Peril on the Sea

by Michael Cadnum

  There was no sign of a wound, but Highbridge was turning a sickened azure hue, his lips sea-gray. Katharine knelt to put her hand on him, feeling for a pulse. A round bruise was appearing on his forehead, like a moon burning through cloud. A pistol shot had struck Highbridge, she guessed, but the bullet had not broken the skin.

  She had a memory of Orwell, the ostler’s son, who climbed on the roof of the Crossed Keys inn near Fairleigh one midsummer night. He fell off the roof and turned blue, just as blue as Highbridge was this instant. His father had hurried from the barn, knelt, and called his son’s name, the youth insensible, lost. But then the ostler had known exactly what to do.

  Just as Katharine did now.

  She seized Highbridge by the shoulders, and shook him hard and repeatedly, with all her strength—until at last he coughed.

  Highbridge took a ragged breath. He opened his eyes and took a long moment to make an inventory of what he beheld. His eyes were bloodshot, and one of his pupils was an outsized ragged oval, and the other a pinprick of black.

  He reached up to take Katharine’s hand, and his grip was powerless. What he said next made no immediate sense to Katharine, in large part because she could not hear beyond the numbing reports of ordnance that made the Vixen lurch.

  Highbridge was saying a single word, and it rhymed with witch. Bitch, itch, flitch. Sherwin could not understand. Highbridge had suffered a head wound—perhaps his faculties were scattered. To see the formerly upright officer so stricken disheartened Sherwin, and he wished for some power to restore the man to health.

  Bartholomew was the first to comprehend.

  “He says give the Spanish pitch, sir,” said Bartholomew. “Flaming pitch, to start them burning.”

  SAILORS CARRIED the smoking buckets aloft, and heaved them across the seething water.

  A few flaming pails of burning pitch plunged into the abyss of water between the vessels, on either side of the Vixen. These errant, fuming buckets sent up spouts of steam and drowned like living entities.

  But several flaming projectiles were heaved—by brawn and good judgment—far enough and well enough to annoy their attackers. One bucket was hurled back, and the scattered contents caused alarm, until Sir Gregory and Sherwin joined in stamping out the flames.

  The sergeant opened the wooden box of iron bomboes, and he and two able-bodied men were soon setting the fuses alight and heaving the sputtering objects, with their spiraling plumes of smoke, high over the enemy vessels. Sherwin joined them, aware that this was evidence of a suicidal desperation on his part.

  He did not feel despair, however, and he certainly did not want to die. His reasoning was that his life was quite possibly already forfeit, his future entirely finished, and that he was as good as food for crabs and eels already. Therefore, he might as well throw himself even further into the fight.

  The explosions were earsplitting, and soon the urca and the galleass were both aflame, and the urca was so crippled and so engulfed in fire that the galleon had to break off her attack, in an attempt to avoid entanglement with her fiery sister vessel.

  IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON before the character of the day altered from one discordant, violent action after another.

  The silence was unsettling—eerie, more stupor than peace.

  The bulk of the Armada had swept north and east of Fletcher’s ship. The Vixen had turned to worry the flank of the enemy force, but remained for the moment out of range of its gunners. The lookout called that Captain Hawkins could be seen, coming up from the west. With the promise of English warships to arrive from the direction of Southampton to the east, there was every sign of a great battle to come.

  All this made the present silence more uncanny.

  Sherwin was enjoying a pipe of tobacco leaf brought to him by Bartholomew, the fumes snatched away by the wind. He felt that he had never been anywhere but on this ship, and any sense he had of a past, or a future, was little more than a fugitive fantasy. The guns were silent, and the loudest sound now was the breathy thunder of the sails.

  “Does tobacco sweeten your humors?” asked Katharine.

  “Dr. Reynard,” said Sherwin, “swears that it counteracts the effect of gun smoke.”

  He offered Katharine the mouthpiece.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I’ll not turn my body into a flue, Sherwin, even if it pleases Dr. Reynard.”

  Feeling pleasantly rebuffed, Sherwin gave the tobacco pipe back to Bartholomew. Katharine’s voice was so unlike any of the sounds that had rent the air that day that he put his arms around her, not solely to embrace her but to keep her just exactly where she was as long as possible.

  His iron corselet by then had been removed, although he kept the sword at his hip. He knew his hair was matted and his doublet was wet through with sweat. He had killed a man that day, and he did not relish the truth of that, feeling his own pulse hammer you, you, you.

  You are living, at the cost of another man’s life.

  “You’re hurt,” said Katharine.

  “No,” he protested, “I am well and happy.” He had to laugh—his own voice was a wheezing, unfamiliar sound.

  But she reached to his cheek and pulled out a splinter, and found another on the bridge of his nose. He was bleeding from a dozen small cuts, and he had not felt the pain. His right arm ached, too, he realized. The bomboes had indeed been heavy, and he had burned his hand on a fuse.

  “My father’s hopes,” she said, “such as they ever were, are either in the hands of the Spanish or reduced to ash.” She spoke sadly, but with a quality of wonder that her prospects could alter so completely in such a short time.

  Sherwin believed in that instant that what they were experiencing was an eerie afterlife—something in their souls had been extinguished, leaving their hearts beating.

  “Will Mr. Highbridge,” asked Sherwin, “soon be joining us on deck?” He made the question sound easy, as though he was certain of an optimistic answer.

  The truth was, he feared for the first officer’s life.

  “He is resting senseless,” said Katharine, surprised at the question, “like an effigy of marble.”

  “Dr. Reynard,” said Sherwin, “will surely smoke and drink our good Mr. Highbridge back to health.”

  “Ah, Sherwin,” she said, “I fear not.”

  Sherwin experienced one more distinct vision of battle that day, and it interrupted a growing illusion of peace. This new violence woke him to the fact that the battle had only begun.

  34

  THE SUN WAS SETTING, the end of day marred by scudding clouds and the promise of a storm.

  Men were making an informal register of shipmates who were still alive, along with a written list kept by Lockwood and his mates. Even Tryce, drunk on wine spirits, made his way to the deck, propped on crutches, to prove that he was alive.

  “What a pig cannot kill, no Spaniard will,” was Tryce’s oft-repeated declaration.

  No crew member had been lost. Beer was drunk and savored, and the best wine, and the smoke that filled the air from the galley had a new flavor, mutton and fish the cook had caught the night before, when the day’s events were in the future—sole and John Dory, spiced with rare peppercorns from a prize the Vixen had taken not a month past.

  During this continuing interval of growing security came a reminder of the enemy’s power, and his spite.

  THE VIXEN had continued to drift wide of the main body of the Armada—the wind was behind the Spanish, and the bulk of the ships were bent by force of the weather toward the east. Warning shots from Spanish ordnance stitched the water, but the captain showed no sign of departing from the Armada entirely. The Vixen continued her wasp-like presence, stubbornly hovering, but not too close to her powerful enemy.

  Burns and blisters were the most common complaints. The surgeon painted gunpowder burns with a balm of sweet lard and carrot pulp, as the doctor explained, mixed with a little suet of cat flesh. Sherwin had received a first application of the ointment after his ini
tial powder burns, and he was already healing.

  The captain came aft to survey the minor damage to the ship.

  The mainsail was being shaken out, and catching the first full swell of wind, when a cannon shot struck the canvas. The ball had traveled a great distance, but its momentum caused the sail to collapse inward. Sailors had to cling to keep from falling.

  The cannonball fell, and hit the deck not a stride ahead of Fletcher.

  The ten-pound shot did little damage to the deck, and it rolled slowly, following the camber of the planks, all the way to the scuppers.

  “Are you all right, there, Captain, sir?” called Lockwood.

  A powder devil, one of the gunner’s boys, appeared from nowhere to gather in the lead ball. He was black with gun soot, and seared like a boy who had been pan-fried, but his smile was bright.

  “Good lad,” said the captain.

  Sherwin was deeply relieved to see the captain unhurt.

  THE VIXEN parted wreckage floating on the sea, all that was left of the Rosebriar. A surprising amount of lumber floated on the swells, flesh-colored spans of rough-milled pine. The crew used hooks to gather what they could of this salvage, as well as the bits of sailors’ kits and ship’s supplies that bobbed on the surface.

  Katharine watched over the side of the ship—she and her father had, after all, invested nearly all they possessed in this vessel, and it was appalling to see what a worthy cargo ship of nearly six hundred tons could be reduced to.

  The captain examined some of these finds, and called Sherwin and Katharine over to see what had been recovered.

  The items made a mournful little cache, so evidently the homely items that individuals had carried for comfort: a velvet shoe, a knit stocking, and a nightcap, along with an assortment of combs of horn and others of bone, wooden buttons and a sodden handkerchief with pretty red stitchery, a gillyflower pattern along the edge.

  The entire assembly smelled of pine pitch or turpentine, a valuable cargo but not like the fragrant perfume of cinnamon, and not originating in the balmy tropics, either. Such cargo came from Newfoundland, or some other northern place.

  Katharine felt the first stirrings of promise. She did not want to give in to this hopeful feeling, fearful that she might be disappointed.

  A plank was carved with the words Lord is mijn herder.

  It was the sort of sacred phrase a ship’s officer or a captain might keep in his quarters. The Lord is my shepherd, in Dutch.

  “I do believe,” said the captain, “that the captured ship was not the Rosebriar after all.”

  35

  AFTER HER INITIAL ELATION at this change of fortune, Katharine realized that she had good reason to be angry.

  Katharine had found the sea battle, which she had endured from the confines of the captain’s quarters, to have been a period of singular hellishness. For a time she had sat with a battle pike across her lap, hoping that the vessel might fall to hand-to-hand combat. That, she had thought with resentful irony, might at least mean less cannon fire and less likelihood that the Vixen would explode and sink.

  Katharine was no innocent about the ways of man and nature. She had been raised around farmers, and every farmer is a matter-of-fact killer. When a farmer is not slaughtering pigs he is castrating them, and when he is not smoking flesh he is stripping it from bones. Katharine was not weak-willed, and she did not consider herself naïve, but she did feel that battle extended human violence and recklessness beyond anything the Lord required.

  She had told herself that the battle would end, eventually, as God willed, and so here it was—a merciful end.

  But the captain showed no intention of departing these bloody seas. His behavior, she thought, bordered on maniacal stubbornness, or perhaps years of gunfire had inured him to the point at which he was dangerous to himself and his crew. If the captain knew the Rosebriar was still at sea, why did he not break off the fighting and go seek her? Honor had been established, surely, and there was no need to keep fighting.

  “We should try to reach the Rosebriar,” she said when she joined the captain on the quarterdeck, “and keep her from tangling with the Spaniards.”

  Despite her relative youth, her counsel was not inappropriate. Her family had a pact with Captain Fletcher, and it was understood that the sponsor of a venture should consult with the ship’s captain, as the need arose. But despite her clear, declarative manner, she felt uneasy speaking to Captain Fletcher. She did not trust him any better now than she ever had, and as a woman on a warship she felt the weakness of her position.

  “These Spanish great-ships have silken pillows stuffed with rosemary and sweet olive oil,” the captain replied. “A Spanish officer has a purse fat with gold reals.”

  Recognizing her helplessness did not discourage her so much as allow her to experience a sudden mental clarity. Her father had misjudged this man.

  The captain was even more unreliable than she had feared. None of these mariners possessed the solid, amiable good sense of a landsman, like Eleanor’s husband with his windmill and his practical desire to avoid all hazard. She felt the first glimmer of an uncharacteristic despair.

  “Captain,” she said, “you are not thinking of sniffing out prizes, surely.”

  “All are fish,” he said, echoing an old adage, “that come to the net.”

  AS THE EVENING stalled and became one of those vaults of darkness that are not made up of hours but go on endlessly, Katharine became temporarily resigned to what was happening. Besides, it was evident that Highbridge, despite his moments of renewed consciousness, was sinking.

  An English ship was expected to hold prayers morning and evening, when conditions permitted. That evening’s service was brief, a thanksgiving for their at least temporary reprieve from death. We gat not this by our own sword, neither was it our own arm that saved us, but thy right hand.

  “For the love of Lord Jesus,” prayed the captain in conclusion, “spare our shipmate Peter Highbridge.”

  FOR TWO DAYS the Vixen traded volleys with the southern flank of the Armada.

  The English gunners were accurate, within the limitations of their ordnance, but the shot either bounced off the strakes of the looming Spanish vessels or sank deep into the enemy superstructures, leaving ruinous-looking but apparently harmless holes.

  Hawkins’s fleet of warships joined the battle, and the Spaniards encountered the bulk of the English fighting force from the east. A great Spanish galleon burned in the distance, and Sherwin could see the smaller English vessels darting among the Spaniards.

  Fletcher kept his ship near the fighting, but often at a distance from the greatest tumult. The weather continued severe, and by the fourth day many English ships had the weather gauge, sailing upwind from the Spanish and able to maneuver more freely than their foe. A force with such an advantage was understood to have the upper hand.

  “We’re running low, Captain, sir,” said Master Gunner Aiken, approaching the quarterdeck. He spoke with an economy of words, as though speech were precious ammunition, too. “We’re dwindling on shot, and nearly out of powder.”

  Spanish musket balls that fell to the deck were loaded into sakers and fired back at the enemy.

  THAT NIGHT Highbridge could not be awakened to sip from a posset cup, spiced wine the surgeon had taken special pains to prepare. He lay in the captain’s own bunk, and at first he would respond vaguely, like a man troubled by a dream, to voices.

  “Highbridge,” the captain would call, as though speaking to someone at the bottom of a deep well. “Highbridge, old friend, you will stir now, cease this petty malingering, and come out on deck.”

  Then, as the night wore on, the captain became more urgent. “Damn it, man, we need you. The Spanish are pushed by storm into Lord Howard’s fleet. Come on deck, Highbridge, and see the Armada falter.”

  The surgeon slipped in and out of the cabin. “It is not the shot wound that is the problem,” said Dr. Reynard. “I fear that when Officer Highbridge fell, h
e hit the deck hard, and his head suffered some distemper.”

  “Have you seen this sort of injury before?” Katharine asked.

  “My lady,” he responded, “I must say, before God, that more men die of falling on a ship than from minion balls or dudgeons.”

  She surmised that Reynard was a man of high hope and knowledge, but little power over fate. His surgeon’s apron was spotted and dyed, evidently with the gore of his patients of years gone by.

  She asked, “Is there no cure?”

  “My lady, a hole can be drilled in the skull,” said Dr. Reynard, “and the unhealthy humors released, but with the sea so heavy, and the guns firing, there is no steady platform for such a delicate operation.”

  “SING TO HIM, if you will, Lady Katharine,” advised the captain during one of his short visits, “because I have heard that song can seek the soul and hang on to it.” Katharine sensed that Fletcher would do anything to keep his friend alive.

  But the captain’s duties were too demanding to permit him to remain beside his stricken officer, and besides, the sight of such closeness to death made the mariner pace helplessly, turning and turning in the confined cabin, until there was no relief but to return to the increasing tempest of wind and rain.

  Katharine knew many songs. Almost every act of household labor had a song. Many were carefree, like the one about the windmill, “Spin my love faithful,” and some expressed superstitions, intended to keep milk from turning sour or to keep a lover faithful.

  There were songs for the mortally stricken, too, and so Katharine sang of the apple that dreamed of the orchard, and the orchard that dreamed of the kingdom, and the kingdom that dreamed of Heaven.

  Sherwin joined her frequently, when he was able, but the ship was bounded by turmoil, and resounded with the calls of the boatswain for men to trim the sails and of the quartermaster requiring sailors belowdecks. Sherwin was always needed elsewhere, and it seemed to Katharine that his visits were all too brief.