by Joan Druett
After the squad formed up in the bright sunlight, the marines listened to the lieutenant attentively, because Forsythe was taking pains to impress on them the importance of making absolutely certain that there was no one left below decks. In pungent phrases he told them about past experiences where dead men had been found in among the dead rats when ships had been opened up after smoking, and described in gross detail how nasty the discovery had been. Then he sent them below.
In order to rouse these hypothetical men, some of the soldiers were carrying side drums. After Wiki arrived in the holds, he could hear the rat-tat, rat-tat noises progressing here and there around and above him, near at times, and faraway at others. As he went forward, bulkheads, oozing dampness, reared up on all sides. It was very dark, and the lantern he was holding flickered every now and then in the stale, foul air. Every time it flared up, he could see hundreds of rats’ eyes gleaming red in the corners, and could hear their squeaking as they skittered away from the light.
When a corporal spoke from just a couple of yards away, Wiki jumped a foot. “There’s thousands of the brutes,” the man said. His voice echoed against the wet iron walls of huge water tanks. There was a squeal as he kicked out, and a whole wave of skittering as a dozen rats fled.
“Releasing a coupla dozen snakes would work a treat,” said Forsythe in his Virginian accent. He emerged from the dark with his rifle propped over his shoulder, giving every appearance of enjoying the job.
The very idea of serpents let loose in the bowels of the ship sent shudders up and down Wiki’s spine. Even though he knew the southerner was joking, he couldn’t help saying, “You’d have trouble getting the men back on board.”
Forsythe, who knew very well how Wiki hated snakes, let out a loud, echoing guffaw, while all the time the drums went rat-tat, rat-tat, and boots stamped to and fro. There was a sudden shout of, “Goddamnit, what the hell are you doing there?” from one of the marines on the deck above. They all broke into a startled run in that direction, convinced that he had found a stowaway. However, it turned out that he had blundered into another marine who had taken a wrong turning, and so they returned to the search.
Gradually, the reports came back that the field was clear. The squad, led by Forsythe, and Wiki bringing up the rear, trailed down to the bowels of the ship where a row of barrels, filled with a mixture of sawdust, brimstone, birchbark, charcoal, and other devilish ingredients, had been firmly wedged in the ballast. The corporal struck a spark, and set the first, and then the others, to slowly burning. Acrid smoke billowed out, carrying a throat-clenching smell of bad eggs. As they waited to make sure the fires would not go out, the marines shifted nervously from boot to boot, and there was general relief when Forsythe gave the word to retreat.
It was a good feeling to get into the bright light again, and batten down the hatches. Then they all waited to see which deck seams needed stopping up to keep the ship smoke-tight. Meantime, the marines sat in the sun and practiced on their instruments. First, “Hail Columbia” racketed out over the water, and then the marines sang, “The Parliaments of England,” while the drummers beat out the rhythm, and derisive cheers echoed from the British ship, a couple of hundred fathoms away. Smoky threads were beginning to curl out from gaps in the seams. The caulking gang set to stopping them up, while Wiki and the marines searched inside the various deckhouses for other leaks.
He and the corporal, along with a couple of others, went into the afterhouse, where Wiki checked the big drafting room. The afterquarters seemed eerily silent, but then the corporal’s Yankee voice spoke up.
“Hello,” he exclaimed. “We got one of the bastards already.”
Wiki stepped through the double doors into the corridor, to see the corporal holding up a dead rat by the tail. He was standing by the credenza. As Wiki arrived beside him, he put the corpse down, and dropped to hands and knees to look underneath the big dresser. “Look,” he said. “There’s a hole.” Smoke was threading up and wafting out.
So that was where the rats had gone, Wiki thought—and how they had come, no doubt. He hunkered down by the corporal to have a look for himself, but then his attention was caught by the dropped rat. It was lying on its side in a rigid, hooked attitude, as if it had been grotesquely deformed by whatever had killed it. When he pushed the cold, limp body with one finger, to turn it onto its back, the spine was so strongly arched that it flopped over onto its other side instead. Its abdomen was purple, and distended. Under the stiff whiskers its nose was tinged blue, and the gaping lips exposed tightly clenched teeth.
The sight brought Grimes’s final convulsion so vividly to mind that Wiki’s stomach clenched. Without a word, he stood up, and searched through the cabins until he found a suitable box. Then he dropped the dead rat inside this, put on the lid, and put it in his pocket before he and Forsythe climbed down the side of the ship to the cutter.
When they got to the boat, the lieutenant propped his rifle against Wiki’s sea chest, and said, “Orders are to carry your duds to the Swallow.”
Wiki blinked. “Captain Wilkes is sending me back to the brig?” It was great news, but the first he had heard of it. “Why the change of mind?” he asked.
“Dunno,” said the southerner, and the cutter headed for the shipyard.
The brig was dancing at her mooring lines as they braced up to the dock, and as pretty a sight as ever. George and Captain Coffin were nowhere to be seen, and the old boatswain was in charge of the ship. After shoving his chest under the double berth in the cabin he shared with Midshipman Keith, Wiki came out on deck again, looked down at Forsythe, and said, “I need to go to Botafogo.”
“What? Why?”
Wiki jumped down into the boat. “To see Dr. Tweedie.”
To his surprise and relief, Forsythe didn’t argue. Instead, the lieutenant directed the men into setting the sail, as the breeze was in their favor. They headed south, coasting past a fortified island and then around Flamingo Point to arrive at the secluded bay of Botafogo. There, it was breathtakingly beautiful. The deeply curving foreshore lay before them, fringed with riotous tropical growth. Low white walls surrounding pastel-colored buildings stood out against the dark green. Beyond the shorefront settlement, more villas were dotted among coffee plantations and orange groves, as far as the forested foothills that swooped up to the abrupt heights of Corcovado Mountain.
The cutter touched sand. Wiki and Forsythe jumped out, leaving the men to paddle off a short distance, and amuse themselves fishing. As they walked up the beach, Wiki studied the beachfront village. Though small, it looked prosperous, made up of a number of substantial, flat-fronted structures, some several stories high. The houses had French doors, and windows with wooden shutters, and were set in luxuriant gardens of ferns, tamarinds, and trees with enormous yellow blossoms. Rippling creeks wound between the trees, noisy with frogs, and crossed with little footbridges. The air was perfumed with myrtles and mimosas, along with the honeyed scent of ripening bananas. Unseen insects chirped, and every now and then flocks of tropical birds burst out of the growth. In the hot brightness of the afternoon the colors were intense.
It was all quite a contrast to the alleys of the port and the polluted waters of the anchorage, and it was hard to believe that the city was just a walk away. “Is Tweedie rich?” asked Wiki.
“Made a fortune selling spectacles and thermometers to the English population when he first arrived, but whether he managed to keep a grasp on it is open to question,” said Forsythe. He led the way along a paved road that followed the curve of the beach and was densely edged with palms and filmy-leaved trees. There was no movement in the heat of the afternoon, save for a line of black slaves undulating along gracefully with burdens on their heads.
Elisha Tweedie’s place turned out to be a complex of three single-floored buildings, set in an extremely botanical garden, and surrounded by a low wall. The one at the front, Forsythe told Wiki, was the dispensary, and that at the back was the place he had called his “
factory,” while the third, which was set on the other side of a brook, was the house where he and his family lived.
When they came around the end of the wall, it was to see a boy, aged about seventeen and with bristling red hair, standing knee-deep in the stream. He was scrubbing pieces of equipment, including a pestle and mortar. They walked onto the bridge that crossed the stream, stopped, and looked down.
Forsythe said with disgust, “What was in them basins and stuff? Ain’t you worried about gettin’ poison in that creek?”
The boy looked up, his expression resentful but unsurprised. He said, “That mix-up weren’t my fault, Lieutenant. I never touched the mortar.”
“So how d’you reckon it happened, huh?”
The boy shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Was Mrs. Dixon there when it happened?”
Mrs. Dixon, Wiki remembered, was the gossipy woman who had bought the strychnine for mice. The boy said, “Yup.”
“Wa’al, if you didn’t do it, she might’ve spoke up in your defense.”
“Doubt it,” the boy said in his offhand way.
“D’you know where she is?”
“At home, if she ain’t in town shopping. Can’t think of nowhere else.”
“What about your father?”
“In the dispensary, of course. What else did you think?”
Forsythe looked as if he would have liked to deliver the boy a clip about the ear, but instead he growled, “Wa’al, then,” and headed for the building closest to the road, with Wiki close behind.
The sign outside the porch read ELISHA TWEEDIE, DRUGGIST & APOTHECARY, and was hung from the traditional red and white striped barber’s pole. It looked extremely odd in the tropical setting, and once they had crossed the veranda and gone inside, it was like entering a different world.
The place was dim, and smelled of aromatic spirits. Posters and shallow glass-fronted cases displaying spectacles and small items of household medical equipment hung from the walls on either side of the customers’ area of the shop. At the far end, Dr. Tweedie was standing behind a wide counter that extended from one side of the room to the other, blocking him off from his clients. He was wearing a leather blacksmith’s apron, and had evidently been making up medicine at a marble-topped bench set against the back wall, because his hands were stained. The marble was very scarred and discolored, evidence of years of use. On the wall above it, racks held glass jars, many of them wondrously shaped. Some of the exotic contents were strangely colored, while others were a crystalline white.
Wiki, who found pakeha glass almost as fascinating as pakeha guns, studied the jars with great interest. On their labels words like and were printed in elaborate script. The bottle of white strychnine powder, he noted, was full. On the side walls, wide shelves stacked with items of equipment were neatly labeled on their forward edges. There were gaps in the ranks, and undoubtedly the utensils the boy was washing in the creek would be placed there, once cleaned.
Like his son, Dr. Tweedie looked neither pleased nor surprised to see them. He said, “How can I help you, Lieutenant?”
“I’m fine,” said Forsythe, his tone rather aggressive. He indicated Wiki, and said, “’Tis Wiki Coffin, here, what wants to consult.”
“He does?” Dr. Tweedie tipped his head a little on one side, studying Wiki with an air of grave curiosity.
“Aye,” said Wiki, and put the box on the counter. Taking off the lid, he said, “Could you tell me what killed this rat?”
The apothecary picked up the rat by the tail. He peered at the body as it slowly revolved before his face, and then dropped it back in the box.
“It was poisoned,” he said in his Scotch accent.
“With strychnine?”
“Probably, though it’s hard to tell. It’s a ship rat,” he added.
Wiki wondered how he knew that, but instead of asking said, “In court, yesterday, I heard you say that the bismuth medicine was contaminated with strychnine because you inadvertently used the wrong mortar.”
“Aye, that’s so,” said the apothecary, looking perfectly calm about it.
“But the analyst testified that there was too little poison in the mixture to kill a person. Would there have been enough to kill a rat—if, for instance, some of the medicine was spilled, and the rat lapped it up?”
Dr. Tweedie frowned. He looked at the rat again, and then back at Wiki. “It’s possible,” he admitted.
Forsythe, who was shifting from foot to foot and scowling down at the rat, said, “How long would it take this rat to die from strychnine poisoning?”
“About a week—or even longer, if the dose was small.”
“That long?” exclaimed Wiki, appalled.
“It’s not a fast-acting poison—not like others I could name.”
“Ah,” said Forsythe, and nodded as if this confirmed something. Then he lost interest, going over to the pharmaceutical posters and reading their ominous messages with his eyebrows going up and down.
Wiki asked, “Would the rat have had to drink a lot of the bismuth to get a fatal dose?”
“Definitely,” said Tweedie, and nodded.
Somehow, thought Wiki, it was hard to see it happening, because Jack Winter, for all his faults, was too clean and tidy to leave a puddle of spilled medicine around for long. Trying to think of an alternative, he queried, “What about the pills? Could eating one of those kill a rat?” Dr. Olliver, he remembered, had suggested that a rat might have eaten the pill that was lost under the credenza.
“What pills?” Tweedie stared. “The pills Dr. Olliver made up? Good God, my lad, those pills would do no harm to man nor beast!”
“Even though they contained opium?”
“I assure you they were safe.”
“The analyst—Dr. Ohlsson—mentioned something about the pills being finished. What did he mean?”
“Once the pills are made, it’s usual to coat them with something to keep them from sticking together in the bottle, and to make them easier to swallow. Common flour makes a nice cheap coating, though carriage varnish is popular. Men who can afford it ask to have their pills finished in gold leaf.”
“Gold?”
“The vanity of man prevails even in the extremity of illness,” Tweedie informed him dryly.
“Good heavens,” said Wiki, wondering greatly. Then he went on, “The analyst said something about licorice root.”
“You have an excellent memory, my boy. Dr. Olliver’s pills were finished with licorice root powder, which is an excellent coating for anything containing Peruvian bark, as it goes very sticky in the heat.”
“What about the carbonate of ammonia? Would that kill a rat?”
Tweedie laughed, and shook his head.
“So, if the rat was poisoned by any of Astronomer Grimes’s medicine, it would have to be the bismuth?”
“Definitely.”
“Even though it was so dilute?”
“The rat might have eaten the bismuth several times. Strychnine is a cumulative poison—with repeated applications the amount of strychnine in the body builds up until there is enough in the system to finish the job.”
“It’s hard to believe that this rat was given more than one chance to get at the bismuth,” Wiki objected.
“It’s much more likely that someone laid poison for rats,” Dr. Tweedie agreed. “Do you have many rats on your ship?”
Thousands, thought Wiki, and said, “The ship is being smoked for rats right now. While we were on passage the steward threatened to lay poison, but if he did do it, it certainly didn’t work.”
“There may be more dead rats in the bilges than you think.”
“That’s possible.” Wiki remembered what it had been like down in the black bowels of the ship. “But that means the steward had the wherewithal to add poison to the medicine,” he pointed out.
Dr. Tweedie exclaimed, “That’s ridiculous! You know perfectly well it was my fault that the medicine was contaminated—and that it was Robert Fest
in who was charged with the crime, not the steward!”
Wiki watched him, feeling surprised. With the mix-up of the mortars on his conscience, Dr. Tweedie should have been uneasy, awkward, and anxious, but instead, he had been remarkably calm. Now, for some reason, he looked rattled.
He said casually, “Of course you’re right—it was Festin who was charged, and not Jack Winter. However, the fact remains that if you hadn’t confessed to the mix-up of mortars, the court could have concluded that someone added strychnine to the mixture, but didn’t know enough to do it properly. The intention of murder would have been assumed.”
Tweedie hesitated, and then said reluctantly, “I suppose it’s possible that the coroner could have come to that conclusion.”
“Other men would have kept quiet instead of confessing to something that was so likely to have a bad effect on business.”
The apothecary went red. “I would have been boneheaded not to come forward! The juicy story that a patient had died after taking my medicine would have gone around the port in no time at all, and got a bit more embellished every time it was told. As it is, I might lose some business—but if I had kept silent and my blunder had been discovered later, it would have looked a great deal worse!”
And Mrs. Dixon, the woman who had bought the poison, was a gossip. As a frequent customer, she might have unconsciously noticed that Tweedie’s lad had put the mortar in the wrong place, and then remembered it later.
Wiki looked at the rat. It lay there in the box, arched in its last agony.
“And strychnine is a poison,” he said slowly.
“A very active poison, as everyone knows,” Dr. Tweedie grimly agreed.
Fifteen
It wasn’t until some moments after they had walked out of the apothecary shop that Wiki realized that his memory wasn’t so wonderful, after all, because he had forgotten the dead rat. However, he did not turn back. He and Forsythe strode on in silence along the hot, dusty road, and then the southerner said, “That rat got poisoned before we got to Rio, and the bismuth ain’t nothin’ to do with it.”