Ship of Fire

by Michael Cadnum

  “This treasure is the Queen’s to keep,” said the admiral, “if she so desires.”

  I felt chastened, and much lost in the choppy waters of monarchs and God, about which I knew little.

  There was hurried conversation at the door, and a guard stepped in, accompanied by Hercules.

  The lad stood, waiting for my permission to speak, but I was so unused to having servants or assistants of any kind that the admiral himself had to prompt Hercules. “Use your tongue, boy.”

  “Our patient, if you please, sir,” said Hercules, his eyes wide, “is dying!”

  “Why did you leave us so long, Thomas?” said Anne. “My mother is worse than ever before.”

  I had no ready reassurance, out of breath and shocked at this turn of events, barely hearing Anne when she added, “I speak to her, and she doesn’t even stir.”

  Hercules was pale with apprehension. “She puked yellow, sir,” he said, “into the basin.”

  When I felt for my patient’s pulse, her hands were moist and cold. Her heartbeat was a broken thread, unsteady and easily lost. I offered Anne my most soothing tone, telling her all would be well.

  But I wished that I could be so certain.

  “In London,” Anne responded, “my mother is attended by Sir George Saltash, the author of ‘The Moon in Her Many Humors.’ That worthy doctor gives her Virginia tobacco smoke to warm her blood.”

  Tobacco, as it is sometimes spelled, can be a useful drug. Blown up the nose, this newly discovered herb can wake up a gentleman knocked senseless, and I have heard it praised as an evacuator of the bowel. But I made no remark, rubbing Mary Woodroofe’s hands. When I peered into her eyes, one pupil was a tiny pinprick, and the other dilated wide.

  “Run quick and seek Sir Robert Garr, good Hercules,” I said, keeping my voice as calm as I could manage, “and ask the scholar to pay us a visit, if he would.”

  My master had explained that an injury to the head causes fluids or vapors to build within the skull. Some medical men keep drills, with hard steel bits, for releasing the evil within the head.

  That sort of surgery was beyond my scope. My patient struggled once again to breathe, and I knew I could not delay any longer. She was close to death.

  “If you would reassure me regarding your schooling, Thomas,” Anne was saying, “and what works on star-signs or bodily humors you have penned—”

  I brought down the earthen jar, pried off the lid, and used a pair of tongs to select the largest and most blood-starved leech.

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  He was a good-sized blood-slug, withered from his long fast, glistening and motionless in the lamplight. He looked quite dead. I gave him a slight pinch with the tongs, however, and the sightless creature gave a vigorous twitch.

  “Anne, you may wish to enjoy the evening air on deck,” I said, with every attempt at sounding sure of myself.

  “I will not leave Mother’s side,” she said. And then, in a lower voice, she added, “You are an accomplished doctor, aren’t you, Thomas?”

  I could not answer. My desire to be honest with her, and my fears for my patient, created a tangled silence in me.

  Anne seemed to realize this. She sighed, and folded her arms, her clothing rustling and casting a shifting shadow across the cabin. But she did not leave.

  I set the sleepy leech on the table and used a lancet to prick my finger, an act which in other circumstances would have forced me to brace myself and hesitate. There was no time to ready my will—when blood welled from my finger, I smeared it on the wrist of my patient.

  A leech needs a primer—milk or blood—to awaken its appetite to the task. Once placed on this sampling of scarlet, the leech locked onto my patient’s flesh. It shrank to a tight, dark orb and then gradually began to swell.

  Anne watched all this with an air of anguished approval.

  As the leech did its work, I gave Anne a true account of my master’s good name, and my own hopes as his assistant. I did not exaggerate my power to cure, but I explained with a truthful heart that no teacher had ever found me the dullest student. I sketched the events of recent days, and she listened.

  I had finished my story at last, and she pressed her hands together prayerfully.

  Her eyes would not meet mine, and her fingers trembled.

  When the leech grew fat, I pried him gently free. A circle of skin where the leech had fed had been removed—only the topmost layer of flesh, as artfully as any a glazier might cut in a church window. I searched among the leeches in the jar for another just as hungry.

  “I cannot find Sir Robert,” said Hercules, panting and wet with salt spray.

  “Maybe he’s studying the sky,” I suggested. Learned men were always working with star-charts and astrolabes, foretelling future calamities.

  “I searched the ship,” said Hercules, his voice falling into a song-song recitation of his effort, “among the seamen and the soldiers, and the arms magazine, where gentlemen sometimes like to count the shot and pinch the gunpowder in its sacks. I sought him in among the wine barrels, too, sir, where he might sample the cargo. He is gone.”

  I considered this. “Hercules, ask the watch on the quarterdeck”—meaning the soldier standing guard there—“to take you to Captain Foxcroft’s cabin. I believe Sir Robert must be there.”

  When fair-haired Hercules had left us again, Anne drew a pomander from a pouch at her belt and took a long breath of healthful spices—their perfume reached me, rose petals and cinnamon. Gentle folk took such fragrance as a bracer, sometimes, when weariness or troubling news put them in need.

  To my pleasure and relief she offered me the pomander, a carved boxwood ball with many holes. I breathed the perfume as I heard her say, her voice weak with feeling, “Shipboard physicians are never the best.”

  “My master was a rare scholar,” I protested.

  She smiled sadly. “With an even more rare apprentice?”

  “I am at your service, Anne.”

  “I am grateful for your honesty, Thomas Spyre,” she said. “You’ve proven merciful and even wise, and I am grieved at the loss of William Perrivale. But more than anything I fear for my mother’s life.”

  Hercules returned, and barely managed a breathless, “Doctor, Sir Robert is not there either,” before Captain Foxcroft’s figure loomed behind him, pushing him to one side and stepping into the lamplight of our cabin.

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  The captain introduced himself with every courtesy to Anne, and then turned to study my patient, not before saying, “With your permission, master surgeon.”

  My master would have ordered him out of the cabin at once. I could have done so myself, but the truth is I believed that the captain had both the rank and experience to override such insistence from me. Furthermore, I believed that the captain had the well-being of his crew and his passengers at heart.

  And I was more concerned than anyone regarding the health of my patient. “We have searched the ship,” I said. “We cannot find Sir Robert.”

  “Perhaps, Thomas,” said the captain in an attempt at wry humor, “Sir Robert has evaporated.”

  I felt a growing flicker of friendship toward the captain, a man already visibly worn by his duty to the ship and its passengers.

  There was one cabin Hercules would not have searched.

  “Is it possible, my lord captain,” I hazarded, “that he is with the admiral?”

  Hercules returned at once with Sir Robert.

  The distinguished knight and playwright bowed handsomely to Anne, asked the captain to excuse us, and, when we were alone with Anne and her mother, knelt beside my patient.

  Sir Robert spoke to me in Latin. When I did not understand what he was saying, he tried an even simpler form of that language. At last I could catch his meaning. “You are right in bleeding her,” he said, “but a lancet would be quicker.”

  “You have my permission,” I said, shaping my Latin with care, “to open a vein.”

  Anne appeared reassure
d to hear us speaking in the scholar’s tongue. She looked on with every show of calm, but I was troubled to hear Sir Robert say, in slowly paced Roman syllables, “I have never cut a blood vessel in my life.”

  “But you are a man of great learning,” I protested, “while I am yet a student.” My simple Latin sounded childish in my ears. I added, earnestly, “I am grateful for your help.”

  “I part with it willingly,” said the knight with an expectant smile. “Your hand, I warrant, is far steadier than mine.”

  I took the lancet in my hand. It was a well-shaped little blade, the sort a lady’s servant might use to smear butter on bread—except for its keen edge, whetted fine.

  The lancet’s shadow approached the pale arm of my patient. I hesitated.

  I asked Sir Robert to hold a blanket as a screen, so Anne would not have to see the blade do its work. I had been reluctant to touch Anne’s mother with steel, and had hoped that a leech would suffice.

  But in the event my hand did not tremble. The blood made a pretty sound, purling from the blue vein in the lady’s arm, into the brass basin.

  When her mother was breathing easily under a gray wool blanket, her pulse thin but steady, Anne put her hand on my arm.

  Her eyes were the umber green of a leaf just touched with autumn.

  “I am sorry I questioned you so, Thomas,” she said.

  I could not bring myself to tell her that she expressed her gratitude all too soon.

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  The week that followed was blessed.

  I forced from my mind both my sorrow, and my fear of the promised warfare. Perhaps I began to believe our voyage would last forever.

  The cook finally got his great copper stock pot over a fire in the galley, and we supped on mutton and beef stews, steaming servings of nourishment, with leeks and a new vegetable just then being imported from France, the parsnip. It is a tapered, strong-flavored root, no improvement on the turnip. We dined on what remained of the Plymouth bakers’ rye and wheat bread. As a ship’s officer I ate at the captain’s table now that calm weather could be expected, and I had never eaten better.

  I heard no end of seaman’s tales, stories of ships punctured by the long, piercing beak of the narwhal, shipwrecked sailors driven by starvation to roast the livers of their departed shipmates. The ship’s purser, a round, plum-cheeked man named Gilbert Brownsword, in charge of the ship’s accounts, winked at me and said that every new officer had to listen to the same purple tales, embellished with each retelling.

  The admiral often joined us, and more than once asked me into his cabin afterward for some West Country cider. He convinced me that I had a gilded future sailing for the Queen, and I basked in the hope, strengthened by mutton chops and drink.

  And then there was Anne.

  Every morning I hurried to see my patient and her daughter. Anne was the one I most wanted to talk to, and she would always open the door to their cabin holding the pomander, offering it to me with a smile, and saying, “It’s our worshipful physician, Mother, to pay us a visit.”

  To keep Mary Woodroofe’s lungs clear, I prepared a mixture of spearmint, red fennel, mace, and celery, to be taken nine spoonfuls morning and evening. The medicine should have included the blood of a nine-day-old sow, but none of that was on hand. My patient awakened every morning, sound in spirit, although weak, and with no memory of ever being afraid of me. Indeed, she had no memory of the pirates and their attack at all, a failing not unusual where blows to the head are concerned. Now that her normal humors had returned she proved to be a calm and dignified woman, taking pleasure in her daughter’s companionship, and expressing delight whenever Admiral Drake paid them a visit.

  “This is the very picture of happiness,” she would say, given a cup of spiced wine. Or, after a visit from the admiral, “I am the very picture of pleasure.” On greeting me in the morning she would say, “I had the very picture of a good night’s sleep.”

  Her daughter had more variety of expression, noting one morning, “Thomas takes the trouble to comb the snags from his hair, Mother, and to brush the salt off his doublet before he comes to see us. You would think,” added Anne, “that he gave a very careful thought to his appearance.”

  “A young man of quality may well do so,” said her mother, taking another sip of wine and cloves.

  “As though he were suffering either from vanity,” said Anne, making a point of speaking about me as though I were not present, “or the desire to impress someone.” Some strong feeling colored her cheeks as she adjusted her mother’s blanket and looked sideways in my direction.

  ‘“Pride always overthroweth his master,’” said my patient cheerfully, reciting a well-worn adage.

  “I am proud,” I rallied, “as every man aboard our ship must be, to have two such ladies as companions.”

  “Two such ladies,” echoed Anne, as though mocking me in some manner that confused my thinking.

  We voyaged south through what we called the Great Ocean, the mainland of Europe to the east, the merest shadow, a band of clouds and a hint of land.

  We sailed beyond the western outline of France. Jack pointed out features I struggled to be able to see, including the great harbor at Bordeaux, with wine-ships and lighters. As we made way even farther south—off the low, green coast of Portugal—Jack pointed out the river-city of Porto, with its caravels and fisher-boats.

  Captain Foxcroft offered me a smile when he took his morning wine on the quarterdeck, and sometimes asked me to join him. From him I learned that the standing rigging of the ship is composed largely of shrouds, the strong ropes attached to the masts and bracing them. The shrouds were laced with transverse ropes up and down their height called ratlines—pronounce rattlins. The ratlines gave the shrouds their web-like appearance, and afforded mariners a foothold as they clambered to shake out a sail.

  The wind was strong, nearly always off the starboard quarter, which Captain Foxcroft said was the prevailing breeze in this ocean, and ideal for sailing. The captain was generous with sea-lore, and despite his steadfast caution, so unlike our admiral’s blazing self-confidence, he took pains to inquire that my bereavement was not an undue burden to me.

  On rare occasions the Golden Lion appeared far behind in our wake, but no other fighting ships kissed the horizon. The soldiers prepared their weapons, and practiced, their halberds crashing as they cross-checked friendly blows.

  After hours of practice, I became accustomed to the fume of the wicks and the deafening reports of the guns. Jack gave me a wave through the smoke from time to time, and I waved back. The gunners nodded at me approvingly—I was the young surgeon who had lost his master, and they extended to me some genial brotherhood, perhaps out of compassion, with a dash of respect.

  Each night a seaman hung the usual red stern lamp behind the Elizabeth Bonaventure, and in the darkness it was easy to convince ourselves that we were not alone on the sea.

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  “My mother and I will be safe, won’t we, when the sea battle begins?” Anne asked me one evening when her mother slept.

  “What shot could penetrate all these futtocks and ribands?” I responded, parroting some knowledge of the ship’s frame I had picked up.

  “Thomas, we shall need more armor than simple faith in shipwrights,” she responded, putting her hand on mine.

  Her touch was warm.

  Some heavy-footed commotion somewhere above distracted us momentarily, the captain and the first mate singing out orders, another urgent adjustment to the canvas on the main and mizzen masts.

  “I would give my blood and breath to protect you,” I said.

  Never had I made such an extravagant statement, certainly not to Jane, the doe-eyed landlord’s daughter back in London.

  “I see, Tom,” she said, not the response I had expected. She gave a warm but pensive smile. “We shall be defended by the good wishes and high hopes of our fighting men.”

  I could say nothing more, warmed by the hope that sh
e considered me one of the men who would fight.

  No doubt a playwright or philosopher could summon the wit to discourse with a lovely woman on a warship. But the noise and cramped quarters, the steps and coughs and heavy tread all around, defeated every hope for intimacy—or even a tender thought. The ship’s armorer was busy at his forge, his hammer pealing, the cook was bawling at one of his mates, a laughing, half-serious scolding audible even here, declaiming, “If I had another poxy rabbit-sucker for a mate I’d hang myself.”

  I stepped closer. It was my sudden intention to kiss her, surprising even myself.

  But before I could complete the act, her mother stirred, and coughed.

  She sat up, saying, “Anne, the lamp is smoking.”

  It could not last, this peace.

  Gradually the evening came when gunners cleaned their guns, polished them, and sang songs I had not heard before. These were deep-voiced chanteys, with strangely charm-laden lyrics intended not for our ears, but for the benefit of the guns.

  Far and true/powder and fire, chants about unerring cannon shots, and an enemy dashed to the Deep.

  The whetstones sang on the cutting edges of boarding hooks and daggers, until no greater keenness could be purchased. A quiet came over the deck. Soldiers and mariners put their heads together, callused fingers pointing where a land-haze rose up over the horizon. We rounded some vague shadow-spit of shore.

  The admiral uttered the words himself, leaning over the quarterdeck rail as a coastline crept by. “The Spanish mainland,” he said. “And a joy to behold.”

  Wine casks and fishing net drifted on the swells, evidence of Spanish shipping and harbor life. My own heart beat fast, and Jack’s eyes met mine with a glow of ill-suppressed excitement.

  “Cadiz harbor,” murmured Jack, “is less than a day away.”

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  All night we did not sleep, our ship keeping steady progress under canvas that glowed in the starlight.

  Every man whispered now, if he spoke at all. Stories were told of shipboard voices drifting for miles, alerting the enemy. Captain Foxcroft paced, gazing back at the Golden Lion, the warship lagging but persistent, growing ever closer.