by Alys Clare
He was silent for so long that it became obvious he was reluctant to continue. I waited. He would tell me in his own time; he had sent for me for that very reason and he was no coward. However long it took, I would hear the tale.
In an abrupt gesture he got up and lurched for the brandy bottle that stood on a shelf beside his bunk, collected a couple of fine crystal glasses and poured out two very generous measures. He shoved one across to me and picked up the other, gulping down about half in a few swift mouthfuls. Then he said, ‘It began as soon as we left the last sight of land behind us.’
‘What did?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Gabe, and that’s the truth. It – the men—’ He shrugged. ‘There was an unease at first; just that. Unease. We should have been a cheerful ship, for we were going home, we’d done well out of the voyage, there’d be good profits for every one of us, the losses to our ship’s company were tolerable and no more than to be expected, and there were neither badly injured nor sick men among us. Not then,’ he added ominously. ‘Yet for all that, there was grumbling, complaining, arguments and even outright fighting almost from the start, and although I was reluctant, for the crew were good men and we’d all been together a long time, I had no choice but to hand out discipline. Oh, nothing terrible,’ he added before I could comment, ‘nothing worse than cut rations and a couple of minor floggings.’
‘And did those measures improve the mood?’
‘No, they made it worse. And—’ He paused, rubbing fiercely at one eye with the knuckle of his forefinger. ‘And I saw something beneath the moaning and the squabbling. I saw what was causing it.’ He looked at me, and the white of the eye he’d been attacking was red. ‘They were afraid, Gabe. My men, who’d been through so much with me, who’d stood fast amid battles, storms and the worst the oceans could throw at them, were scared.’
‘Of what?’ I said.
‘I didn’t know at first,’ Captain Zeke admitted. ‘Then I sensed a whisper of it myself, and I understood.’
‘A whisper? What do you mean? Was someone muttering imprecations?’
Captain Zeke smiled grimly. ‘The down-to-earth Doctor Taverner, always so literal,’ he murmured. ‘No, it wasn’t an actual whisper, although God knows there were other noises nobody could explain … I was being poetic, Gabe. To put it more plainly, I wondered if what was frightening the men so badly emanated from a part of the ship inhabited by them and not by me, so late one evening I went down into the lower decks and made my way straight through the ship from bow to stern.’ He reached for the brandy and poured himself a second measure. ‘I found all was pretty much as I expected, although some of the crates of supplies had shifted slightly and I issued a reminder to myself to send someone to see to it the next day. Otherwise there were the usual sights and smells, quite a lot of water slopping around, rats. Then—’ He stopped, drained his glass and said very quickly, as if he needed to take a rush at it, ‘Then I saw the shape of a man.’
‘A man? One of the crew, no doubt, come to assist you in your—’
‘Shut up, Gabe,’ Captain Zeke said wearily. ‘Of course it wasn’t one of the crew. It – he – was skeletal, huge eyes in a dark face, barefoot and just the remains of tattered garments hanging on his bones, and his skin was blue. He was there one moment and gone the next.’ He leaned his elbows on the table and pushed his face close to mine. ‘There one moment and gone the next,’ he repeated. In case I’d missed the point, he added very softly, ‘He wasn’t real, Gabe. He was a ghost.’ He paused. ‘And he wasn’t alone.’
I said, and it was an unthinking, automatic response, ‘I do not believe in ghosts.’
My brave assertion hung in the silence for what seemed a long time. Then Captain Zeke nodded. ‘So I have always assumed. Which is why I wanted your counsel, and why I am reassured to have your presence on my ship. My haunted ship,’ he added very firmly.
‘You want me to reassure your crew,’ I said, determined, I think, to ignore this wild talk of ghosts and hauntings and remain firmly in the realm of the logical and the tangible. ‘To see if perhaps they are all suffering from some ailment that might cause visual and auditory hallucinations, and thus have given rise to these unlikely beliefs. Possibly there is some dietary deficiency, and I can very easily look into that, and into other possible causes for—’
Captain Zeke was watching me, a strange expression on his face. It was as if he was waiting for me to wind to a halt; or, more likely, to work out something that he knew and I didn’t …
And after a time I knew what it was.
For I had recalled a question I’d asked him at the start of our conversation: why did you need to summon me when surely you have a surgeon on board?
So in a different form of words I asked it again: ‘So, Captain Zeke,’ I said, ‘why not ask your own doctor to advise you?’ He didn’t answer. ‘You do have a ship’s surgeon?’ I persisted.
‘Ashleigh Winterbourn Snell,’ he said. ‘Young, eager, full of book knowledge and desperate to show it. Set out right from the start to demonstrate that he was ready for anything, that he would be right beside the men in the worst of their ills and their injuries and do his best for them, that he could pick up a sword and wave it around to fairly good effect when required.’ Captain Zeke paused, glancing at me. ‘He wasn’t you, but he was all right. He had courage enough, until he had to face something he couldn’t deal with.’
I was beginning to have a deep concern about Ashleigh Winterbourn Snell. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
Captain Zeke muttered something, which I thought was God rest him.
‘What happened to him?’ I demanded.
‘He took your view, Gabe, that ghosts didn’t exist and the men were suffering some mass delusion. He made them spend their time on board in the good fresh air, as he phrased it, doing exercises. Exercises!’ he said scathingly. ‘As if a seaman’s life is anything but exercise. He got them on additional doses of lemon juice, he tried other variations to the diet, he tried taking their minds off their fears with evening entertainments, as he called them – getting them telling stories, having jolly sing-songs.’
‘He sounds like a good, conscientious man,’ I said, stung on my fellow doctor’s behalf by the captain’s sarcastic tone.
‘He was, he was, and I’m not belittling either him or how hard he tried,’ Captain Zeke said swiftly. ‘Only, perhaps, his utter refusal to open his mind a little. To ask himself whether, if a single man in a ship’s company believes one thing and everyone else believes another, the man who stands by himself ought not to look a little deeper.’
‘He could not do that,’ I replied. ‘He would have taken the view that he alone stood for reason and sanity; that he as ship’s surgeon was responsible for everyone else’s physical and mental well-being and must at all costs hold firm.’
‘That was precisely the view he did take,’ Captain Zeke said sadly. ‘Even when others could see the blue ghost flitting right across in front of him, he shouted out that it wasn’t really there, it did not exist, and he held up his two hands in the shape of the holy cross like a shield as he advanced towards it. But then—’ Captain Zeke faltered. ‘But then something happened: I don’t know what it was, whether poor Doctor Ashleigh saw, or heard, or maybe even smelt something, but he gave a great cry and his face suffused with blood, and he fell back onto the deck and we all heard the crack of his head on the wood.’
‘He was dead?’ I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
‘No, although it would have been better if he’d died.’ Captain Zeke’s voice had faltered on the words, and he paused for a moment. ‘He came round after a few hours and we all realized he’d lost his wits,’ he went on dully. ‘We’d got him down to his bunk and when he woke up we had to restrain him, for he was wild. His eyes had gone huge, he was foaming at the mouth and he kept screaming, “I see you! I see you!” Jesus, Gabe, I can still hear him now.’
‘Then he’s alive?’ I was half on my
feet. ‘But I thought you just implied he was dead! You must take me to him, the poor man needs—’
But Captain Zeke put out a very strong arm and shoved me back in my chair. ‘He’s not here, Gabe. He – it was hard to keep watch on him all the time, for we were all exhausted and nobody was prepared to stand guard over him in the depths of the night, for that was when his mania was at its height. I made sure he was firmly tied and couldn’t move from where we left him, but he must have had a blade hidden somewhere and he managed to cut himself free.’ Then, his voice almost a sob, he cried, ‘We were nearly home, Gabe! That’s the pity of it.’
‘What did he do?’
‘It was early in the morning – a beautiful dawn, the rising sun ahead of us painting pink and gold spangles on the water, the breeze soft and the sea calm. The lad up in the crow’s nest called out that he’d sighted land – we were past the Scillies so it would have been the tip of Cornwall – and we were all so relieved. Dear God, I can’t tell you how good that moment was. But then there was a sudden clamour from below, and the sound of pounding feet, and Ashleigh Winterbourn Snell appeared, laughing like the madman he was and crying out that he was an Englishman, a Devonian, true and loyal and would lie in English waters, off a Cornish shore, and before anyone could get a hand on him he seemed to fly across the deck and he threw himself into the sea. He disappeared, Gabe. We circled and searched for hours, convinced we’d find him, but we didn’t.’
After a very long silence I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’
TWO
Captain Zeke stared at me in silence for several moments. I thought he was mentally forming his response, but it turned out I was wrong. When eventually he spoke, he said in a conversational voice, ‘Have you noticed something?’
I had no idea what it was that I should have spotted. His ship was weary and in need of a considerable amount of repair, but that was to be expected after a long voyage. His crew, by his own account, were in a poor state; perhaps with a bodily sickness with which I could help, perhaps with some strange mass malfunction of the mind, but he and I had just been speaking of that so it couldn’t be what he was referring to. With a shrug, I said, ‘What?’
‘You have been on board the Falco now for some time, Gabe, yet you sit here with me with no sign of unease or discomfort other than the frown of puzzlement which, I imagine, has been put on your face by what I have just told you.’
Of course.
In his note he had summoned me to a meeting ashore, in a quayside tavern, and it was only because I had failed to arrive that I had come hurrying to the Falco. He would not have suggested it, knowing better than any man save myself what happened nowadays when I went on board a ship. He had witnessed my terrible seasickness as we sailed home from the Caribbean the last time I went to sea; he was there when I first began to realize that the blow to the head I’d sustained in port had done some damage to my sense of balance which would never be repaired. He had watched as time after time I’d gone out again on the Falco to test myself, each time with the same result. He had sat with me in the worst of Plymouth’s filthy drinking places when self-pity overcame me as finally I faced the brutal truth that I would have to leave the seagoing life I loved.
Now, as understanding dawned, I sat very still, sending out imaginary feelers to my head and my stomach. Just for an instant there was a flash of queasiness, but I told myself it was my imagination, and it passed.
He was watching me intently. ‘Well?’ he barked.
I shook my head – carefully – and still there was no vertigo, no nausea. ‘I’m all right,’ I said cautiously.
He began to smile.
But I couldn’t let him believe something that wasn’t true.
‘We are in port, Captain, and it is a fine, calm day with the sea as flat as a village pond,’ I said firmly. ‘From the little I understand about my complaint, I deduce that it is set off by motion. Today there is no motion.’ I stood up abruptly, for I could not bear to speak of this any more. ‘Again I ask you: what do you want me to do?’
He rose to his feet. ‘Ah, well,’ I heard him mutter. Then, fixing me with a hard stare, he said, ‘I want you to search my ship with me. I want you to walk in the places I have walked, pause in the dark spaces where my crew have seen and sensed things that have terrified them almost out of their wits and where they won’t go back to even if threatened with a flogging.’ Suddenly he banged his clenched fist down on the table, the loud sound making me jump. ‘Sweet Jesus, Gabe, how do you think it made me feel, to tell a man I’d have him whipped because he wouldn’t venture into a black space where I myself was afraid to go? God alive, whatever haunts this ship has turned me into a coward and a hypocrite!’ His furious words echoed round the cabin. Then in a quieter voice – and I could see the effort it took to bring himself under control – he said, ‘I want you to do this with open senses and, more importantly, an open mind, and then try to tell me that evil does not dwell aboard my ship.’
I rose to my feet in exasperation, glaring down at him. ‘I will tell you that right now!’ I cried. ‘I am a physician, not a witch-finder or a ghost hunter! Instead of crawling into the deepest and foulest reaches of the Falco’s lowest decks, let me instead see your men, talk to them, examine them, hear what they have to say about their symptoms. Then, armed with all the information I can gather, I shall return to Rosewyke to consult my books and my diaries and see if I can work out what ails the crew and how to treat it.’
Captain Zeke looked at me. ‘I will make a bargain with you,’ he said.
‘Go on.’
‘Do as I beg you, and search the ship. Then, if you find nothing to back up what I now fully believe to be true, I will let you loose on my crew.’
It was the best – probably the only – deal he was going to offer. I stuck out my hand and we sealed it.
The Falco was eerily quiet.
It was true that many of the men had gone ashore, for in port only those on watch or with specific duties to perform were required on board. I could not help but wonder how many of those who had slunk away would decide never to come back. But this was not the quiet of a deserted place, for the ship was far from deserted. All over the topmost deck, where the captain and I began the tour, teams were working on repairs. There should have been the usual sounds of an adequately paid workforce with a satisfying job to do, yet it seemed to me that the men spoke in whispers, their mood subdued, and many kept glancing over their shoulders as if sensing they were watched by unseen eyes. One man wore a heavy wooden crucifix around his neck. Another crossed himself repeatedly. A third was muttering under his breath: words from the Paternoster, repeated over and over.
Deliver us from evil.
The strange silence intensified as we began our descent through the ship. One deck down, we began at the bow with the shot locker and progressed past the heavy guns. Again, men were at work; again, nobody spoke. In one place, they’d even set a lad on watch, as if they were fearful to bend to their labours without someone to keep his eyes on the approaches.
On that same deck we came to the surgeon’s cabin.
I stopped – I couldn’t help myself – and stood in the doorway. Doctor Ashleigh had placed his chest precisely where I used to keep mine. The work space was set out with care and an eye for efficiency, and my sense of fellowship with him increased. I pictured him here, that poor young man, and for a moment I thought I could even see him, a tall, gangling figure bending his long back over a table as he studied some small puzzle, the mutter as he talked to himself under his breath …
I shook the fancy away and followed the captain on towards the stern.
We continued our descent. A handful of men were busy on the next deck down, removing some empty water barrels and starting on cleaning out the space where they had been. There was a rustling of rats from somewhere out of sight. The men paused to touch their foreheads as the captain passed. Nobody spoke.
Below, the galley was cold and deserted, the cooki
ng fire out, the storage spaces empty. It was dark down here, and I was glad of the lanterns Captain Zeke and I had brought with us.
We went through the narrow little opening between the galley and the first of the holds beyond. We went on, presently coming to the place where the great mast bored down through the ship on the way to its roots in the keel. More storage spaces. There was a smell of rotten meat. The space was airless and chill. Our lanterns illuminated a circle round us, but the further spaces of this deep place were dark and sinister, and I felt a sense of dread creeping over me.
Captain Zeke was working his way past abandoned barrels, a pile of broken buckets, a three-legged stool missing a leg and lying on its side like a dead dog. He went on through a low opening into a second hold, a third, a fourth, and, afraid to lose his light and his presence, I went after him.
I’d been the one to say there was no such thing as ghosts, that it was mere fancy to claim a ship could be haunted. Yet there we were, Captain Zeke and I, and it was he who forged ahead, I who had to force every single step as I followed his lead.
We must have been close to the stern now. We had crawled into increasingly small spaces, moving aside stacked crates that looked as if they’d stood there since the Falco was launched and covering ourselves in a disgusting mixture of dust, very old cobwebs and a sticky, moist, clammily cold substance that seemed to adhere to absolutely everything. And the smell was becoming intolerable.
Captain Zeke stopped, straightened up and held his lantern at arm’s length. We were in a cramped, dark hole of a place, and I had no idea of its original purpose: now it seemed to be a receptacle for bits of junk that nobody knew what to do with. The floor seemed to be on a slant, and with a faint sense of unease I realized that we were well towards the stern, above the rudder, at the place where the lowest deck began to slope steeply up and away from the keel. I held my lantern beside his, and slowly we turned in a full circle and stared into every corner. At the rear, immediately opposite the narrow entrance, was a roughly-stacked pile of broken bits of wood, some the remains of furniture damaged beyond repair, some offcuts from ancient maintenance jobs. We moved towards it, and the stench grew almost overpowering.