Bone Rattler (8 page)

Duncan glanced toward the cells, hating Arnold for so bloodlessly recounting Flora’s fate within her earshot, then looked back at the soldier. He had seen the cool anticipation on Woolford’s face before, in the courtroom crowd when his uncle had been sentenced. It was a moment when a life hung in the balance. He longed for the bleak hours in the cell when he had nothing to keep him alive but the insane notion of being clan chief. He had once seen a man, nearly buried alive, awaken from a coma as the gravediggers’ dirt hit his shroud, a grey shell of a man with no human spark left. That was what Arnold and Woolford had hoped to drag out of Duncan’s cell.

The quill seemed as heavy as granite when he raised it.

“When we disembark, you will be serving in the household of the Ramsey family,” Arnold declared with an approving nod. “We shall abide no foolishness, no sedition. No reckless disregard for your own life, which belongs to Lord Ramsey for the next seven years. You are beloved of God.”

Duncan stared at the vicar as Woolford lifted a second quill to witness. Had he heard the last words from any other man he would have considered them mockery. As he looked back at the parchment, he recalled the questioning, lightless eyes of Evering when they had pulled his body onto the deck. “How do I know,” he asked, his quill
pausing in midair, “that by signing I am not condemning myself to the same fate suffered by Evering?” He spoke slowly, searching the face of each man in turn.

Woolford lowered his quill, his eyes round with question. Arnold’s thin lips pressed into a cold frown.

“Surely,” Duncan declared, “you understand the last Ramsey tutor was murdered.”

Woolford leaned forward, fixing Duncan with an intense, disbelieving stare.

Arnold’s eyes turned to ice. “The professor drowned.”

“With a rope around his neck?” Duncan asked.

“We have thoroughly reviewed the tragic circumstances,” Arnold replied in a level voice. “Evering was despondent from the loss of his wife to fever last year. He has relatives back home. It does his family no favor to tell them it was suicide.”

“Suicides on ship might throw themselves over the rail,” Duncan observed, lowering the quill to the table, “or they might hang themselves. They don’t do both.”

“He simply intended his body to be recovered for Christian burial,” the vicar asserted as he closed the door and returned to the table, leaning over Duncan. “The noose made certain his death was quick. The captain’s log is complete, with my signature as witness. We have already reported that Evering slipped over the rail in the storm. I have written an obituary, to be published in London at Company expense. He is no less a hero for dying before we begin our destined work in America. The captain expects to hail an eastbound ship soon. The body and the death notice will be sent back.”

“Had he been alive when the rope was placed around his neck,” Duncan explained, speaking toward his cupped hands, “it would have bruised his flesh. There was no bruising.”

In the silence that followed, a long, agonized groan rose from the cells.

Arnold’s eyes narrowed. “You know nothing of such things.”

“I seem to recall you once sought out my medical advice.”

“You were never formally qualified as a physician or surgeon,” Arnold rejoined. He raised a corner of the parchment as though in warning.

“You both heard in court that I had three years of medical study. For most of those years I stood in a surgical hall and examined bodies brought by the magistrates, organ by organ, limb by limb. I may not be sufficiently qualified to heal the living,” Duncan admitted, “but I am quite expert at explaining the dead. Show me the body and I will show you the truth.”

The words brought a puzzled twist to Woolford’s mouth.

Arnold closed his hands together as if in prayer. “Such reckless allegations will only harm Lord Ramsey,” he said, and exchanged a somber look with Woolford. “Evering was attached to the Company.”

“On the first day of the voyage I heard you tell the assembled prisoners that the Company stands for honesty and true belief,” Duncan pointed out.

The comment quieted Arnold. “And more,” the vicar agreed. “It is an experiment under a royal warrant. When we succeed, twenty such companies will be chartered, and twenty new communities established to block the French and their savage allies. We will not fail. And we will not be distracted or disgraced. You, sir, are mistaken.”

Duncan looked up. Had Arnold just offered an answer to why the army was so interested in the convicts?

“If the ritual was not a sign of a suicide,” Duncan said, “then it is a message for the living, not the dead.”

“The bloody heart was meant for us?” Woolford’s voice had lost all its confidence. He leaned forward, suddenly and intensely interested.

Arnold slowly turned to stare at Woolford, whose reaction seemed to have taken him by surprise.

“How many in the Company have been in the New World before?” Duncan asked. Arnold pulled Duncan’s quill from his reach, as if reconsidering his offer.

“Why?” the army officer asked.

“The ritual. Some of it was from the Old World. Some of it, I believe, was not. How many, other than Adam Munroe?”

Woolford studied Duncan intently, but did not reply.

“Surely it would have occurred to you, Lieutenant,” Duncan continued, “that Adam Munroe’s death, Professor Evering’s death, the ritual, even the plunge of that poor girl into the sea, all of these events happened only after your trunk was looted. It became the Pandora’s box of the Company. What did it have in it from America?” Duncan saw not anger but deep surprise flash in Woolford’s eyes, quickly replaced by something that may have been worry. The officer stood, circled the table once, then gestured Duncan toward the ladder.

Five minutes later they were in a forward hold, a dim narrow space where the dank air carried the pungent, almost overwhelming scents of bilge water, spices, mildew, pitch, and spoiling meat. Arnold and Woolford stood by with lanterns as three keepers, led by Lister, pulled a canvas sheet from a long wooden box, then pried up the nails that secured the top. They lifted away the top and then quickly retreated, casting suspicious glances toward Duncan as they disappeared. Only Lister remained in sight, lingering uneasily near the entrance.

Professor Evering had been salted. His corpse had been cleaned before being laid in a bed of salt, his clothes neatly arranged, a worn silver timepiece added to his waistcoat. His flesh was drawn and puckered, his bloodless lips stretched in a grotesque grin. The professor’s eyes were covered with large penny coins.

Arnold stepped forward and with his fingernails pushed the pennies away, letting them fall into the salt. “Pagans,” he muttered in a disdainful tone.

“We always placed our cadavers in barrels of brine,” Duncan said in an absent tone as he studied the body, his medical training taking over. “Preserves them quite lifelike.”

“So the cook suggested,” Woolford replied. “But a barrel of brine lowered into a grave somehow seemed less than heroic. And this way we avoid the risk that twelve stone of pickled pork gets buried
instead.” His words seemed to hint at amusement, but there was only challenge in his eyes when Duncan looked up.

Duncan worked quickly, unbuttoning the collar of the dead man. Rigor mortis had long since left the body, and he pushed the head from side to side between his hands while Arnold stood back with disgust on his face. “The most valuable benefit of the office of hangman,” he explained as he worked, “is the privilege of selling his victims to the medical schools. I have examined over a score of men from the gibbet. Each one bore terrible contusions around the throat, because the rope always crushes the living tissue. See for yourself. The professor shows no such marks.” He pointed at the pale skin of the man’s neck.

“Surely this is a job for a magistrate,” Arnold protested. “Some respect is due—”

Arnold was cut off by Woolford’s raised hand. “There is no magistrate here,” the lieutenant interjected, “and soon the body will be on its way home. Surely we owe the esteemed Evering an opportunity to teach his successor.”

Duncan glanced at the doorway, where Lister lingered, looking strangely pained, then proceeded to probe Evering’s remains, starting with his hands. They were soft, unblemished, showing no sign of a struggle. The professor’s right hand clutched the small Bible Duncan had sometimes seen him reading on deck.

“I read from his own scripture at the service we held for him on deck,” Arnold explained. “He kept to his books,” he said in a louder, poised voice, as if he had decided to begin a eulogy. “When his wife died of fever a year ago he sought a new beginning. But he always seemed so lonely.”

Duncan bent, studying the book in the scholar’s hand. “Why is it damaged?” he asked. “He loved his books, he would never do that.”

“Do what?” Woolford asked.

“The last pages are torn out.” Evering’s fingers did not resist as with his own fingertip Duncan pried up the back cover far enough to glance at the last page. “Revelations. Revelations has been ripped out of his Bible.”

Arnold’s mouth opened and shut as if for an explanation, but no words came out. Someone had removed the pages about the end of the world.

Duncan began examining Evering’s attire. “Are these not the clothes he wore when pulled from the sea?”

“Dried and brushed, yes,” Arnold confirmed. “We added the waistcoat and the watch.”

His waistcoat. Duncan did not recall ever seeing Evering without his waistcoat, the pockets of which were always bulging, filled with slips of paper, even sea biscuits to share with the prisoners, who had slowly warmed to the quiet, gentle scholar. But when they had pulled him from the water, Evering had not been wearing the sleeveless garment. As if he had died before fully dressing. As if he had died in his own quarters.

“This is his everyday waistcoat,” Duncan observed. “He had a black one, for Sunday services. And this is his ordinary watch. He had a gold watch with a fob shaped like a book.”

“Gone,” Arnold replied. “The thieves are as thick as rats on this ship.”

“And his shoes?” Duncan asked.

“One of the keepers polished them,” Arnold said.

“And repaired this?” Duncan asked, pointing to the buckle on the left shoe, which was smaller and shinier than that of the right.

“I suppose,” Woolford said impatiently. “Why would we possibly—” he began, but the words died in his throat as understanding lit his eyes.

“What,” Duncan asked, “was the professor’s buckle doing by the blood-soaked compass?”

Arnold bent over the shoe as Woolford stared at it with a dark expression. Neither offered an answer.

Duncan paused again over Evering’s left knee, where the britches seemed somehow to adhere to the flesh. He rolled up the fabric, having to pry it from the skin at the knee. “He knelt on something before he died,” Duncan observed, squatting to study the chalky
skin of the knee. Numerous small punctures radiated out from the patella, the skin slightly discolored around each. Several held tiny shards that glistened in the light. Duncan studied them a moment, holding a lantern close. Glass. Small, sharp pieces of green glass. They would have made it impossible for Evering to walk without incredible pain. Which meant the professor had not knelt on the glass before he died, but as he died.

Duncan moved to the pockets, discovering a slip of paper in the waistcoat. Hoping his companions did not mark his moment’s hesitation, Duncan used his other hand to open a second pocket as he palmed the paper. From the britches he extracted a handkerchief, wrapped around a ball of leaves and stems, which Duncan smelled before extending toward the others.

“Seaweed?” Woolford inquired.

“Tea,” Duncan replied. “Does a man contemplate a pot of tea and suicide at the same time?” He gazed into Evering’s lifeless face, feeling a strange connection with the man, realizing how much they had had in common, remembering the quiet conversations he and Adam and Evering had sometimes shared. Evering had spoken passionately about the calculations he had made that predicted a comet that would be visible in North America by mid-autumn. Duncan sensed that he and Evering would have become close friends had the professor lived. And now, for the first time, Duncan realized that even in his death Evering might provide the key to Adam’s mystery.

“A despondent gentleman, still in anguish over the loss of his wife, might do just that. Suicides are irrational,” Arnold countered. “The death wish can seize them without notice. And we have only the word of a convict that he died before entering the sea.”

Duncan sighed and circled the coffin, then quickly opened Evering’s jaw, lowering his ear toward the dead lips as he firmly pressed on the man’s diaphragm. A wheeze of air rushed up the throat, sounding so much like a cough that Woolford leapt back with a gasp of alarm.

Duncan stayed bent, close to Evering’s mouth. “What say you,
Professor?” he asked in a solemn voice, gazing at Arnold as he spoke. He pushed again and a sound like a groan came from the body. “Exactly,” Duncan said. “That is what I have been telling them.”

The color had vanished from Woolford’s face. He seemed to expect Evering to rise up from his coffin at any moment.

“Desecration!” Arnold hissed.

Duncan fixed him with a somber gaze. “I assumed we were after the truth. You still doubted my words,” he declared. “So I thought you might believe the professor if he told you himself.”

“This is blasphemy!” Arnold barked. “I shall never allow—”

“His lungs were full of air.” Woolford’s declaration silenced the vicar, who stared at the lieutenant, jaw open, his anger slowly fading, replaced with shocked dismay. “You have heard it yourself, Reverend. No water in the lungs,” Woolford continued. “Air. This man did not drown.”

The vicar stared at the dead man. “Then he died preparing his suicide. A fall. The ship was rolling in the rising storm.”