by Joan Druett
The ship was still plunging about in lively fashion, but the plump steward minced back and forth with the same steadiness he had displayed the evening before. Undoubtedly, Wiki mused, Jack Winter’s remarkable sense of balance was the heritage of years on tiny sealing vessels in tumultuous southern seas. Perhaps, he thought ironically, that was where he had learned to make such horrible coffee, too.
“What’s all the early commotion about?” the steward then inquired. “If I may take the extreme liberty of asking?”
“Astronomer Grimes is sick. Something gave him the gripes.”
“The fish didn’t agree with his innards, huh?” Jack Winter’s sideways look was malicious.
Dr. Olliver came into the saloon as Wiki replied impatiently, “I thought you might have more sensible ideas than that.”
“When I viewed them fish I didn’t like the sight at all—to my mind they threatened something bloody nasty, excuse my biblical language, particularly when I saw their reproachful eyes.”
“But we all ate the fish!”
“And maybe we don’t all have delicate digestions,” Jack Winter said in his smarmy way. “You sure they was fresh?”
Wiki snapped, “Ehara! I promise you they were caught yesterday morning! You can argue with Sua and Tana, if you don’t believe me!”
As the steward went off with a resentful look, Dr. Olliver said, “I don’t trust that fellow an inch—he steals my wine, you know.”
Wiki didn’t doubt that for an instant. However, remembering the naturalist’s little ritual of refilling his wineglass every time it reached the precise halfway level, he said curiously, “Why don’t you mark the decanter?”
“Because God alone knows what he would pour into it to bring it up to the mark again. And anyway,” Dr. Olliver went on as he swung a chair around and eased his bulk into it, “I brought the Madeira on board in a butt, which is kept in the steward’s storeroom, and there’s no way I can check how much is taken out of that.”
Wiki helped himself to coffee, thinking that he now had a good idea why Jack Winter slung his hammock there. Captain Couthouy came into the room, blinking and complaining about being disturbed in the night, and the surgeon told him, “Grimes is suffering from a bout of diarrhea,” adding with relish, “And he reckons he’s been poisoned.”
“By the fish?”
“Either the fish or the pudding,” said Dr. Olliver.
“Then it must be the pudding, because no one else has been sick.”
“Whatever, Grimes reckons that odd little cook is out to poison him, and maybe Jack Winter is, too.”
“Can’t he make up his mind?” queried Couthouy.
“He doesn’t need to, because he reckons it’s a conspiracy.”
Wiki echoed blankly, “Conspiracy? Between Jack Winter and Robert Festin? But why?”
“Oh, you have the honor of being included in the number,” Olliver assured him with a smirk. “Not only does he reckon you want him out of that stateroom, but that the cook will stop at nothing to get in there, as well.”
“Dear God,” said Wiki. He wondered if Grimes were mad.
The surgeon said thoughtfully, “Do you have any idea why Festin made him a dessert all of his own?” He pursed plump lips, and confessed rather plaintively, “I must confess it smelled and looked so enticing I could easily have managed a portion myself—but now I wonder if I was lucky I didn’t.”
“I didn’t realize it until too late, but it was intended as a bribe, his logic being that Grimes would be charmed into letting him sleep on the floor of our room. He gets lonely, you see,” Wiki went on, as a lame kind of excuse.
They both stared at him, and then Captain Couthouy barked with laughter. “Well,” he said callously, “if the pudding was poisoned, he’ll have a room all to himself—in the brig—and then a space of his own when he hangs from the yardarm, too.”
“Unless the steward sprinkled something on the top two fish—the ones that Grimes ate,” said Dr. Olliver.
Couthouy guffawed. “Surely you’re not going in for this conspiracy idea, too? Why the devil would the steward want to kill him?”
Dr. Olliver shrugged bulky shoulders. “I agree that Grimes is exhibiting morbid delusions of persecution. The problem is that he’s very ill—ill enough to die.”
Wiki exclaimed in horror, “Die?”
“You’ve noticed how he stoops? His difficulty in breathing? He suffers from a pronounced lateral curvature of the spine, which is probably congenital, and has led to such a long-standing degeneration of the chest that the left lung has adhered to the wall. On top of his other symptoms, he now has a heightened temperature. If the diarrhea, with its accompanying chills, brings on a pneumonia, then the very worst could happen.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” Wiki demanded.
“My first recourse would be venesection, but he utterly refuses to be bled. I have to say he’s the most bloody uncooperative patient I’ve encountered in many a year,” Dr. Olliver confessed on a resentful note. “However, I have managed to dose him with carbonate of ammonia. It was the devil’s own job to get it into his mouth, and he refused to swallow until I pinched his nostrils shut. Then he had the sauce to call me a goddamned quack because it tasted bitter.”
“Will the carbonate of ammonia fix the problem?”
“It should help. It’s a cardiac stimulant, but can also be employed as a valuable expectorant. To make sure, however,” he said, his tone becoming businesslike as he heaved himself out of his chair and went to his room for a wooden box, “I’ll make up some pilula cinchona composita.”
Paying not the slightest regard to the fact that the steward wanted to lay breakfast, Dr. Olliver dumped the box on the table. Opening the lid revealed the contents of a medical chest. He then asked Jack Winter for an egg, and by the time it arrived, rattling in a small bowl, he had four bottles lined up in front of him, along with a small stone pestle and mortar.
As Wiki and Captain Couthouy watched with deep interest from the other side of the table, he measured coarse powder out of three of the bottles. Then he picked up the fourth vial, which held a small amount of dried vegetable matter, and shook it, studying it with a frown before emptying it into the mortar.
“What’s that?” said Wiki.
“Peruvian bark—and I hope there’s more in the ship’s medical chest, because this may not be enough.”
Having unburdened himself of this ominous news, Dr. Olliver energetically ground up the ingredients of the mortar. That done, he cracked the egg, and separated the white into the bowl. Then, holding the yolk in a half shell, he yelled out to Jack Winter, this time for his decanter and a tumbler. When both arrived, he tipped the unbroken yolk into the tumbler and covered it with wine.
Turning to the mortar again, the surgeon tipped the ground-up powder onto a little marble slab, where he gradually mixed it with egg white until it was stiff. Then he rolled it into a pipe, cut off measured pieces, and rolled them between his fat fingers, in this way manufacturing a row of little balls.
Wiki asked, “What do these pills do?”
“Pilula cinchona composita is a compound of Peruvian bark, piperine, ferri pulvis, and gentian root,” Dr. Olliver pompously informed him.
“I meant, will these pills make him better?”
“Pilula cinchona composita is an excellent prophylactic for ague and fever.” Leaving the row of pills on the slab to dry, Dr. Olliver picked up the tumbler with the egg yolk and wine, and drank it down in one swallow. Then, with an air of expecting the worst, he mused aloud, after licking his lips, “Unfortunately, the patient’s intrinsically feeble constitution doesn’t help matters, and his obstinate and contrary nature don’t make my job any easier, either.”
“But shouldn’t he be in the sickbay?” Couthouy inquired. “Dr. Gilchrist—who is the official ship’s surgeon, after all!—should deal with the problem.”
“Grimes flatly refuses to budge from his stateroom.”
W
iki exclaimed, “It’s my stateroom, too, you know—and I can’t stay in there if he’s ill!”
“That’s a point,” said Couthouy. “Is Grimes’s disease contagious?”
Dr. Olliver shrugged. “If he was laid low by something in the food, then of course it isn’t catching. But if it’s something else, it’s possible the air he emanates is noxious.”
“Then he and Wiki certainly shouldn’t sleep in the same room—Kanakas die too easily of white men’s diseases.”
Though blessed with a naturally robust constitution, Wiki wasn’t offended, as he had seen too many Pacific Islanders sicken and die of European illnesses, like measles, that pakeha children contracted routinely and recovered from easily. He was worried about something much more dire. In New Zealand, a temporary shelter—a wharau—was built for anyone who was gravely ill, because a house where a person had died could never be used again, being tapu—forbidden. After the patient expired, the problem of the tapu house was solved by burning it to the ground. Obviously, on board ship, this was no solution, but Wiki’s problem remained—that living in the same space as a man who might die was spiritually impossible.
Wiki looked at the larboard side of the passage, counted the four doors, pointed at the last one, and said, “Is that a spare stateroom?”
Both naturalists shook their heads. “It’s Smith’s,” Captain Couthouy said, adding with a grin, “You could sling a hammock in the storeroom with Jack Winter.”
That idea was almost as impossible as sleeping with a man who might die. Then, to Wiki’s deep relief, Dr. Gilchrist arrived.
Unfortunately, however, after a brief inspection of the patient, and listening to what Dr. Olliver had to say, Dr. Gilchrist professed himself perfectly happy with his distinguished colleague’s decision to leave Grimes in the stateroom. Not only was the propriety of sending a scientific to the common sickbay doubtful, but the patient demonstrated such a strong disinclination to move that shifting him forcibly could lead to an unfortunate decline. Indeed, that Mr. Grimes was so conveniently close to Dr. Olliver was an advantage.
As for the medication, he declared the choice was impeccable. Unfortunately, there was no Peruvian bark in the medical stores of the Vincennes, but hopefully Dr. Olliver’s stock would last until they arrived at Rio, as pilula cinchona composita, administered four times daily at the rate of two pills before breakfast, four before dinner, three before supper, and two more at bedtime, applied in conjunction with carbonate of ammonia, was an excellent prescription. And, forthwith, the two surgeons took themselves off to discuss a bottle of Madeira in the wardroom, leaving Wiki to contemplate Grimes, who glared balefully back.
“It was something in the food that felled me, and it was naught to do with overindulgence,” he hissed. “And I know the reason why I’m being poisoned!”
“You can’t possibly believe that!”
“I collapsed when I used the chamber pot, something that’s never happened before. I’ve had the pneumonia, too, and I know the pain that afflicts me ain’t due to that—nor the state of my innards, neither! So get out of my stateroom, and don’t come back unless you’re accompanied by the captain, so I can state the true case to him.”
There was no point in arguing further. Without another word, Wiki walked off, heading for the foredeck galley and Robert Festin. It was a strange reversal of fortune, he grimly mused—where Festin had wanted to sleep in his room, now he wished to berth with him.
Six
Though Festin was nowhere near the captain’s galley on the foredeck, he was easily located, because his shouts of pain and defiance echoed up from the gun deck immediately below. Springing down the ladder and running through the dimness toward the common galley, Wiki sighted a bunch of seamen silhouetted against the fires, shouting savage imprecations and wielding angry fists.
The man they were attacking was Robert Festin, so hunched down he could scarcely be seen in the center of the group, but defending himself with spirit. As Wiki rushed up, a couple of his attackers came hurtling out of the writhing heap to fall crashing to the planks, while another wave of men descended on the Acadian. Wiki could hear them grunting epithets—“Bloody poisoner! Kill us all with your foreign muck, will you?” Festin’s gasps of pain were audible, too, while his short, powerful arms were held up to cover his face.
Wiki put down his head and barged into the middle of the group by sheer momentum and strength, shouldering away one man and fending off another with a palm in his face. Hard blows thumped against him, but in the blur of motion Wiki scarcely felt the impact. He glimpsed snarling faces as sailors turned to fight him off, but kept on going, shoving with his elbows and fists. In the gap that opened up he could see Festin crouched into a fighting stance.
Wiki launched himself full length and tackled Festin about the thighs, bringing him down with a crash. They landed on the planks as one, while vicious boots lashed out. Wiki rolled them both through a thicket of legs toward the galley fires, taking a couple of kicks as he went. Then he shoved the panting Festin away, and lunged to his feet with the hearth at his back, fists up and braced to meet the oncoming rush.
Belatedly, he heard Lieutenant Forsythe’s loud yelling, coming fast from the amidships part of the deck. The attackers stopped dead, then made a precipitate dash into the dark shadows on either side. In contrast to the previous racket, the sounds of their retreat were as quiet as the pattering of rats. Forsythe’s shouts and rapid steps were very noisy by comparison. By the time he arrived, the last of them had vanished.
The Virginian’s face was red with outrage, and his speaking trumpet was gripped so hard in one huge hand that it threatened to be crushed. Evidently, Wiki deduced, the ruckus had happened while he was in charge of the deck.
“What the bloody hell was all that about?” he roared.
“They were trying to murder Festin,” Wiki said shortly. He turned to the cook. “Are you all right?”
Festin was not all right. His eyes were crossed, and it was obvious that his ears were ringing loudly, because he kept on hitting the sides of his head with his open palms. Wiki said, concerned, “Do you remember your name?”
Instead of answering, Festin smiled seraphically, giving Wiki cause for even more alarm for his health. Then he realized that the Acadian was simply enchanted by being rescued not just by his hero, Lieutenant Forsythe, but by Wiki, too, whom he considered his friend. To spoil the effect, however, blood suddenly gushed out of his mouth and down his chin and chest.
Festin spat out a tooth, caught it in his palm, and studied it with an expression of great interest. Lieutenant Forsythe scowled even more deeply, and demanded, “Why the hell did they want to beat the living daylights out of him, apart from being tired of looking at his ugly face?”
“Haven’t you heard?” Wiki asked. During his seven years at sea he had often noticed that the common seamen knew shipboard gossip long before the officers, but still it never failed to surprise him. “The men think he poisoned Assistant Astronomer Grimes.”
Forsythe laughed in disbelief. “Poisoned?”
“Aye. Grimes had an attack of diarrhea in the night, and blames it on Festin, because he reckons that he put poison in either the fish he cooked last night for us all, or the pudding he made just for him.”
“Jesus,” said Forsythe, and shook his head in disgust. “That was a stupid bloody choice. Why Grimes, and not Lawrence J. Smith?”
“I’ve not a notion,” said Wiki.
“So how did the men hear about it?”
Wiki frowned. Then, remembering the hiss of foreign muck, he jumped to the obvious conclusion. “Jack Winter must have told them,” he said.
“H’m!” grunted Forsythe, and nodded as if it were exactly the kind of behavior he expected of the steward. Then he looked at Wiki and barked, “I should call the marines, and have you thrown into the brig.”
Wiki thought about it, and shrugged.
“You don’t care?”
“It solves my accommodation
problems.”
“What the devil do you mean?”
Wiki paused, studying the big Virginian, wondering if there was a chance he would understand. Forsythe had once hired himself out to a Ngapuhi chief as a mercenary fighter. He had hunted the forest warpaths and voyaged on waka taua—canoes of war—and he had lived and fought with Wiki’s people, though after Wiki had left the Bay of Islands. So Wiki said, “I berth with Astronomer Grimes, and if he dies I’ll have to cope with his kehua—his ghost. And the room will be too tapu to live in.”
“For God’s sake!” Forsythe exploded. “Why can’t you remember that half of you is a civilized American? Aren’t you embarrassed to behave like a bloody ignorant savage?”
Wiki maintained a chilly silence. Then he saw Forsythe’s thick lips pursing in and out as he glowered at Festin, who was still contemplating his tooth. Finally, the lieutenant said with an air of decision, “Come with me.”
“What? Where?”
Instead of answering, Forsythe cast sharp glances all about the gun deck. Wiki looked, too, but the only life to be seen was a trickle of rats, scuttling from shadow to shadow. The fires glowed redly under the big cauldrons where great lumps of salt meat were simmering, but right now there was no one to tend them. Evidently, he thought, the cooks had been part of the party that had attacked Festin, and had run away with the rest. Then, when he looked back at Forsythe, Wiki glimpsed an odd awkwardness in his expression.
The lieutenant said in a lowered voice, “You can both berth with me until the fuss settles down.”
Wiki stared at him, stunned. Involuntarily, he exclaimed, “What?”
“Goddamnit!” Forsythe burst out, now openly embarrassed. “Don’t ask bloody questions, just come!”
Still looking stealthily from side to side, he led the way aft, almost the whole length of the ship. Wiki followed first, and Festin, still clutching his tooth, trailed behind. No sooner were they inside Forsythe’s cabin than the Virginian hastily shut the door.