Finishing his dinner, he dumped the dishes in the sink, then returned to the dining room and the large green canvas. Sipping a fresh cup of coffee, he pulled the canvas away, exposing a smaller canvas and, on it, two of the skeletons that had been uncovered the day before. He had chosen what he thought were the most complete and representative specimens from the staggeringly large burial group and brought the remains back to his house, where he could examine them in peace.
The bones were clean and hard and stained a light brown by the iron-rich soil of the island. In the dry air of the house, they emitted a faint odor of old earth. Hatch stood back, arms akimbo, and contemplated the skeletons and the pathetic collections of buttons, buckles, and hobnails that had been found with them. One had been wearing a ring—a gold ring set with an inferior cabochon garnet, valuable more for historical reasons than anything else. Hatch picked it up from among the neat array of items. He tried it on his little finger, found that it fit, and left it there, somehow pleased at this connection with the long-dead pirate.
Summer twilight lay across the meadow beyond the open windows, and frogs in the millpond at the bottom of the fields had begun their evening vespers. Hatch pulled out a small notebook, writing "Pirate A" on the left side of a page and "Pirate B" on the right. Then he scratched these out, replacing them with "Black-beard" and "Captain Kidd." Somehow, it made them more human. Underneath each heading he began jotting his first impressions.
First, Hatch sexed the skeletons carefully: he knew there were more female pirates plying the seas in the 1700s than most people realized. Both were male. They were also nearly toothless, a characteristic shared with the other skeletons in the mass grave. Hatch picked up a loose mandible, examining it with a magnifying glass. Along the mandibular process there was scarring due to lesions of the gums, and places where the bone had been thinned and apparently eaten away. The few remaining teeth showed a striking pathology: a separation of the odontoblast layer from the dentin. Hatch laid the jawbone down, wondering whether this was due to disease, starvation, or simply poor hygiene.
He cradled the skull of the pirate he'd labeled Blackbeard and examined it, Yorick style. Blackbeard's one remaining upper incisor was distinctly shoveled: That implied either East Asian or Amerindian stock. He replaced the skull and continued his examination. The other pirate, Kidd, had broken his leg in the past: The ends of the bone around the fracture were abraded and calcified, and the break had not knitted together well. Probably walked around with a limp and in severe pain. In life, Kidd would not have been a good-tempered pirate. The man also had an old wound in the clavicle; there was a deep score in the bone, surrounded by spurs. Cutlass blow? Hatch wondered.
Both men appeared to be under forty. If Blackbeard was Asiatic, Captain Kidd was probably Caucasian. Hatch made a mental note to ask St. John if he knew anything about the racial makeup of Ockham's crew.
Hatch walked around the table, musing, then picked up a femur. It seemed light and insubstantial. He bent it and, to his surprise, felt it snap like a dry twig between his fingers. He peered at the ends. Clearly a case of osteoporosis—thinning of the bone—rather than simple graveyard decay. Looking more closely now, he examined the bones of the other skeleton and found the same symptoms.
The pirates were too young for this to be gerontological in origin. Again, it could be either poor diet or disease. But what disease? He ran through the symptoms of several possibilities, his diagnostic mind working, and then suddenly broke into a broad smile.
He turned to his working bookshelf and plucked off the well-thumbed copy of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. He flipped through the index until he found what he was looking for, then turned quickly to the page. Scurvy, it read: Scorbutus (Vitamin C Deficiency). Yes, there were the symptoms: loss of teeth, osteoporosis, cessation of the healing process, even the reopening of old wounds.
He shut the book and slipped it back on the shelf. Mystery solved. Hatch knew that scurvy was now rare in most of the world. Even the poorest Third World areas he had practiced in produced fresh fruits and vegetables, and in all his career he had never seen a case. Until now. He stepped back from the table, feeling uncommonly pleased with himself.
The doorbell rang. Damn, he thought, hastily pulling the canvas cover over the skeletons before stepping into the living room. One of the prices of living in a small town was that nobody thought to telephone before dropping by. It wouldn't do, he thought, to be seen with his dining room table laid with ancient skeletons instead of the family silver.
Stepping up to the front and glancing out the window, Hatch was surprised to see the stooped form of Professor Orville Horn. The old man was leaning on his cane, wisps of white hair standing from his head as if charged up with a Van de Graaf generator.
"Ah, the abominable Doctor Hatch!" the professor said as the door opened. "I was just passing by and saw the lights burning in this old mausoleum of yours." His small bright eyes roved restlessly as he spoke. "I thought perhaps you'd been down in the dungeon, cutting up bodies. Some young girls are missing from the village, you know, and the townsfolk are restless." His gaze landed on the large canvas lump on the dining room table. "Hullo! What's this?"
"Pirate skeletons," said Hatch with a grin. "You wanted a present, right? Well, happy birthday."
The professor's eyes went incandescent with delight as he stepped unbidden into the living room. "Marvelous!" he cried. "My suspicions were well-founded, I see. Where did you get them?"
"Thalassa's archaeologist uncovered the site of the pirate encampment on Ragged Island a couple of days ago," Hatch replied, leading the old man into the dining room. "They found a mass grave. I thought I'd bring a couple back and try to determine cause of death."
The professor's shaggy brows raised at this information. Hatch pulled back the canvas cover and his guest leaned forward with interest, peering closely, poking an occasional bone with his cane.
"I believe I've figured out what killed them," said Hatch.
The professor held up his hand. "Hush. Let me try my hand."
Hatch smiled, remembering the professor's love of scientific challenges. It was a game they had played on many an afternoon, the professor giving Hatch a bizarre specimen or scientific conundrum to puzzle over.
Dr. Horn picked up Blackbeard's skull, turned it over, looking at the teeth. "East Asian," he said, putting it down.
"Very good."
"Not terribly surprising," replied the professor. "Pirates were the first equal opportunity employers. I imagine this one was Burmese or Bornean. Might have been a Lascar."
"I'm impressed," Hatch said.
"How soon they forget." The professor moved around the skeletons, his beady eyes glittering, like a cat circling a mouse. He picked up the bone Hatch had broken. "Osteoporosis," he said, raising an eye in Hatch's direction.
Hatch smiled and said nothing.
Dr. Horn picked up a mandible. "Evidently these pirates did not believe in flossing twice a day." He examined the teeth, stroked his face with a long, thoughtful finger, and straightened up. "All indications point to scurvy."
Hatch could feel his face fall. "You figured that out a lot faster than I did."
"Scurvy was endemic on sailing ships in past centuries. Common knowledge, I'm afraid."
"Maybe it was rather obvious," said Hatch, a little crestfallen.