Roanoke: The Price of Power

The Search

The following morning, Arnold visited the chillhouse before sunrise. He exchanged "good morrows" with John the dispenser, guzzled a pint and topped off his skin.

With his thirst behind him for a spell, he took up a position adjacent to Doc's cottage and waited for the governor's man to call on him.

True to his word, a man cloaked in dawnshadow rapped on the Doctor's door just as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon (though Arnold could only see the twilight of its appearance for the obstruction offered by the stockade walls.) A few moments later, the Doctor left the cottage with his faded black coat trailing behind him.

A few paces from his cottage, the Doc crossed paths with one of the colony youths where he knelt down before the boy, spoke a few words, then both parties moved along their way.

Once the Doc was lost to sight around a row of cottages, Arnold moved quickly.

He pushed through the Doc's front door and was thankful that the man had left a few candles burning. Though the flickering light created only slivers of perception in the shadows, he had braced himself to search the small house in near darkness.

Still, he worked from memory to avoid the desk and chairs and sundries that he'd seen positioned within the singular open space of the cottage. Arnold had a specific purpose in his methodical search: to find a loose plank in the floor. He swept the toe of his boot in narrow arcs as he moved pace-by-pace.

Rounding the back of Doc's desk and avoiding a tall, stuffed bookshelf, he made his find. His boot only moved the plank a fraction of a finger, but the motion was definite. Arnold took a knee, produced a small knife from his boot, and pried up the board.

The resulting void was a puddle of the blackest shadow; not the sort of place a reasonable man would want to blindly plunge his hand. But Arnold knew only one thing: the Doc would be returning. The time he had to conduct his search depended solely on how long Dare could keep him talking. Since there was almost no new information to discuss regarding the Swift murder, he could only assume it wouldn't be long.

He reached into the hole, his fingers touching an array of folded papers. Envelopes, perhaps. He pulled them free of the hole and leaned back toward the single burning candle on Doc's desk.

They were envelopes. Four of them, all but one sealed. Those sealed bore a circle of pressed wax, but in the dim light Arnold couldn't make out the faint signet with which they'd been marked. He quickly removed the contents of the unsealed envelope, a single folded letter, and held it beside the flame. He had no time to read it in full, thus only skimmed:

. . . that there is a remarkable quality in this region . . .

. . . untapped well of potential energy, perhaps geomantic in origin . . .

. . . there can be no doubt. I advise further investigation without delay. . .

. . . Of the principle in question, I have made no contact since my arrival and believe in earnest that he has fled the island at my appearance.

Arnold checked the date, scrawled in flowing letters at the top of the page. It had been written only days after the Doctor had arrived to Roanoke.

Perhaps before he realized there was no means to send correspondence. Unless he had expected a means. Just as the colonists once expected John White to return two years past. Roanoke had long been a place of failed expectations.

Arnold replaced the letter within its envelope and carefully returned the stack of paper to the hole. Finding his apprehension replaced by urgency, he shoved his hand deeper into the darkness and probed.

The Doctor was hiding something, of that he was now sure.

His fingertips blindly moved from object to object, while he tried in vain to identify them through touch alone. He paused when his finger slipped into a ring of cold metal, which he extracted into the candlelight.

A signet ring. The large, raised portion of the ring used to press a wax seal was cast in the shape of a triangle. Within this, a circle and a sharpened ellipse.

Arnold committed the symbol to memory, but the most notable feature of the ring was not the adornment. Within the lines and grooves of the raised symbol and hardly visible in the darkness, was the flaking remnants of dried blood.

It was enough. Something to go on.

Arnold quickly replaced the ring and reordered the contents of the hidden cache by touch and memory. Just as he stood and made his way to the front of the cottage, he spotted movement through the curtained window. Arnold crept closer and peered between the luffing folds of yellowed canvas. Not ten paces beyond the door, Doc's black coat flapped and whipped, heralding the man's immanent return to his home.

Blood and bones! Arnold withdrew from the window and made for the back of the cottage. Without time to spare a look for safety, he parted the sailcloth curtains on the back window and dove through.

He was fortunate to brace his fall with his hands, which allowed him to roll onto his back. His landing wasn't silent by any stretch, but it could have been far more noticeable (and far more injurious.) Arnold rose to a crouch and noticed that his acceptable dismount had been watched.

Randall Hobbs, a boy of roughly nine seasons, was standing just beside cottage and had been privy to his escape. But the boy wasn't agape with surprise or darting his gaze in search of someone to report to. He simply stood and stared and smirked at the crouched Arnold Archard.

Arnold raised his index finger to his lips. Shhh...

With that, he took to his boots and hastened for Dare's cottage.