Abigail was silent for a time, watching the sun dapple through the trees on Sassy’s dark flanks. “I think so,” she said at length. “Though perhaps not the sort of treasure that Mr. Grimes and his companions thought they’d find.”
It was growing dark when they reached Framingham, famished and exhausted. At the single tavern there, Abigail asked, first, after word from Boston—had any message come concerning the King’s reply? When the answer came in the negative, she asked after the countryside west of Medfield, and did my good host or his good wife—or the half-dozen members of the local militia who’d come in at the end of their chores to make the same enquiry about affairs in Boston—know the whereabouts of Deckle’s Farm? Her sister—“That’s Mrs. Deckle,” she explained earnestly—had writ her that it lay about a day’s journey on from the village and that ’twas near a stone Indian ruin, or maybe ’twas the Spanish that had built it . . .
“Spanish?” The innkeeper shook his head. “Not never heard of Spanish in this district, m’am—”
“That wouldn’t be the Devil’s Castle, would it?” A very young militiaman looked up from his ale.
“Is it a castle, then?” exclaimed Abigail in assumed surprise. “I’d heard, ’twas built by the Indians—”
“Narh, Indians never built in stone, m’am.” (Abigail already knew this.) “Never heard about the Spanish, neither. But there’s supposed to be a stone ruin over near Hassanamisco Pond where there was a Nipmuc village onc’t upon a time. Never seen it myself—”
Enquiries for Hassanamisco Pond elicited several sets of mutually conflicting directions, most of which began, “You take the Grafton Road . . .” and ended anywhere in the countryside. Descriptions of the countryside between Framingham and Grafton were not encouraging.
“Is there a cranberry bog nearabouts there?” asked Katy, and that brought better results. Three of the militiamen testified to the location of Shelby’s Bog, but two-three miles from the Grafton Road.
“And Shelby is the name of the man who owns the land?” inquired Abigail.
“Not now it’s not. ’Twas the feller who took it over after King Philip’s War, after the Nipmucs was wiped out there, so I’ve heard—”
“Friend of the Governor in them days,” put in somebody’s white-haired grandfather.
And another, derisively, “Ain’t it always?”
“Had the records changed, I heard, to prove ’twas always his,” confided the oldster. “Didn’t get no good of it. ’Tis bad, hard land.”
“Good cranberries, though . . .”
Ahead of the chaise, Weyountah rode imperturbably, drawing rein from time to time to listen to the woodlands that were growing steadily thicker around them, though Abigail heard nothing but the twittering of birds, the rustle of the wind. He was listening, she thought, as a hunter listens—or a warrior entangled in the endless, ancient woodland fights between tribe and tribe.
He had turned his back on that world, she thought, looking up at the tall figure in his hunting-shirt and boots. And she wondered why. A world where his family clung to the old ways; a world in which visions counted for more than the theorizing of mathematicians and the spirits of the land clung tight to the hearts of its children, holding them in corn-patch and longhouse forever.
He had made his choice and refused to be part of that past. At what cost, Abigail could only guess.
But turn away as he might, thought Abigail, the old world of the forest was in his blood nevertheless. As they moved on again down the less travelled of those forking traces, she could see him sorting out the sounds of birds, the scent of the wind in the woods. As a child he’d hunted and learned what the land should sound like if all were safe.
“Oh, thank Heavens!” exclaimed Katy. “The cranberry bog at last!”
Sunlight brightened through the trees. Bees hummed over milkweed and marsh marigold, and the heavy, peaty smell of wet ground and standing muck breathed through the sweeter scents of the woods. Abigail drew rein, and Katy produced old Beelzebub’s notebook again, marked in a dozen places last night as the five of them had sat around the lamp in a corner of the ordinary of the inn at Framingham until the innkeeper had good-naturedly told them he was banking the fire and putting up the shutters for the night.
“The village should be no more than a mile or two northwest of here . . .”
“And it being noon,” replied Abigail mildly, unwrapping the lunch that Mr. Buckminster at the tavern had put up for them, “if you can determine which direction
“Back that way.” Weyountah pointed. “At least,” he added, as he stripped the harness from Sassy and tethered her to graze, “that’s where I’d put a village: up the stream that feeds the bog, on the higher ground where the soil is better. Look, you can see where the trees were cleared and have grown back. Will you stay here or come with us?”
“Stay here?” Katy stared at him as if he’d suggested she drown herself in the bog. “And miss finding the treasure?”
“And miss a hard walk of a couple of miles uphill.” Horace attempted to spread the carriage-rug for her over a couple of dry tussocks, only to have her turn impatiently away.
“I’m two months with child,” she pointed out. “I didn’t lose a leg.”
“Don’t be a goose, Horace,” added Abigail. “Katy will be fine.”
They shared bread and cheese and cider, and proceeded up the hill.
Weyountah said, “Damn it!” and stopped where the trail steepened, holding up his hand.
Abigail followed his eyes down to the trail and saw in the soft ground the tracks of a man’s boot.
Even to her totally inexperienced eye, she could tell they were fresh.
And that there was only one man.
Horace gasped, “The Cornishman . . .”
“Don’t be silly.” Abigail dropped her voice, knowing how sounds carried in the quiet of the woods. She nudged Weyountah, who put his foot next to the track. “The Cornishman’s as big as an ox. At a guess,” she said, considering the difference in length and breadth, which was barely any and that little in the Narragansett’s favor, “’tis Mr. Ryland.”
Horace breathed, “He must have found the location of this place in the Governor’s records after all—”
“And lied to us about it?” Abigail mimed shock. “The scoundrel!”
Beside her, she was aware of the girl’s eyes suddenly growing hard.
Weyountah signed Diomede to separate from them and follow through the woods some half-dozen yards to the right. Then he handed Katy his spare rifle and motioned her to do the same to the left. In this configuration— picking their every step in the brown leaf-mast—they moved up the hill to where the land flattened out a little. A century had eradicated all trace of the cornfield-patches, where beans and squash had been trained up among the stalks, and the trees seemed to Abigail no thinner or smaller than the surrounding forest. Yet she guessed that a village had been here simply from the shape of the land. There was a spring and level ground big enough for houses to be built by men and women who’d lived and died in this place, worshipping strange gods and minding their own business until the white men came.
Horace’s hand closed tight around Abigail’s wrist. Between the trees she saw it: stones scattered among the deadfalls and tangles of witch hazel, and a little farther on, the shape of a curved stone foundation and what had
