Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Pleased to see ye, y’er highness,” the man sneered. “We saved some Company tea for ye.”

“Rats won’t have to go hunting tonight,” another crowed.

“I only-” Duncan’s protest was choked away by the metal pressing deeper into his flesh. He met the gaze of the filthy, unshaven men, the hardest of the Company. Each brandished a jagged fragment of ballast stone, a weapon sufficient to do murder. Behind them someone moaned in the dark.

A red-bearded man in remnants of what had been a coachman’s greatcoat appeared from the gloom and bent over Duncan’s face. “Who gave ye the right to pick one of us to die?” he snarled.

“McGregor, I never-”

“Serv’ ’im ’is tea,” McGregor snarled.

Duncan’s head was slammed downward, submerged into the festering soup of seawater, urine, mildew, dead rats, and pitch. He did not struggle at first, thinking they sought only to frighten him. But they kept pushing, pressing him down, until his lungs were on fire, and he flailed out, fighting for breath, clearing the water and gasping for only an instant before being pressed into it again, the filthy spume biting his mouth and nostrils. The dunking was repeated a third time, until finally his assailant jerked him upright, gasping, retching.

“There was no murder on this ship until you named it so,” the bearded man growled. “Now the only murder that worries us be the one you be committing against one of us.” On McGregor’s knuckles were drops of fresh blood.

Duncan, gaining his breath, spat more filth from his mouth. “Until another man is taken by the true killer,” he shot back, pushing the arm away from his neck.

“Ye name one of us, McCallum, and every jack one of us will name ye. A pretty boy raised below the borders, just another English lapdog, we thought at first. Nay a Scot at all. Now we see ye’re worse, a slimeworm sent to consume us from the inside out. Poor Evering sniffed y’er true scent and ye had to silence him.” McGregor leaned closer, his crooked yellow teeth inches from Duncan’s face. “Ye made it easy, boy, paying us a call. We won’t even have to kill ye. We’ll just knock the senses from ye and cut a few slices on y’er limbs. By the time ye wake, the rats will have eaten half y’er flesh.” The arm began to close around his neck again.

Duncan did not remember all the oaths of the Hebrides fishermen he had learned as a boy, but he recalled enough of them to practice on McGregor, in the coarse Gaelic of the islands. He was invoking the glaistig, the uruisg, and the one-eyed direach, vile supernatural creatures all, when the ragged old Scot, eyes round with surprise and dread, clamped a hand over his mouth and pulled him from his assailant’s arms.

Duncan pushed the hand away. “The English don’t conquer us by killing us. All they have to do is play to the fears and suspicions that have kept Scots killing one another for centuries,” he said in a simmering voice. He reached into his pocket, extracting the piece of folded newsprint Lister had found in Evering’s cabin. “I came from no barracks,” he stated as he handed the paper to McGregor.

The old Scot bared his teeth like an angry dog, but took the paper and leaned into a lantern.

“Whatever you may think about me,” Duncan said, “you know Adam was one of you. He told something to Evering and Evering died for it. A secret about the Company. Perhaps Adam himself died for it.”

“Death to spies!” came an unsteady, boyish voice from the shadows.

McGregor, ignoring the cry, stroked his red beard. “What are ye saying, McCallum?”

Duncan spat more of the filth from his mouth and lowered himself onto a low pile of ballast bricks. “How many of you were taken out of court together?”

The nail, moving toward his throat again, was halted by McGregor’s outstretched arm. “I was alone, the only one taken from me town,” the red-bearded man said.

“I think everyone was,” Duncan said. No one refuted him. “They sought only certain types. Not just those with backs strong enough for seven years’ labor.”

“To what end?”

“To an end Adam glimpsed. We are not going there just to build some rich man’s town. Where were you taken?” Duncan asked. “Where were each of you ordered into the Company?”

“Dunkeld,” McGregor grunted, and nudged the man beside him.

“Oban,” the man said, followed by quick answers from the others. Fort William. Girvan, Kilmarnock, Ballantrae, Fairlie, Culross.

“All recruited from different places, so the men did not know one another. To make it easier to tame us but also to make it more difficult to know what we all shared. What is it we don’t see?” Duncan pressed. “Half have been in America before. What of the rest? If we cannot understand, we are doomed to suffer the consequences.”

McGregor, giving up for now on his plans for Duncan, wasted little time in prying answers from the men in the bilges. Half of those present had served in the army or navy. He held the lantern to the faces of the remaining four in turn. “McPhee?” he barked.

“I allowed gravediggers to earn their pay twice,” the man muttered.

“I pinched a few stags off me laird’s hills,” the second admitted with a grin.

“I fed my family for ten years off Lord Dundee’s estate ’afore they nabbed me,” declared the next.

“I kept the tables at Saint Luke’s Infirmary filled for the teachers,” confessed the last, a gaunt man named McSween.

McGregor threw Duncan a perplexed glance and muttered a curse. “Glory be. If we ain’t soldiers, we be poachers and body snatchers.”

Moans came from the dark again, and Duncan spotted a rivulet of blood flowing on the bilge water from behind the prisoners. “What have you done?” he demanded.

“He’s been trying to kill us. Day by day carving a hole below the waterline.”

Duncan pushed past the men. Frasier, the young keeper, lay sprawled against the hull, his lip swollen and bleeding, one hand grasped around the other, its index finger bloody and jutting at an unnatural angle. Duncan pulled the tail of his shirt from his pants and began ripping away a strip. “That nail!” he barked. “Give me the nail.”

The man who had assaulted him made a growling noise.

“You’ve broken his finger! It must be set and splinted.”

McGregor grabbed the nail, handing it to Duncan. The prisoners silently watched as Duncan ministered to the broken bone, then guffawed as Frasier regained his senses and began swinging at Duncan.

“Traitor! Spy!” the youth hissed then, hammering his injured hand into Duncan’s thigh, and recoiled in pain. He gazed at the gathered men uncertainly, probably more bewildered than Duncan at the silence that had descended over them. Tears began streaking down his cheeks.

“An odd use of a spy,” Duncan suggested, “to put him alone in a cell for the rats to nibble on.” He bent and pulled Frasier out of the filth, onto a low ledge of ballast rocks. “If I were what you say, I would have reported your slicing of the hull.”

“You never knew.”

“I knew who did it a minute after I saw it. The hole was chipped out by someone left-handed, since the beam beside it prevented a right-handed stroke. It took many hours. No prisoner from the hold has been missing so long. The captain may be a tyrant, but he always accounts for his men. That leaves the keepers. And of them you are the only corrach,” Duncan explained, using the old word for a left-handed person. He looked about the rough faces before him. Certainly McGregor and his men would not have known about the sabotage on the cargo deck. There was only one possible explanation. But why would Woolford have told McGregor, then left the ship?