Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Frasier seemed to shrink. “My cousin understood,” he said in an absent tone. “Play the odds, he said, that’s how we beat the English. When he was pressed into the navy, he told me how he was going to drug the marine guards one night and walk into the magazine with a lighted taper. Three months later his ship exploded. Two hundred Englishmen, one Highlander.”

Even the most brutal of McGregor’s gang could find no response to the startling confession.

“Many of us might summon enough anger to chip away the first few inches,” Duncan declared as some of the men bent toward Frasier, vengefulness in their eyes. “It’s only the last inch of the hull that matters. He was never going to do it. What he did do was sabotage a trunk of Ramsey supplies.”

The heat seemed to sap from several of the men. But as Duncan studied them, a rock thudded against his shin and he bent in sudden pain.

“Liar! I know how to kill English!” As Frasier lifted a second stone to throw at him, Duncan leaned over and clamped a hand around his arm.

“I came from the assizes like every man here,” Duncan said in a level voice.

“Look at him!” Frasier cried. “He hides army secrets around his neck!” The top buttons of Duncan’s shirt had opened in their scuffle, exposing a glimpse of what lay underneath.

Duncan did not move as McGregor pulled out the medallion, now with the dried thistle pressed into its leather seams and wrapped with his precious long strip of paper. The old Scot unrolled the list with a suspicious eye. “By God, McCallum,” he spat, “’tis the work of an informer for certain! Who be these names?”

“The men of my clan,” Duncan shot back, using Gaelic again. “My clan lairds. Now I am the oldest to survive, all those elder cut down by the king. Would you prefer I name for you the things they did to the bodies of my mother and sisters and six-year-old brother? Or how many weeks it took for my father’s bones to fall from the gibbet after Culloden?” A new tone had entered his voice unbidden-the coarse, wild edge that erupted when rival clans parried before a fight.

McGregor grew very quiet. As the old Scot gazed silently at the list, Duncan watched the last of his venom drain away, replaced by a weary melancholy. He returned the paper and lifted first one, then the other of Duncan’s hands, studying the many gashes left by small teeth. “Why do they do this to you?”

“Why do they do this to any of us? If we do not find out, we may as well go finish that hole in the hull.”

“This one is still dangerous,” McGregor said, indicating Frasier. “There be those who say he was with Evering the night before his death. The last to see him alive. If he confesses to you now, it saves the rest of us.”

“I told them nothing happened that night,” the young keeper said in a small voice, tears streaking the grime on his cheeks.

“What I want to hear, Frasier,” Duncan said, “is why Adam invited you to rob Woolford’s trunk.”

“I never-” the young keeper began, then seemed to sense something in Duncan’s eyes that made him start over. It was why the prisoners felt no fear of assaulting the keeper. They all knew what Frasier had done with Woolford’s trunk, and a word from any one of them would mean the loss of his keeper status. “He said he was certain there would be sugar in such a gentleman’s chest, that there would be trinkets for the games, which I could give to Cameron to buy his silence. All he wanted was one thing.”

“Brandy,” someone suggested with a guffaw.

“Tobacco,” Frasier said. “He wanted the tobacco. Except he said not to give it to him. I was to get it to Professor Evering.”

“But Evering did not smoke,” Duncan pointed out.

Frasier’s face darkened. “Sometimes I think maybe I was the one, the one who did kill the professor. As well as done.” Duncan sensed the men behind him shift, tensing again, and he shifted to place himself between them and the young keeper. “I saw Evering twice that last night, before the storm,” Frasier continued in a hollow voice. “First on deck, speaking of the heavens, but then past midnight in the passage outside his cabin, though he did not see me. He was waving a piece of lit tobacco, letting the passage fill with the fragrance, then going into the sick room with it. He did something terrible with it, and I made it possible. Adam could never have intended it.”

“Did what, lad?” McGregor demanded.

“Don’t you see? Evering revived the beanshith, the banshee. I gave him the tobacco and the medallion like Adam asked, and he used the tobacco to revive the banshee. He didn’t know she would kill him.”

Duncan surveyed the rough assembly. Their hate had totally burned away, replaced with a dim confusion, even fear.

“Why did you ask Woolford about being at all our trials?” Duncan asked the young keeper.

“If the Company is to be used by the army, we should know it.”

“But why now, why ask when you did?”

All the fight had gone out of Frasier. He spoke toward his hands. “Adam had died.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Adam used to sing in the night.”

“You’re making no sense.”

Strangely, it wasn’t pain in Frasier’s eyes when he looked up at Duncan, but embarrassment. “I asked him once,” the young Scot said. “I missed my home so. There was a song my mother used to sing, about the sun setting over the loch with the heather in bloom. I asked him to sing it, and he did, every night when he knew I was in earshot.”

“But why?” Duncan pressed. “If you were upset about Adam, why badger Woolford about the army?”

“Because of the lies they told, because of the way they treated him. Because I won’t let it be forgotten. They put Adam in with the Company prisoners two days before sailing, as if he were just another one brought in from some village court. But he was the first prisoner, here before the keepers, before the murderers, kept by Woolford in a cell.”

Duncan leaned closer. “How do you know it was Adam in the cell?”

“Because the captain’s wife fed him when Woolford was away at the law courts. She was feeling ill one eve and told me to go down with the food. That was when I first heard him sing. I still hear him,” Frasier added in a whisper. “I never saw him in the cell, and might have been taken into the deception like everyone else.”

“Except he sang,” Duncan concluded. “And you heard him later, in the prisoner hold.”

Duncan tried to piece together Frasier’s words with Woolford’s revelation that Adam had volunteered to become a prisoner. “Sometimes,” he said, “a man’s crime can be knowing someone, or something.”

“What secret could Adam have known that made him so dangerous to be locked in a cell?” Frasier asked in a rueful voice.

“What he knew was something about someone called a fishspeaker and an inn in America. And,” Duncan said with conviction, “why the Company is going to need so many poachers and body snatchers.” As well as, he almost added, a secret about Duncan that Duncan himself did not know.

When he returned to the cells, Lister had a bucket of seawater waiting for him, and Duncan gladly let the old mate dowse him repeatedly. But his dreadful foreboding could not be stripped away as easily as the stench. As Lister locked the cell door, Duncan leaned against the wall, feeling strangely weak. Confusion had become his new disease. Adam had condemned himself to the ship of his own accord, as if under some dark spell. Woolford’s chest had indeed been the work of Pandora, its demons now preying on the ship. Woolford, he had slowly realized, must have told McGregor about the hole in an attempt to slow the ship’s arrival in New York, as if he, like Adam, dreaded its arrival there. His legs gave way and he slowly sank to the floor, staring into the shadows. Much later he discovered that the black stone was in his lap, one hand clenched tightly around it, the other stroking the thing as if it needed comforting. He pressed the warm stone to his cheek, then to his heart, and then began wrapping it in the unused bandage, covering it in many layers. He stuffed the bundle into the bottom of his sea bag and settled into a corner of his cell, his hands clasped around Adam’s mysterious amulet.