudder he remembered the two savages in the army headquarters. They had adorned themselves with his blood. He could not connect the glib officer he had known on the ship to such creatures.
“Been doing it so long they say he’s half Indian himself. He disappears into the forest, too, but he always comes back.”
Duncan fought another shudder. The savages he had encountered seemed not so much human as wild animals in the shapes of humans. “You’re a butler in a great house, Crispin,” Duncan observed, sensing his companion’s dread of the Indians. “Surely you need not be going into the wilderness.”