The ship’s beams creaked in the silence, and the table slightly canted as the vessel heeled in the wind. Duncan glanced toward the ladder and paused as something pawed at his memory. Woolford. Duncan had grown accustomed to the sounds made as those leaving the cell deck climbed toward the top decks, the creaking of certain ladder boards, the progressive opening and closing of hatches. Woolford’s egress had not been followed by the same sounds. Duncan rose and warily approached the ladder.
He climbed one step at a time, pausing at each to listen, finally gaining the next deck, a series of cargo holds packed with crates, barrels, and trunks. His heart pounding, knowing if he were caught he would pay with skin and flesh, he pushed on the hatch door leading to the first bay. The door swung open on its iron pintels without a sound.
The second bay was separated from the first not with a door but with a hanging sailcloth, which he silently brushed aside. Thirty feet in front of him, Woolford moved along the stacks of crates and trunks with a hooded lantern, in his hand one of the iron bars used to pry up the lids. As Duncan watched, the officer paused, drank from a flask he pulled from a pocket, then opened a crate and began sifting through the contents.
Duncan inched forward, suddenly desperate to see at least the label on the crate, watching for variations in the blackness that might mean a hiding place. He had found it, a gap between two crates, when a quick, furry creature leapt onto his shoulder. The rat’s transit across his back was silent, but not the creature’s jump onto a stack of kegs, where it slipped, its claws scratching at the wood as it sought purchase on the round sides.
Woolford spun about, lantern in one hand, iron bar in the other, raised for throwing. “At this distance I can put this into your spleen before you make it to cover,” he declared in a low, lethal voice.
“As a military art, I thought spear throwing went out with the Crusades.” Duncan fought to keep his voice level.
“You’d be quite astonished at the arts of the modern American officer,” Woolford growled, and lifted the pointed bar higher.
“I prefer you do it, here and now, Lieutenant, if you will not permit me to find the truth about the killings.”
“Killing. There was but one murder.”
“That’s your dilemma, Lieutenant. You and I both know I cannot find the truth about Evering without finding the truth about Adam Munroe. You might have an interest in Evering’s killer, but you cannot abide anyone knowing your secret about Adam.”
“Do you have any notion what the captain is going to do to you?”
Duncan did not doubt Woolford was capable of killing him. But it was time to test Adam’s words. Before the army used him it was going to protect him. He advanced, his hands held out at his sides. “We can stand here for half an hour, Lieutenant,” he said when the pool of light reached his face, “as you recount all the ways you and the captain can end my life in unimaginable misery. I’ll consider the point taken, provided you accept that when you take me before the captain and Reverend Arnold I will raise a dozen possibilities as to why you were creeping about searching boxes”-he glanced at the now-visible label-“holding the private belongings of the Ramsey family.”
Woolford lowered his makeshift weapon. “Inventory,” he muttered. “With so many thieves on board, we must watch every possession.”
“Fine. Let us go explain that. If you prefer I will go alone.”
“And receive a few dozen lashes for leaving the cell deck?”
“I will savor every stroke if your true colors be exposed.”
“Are all Scots as self-destructive, McCallum, as you and Munroe?”
“Consider it a study in what men do when the king lances the bubble of their hope.”
Woolford looked as if he had bitten into something sour. He leaned on a crate, setting the lantern beside him. “My preference in playing to a stalemate is to sweep the board and start anew. Shall we inspect the work that precedes us?” he said, aiming a thumb at a nearby trunk. The lock, Duncan saw, had already been forced, as had those of several others nearby, all bearing an ornate R, the Ramsey mark.
“What did you do to Adam last week?”
“I deeply regret to say I did nothing.”
“What is so important about the Ramsey tutor to you, just a soldier with no ties to the Company?”
Woolford ignored the question, probed the contents of the trunk before him.
“Then why,” Duncan pressed, “did Adam Munroe consider it such a catastrophe that we are going to the New York frontier?”
Woolford paused, stared into the shadows of the trunk. He seemed strangely wounded by the question. “The wilderness works in many different ways on men’s souls.”
“Many different kinds of fear, you mean.”
Wooford slowly lifted his head, fixing Duncan with a sober stare. “You have no notion, McCallum, how right you are.”
Duncan leaned forward to glimpse inside the trunk. With a chill he recognized the contents. Long bags of canvas, with laces at the top. The ever-efficient managers of the Ramsey Company had packed an entire trunk of burial shrouds.
“A ghostwalker,” Duncan said as he gazed at the shrouds. “Does it mean one fixed on suicide?”
Woolford gripped the iron bar in both hands. “Not a word easily explained.” His tone turned oddly melancholy. “The opposite of suicide perhaps. In America the dead can walk again.”
“You took custody of Adam in the courts. You knew his record. Why did he kill himself?”
Woolford stared at the bar, twisting his hands, twisting his face, speaking toward the shadows. “Adam Munroe was the only one who was not arrested. He told Arnold that if he needed to be arrested to join the Company, he would gladly assault me and every soldier in Argyll.”
“Impossible. He would not willingly give himself to slavery.”
“I suspect you and I did not know him as well as we thought.”
Duncan saw something in Woolford’s eyes that frightened him, and for a moment the officer gripped the bar like a weapon again, but then he exhaled heavily, tossed it into the darkness, and moved down the line of forced trunks. Duncan followed a step behind. The first three contained fine clothes, which appeared disheveled but undamaged. The next, marked Hand Implements, held a top layer of blankets. But under the blankets at the top were at least two score bayonets, of a style for plugging into the barrels of heavy muskets, then hand axes and heavy knives nearly the size of swords. The next trunk held heavy woolen waistcoats, red with long sleeves-some with blue facing, others with buff. Though tattered from long use, they would still have had years of service left in them had not someone poured tar over them, soaking through the fabric.
“You brought these from a barracks?” Duncan asked.
“Not I. But all were made under the king’s warrant. They were uniform coats, made for the army.
“But none is new.”
“I daresay most are twenty years old and more. Quartermasters sometimes sell old equipment to pay for new. I know of a theater in Chelsea,” Woolford observed, “that regularly buys trunks of it, for playacting.” He paused and with a rueful grin tipped back his flask again. “My father’s country estate had a huge courtyard. He called it his Roman amphitheater. We held plays there, great pageants where we praised kings and celebrated the ascendancy of England as the queen of civilization.”
A second son, Duncan realized. Woolford had an aristocratic father and only a junior post. It could only mean he was unable to inherit. Woolford’s voice grew distant. “‘This sceptered isle, this precious stone set in the silver sea,’” he offered, irony thick in his words. “Shakespeare was my favorite. ‘Conscience,’” he recited, now in a stage voice, “‘is but a word that cowards use to keep the strong in awe.’”
“‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,’” Duncan countered. “‘He died as one that had been studied in his death. To throw away the dearest thing he owned.’”