Bone Rattler (9 page)

Duncan lifted the dead man’s head again, probing, and discovered a soft spot behind the left ear where there should have been hard bone. “Someone hit him from behind,” he explained, pointing to the discolored, split tissue under the hair. “There is bruising, so it was done before death. The blood that would have clotted in the hair should have made it obvious, but the sea washed it away. It is a circle, nearly an inch wide. This was the end of a pole or spike. Perhaps the butt of a pistol. A hammer even,” he added.

“He was preparing for his suicide,” Arnold pressed, “planning to throw himself overboard after tying the rope to the rail, when a roll of the vessel knocked him backward, hitting his head so that he died before finishing his task. The top of a belaying pin could have made such a mark. He fell against the barrels and was hidden until that huge wave washed him over.”

Duncan probed further, pushing back the professor’s long hair, and paused again. “There’s another,” he said, and pointed to a second discolored circle, above the ear on the opposite side of the
head. “He fell from the first blow, probably to his knees, and was finished with a second blow. This was no accident.”

Arnold’s face seemed to sag, then he turned toward the dead man. “Evering,” he declared in a mournful whisper, then stepped closer. “When Jehovah calls, not even the noblest of mortals may resist,” he added, his voice cracking. “God wills it so.”

They stood in silence, gazing upon the dead man as if at a wake. In Duncan’s youth, a man’s friends would have kissed his bloodless face.

“He never spoke with the sailors,” Woolford finally said in a slow, studied voice. “He acted as if the crew were invisible.”

Arnold began a whispered prayer, his palm now on Evering’s head.

“But he would often read to the prisoners,” Woolford continued. “And write letters for them.”

“In the evening,” Duncan agreed, recalling how Evering stayed with the Company prisoners when they were allowed evening exercise, sitting on a barrel, writing as this or that prisoner whispered to him. Even the keepers sometimes asked the scholar to help with a letter. “And the barrel that hid the line on his neck. The knots that bound it were those of a landsman.”

The vicar ended his prayer in midsentence. “What are you saying?”

“I asked the captain,” Woolford explained. “The chaos that day started at dawn, when the new watch passed through the compass room. Evering died in the night. All the earlier watch crew save the helmsman were below, out of the weather. There was a terrible fog before dawn, so thick the helmsman could not see the midship lantern. But the crew were all together below, no one unaccounted for. His murderer,” Woolford said, his voice fading to a whisper, “was someone in the Company.”

The announcement seemed to take the strength out of Arnold. He lowered himself onto a nearby crate, then stared into his folded hands a long time.

When Arnold finally spoke, he had found his pulpit voice. “We will not have our noble experiment destroyed by scandal.” He
slowly raised his head toward the ceiling. “It must be resolved. One versed in the ways of death could do so.”

Duncan looked at Woolford. The officer did not react to Arnold’s apparent invitation.

“You have not yet signed the indenture, McCallum,” Arnold observed.

Duncan felt his chest tighten, his mouth go dry.

“I believe,” Woolford offered with a thin grin, “the good reverend has proposed an amendment to your terms.”

“I cannot. I will not inform against the men.”

“Of course the choice is yours,” Arnold said, his prayer-like tone raising gooseflesh down Duncan’s spine. “You can find our murderer. Or we can give you to the captain, who will lash you all the way to Jamaica. By the time you arrive, the flies will be burying eggs in your flesh as you lay dying.”

A
RNOLD GAINED ENERGY AS HE paced around Evering’s coffin. “You can have your indenture, have the freedom offered the Company tutor,” he continued. “But you will provide an answer to this horrible crime.”

Duncan’s heart began rising into his throat. “I have nothing to do with this,” he said.

“Your duty is to the Company, in all things. This must be addressed quickly,” Arnold said, then circuited the coffin again as he collected his thoughts. “You will speak to no one about your work. You will assemble the facts, identify the killer, and report your answer to us.”

“Surely you are mistaken,” Duncan said. “I am a—” He struggled for a moment, no longer sure who or what he was.

“You are highly educated, a doctor in all but name. You have demonstrated your power of deduction. You will still be part of the Company. As tutor you will have sufficient latitude to observe its workings. The prisoners will speak to you as one of their own. And you will have ample opportunity to obtain my counsel to assure the proper direction. Or,” Arnold said, his tone sharper, “I can burn the indenture.” He punctuated his statement with a pointed glance toward the cells. “The captain is paid by the head for his deliveries to the sugar plantations. No one will object if he delivers one more than he started with. No one will notice if you disappear at sea.”

Duncan did not reply.

“The Reverend and I will collect the letters the professor wrote for the prisoners,” Woolford suggested.

“They were confidences,” Duncan protested.

“Exactly,” Arnold shot back. “It is but a fine line between the secrets of convicts and outright conspiracy. We shall collect all the Company letters still on board.”

“They are part of the royal mails.”

“Which is why we must review them before we land.”

“You are asking me to be a spy, an informer. I cannot.”

Arnold breathed deeply. He seemed to take strength from Duncan’s protests. “I am asking only for the Company to be released from the threat of scandal. Prove your loyalty to Lord Ramsey. Sign our contract and find us an answer. A bargain any other man on this ship would leap at.”

“
An
answer or
the
answer?” Duncan stared at the unhearing Evering, then flushed as he realized he had spoken aloud the question that had leapt to his tongue. He looked up to see Arnold’s eyes flare.

“Practice none of your sophistry on us, McCallum,” the vicar snapped. “The truth is a sacred thing. You have a duty to it. I bind you to it. If you sign and disobey, you will join the prisoners assigned to the Ramsey forests and confront the two- and four-legged beasts that dwell there. The members of the Company will not die of tropical diseases. But some will die of arrows and axes, I assure you. And worse.”

Duncan decided it was safest to address the dead man again. “So justice is a private affair in America.” He fought a temptation to take the dead man’s hand as he would a friend’s. In death the professor had become more a part of Duncan’s destiny than ever he had been in life.

“Truly you have found a man for all seasons,” Woolford observed, cool amusement entering his voice. “A doctor. A sailor, judging by his ease in the rigging. A tutor. Now a lawyer.”

“It was my honor on this journey,” Arnold reported in a chill tone, “to take delivery of his majesty’s appointment of Lord Ramsey
as a magistrate. Every man in the Company signed its articles, agreeing to submit to his judicial power.”

“I was given the choice of signing the Company rolls or returning to prison. I was shown no articles.”

“When we arrive at the appropriate answer,” Arnold continued, ignoring his protest, “Lord Ramsey will close the matter officially. You will find he does not cower from difficult decisions.”

Duncan was not sure what hurt worse, Arnold’s threat to consign him to the prisoners bound for Jamaica or the reminder that to gain his freedom Duncan must become a lapdog for the aristocracy he despised so much.

As they left the chamber Woolford gestured Lister back inside to close the coffin. The old Scot moved stiffly, acknowledging Duncan with only a quick, empty nod as he passed. Duncan paused, sensing something had changed in the keeper. He watched as Lister silently set the pennies back over Evering’s eyes, then lifted a mallet from a nearby crate and began sealing the professor into his box for the last time.

Five minutes later they were back on the prison deck. Duncan signed the indenture in silence, staring at the table as Woolford witnessed and Arnold rolled up the document. “The clothes,” the vicar declared impatiently, gesturing toward Duncan’s sleeve, “belong to the family Ramsey. We will not have them befouled in a cell. You may retain the smallclothes and shoes.”

Duncan stared at the man in disbelief, but the protest on his tongue died as he heard another anguished moan from one of the cells. Slowly he began to unbutton his waistcoat.

Arnold climbed up the ladder without a word of parting, the clothing carefully folded over one arm, the indenture tucked under an elbow. Woolford sighed and extinguished one lantern, seemed about to climb up when he hesitated. “I could find a blanket,” he offered.

Duncan had been working hard to hate the officer. Now Woolford’s words had a tone of apology.

“I need nothing from you but an answer. Is Mr. Lister ill?”

The jagged scar on Woolford’s neck went white as he clenched his jaw. “When prisoners flee confinement, a flogging must follow.”

Duncan closed his eyes a moment. As the keeper who had brought Duncan back from his escape, Lister was supposed to be the one to bind Duncan to the mast and begin the flogging.

“But Lister announced that your disappearance had been his fault, that he had given you permission to linger another minute on deck after breakfast, that he had forgotten you, that you had not actually escaped.”

“A lie!” Duncan gasped. “My God! The captain’s fury—”

“Lister took your flogging.”

The words ripped at Duncan like a hot blade.

Woolford raised the lantern and studied Duncan’s face. “The captain himself administered the cat. Forty strokes. He acted as if cheated of a greater pleasure. Lister broke three splints of wood placed between his teeth but never cried out.”

Duncan felt the blood drain from his face as he sank against the wall. He had doubted Lister, had questioned what it meant for the old Scot to bind himself to Duncan and the clan. So Lister had shown him.

The brittle silence was broken by the sound of movement on the ladder. In the shadows at its base stood Cameron, the tall, ox-like leader of the keepers, holding a bucket of worm-ridden biscuits.

Woolford had lingered, and seemed about to say something until he spotted the keeper. “Is she safe?” Duncan asked the officer.

The officer seemed to have a hard time finding an answer. “She lives. I can’t decide whether what you did was incomparable bravery or incomparable stupidity.”

“I thought her dead for certain.”

“It was the first time she had been left alone on the voyage. Everyone had thought her sleeping.” Woolford gestured him toward his cell.

“Who is she?”

The question brought a hard glint to Woolford’s eyes. “Difficult
to say exactly. She has been abed, too weak for speech, the entire voyage.”

But not too weak to climb up the mast and out on the spar, Duncan nearly said. “Lieutenant, you have helped nurse her all these weeks,” he pointed out instead. “Surely you know her name.”

“I have heard many,” Woolford’s tone made it clear he would speak no more on the subject.

They stood silently staring at each other as Cameron distributed the biscuits down the line of cells.

“I have a brother, Lieutenant,” Duncan ventured as he reached the cell door. “Somewhere in the army. When we arrive in New York, could you find where he is stationed?”

“It’s a large colony.”

“His name is James. James McCallum. A captain of the Forty-second Regiment of Foot.”

Woolford gazed at him with an odd mixture of anger and worry. “Captain McCallum of the Forty-second,” he recited in a tight voice, then spun about and marched toward the ladder as Cameron approached, brandishing the key to lock Duncan’s cell.

By the time the lock snapped shut, the slip he had taken from Evering’s pocket was back in his hand, held in the dim light of the hatch. He gazed at it with a sinking heart. It was nothing but a small star chart, with a trajectory shown in dotted lines through constellations and a single word:
October.
But Lister had been very clear in relaying Adam’s words.
Heed how Evering explains his comet,
as if the comet might explain the threat to Duncan. His confusion seemed a palpable thing, a weight that was slowly crushing him. But Lister had shown him otherwise. The McCallum clan would not be crushed. He had to live—for Lister, for Jamie, for the Scots in the prisoners’ hold, for the nameless woman he had saved.

With new, intense effort Duncan tried to understand the ritual at the compass, etching each of the bloody objects into his memory. He would ask Arnold for the objects, he decided, he would arrange them as they had been in the compass room so he could study each
in turn, and together. There had to be a logic, however distorted, and if he failed to find it, he and others could pay with their lives.