Free Bone Rattler by Eliot Pattison

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