Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Arnold’s words were cut off by a peal of laughter. A boy of perhaps eight years and a girl who seemed about two years younger, both with light brown, curly hair, entered the room, a small spaniel romping at their feet. They did not see Arnold until they were halfway across the room. They halted abruptly, all joy draining from their eyes, and gazed nervously at the tall, stern figure in black. Arnold opened his mouth and seemed about to reprimand them, but then reconsidered as the children darted behind the skirts of a young woman who appeared with a vase of flowers.

She could be no more than eighteen, Duncan thought as he studied her, but there was something in her graceful countenance that spoke of sadness and wisdom far beyond her years. Her long brown hair, streaked with auburn, hung loose over the shoulders of her simple, hunter green dress. Her eyes, though quiet and intelligent, were remarkably shrunken, as if she had long been deprived of sleep. She wore no jewelry except a simple gold cross above the square bodice of her dress. Her unadorned face flushed with color as she looked into Duncan’s eyes, and he struggled with the notion that he had seen her somewhere before. She was the third, the one Crispin had been scared to speak of.

“I had intended to make introductions at tea,” Reverend Arnold said with a sigh, then stepped between Duncan and the newcomers, gesturing for the boy and girl to step forward. “Master Jonathan Ramsey, Miss Virginia Ramsey,” he said with a quick motion to each of the small children. “And our Sarah,” he concluded in a voice gone oddly still. “You may greet your new tutor, Mr. McCallum.”

Sarah seemed to look for cues from her younger siblings, as if she did not understand what to say, then mouthed the words that Jonathan and Virginia spoke. “Good afternoon, Mr. McCallum. Welcome to our house.” Jonathan gave a small, stiff bow; Virginia, a deep curtsy. Sarah, flushing again, made an awkward motion somewhere between a bow and a curtsy, the vase still in her hands.

Sarah seemed unwilling to look back into Duncan’s eyes. She silently retreated around the table, walking along the far side, and stepped into the library alone to place the vase in front of the portrait of the woman, removing the old flowers. As Duncan watched from a distance, her left hand began trembling, and she quickly clamped her right around it.

Something new had entered the pastor’s eyes, a sudden skittish-ness. As Duncan watched, Arnold pulled his own gaze from Sarah back to the children, who had not moved. His eyes flared and he stepped to Jonathan, prying something out of the boy’s fingers. A long, narrow blade-a letter opener, held like a sword. Arnold dropped the blade into his own pocket and glared at the boy. Duncan watched in surprise as the boy braved the vicar’s steely gaze for a moment before looking toward the floor.

“We must offer new prayers tonight,” the boy said in a bold voice.

The comment seemed to unsettle Arnold. “Prayers for whom, son?”

“The one with the laughing eyes who carved me a beaver out of a stick,” Jonathan said in an earnest tone. “He’s gone to see Old Crooked Face at the crooked tree.”

Arnold seemed to stop breathing for a moment. When he spoke his voice was hoarse. “Of course we shall pray.” Duncan did not miss the alarmed glance he threw toward Sarah. “Meanwhile, should you not take your new tutor to his classroom?”

Jonathan, with an odd expression of triumph, took Duncan’s hand and led him away. As they entered the kitchen, Duncan looked back to see Arnold hurrying out the front door, hat and coat in hand.

The boy scampered away after leading Duncan to the chamber Arnold had described, a cheerful, sunlit room with a large walnut desk and three small tables arranged in front of it, each bearing a slate but also sheets of precious paper, pewter inkwells, pencil leads, and quills. Duncan idly leafed through the expensive atlas on the desk, gazing at the vast, unmarked lands west of the American coast, then saw the open crate in the corner, its contents partially unpacked onto an adjacent bench.

Duncan quickly sorted through the items, more desperate than ever for a clue to Evering’s murderer. A dozen thin books, primers for teaching young readers. An alphabet chart pressed inside a wood frame under a transparent layer of horn-a hornbook. Jars of pigment sealed with wax. Five identical wooden boxes, each crafted with small compartments inside, one containing minerals, another dried leaves, the others lenses, shells, and empty bird eggs. Large, rolled maps tied with yarn. Duncan’s eyes drifted around the room as he realized the crate would have been packed before Evering had left England. His gaze came to rest on a chair by the door, holding a small, worn trunk.

More books were in the trunk, thicker volumes with dog-eared pages. Hume’s controversial Enquiry on the Principle of Morals. A tattered edition of Gulliver’s Travels, another of the essays of Berkeley, the great philosopher who had spent part of his life in the New World. Two collections of poetry, one in French. A volume on the flora and fauna of the Americas, which he spent several minutes perusing. Under the books lay three more of the wooden boxes Evering used for his collections. The first was filled with dried flowers, in small compartments made of stiff, interlocking sheets of wood. One of the compartments, labeled Thistle, was missing its specimen. The second box was nearly empty, its only occupied compartment containing the bones of a small mammal. One compartment of the third was untenanted, while the others were filled with lenses and faceted glass. As he lifted out the last box, he felt a thrill of discovery. At the very bottom lay Evering’s journal.

Duncan’s heart raced as he opened the worn leather binding. The first page bore a date nearly two years earlier, and all the early entries were long, dry descriptions of daily life in London. But then the following year’s entries turned into poems, or efforts at poems, for many lines were crossed out. The verses he could decipher were stiff and heavy, strangely filled with science-the musings of an intelligent, though not passionate, man, an empiricist who for some reason had begun to speak in verse. After twenty pages these verses stopped, replaced by a several pages of lines strangled with emotion, most of them crossed out. Evering’s wife had died abruptly, Duncan recalled, taken by a fever. There followed several pages more of cramped lines of poetry, some stained with what he guessed was wine. Several poems were about life aboard ship, with references to rigging like spider webs and sailors with lobster-claw hands and oyster-shell faces. Several more were about seabirds. The last half-dozen pages of writing were filled with verses about women, not typical of those before-romantic verses, sympathetic, soulful verses. Duncan would never have thought them from the same man had they had not been so obviously written in the same hand.

A beaver. He suddenly looked up at the doorway where Jonathan had disappeared. The boy had wanted prayers for the laughing man who had carved him a beaver. Duncan had known a joyful man who had carved a beaver into a mast. And Jonathan’s friend, too, needed prayers. Because he had gone to see a crooked man. Not a crooked man, Duncan recalled, but Old Crooked Face. But it was impossible the boy could have known Adam, let alone learn the news of Adam’s death so quickly.

Evering was on the desk in front of him, reduced to his essence. Duncan read the pages with the care he had learned in dissecting the dead, pausing over every word as if it were a symptom, gradually realizing all the recent poems were about not women but one woman. At first he thought they were reminiscences of Evering’s dead wife, for the awkward lines were heavy with tragedy. But then two unconnected verses, a quartet and a couplet, described the subject: