“It could mean many things,” Duncan suggested as he read again the confusing words. What had the Company brought from Auld Reekie, the age-old nickname of Edinburgh, that they could not find in the western counties? And what was Frasier expecting from the army barracks near the eastern city? He read the words again with growing unease. In Highland lore a dog that stepped over a corpse had to be killed.
“It could mean this man from Glasgow intended to kill an Englishman,” Arnold declared. “He has free range of the ship as a keeper. Convicted of striking a tax collector. He speaks of a pagan ritual.”
“Many English children celebrate May Day,” Duncan countered.
“Not by laying out circles of fire and leaping through them,” Arnold shot back.
At the end of the letter was a postscript. Before he was summoned by a witch, a man from Argyll traded these six buttons for a white deerskin pouch I found, stained with blood. Use them for one of the young nephews. Inside the folded paper envelope were six familiar discs of wood.
Duncan stared at the page, not focusing on the words, then looked up at Woolford. “Why,” he asked the officer, “would Adam Munroe trade perfectly good buttons for a bloodstained pouch?”
Woolford frowned. “Let’s put to rest one troubled soul at a time, shall we?”
“You have not reclaimed your buttons,” Duncan pressed.
“It seemed miserly,” Woolford replied in a brittle tone, “to interfere with a gift to a child.”
The officer pushed the second letter across the table. “I keep reading it, trying to make sense of the words.”
It was from Cameron, the senior keeper who always showed the most enthusiasm when flogging his fellow prisoners-a four-page letter addressed to D. Camshron, care of a priest in Strontian. It began Dear Doilidh, and what followed was a rambling narrative of the voyage, boasting of riches to come in the New World, then speaking of Evering’s death. We know why men get fetched in the night. The darker the secret a man hides, the quicker he kills. Woolford pointed to the closing passage, which read like a cryptic verse. Three times up for your new one, three times deiseal kirkside, it said, hot coal behind. Three times over flame, salt against sins. Three times over iron so the devils gnaw their own bones.
“He speaks of salt, of devils and bones,” Woolford observed. “Black arts. And Cameron was in the colonies before.”
Duncan read the words again and glanced at each man’s face. Each seemed to be nominating his own candidate for the noose. “Surely only a letter to a loved one.”
“You can’t know that.”
But Duncan did know, without a doubt. Lister was not the only one hiding something about his family. Doilidh was the Gaelic form of Dolly, just as the English translation for Camshron was Cameron. The words were about a newborn, but could only be understood by one from the Highlands. Deiseal meant sunwise in the old tongue-walking from east to west. A new mother on the first outing with her child was supposed to carry the baby up three steps to assure prosperity, then walk three times sunwise or clockwise around the kirk, the church, to avoid begin trapped by the spirits who craved newborns, tossing a hot coal behind to assure they were not following her. Passing the baby three times over flames was an old charm to protect a newborn, as was touching salt to a newborn’s mouth. And a secret, second baptism at the smithy’s forge, passing the infant over the iron anvil, was frowned on by the church but was a tradition steeped in time, from long before priests arrived in Scotland. It would deny the devils a chance to eat the newborn, making them chew their own bones instead. Cameron had left a pregnant woman, a wife or perhaps a sister, and wanted to be sure the offspring was blessed in all the traditions of the Highlands.
Duncan eyed Woolford uncertainly. “I don’t know that,” he replied, then froze as terrible realization swept over him. He glanced at his companions again. Had they made the connection? Cameron spoke of a man fetched in the night. Frasier spoke of what the Company brought from Edinburgh. Arnold and Woolford had made but one trip to Edinburgh, to bring Duncan. And they had brought him onto the ship in the night.
“Nothing here explains what happened in the compass room,” he observed, fighting to keep his voice level.
“Evering himself made the ritual,” Arnold proclaimed. “He placed his own buckle there, stole into the gallery for salt and blood and the heart, even that horrible eye, which the cook says came from a shark they had boarded the day before. The claw must be from one of his own collections.”
“Why would he do such a thing?” Duncan asked.
“He was deranged. Delirious. His grief erupted anew. Perhaps he saw something that set off a powerful memory. He was sending a final message to his wife before he took his own life.”
“He was murdered. Not a suicide,” Woolford reminded Arnold.
“He planned to commit suicide, McCallum may take that as certain,” the vicar replied. “He was deeply troubled. I am unable to divulge the secrets of prayer, but suffice it to say we often knelt together. He must have gathered the objects in the compass room as one last expression of his anguish. Nothing more than the work of a highly literate man whose emotions overwhelmed his intellect. Bones means death. Two stacks of bones means two deaths. His and his wife’s. The buckle signifies himself, a token from his own person. The eye is the evil that had stared down at him since his wife’s passing. The claw symbolizes the agony he has felt, the feather his plan to join his wife in the ranks of angels. The heart is his own broken heart, the salt the earth that he is about to leave.” Arnold’s words, tentative at first, finished with a triumphant flourish. “Evering,” the vicar concluded in a superior tone, “was a romantic. The ritual at the compass proved it.”
“Salt is also used to purify,” Duncan suggested. “And metal, even in a buckle, can be used to fight demons.”
Arnold gave an impatient, warning sound. “Not by any Christian.”
“The church I knew as a boy,” Duncan continued, “kept one foot in the old ways.”
“At last we get to the truth of it,” Arnold said in a smug voice. “I have explained why it had to be Evering who began the ritual. You have given us proof of the origin of the one who interrupted him. You shall record it so, McCallum. The killer committed his heinous deed, then rearranged the objects in a way that would have meaning only to an illiterate whose priests were little more than Druids.”
Duncan fought down the bile that rose with Arnold’s words. But he had to concede one germ of truth in what Arnold said, that the ritual seemed to have been prepared by two very different people, from two different worlds. “If it was not Evering who completed the ritual,” he pressed, watching Woolford carefully, “then perhaps that part not made by the professor was meant to be read by a mortal.”
“Meaning what?” asked the lieutenant.
“Meaning perhaps you will accept that it was a message for someone on board.”
Woolford buried his head in his hands. When he looked up, his jaw was set in grim determination, as if he were about to do battle. “Half,” he said. “Half the men.”
Duncan did not miss the way Arnold’s knuckles whitened. “I’m sorry?”
“You asked me how many had been in the New World before.”