Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Then why,” Duncan pressed, “did Adam Munroe consider it such a catastrophe that we are going to the New York frontier?”

Woolford paused, stared into the shadows of the trunk. He seemed strangely wounded by the question. “The wilderness works in many different ways on men’s souls.”

“Many different kinds of fear, you mean.”

Wooford slowly lifted his head, fixing Duncan with a sober stare. “You have no notion, McCallum, how right you are.”

Duncan leaned forward to glimpse inside the trunk. With a chill he recognized the contents. Long bags of canvas, with laces at the top. The ever-efficient managers of the Ramsey Company had packed an entire trunk of burial shrouds.

“A ghostwalker,” Duncan said as he gazed at the shrouds. “Does it mean one fixed on suicide?”

Woolford gripped the iron bar in both hands. “Not a word easily explained.” His tone turned oddly melancholy. “The opposite of suicide perhaps. In America the dead can walk again.”

“You took custody of Adam in the courts. You knew his record. Why did he kill himself?”

Woolford stared at the bar, twisting his hands, twisting his face, speaking toward the shadows. “Adam Munroe was the only one who was not arrested. He told Arnold that if he needed to be arrested to join the Company, he would gladly assault me and every soldier in Argyll.”

“Impossible. He would not willingly give himself to slavery.”

“I suspect you and I did not know him as well as we thought.”

Duncan saw something in Woolford’s eyes that frightened him, and for a moment the officer gripped the bar like a weapon again, but then he exhaled heavily, tossed it into the darkness, and moved down the line of forced trunks. Duncan followed a step behind. The first three contained fine clothes, which appeared disheveled but undamaged. The next, marked Hand Implements, held a top layer of blankets. But under the blankets at the top were at least two score bayonets, of a style for plugging into the barrels of heavy muskets, then hand axes and heavy knives nearly the size of swords. The next trunk held heavy woolen waistcoats, red with long sleeves-some with blue facing, others with buff. Though tattered from long use, they would still have had years of service left in them had not someone poured tar over them, soaking through the fabric.

“You brought these from a barracks?” Duncan asked.

“Not I. But all were made under the king’s warrant. They were uniform coats, made for the army.

“But none is new.”

“I daresay most are twenty years old and more. Quartermasters sometimes sell old equipment to pay for new. I know of a theater in Chelsea,” Woolford observed, “that regularly buys trunks of it, for playacting.” He paused and with a rueful grin tipped back his flask again. “My father’s country estate had a huge courtyard. He called it his Roman amphitheater. We held plays there, great pageants where we praised kings and celebrated the ascendancy of England as the queen of civilization.”

A second son, Duncan realized. Woolford had an aristocratic father and only a junior post. It could only mean he was unable to inherit. Woolford’s voice grew distant. “‘This sceptered isle, this precious stone set in the silver sea,’” he offered, irony thick in his words. “Shakespeare was my favorite. ‘Conscience,’” he recited, now in a stage voice, “‘is but a word that cowards use to keep the strong in awe.’”

“‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,’” Duncan countered. “‘He died as one that had been studied in his death. To throw away the dearest thing he owned.’”

“MacBeth.”

“A Scottish king, on a Scottish death. Why did Adam insist on being on this ship?” Duncan pressed. “What did you do to drive him to his death?”

Woolford stared at his engraved flask a moment, then raised it with a salute to Duncan and drained it. “‘Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself,’” he offered. He closed the trunk and then silently gestured Duncan forward, into the shadows. They walked past another canvas partition until they reached the thick, curving planks of the hull, where the sound of the coursing sea was unusually loud through the wood.

“I discovered it the day after Adam’s death,” the officer declared as he pulled away a small crate from the hull and extended his lantern.

An unnatural fear gripped Duncan. He steadied himself on the crate as he stared at a ten-inch-wide hole chipped into the hull beside one of the heavy support timbers. Someone was trying to sink the ship. “How thick-” he began.

“The hull planks are eight inches, if the ship’s carpenter’s to be believed. By my calculation less than an inch separates us from the brine.”

“Are you saying Adam did this?”

“So I assumed. But when I came back again after he died, I found fresh chips on the deck.”

“You did not tell the captain?”

“The captain has no imagination. He is like an artilleryman, all about hasty aim and loud explosions. He would rail about the Scots, then steer the ship for Halifax.”

Duncan knelt, studying the size of the chips. The hole was immediately to the left of the large timber, hidden in its shadow. It would have been hard to spot on a casual inspection, as would have been the bayonet he pulled from behind the nearest trunk. “Surely you should tell the ship’s carpenter,” he enjoined.

“And scare away the culprit?” Woolford said. “Officially no one knows about this.” He pushed the trunk against the hole.

“Officially?”

“In the army we have official files which go to the public, to the king. The unofficial ones have more texture, more interesting details.”

“Like the truth.”

“Usually enough material for any number of truths. Rather like Shakespeare.”

“Like the letters we opened.”

Woolford gestured him back toward the ladder. “I thought you reacted quite evenly. Splendid performance.” He turned, and a cool grin returned to his face as he saw Duncan’s bewildered expression. “Surely you understood Frasier’s letter even if Reverend Arnold did not.”

“Frasier has a troubled spirit.”

“Frasier,” Woolford declared, “has told the Company that they have a spy from the army within their ranks. Be grateful for your cell. Be grateful for the protection of Reverend Arnold. The other prisoners and the captain have similar intentions for you. But there is a big difference. The captain wants to throw you to the sharks. The men in the Company would prefer to find an ax and do it piece by piece as you watch.”

Duncan, suddenly very weak, leaned against the hatch as he watched Woolford’s lantern moving upward, a dying star on a bleak night. In the Highlands, one who openly stood at the side of the English might be an enemy, but at least one with whom honest battle could be done. But a secret turncoat was the lowest form of life, best dealt with by a blade in the spine on a foggy night. Duncan was the rot Frasier meant to slice away.

He found his way to the candlelit table in a daze and stared at the flame, trying to calm himself before returning to his work. He had transcribed one letter when he became aware of a presence behind him.

A thickset man stepped from the shadows. “I have these,” Cameron said, extending a folded scrap of sailcloth. “The vicar asked me to clean the professor’s shoes, to help brush his clothes, get the body ready.”

Duncan laid the cloth on the table and opened it. It contained glass, small shards of green glass.

“When I went back for his shoes, these pieces were on his cabin floor. Should have thrown them over. But I shoved them in a corner under his bed.”

Duncan pushed at the shards with the end of his quill. They matched those he had seen embedded in Evering’s knee. The larger pieces were slightly curved. “What was it, Cameron?”