By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

arrived in the ‘tween decks aft ready to retire to her bunk.

  “Where’s the pain exactly?” she asked.

  The young woman had to pull up her shift to indicate an area on her lower right abdomen mid-way between her navel and the point of her hip.

  “I’ll go for Doctor Reade,” Jess offered.

  “No, I’ll go myself,” Sarah decided, having just helped Jess across the wind-buffeted deck. “You stay here.”

  “Sounds like appendicitis,” Doctor Reade said, when she described the symptoms. “I’ll go and look straight away. Would you have Matron meet us in the hospital flat, please?”

  While Sarah was collecting the matron, Doctor Reade told the captain of his suspicions, so that when she got back to the ‘tween decks aft Captain Hedley, with his second officer and the midshipman, was waiting outside the ‘tween decks companionway.

  “You’d best come in out of the storm,” the matron invited gruffly. “If any of the girls ain’t respectable, it’ll be their own silly faults.”

  The three men huddled in an embarrassed group at the bottom of the ladder, until the doctor called them across to help him with his patient.

  “I’ll have to operate,” he said. “I’ll want a pipe cot to transfer her to the hospital flat. Then you fellows must help to hold her.”

  “All three of us?” Captain Hedley asked.

  “It will need three.”

  “Does it have to be us?”

  “She won’t want any of the seamen doing it,” Doctor Reade told him. “None of the women will be strong enough, and there won’t be room for more than three holding her.”

  “No rum,” the poor patient cried plaintively. “I don’t take no liquor.” She was more concerned with that, than she was with the prospect of men having to handle her.

  “Not if you don’t want it,” Doctor Reade assured her.

  “I’ll stand the pain, I will,” she promised.

  In the hospital flat she kept that promise for all of thirty seconds, and then she screamed and fainted.

  Under a circle of candle lanthorns, Captain Hedley was holding down both of her arms, and she had one of the other men on each of her legs. The legs were much the harder to hold when she began to kick and buck under the knife.

  After washing the area with raw whiskey, Doctor Reade made a quick slash, and the incision opened like an obscene mouth across the fine white skin. Sarah’s task was to hold the wound open with pads on either side. Matron Greeley kept mopping the blood away, and passing the doctor the different implements as he required them. Once the patient fainted, it all became much easier to do.

  “Don’t relax,” the doctor warned. “She’s likely to jump whenever I touch nerves, regardless of whether she’s conscious or not.”

  “Nice and clean,” he commented a few moments later, tossing the inflamed appendix into a dish. Rapidly he stitched and tied, stitched and tied. “I much prefer doing this operation at sea. It’s not often successful on land.”

  Looking at it, Sarah was not willing to ask what happened when the operation was not a success. The pain of the scalpel cutting into the young woman’s stomach must have been ferocious. The doctor would never have subjected her to such agony if it had not been necessary.

  “Tar?” Sarah enquired.

  “No, a whiskey-soaked pad for a couple of days,” he directed. “She’ll not object to the liquor on the outside, I think.”

  “Won’t it sting?”

  “She’ll stand it. I can’t have tar, because I’ve left stitches inside, and they’re going to have to come out before I’m finished.”

  “So you’ll cut her open again?”

  Doctor Reade nodded, as he and the matron began fixing a dressing over the wound.

  Not needed any more, Sarah stepped back to be out of their road. Her forehead felt burning hot, and yet her cheeks felt cold. She had held out very well, she thought, throughout the operation, but now that her part in it was over, it was beginning to catch up on her. Having to do it again to get the stitches out from inside was not good to think about.

  Suddenly Ken MacGovern’s hand was under her elbow, steadying her. He looked into her eyes, winked, and shook his head.

  She must have staggered; come near to fainting herself.

  “You did very well,” Doctor Reade complimented her, and then she was all right again.

  Two days later they took out the internal stitches, and the outer wound was stitched up again for the second time. It was red and angry, but the doctor said that was a reaction to the whiskey burning, rather than a damaging inflammation. The poor young woman, however, had not slept in all that time, and was quite stupid from exhaustion. Sarah suffered with her in sympathy, and slept little herself.

  On a more cheerful note, Matilda Earnshaw continued to improve, and after the storm cleared, her mother began to take her out on deck, where the wee thing at last began to take an interest in her surroundings.

  Twenty Four

  Births on board were also something Sarah could cope with. She had helped with a number in her home village during her last couple of years, her mother often being called on as a midwife. Three came in quick succession in the days after the storm, each without complications, for which everybody was truly thankful.

  David Selkirk found himself the sole male occupant of a largely female world, screened away in a corner of the hospital flat, listening to all the keening and groaning of the women who occupied the other cots. Once his ribs were healed, and he had back the use of his arms and hands, he was much more comfortable. His leg, however, kept him literally tied to his bunk. Jess and Samantha still visited him, and played chess with him, but his other male visitors were no longer welcome.

  To spend any time with Andy, which she found herself wanting to do more and more as the voyage progressed, Jess had to meet him on deck after dark, always muffled up in an oilskin with the hood up. On the one hand she was embarrassed to use the subterfuge, but on the other did not feel really guilty about it, as all the people who mattered to her knew quite well what she was doing. They leaned on the gunwale and talked about the sea, and the stars, and what other countries were like, just as Sarah and Ken MacGovern were doing just a few feet away. When Sarah called it a night, and went below, Jess did too.

  Sarah’s relationship with Ken MacGovern was an odd one. There was no future in it, and both of them knew it. It could never progress past the easy chatting stage. Sarah didn’t want it to, and wouldn’t want it to under any other circumstances anyway. He was nice, and she liked him, but her real need for him was as a check-weight to Gil Inkster. There her heart really was involved, and it hurt. Ken understood that. He was no fool. In any case, it would be years before he would have anything he could offer a girl like Sarah, and then it would be only in the times when his ship was in port, with long lonely passages in between. What Sarah did for him was make him wish that he had never decided to go to sea.

  Another that Sarah talked with at length was White Eye, a charming man for all his frightening appearance. He too knew that part of the reason Sarah sought him out was to keep herself away from Gil. There was more to it than that, of course, and both of them valued a friendship that they hoped to maintain long after their voyage had been completed.

  With Gil’s children there was no holding back. The motherless youngsters needed a woman’s hand, and Sarah gave them her love unreservedly. In New Zealand she knew that her home would be close enough for her to keep in touch with them as they grew up. There would be no need to break with them completely at the Lyttelton wharves.

  Outside of their work with the school, and their care of Gil’s little ones, Sarah’s relationships with Gil were a muddle that grew no better as the miles passed backward under the keel. Neither of them seemed to be able to help themselves.

  In the running of the school they co-operated so well with each other they could almost have been telepathic. Sarah did what Gil wanted with hardly anything needing to be explained, while her sugge
stions for improvements in this and that were adopted practically as if they had been Gil’s own. In her handling of his children, if she had not been so young, an outsider looking on could have mistaken them for her own. In all ways they looked like a couple who had been contentedly married for years...only they weren’t.

  Every now and then Gil would find himself standing with an arm about Sarah, but with no recollection of having put it there. On her part, Sarah accepted the arm without thinking. At times she did the same to him, or turned into his arms when she paused to tell him something. Just standing next to him was different to standing next to any other man. They always stood closer together than either would with anybody else.

  When they realised what they were doing, they stopped, and pulled back guiltily. They never spoke about it; never apologised. They didn’t need to. They understood. Five minutes later they were unconsciously back where they were again.

  It was hopeless.

  And painful...

  So Sarah spent time when she could with Ken or White Eye, and Gil buried himself in schoolwork, or caring for his children.

  A death on board, when it came, was a shock to everybody. Voyages without a death or two, and sometimes more, many more, were almost unheard of. They had got so far without one, they thought they might get all the rest of the way. David, the most likely, was healing well. The woman with the appendicitis was back on deck in a fortnight.

  The lad who died simply