Bone Rattler (11 page)

No one spoke for a long moment.

“So tobacco was burned to gain the attention of Mrs. Evering in the next world,” Duncan suggested in a careful tone, feeling Arnold’s withering glance.

“Most of the men partake of tobacco when they can,” Arnold interjected. “One of them stole it from the lieutenant, who was well known for having fine twists of Virginia leaf.” He paused, taking note, as Duncan already had, of the sudden melancholy that had overtaken Woolford. “Evering brought the brazier for warmth. The tobacco fell as the murderer struggled with him.”

“I must see the professor’s quarters,” Duncan finally stated. He dared not openly express interest in Evering’s journal.

“The captain gave his orders,” Arnold said. “You’ll not be leaving the cell deck.”

“I must see the other letters at least.”

“Equally impossible,” Arnold said. “You will not be permitted to tamper with the royal mails.”

Duncan gazed at the letters in front of him. “Then surely you will return these to the mails.”

“They have become evidence.”

“There is but one killer. Even were it one of these men, the other is innocent.” He searched Arnold’s unyielding face. “Bring me paper and ink. I shall transcribe them. You can witness them as true copies. Surely,” he entreated, “we will not punish the innocent. When will word reach their loved ones again? A child needs his buttons.”

Arnold cast a disappointed glance at Duncan. “Innocent, Mr. McCallum?” he asked, as if unfamiliar with the term.

Woolford rose. “I shall make it so,” the officer said, and hurried up the ladder.

Arnold paced around the table. “Paper and ink will provide an opportunity to commence your report,” he observed. “Lord Ramsey is fastidious about records. He will desire a quick conclusion, but a complete written account. Flavor it with your science. The army will soon know of a killing in the Company,” he added, with a
glance toward the gangway where Woolford had disappeared. “Lord Ramsey will not desire a military inquiry to be opened.”

“It could be useful to one writing such a report, Reverend,” Duncan pointed out, “to know why the military would be interested.”

Arnold considered the question for a long moment. “The Ramsey Company and the army share many of the same goals, but we are oceans apart in how to achieve them.” The vicar gazed toward the cells. “Your report. It shall point out the sins committed along the way, with the truth shining like the light of the Almighty at its conclusion.”

“You make it sound as if I am writing a sermon,” Duncan replied. “And you forget I have been locked in a cell,” he added.

“Your isolation but heightens your objectivity. You will record a simple and tragic tale. Evering was possessed by the demon of grief, compelling him to the unnatural act in the compass room. His lapse of faith gave the killer an opportunity. Amen.”

Arnold was indeed interested in a sermon. “Perhaps,” Duncan suggested with a solemn air, “there should be lightning. Evering could have been struck by a bolt that burned away his reason.”

“Excellent,” Arnold said, in the voice he used in the pulpit. “Poetic. A call from God. Worthy of the Ramsey scholar. You encourage me, McCallum.”

“Then a mermaid rose up and killed him.”

Arnold sighed, then answered by pushing open the door to the cell corridor. The smell of unwashed men and women, of mildew and human excrement, wafted into their chamber, mingled with the sound of weeping. The vicar paused, as if for effect, then approached the table again. “The killer will hang, whatever reason for the crime. Perhaps one of them stole something of value from Evering. His gold watch is missing. Linking the killing to a robbery would offer a strong moral lesson,” he suggested. “The Company will witness the punishment after we arrive at Edentown. A perfect ceremony for setting the proper tone of the prisoners’ new life. The path of righteousness,” he added in a suddenly contemplative tone,
“can be as slender as a thread. Do your work correctly, and there will be no need to raise the specter of sedition.”

Suddenly Woolford was back in the pool of light cast by the lanterns, with a writing box holding paper, ink, and a quill. As Duncan arranged them on the table, Arnold climbed back up the ladder. Woolford paused at the dark corridor of cells, then ascended the ladder, leaving Duncan alone, staring at the white empty paper. He paced about the table, considering the threat against Scots in Arnold’s parting words, fighting to dam up the unnatural fear that had surged through him when Woolford had mentioned the savages of the forest. British papers frequently reported on the cannibalism, the compulsive violence, the unquenchable blood thirst of the American natives. Animals in human form, they were often called.

When he finally lifted the quill, Duncan did not begin with the transcription of the letters, but with a list of names, sixteen names in a column, including his great-uncle, his father, and his grandfather. The name of every chieftain of Clan McCallum for the past four hundred years, names that had been burned into his memory as a young boy, an unbroken chain of names he and his grandfather had often shouted into the wind as they had sailed and rowed among the Hebrides. Angus McCallum, was the earliest, then Ian McCallum, Lame Rob, Alastair, Crooked James, and Blind William. When he was done he ripped away the long column and wrapped the paper strip around Adam’s amulet, close against his skin; then he pulled the silver button from his pocket, examining it for the first time in direct light. It was intricately worked on the top, and though its dome had been smashed inward, the violence had not obliterated what was obviously, as Lister had reported, a map. The surface of the button had held a tiny rendering in relief of eastern America and Europe, exquisitely worked in silver.

The ship’s beams creaked in the silence, and the table slightly canted as the vessel heeled in the wind. Duncan glanced toward the ladder and paused as something pawed at his memory. Woolford. Duncan had grown accustomed to the sounds made as those leaving
the cell deck climbed toward the top decks, the creaking of certain ladder boards, the progressive opening and closing of hatches. Woolford’s egress had not been followed by the same sounds. Duncan rose and warily approached the ladder.

He climbed one step at a time, pausing at each to listen, finally gaining the next deck, a series of cargo holds packed with crates, barrels, and trunks. His heart pounding, knowing if he were caught he would pay with skin and flesh, he pushed on the hatch door leading to the first bay. The door swung open on its iron pintels without a sound.

The second bay was separated from the first not with a door but with a hanging sailcloth, which he silently brushed aside. Thirty feet in front of him, Woolford moved along the stacks of crates and trunks with a hooded lantern, in his hand one of the iron bars used to pry up the lids. As Duncan watched, the officer paused, drank from a flask he pulled from a pocket, then opened a crate and began sifting through the contents.

Duncan inched forward, suddenly desperate to see at least the label on the crate, watching for variations in the blackness that might mean a hiding place. He had found it, a gap between two crates, when a quick, furry creature leapt onto his shoulder. The rat’s transit across his back was silent, but not the creature’s jump onto a stack of kegs, where it slipped, its claws scratching at the wood as it sought purchase on the round sides.

Woolford spun about, lantern in one hand, iron bar in the other, raised for throwing. “At this distance I can put this into your spleen before you make it to cover,” he declared in a low, lethal voice.

“As a military art, I thought spear throwing went out with the Crusades.” Duncan fought to keep his voice level.

“You’d be quite astonished at the arts of the modern American officer,” Woolford growled, and lifted the pointed bar higher.

“I prefer you do it, here and now, Lieutenant, if you will not permit me to find the truth about the killings.”

“Killing. There was but one murder.”

“That’s your dilemma, Lieutenant. You and I both know I cannot find the truth about Evering without finding the truth about Adam Munroe. You might have an interest in Evering’s killer, but you cannot abide anyone knowing your secret about Adam.”

“Do you have any notion what the captain is going to do to you?”

Duncan did not doubt Woolford was capable of killing him. But it was time to test Adam’s words. Before the army used him it was going to protect him. He advanced, his hands held out at his sides. “We can stand here for half an hour, Lieutenant,” he said when the pool of light reached his face, “as you recount all the ways you and the captain can end my life in unimaginable misery. I’ll consider the point taken, provided you accept that when you take me before the captain and Reverend Arnold I will raise a dozen possibilities as to why you were creeping about searching boxes”—he glanced at the now-visible label—“holding the private belongings of the Ramsey family.”

Woolford lowered his makeshift weapon. “Inventory,” he muttered. “With so many thieves on board, we must watch every possession.”

“Fine. Let us go explain that. If you prefer I will go alone.”

“And receive a few dozen lashes for leaving the cell deck?”

“I will savor every stroke if your true colors be exposed.”

“Are all Scots as self-destructive, McCallum, as you and Munroe?”

“Consider it a study in what men do when the king lances the bubble of their hope.”

Woolford looked as if he had bitten into something sour. He leaned on a crate, setting the lantern beside him. “My preference in playing to a stalemate is to sweep the board and start anew. Shall we inspect the work that precedes us?” he said, aiming a thumb at a nearby trunk. The lock, Duncan saw, had already been forced, as had those of several others nearby, all bearing an ornate
R
, the Ramsey mark.

“What did you do to Adam last week?”

“I deeply regret to say I did nothing.”

“What is so important about the Ramsey tutor to you, just a soldier with no ties to the Company?”

Woolford ignored the question, probed the contents of the trunk before him.

“Then why,” Duncan pressed, “did Adam Munroe consider it such a catastrophe that we are going to the New York frontier?”

Woolford paused, stared into the shadows of the trunk. He seemed strangely wounded by the question. “The wilderness works in many different ways on men’s souls.”

“Many different kinds of fear, you mean.”

Wooford slowly lifted his head, fixing Duncan with a sober stare. “You have no notion, McCallum, how right you are.”

Duncan leaned forward to glimpse inside the trunk. With a chill he recognized the contents. Long bags of canvas, with laces at the top. The ever-efficient managers of the Ramsey Company had packed an entire trunk of burial shrouds.

“A ghostwalker,” Duncan said as he gazed at the shrouds. “Does it mean one fixed on suicide?”

Woolford gripped the iron bar in both hands. “Not a word easily explained.” His tone turned oddly melancholy. “The opposite of suicide perhaps. In America the dead can walk again.”

“You took custody of Adam in the courts. You knew his record. Why did he kill himself?”

Woolford stared at the bar, twisting his hands, twisting his face, speaking toward the shadows. “Adam Munroe was the only one who was not arrested. He told Arnold that if he needed to be arrested to join the Company, he would gladly assault me and every soldier in Argyll.”

“Impossible. He would not willingly give himself to slavery.”

“I suspect you and I did not know him as well as we thought.”

Duncan saw something in Woolford’s eyes that frightened him, and for a moment the officer gripped the bar like a weapon again, but then he exhaled heavily, tossed it into the darkness, and moved down the line of forced trunks. Duncan followed a step behind. The first three contained fine clothes, which appeared disheveled but undamaged. The next, marked
Hand Implements,
held a top layer of blankets. But under the blankets at the top were at least two score
bayonets, of a style for plugging into the barrels of heavy muskets, then hand axes and heavy knives nearly the size of swords. The next trunk held heavy woolen waistcoats, red with long sleeves—some with blue facing, others with buff. Though tattered from long use, they would still have had years of service left in them had not someone poured tar over them, soaking through the fabric.

“You brought these from a barracks?” Duncan asked.

“Not I. But all were made under the king’s warrant. They were uniform coats, made for the army.

“But none is new.”

“I daresay most are twenty years old and more. Quartermasters sometimes sell old equipment to pay for new. I know of a theater in Chelsea,” Woolford observed, “that regularly buys trunks of it, for playacting.” He paused and with a rueful grin tipped back his flask again. “My father’s country estate had a huge courtyard. He called it his Roman amphitheater. We held plays there, great pageants where we praised kings and celebrated the ascendancy of England as the queen of civilization.”

A second son, Duncan realized. Woolford had an aristocratic father and only a junior post. It could only mean he was unable to inherit. Woolford’s voice grew distant. “‘This sceptered isle, this precious stone set in the silver sea,’” he offered, irony thick in his words. “Shakespeare was my favorite. ‘Conscience,’” he recited, now in a stage voice, “‘is but a word that cowards use to keep the strong in awe.’”

“‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,’” Duncan countered. “‘He died as one that had been studied in his death. To throw away the dearest thing he owned.’”

“MacBeth.”

“A Scottish king, on a Scottish death. Why did Adam insist on being on this ship?” Duncan pressed. “What did you do to drive him to his death?”

Woolford stared at his engraved flask a moment, then raised it with a salute to Duncan and drained it. “‘Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot that it do singe yourself,’” he offered. He closed the
trunk and then silently gestured Duncan forward, into the shadows. They walked past another canvas partition until they reached the thick, curving planks of the hull, where the sound of the coursing sea was unusually loud through the wood.