Help indeed, Duncan told himself. Frasier not only could not have achieved such a clever theft alone, he could not have conjured up the idea of seeking out the trunk packed with Woolford’s deliveries for America. “You were there before. In America. What was it like?”
For a moment the big man seemed to shrink. “It was a fine farm, in the north of Pennsylvania, the Wyoming Valley they call it. But I still have nightmares. They killed my wife and two young children in front of me, left me for dead when the militia came running.” He turned his head and lifted the locks that hung over the side of his face, revealing a knot of scar tissue at his hairline.
“And that is why you came to be Reverend Arnold’s top keeper?”
“I was one of the first on board. I asked for prayers. The vicar heard my story and took pity. I know the way of things in America.”
The way of things in America, Duncan decided, was already ripping the Company apart. He studied the shards on the table. “Evering had a good black waistcoat and a gold watch. Where are they?”
“Stolen, like the chart pinned over his bunk.”
“What kind of chart?”
“I used to see it when I cleaned his cabin. Calculations and such. Things a tutor might be planning for his wee pupils, I suspect.”
“What else was in the professor’s chamber?”
“Usual things. Books. Clothing. A locked trunk. Boxes of things.”
“What things exactly?”
“He had collections. Bits of nature. He was a natural philosopher.”
“You mean like bones. And feathers.”
Cameron nodded.
“Do you ever see the sick woman?”
“Only that day she tried to fly. She stays abed. Food goes in on trays. They watch her close as a newborn.”
“Who watches?”
“The vicar. The lieutenant. The captain’s wife sometimes. The professor did, before.”
“Tell me something about the savages, Cameron. Do they have witches?”
The question seemed to shake the big Scot. He looked into the shadows before answering. “Aye. Terrible demon men, and women too, who can take the shape of animals. Fly like a bird. Swim like a fish. Wizards. Shamans, they call them.”
“And these witches, these shamans who can fly out over oceans, do they use rituals with blood and bone?”
Cameron’s eyes flared for a moment, but as he gazed into the shadows his anger changed to worry.
Duncan lifted a quill to continue his work. “You’ll need to lock me back in my cell in an hour, Cameron. Meanwhile, ask the ship’s carpenter if he is missing a hammer. And bring the log of Company letters submitted for the mails.”
When the keeper returned, Duncan handed him the bundle of folded papers to convey to Arnold and quickly scanned the mail log. There were two lists of letters, labeled Eastbound and Westbound, with the names of the passing ships that had slowed to retrieve them. The few westbound letters included half a dozen addressed to William Ramsey, Esq., all from Arnold. Adam Munroe had written two letters addressed to an inn in New York town, both to the same man, a name that Duncan stared at in confusion. Socrates Moon. The mysterious Greek who had gone to England with their suicidal passenger six months earlier.
But most curious of all was another, also addressed to Socrates Moon, entered for the mails the day after Adam’s death. It had no return name, only the words Tutor, Ramsey Company.
As the keeper escorted Duncan to his cell, he produced the stub of a candle, lit it, and handed it to Duncan. “Carpenter lost his best hammer,” Cameron reported as he locked the cell door. “Was in the hold with the timber stores, but when he went for repairs after the storm it was gone.”
“Tell me this, Mr. Cameron, in your log do you record the names exactly as written on the letters?”
“Aye. ’Tis an official thing.”
A dark foreboding seized Duncan. Evering had sent a letter to the mysterious Greek but identified himself only as the tutor, as if it would mean something to the man, as if this Socrates Moon expected something of the tutor, whether it be Evering or his successor.
“I must have the letter sent by Evering,” he said through the hatch. “Above all, I must have that letter.”
“Gone. Posted on a passing fishing schooner these three days past.”
Duncan’s heart sank. He dropped to the floor as Cameron’s steps receded in the darkness. After several minutes he extracted his list of ancestors and stared at it, whispering the names, until the little hatch on his door was pulled open and a large tin of steaming liquid passed through. Tea, sweetened with honey. He whispered his thanks and sat back in a corner with the mug just as the candle sputtered out. In the darkness that followed he found himself wishing for Flora’s chants, which had grown strangely comforting to him. But she had been silent for hours, and the sounds Duncan heard most often from her cell were those of weeping. He tried to pass the time thinking of happier days as a youth in the Highlands and the Hebrides, but always his thoughts returned to Adam’s haunting legacy and Evering’s dead, questioning eyes, to the bloody compass and the fateful hour when the sea had closed around him. His foreboding was so real, so intense, he could taste it, like some salty, bitter thing in his mouth. Duncan had sought a final escape in the black water, had become certain the storm would be his ending. Everything had changed in the span of a quarter hour, when Lister had given him a reason to live, and Duncan had gone into the sea for a different reason.
But his life had indeed ended that day, Duncan began to realize. The man the storm had given back was not the same man who had gone into the water. He had fancied for a few hours that he might become the clan chief Lister wanted him to be, that he could indeed protect the Scots on board. But the Company had made him something else, something worse than a prisoner, something no clan chief could ever be. He had become an informer, a servant, a pawn to an English lord. Arnold and Woolford had given a terrible truth to Frasier’s suspicions. Was Arnold truly so clever to understand he had found the perfect way to break Duncan?
No, a voice argued from some dim part of his mind; no, there is hope, for the indenture meant he had lost his chains, gave him a chance to act like a clan chief, if only in secret. But the weak voice soon died as Duncan began a new nightmare, a recurring one of two men on a gibbet. One was a man with a tartan cloth covering his face, his skin being flayed away with a whip wielded by Reverend Arnold. The other was his dead father, cursing him for failing to see what suffering Duncan was causing the Company. The English expected him to deliver a political parable. Now that Duncan had convinced them the professor had been murdered, they expected him to give them a Scot, any Scot, to hang for the crime. And the Scots, whom he had vowed to protect, wanted Duncan dead.
Chapter Four
He was chasing a lamb in the kitchen dooryard as his mother watched from the granite step, laughing as he and the lamb tumbled together into a bed of flowers. Then the joyful bleats turned to snarls as the lambs grew long, sharp teeth and began scratching at his flesh.
Duncan exploded into wakefulness, gasping and groping in the dark for something to swing against the rats. Suddenly the cover of a lantern lifted an inch, an arm’s length away. There were no rats, only strong, callused fingers wrapped around his leg, shaking him awake.
“Y’er scarletback fled,” a raspy voice declared. “Like a brigade of French were at his heels.”
As Duncan rubbed his eyes, squinting at Lister’s dim shape, his hand went to his throat. There was an unfamiliar bitter taste in his mouth, a soreness in his windpipe. He glanced at the tin tankard that had been handed through the door in the night, filled with sweet hot tea. “Woolford’s gone? How?”
“A fishing schooner overtook us,” Lister said as he squatted beside Duncan, handing him a lump of gray meat wrapped in a limp cabbage leaf. “Smaller, more spry than this old bucket. As soon as the lookout called out, Woolford dashed below, then when she drew close, he hailed her, offered a reward for their trouble. She can close haul in this wind and make the harbor in a few hours. We’ll be a day and more.”