McGregor, giving up for now on his plans for Duncan, wasted little time in prying answers from the men in the bilges. Half of those present had served in the army or navy. He held the lantern to the faces of the remaining four in turn. “McPhee?” he barked.
“I allowed gravediggers to earn their pay twice,” the man muttered.
“I pinched a few stags off me laird’s hills,” the second admitted with a grin.
“I fed my family for ten years off Lord Dundee’s estate ’afore they nabbed me,” declared the next.
“I kept the tables at Saint Luke’s Infirmary filled for the teachers,” confessed the last, a gaunt man named McSween.
McGregor threw Duncan a perplexed glance and muttered a curse. “Glory be. If we ain’t soldiers, we be poachers and body snatchers.”
Moans came from the dark again, and Duncan spotted a rivulet of blood flowing on the bilge water from behind the prisoners. “What have you done?” he demanded.
“He’s been trying to kill us. Day by day carving a hole below the waterline.”
Duncan pushed past the men. Frasier, the young keeper, lay sprawled against the hull, his lip swollen and bleeding, one hand grasped around the other, its index finger bloody and jutting at an unnatural angle. Duncan pulled the tail of his shirt from his pants and began ripping away a strip. “That nail!” he barked. “Give me the nail.”
The man who had assaulted him made a growling noise.
“You’ve broken his finger! It must be set and splinted.”
McGregor grabbed the nail, handing it to Duncan. The prisoners silently watched as Duncan ministered to the broken bone, then guffawed as Frasier regained his senses and began swinging at Duncan.
“Traitor! Spy!” the youth hissed then, hammering his injured hand into Duncan’s thigh, and recoiled in pain. He gazed at the gathered men uncertainly, probably more bewildered than Duncan at the silence that had descended over them. Tears began streaking down his cheeks.
“An odd use of a spy,” Duncan suggested, “to put him alone in a cell for the rats to nibble on.” He bent and pulled Frasier out of the filth, onto a low ledge of ballast rocks. “If I were what you say, I would have reported your slicing of the hull.”
“You never knew.”
“I knew who did it a minute after I saw it. The hole was chipped out by someone left-handed, since the beam beside it prevented a right-handed stroke. It took many hours. No prisoner from the hold has been missing so long. The captain may be a tyrant, but he always accounts for his men. That leaves the keepers. And of them you are the only corrach,” Duncan explained, using the old word for a left-handed person. He looked about the rough faces before him. Certainly McGregor and his men would not have known about the sabotage on the cargo deck. There was only one possible explanation. But why would Woolford have told McGregor, then left the ship?
Frasier seemed to shrink. “My cousin understood,” he said in an absent tone. “Play the odds, he said, that’s how we beat the English. When he was pressed into the navy, he told me how he was going to drug the marine guards one night and walk into the magazine with a lighted taper. Three months later his ship exploded. Two hundred Englishmen, one Highlander.”
Even the most brutal of McGregor’s gang could find no response to the startling confession.
“Many of us might summon enough anger to chip away the first few inches,” Duncan declared as some of the men bent toward Frasier, vengefulness in their eyes. “It’s only the last inch of the hull that matters. He was never going to do it. What he did do was sabotage a trunk of Ramsey supplies.”
The heat seemed to sap from several of the men. But as Duncan studied them, a rock thudded against his shin and he bent in sudden pain.
“Liar! I know how to kill English!” As Frasier lifted a second stone to throw at him, Duncan leaned over and clamped a hand around his arm.
“I came from the assizes like every man here,” Duncan said in a level voice.
“Look at him!” Frasier cried. “He hides army secrets around his neck!” The top buttons of Duncan’s shirt had opened in their scuffle, exposing a glimpse of what lay underneath.
Duncan did not move as McGregor pulled out the medallion, now with the dried thistle pressed into its leather seams and wrapped with his precious long strip of paper. The old Scot unrolled the list with a suspicious eye. “By God, McCallum,” he spat, “’tis the work of an informer for certain! Who be these names?”
“The men of my clan,” Duncan shot back, using Gaelic again. “My clan lairds. Now I am the oldest to survive, all those elder cut down by the king. Would you prefer I name for you the things they did to the bodies of my mother and sisters and six-year-old brother? Or how many weeks it took for my father’s bones to fall from the gibbet after Culloden?” A new tone had entered his voice unbidden-the coarse, wild edge that erupted when rival clans parried before a fight.
McGregor grew very quiet. As the old Scot gazed silently at the list, Duncan watched the last of his venom drain away, replaced by a weary melancholy. He returned the paper and lifted first one, then the other of Duncan’s hands, studying the many gashes left by small teeth. “Why do they do this to you?”
“Why do they do this to any of us? If we do not find out, we may as well go finish that hole in the hull.”
“This one is still dangerous,” McGregor said, indicating Frasier. “There be those who say he was with Evering the night before his death. The last to see him alive. If he confesses to you now, it saves the rest of us.”
“I told them nothing happened that night,” the young keeper said in a small voice, tears streaking the grime on his cheeks.
“What I want to hear, Frasier,” Duncan said, “is why Adam invited you to rob Woolford’s trunk.”
“I never-” the young keeper began, then seemed to sense something in Duncan’s eyes that made him start over. It was why the prisoners felt no fear of assaulting the keeper. They all knew what Frasier had done with Woolford’s trunk, and a word from any one of them would mean the loss of his keeper status. “He said he was certain there would be sugar in such a gentleman’s chest, that there would be trinkets for the games, which I could give to Cameron to buy his silence. All he wanted was one thing.”
“Brandy,” someone suggested with a guffaw.
“Tobacco,” Frasier said. “He wanted the tobacco. Except he said not to give it to him. I was to get it to Professor Evering.”
“But Evering did not smoke,” Duncan pointed out.
Frasier’s face darkened. “Sometimes I think maybe I was the one, the one who did kill the professor. As well as done.” Duncan sensed the men behind him shift, tensing again, and he shifted to place himself between them and the young keeper. “I saw Evering twice that last night, before the storm,” Frasier continued in a hollow voice. “First on deck, speaking of the heavens, but then past midnight in the passage outside his cabin, though he did not see me. He was waving a piece of lit tobacco, letting the passage fill with the fragrance, then going into the sick room with it. He did something terrible with it, and I made it possible. Adam could never have intended it.”
“Did what, lad?” McGregor demanded.
“Don’t you see? Evering revived the beanshith, the banshee. I gave him the tobacco and the medallion like Adam asked, and he used the tobacco to revive the banshee. He didn’t know she would kill him.”
Duncan surveyed the rough assembly. Their hate had totally burned away, replaced with a dim confusion, even fear.
“Why did you ask Woolford about being at all our trials?” Duncan asked the young keeper.
“If the Company is to be used by the army, we should know it.”
“But why now, why ask when you did?”
All the fight had gone out of Frasier. He spoke toward his hands. “Adam had died.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Adam used to sing in the night.”
“You’re making no sense.”
Strangely, it was
n’t pain in Frasier’s eyes when he looked up at Duncan, but embarrassment. “I asked him once,” the young Scot said. “I missed my home so. There was a song my mother used to sing, about the sun setting over the loch with the heather in bloom. I asked him to sing it, and he did, every night when he knew I was in earshot.”
“But why?” Duncan pressed. “If you were upset about Adam, why badger Woolford about the army?”
“Because of the lies they told, because of the way they treated him. Because I won’t let it be forgotten. They put Adam in with the Company prisoners two days before sailing, as if he were just another one brought in from some village court. But he was the first prisoner, here before the keepers, before the murderers, kept by Woolford in a cell.”
Duncan leaned closer. “How do you know it was Adam in the cell?”
“Because the captain’s wife fed him when Woolford was away at the law courts. She was feeling ill one eve and told me to go down with the food. That was when I first heard him sing. I still hear him,” Frasier added in a whisper. “I never saw him in the cell, and might have been taken into the deception like everyone else.”
“Except he sang,” Duncan concluded. “And you heard him later, in the prisoner hold.”
Duncan tried to piece together Frasier’s words with Woolford’s revelation that Adam had volunteered to become a prisoner. “Sometimes,” he said, “a man’s crime can be knowing someone, or something.”
“What secret could Adam have known that made him so dangerous to be locked in a cell?” Frasier asked in a rueful voice.
“What he knew was something about someone called a fishspeaker and an inn in America. And,” Duncan said with conviction, “why the Company is going to need so many poachers and body snatchers.” As well as, he almost added, a secret about Duncan that Duncan himself did not know.
When he returned to the cells, Lister had a bucket of seawater waiting for him, and Duncan gladly let the old mate dowse him repeatedly. But his dreadful foreboding could not be stripped away as easily as the stench. As Lister locked the cell door, Duncan leaned against the wall, feeling strangely weak. Confusion had become his new disease. Adam had condemned himself to the ship of his own accord, as if under some dark spell. Woolford’s chest had indeed been the work of Pandora, its demons now preying on the ship. Woolford, he had slowly realized, must have told McGregor about the hole in an attempt to slow the ship’s arrival in New York, as if he, like Adam, dreaded its arrival there. His legs gave way and he slowly sank to the floor, staring into the shadows. Much later he discovered that the black stone was in his lap, one hand clenched tightly around it, the other stroking the thing as if it needed comforting. He pressed the warm stone to his cheek, then to his heart, and then began wrapping it in the unused bandage, covering it in many layers. He stuffed the bundle into the bottom of his sea bag and settled into a corner of his cell, his hands clasped around Adam’s mysterious amulet.
He awoke to shouts from above, sounds of celebration floating down from the main deck. An hour later his cell door opened and a dark bundle was tossed inside. His servant’s clothes. Duncan glanced up to see Cameron’s tall figure retreating toward the ladder.
“It’s New York,” Duncan said to Flora after he had dressed, awkwardly squared the tutor’s cap on his head, and shouldered his bag. Her cell was as silent as death. Something moved inside. It could have been the despairing woman. It could have been a rat.
“I wish you good fortune, Flora,” he whispered into the hatch of her locked door, then paused, knowing that luck had long ago abandoned the woman. In another time, another life, he would have tried to help her. But in this life he was powerless. He pushed his arm through the hatch, fingers extended, but she did not respond. “I wish you peace,” he said in a cracking voice, then turned away.
He climbed warily into the sunlight, pausing with his head just over the rim of the deck-uncertain why he was not escorted, half expecting to be seized and chained again-then slowly approached the rail. The ship, docked at a wide timber wharf, was busily disgorging its cargo, human and otherwise. Cameron stood like a sentinel at the bottom of the gangway, forty feet from an elegant carriage attended by a broad-shouldered man whose skin was a rich chocolate brown, his waistcoat and britches a larger version of those worn by Duncan. Beyond the carriage were several heavy wagons with benches along their sides, guarded by the keepers and several brutish, thickset men armed with clubs and spontoons-the broadheaded spears sometimes used by the army-watching as the prisoners, wide-eyed, filed off the ship and climbed onto the wagon benches.
“Benign Providence continues to watch over you,” an austere voice said at Duncan’s side. Reverend Arnold was in his merchant’s attire again and clutched a thin leather case, the kind Duncan knew was often used for military dispatches. “A short report now, and you will be done. There is a grand sermon here, about the pitfalls of forgiveness.”
Duncan’s mouth went dry. He searched the deck for an explanation, then studied the Company wagons again. In the first wagon two men with clubs sat behind the driver’s seat, a crumpled shape on the floor between them. “What have you done?” he demanded.
“He was seen lurking about Evering’s cabin last night, against our express command. As a keeper he had the run of the ship the night Evering died. He has condemned himself with his own traitorous ways. When we caught him he pulled a paper from his shirt and stuffed it into his mouth, obviously to destroy evidence against himself. The captain brought out the cat again, to loosen his tongue. He began pouring out curses in the Highland tongue, invoking the Jacobite prince. Lying from the start, betraying our trust in him as a keeper.”
Duncan did not recall running down the gangway, did not remember touching the wharf, his first step in the New World. He was suddenly at the wagon’s side, nearly retching from what he saw.
The pile of bloody rags was breathing, though only just. He leapt onto the wagon, parrying a keeper’s raised club with a venomous glare. The old man’s shirt was in ribbons, revealing crosshatches of raw flesh where the cat had done its work, partly healed and now reopened. His manacled hands were bloody and swollen, his battered face barely recognizable. Lister was not unconscious, but he did not seem to recognize Duncan.
“He wouldn’t stay down, the old fool,” Cameron said over Duncan’s shoulder. “’Twere the sailors, with the captain urging them on. Lying about his Highland blood, to some it’s as good as confessing a murder.”
“Remove him, Mr. Cameron. He is in need of care.”
“I cannot,” the keeper said with a glance toward the ship.
As Duncan followed his gaze toward the captain, who now stood beside Arnold, a haze seemed to fall over his eyes. Cameron was not quick enough to stop him as he darted back up the gangway.
“He must have a doctor!” Duncan demanded. “You have no right!”
The captain seemed to take great pleasure in Duncan’s protest. He signaled to someone behind him, and with a flurry of movement two sailors appeared, one tapping a belaying pin on his palm. “One more insult,” the captain snarled, “and I shall appropriate you from the Company. There be no keepers on board to protect you now!”
“He did nothing last night but-”
The sailors seized Duncan, one on each arm, pressing him against the rail as they gazed expectantly at the captain, who stepped forward with a cold grin. The open hand that slapped Duncan felt like an oak plank.
“Reverend Arnold,” the captain said in a satisfied tone, “I forego my demand for indemnity. I am taking this mongrel to-”
The captain finished his sentence with a terrified moan. With a strange hissing of air, a long, feathered shaft materialized in his upper arm.
Arnold uttered a panicked cry and dropped to the deck. The captain stood as if paralyzed, staring at the blood that flowed down his shirtsleeve, his ruddy face draining of color. Duncan’s assailants released him and dragged their captain toward the cabins as the ship’s bell began to ring frantically. Dunc
an slowly turned, not understanding, as a second arrow appeared, quivering in the wood of the rail directly below his heart.
The deck and the wharf burst into a chaos of fleeing figures, barking dogs, shouting sailors, and stevedores. Makeshift weapons appeared in the sailors’ hands, and the captain, clutching his wound, barked orders as if preparing for boarders. But no more arrows came, no enemy charged the ship. The wharf gave no clue of attackers, no sign of a bowman. The panic seemed to affect all but a gang of boys perched excitedly on a pile of bales and an old man who hobbled away on a long stick. The arrows could have come from a dozen hiding places, from the shadows between the warehouses on the far side of the dock or perhaps from among the stacks of cargo on the wharf itself.
As Duncan slipped down the gangway, whips cracked and the Company wagons heaved forward, the teams urged to a trot by their panicked drivers. He stood at the bottom of the ramp watching helplessly as they disappeared. Lister, who had promised to dance a jig and pick a flower, had begun his new life in America.
After a moment Duncan felt a tug on his arm, and he turned to see the tall African, one hand on Duncan’s bag. When Duncan refused to release it, the big man shrugged and stood aside to let Duncan set it inside the coach.
“I am Crispin,” the big man announced in a deep baritone. “I will see you settled at Ramsey House. It is but a short ride from here.” He cast a worried glance toward the shadows by the warehouses, then gestured Duncan inside.
“But the Company proceeds to the frontier,” Duncan protested.
“The children’s tutor must be with the children,” Arnold said in a rushed, nervous voice over his shoulder. The vicar was guarded by two sailors. “The children reside here in the city except in the warm months. We will join the Company in two weeks’ time.”
Duncan was about to argue when he realized the big man meant they were going to the house where Evering’s journal had been sent.
As Crispin gestured Duncan into the carriage, Arnold cast a worried glance up and down the wharf, then darted into a second, more ornate coach that waited behind a stack of tobacco bales. Crispin climbed into Duncan’s coach, perching by a small wooden crate on the opposite seat as the driver called out to the team of matching chestnuts, and the carriage lurched forward. As he gazed at the Anna Rose, where muskets now bristled from the rail, Duncan fought a sinking feeling that somewhere on board he had missed the answers to the mysteries that beset the Company. But then he realized that here, in America, was where the Company was intended to be, here was where the unknowing players in this tragedy were finally entering their stage.
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