Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“I have a brother in the New York colony,” he said after a long silence. “I have read in the journals about the beautiful mountains and lakes there, with wild beasts unknown back home. I had a plan once, I wrote him about it last year,” Duncan continued, louder now. “I said when he leaves the army we could build a farm together, on a hill by a lake. We’ll have cows and sheep. My mother always loved the sheep. When I was a boy she would keep the orphaned lambs in the house.” Duncan realized he was speaking in a tight, boyish voice. It felt somehow as if he were asking for forgiveness, not knowing why he spoke the lie, why he pretended to her that he would be free to find his brother. “My brother’s in the war. . ” A slender arm, naked and pale, appeared from the next cell, slowly moving up and down as if it were exploring the shadows. His brother Jamie had been raised as an Englishman in the lowlands, and before he had come of age, the second cousins who had raised him, lying about his birth date, had rid themselves of him by purchasing a commission in the king’s army, which assured he would never go back to his Highland ways. Now Duncan’s plan about a farm had become one more forlorn dream, and his brother’s army, Adam had vowed, was going to destroy Duncan. The army that, Frasier insisted, had some secret connection to the Company. Adam’s note had said that whatever the Company declared it was going to do in the New World, it intended the opposite. Duncan had often heard Arnold state the purpose of the Company. To spread goodness and virtue, to make the new land like a peaceful, orderly England.

Suddenly, without thinking, Duncan extended his own arm through the small hatch, reaching toward the next cell, his arm filling the opening so that he was unable to see where the woman’s arm was. He brushed her hand, then stretched out his fingers. Her hand found his and they touched, their fingertips overlapping. There was too much distance between them to grip each other’s palm, but they entwined the ends of their fingers.

“My name is Duncan,” he offered. Her fingers were soft, not those of a woman accustomed to labor. Women of wealth, he reminded himself, could also kill their children. Indeed, without wealth such a woman would likely have been hanged in her own town square.

She spoke a few words in her strange language, then squeezed his fingers and fell silent. Asian. He had never heard the Oriental tongues, but knew they were quick and filled with singsong rhythms. She must have been raised in one of the Asian colonies and was relapsing to another, happier time of her life. It was, he well knew, one of the ways despair played with the human spirit.

“How may I call you?” he asked. The woman’s only reply was the sound of a choked laugh. “You are Flora, then,” he declared.

She did not reply, but did not pull away.

“She would sing to them, Flora,” he whispered, an unexpected aching in his heart. “My mother. She would hold the orphaned lambs and sing to them in the middle of the night, when she thought everyone asleep. I would stay awake and steal to the kitchen door just to listen. She never knew I was there. I think the songs had as much to do with those babies staying alive as the milk she fed them.”

The woman squeezed tightly, and he kept speaking, forgetting for a moment the doom that was closing around him, telling of the ancient stone house they had lived in, of sailing with his grandfather, even how once his grandfather had stripped naked and leapt on the back of a passing fin whale, leaving Duncan alone in the open skiff as the old man roared with laughter and sang a Gaelic traveling ballad to the great leviathan, which had stayed on the surface, an odd contentment in its huge black eye. Eventually, realizing he had not confided so much to a woman in years, Duncan quieted, their grip continuing in the silent dark. Her fingers were the only warm thing he had felt for days.

Suddenly there was a creak of wood and Flora snatched her hand away. Someone was approaching through the outer door, carrying a lantern. Duncan retreated, crouching in the corner of his cell. A moment later a key turned in the lock of his door; the entrance flew open and two men appeared, their faces obscured in shadow.

“The captain’s compliments,” one announced with a guffaw.

As the man leaned into the cell, Duncan recoiled in terror. The captain had struck his bargain, and had sent for his prize. He twisted and rolled, evading the man’s reach for a moment before the man landed a kick in his belly that left Duncan doubled up on the floor. Short, vicious blows reached Duncan, kicks to his legs and back, and the sailor laughed as Duncan kept up his vain, frantic resistance, trying to avoid his boot. They were going to render him unconscious, and he would not revive until he hit the water tied inside a shroud.

Suddenly the man was pulled away by his companion, who carried a length of heavy, knotted rope with which he began beating Duncan. But after the first blow Duncan felt nothing, only heard the sound of the strikes. He thought he had gone numb, then realized the man was striking the walls and floor on either side of Duncan, while loudly cursing him. After a minute the man stopped, dropped something near Duncan’s head, muttered quick words, then stepped away. The first man reappeared with a bucket and emptied its frigid seawater onto Duncan, then with a cruel laugh slammed the door shut, snapping its heavy lock closed. Duncan stood, shaking off the water, forgetting his pain as he crawled to the hatch to look after them. Had the captain lost his negotiation?

He held up the object left by the second man. It was a dried, pressed flower. A thistle. Suddenly the rushed, whispered words echoed clearly in his mind. Redeat, Clan McCallum. Lister, he slowly realized, had used the visit of the captain’s bully as a cover. The stubborn old Scot was not going to let Duncan turn his back on his past. Lister had beaten the planks for demons and presented the traditional token. Despite the blood dripping from his reopened wound, a bitter grin tugged at Duncan’s mouth. The ceremony for installation of the last McCallum clan chief had just been completed.

Two piles of tiny bones, a buckle, an eye, a claw, a feather, a heart on salt. At first the objects from the compass room drifted in and out of Duncan’s consciousness, then he focused on them, until in his mind’s eye he had their placement by the compass fixed. Next, like the orderly bits of facts from his medical lectures, he assembled in his mind all he knew about Evering’s last few days. Adam must have confided in Evering, must have entrusted the professor with the strange amulet he wore around his neck. But why had he saved the stone for Duncan, why had he chosen Duncan for his legacy and not Evering? Why, he kept asking himself, would Adam say, They know who you are, as if there were something the leaders of the Company knew about him that Duncan himself was blind to? Why had Evering died so soon after Adam, and why so soon after that had the angel on the spar sought her own death? He lifted the stone bear for the hundredth time and pressed it to his forehead in frustration.

He slept, plagued by a recurring dream of a beautiful woman suspended in the water beside him, her fingers ending in long black claws, pointing at him the way his father did from the gibbet of his nightmares. When he awoke, two large sea biscuits had appeared on his cell floor, apparently dropped through the hatch. For several minutes he tried to extract the worms from them in the dark, then gave up and ate them intact, as many of the sailors preferred. He spoke through the hatch again, calling to the madwoman, extending his arm to blindly search for her fingers in the shadows. Flora was there, for he heard her cry out several times, as though from nightmares, but she no longer sang her songs, no longer offered her soft, desperate touch.