Duncan closed his eyes a moment. As the keeper who had brought Duncan back from his escape, Lister was supposed to be the one to bind Duncan to the mast and begin the flogging.
“But Lister announced that your disappearance had been his fault, that he had given you permission to linger another minute on deck after breakfast, that he had forgotten you, that you had not actually escaped.”
“A lie!” Duncan gasped. “My God! The captain’s fury-”
“Lister took your flogging.”
The words ripped at Duncan like a hot blade.
Woolford raised the lantern and studied Duncan’s face. “The captain himself administered the cat. Forty strokes. He acted as if cheated of a greater pleasure. Lister broke three splints of wood placed between his teeth but never cried out.”
Duncan felt the blood drain from his face as he sank against the wall. He had doubted Lister, had questioned what it meant for the old Scot to bind himself to Duncan and the clan. So Lister had shown him.
The brittle silence was broken by the sound of movement on the ladder. In the shadows at its base stood Cameron, the tall, ox-like leader of the keepers, holding a bucket of worm-ridden biscuits.
Woolford had lingered, and seemed about to say something until he spotted the keeper. “Is she safe?” Duncan asked the officer.
The officer seemed to have a hard time finding an answer. “She lives. I can’t decide whether what you did was incomparable bravery or incomparable stupidity.”
“I thought her dead for certain.”
“It was the first time she had been left alone on the voyage. Everyone had thought her sleeping.” Woolford gestured him toward his cell.
“Who is she?”
The question brought a hard glint to Woolford’s eyes. “Difficult to say exactly. She has been abed, too weak for speech, the entire voyage.”
But not too weak to climb up the mast and out on the spar, Duncan nearly said. “Lieutenant, you have helped nurse her all these weeks,” he pointed out instead. “Surely you know her name.”
“I have heard many,” Woolford’s tone made it clear he would speak no more on the subject.
They stood silently staring at each other as Cameron distributed the biscuits down the line of cells.
“I have a brother, Lieutenant,” Duncan ventured as he reached the cell door. “Somewhere in the army. When we arrive in New York, could you find where he is stationed?”
“It’s a large colony.”
“His name is James. James McCallum. A captain of the Forty-second Regiment of Foot.”
Woolford gazed at him with an odd mixture of anger and worry. “Captain McCallum of the Forty-second,” he recited in a tight voice, then spun about and marched toward the ladder as Cameron approached, brandishing the key to lock Duncan’s cell.
By the time the lock snapped shut, the slip he had taken from Evering’s pocket was back in his hand, held in the dim light of the hatch. He gazed at it with a sinking heart. It was nothing but a small star chart, with a trajectory shown in dotted lines through constellations and a single word: October. But Lister had been very clear in relaying Adam’s words. Heed how Evering explains his comet, as if the comet might explain the threat to Duncan. His confusion seemed a palpable thing, a weight that was slowly crushing him. But Lister had shown him otherwise. The McCallum clan would not be crushed. He had to live-for Lister, for Jamie, for the Scots in the prisoners’ hold, for the nameless woman he had saved.
With new, intense effort Duncan tried to understand the ritual at the compass, etching each of the bloody objects into his memory. He would ask Arnold for the objects, he decided, he would arrange them as they had been in the compass room so he could study each in turn, and together. There had to be a logic, however distorted, and if he failed to find it, he and others could pay with their lives.
Bone, buckle, eye, claw, feather, salt, heart. In his youth such an eye had appeared on a post in an island village, and even though his grandfather had named it as coming from a great shark, the villagers had abandoned their homes until a priest could be brought to purify the grounds. The devil’s eye, they had called it. Eye from a great beast, bones from small ones. They had been from several different small birds, some with tiny, disconnected vertebrae, even the fragile bones of the wings. The eye and the bones. A great god and his mortals.
He lifted Evering’s paper again, this time trying to create in his mind a dialogue with the scholar about his comet, like those Duncan had conducted with his medical professors in his prior life. Evering had been a man of science, and Duncan probably had more scientific training than any other man on board. The professor would open his journal and show the other pages of notes and maps; he would speak of the old records he had found that supported his predictions about the comet; he would-
Duncan suddenly closed his hand around the paper and grinned. It wasn’t the comet. Heed how Evering explains his comet, Adam had said. The journal. Adam would know Evering would inevitably show him the journal. And in the journal would lie other secrets. It wasn’t what the comet meant that mattered, but what was with the comet, the other pages inscribed during the past few weeks.
Food came twice a day, consisting each time of one of the small loaves, hard as planks, or a square of the worm-pocked ship’s biscuit, sometimes with a spoiled apple or scrap of salt pork. Duncan slept, warm and dry thanks to the blanket Lister had provided, futilely trying every few hours to engage Flora in conversation. The madwoman acknowledged him only with her unintelligible chants. “Take the skin you are,” she blurted out once, like a cry of pain, the only English words she had uttered since Duncan’s first hours in the cell. Her speech had become hollow and slow, sometimes slurred, as if she were distracted, even drunk, all proof that if she were not already mad, she was quickly progressing to madness. Sometimes, without speaking, she thrust her arm out and flailed the air, clutching his fingertips when he responded with his own hand. Each time, they stayed locked in the strange intimacy for several minutes, listening to each other breathe, never seeing each other’s face. The few times Duncan tried to speak while holding her fingers she always withdrew. Flora had killed her child, and whether she had known before, Arnold had made it clear that she was going to a certain, agonizing death. Duncan recognized the symptoms even through the darkness. She had already started her dying, the gradual, agonizing way that Adam Munroe had died.
He was sleeping when they came for him again. Arnold left his cell door open as he walked back to the table in the entryway. As Duncan warily approached the table, Woolford appeared from the shadows. The officer absently gestured to a pewter plate at the edge of the table bearing slices of bread and mutton, his gaze locked on two letters in the center of the table. Duncan stared at the plate. He had eaten no fresh meat, no real bread, for months.
“There were more than twenty letters from the prisoners, several written by Evering over another’s name,” Arnold explained as Duncan stuffed a piece of meat into his mouth. “Mostly the ramblings of lonely men, asking for forgiveness, offering harmless lies to convince family not to worry. Some pleas to fund barristers for appeals. These two,” he said, pointing to the center of the table, “cannot be so easily dismissed.” He spread the open envelopes over the table. Evering had affixed wax seals to them, which had been opened by a clumsy trick, slicing away the seal with a hot blade, to be later closed with a larger dollop of hot wax over the original seal.
As Duncan stared at the papers, he recalled that he, too, had written a letter, addressed to his brother, cursing the king. He picked up the first and began to read. It was from the moody young keeper, Frasier, addressed to his aunt, the old maiden who had raised him when his family had been taken from him after Culloden. The letter spoke of an uneventful voyage, woven with bitter comments about his arrest and trial. I know the secret of why the English went all the way to Auld Reekie when there were wagonloads of prisoners to be had in Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, and Argyll. We know what oozes out of Lothian barracks. We know how to treat the dog who stands over corpses. We know how to cut out the rot. Payment will be made before you lay out the Beltane fires.