The Dakota Cipher

from the damn Indian. I had little money left, but enough to start a game or two of my own. I’d acquire the girl, we’d go find Welsh Indians, and while Magnus poked about for old hammers we’d share a cosy lodge …

This reverie was interrupted when I saw Aurora slipping along the edge of the bacchanal, looking aloof and purposeful as she hurried on some mission. Now resentment boiled more. How dare she toy with me! I was tired of being put off, warned away, mocked, and ignored – this by a woman who by rumour had fled scandal! And now where was she going, so important and haughty? I impulsively decided to follow, suddenly determined to regain the intimacy we’d enjoyed at Mackinac.

I’d catch her and I’d grab her and I’d say … well, I didn’t know what I’d say, but maybe I’d just kiss her. We’d fight or make love, and either way bring an end.

Aurora had a slim white dress that made her glow like a fairy nymph, making her easier to track as she skirted the clumps of revellers without pausing. Where the devil was she going? I considered running to catch up, but it seemed undignified to chase her, even though that’s exactly what I was doing. I tried sauntering, rehearsing lines to demand that either our relationship be consummated again or end completely. I didn’t need the Somersets anymore, I was at Grand Portage! But even as I mentally rehearsed witty repartee, Aurora didn’t pause to let me try it.

She came to a cluster of Indian wigwams at the northern extremity of the encampment, the bark-covered domes seeming to erupt naturally from the earth. She stopped, uncertain, and called something softly. A glow appeared at the door of one of the lodges, its light leaking through cracks in the shingled birch. It was a candle or lantern no Indian would have. She made for the wigwam, fell to her knees, and wiggled inside.

By Abigail Adams, an Indian hut for British aristocracy? Was the strumpet meeting that cannibal Red Jacket? Or did she have some other game entirely?

I’m not a Peeping Tom, but she’d slipped from me once again, and into the most improbable place I could imagine for a lady. Was it possible she was compelled to come to this dark village and was in some kind of trouble? Perhaps I could rescue her! I hesitated as I crouched in the gloom, wrestling with good manners, and then I heard first the low murmur of voices and then the coos and cries of accelerating passion. Now I had to spy. Aurora Somerset coupling with an Indian buck? It was the kind of revelation that might give me leverage.

Frustrated and curious, I crept in the dark to the rear of the lodge. I could hear pants within, a delicious moaning from the beauty, and murmurs that seemed English. What the devil? I found a slit to put my eye to and had a vision from the kind of naughty book you can buy in the back aisles of a Parisian bookshop. Aurora was straddling her lover – how typical that she’d insist on being on top – and was riding him with arched back, hips flared, breasts pointing upward, her form lit a rosy hue by the glow of a lantern. Her eyes were closed, lips pouted, face tilted towards the lodge peak, and her hair a glorious shawl cascading down her back. It was a magnificent sight and I was hard in an instant, lusting even as I hated her for her haughtiness, yet ready to tell her anything if it would gain me entry to her guarded gateway! The woman was a sorceress. I leant forward, pressed against the rough bark, near groaning myself.

And then I heard the words of the man under her. ‘Buck my beauty, buck my love! God, I worship your form!’

Could it be? A white man in an Indian lodge? But of course, it was a secret liaison! A perfect hiding place! My view was obscured by the narrow slit so I recklessly put my fingers up to pull bark aside to give a better view, wondering which bourgeois the lucky bastard was. It was dim, so I pressed my face in, looking at his limbs under her as he thrust upward, hands clutching her breasts. Then he turned slightly, the lantern giving better resolution of his features, and I almost yelped with shock. I looked to the pile of clothes beyond, and then back at the gasping couple.

Something was gleaming on the chest of the man, a pendant I’d seen months before tattooed on Renato’s skin in Italy. It was a pyramid entwined with a snake.

Aurora Somerset was riding her own cousin, Cecil.

And Cecil was wearing a symbol of Apophis, the snake cult allied with that London-based Egyptian Rite he’d pretended to disdain! Who had I befriended?

Or rather, who had befriended me?

They turned to look at my fingers caught in the slit of bark, the white of my eye illuminated in the glow. I jerked backward, accidentally yanking a piece of the lodge covering with me, and fell on my back.

I heard a hiss. ‘Gage!’

And then I ran.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

My mind was in tumult as I sprinted away in the dark. Aurora and Cecil as lovers? How had I missed that? Was this part of the scandal that had driven them from England to work in Canada? Did Simon McTavish, who looked the stern Puritan type, know of this incest? Or were Aurora and Cecil really cousins at all? Perhaps a phrase I’d taken literally was meant merely as endearment, like calling a close friend a brother.

And what relationship did they have to the occult theorists, the seekers of the secrets of the ancient past, whom I’d duelled in Egypt and the Holy Land? Why had they disdained the Egyptian Rite if Cecil wore its symbol?

What was certain was that I’d been recognised, and sharing a cosy canoe with the Somersets on the way to Rainy Lake suddenly was impossible. Our partnership had abruptly ended with my own spying, and my lust for Aurora had withered in an instant. She was playing games I had no understanding of, and the best thing to do was run. I stopped in the night, panting, and considered what to do next. Nothing else had changed; fires along the shore illuminated the dancing celebrants. But it was time to strike out alone. To hell with these lunatics! Magnus and I could go southwest from Grand Portage on foot. It looked no more than two or three hundred miles to the place marked on his medieval map. We’d need supplies and a guide, yes, but the night’s revelry seemed an ideal time to steal the former and fetch the latter – the lovely Mandan Namida, and her friend, Little Frog.

My rescue of them would pay back Red Jacket, too.

With this plan impulsively decided, I searched and found Magnus, wanting to be well away by morning. My companion, alas, had collapsed in a stupor and was as easy to accelerate as a recalcitrant mule.

‘Magnus! Get up! It’s time to go look for Thor’s hammer!’

‘What?’ He blinked blearily. ‘It’s the middle of the night.’

‘Something’s happened and we need to get away! We need to steal some provender and light out for the woods. Say, have you seen Namida?’

‘Who?’

‘The Indian girl! The pretty one.’

His head fell back. ‘By Loki’s mischief …’

‘Never mind, we can look for her together.’

It required a pitcher of lake water hurled at his head, but at length I got him up, sputtering, grumpy, and lumbering – he with his eye patch and slouch hat and battered map case and axe, me with my rifle and tomahawk.

‘What, by the wolf Fenrir, happened?’

‘I caught Cecil and Aurora rutting like rabbits and they spotted me. I don’t think they’ll want me around to gossip, or to share their canoe, either.’

‘Cecil and Aurora? They’re cousins! Aren’t they?’

‘I don’t know what the devil they are, but our Lord Somerset was wearing a heathen sign I attribute to old enemies from England’s Egyptian Rite. I’m not about to clarify the point. They got us this far, and we can do the last on our own. You were right about Aurora, Magnus. I should never have gone near the trollop.’

We easily filched food and powder, given that half the company was unconscious and the rest inebriated past the point of caring, and I tried not to think too much about plunging into the dark woods alone.

‘How are we going to find the spot that has Thor’s symbol without a guide?’ Magnus asked, as he became more awake.