We drank to His Rotundancy, President Adams; to free ships and free trade; and to wives and sweethearts, may they never meet. When it was Rogers’s turn, he said, “Gentlemen, I give you the United States armed schooner Rattle-Snake. May she finally be believed!”
After drinking, Connor said, “Why ever would she not be believed?”
“It is a customary toast with us,” said Peter. “Before the schooner was bought into the service, she was called Cassandra.”
“Who was doomed always to speak the truth and never to be believed,” said Franklin. “I wonder—would it be worse never to tell the truth yet always be believed?”
The party broke up soon after in response to a call from the lookout—a Connecticut privateer that forgot the private signal and had to be boarded—and we left our guests to their own devices. Connor did not take the quarterdeck after we returned but pleaded seasickness and went to his cabin. Franklin must have had a delicate stomach too, for I did not see him at all.
The sick berth was a low and cramped room in the bows, pierced in its forward part by the bowsprit and made noisy and foul by the pigsty on the other side of the bulkhead. Quilty had laid the corpse of Connor’s would-be assassin out on a bit of sailcloth stretched across his operating table, the better to dissect it at this his first opportunity before the heat could dissolve it into a stinking mass of goo. The cloth was streaked with congealed blood that filled the sick berth with an iron stench.
Peter stood in the doorway, looking at the hanging cots that lined the sick berth. “Where are the wounded, Mr. Quilty?”
“Please come in, sir, and close the door behind you,” said the surgeon. He removed his neck-cloth and exchanged his coat and vest for a leather apron. “Crispus Ames, who had his arm shot off this morning, expired before dinner. Otherwise I should not have come. His mates have taken him away to be sewn into his hammock. The rest of our wounded are not serious. Before we had even sank the Princes below the horizon I had given them plenty of sticking plaster and a tot of grog, which satisfied them, and sent them away.” He rolled up his sleeves and hung a lantern from a hook over the table.
It was as if he was talking about bits of meat, cut to size and wrapped up in paper. The rest of us often spoke lightly about death and disfigurement to keep ourselves from getting the creepy jeebies, but I’d never known Quilty to do so. His face looked sallow and creased in the lantern light, like an old actor’s will under the paint when you sit too close to the stage.
Peter closed the door with reluctance. He had to bend low under the deckbeams to enter the room, and he plucked at the handkerchief in his sleeve, as if he wanted to cover his mouth and nose with it but didn’t want to seem delicate. “You said you had something of dire importance to show us.”
“Indeed I do, sir.” Quilty indicated the corpse. Its torso and head were covered with a sheet, with the legs and arms sticking out.
“It is a dead man,” said Peter. “I have seen bodies before, Mr. Quilty.”
“Yes, sir, but none like this one, I hope. Notice first the soles of the feet.”
Peter and I peered at the feet as well as we could without touching them. The letter X was tattooed on each.
“Maybe he was a sailor,” I said. “You know how Jack tattoos his feet.”
“I have seen pigs and roosters used as charms against drowning,” said Peter. “But never an X.”
“Yes, sir,” said Quilty. “Pray take this glass and look more closely.”
Peter examined the feet through the surgeon’s magnifying lens and then handed it to me. The X was actually a pair of crossed daggers, with the Roman numeral DXII arranged in the spaces between. I handed the glass back to Quilty and said, “five hundred and twelve?”
“If the letters are read from top to bottom and then left to right, yes,” said Quilty. “But clockwise and counterclockwise both, it reads dixi.”
“Latin for ‘I have spoken,’” said I.
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Graves,” said Peter, giving me a vicious look. “For we have none of us had our amo, amas, amat here.”
“Beg pardon, sir.” It’d been so long since he’d spoke sharp to me that I’d forgotten how much he could make it sting. His eyes watered, though I didn’t think the body stank that much. It flavored the air, certainly, but it weren’t yet what you’d call ripe.
“Observe, now, the hands.” Quilty pressed them into fists, revealing the letters DIES on the first knuckles of the right hand and IRAE on the left: day of wrath—Judgment Day. He turned the hands palm up and spread them with his artful fingers. “Feel them, if you please.”
“I do not please,” said Peter.
“Me neither,” I said. “What about ’em?”
“No callosities, and yet the body is excellently muscled in a way that suggests he was used to periodic and violent exercise, rather than steady labor.”
“Perhaps he was a soldier,” said Peter. “I have seen them go in for this low sort of superstition. Like sailors with HOLD FAST on their knuckles, to prevent their falling from aloft.”
“But observe the skin,” said Quilty. “Was he a soldier, one would expect him to spend his days marching about in the sun, yet his skin is as white as a fish’s belly.”
“Well, of course he’s white—he’s dead, ain’t he?”
“Oh, spot on as always, Mr. Graves,” said Peter. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his face.
“Yes,” said Quilty, “but there is nary a patina of tan, not even on the backs of the hands or the nape of the neck. If he was a soldier, he fought only at night.”
“But Mr. Quilty,” I said, “what kind of a soldier fights only at night?”
“This kind.” He twitched aside the cloth that had covered the body.
I tore my glance away from the ruined face with its eyes that stared up into nothingness, and looked at the body. It was as white as any fish belly I’d ever seen, all right, except for a lurid pink streak all along one side.
“We handled him like eggs,” I said. “How did he get so bruised?”
“Death was instantaneous,” said Quilty. “His heart ceased to function, so of course he did not exsanguinate—that is, he did not bleed out. The discoloration you see is where the blood settled after death.” He rolled the body onto its side. “You can see the mark of perhaps a thwart here on his shoulder. And over here, this pair of marks would indicate that a seaman rested his feet on our friend here while he rowed.” Giving me a sideways glance while I pretended an interest in the deckbeams overhead, he turned the body back over. “Now look you here at his breast.”
“Another tattoo,” said Peter. “A hand clutching a heart.”
“A white hand clutching a black heart,” said Quilty. “And more Latin.” He pointed at the words on the scrolls above and below the hand and heart.
“Bellum internecinum,” read Wickett. “A war of extinction. Extinction of whom?”
“We arrive at that anon,” said Quilty. “Look you at the lower scroll.”
I peered around him to see. It read Deus Vult.
“The rallying cry of the first Crusade: ‘God Wills It,’” sneered Peter. The tips of his pointed nose and chin seem to reach for each other like the horns of a crescent moon. “If God wills it, we will never see another murder in His name again.”
“Exactly so, sir,” said Quilty. He tapped the tattoo with a blunt forefinger. “And in the quadrants, reading from the upper left, we have the initials A. M. D. G., for Ad majorem Dei gloriam.”
“‘For the greater glory of God,’” said Peter. “So he was a papist.”
“No,” said Quilty. “I have seen it before, and not in a church.”
“Where then?”
“In Philadelphia during the yellow jack epidemic of ’93,” said Quilty. “I had the honor of consulting with Dr. Benjamin Rush.” He preened, a gesture he suppressed as soon as he made it. “The troubles had commenced with mumps the previous December. Scarlatina anginosa, or scarlet fever, also bega
n to exhibit during that time, and continued so through the spring and into summer. By July its symptoms were of great violence, which we treated with vomits and purges—to little effect, I thought, but most of our patients survived. Toward the end of July the heat was such that the aged began to die of it. Bilious remitting fevers made their appearance at that time, as well. I remarked that it was very much like the so-called break-bone fever that struck the city in 1780.”
“I make myself comfortable, Mr. Quilty,” said Peter, seating himself on the edge of one of the hanging cots, “although I am pregnant with desire to know what this has to do with our friend here.”
“I arrive at that anon, sir. August brought cooler temperatures. Cholera morbus and the remitting fevers were everywhere, it seemed. Refugees from the first slave rebellion in San Domingo began to arrive at that time. They brought the influenza with them, which seized the city but caused little morbidity. A heavy rain fell on the twenty-fifth.”
Peter twined his fingers around each other, a habitual gesture with him that usually portended some minor torment for whoever was annoying him at the moment.
“It was the last rain that fell for many a week,” said the surgeon. “The river fell. The contents of every puddle and rain barrel grew putrid and gave rise to clouds of mosquitoes. They were a great discomfort to the well and the sick alike.”
“What, Mr. Quilty,” said Peter, “have mosquitoes to do with an epidemic of yellow jack?”
“Those were Dr. Rush’s exact words when I suggested a connection, sir, and in just that peevish tone—he was even then the most famous physician in America, and I had yet to finish my studies. To continue: On the nineteenth of August he condescended to stop in as I was treating a woman in Water Street. She was in extremis, vomiting all the while. We gave her tonics and cordials, but she soon died. As we left that place I remarked to Dr. Rush that I had seen an unusual number of bilious fevers in the neighborhood, all accompanied by the severest malignity, and that five of my patients had died within sight of the very place on which we stood—one of them within twelve hours of the fever’s onset.
“Dr. Rush investigated the matter and discovered that in each case the illness was brought on by inhaling the noxious effluvia of a great pile of coffee rotting on Ball’s wharf nearby. You could hardly get away from it, the stench so pervaded the entire street. He at once pronounced the nature of our doom: the bilious remitting yellow fever.”
Peter and I had bent over the corpse as Quilty talked. I near jumped out of my skin at the mention of fever, what with the way that corpse seemed to stare with its empty eyes, but Peter said merely: “Mr. Quilty, does this body exhibit any signs of yellow jack?”
“Not at all. Death, sir, was caused by that great hole in his throat.”
“Then pray tell us what all this has to do with the body.”
“Everything, sir, as you shall hear. I was fetched one morning in great secrecy to see a man in Arch Street. He was very far gone with the bilious remitting fever. He asked me was he to die. Naturally I laughed off the suggestion, as I find that fear of death has a way of bringing it about. However, he clutched at my coat with a strength that surprised me in one in his condition, and his eyes were as intense as a demon’s. ‘Do not lie,’ he said. ‘If my end is near, I need to be released.’ Thinking he wanted a minister, I asked him what his church was. And he said, ‘Hell is my church, and Lucifer is my angel.’ I asked him what he meant by such a thing. And he said, ‘I kill niggers.’”
“A murderer, then, confessing his sins,” said Peter.
“A rectifier of divine error, in his eyes,” said Quilty. “No, sir, it was no confession that he made. It was more in the line of reporting that he had done his duty.”
“His duty?” said I. Maybe it was the closeness of the room, maybe it was the stench of pig shit wafting in from next door, but I suddenly had to swallow repeatedly to keep from puking.
“Yes, his duty. Naturally I feared no physical assault from one in his condition, but looking into his eyes was like looking into the depths of his very soul and finding nothing but the emptiest of voids. I have never seen such an abyss in a man’s eyes . . . I confess it rattled me as no doctor should ever be. I was reminded of Milton’s line about Lucifer.”
“Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell,” quoted Peter. “At another time it would be instructive to ponder if Hell is an actual place of torment, or if its torment is rather the pain of exile from God’s presence— but now is not such a time. Pray continue, Mr. Quilty.”
“Aye aye, sir. I purged him with ten grains each of calomel and jalap, and took a few ounces of blood from him while I considered my reply. When at last I regained my composure I asked him why he would tell me such a thing. He said it was because his brother knights had fled the city and he had no one else to tell.”
“Brother knights?” said I. “What was he, a Freemason?”
“Oh no, Freemasons don’t go in for such wickedness, I assure you. No, he was a Knight of the White Hand.”
“The White Hand?” said Peter. “It reeks of the stage.”
“Nonetheless, sir, these self-styled knights take themselves very seriously. Now, during the course of my examination I had noticed an odd tattoo on his breast, the very same as this fellow has—”
“The connection at long last,” said Peter, throwing up his hands.
Quilty bowed. “And he now dragged his nails across this tattoo and said—his breath came in gasps—‘Lecit,’ then ‘iure divino.’ I assumed him to mean ‘Divine law allows it.’”
“Allows what?”
“The murder of Negroes, sir. What, have you not been listening?”
“With every ear I possess,” said Peter.
“The Knights of the White Hand, as I later discovered,” said Quilty, “is a purposefully obscure brotherhood whose goal is as abominable as it is ambitious. It is to remove all the nonwhite races from America.”
“And do what with ’em, send ’em back to Africa?” I laughed at the notion.
“No indeed,” said Quilty, shutting me up with a frown. “It was the task of him and his fellows to hunt down runaway slaves. Philadelphia is the headquarters of many such bounty men, you know, it being the nearest city of any size above Mason and Dixon’s line. Many runaways seek haven in the City of Brotherly Love. But instead of returning the poor brutes to bondage for the reward, these fiends simply murder them. They take especial delight in kidnapping free blacks to use in terrible rituals. He described these vicious rites to me in detail and with appetite, despite his rapidly fading strength and the black vomit that spewed from his throat.
“I am not a godly man, but when he had done I begged him to repent. He laughed . . . I can still hear the ghastly rattle in his chest. He was seized with rigors, and his pulse, which had been languid, became intense, as if his heart endeavored to leap from his body. He beckoned me to put an ear to his lips. ‘Dixi,’ he said, and died.”
“Good riddance,” said Peter. “You informed the authorities, I take it?”
“I, sir, did not. Not because I was bound by the Hippocratic oath. I had not completed my studies, as I said. But in my ignorance I hoped he was simply a madman—that his Arcane Empire, as he called it, was simply the figment of a diseased mind.”
“Certainly it is the product of a diseased mind,” said Peter. He pulled himself out of the cot and rubbed his legs.
“Indeed, sir. But I said figment.” Pity and disgust mixed in Quilty’s face as he touched the corpse before him. “I was naïve—which is not an excuse for my failure to act, but merely an explanation. See here.” He unlocked a cabinet and took from it a sword and dagger and laid them beside the corpse. Next he unwrapped the dead man’s clothing and took from it a sword that seemed a twin of the first. “That sword and dagger were given me by my patient as payment for my services,” he said, his lip curling. “They have given me such horrors through the years that I have never been able to part with them, for fear they should f
all into evil hands.” He touched the second sword with a shudder. “This one arrived with our dead friend here.”
He drew the sword from its scabbard. It was a typical gentleman’s small-sword on first appearance, with a black leather grip wrapped in silver wire, and a hilt and guard of steel. The steel indicated that it was a fine weapon, or at least one of a small lot made to order by a craftsman, with none of the molded brass you see on military swords turned out by the hundredweight. He pointed at the engraving on the sword’s long, tapering blade. “You see here the same design and mottoes as on the body.”
Peter took the sword from him. “Good Damascus steel,” he said, tensing the blade, and then examining it closely. “I see no foundry mark. Which in itself is not unusual.” He parried an imaginary opponent, tierce to seconde, seconde to quinte, bowed low though he was under the deckbeams. “The balance is excellent—murder in the hands of a good swordsman.” With a lightning advance and thrust he sank the blade into the bulkhead. The pigs squealed on the other side. “I dislike the death’s-head on the pommel, though,” he said, leaving the sword quivering in the woodwork. “It is sufficient to know we all must die without having memento mori served upon us from all sides. You say the other blade is the same, Mr. Quilty?”
“Its very brother, sir.”
I had been giving the dagger a going over. It, too, had a death’shead for a pommel. The grip was black leather bound with silver wire, like the sword, and the straight hilt was of steel. The blade was some nine or ten inches long and tapered to a nasty point. It bore the same Latin inscriptions as the swords and body.
“And your dagger matches this one, Mr. Quilty?”
“No, Mr. Graves, that is my dagger. There was nonesuch among this man’s effects.”
“But there was,” I said. “He slashed my sleeve with it. I put it in the bundle myself.”
Peter shook out the black cloak the dead man had worn, but there was no dagger in it. “Well, it is gone now,” he said. “Mr. Quilty, was the body ever out of your sight?”
“Of a certainty, sir,” said Quilty. “During the middle watch, when I slept. For a few minutes this morning before the engagement. When I was at dinner this afternoon with you gentlemen. And after dinner when we detained that Yankee privateer. I came on deck to watch. But while I was at my post here this morning expecting the momentary arrival of wounded men, I had a few moments to spare. I unwrapped him from his cloak and found the sword right away, of course, and having seen it, I immediately looked for a dagger. But there was no dagger even then.”
The War of Knives Page 6