Bone Rattler (13 page)

H
E WAS CHASING A LAMB in the kitchen dooryard as his mother watched from the granite step, laughing as he and the lamb tumbled together into a bed of flowers. Then the joyful bleats turned to snarls as the lambs grew long, sharp teeth and began scratching at his flesh.

Duncan exploded into wakefulness, gasping and groping in the dark for something to swing against the rats. Suddenly the cover of a lantern lifted an inch, an arm’s length away. There were no rats, only strong, callused fingers wrapped around his leg, shaking him awake.

“Y’er scarletback fled,” a raspy voice declared. “Like a brigade of French were at his heels.”

As Duncan rubbed his eyes, squinting at Lister’s dim shape, his hand went to his throat. There was an unfamiliar bitter taste in his mouth, a soreness in his windpipe. He glanced at the tin tankard that had been handed through the door in the night, filled with sweet hot tea. “Woolford’s gone? How?”

“A fishing schooner overtook us,” Lister said as he squatted beside Duncan, handing him a lump of gray meat wrapped in a limp cabbage leaf. “Smaller, more spry than this old bucket. As soon as the lookout called out, Woolford dashed below, then when she drew close, he hailed her, offered a reward for their trouble. She can close
haul in this wind and make the harbor in a few hours. We’ll be a day and more.”

“Alone?”

Lister reached behind him and produced a stained, tattered sea bag, the one Duncan had used to carry his only earthly possessions on board. “Woolford, two sailors, and a man in a cloak went over in the ship’s boat. With two trunks. Two sailors came back, no trunks.”

“Who was the other?”

“I was below until they were clear of the ship. But Frasier’s missing.”

Duncan retrieved the crock of water in the corner of his cell and drained it. Still the acrid taste lingered. “The tea you brought,” he said. “What was in it?”

“I brought no tea.”

He had been drugged. Someone had dosed him, disguising it with the sweet tea, which he had ravenously consumed. But why, why would someone want him drugged in his cell? With a stab of worry he touched the stone in his pocket, the medallion on his neck, even examined the linen holding the button. Nothing had been disturbed.

“I heard what you did for me, Mr. Lister,” he said. “You lied. You took the beating meant for me.”

Lister forced a grin. “Ye were in no shape, lad. ’Twas far from the first time fer me. Once ye grow good scars on y’er back, ’tain’t so bad. Like scratching an old itch.”

“You brought me back from the dead that day on the mast, then took my punishment. Never in my life have I owed so much to one man.”

“Tell me something, Clan McCallum,” Lister said. “Do ye ken what the New World means?” The question seemed strangely urgent, somehow difficult for the old mate to express.

A different kind of prison, Duncan was tempted to say. “So far it seems to have a lot to do with dying.”

“I’ve been there before. New York, Boston, Philadelphia. What I know is that ye can breathe there. It’s about what is in front of ye,
’tain’t about where ye were born, or what ye were born. The present don’t have to compromise with the past.” The old man eyes flashed. “I am going to trot down that gangway, dance a jig, and pick a blossom for the first lass I see.”

Duncan’s long hours in the darkness had left two burning impressions of the New World, a vague but fearful sense of something deadly lurking there with its eyes on him and the Company, and the demeaning way Arnold had stared at him when he was attired in the Ramsey clothes, his uniform for America. “For me it seems the New World will mean yes sir and no sir and wipe the mud from the young master’s shoes.”

Lister seemed uninterested in his wit. “I will tell ye how to repay me, Clan McCallum. Me, and the souls of y’er blessed parents.”

Duncan’s eyes narrowed.

“Go with the good reverend and take Evering’s place. He be a harsh master but means ye well. Do y’er duty to the Ramsey Company and to the clan. Give the New World a chance. Preserve y’erself. What ye did for that lass in the storm, ’twas the work of a clan chief. If a killer be seeking to thin our ranks, ye be the man who can stop him.”

Surprised at the emotion that flushed the man’s face, Duncan hesitated, then soberly spat into his own palm and for the second time that week took Lister’s rough, callused hand in his own. As Duncan returned Lister’s gaze, it seemed he was looking into the eyes of his father and grandfather, it seemed he was making a vow not just to Lister but to all of them, to all the old Scots.

Down the corridor Duncan heard the scurrying of tiny feet. It was the middle of the night. “Take me to Evering’s chamber,” he abruptly asked.

“With the captain ready to have y’er tripe for stew? Not likely.”

“You know Arnold demands an answer to Evering’s murder,” Duncan said. “I will not lie to satisfy him. You know what he will do if I do not find the truth.”

The words seemed to take the protest out of Lister’s eyes. He sighed, then stood, covering the lamp again.

“Give me something to act as a weapon. Your baton. If we are noticed, I shall make it clear I forced you.”

“Be quick and keep y’er head down,” the keeper whispered after handing Duncan the short, thick stick the keepers used to enforce discipline.

Lister took Duncan through a maze of small holds on the cargo deck, then up a ladder that opened into the forecabins, pausing every few moments to listen for sounds of men moving in the night, then creeping along a dim corridor, unlatching a cabin door, and gesturing Duncan inside. As Lister closed the door behind them and lifted the lantern cover, Duncan saw that the cabin was not much larger than his cell. It had been stripped, the long, swinging bed box hanging empty on its gimbals, the shelves behind it bare. The journal he had so desperately hoped to find was gone.

“His books?” Duncan whispered.

“Packed up by the keepers. Marked for Ramsey House in the port of New York.”

The answers Adam had expected him to find had been boxed and sealed, and Duncan would somehow have to track them in America. He swallowed his disappointment and surveyed the tiny chamber. Above the bed were two ribbons, one faded pink, the other willow green. Stains of candle wax spotted the floor beside the bed. While Lister kept watch at the entrance, Duncan tilted the bed and lay in it as the dead man would have, his longer legs hanging over the end. He could touch the ribbons above, and knew from their discolored appearance that Evering must have often done so, dozens of times, as he must have long studied the missing chart that had hung on the four small nails still protruding from the planks above. This had been Evering’s life on board, lying in the coffin-like box, reading by candlelight despite the captain’s stern orders against open flames, gazing at his chart and the once-delicate ribbons. Dreaming about the comet he hoped to put his name to. Writing letters for the prisoners. And tending to the diseased banshee in the front cabin.

The shadows above the bed were so thick Duncan almost missed
the slip of paper stuck into a joint overhead. A drawing of an arrow, he saw as he raised the paper into the light. A very particular arrow, for the shaft was shaded along its length, perhaps indicating paint, and the fletching likewise held four segments in different shades, giving the effect of stripes. Underneath, in the small, precise hand Evering used for his scientific notes, were two words—
Wolf Clan
—then short phrases that made his skin crawl.
Small bones speaking. Truth beads. Fishspeaker on the river. False faces.
With a trembling hand, he tucked the paper into his pocket.

Climbing out of the bed, he knelt and studied the shadows underneath, quickly spotting not just a few more shards of glass where Cameron had thrown them in the corner, but several others, much smaller, in a tight circle on the deck beyond the edge of the bed, pressed into the wood. “A cloth, Mr. Lister,” Duncan asked as he scraped a few shards from the planks. “Something to put these in.”

The old mate futilely searched his pockets, shook his head, and turned his nervous gaze back out the door.

In the shadows was a chipped ceramic pot, for Evering’s convenience in the night, in which lay ashes of burned paper. Duncan looked back at the circle of glass particles. Here was where Evering had dropped a dosing vial perhaps only moments before his death, not just dropped it but smashed it deliberately, perhaps angrily. Duncan considered the scene. Evering had smashed the vial, then not long after been knocked to his knee, probably by the first blow of the stolen hammer, then received the second blow while on the floor. And at about the same time, someone—whether Evering or his killer, Duncan had no way of knowing—had burned papers in the night pot.

Duncan gestured for Lister to hold the lantern closer as he studied the ashes in the pot. He saw curved lines on a charred scrap, then at the very bottom words untouched by the flame, in Evering’s hand.
The old fishspeaker will know,
it said.
Stag’s Head. Show him the medallion.

As they returned to the cell corridor, Duncan paused and put a hand on the sailor’s arm. “After Woolford’s chest was pilfered, had you seen Adam with Evering?”

Lister rubbed his grizzled chin a moment. “Aye. On the deck the eve before young Munroe died. A Sunday eve. The Reverend held vespers for the prisoners, and Evering and Adam sat nigh each other. Afterwards, the professor was writing a letter for Adam.”

“But Adam,” Duncan pointed out, “could write his own letters.”

Lister’s brow knitted. “So ’e could.”

Evering had not been writing a letter, Duncan knew, but recording notes of something Adam had confided to him. Adam and Evering had shared a secret, and both had died within days of doing so. A secret about the New World. “What do you know of this place Edentown where they take us?”

“On the frontier, a few days from port. Being built by the great laird. Some of the men know of it, say the road to it is lined with graves,” Lister added, then hurried Duncan toward the ship’s ladder that led below.

But Duncan paused when they reached the door to the cell corridor. “Are the pumps still manned?” he asked.

“Finished. Only a foot or so of water in the—” Lister broke off and muttered a low curse as realization lit his eyes.

“You must go to my cell,” Duncan said. “Pull the door shut behind you. If someone comes, pretend to be unconscious. It must look as though I overpowered you.” He lifted the hooded lantern from the peg where they had left it.

“Ye’ll be dead five minutes after the captain finds ye.”

“There are questions to be answered.”

“Don’t do this,” Lister pleaded. “There’s others who won’t take so long as the captain.”

“Like you said,” Duncan rejoined, “a clan chief dies on his own terms.
Redeat.”
He stole back into the darkness, working his way down the row of cells to a small floor hatch at the end of the corridor. It was the work of less than a minute to pry open the hatch, releasing the garbage-midden stench of the bilges. He clenched his jaw, fighting a tremor of nausea, then dropped into the low, cramped space and, stooping, began moving along the keel, the dimmed lantern in front of him.

The captain of the
Anna Rose
fancied that the Company prisoners stayed closely confined in their hold except for their hours of daylight exercise. But by the end of the first month they had found a loose plank in the head, at the opposite end of the prisoners deck. Within a week they had loosened two more, discovering access not to freedom but to a secret though fetid retreat. While they seldom had to fight for the pleasure of sitting in the foul, near-suffocating compartment, certain prisoners regularly descended into the bilge in the middle of the night, for the pleasure of cursing the king in private.

Wading through the calf-high muck, Duncan reached the large crib of ballast bricks over the center of the keel, awkwardly crawling forward with the muted lantern held high. Something scurried on the stones beside him. The rats might dine on the decks above, but here is where they nested.

He had taken only a few cramped steps past the ballast bricks when a strong arm reached out of the shadows, clamping around his throat, and the lantern was snatched from his hand. He did not struggle but let himself be half led, half dragged through the bilge water until suddenly his lantern, and a second, were fully uncovered. Eight men stared at him with fierce, angry expressions. His assailant held a long, sharpened nail to his neck, against his artery.

“Pleased to see ye, y’er highness,” the man sneered. “We saved some Company tea for ye.”

“Rats won’t have to go hunting tonight,” another crowed.

“I only—” Duncan’s protest was choked away by the metal pressing deeper into his flesh. He met the gaze of the filthy, unshaven men, the hardest of the Company. Each brandished a jagged fragment of ballast stone, a weapon sufficient to do murder. Behind them someone moaned in the dark.