Bone Rattler (14 page)

A red-bearded man in remnants of what had been a coachman’s greatcoat appeared from the gloom and bent over Duncan’s face. “Who gave ye the right to pick one of us to die?” he snarled.

“McGregor, I never—”

“Serv’ ’im ’is tea,” McGregor snarled.

Duncan’s head was slammed downward, submerged into the festering soup of seawater, urine, mildew, dead rats, and pitch. He did not struggle at first, thinking they sought only to frighten him. But they kept pushing, pressing him down, until his lungs were on fire, and he flailed out, fighting for breath, clearing the water and gasping for only an instant before being pressed into it again, the filthy spume biting his mouth and nostrils. The dunking was repeated a third time, until finally his assailant jerked him upright, gasping, retching.

“There was no murder on this ship until you named it so,” the bearded man growled. “Now the only murder that worries us be the one you be committing against one of us.” On McGregor’s knuckles were drops of fresh blood.

Duncan, gaining his breath, spat more filth from his mouth. “Until another man is taken by the true killer,” he shot back, pushing the arm away from his neck.

“Ye name one of us, McCallum, and every jack one of us will name ye. A pretty boy raised below the borders, just another English lapdog, we thought at first. Nay a Scot at all. Now we see ye’re worse, a slimeworm sent to consume us from the inside out. Poor Evering sniffed y’er true scent and ye had to silence him.” McGregor leaned closer, his crooked yellow teeth inches from Duncan’s face. “Ye made it easy, boy, paying us a call. We won’t even have to kill ye. We’ll just knock the senses from ye and cut a few slices on y’er limbs. By the time ye wake, the rats will have eaten half y’er flesh.” The arm began to close around his neck again.

Duncan did not remember all the oaths of the Hebrides fishermen he had learned as a boy, but he recalled enough of them to practice on McGregor, in the coarse Gaelic of the islands. He was invoking the
glaistig,
the
uruisg,
and the one-eyed
direach,
vile supernatural creatures all, when the ragged old Scot, eyes round with surprise and dread, clamped a hand over his mouth and pulled him from his assailant’s arms.

Duncan pushed the hand away. “The English don’t conquer us by killing us. All they have to do is play to the fears and suspicions
that have kept Scots killing one another for centuries,” he said in a simmering voice. He reached into his pocket, extracting the piece of folded newsprint Lister had found in Evering’s cabin. “I came from no barracks,” he stated as he handed the paper to McGregor.

The old Scot bared his teeth like an angry dog, but took the paper and leaned into a lantern.

“Whatever you may think about me,” Duncan said, “you know Adam was one of you. He told something to Evering and Evering died for it. A secret about the Company. Perhaps Adam himself died for it.”

“Death to spies!” came an unsteady, boyish voice from the shadows.

McGregor, ignoring the cry, stroked his red beard. “What are ye saying, McCallum?”

Duncan spat more of the filth from his mouth and lowered himself onto a low pile of ballast bricks. “How many of you were taken out of court together?”

The nail, moving toward his throat again, was halted by McGregor’s outstretched arm. “I was alone, the only one taken from me town,” the red-bearded man said.

“I think everyone was,” Duncan said. No one refuted him. “They sought only certain types. Not just those with backs strong enough for seven years’ labor.”

“To what end?”

“To an end Adam glimpsed. We are not going there just to build some rich man’s town. Where were you taken?” Duncan asked. “Where were each of you ordered into the Company?”

“Dunkeld,” McGregor grunted, and nudged the man beside him.

“Oban,” the man said, followed by quick answers from the others. Fort William. Girvan, Kilmarnock, Ballantrae, Fairlie, Culross.

“All recruited from different places, so the men did not know one another. To make it easier to tame us but also to make it more difficult to know what we all shared. What is it we don’t see?” Duncan pressed. “Half have been in America before. What of the rest? If we cannot understand, we are doomed to suffer the consequences.”

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 wasn’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.