Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Duncan’s confusion mounted. “The patron resides in the New World?” He met Woolford’s stare. The officer was studying Duncan intensely, running his finger along a long scar on his own neck, the most recent of several that marked his neck and jaw. Though not far from Duncan’s own age, Woolford had the hard, weary look of a man much older, and the cool eyes of a predator. The officer had caused Adam’s death, Lister had insisted, by telling him they were bound for Lord Ramsey’s town in the New York colony.

“In addition to his estates in England,” Arnold continued, “Lord Ramsey owns a great house in the city of New York as well as lands in the west of the colony. He enjoys the vigor of life in America, knows he can better serve the interests of his cousin the king in the colonies. But he desires his children to be instructed by someone versed in the curricula of Europe.”

Duncan searched Arnold’s narrow, impassive face. The vicar’s words were impossible. Surely he had misunderstood.

“Instructed for seven years,” Arnold added with a thin smile. He lifted a quill and handed it to Duncan.

“A tutor?” Duncan asked in disbelief. “To an English lord’s children?”

Arnold clenched his jaw, then pointed a long, bony finger toward the corridor behind Duncan. “Alternatively, you may have been an active participant in your uncle’s traitorous acts and an active saboteur on this ship. Deserving of the most severe punishments, like those in these cells, bound for Jamaica.” Arnold stood and pushed open the door to the cell corridor, then planted himself at the entrance. “Have you any notion what these wretched creatures face? What you may face should you not lift that goose feather?” he demanded, raising his voice as if wanting to be certain those in the cells heard. “Years of labor on the sugar plantations, if you are unlucky enough to survive so long. Insects so thick they are sucked into your lungs with every breath. Serpents. Yellow jack. Malaria. Hurricanes. Half don’t live past their second year. Buried in a shallow grave without a marker, your bones mixed with all the other slaves who die.” The soft-spoken Anglican priest had his own unique form of fire and brimstone.

Duncan glanced toward the cells, hating Arnold for so bloodlessly recounting Flora’s fate within her earshot, then looked back at the soldier. He had seen the cool anticipation on Woolford’s face before, in the courtroom crowd when his uncle had been sentenced. It was a moment when a life hung in the balance. He longed for the bleak hours in the cell when he had nothing to keep him alive but the insane notion of being clan chief. He had once seen a man, nearly buried alive, awaken from a coma as the gravediggers’ dirt hit his shroud, a grey shell of a man with no human spark left. That was what Arnold and Woolford had hoped to drag out of Duncan’s cell.

The quill seemed as heavy as granite when he raised it.

“When we disembark, you will be serving in the household of the Ramsey family,” Arnold declared with an approving nod. “We shall abide no foolishness, no sedition. No reckless disregard for your own life, which belongs to Lord Ramsey for the next seven years. You are beloved of God.”

Duncan stared at the vicar as Woolford lifted a second quill to witness. Had he heard the last words from any other man he would have considered them mockery. As he looked back at the parchment, he recalled the questioning, lightless eyes of Evering when they had pulled his body onto the deck. “How do I know,” he asked, his quill pausing in midair, “that by signing I am not condemning myself to the same fate suffered by Evering?” He spoke slowly, searching the face of each man in turn.

Woolford lowered his quill, his eyes round with question. Arnold’s thin lips pressed into a cold frown.

“Surely,” Duncan declared, “you understand the last Ramsey tutor was murdered.”

Woolford leaned forward, fixing Duncan with an intense, disbelieving stare.

Arnold’s eyes turned to ice. “The professor drowned.”

“With a rope around his neck?” Duncan asked.

“We have thoroughly reviewed the tragic circumstances,” Arnold replied in a level voice. “Evering was despondent from the loss of his wife to fever last year. He has relatives back home. It does his family no favor to tell them it was suicide.”

“Suicides on ship might throw themselves over the rail,” Duncan observed, lowering the quill to the table, “or they might hang themselves. They don’t do both.”

“He simply intended his body to be recovered for Christian burial,” the vicar asserted as he closed the door and returned to the table, leaning over Duncan. “The noose made certain his death was quick. The captain’s log is complete, with my signature as witness. We have already reported that Evering slipped over the rail in the storm. I have written an obituary, to be published in London at Company expense. He is no less a hero for dying before we begin our destined work in America. The captain expects to hail an eastbound ship soon. The body and the death notice will be sent back.”

“Had he been alive when the rope was placed around his neck,” Duncan explained, speaking toward his cupped hands, “it would have bruised his flesh. There was no bruising.”

In the silence that followed, a long, agonized groan rose from the cells.

Arnold’s eyes narrowed. “You know nothing of such things.”

“I seem to recall you once sought out my medical advice.”

“You were never formally qualified as a physician or surgeon,” Arnold rejoined. He raised a corner of the parchment as though in warning.

“You both heard in court that I had three years of medical study. For most of those years I stood in a surgical hall and examined bodies brought by the magistrates, organ by organ, limb by limb. I may not be sufficiently qualified to heal the living,” Duncan admitted, “but I am quite expert at explaining the dead. Show me the body and I will show you the truth.”

The words brought a puzzled twist to Woolford’s mouth.

Arnold closed his hands together as if in prayer. “Such reckless allegations will only harm Lord Ramsey,” he said, and exchanged a somber look with Woolford. “Evering was attached to the Company.”

“On the first day of the voyage I heard you tell the assembled prisoners that the Company stands for honesty and true belief,” Duncan pointed out.

The comment quieted Arnold. “And more,” the vicar agreed. “It is an experiment under a royal warrant. When we succeed, twenty such companies will be chartered, and twenty new communities established to block the French and their savage allies. We will not fail. And we will not be distracted or disgraced. You, sir, are mistaken.”

Duncan looked up. Had Arnold just offered an answer to why the army was so interested in the convicts?

“If the ritual was not a sign of a suicide,” Duncan said, “then it is a message for the living, not the dead.”

“The bloody heart was meant for us?” Woolford’s voice had lost all its confidence. He leaned forward, suddenly and intensely interested.

Arnold slowly turned to stare at Woolford, whose reaction seemed to have taken him by surprise.

“How many in the Company have been in the New World before?” Duncan asked. Arnold pulled Duncan’s quill from his reach, as if reconsidering his offer.

“Why?” the army officer asked.

“The ritual. Some of it was from the Old World. Some of it, I believe, was not. How many, other than Adam Munroe?”

Woolford studied Duncan intently, but did not reply.

“Surely it would have occurred to you, Lieutenant,” Duncan continued, “that Adam Munroe’s death, Professor Evering’s death, the ritual, even the plunge of that poor girl into the sea, all of these events happened only after your trunk was looted. It became the Pandora’s box of the Company. What did it have in it from America?” Duncan saw not anger but deep surprise flash in Woolford’s eyes, quickly replaced by something that may have been worry. The officer stood, circled the table once, then gestured Duncan toward the ladder.