Bone Rattler amoca-1

by Eliot Pattison

  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.”

  The woman squeezed tightly, and he kept speaking, forgetting for a moment the doom that was closing around him, telling of the ancient stone house they had lived in, of sailing with his grandfather, even how once his grandfather had stripped naked and leapt on the back of a passing fin whale, leaving Duncan alone in the open skiff as the old man roared with laughter and sang a Gaelic traveling ballad to the great leviathan, which had stayed on the surface, an odd contentment in its huge black eye. Eventually, realizing he had not confided so much to a woman in years, Duncan quieted, their grip continuing in the silent dark. Her fingers were the only warm thing he had felt for days.

  Suddenly there was a creak of wood and Flora snatched her hand away. Someone was approaching through the outer door, car
rying a lantern. Duncan retreated, crouching in the corner of his cell. A moment later a key turned in the lock of his door; the entrance flew open and two men appeared, their faces obscured in shadow.

  “The captain’s compliments,” one announced with a guffaw.

  As the man leaned into the cell, Duncan recoiled in terror. The captain had struck his bargain, and had sent for his prize. He twisted and rolled, evading the man’s reach for a moment before the man landed a kick in his belly that left Duncan doubled up on the floor. Short, vicious blows reached Duncan, kicks to his legs and back, and the sailor laughed as Duncan kept up his vain, frantic resistance, trying to avoid his boot. They were going to render him unconscious, and he would not revive until he hit the water tied inside a shroud.

  Suddenly the man was pulled away by his companion, who carried a length of heavy, knotted rope with which he began beating Duncan. But after the first blow Duncan felt nothing, only heard the sound of the strikes. He thought he had gone numb, then realized the man was striking the walls and floor on either side of Duncan, while loudly cursing him. After a minute the man stopped, dropped something near Duncan’s head, muttered quick words, then stepped away. The first man reappeared with a bucket and emptied its frigid seawater onto Duncan, then with a cruel laugh slammed the door shut, snapping its heavy lock closed. Duncan stood, shaking off the water, forgetting his pain as he crawled to the hatch to look after them. Had the captain lost his negotiation?

  He held up the object left by the second man. It was a dried, pressed flower. A thistle. Suddenly the rushed, whispered words echoed clearly in his mind. Redeat, Clan McCallum. Lister, he slowly realized, had used the visit of the captain’s bully as a cover. The stubborn old Scot was not going to let Duncan turn his back on his past. Lister had beaten the planks for demons and presented the traditional token. Despite the blood dripping from his reopened wound, a bitter grin tugged at Duncan’s mouth. The ceremony for installation of the last McCallum clan chief had just been completed.

  Two piles of tiny bones, a buckle, an eye, a claw, a feather, a heart on salt. At first the objects from the compass room drifted in and out of Duncan’s consciousness, then he focused on them, until in his mind’s eye he had their placement by the compass fixed. Next, like the orderly bits of facts from his medical lectures, he assembled in his mind all he knew about Evering’s last few days. Adam must have confided in Evering, must have entrusted the professor with the strange amulet he wore around his neck. But why had he saved the stone for Duncan, why had he chosen Duncan for his legacy and not Evering? Why, he kept asking himself, would Adam say, They know who you are, as if there were something the leaders of the Company knew about him that Duncan himself was blind to? Why had Evering died so soon after Adam, and why so soon after that had the angel on the spar sought her own death? He lifted the stone bear for the hundredth time and pressed it to his forehead in frustration.

  He slept, plagued by a recurring dream of a beautiful woman suspended in the water beside him, her fingers ending in long black claws, pointing at him the way his father did from the gibbet of his nightmares. When he awoke, two large sea biscuits had appeared on his cell floor, apparently dropped through the hatch. For several minutes he tried to extract the worms from them in the dark, then gave up and ate them intact, as many of the sailors preferred. He spoke through the hatch again, calling to the madwoman, extending his arm to blindly search for her fingers in the shadows. Flora was there, for he heard her cry out several times, as though from nightmares, but she no longer sang her songs, no longer offered her soft, desperate touch.

  Sleeping again, he was awakened by the sound of his door shutting, and by dim light once more reflecting through the little hatch. A stack of folded clothes had been left inside his cell door. In the corridor, the door to the outside was open, and Duncan could see that the table held a paper and two large candle lanterns.

  He dressed slowly, watching the empty table. The clothes were plain and sturdy, though not cheaply made-the austere dress of a servant to a great house. As Duncan slid on the buckled shoes, his door groaned open, and he looked out to see Lieutenant Woolford retreating toward the table, where he took a seat as Reverend Arnold stepped from the shadows, closed the door to the cell corridor behind Duncan, and settled beside the officer. A stool across from the two men awaited Duncan.

  “It was not a human heart,” Duncan ventured as he lowered himself onto the stool.

  Woolford frowned. “The cook eventually revived and explained that it was from a pig he had butchered the night before,” the officer confirmed in a brittle tone, stroking his square jaw as he studied Duncan. The scarlet uniform coat the officer usually wore was oddly lacking in brocade or any other adornment of rank. Never had Duncan seen Woolford wear over his chest the small brass gorget that was so treasured by other army officers. Indeed, despite the aristocratic bearing that betrayed Woolford’s origins, there was a restless, feral quality about him that Duncan had never before seen in a man in uniform.

  “The ship weathered the storm,” Duncan offered.

  “That particular storm, McCallum,” Woolford snapped, “is one you still have to weather. Evering died, precious time was lost fighting the weather because you failed to assure the crew with the truth, then you cut the brace for the mast just as it was needed. Most of us thought ourselves dead.”

  “Half the furnishings in the captain’s cabin,” a more patient voice observed, “were heaved overboard by those trying to placate the sea demons. We have obligated the Ramsey Company to bear the expense of replacement and the repairs,” Arnold explained with a sigh. “We have given our covenant you will cause no more harm.”

  “I am as powerless in the prisoner hold as I am in here,” Duncan offered in a low tone, with a troubled glance toward the corridor of mildewed cells.

  “You have proven otherwise,” Woolford shot back. “If you saw the fire in the captain’s eye when your name is mentioned, you would be grateful to be locked down here.” The officer coolly studied Duncan. “He has reminded us that under our own rules you are owed forty lashes for escaping.”

  The complaint that leapt to Duncan’s lips died with the officer’s last words. The still-healing flesh of his back crawled at the mention of the whip.

  “The captain considers you our most dangerous criminal,” Arnold interjected in a chastising voice. “But,” he added in a softer tone, “we remain aware that while you perhaps endangered every soul on board you undoubtedly saved one life.”

  Duncan’s gaze drifted to the papers in front of Arnold. The clergyman’s elbow rested on the corner of the paper, a wide parchment curved at the ends. Beside it were quills, a pewter pot of ink, and a black lump of cloth.

  Arnold leaned backward, letting the silence take hold as he might from the pulpit before making a profound point. “The Company has suffered a terrible blow,” he declared. The Reverend, Duncan realized, was not wearing his stiff black waistcoat, but a stylish brown frockcoat and shirt with lace cuffs-the attire of a successful merchant. “Our Aristotle has been called to a higher temple.”

  “Professor Evering will be missed,” Duncan ventured, not understanding what Arnold expected of him. He found himself watching the ladder, the skin on his back still crawling. A keeper would come soon, and the flogging they intended would leave him scarred for life-if he survived it. If the captain took the whip, Duncan would never leave the mast alive.

  “But Providence has provided.”

  Duncan realized Arnold was staring at him, that the words were aimed at him. “Providence?”

  “I personally selected every member of the Company,” Arnold reminded him. Duncan had not understood why the stranger with the clerical collar had stood beside the judge’s bench, not until the judge had declared his sentence commuted to transportation, then had turned and shaken Arnold’s hand. “You had a European education. Before your lapse of morals, you were about to commence an honorable profession.”

  “That life is gone,”
Duncan said in a near-whisper, glancing at Woolford as he reminded himself of Frasier’s discovery that Arnold had not been alone in selecting the men of the Company. “I am a convict now.”

  Arnold pushed the lanterns to the side of the parchment so its full text was uncovered. “The essential role of the Ramsey Company,” he said with gravity, gesturing to the document, “is reshaping the destinies of men.”

  Duncan gazed at him uncertainly, then began to read. On the ship Anna Rose, out of Glasgow, it began. Printed on the first line, with large ornate letters, was his own name. He read the text, then looked up in confusion. It was an indenture, a document commuting his sentence of hard labor to seven years as indentured servant. There was a line for his signature beside that of Arnold, who had signed as agent for Lord Ramsey.

  “There is no dishonor in such servitude. Many free men have signed such papers to win passage to the New World,” Arnold observed.

  Duncan was beginning to remember his leap over the rail. This was how it had felt when the black waters had closed around him. “I have already won passage,” he murmured, keeping his gaze on the table, watching as Arnold’s hand clenched into a fist. Confusion still nagged him, even fear, but these emotions were overshadowed by his bitter resentment of the two men before him.

  “We must replace Evering as tutor to his lordship’s children,” the vicar continued. “The king can be merciful. You were convicted for shielding an old highwayman. But your trial record mentioned he was an ailing relative. Perhaps you were simply honoring your duty to an aged family member without full knowledge of the circumstances,” Arnold added in a tentative tone, as if he had been authorized not only to rewrite Duncan’s sentence but the very record of his trial. “Sign, and the lieutenant will witness.” The vicar pushed the lump of black cloth toward Duncan. It was a cap, Duncan saw, one of the black-and-grey caps worn by scholars at colleges, probably the one Evering had worn at formal Company gatherings.