Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“I must have the letter sent by Evering,” he said through the hatch. “Above all, I must have that letter.”

“Gone. Posted on a passing fishing schooner these three days past.”

Duncan’s heart sank. He dropped to the floor as Cameron’s steps receded in the darkness. After several minutes he extracted his list of ancestors and stared at it, whispering the names, until the little hatch on his door was pulled open and a large tin of steaming liquid passed through. Tea, sweetened with honey. He whispered his thanks and sat back in a corner with the mug just as the candle sputtered out. In the darkness that followed he found himself wishing for Flora’s chants, which had grown strangely comforting to him. But she had been silent for hours, and the sounds Duncan heard most often from her cell were those of weeping. He tried to pass the time thinking of happier days as a youth in the Highlands and the Hebrides, but always his thoughts returned to Adam’s haunting legacy and Evering’s dead, questioning eyes, to the bloody compass and the fateful hour when the sea had closed around him. His foreboding was so real, so intense, he could taste it, like some salty, bitter thing in his mouth. Duncan had sought a final escape in the black water, had become certain the storm would be his ending. Everything had changed in the span of a quarter hour, when Lister had given him a reason to live, and Duncan had gone into the sea for a different reason.

But his life had indeed ended that day, Duncan began to realize. The man the storm had given back was not the same man who had gone into the water. He had fancied for a few hours that he might become the clan chief Lister wanted him to be, that he could indeed protect the Scots on board. But the Company had made him something else, something worse than a prisoner, something no clan chief could ever be. He had become an informer, a servant, a pawn to an English lord. Arnold and Woolford had given a terrible truth to Frasier’s suspicions. Was Arnold truly so clever to understand he had found the perfect way to break Duncan?

No, a voice argued from some dim part of his mind; no, there is hope, for the indenture meant he had lost his chains, gave him a chance to act like a clan chief, if only in secret. But the weak voice soon died as Duncan began a new nightmare, a recurring one of two men on a gibbet. One was a man with a tartan cloth covering his face, his skin being flayed away with a whip wielded by Reverend Arnold. The other was his dead father, cursing him for failing to see what suffering Duncan was causing the Company. The English expected him to deliver a political parable. Now that Duncan had convinced them the professor had been murdered, they expected him to give them a Scot, any Scot, to hang for the crime. And the Scots, whom he had vowed to protect, wanted Duncan dead.

He was chasing a lamb in the kitchen dooryard as his mother watched from the granite step, laughing as he and the lamb tumbled together into a bed of flowers. Then the joyful bleats turned to snarls as the lambs grew long, sharp teeth and began scratching at his flesh.

Duncan exploded into wakefulness, gasping and groping in the dark for something to swing against the rats. Suddenly the cover of a lantern lifted an inch, an arm’s length away. There were no rats, only strong, callused fingers wrapped around his leg, shaking him awake.

“Y’er scarletback fled,” a raspy voice declared. “Like a brigade of French were at his heels.”

As Duncan rubbed his eyes, squinting at Lister’s dim shape, his hand went to his throat. There was an unfamiliar bitter taste in his mouth, a soreness in his windpipe. He glanced at the tin tankard that had been handed through the door in the night, filled with sweet hot tea. “Woolford’s gone? How?”

“A fishing schooner overtook us,” Lister said as he squatted beside Duncan, handing him a lump of gray meat wrapped in a limp cabbage leaf. “Smaller, more spry than this old bucket. As soon as the lookout called out, Woolford dashed below, then when she drew close, he hailed her, offered a reward for their trouble. She can close haul in this wind and make the harbor in a few hours. We’ll be a day and more.”

“Alone?”

Lister reached behind him and produced a stained, tattered sea bag, the one Duncan had used to carry his only earthly possessions on board. “Woolford, two sailors, and a man in a cloak went over in the ship’s boat. With two trunks. Two sailors came back, no trunks.”

“Who was the other?”

“I was below until they were clear of the ship. But Frasier’s missing.”

Duncan retrieved the crock of water in the corner of his cell and drained it. Still the acrid taste lingered. “The tea you brought,” he said. “What was in it?”

“I brought no tea.”

He had been drugged. Someone had dosed him, disguising it with the sweet tea, which he had ravenously consumed. But why, why would someone want him drugged in his cell? With a stab of worry he touched the stone in his pocket, the medallion on his neck, even examined the linen holding the button. Nothing had been disturbed.

“I heard what you did for me, Mr. Lister,” he said. “You lied. You took the beating meant for me.”

Lister forced a grin. “Ye were in no shape, lad. ’Twas far from the first time fer me. Once ye grow good scars on y’er back, ’tain’t so bad. Like scratching an old itch.”

“You brought me back from the dead that day on the mast, then took my punishment. Never in my life have I owed so much to one man.”

“Tell me something, Clan McCallum,” Lister said. “Do ye ken what the New World means?” The question seemed strangely urgent, somehow difficult for the old mate to express.

A different kind of prison, Duncan was tempted to say. “So far it seems to have a lot to do with dying.”

“I’ve been there before. New York, Boston, Philadelphia. What I know is that ye can breathe there. It’s about what is in front of ye, ’tain’t about where ye were born, or what ye were born. The present don’t have to compromise with the past.” The old man eyes flashed. “I am going to trot down that gangway, dance a jig, and pick a blossom for the first lass I see.”

Duncan’s long hours in the darkness had left two burning impressions of the New World, a vague but fearful sense of something deadly lurking there with its eyes on him and the Company, and the demeaning way Arnold had stared at him when he was attired in the Ramsey clothes, his uniform for America. “For me it seems the New World will mean yes sir and no sir and wipe the mud from the young master’s shoes.”

Lister seemed uninterested in his wit. “I will tell ye how to repay me, Clan McCallum. Me, and the souls of y’er blessed parents.”

Duncan’s eyes narrowed.

“Go with the good reverend and take Evering’s place. He be a harsh master but means ye well. Do y’er duty to the Ramsey Company and to the clan. Give the New World a chance. Preserve y’erself. What ye did for that lass in the storm, ’twas the work of a clan chief. If a killer be seeking to thin our ranks, ye be the man who can stop him.”

Surprised at the emotion that flushed the man’s face, Duncan hesitated, then soberly spat into his own palm and for the second time that week took Lister’s rough, callused hand in his own. As Duncan returned Lister’s gaze, it seemed he was looking into the eyes of his father and grandfather, it seemed he was making a vow not just to Lister but to all of them, to all the old Scots.

Down the corridor Duncan heard the scurrying of tiny feet. It was the middle of the night. “Take me to Evering’s chamber,” he abruptly asked.

“With the captain ready to have y’er tripe for stew? Not likely.”