Bone Rattler (5 page)

When he stirred again—was it hours, or only minutes that had passed?—there was a new sound, someone whispering low, rhythmic words that had the semblance of prayers. Their meaning seemed to linger at the edge of his consciousness, as if he should recognize them, but the words were not in English, nor in Gaelic, nor in any other language of Europe.

Through the darkness he could not discover the source, only knew that the longer the whispers were spoken, the more they made his skin crawl. They could have been from the murderer next door or from another down the corridor, or even from someone roaming the aisle itself. Or something clinging to the hull outside. The dead were trying to take over the ship, the sailors had insisted. Or perhaps they were just trying to share their secrets.

He began shivering, though his wound burned like a hot poker. In the fever that took hold, questions and faces swirled in his mind. Lister. Evering. The ghostly woman who had drowned. Adam Munroe, again and again Adam, whom Duncan would dishonor because he was incapable of grasping his friend’s dying bequest. Nothing of that terrible day made sense, but he knew better than to think everything unconnected. Someone had performed the work of the devil in the compass room, leaving Adam’s strange medallion, then the melancholy angel had materialized on the mast and chosen to die by leaping into the raging water. The captain and Arnold had wanted him to prove no one had died. But instead he had shown them that Evering had died, and not, Duncan knew, in the way it appeared to the crew. Evering, who held the key, had died before Duncan could learn how to save himself.

Redeat,
he kept hearing Lister say, over and over, and he kept seeing the chastising way the old Scot had looked at him. Surely it
was just a bad joke, that anyone, even a dried-up old sailor, would consider Duncan a clan chief.

He slumped against a corner of the cell, the visions strangely congealing like the blood on his ribs. Adam and Evering, supporting the porcelain white angel between them, ran on the surface of the ocean, pursuing the ship, shouting something to Duncan that he could never quite discern. The captain poked a crimson-hot iron into his ribs. His father whipped him with thistles.

When he awoke again, much later, his mind was clear of the fog brought by the fever. A dim light shone down the corridor of cells, from a lantern hung on a beam. A crock of water had been left inside his door, and he gulped it down before noticing that his wound had been bound with a strip of cloth tied around his ribs. By the door lay another piece of cloth, an extra bandage. Not a bandage as such, his fingers told him, but a linen handkerchief, something from the traveling kit of a gentleman. Inside its careful folds was a small metallic object. He held it up to the meager light seeping through the hatch, touched it to his tongue. It was a button, a silver button with flecks of dried blood.

For the first time in a week he felt hunger, a ravenous, piercing hunger. As he lifted his britches from the peg, ready to pull them on, he explored the pockets, hoping to find something, a scrap of leather, even a chip of wood to chew. But then his fingers touched the hard, cold stone Adam had given him, and his appetite vanished. Beneath the stone was the medallion, which he examined for the first time, his fingers running over it in the dark. The storm was gone, the real world had returned, and he could no longer rely on demons or ghosts for explanations.

He had never known Adam to take the medallion from his neck, but someone had taken it, only to leave it on the bloody compass two days after Adam’s death. He had sometimes glimpsed the colorful pattern on the leather circle inside Adam’s shirt, the shape of a black bird like a crow surrounded by red and yellow concentric rings, but he had always assumed the pattern was made of beads.
Now he found they were not beads, but rows of flat strands—not glass, not reed, waxy-hard yet flexible. It was not of the Old World. He explored the bulge at the back with his fingers, surprised to discover that something small was sewn inside the soft leather. Without knowing why, he draped the amulet around his own neck and covered it with his shirt, then pulled on his britches. He sat, clutching the carved stone, squeezing it until his fingers hurt, hating it, irrationally blaming it for Adam’s death, then, as his senses surrendered to despair again, slowly pounding his fist against it. Finally, his strength and emotion spent, he leaned against the hull, listening in the dark to the rush of the water, sensing changes in its rhythms, wondering if somewhere in the sounds were the last words of Adam, spoken as he swam downward, leaving his unfinished earthly business in Duncan’s unready hands.

He fell into a languid trance, the carved stone clutched to his chest, his ear to the wood, his thoughts tangled with images of Adam and Evering and the disturbing, unintelligible whispers he had heard, until suddenly he bolted upright, wide awake. “The buttons!” he cried, understanding the first meager piece of the puzzle.

Voices rose in the distance. Kneeling at the hatch, he saw for the first time past the door, into an antechamber with a heavy table and a steep ladder stair that led to the upper decks. A shadow moved along the cells, pausing at each one, then dropping a small, hard crust of bread and a rotting apple into his own cell before disappearing, closing the outer door with the loud snap of a bolt. The voices, he realized as he ate, were those of inmates down the corridor, speaking to one another through their door holes, the meal having resurrected them. Duncan could not make out distinct words, only the hopeless tones in which they were spoken.

“Are you there?” he whispered through his own tiny hatch after he had gulped down the food, suddenly yearning for any human company, even that of the madwoman. “What did you mean about the black wind?” What was her crime, he wondered, what awful thing had she done to deserve condemnation to the deadly tropical
plantations? He had once heard of a woman sent away for killing her infant. “I was frightened of the storm, too,” he offered, his voice weakening, shamed at his desperation for a single word of acknowledgment. “Did you hear those words earlier? Like some dreadful spirit speaking through the hull. Have you heard it before?”

But no reply came. Had he indeed imagined the words? Was he losing his mind?

In the hours to come, he learned how the prisoners distinguished between night and day. Night was when the rats came.

 

 

He woke to the rattle of iron. A figure stepped into his cell, pulling the door behind him, squatting with a dim, hooded candle lantern.

“Brought ye a blanket,” the man whispered, handing Duncan a tattered wool sheet and another crock of water. “How be the ribs?”

“Better, thanks to you, Mr. Lister,” Duncan said after he nearly drained the crock. “The ship?”

“Captain wanted to make for Halifax for repairs. Reverend Arnold would have none of it. Foretopmast is gone. Prisoners on the pumps these past thirty hours. They had me clean the compass room.”

“It’s where you found that button? The thing jammed in the heart?”

“Aye. A cold, angry deed. A map was engraved on it, finely worked. A lord’s jewelry. Whoever stole it likely realized he best not be found with such a thing on this boat.” He extracted a piece of salt pork from his pocket and extended it toward Duncan. “Christ on the cross!” he exclaimed. “Y’er hands!”

Duncan held his fingers in front of the dim light. Blood oozed from a dozen small, swollen bites. “The wound on my side was still bleeding. The rats wanted to feed.” He pointed to two dead rodents, lying where he had slammed them against the wall.

The keeper uttered a low groan. “Close the hatch after meals are delivered,” Lister instructed as he bent and tossed the dead things into the passage. “At night, block the bottom of the door.” He
glanced nervously back toward the door. Lister was not, Duncan recalled, one of the keepers authorized to be on the cell deck.

“Surely I need not bear another night of this,” Duncan protested. “Let them confine me to the prison hold. I did nothing to—”

The old mate leaned forward, his raised hand cutting Duncan off. “The captain was like a madman. Kicked away the one trying to revive ye after they hauled ye up, tried to heave ye back over the rail. Reverend Arnold took him aside. Ye would have thought ye were a Ramsey firstborn the way he carried on, not a Ramsey slave. When they finished speaking, two sailors carried ye down here, the captain shouting that he would haul ye by the heels for sharkbait. He’s brought charges against ye. Two counts of escape on the day of the storm. Deliberate sabotage of the ship. He says fer that one he has the right to try ye and hang ye from a yardarm. Arnold had ye put in here as much to save ye as to punish ye, lad. Show y’erself to the captain and he’s liable to drive a spike through y’er neck. There’s bartering goin’ on as we speak.”

“Bartering?”

“The captain drew up a bill of damages alongside his charges. He demands payment from the Ramsey Company. The Reverend counters, claims it was the negligence of the ship’s crew that nigh caused us to be lost, that with the crew at their stations Professor Evering would n’er been lost, that the captain owes him for loss of the Company tutor.”

Duncan twisted his hands together, staring at the filthy straw at his feet. “Who decides the outcome?”

“All I know is that ye be the prize. The mate says if the captain wins, he’s goin’ to tie ye into a shroud with ballast rocks and drop ye over the stern.”

For a long moment there was no sound but the murmuring of the sea. “Was there a proper funeral for her at least?” Duncan asked in a hollow tone.

Surprise creased Lister’s brow. “Ye don’t remember? Ye brought her up, lad!” the old keeper declared, wonder in his voice. “We thought ye were gone for certain, what with a half second to tie that
knot and the captain’s bullet in ye. A chance in a thousand. She was mostly drowned. When they carried you away, I saw Reverend Arnold working on her, pushing her belly, but then I was needed aloft and saw no more.”

Duncan’s head shot up. “She lives?”

“There’s been no burial.”

The news brought an unexpected rush of emotion. The angel had fallen and he had plucked her from the sea.

“But who . . . ?”

“The invalid from the front cabins.” Lister leaned close to Duncan, whispering now. “I’ve seen her before, I’d swear it. Last autumn. I was on an eastbound merchantman, full of timber for Liverpool. She was a passenger. I’d not forget that face, so young and graceful yet so old. Like all the beauty had been burnt out of her. Stayed in her cabin nigh all the time. Traveled with a Greek gentleman.”

“Greek?”

“Put me in mind of the sponge divers I’d seen in the Aegean. Dark, silent. Learned. Genteel enough. Walked the deck all hours of the night. Drew diagrams of constellations, pictures of the great fishes. Had me teach him sailors’ knots. Carved me a little wolf, ’cause I’d said I had a dog like one as a boy. Socrates Moon, he was named.”

“Who was she?”

“A princess, he said. A princess in exile, in danger somehow, so her name could not be spoken.”

“You make it sound a fairy tale.”

“Not my words, but his.”

Duncan rose and put his hand on Lister’s shoulder as the old mate turned to leave. “The day before Adam died,” he said. “Someone’s chest was broken into. The captain accused me of theft.”

“Ye ship with dogs, everyone gets fleas,” Lister declared with a sigh. The Ramsey Company included several slipfasts and pocketmen in its ranks. Possessions of the sailors, even officers, had sometimes appeared on the prison deck, always prompting a flurry of barter and, sometimes, betting.

“But a new horde of trinkets appeared that day,” Duncan explained. “Sewing needles. A flint striker. A horn drinking cup. Musket flints. Wooden buttons.” Adam had never had wooden buttons until the day before he died.

“His honor the lobsterback.”

“Lieutenant Woolford?”

Lister leaned closer, as if unwilling for even a rat to hear. “After we recovered from the storm, he turned out every man in the Company, with the captain’s best bullies at his side, searched the prisoners, then searched every hammock. He cursed the lot of them, demanded the return of his property. He had a club in his hand and fire in his eyes. Even Cameron was scared,” he added, referring to the short-tempered, barrel-chested man who led the keepers. “He said Woolford knows the ways of the heathens, who can inflict pain we have never dreamt of. He struck those who resisted, clipped young Frasier just for asking questions. A trunk in his cabin was broken into.”

“What did he recover?”

“A bullet mold. A steel ax head. The horn cup. Things for America. He went through Adam’s kit, twice. Seemed fair kicked about when he finished.”

“You mean he did not find what he sought?”

“Most of his property he recovered, ’cause he said none be punished if they surrendered it then and there. But I’d say what he wanted most of all he didn’t find. I’d say he was confirming to himself that Munroe took it with him.”

“Took with him?”

“We all saw it. All of us near the bow that day. Woolford. Arnold. Cameron. When Adam was on the maintop after scratching those marks, he raised his hand. Something small was in it, something black. Put me in mind of a lump of coal. But t’ain’t a piece of coal that worries our soldier,” Lister said and reached for the door. “A black bag of jewels perhaps. The instant Woolford saw Adam swing off the mainmast, he began running to reach him.”

It was true, Duncan recalled. Woolford had arrived at his shoulder, gasping, as Adam had disappeared into the water. When Duncan turned, the lieutenant had looked like he had been kicked by a bull. He fought the temptation to touch the black stone in his pocket.

“What questions?” Duncan asked. “What was Frasier seeking?” The young Scot, barely out of his teens, was from a remote Highland family, raised by a maiden aunt after his parents had been taken. One of the Company’s many poorly kept secrets was the fact that his aunt had paid for him to be made a trusty keeper.