Bone Rattler (6 page)

“About the Company recruitment. Why was Woolford at every court session? Saying that if the Company was just a scheme for pressing men into the army, he’d as soon stayed in jail. Quick as you can say Jack Pudding, the bastard was on the boy, throttling him. Took three of us to pull him away. Woolford was drunk. Sober as churches all voyage, and now he carries a flask.”

“Is it so, what Frasier said?”

“Near as we can tell. I spoke with the boy. He says he canvassed every man, and every one recalls Woolford in his courtroom, though most thought nothing of it, since the army sometimes recruits from the courts itself. Says that to the army, men like us be like lambs kept for mutton. He says,” Lister added hesitantly, “that English terriers are rightly sent to the kennels of the murderers.”

Duncan chilled as he heard the words. “There is only one of the Company sent to the cells,” he whispered. Adam had kept Duncan connected to the men of the Company, more than a few of whom spoke resentfully of Duncan’s English upbringing. “I had nothing to do with what happened.”

“He says favors ain’t granted for free.”

“Favors? Imprisonment in this rathole?”

“Frasier’s half sick with hate and fear. He’s been tossing salt in dark corners, speaking old words, words I ain’t heard since I was a wee bairn. Reverend Arnold is assembling the Company twice a day for readings of the Bible. He says the only thing they need fear when men take their own lives is too great a distance from God.

“That’s what they would have us think,” Lister continued after glancing out the door again. “A herd of weaklings already being culled out by the wilderness, that’s what Cameron says.” Lister looked up into Duncan’s eyes. “But ye and I know ’tweren’t weakness that killed Adam Munroe. That last night when he sat by the door, I fetched him a cup of tea. He looked so low, I thought he were building a fever. He stared into the steaming mug, not speaking for a long time, then suddenly he looks up and starts firing questions, waiting for nary an answer. Asked me if I had ever thought about what God looked like. Asked if I’d ever been married. Asked if the navy were as heartless as the army. Said he had done terrible wrongs to people without knowing it. I asked if he had gotten into some rum.

“He said the Company would be used to set the price for changing the world. A tear rolled down his cheek, and he said his friend Duncan was about to fall into a black pit. He said the army was going to chew you up and spit out your bones.”

Duncan drew in a shuddering breath. “I’ve nothing to do with the army.”

“Perhaps,” Lister suggested, “if we were to believe young Frasier, we all have something to do with it.”

Duncan drank from the crock again. “It’s because of what Adam said that you came up the mast for me.”

“Cameron always gives me the late watch, in the small hours. Mostly I sit at the hatch, thinking about those inside, listening to their songs and the things they cry out in their sleep. All I knew was that I’m weary of seeing what happens to the fresh blood of the clans.”

“The bruise on your face, Mr. Lister, how did you come by it?”

“It be nothing, an accident.”

“No. Someone hit you.”

The old sailor went silent for a long moment. “The day after Adam died, I asked about him, asked Cameron. He struck me with nary a word. Then told me to keep me nose pointed straight ahead.”

“What exactly did you ask about Adam?”

“Who brought him on board. Did Adam come with Evering.”

“But Adam was just another prisoner.”

Lister pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, a remnant from a news journal, folded very small, compressed as if it had been flattened by an iron. “This was in Evering’s cabin, pushed into a crack in a beam. It’s from a paper in Argyll, where Adam came from. And ye remember how Adam carried things, paper things, small things?”

“In his shoe,” Duncan recalled as he accepted the paper. “Folded into his shoe.” Duncan had once thought Adam kept papers there for warmth, like some of the other men. But then Duncan had seen him reading them, when Adam thought himself alone. Duncan bent to the light and instantly his breath caught. It was an account of the trial of Duncan and his uncle. “Why would Adam have . . . ?” he muttered when he could speak again. “Why give it to Evering?” But he knew neither he nor Lister had answers, only more questions.

Lister pulled another slip of paper from inside his shirt. “And there was this, inside Evering’s waistcoat when I was helping clean the body.”

Duncan took the slip as Lister pushed the lantern closer.
McCallum,
it said,
6 bells first watch.
He looked up at Lister. “He wanted to meet me before dawn. It must have been for the next day, a message to give me at the morning slops.” But Lister’s pointed gaze meant the keeper understood the conclusion everyone else would reach, that Evering had met Duncan the day he died, at the likely hour he had died.

Lister pulled the slip away from Duncan. “Can’t have this on y’er person, lad,” he warned. As he turned to leave, Duncan touched his shoulder.

“What you said on the mast, about the McCallum clan chief.”

“About ye, lad.”

“No. That’s what I mean. I know you meant well. But I was wrong to pretend about such a solemn thing. I am no clan chief. I can never be. You spoke of all those who came before. I can do them no honor.”

“What would be wrong, lad, would be to pretend their world still exists. There be the rub of it.”

“The rub?”

“Ye’ll never have their world. But ye’ll always have their name.”

The words hung in the air a long time.

“Sometimes, at the edge of sleep,” the old mate said as he turned to the door, “I hear pipes and smell the heather. I used to help me father bring the long-haired cattle from the hills.” Lister’s voice suddenly grew hoarse. “He would raise me onto the back of a shaggy cow and walk beside me singing.”

For a moment Duncan’s heart rose so far up in his throat he could not speak. “In prison,” he said at last, “they left me in a solitary stone cell without light, for nearly two months. I thought I would lose my mind. I survived by picking a day of my youth and reconstructing what I might have done, for every hour of it, from the moment my mother roused me from the blankets. Festival days. Days with my grandfather. Sometimes it’s summer, with a blue sky and a fair wind, and I am sailing, with seals all around.” He put his hand on Lister’s arm.

Lister stayed, and they sat on the cell floor, the lantern between them like some dim Highland campfire, as they spoke of the life each had known. Duncan told stories he had not put into words for years, and Lister’s grizzled face broke into a grin as he spoke of long-dead aunts who danced with him as a boy, of drinking
athole brose,
the Highland drink of whiskey mixed with honey, oatmeal, and cream, on festival days. Duncan’s own stories leapt off his tongue without forethought—of bonfires on St. John’s Eve kept lit all night to ensure fertile crops, of helping his grandfather sprinkle whiskey over fishing boats before they first embarked in the spring, of tying juniper sprigs to the cattle tails, of the island women lined up around lengths of tweed, singing their waulking songs as they pounded and stretched the cloth, and of two score other memories of the lost Highland ways. An hour passed, and though Duncan could not name why, he felt more at peace than he had since his arrest months earlier. Lister felt it, too, Duncan knew, for the old keeper’s voice grew lighter, even gleeful, until sitting in the shadow,
Duncan was hearing the boy who had romped in the heathered hills half a century earlier.

“
Tapahd leat
,” the keeper whispered when he finally rose. Thank you.

As Lister pushed the door shut, Duncan leaned into the little open hatch. “You did not name him,” he said to the retreating figure. “The one who revived me when I was hauled on deck.”

“The devil hisself,” Lister replied. “Redshanks. But for him and Arnold, the captain would have put a knife in y’er gills and tossed ye back to the sea.”

Duncan watched through the hatch as Lister closed the outer door.
She lived.
The mysterious woman in the white gown was safe, he told himself with an unexpected exhilaration. Not for an instant had he considered that he might have been successful. He had saved her, and she was no prisoner but the sick, secret passenger—the banshee, the princess, the angel—who had stayed in the forward cabins with Arnold and Woolford. And Evering.

He pulled the black stone carving from his pocket. Adam had wanted the others, especially Woolford, to believe the stone had gone into the sea with him. Duncan turned it over and over in his fingers, trying to understand why it could be so important. With an abrupt, uninvited realization, he knew the shape was of a bear, a fat, fecund bear. A she-bear.
She is done with me,
Adam had said.
’Tis you she needs now.
Surely it was not possible that Adam had died for the bear, just to mislead Woolford and Arnold into thinking it destroyed. He unfolded the linen bandage and lay the stone on it, beside the silver button, staring at them in the dim light. Old World and New. Flotsam of the deadly tide surging through the Company.

Hours later, after more fitful sleep, the haunting words came again, in the strange singsong tongue that had made his flesh crawl, the soft liquid cadences filled with
S
’s and
Q
’s. Without conscious thought, he raised the stone to his ear to see if it was the bear speaking, then, shamed, shoved it back into his pocket.

“Be still, you witch!” came a shout from the end of the corridor.
Duncan bent to the hatch door, strangely relieved. Someone else heard the voice.

As if in defiance, the words grew louder, the syllables more distinct, though still unintelligible.
“Haudenosaunee! Haudenosaunee!”
At last, as the volume rose above a whisper, he realized they were coming from the madwoman in the next cell. More curses rose from the end of the corridor. She was frightening her fellow murderers.

He listened at the small square hatch a long time, until the voice descended to a whisper and fell away.

“Do you know where you are bound?” he asked the woman abruptly, feeling a sudden urge to distract her, to comfort her. “Jamaica? The ship stops in New York first. Surely they will let you out on deck there, to breathe fresh air.” He alternately placed his mouth, then his eye to the small hole. “The Ramsey Company disembarks in New York. But the captain needs to deliver you healthy. He will let you exercise when we . . . .” His voice drifted off as he realized that for all he knew he, too, could be bound for the deadly tropical plantations or, even more likely, might never leave the ship except over the rail with a rock at his feet. His life was in the hands of Reverend Arnold, a man he despised, a man who had shown only contempt toward Duncan.

“I have a brother in the New York colony,” he said after a long silence. “I have read in the journals about the beautiful mountains and lakes there, with wild beasts unknown back home. I had a plan once, I wrote him about it last year,” Duncan continued, louder now. “I said when he leaves the army we could build a farm together, on a hill by a lake. We’ll have cows and sheep. My mother always loved the sheep. When I was a boy she would keep the orphaned lambs in the house.” Duncan realized he was speaking in a tight, boyish voice. It felt somehow as if he were asking for forgiveness, not knowing why he spoke the lie, why he pretended to her that he would be free to find his brother. “My brother’s in the war . . . .” A slender arm, naked and pale, appeared from the next cell, slowly moving up and down as if it were exploring the shadows. His brother Jamie had been raised as
an Englishman in the lowlands, and before he had come of age, the second cousins who had raised him, lying about his birth date, had rid themselves of him by purchasing a commission in the king’s army, which assured he would never go back to his Highland ways. Now Duncan’s plan about a farm had become one more forlorn dream, and his brother’s army, Adam had vowed, was going to destroy Duncan. The army that, Frasier insisted, had some secret connection to the Company. Adam’s note had said that whatever the Company declared it was going to do in the New World, it intended the opposite. Duncan had often heard Arnold state the purpose of the Company. To spread goodness and virtue, to make the new land like a peaceful, orderly England.

Suddenly, without thinking, Duncan extended his own arm through the small hatch, reaching toward the next cell, his arm filling the opening so that he was unable to see where the woman’s arm was. He brushed her hand, then stretched out his fingers. Her hand found his and they touched, their fingertips overlapping. There was too much distance between them to grip each other’s palm, but they entwined the ends of their fingers.

“My name is Duncan,” he offered. Her fingers were soft, not those of a woman accustomed to labor. Women of wealth, he reminded himself, could also kill their children. Indeed, without wealth such a woman would likely have been hanged in her own town square.

She spoke a few words in her strange language, then squeezed his fingers and fell silent. Asian. He had never heard the Oriental tongues, but knew they were quick and filled with singsong rhythms. She must have been raised in one of the Asian colonies and was relapsing to another, happier time of her life. It was, he well knew, one of the ways despair played with the human spirit.

“How may I call you?” he asked. The woman’s only reply was the sound of a choked laugh. “You are Flora, then,” he declared.

She did not reply, but did not pull away.

“She would sing to them, Flora,” he whispered, an unexpected aching in his heart. “My mother. She would hold the orphaned
lambs and sing to them in the middle of the night, when she thought everyone asleep. I would stay awake and steal to the kitchen door just to listen. She never knew I was there. I think the songs had as much to do with those babies staying alive as the milk she fed them.”