Bone Rattler amoca-1 Page 7

  “He was preparing for his suicide,” Arnold pressed, “planning to throw himself overboard after tying the rope to the rail, when a roll of the vessel knocked him backward, hitting his head so that he died before finishing his task. The top of a belaying pin could have made such a mark. He fell against the barrels and was hidden until that huge wave washed him over.”

  Duncan probed further, pushing back the professor’s long hair, and paused again. “There’s another,” he said, and pointed to a second discolored circle, above the ear on the opposite side of the head. “He fell from the first blow, probably to his knees, and was finished with a second blow. This was no accident.”

  Arnold’s face seemed to sag, then he turned toward the dead man. “Evering,” he declared in a mournful whisper, then stepped closer. “When Jehovah calls, not even the noblest of mortals may resist,” he added, his voice cracking. “God wills it so.”

  They stood in silence, gazing upon the dead man as if at a wake. In Duncan’s youth, a man’s friends would have kissed his bloodless face.

  “He never spoke with the sailors,” Woolford finally said in a slow, studied voice. “He acted as if the crew were invisible.”

  Arnold began a whispered prayer, his palm now on Evering’s head.

  “But he would often read to the prisoners,” Woolford continued. “And write letters for them.”

  “In the evening,” Duncan agreed, recalling how Evering stayed with the Company prisoners when they were allowed evening exercise, sitting on a barrel, writing as this or that prisoner whispered to him. Even the keepers sometimes asked the scholar to help with a letter. “And the barrel that hid the line on his neck. The knots that bound it were those of a landsman.”

  The vicar ended his prayer in midsentence. “What are you saying?”

  “I asked the captain,” Woolford explained. “The chaos that day started at dawn, when the new watch passed through the compass room. Evering died in the night. All the earlier watch crew save the helmsman were below, out of the weather. There was a terrible fog before dawn, so thick the helmsman could not see the midship lantern. But the crew were all together below, no one unaccounted for. His murderer,” Woolford said, his voice fading to a whisper, “was someone in the Company.”

  The announcement seemed to take the strength out of Arnold. He lowered himself onto a nearby crate, then stared into his folded hands a long time.

  When Arnold finally spoke, he had found his pulpit voice. “We will not have our noble experiment destroyed by scandal.” He slowly raised his head toward the ceiling. “It must be resolved. One versed in the ways of death could do so.”

  Duncan looked at Woolford. The officer did not react to Arnold’s apparent invitation.

  “You have not yet signed the indenture, McCallum,” Arnold observed.

  Duncan felt his chest tighten, his mouth go dry.

  “I believe,” Woolford offered with a thin grin, “the good reverend has proposed an amendment to your terms.”

  “I cannot. I will not inform against the men.”

  “Of course the choice is yours,” Arnold said, his prayer-like tone raising gooseflesh down Duncan’s spine. “You can find our murderer. Or we can give you to the captain, who will lash you all the way to Jamaica. By the time you arrive, the flies will be burying eggs in your flesh as you lay dying.”

  Chapter Three

  Arnold gained energy as he paced around Evering’s coffin. “You can have your indenture, have the freedom offered the Company tutor,” he continued. “But you will provide an answer to this horrible crime.”

  Duncan’s heart began rising into his throat. “I have nothing to do with this,” he said.

  “Your duty is to the Company, in all things. This must be addressed quickly,” Arnold said, then circuited the coffin again as he collected his thoughts. “You will speak to no one about your work. You will assemble the facts, identify the killer, and report your answer to us.”

  “Surely you are mistaken,” Duncan said. “I am a-” He struggled for a moment, no longer sure who or what he was.

  “You are highly educated, a doctor in all but name. You have demonstrated your power of deduction. You will still be part of the Company. As tutor you will have sufficient latitude to observe its workings. The prisoners will speak to you as one of their own. And you will have ample opportunity to obtain my counsel to assure the proper direction. Or,” Arnold said, his tone sharper, “I can burn the indenture.” He punctuated his statement with a pointed glance toward the cells. “The captain is paid by the head for his deliveries to the sugar plantations. No one will object if he delivers one more than he started with. No one will notice if you disappear at sea.”

  Duncan did not reply.

  “The Reverend and I will collect the letters the professor wrote for the prisoners,” Woolford suggested.

  “They were confidences,” Duncan protested.

  “Exactly,” Arnold shot back. “It is but a fine line between the secrets of convicts and outright conspiracy. We shall collect all the Company letters still on board.”

  “They are part of the royal mails.”

  “Which is why we must review them before we land.”

  “You are asking me to be a spy, an informer. I cannot.”

  Arnold breathed deeply. He seemed to take strength from Duncan’s protests. “I am asking only for the Company to be released from the threat of scandal. Prove your loyalty to Lord Ramsey. Sign our contract and find us an answer. A bargain any other man on this ship would leap at.”

  “An answer or the answer?” Duncan stared at the unhearing Evering, then flushed as he realized he had spoken aloud the question that had leapt to his tongue. He looked up to see Arnold’s eyes flare.

  “Practice none of your sophistry on us, McCallum,” the vicar snapped. “The truth is a sacred thing. You have a duty to it. I bind you to it. If you sign and disobey, you will join the prisoners assigned to the Ramsey forests and confront the two- and four-legged beasts that dwell there. The members of the Company will not die of tropical diseases. But some will die of arrows and axes, I assure you. And worse.”

  Duncan decided it was safest to address the dead man again. “So justice is a private affair in America.” He fought a temptation to take the dead man’s hand as he would a friend’s. In death the professor had become more a part of Duncan’s destiny than ever he had been in life.

  “Truly you have found a man for all seasons,” Woolford observed, cool amusement entering his voice. “A doctor. A sailor, judging by his ease in the rigging. A tutor. Now a lawyer.”

  “It was my honor on this journey,” Arnold reported in a chill tone, “to take delivery of his majesty’s appointment of Lord Ramsey as a magistrate. Every man in the Company signed its articles, agreeing to submit to his judicial power.”

  “I was given the choice of signing the Company rolls or returning to prison. I was shown no articles.”

  “When we arrive at the appropriate answer,” Arnold continued, ignoring his protest, “Lord Ramsey will close the matter officially. You will find he does not cower from difficult decisions.”

  Duncan was not sure what hurt worse, Arnold’s threat to consign him to the prisoners bound for Jamaica or the reminder that to gain his freedom Duncan must become a lapdog for the aristocracy he despised so much.

  As they left the chamber Woolford gestured Lister back inside to close the coffin. The old Scot moved stiffly, acknowledging Duncan with only a quick, empty nod as he passed. Duncan paused, sensing something had changed in the keeper. He watched as Lister silently set the pennies back over Evering’s eyes, then lifted a mallet from a nearby crate and began sealing the professor into his box for the last time.

  Five minutes later they were back on the prison deck. Duncan signed the indenture in silence, staring at the table as Woolford witnessed and Arnold rolled up the document. “The clothes,” the vicar declared impatiently, gesturing toward Duncan’s sleeve, “belong to the family Ramsey. W
e will not have them befouled in a cell. You may retain the smallclothes and shoes.”

  Duncan stared at the man in disbelief, but the protest on his tongue died as he heard another anguished moan from one of the cells. Slowly he began to unbutton his waistcoat.

  Arnold climbed up the ladder without a word of parting, the clothing carefully folded over one arm, the indenture tucked under an elbow. Woolford sighed and extinguished one lantern, seemed about to climb up when he hesitated. “I could find a blanket,” he offered.

  Duncan had been working hard to hate the officer. Now Woolford’s words had a tone of apology.

  “I need nothing from you but an answer. Is Mr. Lister ill?”

  The jagged scar on Woolford’s neck went white as he clenched his jaw. “When prisoners flee confinement, a flogging must follow.”

  Duncan closed his eyes a moment. As the keeper who had brought Duncan back from his escape, Lister was supposed to be the one to bind Duncan to the mast and begin the flogging.

  “But Lister announced that your disappearance had been his fault, that he had given you permission to linger another minute on deck after breakfast, that he had forgotten you, that you had not actually escaped.”

  “A lie!” Duncan gasped. “My God! The captain’s fury-”

  “Lister took your flogging.”

  The words ripped at Duncan like a hot blade.

  Woolford raised the lantern and studied Duncan’s face. “The captain himself administered the cat. Forty strokes. He acted as if cheated of a greater pleasure. Lister broke three splints of wood placed between his teeth but never cried out.”

  Duncan felt the blood drain from his face as he sank against the wall. He had doubted Lister, had questioned what it meant for the old Scot to bind himself to Duncan and the clan. So Lister had shown him.

  The brittle silence was broken by the sound of movement on the ladder. In the shadows at its base stood Cameron, the tall, ox-like leader of the keepers, holding a bucket of worm-ridden biscuits.

  Woolford had lingered, and seemed about to say something until he spotted the keeper. “Is she safe?” Duncan asked the officer.

  The officer seemed to have a hard time finding an answer. “She lives. I can’t decide whether what you did was incomparable bravery or incomparable stupidity.”

  “I thought her dead for certain.”

  “It was the first time she had been left alone on the voyage. Everyone had thought her sleeping.” Woolford gestured him toward his cell.

  “Who is she?”

  The question brought a hard glint to Woolford’s eyes. “Difficult to say exactly. She has been abed, too weak for speech, the entire voyage.”

  But not too weak to climb up the mast and out on the spar, Duncan nearly said. “Lieutenant, you have helped nurse her all these weeks,” he pointed out instead. “Surely you know her name.”

  “I have heard many,” Woolford’s tone made it clear he would speak no more on the subject.

  They stood silently staring at each other as Cameron distributed the biscuits down the line of cells.

  “I have a brother, Lieutenant,” Duncan ventured as he reached the cell door. “Somewhere in the army. When we arrive in New York, could you find where he is stationed?”

  “It’s a large colony.”

  “His name is James. James McCallum. A captain of the Forty-second Regiment of Foot.”

  Woolford gazed at him with an odd mixture of anger and worry. “Captain McCallum of the Forty-second,” he recited in a tight voice, then spun about and marched toward the ladder as Cameron approached, brandishing the key to lock Duncan’s cell.

  By the time the lock snapped shut, the slip he had taken from Evering’s pocket was back in his hand, held in the dim light of the hatch. He gazed at it with a sinking heart. It was nothing but a small star chart, with a trajectory shown in dotted lines through constellations and a single word: October. But Lister had been very clear in relaying Adam’s words. Heed how Evering explains his comet, as if the comet might explain the threat to Duncan. His confusion seemed a palpable thing, a weight that was slowly crushing him. But Lister had shown him otherwise. The McCallum clan would not be crushed. He had to live-for Lister, for Jamie, for the Scots in the prisoners’ hold, for the nameless woman he had saved.

  With new, intense effort Duncan tried to understand the ritual at the compass, etching each of the bloody objects into his memory. He would ask Arnold for the objects, he decided, he would arrange them as they had been in the compass room so he could study each in turn, and together. There had to be a logic, however distorted, and if he failed to find it, he and others could pay with their lives.

  Bone, buckle, eye, claw, feather, salt, heart. In his youth such an eye had appeared on a post in an island village, and even though his grandfather had named it as coming from a great shark, the villagers had abandoned their homes until a priest could be brought to purify the grounds. The devil’s eye, they had called it. Eye from a great beast, bones from small ones. They had been from several different small birds, some with tiny, disconnected vertebrae, even the fragile bones of the wings. The eye and the bones. A great god and his mortals.

  He lifted Evering’s paper again, this time trying to create in his mind a dialogue with the scholar about his comet, like those Duncan had conducted with his medical professors in his prior life. Evering had been a man of science, and Duncan probably had more scientific training than any other man on board. The professor would open his journal and show the other pages of notes and maps; he would speak of the old records he had found that supported his predictions about the comet; he would-

  Duncan suddenly closed his hand around the paper and grinned. It wasn’t the comet. Heed how Evering explains his comet, Adam had said. The journal. Adam would know Evering would inevitably show him the journal. And in the journal would lie other secrets. It wasn’t what the comet meant that mattered, but what was with the comet, the other pages inscribed during the past few weeks.

  Food came twice a day, consisting each time of one of the small loaves, hard as planks, or a square of the worm-pocked ship’s biscuit, sometimes with a spoiled apple or scrap of salt pork. Duncan slept, warm and dry thanks to the blanket Lister had provided, futilely trying every few hours to engage Flora in conversation. The madwoman acknowledged him only with her unintelligible chants. “Take the skin you are,” she blurted out once, like a cry of pain, the only English words she had uttered since Duncan’s first hours in the cell. Her speech had become hollow and slow, sometimes slurred, as if she were distracted, even drunk, all proof that if she were not already mad, she was quickly progressing to madness. Sometimes, without speaking, she thrust her arm out and flailed the air, clutching his fingertips when he responded with his own hand. Each time, they stayed locked in the strange intimacy for several minutes, listening to each other breathe, never seeing each other’s face. The few times Duncan tried to speak while holding her fingers she always withdrew. Flora had killed her child, and whether she had known before, Arnold had made it clear that she was going to a certain, agonizing death. Duncan recognized the symptoms even through the darkness. She had already started her dying, the gradual, agonizing way that Adam Munroe had died.

  He was sleeping when they came for him again. Arnold left his cell door open as he walked back to the table in the entryway. As Duncan warily approached the table, Woolford appeared from the shadows. The officer absently gestured to a pewter plate at the edge of the table bearing slices of bread and mutton, his gaze locked on two letters in the center of the table. Duncan stared at the plate. He had eaten no fresh meat, no real bread, for months.

  “There were more than twenty letters from the prisoners, several written by Evering over another’s name,” Arnold explained as Duncan stuffed a piece of meat into his mouth. “Mostly the ramblings of lonely men, asking for forgiveness, offering harmless lies to convince family not to worry. Some pleas to fund barristers for appeals. These two,” he said, pointing to the center o
f the table, “cannot be so easily dismissed.” He spread the open envelopes over the table. Evering had affixed wax seals to them, which had been opened by a clumsy trick, slicing away the seal with a hot blade, to be later closed with a larger dollop of hot wax over the original seal.

  As Duncan stared at the papers, he recalled that he, too, had written a letter, addressed to his brother, cursing the king. He picked up the first and began to read. It was from the moody young keeper, Frasier, addressed to his aunt, the old maiden who had raised him when his family had been taken from him after Culloden. The letter spoke of an uneventful voyage, woven with bitter comments about his arrest and trial. I know the secret of why the English went all the way to Auld Reekie when there were wagonloads of prisoners to be had in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, and Argyll. We know what oozes out of Lothian barracks. We know how to treat the dog who stands over corpses. We know how to cut out the rot. Payment will be made before you lay out the Beltane fires.

  “It could mean many things,” Duncan suggested as he read again the confusing words. What had the Company brought from Auld Reekie, the age-old nickname of Edinburgh, that they could not find in the western counties? And what was Frasier expecting from the army barracks near the eastern city? He read the words again with growing unease. In Highland lore a dog that stepped over a corpse had to be killed.

  “It could mean this man from Glasgow intended to kill an Englishman,” Arnold declared. “He has free range of the ship as a keeper. Convicted of striking a tax collector. He speaks of a pagan ritual.”

  “Many English children celebrate May Day,” Duncan countered.

  “Not by laying out circles of fire and leaping through them,” Arnold shot back.

  At the end of the letter was a postscript. Before he was summoned by a witch, a man from Argyll traded these six buttons for a white deerskin pouch I found, stained with blood. Use them for one of the young nephews. Inside the folded paper envelope were six familiar discs of wood.