Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

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 of 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.

Duncan stared at the page, not focusing on the words, then looked up at Woolford. “Why,” he asked the officer, “would Adam Munroe trade perfectly good buttons for a bloodstained pouch?”

Woolford frowned. “Let’s put to rest one troubled soul at a time, shall we?”

“You have not reclaimed your buttons,” Duncan pressed.

“It seemed miserly,” Woolford replied in a brittle tone, “to interfere with a gift to a child.”

The officer pushed the second letter across the table. “I keep reading it, trying to make sense of the words.”

It was from Cameron, the senior keeper who always showed the most enthusiasm when flogging his fellow prisoners-a four-page letter addressed to D. Camshron, care of a priest in Strontian. It began Dear Doilidh, and what followed was a rambling narrative of the voyage, boasting of riches to come in the New World, then speaking of Evering’s death. We know why men get fetched in the night. The darker the secret a man hides, the quicker he kills. Woolford pointed to the closing passage, which read like a cryptic verse. Three times up for your new one, three times deiseal kirkside, it said, hot coal behind. Three times over flame, salt against sins. Three times over iron so the devils gnaw their own bones.

“He speaks of salt, of devils and bones,” Woolford observed. “Black arts. And Cameron was in the colonies before.”

Duncan read the words again and glanced at each man’s face. Each seemed to be nominating his own candidate for the noose. “Surely only a letter to a loved one.”

“You can’t know that.”

But Duncan did know, without a doubt. Lister was not the only one hiding something about his family. Doilidh was the Gaelic form of Dolly, just as the English translation for Camshron was Cameron. The words were about a newborn, but could only be understood by one from the Highlands. Deiseal meant sunwise in the old tongue-walking from east to west. A new mother on the first outing with her child was supposed to carry the baby up three steps to assure prosperity, then walk three times sunwise or clockwise around the kirk, the church, to avoid begin trapped by the spirits who craved newborns, tossing a hot coal behind to assure they were not following her. Passing the baby three times over flames was an old charm to protect a newborn, as was touching salt to a newborn’s mouth. And a secret, second baptism at the smithy’s forge, passing the infant over the iron anvil, was frowned on by the church but was a tradition steeped in time, from long before priests arrived in Scotland. It would deny the devils a chance to eat the newborn, making them chew their own bones instead. Cameron had left a pregnant woman, a wife or perhaps a sister, and wanted to be sure the offspring was blessed in all the traditions of the Highlands.

Duncan eyed Woolford uncertainly. “I don’t know that,” he replied, then froze as terrible realization swept over him. He glanced at his companions again. Had they made the connection? Cameron spoke of a man fetched in the night. Frasier spoke of what the Company brought from Edinburgh. Arnold and Woolford had made but one trip to Edinburgh, to bring Duncan. And they had brought him onto the ship in the night.

“Nothing here explains what happened in the compass room,” he observed, fighting to keep his voice level.

“Evering himself made the ritual,” Arnold proclaimed. “He placed his own buckle there, stole into the gallery for salt and blood and the heart, even that horrible eye, which the cook says came from a shark they had boarded the day before. The claw must be from one of his own collections.”