Bone Rattler (3 page)

“I’m asking y’er help now, as he did,” Lister said, urgency now in his voice.

“Three weeks later they came for him, claiming he was a reiver,” Duncan continued, referring to the highwaymen of the Scottish borderlands. “I was arrested for aiding him, sentenced in the name of the king to seven years’ imprisonment. After four months they dragged me out of that moldy hole, more dead than alive. Threw me before a judge who said the king had decided to be merciful, that I would instead do seven year’s hard labor in the colonies. Transportation, the judge called it,” he added bitterly. “A pilgrimage, in order to reflect on my sins.” He looked back into the keeper’s weathered face. “I had a new life, and now I have none.” Duncan knew he would never be a doctor now, never fulfill his secret dream of becoming wealthy enough to buy back his family’s Highland lands. Adam had seen something in Duncan’s path that Duncan was blind to. There would be no freedom after seven years’ labor. They were going to use him, then kill him. Adam, too, had somehow been used and killed. Despair seized Duncan again, a cold vise on his heart. “There is a letter in my hammock, Mr. Lister. Perhaps you could get it to my brother in New York.” Duncan had spent much of the night before in writing the letter as the other prisoners slept, to his brother who had likewise been forced to leave the ways of the clans behind.
The English king,
he had written at the closing,
has wreaked its final vengeance on our family.

“God knows I’m sorry, lad. But there be many good men on this ship who once wore the thistle,” Lister declared, invoking the ancient symbol of Scotland. “They, too, will die without your help. And the ones in the ratholes,” he said. Duncan cringed at the mention of the locked cells in the rear hold of the prison deck, reserved for the most violent of the transported prisoners, murderers all, separately bound under the king’s warrant for the deadly sugar plantations of the West Indies. “Every last one taken from the courts in Glasgow, condemned by English judges,” Lister continued. “I know this ship. The foretopmast is weakened, and she’ll snap like a twig when the gale blows. ’Tis likely she’ll stove in a hold cover when she falls, and the hull will slowly fill. Those in the cells will die first, drowned in their locked boxes.
Redeat,”
he uttered after a moment. It had started long ago as a Jacobite oath,
May He Return,
for the return of the Scottish Stewart prince. But it had become something of a prayer for all Highlanders, an invocation, as it were, of the Scottish gods. “The Ramsey Company will die without a chance to prove itself,” he added, referring to the great lord named Ramsey, to whom all the prisoners outside the cells were bound. A community of troubled souls—as Reverend Arnold, the Anglican pastor who escorted them, called the Company—on its way to redeem itself in a New World paradise.

A furious voice thundered from below. An officer was chasing two sailors as they ran with an elegant chair out of the cabins. “What possesses them?” Duncan asked as the sailors dumped the chair over the rail and another man appeared, throwing bottles of brandy over the side, uttering a fearful prayer with each toss. They were making offerings to the sea.

“The devil awoke this morn. Ye must put an end to it.”

Duncan swallowed the question that leapt to his tongue. How could he possibly stop the madness below? “Whatever inside me had been capable of helping other souls,” he answered in a bitter voice, “drained out onto my prison floor.” He could see lightning now, long, jagged bolts rending the horizon. Adam’s face still lingered at the edge of his consciousness, as if calling Duncan to join him.

“Why today, lad?”

“We’re due in port soon. I’ll be given no chance to break free again. A member of the Company has but one way to express his freedom. My clan will not end in slavery.”

“’Tis but seven years, McCallum. Don’t be so prideful. Y’er still young.”

Duncan’s gaze drifted back toward the wind-whipped waves. “Are you suggesting, Mr. Lister, that for people like you and me long lives are worth the living?”

It was Lister’s turn to grow silent and turn his gaze toward the sea. “Y’er great-uncle?” he asked after a long moment.

“They dragged me from my prison to make certain I was a witness. From the gallows they pronounced him an unrepentant traitor. He danced a jig, then spat as the hangman lowered the noose.”

“Y’er brother. Older?”

“A year younger.”

The announcement seemed to stir something in Lister. His eyes grew wide with a sudden, intense curiosity. He studied Duncan as if for the first time, a strange fire kindling in his eyes, then grimaced as though unhappy with what he saw. “Look at ye then,” he growled, “is this how ye treat all those who go before?”

It was impossible, but the chastising voice Duncan heard was that of his grandfather, as was the disapproving cast in the old sailor’s eyes. Duncan sensed something twitching inside him, and he grew very still, no longer aware of the storm. Lister had opened another long-barred chamber in Duncan’s mind, a chamber of nightmares in which the rotting corpse of his father pointed at him from the gibbet, accusing him of forsaking the clan to become an Englishman.

“Have ye forgotten what it means to be the eldest?”

“I didn’t . . . I couldn’t . . . ,” Duncan muttered after a moment, in a voice cracking with a new emotion. There was another chamber, often visited by Duncan, that held memories of long days spent with his grandfather, watching with awe as the fiery old Scot performed the duties of clan elder, protecting the innocent, filling
the larders of the impoverished, dispensing rough justice among the tenants of the far-flung islands traditionally bound to their clan, even saving the drowning, for his grandfather had been the best swimmer in the isles. “My clan is extinguished.”

“As long as ye and y’er brother breathe, there be a clan.”

He gazed at Lister in wonder. During all the days of his torment since his arrest, the thought had never occurred to him. His uncle’s executioners had made Duncan clan chieftain.

“God’s eyes, McCallum!” Lister spat. “Ye must forget y’er own misery! Ye are blood-bound to y’er clan, living and dead, to all them who wear the thistle. Death stalks this ship, and if any survive, ’tis Scots who will be blamed. What will a clan chief do about it?”

Duncan looked from Lister to the gale, now nearly upon them. He could find no reply.

“What if it be true,” Lister pressed, “what Reverend Arnold said not a quarter hour ago, that ye may be the one who could save the ship?”

“Arnold?” Arnold was the one who had snatched him from court, who had committed him to the prison ship. “I owe him nothing.”

“Then what if it be true, that the professor needs y’er help?”

Duncan twisted his head toward the old sailor. “Evering?”

“That last night as he sat by the hatch, Adam told me to say to you that Evering found the key to save us all but knows not how to use it. He said to help McCallum protect the professor.”

Duncan looked back at the waves, not wanting to betray his surprise, to acknowledge the sudden ripple of hope in his sea of despair.

“He said to heed how Evering explains his comet,” Lister added in a perplexed tone. “Save us all,” he repeated. “As if we all be going to die elsewise.”

Duncan gripped a rope and leaned out, as if the wind might clear his mind. The storm still called him, but in a corner of his brain something was recounting ways he might reach Evering hiding in the holds below. No, it was impossible to descend without being snatched by the other keepers.

“My grandmother was a McCallum, came from y’er islands,”
Lister ventured when Duncan did not reply. “My own clan is shattered, lad, ashes lost to the winds. Long ago we came from those same islands.” The old mate’s voice cracked as he spoke.

“What are you saying?”

With a strange contemplation in his eyes, Lister ran his fingertips over Adam’s scratchings on the wood, then fixed Duncan with a solemn gaze. “I petition for protection, Clan McCallum,” he said in a slow, deliberate voice, using one of the old ways of addressing a clan chief. “I swear me blood to ye.”

Duncan felt a bitter grin tug at his mouth. “You pledge yourself to a condemned convict? This is playacting, Mr. Lister. I am nobody. Less than nobody.” Duncan was but a thin shadow of his grandfather. But his grin froze as he saw the earnest, hurt expression on Lister’s countenance. It was an ancient tradition, that Highlanders who shared blood ties with a clan could offer their loyalty in exchange for its protection.

“I swear it to the laird of the McCallum clan.”

Duncan stared numbly as Lister spat into his hand and extended it toward him.

“As God is my vow,” the old sailor solemnly declared.

“People want me dead,” Duncan said. “And I don’t even know why.”

“In the place of our birth, lad, that be a badge of honor. ’Tis my experience that the best of the clan chiefs be tougher than a shaggy ox to put down, and when they finally die, they do so on their own terms. It’s easy for a king’s convict to die. But a clan chief is duty-bound to stay alive, just to spite him.”

At home there had always been a grand ceremony when a chief was installed, with pipes and sword dancing and, in the tradition of his own clan, the beating of the earth beside the new chieftain with knotted ropes to drive out the demons, then the presentation of a bundle of dried thistles. But in a world where pipes and tartans were outlawed, traditions were thin.

Duncan let Lister’s callused hand close around his own, then returned the grip uncertainly as the sailor squeezed. As he did so the
wind rose again, shifting, pushing the ship about so that for a moment it rode before a steep, following sea.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” the old mate moaned, and grabbed the mast as tightly as a landsman.

As Duncan followed Lister’s gaze, something frigid clutched his spine. A man was suspended in the wall of water behind the vessel, his pale face fixed on the ship, his arm gesturing as if beckoning the crew to join him. It was what had terrified the two sailors who had followed the lost sail.
It’s too late,
one had cried,
they’ve come for us.

“The dead shall rise up,” Lister said in a haunted tone. For the first time real fear entered the keeper’s voice.

Duncan did not will himself to move, only seemed to watch as his body leapt to the side of the platform, grabbed a line, and quickly climbed down.

“Prisoner!” a keeper shouted as he bounded toward Duncan. An arm hooked around his neck. Another man slammed an elbow into Duncan’s side, trying to knock him down. Duncan twisted free, running for the port rail.

“’Tis McCallum! Leave him!” Lister called out behind him as a young sailor leapt onto Duncan and began wrestling him to the deck.

“He isn’t following!” Duncan shouted, pointing to the rail. “He’s being dragged!” The sailor released him with an uncertain look, then helped Duncan untie the tangle of knots lashing a barrel to the rail. Duncan pointed to a rope tied at the base of the rail behind the barrel, chafing the wood where it hung over the side.

“A lifeline!” the sailor gasped as they pushed the barrel aside, and began hauling the rope with Duncan.

Lister appeared at his side and joined in the task. “What good’s a lifeline,” the keeper muttered, “if no one be there to see ye tumble o’er the rail? ’Tis an accident, nothing more,” he added as if to assure the gathering men. But when they heaved the grisly thing onto the deck, even Lister shuddered and stepped back with a moan. The rope was not fastened around the man’s waist. It was tied around his neck.

“Professor Evering!” the young sailor gasped, clutching his belly as he retched over the rail.

Duncan’s heart lurched. He forced himself to look at the bloodless face, its empty brown eyes gazing up in surprise. It was indeed the kindly middle-aged professor who traveled with them to join the Ramsey family as private tutor; it was Evering, who had found the key that might save Duncan from those who would kill him.

“The rope,” Duncan observed in a hoarse whisper. “His arm was tangled in the rope. It’s why he appeared to be waving for us.”

“It be the work of man, not demons,” Lister declared to the terrified sailors, who gave no sign of hearing. He grimaced, then pulled Duncan away toward the hatch in front of the helm. “The captain,” he said with foreboding.

A moment later they were in the chamber that the sailors called the compass room, where, amid crates painted with the name of the Ramsey Company, the ship’s carpenter had raised a stanchion for the elegant compass that Lord Ramsey had ordered from a London craftsman, set out for final calibration during the voyage. Lister pushed Duncan toward a circle of grim men that included the bearded captain with his first mate; Reverend Arnold, the stern Anglican who regularly prayed over the Ramsey Company; and Lieutenant Woolford, the army officer taking passage to New York with them. Behind, in the shadows, several sailors lurked, some watching the captain and his companions with wild eyes, one kneeling, frantically praying as tears flooded his cheeks.

Lister leaned into the captain’s ear for a moment.

“Your damned fool scholar!” the captain snapped to Arnold, then spun about to face Duncan. “Was Evering’s chest split open?”

Duncan stared at him in mute confusion.

“Is it so difficult to tell if a man’s lost his heart?” the captain demanded. “Speak up, damned your eyes!”

“His body appeared intact,” Duncan stammered, scanning the faces of the others in vain for some explanation.

The captain spat a curse, dispatched his mate to the deck, then
abruptly grabbed Duncan’s shirt and pulled him into the circle. “There! Tell me, you wretch! Is it a man’s?” The captain’s voice was full of anger, but the fear in his eyes was unmistakable as he pointed toward the compass.

“I don’t understand what—” The words choked in Duncan’s mouth as he saw the instrument. It was covered in blood. On the floor below, arranged in a small circle, were the feather of a large bird, two stacks of small bones, a huge black claw, a metal buckle, a two-inch-wide yellow eye, and, resting on a pile of salt, a large, bloody heart. At the edge of the circle, opposite the stanchion, was a small brazier, the kind the cook sometimes used, which held the smoldering remains of a twist of tobacco. Above the gruesome circle, hanging on one of the brass swivel pins, was a colorful medallion on a leather strap, a medallion Duncan had often seen hanging inside Adam Munroe’s shirt.