Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

“Impossible.”

“On my own covenant then. He is an old man who will not stray far.”

“And what recompense will you offer when he kills again?” Arnold inquired.

“I pledge my indenture. If you find me mistaken, then put me in chains mucking out the horse stalls for seven years.”

Ramsey replied with a silent frown, then stepped closer to his map. “In England,” he offered with a gesture toward the drawing, “towns and their populations have become such random, disheveled things. Here we have the opportunity to correct all mistakes.” He fixed Duncan with a sober gaze. “Our century stands at the culmination of civilization. We are its ambassadors.”

The lord’s library, Duncan decided, was the most treacherous terrain he had yet encountered in the New World. He noticed small numbers in the lower right corner of each building sketch, the house bearing the numeral 3. Examining the numbers of each sketch and the status of the new construction, he recognized the sequence. “The very last structure to be built in your utopia is the courthouse,” he observed.

Reverend Arnold seemed to welcome the comment. “Next is the house of God. What need hath man for the courts and legislation when he has a church and the Decalogue?” he asked, using the High Church reference for the Ten Commandments.

“I am writing a commentary on Plato,” Ramsey announced, abruptly changing the subject. “Where else but in the New World do we have an opportunity to shape an entire society according to his esteemed principles?” The patron fixed Duncan with a level gaze. “Each of us is born to a destined duty. The ancient sage teaches that the highest reward is the fulfillment of that duty.” Ramsey had not changed the subject after all.

Duncan dared to return Ramsey’s stare for a moment, then lowered his gaze. Lister was right. He was going to have to master the skills of retreat. “I shall tirelessly strive toward my just rewards,” Duncan said in a taut voice. He placed his cup on the tray and offered a slight bow as he maneuvered toward the door.

Ramsey raised his cup toward Duncan as if in salute.

Duncan wandered about the compound, admiring the huge barn, more English than the house itself-its mortised beams joined like those of a mighty ship, with thirty stalls and central grain storage chambers and tool rooms under a cavernous hayloft-but soon found himself back in the classroom, staring at the blank slate on the wall. Checking that the door was latched, he extracted tattered pieces of paper from his pocket and arrayed them in front of him on the teacher’s table. His list of the McCallum clan chiefs. Evering’s poetry. The two messages from Jacob’s lean-to. He found a sheet of paper and began writing, one line for each event in the mystery that lay before him, then tore the list of events into slips, one line per slip, and arranged them in a row, top to bottom. Evering breaks vial of laudanum. Compass ritual, said the next. Then Evering murdered and Sarah awakens. He studied them for several minutes, then shifted the last paper to the top. Sarah awakens, Compass ritual, Evering murdered. After a moment he wrote and tore more slips. Frasier and Cameron loot Woolford’s chest. Adam barters with McGregor for the bear stone from Woolford’s chest. Woolford flees the ship with Sarah to be in port a day before the others. Adam commits suicide. Jacob the Fish receives message about ship from Socrates Moon. Old Jacob murdered. Duncan attacked in New York harbor. Woolford secretly writes Moon. Moon leaves message for Jacob. He arranged the papers in an arc before him, as he once had done with the names of the bones when memorizing the sequence of the human skeleton. As he stared at the slips, convinced that if he could only place them in the right sequence he would glimpse the truth, a terrible weight seemed to close around his shoulders. The skeleton before him was that of the monster responsible for the violence and mystery that simmered below the surface of the Ramsey Company. Here before him, in his hands, hung the life of Lister. He wrote a last slip and put it in front of all the others. Massacre at Stony Run.

He turned to his list of clan chieftains and recited each name out loud, then retrieved and unwrapped the bear stone, placing it before him, facing the paper slips, as if it might help him translate the events and the dialogue in his patron’s library. It had not been Ramsey’s words about Lister that had made Duncan’s skin crawl. There had been something else, when he had described the death of Old Jacob. Indians are always dying, Ramsey had said. It is a sign of our victorious God. In his youth, Duncan had been forced to listen to the same words spoken from English pulpits, about the destruction of the Highland Scots. He stared at the clan names again, then pushed the slips aside, unfolded the message Jacob had made in his own blood, and stared at it. It was meant for a man who understood more than Duncan did, meant for a man more conversant with the violent truths of the New World. He buried his head in his hands.

Flora is alone, with no hand to hold. The thought pounced upon him from nowhere. The guilt he felt for leaving the mad, faceless murderess on the ship would not be shaken. She was gone, condemned to slow death in the tropics, and for the rest of his life he would feel the helplessness, the pain of not being able to help her, the doubt over whether she had, like him, been unfairly convicted. He was a clan chief and was supposed to help Scots in peril. But he had failed her. Her strange words, the soft, desperate touch of her hand during the long, dark hours, had moved him more than he cared to admit. Flora, too, had been touched by the New World, he knew now, for her words had been echoed on the river and the frontier road, had been the seed of a strange, unnamable awareness that seemed to be building inside him. At night, at the edge of sleep, he sometimes sensed a warmth in his fingers, as if she were still there. She had become an invisible member of his clan, more real in a way than Sarah, who had proven an imposter. The night before, he had dreamt he had stayed with Flora, gone to Jamaica and escaped with her in a small, swift sloop on a warm, dark sea.

He became aware of a small, round face peering through the window at him and hurried to the door. “I am in need of a guide, Master Jonathan,” he declared, “Will you show me your town?”

They moved along the perimeter of the little community, past the dog kennels and pens where rotund sows suckled piglets. Some of the workers, men not of the Company, called out greetings to the boy, who answered with awkward waves. Others, familiar from the Anna Rose, glanced nervously at Duncan and looked away without speaking.

Duncan had to admire the planning that had gone into the construction of Ramsey’s town. The nucleus he was creating would have sustained a much larger community. They passed saw pits where logs were being cut into planks, a mason’s yard where large stones dragged in on ox sledges were being shaped for lintels and sills. He studied the men with the oxen, remembering Evering’s cryptic words on the sheet torn from his journal. The ghostwalker at the ox wheel, his tongue is in his heart. But Duncan saw no ox cart, no wheel of any kind among the great beasts.

Jonathan pointed out a lime kiln built into the knoll beside the northernmost pasture, even a potter’s shed where rust-colored bowls were lined up on a bench to dry in the sun. Ramsey’s fields were laid in careful squares, divided by walls of stone collected in the clearing of the fields, except for a flat acre of thicket and small trees that extended like a tongue into the fields from the south, disrupting the neat sequence.