“We’re bound for the New World, lad,” Lister said. “New lives can be made.”
“I had a new life,” Duncan said despondently, his eyes back on the clouds. “Cousins in Yorkshire raised me. They never let me speak our true tongue out loud, never let me speak of my dead parents. A proper Englishman they made me. The best schools in Holland and England. I had completed three years of medical lectures, was set to join the chambers of a doctor in Northumbria. Then six months ago the last of my great-uncles appeared at my door, asking me to hide him in my rooms. Over eighty years old. I had thought him in the far northern isles, hiding all these years. Our last clan chief.”
“I’m asking y’er help now, as he did,” Lister said, urgency now in his voice.
“Three weeks later they came for him, claiming he was a reiver,” Duncan continued, referring to the highwaymen of the Scottish borderlands. “I was arrested for aiding him, sentenced in the name of the king to seven years’ imprisonment. After four months they dragged me out of that moldy hole, more dead than alive. Threw me before a judge who said the king had decided to be merciful, that I would instead do seven year’s hard labor in the colonies. Transportation, the judge called it,” he added bitterly. “A pilgrimage, in order to reflect on my sins.” He looked back into the keeper’s weathered face. “I had a new life, and now I have none.” Duncan knew he would never be a doctor now, never fulfill his secret dream of becoming wealthy enough to buy back his family’s Highland lands. Adam had seen something in Duncan’s path that Duncan was blind to. There would be no freedom after seven years’ labor. They were going to use him, then kill him. Adam, too, had somehow been used and killed. Despair seized Duncan again, a cold vise on his heart. “There is a letter in my hammock, Mr. Lister. Perhaps you could get it to my brother in New York.” Duncan had spent much of the night before in writing the letter as the other prisoners slept, to his brother who had likewise been forced to leave the ways of the clans behind. The English king, he had written at the closing, has wreaked its final vengeance on our family.
“God knows I’m sorry, lad. But there be many good men on this ship who once wore the thistle,” Lister declared, invoking the ancient symbol of Scotland. “They, too, will die without your help. And the ones in the ratholes,” he said. Duncan cringed at the mention of the locked cells in the rear hold of the prison deck, reserved for the most violent of the transported prisoners, murderers all, separately bound under the king’s warrant for the deadly sugar plantations of the West Indies. “Every last one taken from the courts in Glasgow, condemned by English judges,” Lister continued. “I know this ship. The foretopmast is weakened, and she’ll snap like a twig when the gale blows. ’Tis likely she’ll stove in a hold cover when she falls, and the hull will slowly fill. Those in the cells will die first, drowned in their locked boxes. Redeat,” he uttered after a moment. It had started long ago as a Jacobite oath, May He Return, for the return of the Scottish Stewart prince. But it had become something of a prayer for all Highlanders, an invocation, as it were, of the Scottish gods. “The Ramsey Company will die without a chance to prove itself,” he added, referring to the great lord named Ramsey, to whom all the prisoners outside the cells were bound. A community of troubled souls-as Reverend Arnold, the Anglican pastor who escorted them, called the Company-on its way to redeem itself in a New World paradise.
A furious voice thundered from below. An officer was chasing two sailors as they ran with an elegant chair out of the cabins. “What possesses them?” Duncan asked as the sailors dumped the chair over the rail and another man appeared, throwing bottles of brandy over the side, uttering a fearful prayer with each toss. They were making offerings to the sea.
“The devil awoke this morn. Ye must put an end to it.”
Duncan swallowed the question that leapt to his tongue. How could he possibly stop the madness below? “Whatever inside me had been capable of helping other souls,” he answered in a bitter voice, “drained out onto my prison floor.” He could see lightning now, long, jagged bolts rending the horizon. Adam’s face still lingered at the edge of his consciousness, as if calling Duncan to join him.
“Why today, lad?”
“We’re due in port soon. I’ll be given no chance to break free again. A member of the Company has but one way to express his freedom. My clan will not end in slavery.”
“’Tis but seven years, McCallum. Don’t be so prideful. Y’er still young.”
Duncan’s gaze drifted back toward the wind-whipped waves. “Are you suggesting, Mr. Lister, that for people like you and me long lives are worth the living?”
It was Lister’s turn to grow silent and turn his gaze toward the sea. “Y’er great-uncle?” he asked after a long moment.
“They dragged me from my prison to make certain I was a witness. From the gallows they pronounced him an unrepentant traitor. He danced a jig, then spat as the hangman lowered the noose.”
“Y’er brother. Older?”
“A year younger.”
The announcement seemed to stir something in Lister. His eyes grew wide with a sudden, intense curiosity. He studied Duncan as if for the first time, a strange fire kindling in his eyes, then grimaced as though unhappy with what he saw. “Look at ye then,” he growled, “is this how ye treat all those who go before?”
It was impossible, but the chastising voice Duncan heard was that of his grandfather, as was the disapproving cast in the old sailor’s eyes. Duncan sensed something twitching inside him, and he grew very still, no longer aware of the storm. Lister had opened another long-barred chamber in Duncan’s mind, a chamber of nightmares in which the rotting corpse of his father pointed at him from the gibbet, accusing him of forsaking the clan to become an Englishman.
“Have ye forgotten what it means to be the eldest?”
“I didn’t. . I couldn’t. .,” Duncan muttered after a moment, in a voice cracking with a new emotion. There was another chamber, often visited by Duncan, that held memories of long days spent with his grandfather, watching with awe as the fiery old Scot performed the duties of clan elder, protecting the innocent, filling the larders of the impoverished, dispensing rough justice among the tenants of the far-flung islands traditionally bound to their clan, even saving the drowning, for his grandfather had been the best swimmer in the isles. “My clan is extinguished.”
“As long as ye and y’er brother breathe, there be a clan.”
He gazed at Lister in wonder. During all the days of his torment since his arrest, the thought had never occurred to him. His uncle’s executioners had made Duncan clan chieftain.
“God’s eyes, McCallum!” Lister spat. “Ye must forget y’er own misery! Ye are blood-bound to y’er clan, living and dead, to all them who wear the thistle. Death stalks this ship, and if any survive, ’tis Scots who will be blamed. What will a clan chief do about it?”
Duncan looked from Lister to the gale, now nearly upon them. He could find no reply.
“What if it be true,” Lister pressed, “what Reverend Arnold said not a quarter hour ago, that ye may be the one who could save the ship?”
“Arnold?” Arnold was the one who had snatched him from court, who had committed him to the prison ship. “I owe him nothing.”
“Then what if it be true, that the professor needs y’er help?”
Duncan twisted his head toward the old sailor. “Evering?”
“That last night as he sat by the hatch, Adam told me to say to you that Evering found the key to save us all but knows not how to use it. He said to help McCallum protect the professor.”
Duncan looked back at the waves, not wanting to betray his surprise, to acknowledge the sudden ripple of hope in his sea of despair.