Bone Rattler (10 page)

Bone, buckle, eye, claw, feather, salt, heart. In his youth such an eye had appeared on a post in an island village, and even though his grandfather had named it as coming from a great shark, the villagers had abandoned their homes until a priest could be brought to purify the grounds. The devil’s eye, they had called it. Eye from a great beast, bones from small ones. They had been from several different small birds, some with tiny, disconnected vertebrae, even the fragile bones of the wings. The eye and the bones. A great god and his mortals.

He lifted Evering’s paper again, this time trying to create in his mind a dialogue with the scholar about his comet, like those Duncan had conducted with his medical professors in his prior life. Evering had been a man of science, and Duncan probably had more scientific training than any other man on board. The professor would open his journal and show the other pages of notes and maps; he would speak of the old records he had found that supported his predictions about the comet; he would—

Duncan suddenly closed his hand around the paper and grinned. It wasn’t the comet.
Heed how Evering explains his comet,
Adam had said.
The journal.
Adam would know Evering would inevitably show him the journal. And in the journal would lie other secrets. It wasn’t what the comet meant that mattered, but what was with the comet, the other pages inscribed during the past few weeks.

Food came twice a day, consisting each time of one of the small loaves, hard as planks, or a square of the worm-pocked ship’s biscuit, sometimes with a spoiled apple or scrap of salt pork. Duncan slept, warm and dry thanks to the blanket Lister had provided, futilely trying every few hours to engage Flora in conversation. The madwoman acknowledged him only with her unintelligible chants. “Take the skin you are,” she blurted out once, like a cry of pain, the only English words she had uttered since Duncan’s first hours in the cell. Her speech had become hollow and slow, sometimes slurred, as if she were distracted, even drunk, all proof that if she were not
already mad, she was quickly progressing to madness. Sometimes, without speaking, she thrust her arm out and flailed the air, clutching his fingertips when he responded with his own hand. Each time, they stayed locked in the strange intimacy for several minutes, listening to each other breathe, never seeing each other’s face. The few times Duncan tried to speak while holding her fingers she always withdrew. Flora had killed her child, and whether she had known before, Arnold had made it clear that she was going to a certain, agonizing death. Duncan recognized the symptoms even through the darkness. She had already started her dying, the gradual, agonizing way that Adam Munroe had died.

He was sleeping when they came for him again. Arnold left his cell door open as he walked back to the table in the entryway. As Duncan warily approached the table, Woolford appeared from the shadows. The officer absently gestured to a pewter plate at the edge of the table bearing slices of bread and mutton, his gaze locked on two letters in the center of the table. Duncan stared at the plate. He had eaten no fresh meat, no real bread, for months.

“There were more than twenty letters from the prisoners, several written by Evering over another’s name,” Arnold explained as Duncan stuffed a piece of meat into his mouth. “Mostly the ramblings of lonely men, asking for forgiveness, offering harmless lies to convince family not to worry. Some pleas to fund barristers for appeals. These two,” he said, pointing to the center of the table, “cannot be so easily dismissed.” He spread the open envelopes over the table. Evering had affixed wax seals to them, which had been opened by a clumsy trick, slicing away the seal with a hot blade, to be later closed with a larger dollop of hot wax over the original seal.

As Duncan stared at the papers, he recalled that he, too, had written a letter, addressed to his brother, cursing the king. He picked up the first and began to read. It was from the moody young keeper, Frasier, addressed to his aunt, the old maiden who had raised him when his family had been taken from him after Culloden. The letter spoke of an uneventful voyage, woven with bitter comments
about his arrest and trial.
I know the secret of why the English went all the way to Auld Reekie when there were wagonloads of prisoners to be had in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, and Argyll. We know what oozes out of Lothian barracks. We know how to treat the dog who stands over corpses. We know how to cut out the rot. Payment will be made before you lay out the Beltane fires.

“It could mean many things,” Duncan suggested as he read again the confusing words. What had the Company brought from Auld Reekie, the age-old nickname of Edinburgh, that they could not find in the western counties? And what was Frasier expecting from the army barracks near the eastern city? He read the words again with growing unease. In Highland lore a dog that stepped over a corpse had to be killed.

“It could mean this man from Glasgow intended to kill an Englishman,” Arnold declared. “He has free range of the ship as a keeper. Convicted of striking a tax collector. He speaks of a pagan ritual.”

“Many English children celebrate May Day,” Duncan countered.

“Not by laying out circles of fire and leaping through them,” Arnold shot back.

At the end of the letter was a postscript.
Before he was summoned by a witch, a man from Argyll traded these six buttons for a white deerskin pouch I found, stained with blood. Use them for one of the young nephews.
Inside the folded paper envelope were six familiar discs of wood.

Duncan stared at the page, not focusing on the words, then looked up at Woolford. “Why,” he asked the officer, “would Adam Munroe trade perfectly good buttons for a bloodstained pouch?”

Woolford frowned. “Let’s put to rest one troubled soul at a time, shall we?”

“You have not reclaimed your buttons,” Duncan pressed.

“It seemed miserly,” Woolford replied in a brittle tone, “to interfere with a gift to a child.”

The officer pushed the second letter across the table. “I keep reading it, trying to make sense of the words.”

It was from Cameron, the senior keeper who always showed the most enthusiasm when flogging his fellow prisoners—a four-page letter addressed to D. Camshron, care of a priest in Strontian. It began
Dear Doilidh,
and what followed was a rambling narrative of the voyage, boasting of riches to come in the New World, then speaking of Evering’s death.
We know why men get fetched in the night. The darker the secret a man hides, the quicker he kills.
Woolford pointed to the closing passage, which read like a cryptic verse.
Three times up for your new one, three times
deiseal
kirkside,
it said,
hot coal behind. Three times over flame, salt against sins. Three times over iron so the devils gnaw their own bones.

“He speaks of salt, of devils and bones,” Woolford observed. “Black arts. And Cameron was in the colonies before.”

Duncan read the words again and glanced at each man’s face. Each seemed to be nominating his own candidate for the noose. “Surely only a letter to a loved one.”

“You can’t know that.”

But Duncan did know, without a doubt. Lister was not the only one hiding something about his family.
Doilidh
was the Gaelic form of Dolly, just as the English translation for
Camshron
was Cameron. The words were about a newborn, but could only be understood by one from the Highlands.
Deiseal
meant sunwise in the old tongue—walking from east to west. A new mother on the first outing with her child was supposed to carry the baby up three steps to assure prosperity, then walk three times sunwise or clockwise around the
kirk,
the church, to avoid begin trapped by the spirits who craved newborns, tossing a hot coal behind to assure they were not following her. Passing the baby three times over flames was an old charm to protect a newborn, as was touching salt to a newborn’s mouth. And a secret, second baptism at the smithy’s forge, passing the infant over the iron anvil, was frowned on by the church but was a tradition steeped in time, from long before priests arrived in Scotland. It would deny the devils a chance to eat the newborn, making them chew their own bones instead. Cameron had left a pregnant
woman, a wife or perhaps a sister, and wanted to be sure the offspring was blessed in all the traditions of the Highlands.

Duncan eyed Woolford uncertainly. “I don’t know that,” he replied, then froze as terrible realization swept over him. He glanced at his companions again. Had they made the connection? Cameron spoke of a man fetched in the night. Frasier spoke of what the Company brought from Edinburgh. Arnold and Woolford had made but one trip to Edinburgh, to bring Duncan. And they had brought him onto the ship in the night.

“Nothing here explains what happened in the compass room,” he observed, fighting to keep his voice level.

“Evering himself made the ritual,” Arnold proclaimed. “He placed his own buckle there, stole into the gallery for salt and blood and the heart, even that horrible eye, which the cook says came from a shark they had boarded the day before. The claw must be from one of his own collections.”

“Why would he do such a thing?” Duncan asked.

“He was deranged. Delirious. His grief erupted anew. Perhaps he saw something that set off a powerful memory. He was sending a final message to his wife before he took his own life.”

“He was murdered. Not a suicide,” Woolford reminded Arnold.

“He planned to commit suicide, McCallum may take that as certain,” the vicar replied. “He was deeply troubled. I am unable to divulge the secrets of prayer, but suffice it to say we often knelt together. He must have gathered the objects in the compass room as one last expression of his anguish. Nothing more than the work of a highly literate man whose emotions overwhelmed his intellect. Bones means death. Two stacks of bones means two deaths. His and his wife’s. The buckle signifies himself, a token from his own person. The eye is the evil that had stared down at him since his wife’s passing. The claw symbolizes the agony he has felt, the feather his plan to join his wife in the ranks of angels. The heart is his own broken heart, the salt the earth that he is about to leave.” Arnold’s words, tentative at first, finished with a triumphant flourish.
“Evering,” the vicar concluded in a superior tone, “was a romantic. The ritual at the compass proved it.”

“Salt is also used to purify,” Duncan suggested. “And metal, even in a buckle, can be used to fight demons.”

Arnold gave an impatient, warning sound. “Not by any Christian.”

“The church I knew as a boy,” Duncan continued, “kept one foot in the old ways.”

“At last we get to the truth of it,” Arnold said in a smug voice. “I have explained why it had to be Evering who began the ritual. You have given us proof of the origin of the one who interrupted him. You shall record it so, McCallum. The killer committed his heinous deed, then rearranged the objects in a way that would have meaning only to an illiterate whose priests were little more than Druids.”

Duncan fought down the bile that rose with Arnold’s words. But he had to concede one germ of truth in what Arnold said, that the ritual seemed to have been prepared by two very different people, from two different worlds. “If it was not Evering who completed the ritual,” he pressed, watching Woolford carefully, “then perhaps that part not made by the professor was meant to be read by a mortal.”

“Meaning what?” asked the lieutenant.

“Meaning perhaps you will accept that it was a message for someone on board.”

Woolford buried his head in his hands. When he looked up, his jaw was set in grim determination, as if he were about to do battle. “Half,” he said. “Half the men.”

Duncan did not miss the way Arnold’s knuckles whitened. “I’m sorry?”

“You asked me how many had been in the New World before.”

“Half would seem more than coincidence. It would take some effort to find so many who had both fallen out with the law and been in America.”

“A credential much to be desired,” Arnold interjected. “We had several weeks to fill the Company ranks, time to be selective.
Experience in the colonies told us they were strong, that they would require little time to adjust to the rigors of their new life.”

Duncan had never known a man of the cloth who was an outright liar, but indeed had known many who chose to focus on pieces of the truth rather than the whole of it, when it served to make the point of their homilies. “The objects used that night,” he said. “I would like to see them. Perhaps a closer examination would—”

Woolford raised a hand to cut Duncan off. “The crew was terrified of them. Mr. Lister and I wrapped everything in a canvas weighted with rocks from the ballast and tossed it over the stern.”

Duncan stared at him in disbelief. “They would have told us more.” It was as if Woolford, too, was interested in only fragments of the truth.

Woolford stroked the long scar on his neck again. It seemed to have become a nervous habit, one Duncan had not noticed before the storm. “Your pipe,” he said abruptly, remembering now the clay pipe Woolford had often carried during the voyage. “You are no longer smoking. It affects your nerves.”

Woolford grimaced. “Someone stole my tobacco,” he admitted.

“And burnt it in the compass room,” Duncan concluded. “I have never heard of such a ritual in the Old World,” he added after a moment.

“There are other people,” the officer observed in a hesitant voice, “people who burn the leaf to attract spirits.”

“What kind of people?” Duncan pressed. “Who prays to spirits with tobacco?”

Arnold’s glance of warning was quick but obvious. Woolford looked away from the vicar, into the shadows. He seemed to struggle to get the words out. “The people of the forest.” Woolford’s haunted expression as he spoke toward the darkness caused Duncan to twist about to study the shadows. It seemed Woolford’s meaning was grasped first by something in his gut, turning it cold, sending an icy tentacle up his spine until it touched his brain. The savages. Woolford was speaking of the dreaded aborigines of the American woodlands.