Eliot Pattison - Bone Rattler

At midnight Duncan arrived at the door of the great house, the report folded inside a blank sheet of paper with Lord Ramsey’s name on it. He paused and touched the iron thumb latch. The door was unlocked. With a quick survey of the yard to confirm no one watched, he stepped inside and laid the report on a side table under a flickering candle in a pewter holder. The house was still and silent. He lifted the candleholder and ventured over the wide plank floor into the kitchen in search of something to ease his mounting hunger. With guilty pleasure he discovered and quickly consumed the heel end of a loaf, dipping it in a tub of butter left on the windowsill, then saw the small door under the back stairway. He lifted its latch slowly, wary of making the slightest noise, then raised the candle and moved down the steps into Ramsey’s forbidden cellar.

Rows of wooden crates and barrels lined the large, dirt-floored chamber. He ventured along the nearest wall, extending the candle to read the labels. Madeira, Port, Brandy. Sugar, salt, ale, and a dozen other consumables. Across the stone flags along the opposite wall were crates and trunks bearing the Ramsey name in the black letters he had seen on the ship. It took but a few moments to verify that they were the ones he and Woolford had seen in the hold, one still smelling of tar, though its ruined coats were gone. Beyond, under a heavy canvas cover, were more kegs of rum than he could quickly count. He raised the candle and discovered in the far corner a small chamber constructed of heavy timbers and planks. Its narrow door did not yield when he tested the latch.

Such safe rooms had been used at his medical college to store habituating doses, where doctors were so numerous it was impractical to provide them all with keys. He held the candle close to the door, saw through its crack the dim shape of a wooden bar blocking the door near the top, and began exploring the planks, pushing, probing the cracks in the wall with fingers and toes. The first plank around the corner groaned as he pushed at its bottom, its top swinging out on a pin concealed at its center. The locking bar, attached to the top of the plank, pulled clear of the door, and he stepped inside.

Kegs of rum lined the front wall of the chamber. In the nearest corner stood a low bench with a rack holding four heavy horse pistols, newly flinted, each loaded and primed, ready for use, several more flints under the rack, with gun cleaning cloths. A small table against the back stone wall held a bound ledger, a house account, with records of household purchases in the front. But in the rear of the book was another list, a record of payments over several months to perhaps two dozen different men, most of the names repeating, the most frequent entry being that of Hawkins, each entry bearing a number of hash-marks beside it. They could have indicated pelts, or game for the kitchen. The most recent entries, for Hawkins and five other men, had been made three days earlier, in a different handwriting.

Beside the book was a hand-drawn map that showed the country north of Edentown, following the river north as it meandered through rough-drawn ranges. Halfway up the river was a sketch of rock formations with tall columns of stone, marked Chimney Rocks. The only other features were farther north and slightly west, two places separated by half an inch, marked in a cramped hand and underlined. German Flats and Stony Run. Below, at the bottom of the map, was a single word: Okewa.

He was about to leave when his gaze fell on two flour sacks, each with lumpish contents. Upending the first on the table, he discovered an ornate red-peaked cap, tall and military with a large 49 embroidered in gold brocade. He studied it in the dim light, putting his hand inside it, not understanding why it should be kept so secret. He stretched it over the candle. There were four small holes in its side, each big enough to insert a writing lead, spaced in two pairs four inches apart. They were too small for bullet holes, too regular to be the work of wool-eating insects. At the bottom of the flour sack was a brass cylinder, perhaps five inches long, perforated with holes and tapered at the base, topped with a hinged, domed cap.

He absently opened the second sack, upending it onto the table, then with a moan backed away. Inside were skulls, perhaps twenty skulls of birds, messengers to the gods. His hand trembling, he returned the bones to the sack, then dropped the cylinder into his pocket. He lifted the cap to return it to its sack, then paused and quickly tucked it inside his belt, pocketed the map, and jammed several of the guncloths into the empty sack.

A minute later he was out of the house, calming himself with gulps of the cool night air, heading across the plowed fields in the moonlight. He sat against a huge stump that had been too big for the oxen to extract, trying to lose himself in the deep night sky.

He turned the red cap over in his hand, uncertain why he had taken it, uncertain why it would be important to Ramsey. But somehow it seemed to be a start, a tiny step toward becoming the chieftain that Lister wanted him to be. As he studied the stars he began to sing, in quiet Gaelic, an old ballad about a Highlands warrior who battled the gods to save his clan.

Lord Ramsey sent for him before noon the next day. “I have read your report,” the patron announced from his desk chair. Duncan’s papers lay under one jeweled hand. “You confuse me, McCallum. What was it you did not understand about your task? In my experience, Reverend Arnold expresses himself more than adequately.” Arnold stood behind Ramsey, arms folded across his sleeveless waistcoat.

Duncan returned the vicar’s smoldering gaze, then addressed Ramsey. “I gave you precisely what you need, sir. A way out, a means to avoid scandal while also avoiding the harm to the Company that would come from condemning an innocent man.”

Ramsey frowned and waved the papers in front of him. “You say it is a pattern, that the same forces are at work in the deaths of Evering and some old savage, that it is connected to the battle at Stony Run. You offer a detailed scientific review of Evering’s corpse, but you decline to adopt the vicar’s view of the puzzle in the compass room. I fail to see how this restores the balance in the Company.” The patron’s gaze drifted out the window to the settlement’s newest structure, a threadbare tent, and he frowned again.

In the early morning new travelers, unwelcome to Ramsey, had arrived. A tall, gray-bearded man had stopped Duncan, asking for Reverend Arnold. After five minutes of conversation, he had introduced himself as Reverend Zettlemeyer, a Moravian missionary who had brought in survivors of raids on a dozen homesteads. Ramsey had offered them the tent, which he had ordered to be erected at the far side of the fields. With the battered settlers had come half a dozen red-coated soldiers, fresh from New York, who to Ramsey had been even less welcome than the settlers.

“The ritual at the compass,” Duncan explained, “was capable of many interpretations. The Reverend saw it as the work of a London professor, but the Reverend himself is the product of a proper English education, like Evering. He gave,” Duncan said, struggling for words, acutely aware that if pushed too far they would shut him out and decree their own solution, “the proper interpretation for a learned and moral man.” Arnold appeared confused for a moment, then offered an uncertain nod. “But what if the killer had not been blessed with such a refined education?” The ritual, he had begun to realize, hung over Arnold and Ramsey more heavily than the actual murder of Evering.

“You suggest the killer had already taken Evering’s life before performing the ghastly ritual?”