Duncan studied the message in blood again before stuffing the two papers into his pocket, desperate to understand. Was this truly the message Jacob had died for, the message Evering had expected? The lines of ovals were not decorative, he decided, but part of the message. The first of the two rows had six short lines preceding its row of six ovals-two filled in, then one hollow, then two filled in and one hollow again. The second row had four short lines, then eight ovals-two solid, two hollow, then the pattern repeated. His gaze drifted back to the bear drawing, a man and a bear surrounded by men who seemed to want them dead. It could have been an image of Duncan and his stone.
Angry shouts from the barnyard woke Duncan at dawn. He leaned out the open window to see Captain Woolford berating the proprietor as Fitch led a saddled horse out of the barn. Duncan quickly dressed and found Crispin standing on the porch, gazing forlornly toward the river. The ferry was approaching, a single horse and rider its only tenants.
“She’s gone,” Crispin announced in a dismal tone.
Duncan’s heart leapt into his throat. “Sarah?”
“The innkeeper found her saddling one of the coach horses before dawn.” Woolford explained as Duncan reached him. “She promised him Crispin would pay him double the value of the saddle, then galloped down the road.”
“Alone?” Duncan gasped, and gazed toward the shadowed trail that led west.
Woolford checked the saddle girth of his horse, then conferred briefly with Fitch, gesturing toward the ferry. Fitch bolted inside, returning with a scrap of paper on which Woolford hastily scrawled a note, handing the paper to Crispin as he swung onto the horse. “You must take the children to their father,” he said. “The sergeant will stay with you to Edentown.”
“Where is she bound?” Duncan asked no one in particular as Woolford took his rifle from Fitch, pressed his heels to the flanks of his mount, and galloped down the narrow road. “Why would she go alone?”
“The body is gone,” the innkeeper announced, as if in answer.
“The girls in the kitchen,” his wife declared, “told her of the Indians in the harbor. She must be wild with fear.”
“The ferry,” Fitch muttered.
Crispin made a rumbling sound in his throat. “Let us take a hearty breakfast,” he said with a glance toward the river. “It shall be an arduous hour ahead.”
Duncan studied the ferry again and finally recognized the tall, lean figure in black.
Reverend Arnold was dark and brooding as he strode into the tavern. He surveyed the dining chamber in silence, then seemed to relax as he saw the trunks of Sarah and her siblings stacked by the door, where Crispin had conspicuously left them. He called for the proprietor to have the dirt brushed from his coat, then joined the two men at their table.
“Servants of the Ramsey house may not,” Arnold declared in a simmering tone, “simply decide to load the family into wagons and relocate. You had no permission to leave New York.”
Crispin assumed a meek, apologetic expression. “Miss Ramsey explained that she had turned eighteen and that made her old enough to decide family business in the absence of her father,” he explained in a flat voice, as if reading a script. “She said she had urgent messages for her father, and instructed me to take her and the children. She said you had meetings with the army that could not be disturbed.” He glanced at Duncan. “She said she would not be so disrespectful to you and her father as to leave their new tutor behind.”
The announcement seemed to confuse Arnold. “This shall be discussed with Lord Ramsey,” he said after a moment’s reflection, though his voice held more resentment than anger now. The vicar sighed, glanced back at the trunks, and pulled out a chair as the innkeeper’s wife set a third cup and saucer on the table. Crispin started to rise but was motioned back into his chair by a weary wave of Arnold’s hand. The vicar reached for the pot of tea and drank deeply before turning to Duncan. “I protested most vigorously your treatment by Major Pike. They had no right to restrain a member of our household.”
Duncan offered the grateful nod he knew Arnold expected, then ate quickly and hurried out the rear door to the summer kitchen. The chamber was indeed empty, with no sign left of the dead man but a few cones from the cedar boughs and the stubs of the candles used in the vigil. He found the proprietor in the barnyard, speaking with Sergeant Fitch, who was wiping down Reverend Arnold’s horse. “Jacob’s body,” Duncan said, “you must have seen what happened to it.”
“I collapsed onto my pallet at midnight,” the Dutchman replied. “Perhaps Fitch saw. He and the captain never slept in their beds.”
Arnold appeared on the porch, calling the innkeeper, who muttered under his breath and trotted to the clergyman as Duncan stepped deeper into the shadows. A moment after Arnold followed the innkeeper into the building, his voice was raised in shrill outrage. The vicar’s anger upon discovering that Sarah was missing built like a tempest. Scullery girls spilled out of the rear door, the proprietor’s wife out the front. Crispin finally emerged onto the porch, Arnold at his side, gesturing toward the barn. As the vicar’s commands for his horse to be saddled echoed into the yard, Fitch appeared, calmly explaining that the mare was now needed to pull the coach since Sarah had taken one of the team.
“Which of the Ramsey vehicles shall we leave behind?” the sergeant asked when Arnold protested. “The grand coach or the wagon with the family belongings?” Arnold answered with a scowl, then accepted from Fitch the note written by Woolford, which the vicar read, frowning, and stuffed into his pocket.
It was but the work of a few minutes for Duncan to steal away as the others readied the teams, entering through the empty kitchen into the silent barroom. On a shelf under the bar he quickly found the journal used by the innkeeper and scanned the column of names and payments made in the last ten days. Three nights earlier, before the Anna Rose had docked, Socrates Moon had stayed at the inn. The mysterious Greek who had accompanied Sarah to England-Adam’s secret correspondent-had crossed their path. Duncan studied the ornate handwriting, the odd way the double O’s in the signature overlapped, then with a shiver of excitement compared them to the writing on the first message from Jacob’s moccasin. The double O’s were identical. Socrates Moon had left the note for the old Mahican.
A horse neighed outside. Duncan quickly scanned the rest of the ledger. Two nights before, a day after Moon, another man had stayed at the inn, as if he had been following Moon-a man Duncan knew had next gone on to the Ramsey house in New York town, to collect a dispatch case from Arnold. He had signed one scribbled name, without a Christian prefix. Hawkins.
It was nearly noon of the fifth day of travel when they reached the first of the neat, cleared fields that marked Edentown, the Ramsey estate. Duncan had passed much of the time walking with the sergeant and Crispin, learning about the rugged geography they traversed and about the New World generally. They named for him unfamiliar trees like sugar maple, sassafras, hackberry, butternut, tulip poplar, and hickory, and sketched crude maps of the region with sticks in the earth as they sat at campfires. Their little caravan passed through small crossroads villages, where mills were often being constructed, past old houses of stone and newer ones of logs, where children in ragtag clothes peered shyly at the grand coach as it rolled by. Crispin pointed out birds that were unknown to Duncan and spoke of the native animals, like the porcupine whose elastic quills covered the medallion the butler had seen hanging from Duncan’s neck.
When out of earshot of the children, Fitch spoke of the native peoples and taught Duncan the meaning of Indian words like tomahawk, canoe, and succotash, describing how, as with nations in Europe, tribes rose and fell from dominance in their regions, how the Mahican, then the Lenni Lenape-called the Delaware by Europeans-had once been the powerful masters of the eastern lands, and in time were overshadowed by the Iroquois. The Iroquois themselves, whom Fitch often referred to as the Six, for the six nations that comprised them, were held together in a confederation that was doomed to failure, the sergeant insisted, since they foolishly acted like ancient Greeks, giving a vote to every warrior, even allowing women to choose their chieftains.