Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Your isolation but heightens your objectivity. You will record a simple and tragic tale. Evering was possessed by the demon of grief, compelling him to the unnatural act in the compass room. His lapse of faith gave the killer an opportunity. Amen.”

Arnold was indeed interested in a sermon. “Perhaps,” Duncan suggested with a solemn air, “there should be lightning. Evering could have been struck by a bolt that burned away his reason.”

“Excellent,” Arnold said, in the voice he used in the pulpit. “Poetic. A call from God. Worthy of the Ramsey scholar. You encourage me, McCallum.”

“Then a mermaid rose up and killed him.”

Arnold sighed, then answered by pushing open the door to the cell corridor. The smell of unwashed men and women, of mildew and human excrement, wafted into their chamber, mingled with the sound of weeping. The vicar paused, as if for effect, then approached the table again. “The killer will hang, whatever reason for the crime. Perhaps one of them stole something of value from Evering. His gold watch is missing. Linking the killing to a robbery would offer a strong moral lesson,” he suggested. “The Company will witness the punishment after we arrive at Edentown. A perfect ceremony for setting the proper tone of the prisoners’ new life. The path of righteousness,” he added in a suddenly contemplative tone, “can be as slender as a thread. Do your work correctly, and there will be no need to raise the specter of sedition.”

Suddenly Woolford was back in the pool of light cast by the lanterns, with a writing box holding paper, ink, and a quill. As Duncan arranged them on the table, Arnold climbed back up the ladder. Woolford paused at the dark corridor of cells, then ascended the ladder, leaving Duncan alone, staring at the white empty paper. He paced about the table, considering the threat against Scots in Arnold’s parting words, fighting to dam up the unnatural fear that had surged through him when Woolford had mentioned the savages of the forest. British papers frequently reported on the cannibalism, the compulsive violence, the unquenchable blood thirst of the American natives. Animals in human form, they were often called.

When he finally lifted the quill, Duncan did not begin with the transcription of the letters, but with a list of names, sixteen names in a column, including his great-uncle, his father, and his grandfather. The name of every chieftain of Clan McCallum for the past four hundred years, names that had been burned into his memory as a young boy, an unbroken chain of names he and his grandfather had often shouted into the wind as they had sailed and rowed among the Hebrides. Angus McCallum, was the earliest, then Ian McCallum, Lame Rob, Alastair, Crooked James, and Blind William. When he was done he ripped away the long column and wrapped the paper strip around Adam’s amulet, close against his skin; then he pulled the silver button from his pocket, examining it for the first time in direct light. It was intricately worked on the top, and though its dome had been smashed inward, the violence had not obliterated what was obviously, as Lister had reported, a map. The surface of the button had held a tiny rendering in relief of eastern America and Europe, exquisitely worked in silver.

The ship’s beams creaked in the silence, and the table slightly canted as the vessel heeled in the wind. Duncan glanced toward the ladder and paused as something pawed at his memory. Woolford. Duncan had grown accustomed to the sounds made as those leaving the cell deck climbed toward the top decks, the creaking of certain ladder boards, the progressive opening and closing of hatches. Woolford’s egress had not been followed by the same sounds. Duncan rose and warily approached the ladder.

He climbed one step at a time, pausing at each to listen, finally gaining the next deck, a series of cargo holds packed with crates, barrels, and trunks. His heart pounding, knowing if he were caught he would pay with skin and flesh, he pushed on the hatch door leading to the first bay. The door swung open on its iron pintels without a sound.

The second bay was separated from the first not with a door but with a hanging sailcloth, which he silently brushed aside. Thirty feet in front of him, Woolford moved along the stacks of crates and trunks with a hooded lantern, in his hand one of the iron bars used to pry up the lids. As Duncan watched, the officer paused, drank from a flask he pulled from a pocket, then opened a crate and began sifting through the contents.

Duncan inched forward, suddenly desperate to see at least the label on the crate, watching for variations in the blackness that might mean a hiding place. He had found it, a gap between two crates, when a quick, furry creature leapt onto his shoulder. The rat’s transit across his back was silent, but not the creature’s jump onto a stack of kegs, where it slipped, its claws scratching at the wood as it sought purchase on the round sides.

Woolford spun about, lantern in one hand, iron bar in the other, raised for throwing. “At this distance I can put this into your spleen before you make it to cover,” he declared in a low, lethal voice.

“As a military art, I thought spear throwing went out with the Crusades.” Duncan fought to keep his voice level.

“You’d be quite astonished at the arts of the modern American officer,” Woolford growled, and lifted the pointed bar higher.

“I prefer you do it, here and now, Lieutenant, if you will not permit me to find the truth about the killings.”

“Killing. There was but one murder.”

“That’s your dilemma, Lieutenant. You and I both know I cannot find the truth about Evering without finding the truth about Adam Munroe. You might have an interest in Evering’s killer, but you cannot abide anyone knowing your secret about Adam.”

“Do you have any notion what the captain is going to do to you?”

Duncan did not doubt Woolford was capable of killing him. But it was time to test Adam’s words. Before the army used him it was going to protect him. He advanced, his hands held out at his sides. “We can stand here for half an hour, Lieutenant,” he said when the pool of light reached his face, “as you recount all the ways you and the captain can end my life in unimaginable misery. I’ll consider the point taken, provided you accept that when you take me before the captain and Reverend Arnold I will raise a dozen possibilities as to why you were creeping about searching boxes”-he glanced at the now-visible label-“holding the private belongings of the Ramsey family.”

Woolford lowered his makeshift weapon. “Inventory,” he muttered. “With so many thieves on board, we must watch every possession.”

“Fine. Let us go explain that. If you prefer I will go alone.”

“And receive a few dozen lashes for leaving the cell deck?”

“I will savor every stroke if your true colors be exposed.”

“Are all Scots as self-destructive, McCallum, as you and Munroe?”

“Consider it a study in what men do when the king lances the bubble of their hope.”

Woolford looked as if he had bitten into something sour. He leaned on a crate, setting the lantern beside him. “My preference in playing to a stalemate is to sweep the board and start anew. Shall we inspect the work that precedes us?” he said, aiming a thumb at a nearby trunk. The lock, Duncan saw, had already been forced, as had those of several others nearby, all bearing an ornate R , the Ramsey mark.

“What did you do to Adam last week?”

“I deeply regret to say I did nothing.”

“What is so important about the Ramsey tutor to you, just a soldier with no ties to the Company?”

Woolford ignored the question, probed the contents of the trunk before him.