Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“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. We 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.