Bone Rattler

Начало книги

Hope, Duncan McCallum had discovered after two months on an English convict ship, was the deadliest thing in the world. It wasn’t scurvy that was killing his companions, nor any of the other shipborne diseases his medical training warned him to watch for. Hope was their poison, for hope was the seed of despair, and on the dark, dank prisoner deck those who had embarked with the greatest hopes were now dying of despair.

Had he time, and paper and ink, Duncan could have penned a treatise on the fatal contagion of despair, recounting how it consumed each prisoner differently, the final chapter being a description of himself. For Duncan, with strange detachment, had not missed his own symptoms. He had seen the sunken eyes looking back at him from his reflection in the water butt, observed the trembling hands, the absence of appetite, his abrupt obsession with memories of his Scottish boyhood, the only contented time of his twenty-four years. He had embarked for the New World clinging to vague ambitions about a fresh beginning, but the realities of the convict’s fate had overtaken him, and now the dim spark of his life was fueled only by his compulsion to decipher the ghastly death of his friend Adam Monroe.

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