Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

Is this a goddess or god’s own blunder

She who, waking, opens a door for us

I watch and weep, for how I wonder

Stay she so sad in the arms of Morpheus

then

Face so frail between long red tresses

Belongs to the land of sleeping princesses

Evering had watched his subject as she slept. Duncan read on. Evering had written about youth and age, about riches of gold and riches of the spirit, and how he thought the two incompatible. Throughout was a wrenching melancholy. The last lines he rested his eyes on were another couplet:

You claim all that beauty and wealth may yield

Yet silent sadness be the power you wield

Duncan found himself looking out the window, remembering the sick passenger, the nameless woman he had saved, the one Lister, too, had called a princess. So ill she had slept most of the time, Woolford had told him, usually watched over by Arnold, Woolford, Evering, and the captain’s wife. But she had awakened in the storm, alone, and risen from her troubling dreams to act out a new nightmare. He recalled the two ribbons hanging above Evering’s cot. He might have suspected a tragedy between lovers had Evering been younger. But in the poems Evering’s affection was not one of passion, but of worship for the woman with the long tresses. And she could have grown attached to a man who might seem like a father to her. Had she learned of Evering’s death, and been so stricken with grief she had wanted to die? Or, as Frasier insisted, had she been a witch who, once revived by Evering, had rewarded him with a hammer to the skull?

At the bottom of the penultimate page were notes for new compositions of a similar tone. With tiny cramped writing, no doubt to preserve his precious paper, Evering had written a series of disconnected words without punctuation. Lost, Duncan read, then heart and stony run, oak, then bones. He faltered at a word he could not fully decipher, written three times. Tastgua, it said, or Tashgua. It could have been Teshqua, Latin for wastelands -the kind of word Evering would use in his poems. At the end of the strange ciphers came two more words, written clearly though just as perplexing: King Hendrick.

He looked up, startled to see that without conscious thought he had lifted the black stone from his pocket onto the table. Lifting the book from the table, he studied the binding. The page after the last entry had been torn out, as had perhaps twenty pages at the back of the journal. The paper matched that which had been used for the prisoners’ letters. Evering had sacrificed his precious paper so the prisoners might write home. But only one page was taken from the end of the text. He examined the next page, a blank one, noticing tiny indentations-faint embossing from the nib that had been pressed on the missing page before it. Duncan lifted a quill from the desk and slipped into the empty kitchen, where he dabbed the feather against the soot on the wall of the huge fireplace.

Back at the desk, he stroked the feather lightly across the empty page, turning the indentations into words, or fragments of words, white against the black. They were more notes, disconnected phrases that the professor must have memorized then decided to destroy. The crow, the faint first words said, the crow will keep you alive. Duncan touched the medallion under his shirt. Adam had given Evering the crow before Duncan had taken it from the bloody compass. Show the fishspeaker, he read next, followed by unintelligible scratches. Keep McCallum from the army, he read with a chill. The remainder of the marks offered remnants he could not connect in any logical sequence. The ghostwalker at the ox wheel, he read, then below that, his tongue is in his heart.

He studied the poems another quarter hour, then he tore the last four pages of writing from the book and folded them into his pocket with the stone. Tossing his scholar’s cap onto the desk, he returned to the kitchen, found a small crockery bowl, filled it halfway with water from a bucket by the door, then carried the bowl back to the desk. Into it he dumped the contents of the cloth scrap Cameron had given him, the shards of glass from Evering’s cabin.

He roamed back through the quiet house into the dining room, hoping to read some of the American journals he had seen on the shelves. He halted at the entrance to the library as he saw that Sarah still stood at the portrait of the woman, tears streaming down her cheeks, one hand trembling again as the other clenched it. He stepped into the shadows and watched her, flushed with shame for doing so but unable to look away. Her hair was loosened, sweeping over her shoulders, and she had a feverish appearance. She raised her arms slowly, extending them from her sides as if she were trying to embrace the woman on the canvas, a strand of russet hair falling across a cheek as she did so.

A chill shot down Duncan’s spine. He had indeed seen Sarah before, had seen her with her arms thus extended, her hair tumbling, had seen her balance along the spar in the rising storm, then leap into the churning sea. His grieving angel. It had been Sarah he had saved that awful day; Sarah had been the sick, sleeping passenger. A banshee, the crew had called her. They had hurled belaying pins and curses at her. But, he knew now, Professor Evering had written poems about her. Evering’s sad, frail princess. The eldest child of one of the most powerful families of the New World. The one Frasier had named as a witch, as the killer of Evering. The owner, no doubt, of the Ramsey pendant stuck in the pig’s heart.

He suddenly realized he had uttered a gasp of surprise. Sarah’s head slowly turned toward him, then she lowered her arms, scrubbed the tears from her cheeks and picked up the vase of old flowers as he awkwardly approached her.

“They keep flowers for her,” Sarah whispered, forcing a small smile. She seemed so vulnerable, so frail. “Fresh ones, every day in spring and summer.”

They. She spoke as if she were not part of the house, not part of the family.

“In the winter perhaps you could draw a flower on paper each day and leave it,” Duncan suggested in his own whisper. She was a deer that might bolt at the slightest shift in the wind. “There are paints. We could add colors, paint entire bouquets.”

The thought seemed to cheer Sarah, whose natural expression seemed to be one of melancholy. She offered another quick, tiny smile, self-consciously brushing a lock of hair from her face, her green eyes darting toward him, then away.

“There are three small desks in the back chamber, Miss Ramsey,” Duncan observed. “Surely you will not need to sit through the same lessons as your brother and sister.”

“But I must,” Sarah said, speaking to the wilting flowers in her hands. “I have no arithmetic. I have little of writing.” She gave him another skittish glance. “Please,” she said in the voice of a small girl. “I desire to spend as much time as possible in the classroom.” She made it sound as though she needed to escape from the rest of house.

What was the secret illness that had kept her bed-bound for the entire voyage across the Atlantic, Duncan wanted to ask. What had prevented Evering, the natural philosopher who seemed to have been so obsessed with her, from discussing her illness in his journal? Had she truly been so ill for so long that she had lost a decade of instruction, lost her adolescent years? He struggled to put a name to her malady, trying to connect her trembling hands and sunken eyes to any disorder he had studied.

When she looked up at him, her moist, nervous eyes were those of a child. He had never known such a creature. One moment she seemed to bear the weight of the world, the next she seemed so naïve, so innocent in the ways of the world; one moment so poised, the next, so awkward.