The Enterprise of England

by Ann Swinfen

  ‘The sewing women have been put to cutting up all the cloth we have,’ he said, ‘and they’ve sent out for more. Ah, here we are.’

  Margaret Jenkins, one of the sewing women I knew well, came into the ward with a large basket of bandage strips, which she placed next to the tray. As she turned and caught sight of the ward, she gasped and pressed her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Oh, Dr Alvarez,’ she said, ‘how many are there?’

  ‘I think we have taken in about four hundred,’ I said. ‘The rest have gone to St Thomas’s.’

  She shook her head, as though all words had deserted her, and hurried away back to the sewing room. I knelt down beside the first pallet. The soldier was a grizzled man of middle years with half his breeches torn away, his right leg bound up in a filthy bloody cloth.

  He attempted a smile. ‘Not a good sight, doctor.’

  ‘Pass me the scissors, Peter,’ I said, and held out my hand for them. ‘What caused this?’

  ‘Spanish bullet. Two weeks ago.’ He clamped his mouth shut as I began to cut away the dirty cloth. It was stuck fast to the leg and I could not remove it without hurting him.

  ‘Is the bullet still there?’

  ‘No. Got. It. Out. Myself. Oh, Jesu!’

  ‘I’m sorry, it can’t be helped.’ I looked down at the wound which was badly inflamed. ‘How did you get it out?’

  ‘Point of my dagger.’

  He tapped the sheath attached to his belt. It was probably dirty, but at least I would not have to remove the bullet. Peter knelt on the floor beside me, holding a bowl of Coventry water. He handed me a cloth. I dipped it into the water and began to wipe away the dirt and crusted matter from the wound. The soldier bit down on his lip.

  ‘I’m afraid this will hurt, but I need to clean it. Then I’ll salve it and bind it up. There’s no sign of gangrene, so you can be thankful for that.’ I was thinking of Sir Philip Sidney, who died from one of Parma’s bullets, followed by gangrene.

  He nodded, but did not risk his voice in speaking. When I was satisfied that the wound was as clean as I could get it, Peter handed me the salve, which I smeared generously over the wound and the surrounding skin, then bound the leg with a clean strip of cloth.

  ‘Now try and rest a while,’ I said. ‘We have to see to all of the injuries first, but later they will bring you food.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor.’ His voice was stronger now, and he managed a weak smile. ‘That salve is making it feel better already.’

  ‘Good.’ The salve was made with many cooling and antiseptic herbs, pounded in honey, which is one of the best healers God has given us. With luck, the wound would heal. I patted his shoulder and moved with Peter to the next soldier.

  By now I could see my father working his way along the opposite wall, while Dr Stevens was directing four of the nursing sisters to care for some of the less serious cases. When the hospital was part of the Priory of St Bartholomew, back before King Henry’s time, the daily care of the sick was carried out by nuns. Now the women who looked after our patients were secular, many of them widows, but the term ‘sister’ had lingered on. The mistress of the nurses, who did not normally care for the patients herself, had rolled up her sleeves and joined them. My father must have pacified her somehow.

  The next soldier in the row along the near wall was a young boy, who could not have been more than thirteen or fourteen. He seemed only half conscious but it was clear that the injury was to his right hand, which was invisible inside a crude bundle of cloth. Once again I cut the bloodstained cloth away, to reveal a horribly crushed and mangled hand.

  Peter looked at me and shook his head. I shrugged. It might be possible to save it, but I was doubtful. I took so long cleaning the hand and setting each finger in tiny splints that Dr Stephens came and stood over me, watching what I was doing. It made me nervous, for I knew he had a low opinion of me. Unlike him, I had not studied at the Medical School in Oxford. I had not even studied at a Portuguese university. I had learned my medicine at my father’s side, like an apprentice, and I had read widely and carefully in his medical texts, but for Dr Stephens that was not a rigorous physician’s training. I had not attended lectures on the great Greek physician Galen and I subscribed to the strange modern views of the infidel Arabs.

  However, he was gracious enough to nod when I was finished. ‘At neat job,’ he said, as he turned away. From Dr Stephens, that was an accolade.

  Peter grinned at me and winked.

  As I finished, the boy half woke and moaned with pain. I felt a wrench at my heart, for he must have been suffering terribly for days, and he was so young. I called over one of the sisters.

  ‘Bring me half a cup of small ale,’ I said.

  When she returned, I added a small amount of poppy syrup from the phial I kept in my satchel of medicines.

  ‘Help me to lift him up,’ I said to Peter.

  One on either side, we eased the boy into a sitting position and I held the cup to his lips. They were cracked and blackened. Like all the soldiers he had starved during the siege and nearly died from lack of water. His eyes opened once we had him upright, but they wandered, unfocused.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘here’s is some ale for you. Drink it slowly and it will help the pain.’

  Some of it dribbled down his shirt, but he managed to drink most of it. As soon as we lowered him down on to the pallet again he dropped into a deep sleep.

  ‘That acted quickly,’ Peter said.

  ‘I think his body is so exhausted he would have slept anyway, but it will ease his pain, I hope.’

  Gradually Peter and I worked our way along the row of soldiers, stopping from time to time to reassure some of our other patients who were already occupying the beds, for the sight of so many wounded men brought in amongst them was causing them distress. One aggressive fellow, who had no more wrong with him than over-indulgence in eating and drinking which had made him bilious, demanded that the soldiers should be moved out of the ward, for the noise made it impossible for him to sleep.

  ‘Better, I think, Goodman Watkins,’ I said, ‘that you should go home and give up your bed to one of these wounded soldiers. Your wife can look after you now.’

  I knew that his wife was a shrewish scold, who would not tolerate his malingering.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, rubbing his stomach and rolling his eyes, ‘I am in a vast amount of pain. I have not the strength even to step out of this bed.’ With that he rolled over and closed his eyes.

  Peter shrugged. ‘We’ll send him home tomorrow. Only this morning Dr Stephens said he should go.’

  We were perhaps a little more than halfway along the row when we reached a soldier with a heavily bandaged head and one arm strapped in a sling. I had noticed his eyes following me as I moved nearer to him. There was something familiar about him, but I could not put my finger on it. Kneeling down beside the pallet, I saw that, unlike so many of the men, he was fully awake and alert. Two bright eyes looked out at me from below the bandage which was wound around his head and one ear.

  ‘Well, Kit Alvarez, I did not expect to meet you again in such a manner as this.’

  I knew the face, knew the voice.

  ‘Andrew!’ I said. ‘What are you doing here? These are foot soldiers. Surely you are a trooper?’

  ‘Aye, I’m still a trooper, but a few of us were sent over to Sluys with the infantry. I have been working with the gunners this year and it was thought my experience would be of some use to those poor buggers. But there’s not much use having guns when you run out of gunpowder. And there might have been need of a galloper to carry messages, but we never had the chance. The only messages sent out from the town were carried by cunning local lads who knew where to slip through the enemy lines.’

  I saw that he was sweating slightly and realised that the brightness of his eyes was partly due to fever.

  ‘Peter,’ I said, ‘will you fetch me some of the febrifuge tincture? And we are going to need more of the salve.’
r />   Peter, who had been listening to this exchange with interest, nodded and got to his feet.

  ‘Trooper Andrew Joplyn and I worked together last year.’ I felt I must satisfy his curiosity. ‘When I was in Sussex with Master Phelippes.’

  Peter nodded. ‘I remember.’ He picked up his tray and headed off to the hospital still room.

  ‘That was a night.’ Andrew lay down with a sigh. ‘Back last year. I thought those fishermen were going to catch us.’

  ‘Because of my stupidity,’ I said.

  ‘Anyone could have had an accident in the dark,’ he said. ‘Still it was a fine race we had, back to Rye. Did they catch those men?’

  ‘Aye. They were . . .’ I paused, ‘dealt with.’

  ‘So you really are a physician. I’m not sure I believed you.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. Now, what is amiss with you?’

  ‘Dislocated my shoulder. A couple of the lads pulled it straight for me. It’s something we learn how to do. You can easily dislocate a shoulder, falling off a horse. The sling is just to give me some ease.’

  ‘And your head?’

  ‘Ah, well, that is nastier. I had a lucky escape. A bullet grazed my head just above the ear, but it didn’t penetrate. Hit the poor bugger behind me and killed him. Still, it’s sore.’

  I began to unwind the bandage around his head. Like so many of the dressings I had already removed, this one was caked with dried blood and would not come away easily. Peter had left a bowl of Coventry water on the floor beside me, so I soaked the bandage until I could peel it away, revealing a deep gash in the side of Andrew’s head, as broad as two fingers. The bullet had also torn away the tip of his ear. While I was working, Andrew said nothing, but bit down on his lower lip. Beads of sweat trickled down the side of his face.

  ‘Aye, you were lucky,’ I said, relieved that the bone of the skull was merely grazed and not shattered. ‘It also looks quite clean.’

  ‘I did my best to wash it.’ His voice came out high-pitched, as if he was still struggling with the pain.

  Peter came back with more salves and a bottle of the febrifuge tincture. I dressed the wound and bound it up, then gave Andrew a dose of the tincture.

  ‘I’m not sure whether or not your hair will grow back, and you will have a nick out of the top of your ear.’

  ‘My beauty quite spoiled, then?’ He gave me a shaky smile.

  ‘Oh, it will be quite an heroic wound.’

  He smiled again and sank back on to the pallet.

  ‘Good to see you again, Kit.’

  I smiled down at him. ‘And you, Andrew.’

  Chapter Four

  Peter and I continued to tend the wounded lying along the left hand wall of the ward until we reached the end. Most of the injuries were bullet wounds. In some cases the bullet had passed through the body or had been clumsily prised out, but I had to extract most of them with a scalpel and forceps. It was difficult to judge which were the more dangerous, those where a bullet had been left in the wound, preventing it from healing, or those where some dirty knife had been used to poke it out, enlarging the wound and filling it with who knew what filth.

  In order to work more quickly, I showed Peter how to clean and salve the wound after I had extracted the bullet. He was quick and neat, so that by the time we reached the end of the row we were working to a steady rhythm. There were three cases where the bullet had penetrated more deeply, into chest or stomach. Those cases I left to my father and Dr Stephens, though the likelihood of the men’s survival was small.

  As well as bullet wounds there were burns from handling hot cannon and one man with half his face blown away when a Spanish fire arrow had caused an explosion amongst the defenders’ gun powder. Mercifully he died that night, for otherwise he could only have lingered on in unbearable suffering.

  When we reached the top of the room, Peter and I both stood up for a moment, to ease our backs.

  ‘Jesu!’ he said. ‘My knees are on fire! And I suppose we need to start on the next row now.’

  I nodded. My own knees hurt from kneeling so long on the stone-flagged floor and I was feeling dizzy, from crouching over the patients or from the horrors of the number of bullets I had extracted from raw flesh. Down by the door of the ward I saw that some of the hospital’s serving women had carried in a great pot of soup and baskets of bread. They were starting to feed the men we had treated, those who were awake.

  ‘I think we should take some food,’ I said, ‘before we start again. Can you ask the women to give us some soup and bread, Peter?’

  He nodded and hurried away down the ward, picking his way between the men on the floor. My father came across to me.

  ‘I’m afraid we lost the one with a bullet in his chest,’ he said. ‘It had punctured his lung. He died before we could do anything for him.’

  I looked at him bleakly.

  ‘Was all this suffering necessary? Sir Francis says Leicester could have saved them, saved the town of Sluys, but he is all courtly talk, a nobleman’s façade – underneath it he’s as cowardly as a girl. He kept his ships out at sea and did nothing.’

  ‘A deal more cowardly than one girl I know,’ my father said softly, casting his glance over my blood-stained hands and clothes. ‘You have a smear of blood on your forehead.’

  ‘Take care no one hears you,’ I said. I dipped a cloth in the bowl of Coventry water and wiped my face. It felt good. ‘Peter is getting us some soup, then we’ll start down this next row.’

  ‘I think you should go home,’ he said. ‘You’re as white as a bleached sheet.’

  I shook my head. ‘How could I go home and leave this? I will do well enough when I have had some soup. You should eat something too. Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘I heard the church clock strike eleven some while ago.’

  ‘Then we might as well spend the rest of the night here. We won’t be finished before morning.’

  Peter came back with a tray. He had brought a cup of soup for my father too, and some rough-cut slices of the brown bread the hospital makes for our pauper patients. For myself, I think it tastes better than the fine manchet loaves served in the Lopez house. The soup had been made with beef bones and was a rich dark brown with pieces of carrots and leeks in it. I hoped it would not be too rich for men who had been near starvation before, but they were eating it eagerly. When my father had finished his, he walked along the row, warning the soldiers to take the soup slowly and to chew the vegetables carefully. I was not sure whether they heeded him.

  As soon as we had eaten, Peter and I began to treat the soldiers lying on one of the rows of pallets which had been laid done the middle of the ward. There was barely space to kneel between them and some of the soldiers were gravely ill. I continued to extract bullets, but there were broken limbs to set as well. Peter fetched splints and we did the best we could, but in some cases the bone was not broken cleanly, so that I had to pick out shattered fragments before strapping the leg or arm into place. It was clear that in some cases, even if the limb mended, it would be left shorter or twisted. There was hardly a man here who would be fully whole again. And all for what? The more I saw of what had happened to these men, the more I cursed Leicester under my breath. In some ways, I held him more guilty than Parma.

  We were nearly at the end of the row, and I was looking forward to resting at last, for my father and Dr Stephens had just finished all the other patients. I knelt down beside a young man with a thatch of golden curls who reminded me a little of Simon. Peter was fetching a final supply of our wound salve, while I began to unwind yet another bandage from around a blood-stained leg. The soldier watched me with a despairing look in his eyes.

  ‘Not much use you trying to treat it, Doctor,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly a month since a Spanish cannon ball smashed into my leg. I know what’s happening.’

  As I peeled off the cloth, I understood what he meant. The unmistakable stench of gangrene rose from his body. Revealed to sight, his leg was
a mass of festering flesh.

  ‘I will do what I can to ease your pain,’ I said. ‘But you are right.’ I felt I owed him honesty.

  Peter came back and together we cleaned and salved the leg, holding our breath against the stench. The lower part of the leg, from the foot to just below the knee, where the original injury was located, had turned a bluish black colour. I squeezed the toes of the soldier’s foot hard.

  ‘Can you feel that?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  I tried pressing at various points up his leg. There was no feeling. Even above the knee, where the skin was not yet discoloured, he shook his head every time I pressed, until I was halfway up his thigh.

  ‘Yes, I can feel that.’ His voice was colourless with despair. I knew that he had abandoned all hope of life.

  ‘There is only one course,’ I said, hating every word. ‘The leg must be amputated.’

  ‘Is there any use in that, doctor?’ His voice was so quiet I had to lean closer in order to hear him. ‘Once the gangrene has taken hold, it will reach my heart, won’t it? Even if it don’t kill me, I’ll be maimed, only half a man.’

  I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Listen to me. We will save you if we can. If you live, then it is part of God’s purpose that you should live. I know it will be hard, but you must make of your life the best you can.’

  I felt ashamed as I spoke, sounding as righteous as a street preacher, I who had my health and strength. What did I know of the life that would lie ahead of a soldier who was left crippled? What could he do? How could he live? Yet I was all the more determined to save him.

  ‘I will see how quickly we can fetch a surgeon,’ I said. ‘As physicians we are not permitted to carry out amputations, except when there is no other way, as on the battlefield, but there are surgeons we can call in.’

  I patted his shoulder and rose to my feet, but he turned his head away and closed his eyes. I saw that tears were seeping from beneath his eyelids.

  ‘Stay with him,’ I murmured to Peter, and went to look for my father.