by Alys Clare
It was fully dark outside now, and probably had been for some time. The fire was no more than embers. Suddenly very much in need of warmth, and even more of light, I leapt up and threw on more wood. The beer was long gone, so I went down and fetched the brandy bottle. I forgot to bring a glass, so I drank from my beer mug.
I had remembered aright. There it was, in my own handwriting: my passage of notes on the stories told to the Falco’s gullible crew while they waited, overheated, homesick and more than ready to entertain anything to relieve the monotony of the long days, for the repairs to the ship to be completed so that they could sail away and forget all about that wretched little island.
I’d written the stories down to amuse myself, for I too was bored, and if anyone had asked me if I’d believed them I’d have said ‘No, most certainly I do not, for I am not wide-eyed and ignorant like the crew but a man of science and discernment.’
But a recently-dead body was even now awaiting me in Theo’s cellar, and it would be receiving my attention the next morning. Although I told myself I must be wrong, that I was permitting the late hour, the darkness, my solitude and my fatigue to sway me, still I could not shake off the unpleasant suspicion that what I’d always taken to be a sailor’s tall travellers’ tale might have rather more than a grain of truth in it.
I took Flynn out for the usual breath of air before we both turned in. I stood by the gates at the end of the track that leads up to my house, deep in thought. Flynn was wuffing and snuffling at some rodent in the hedge, and I was about to call him away and head back inside when suddenly I knew someone – some presence – was watching me.
I stood quite still, listening. Flynn came to stand beside me, and as I put my hand on the back of his neck I felt the hairs rise up. He is a brave dog, unafraid of any danger that he can see to attack, but just then he was frightened.
I hated to admit it but so was I.
In that moment, with all that I had recently read and experienced vivid in my mind, I was quite sure that if I searched I would find nothing, for whatever was out there had no tangible form.
I slept poorly. I couldn’t get warm and I had a series of very colourful dreams, in one of which someone had removed all my blood, which was why I was so cold. It was a relief to wake up from that one.
I set out after an early breakfast, leaving word for Celia with Sallie not to expect me until late. Ruthlessly I drove all thoughts of bloodless corpses and reanimated dead bodies from my mind and forced myself to give the morning’s three patients my full attention. Fortunately for me – even more for them – not one of them was seriously ill: one required a change of dressing on a stitched and healing wound; one needed more cough syrup, which I had brought with me; one suspected what would be a very welcome pregnancy, and I referred her to Judyth Penwarden, who would no doubt be able to tell for certain after only the briefest of consultations.
Then I set Hal’s head for Withybere, and what awaited me in Theo’s cellar.
He greeted me distractedly, his thick light brown hair standing up from where he’d repeatedly run his hands through it; clearly he was not having a great morning. I inclined my head towards the cellar, and he nodded. ‘Yes, yes, get on with it!’ he snapped, then immediately apologized: ‘Sorry, Gabe, too much to do and Jarman Hodge has gone off on some investigation of his own.’ He muttered an oath; several oaths, in fact. ‘He was here when we brought the corpse in yesterday and when I told him where it had been found, he said “Buckland, you say? Near to Buckland Abbey?” as if it meant something, although for the life of me I can’t see what, and now the bloody man’s not here when I need him, and—’
His complaint was rapidly turning into a rant and he wasn’t really talking to me any more. I left him to it and headed down the steps into the cool cellar.
The body was on the trestle where the tiny corpse from the Falco had been until someone came in the night and took it. It lay beneath a length of worn but clean linen which covered it from head to toe. I folded back the top third and began my inspection.
I was alone this time, so there was no need to speak my findings aloud. Slowly I began the examination, looking again at the two cuts in the sides of the neck, and reflecting now that they had been done with skill and efficiency.
Which led straight away to an interesting thought …
I didn’t hurry. Slowly and carefully I studied the head, feeling all over the beautifully-shaped skull, running my fingers deep in the thick curly hair to feel the bone beneath the skin. The hair, I noticed, was extremely dry, and strands broke off right down close to the scalp as I lightly touched them. Then I went on to the chest, the belly, the thighs and legs. I observed what I’d noticed already, that while the youth was tall, deep-chested and broad in the shoulder, he was very skinny, and now I judged by the condition of the body that it was a very long time since this young man had eaten properly. His skin was dry and scaly.
With a soft exclamation I went back to the face, this time gently parting the soft, full lips. His teeth had been very good – white, large and even – but now at least three were missing, and the gums were purplish and spongy.
Whatever food scraps he had managed to purloin from the Falco’s stores, lemons, limes and fresh vegetables hadn’t featured in his diet, for he’d had scurvy.
We had known about the debilitating and frequently fatal sickness that struck down sailors ever since ships had begun the long voyages that saw them at sea for weeks, and sometimes months, at a time. Sailors were no use when they were weak and exhausted, when their teeth fell out and agonizing pain in their joints stopped them working, and the least knock marked their flesh with huge, painful bruises. Many cures had been advocated, and it was John Hawkins’s son, Admiral Richard Hawkins, who had introduced back in 1593 the rule that every man on board the Queen’s ships be given orange or lemon juice each day. Nobody knew why the remedy worked, only that it did.
And the young man lying dead before me hadn’t seen an orange or a lemon in months.
I went on with my inspection.
His hands, feet, joints and his long, elegant limbs showed signs of hard physical labour. I peered more closely at his hands, and the lad who’d brought the cart was quite right: the skin definitely had a blue stain. I reached for a lantern, holding it close to first the right arm and then the left. On both sides the colour that had penetrated his dark skin reached right up above the elbows, on the right side almost to the shoulder. Reaching beneath him, my arms supporting his shoulders and hips, gently I turned him over to repeat the examination on his back.
Between his ribs on the left hand side I discovered a hole.
It was almost circular and about the diameter of my thumbnail. The flesh around the hole’s perimeter was raw and had bled a little. This young man’s breast had been unmarked, which meant that the projectile that had entered him from the rear was still inside him.
I went to my roll of instruments and selected a long, thin probe. I inserted the tip into the hole, exerting just enough pressure to let it follow the projectile. The track that it had made angled upwards, I noted. Then the tip of the instrument struck something hard.
I removed the probe, then stood in thought for a few moments. Returning to my instruments, I removed a tool originally designed to extract arrowheads and whose purpose was to enlarge the track made by the arrow’s entry so as to facilitate extraction. It has two jaws which sit together as you insert it into the body and which, by adjusting the handles, can be opened out once in place.
I put the jaws into the wound and, once I felt the ends strike the hard object I’d found with the probe, gently opened them. The flesh parted and, peering into the enlarged hole, I saw what had caused it. Holding the jaws open with my left hand, I reached for my long-nosed tweezers. After quite a lot of fumbling and a deal of cursing – it was as well my patient was dead and insensate to pain – I got a firm grip on the object and very carefully withdrew it from the wound.
It was a musket ball.
Whatever had stopped its progress through the young man’s chest cavity cannot have been hard, for the lead ball was still roughly round and, had it hit a rib, it would have been grossly misshapen.
I wiped it and studied it. I thought I knew what had happened: someone had fired a musket at him and the ball had hit him in the back. Whoever fired the weapon was some distance away, since musket balls fired at close range tend to blast right through the body and leave an exit wound the size of my two clenched fists put together. Whoever had fired had been shorter than the victim, or, more probably, firing from below; the young man might, for example, have been trying to escape by climbing up a low rise.
The musket ball had found his heart.
‘It was still there inside him when they strung him up,’ I said softly. ‘By accident or design, the men who did this to him kept his body stoppered up like a bottle with very valuable contents until they had him upside down and were holding their cups under his severed blood vessels ready to catch his blood.’
I have had a great deal of experience with penetrating wounds. I have seen a man pierced by a huge splinter of wood powered into him as a cannon ball hit the ship; a man whose life I could have saved had I been there to staunch the wound as the splinter was removed, and had it not been torn out of him by a well-intentioned shipmate long before I reached him. In every ship I subsequently served on I drummed it into the crew every time we went into action: don’t remove anything from wounds until I tell you to do so.
I turned the young man over again. I stared down into his face. He looked peaceful, and I told myself this indicated he had died swiftly and had not known much about it. I knew full well there was nothing in a calm expression to prove any such thing, but something about the man had roused deep pity. If he really had been one of the fugitives who had endured that terrible voyage down in the depths of the Falco – and the staining on his hands and arms seemed to place it beyond doubt that this lad had been one of the ‘blue men’ – how poignant it was that he had survived it only to end his life a matter of days afterwards.
I drew the cloth up over him again, covering him to the chin. For a moment I rested my hand on his forehead. ‘I am sorry,’ I said quietly. ‘I will do what I can to discover who you are, and why you came here, and then we will bury you and prayers will be said for you.’
Then I pulled the cloth up over his head and left him.
I went into Theo’s office. He was looking slightly less harassed, and waved a hand for me to tell him my findings. ‘He died from a musket ball that hit him in the heart,’ I said. ‘It looks to me as if they killed him quickly – catching him by surprise, probably, for there are no signs that he tried to fight them off – and then immediately hung him up and opened the vessels in his throat to drain him of his blood.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Theo muttered. ‘Why?’
I thought back to what I’d been reading the previous night, but decided it was too soon to share it with Theo. I needed to sit alone and think; to let the connections form, break and re-form, and I knew nothing would even begin to clarify until I could do so.
‘I don’t know,’ I said shortly. ‘Yet. I’m off to see Captain Zeke,’ I went on before Theo could ask me anything else.
‘Very well. Report to me as soon as you have any information.’
I nodded my assent, then hurried away.
I found the same uneasy mood on the Falco, but now unease had been joined by resentment and a very obvious dissatisfaction. It was hardly surprising, since the crew were still engaged on the awful task of emptying out the barrel in the hiding place. I stood on the upper deck beside Captain Zeke, listening to the regular sound of bucket-loads of unmentionable waste matter being hurled into the sea. The men had been ordered to throw their noisome burdens over the Falco’s bows, on the port side, so the filthy puddle polluting the clear blue-green sea and slowly dissipating was mostly concealed from the crowds on the quayside.
‘They hate it,’ Captain Zeke said unnecessarily, nodding towards his surly crew.
‘I’m not surprised.’
He grinned briefly. ‘I didn’t mean the task itself, although in truth they’re none too happy about that either. I meant they hate having to go down there, where the fugitives hid. To begin with, I ordered the chain of men to change their positions only every couple of hours, but it wasn’t working.’ He didn’t elaborate. ‘Now they’re shifting around like a troupe of country dancers.’ He hawked and spat over the side, the gesture eloquent of his disgust.
‘They’re still seeing blue men?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Aye.’
I hadn’t come merely to ask him where the fugitives might have boarded his ship: there was something I had to tell him, and I judged now was the moment. ‘A body has been found,’ I said, keeping my voice low. There were sailors busy nearby, and what I had to say was for the ship’s captain to hear first.
He spun round, his light eyes staring penetratingly at me. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s that of a young man, tall, very thin, dark-skinned. He was hung from the ankles from a tree up at Buckland, and his body was drained of blood.’
‘And why are you telling me this?’
‘Because his hands and his arms were stained blue.’
Captain Zeke didn’t speak for some moments. Then he said heavily, ‘There was more than one man down there – there had to be.’
I thought I understood. He was desperate for answers: how and where the fugitives had managed to board the Falco, why they had done so, how they’d managed to stay alive for the duration of the crossing of the Atlantic and how they’d left the ship without being spotted. If there had only been the one man who had crept on board and he was now dead and beyond explaining, Captain Zeke was never going to find out.
‘I think so too,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking that his death was the result of a fight among them – the group of fugitives. They’d have been in a bad way, if the dead youth is anything to go by. He hadn’t eaten a proper meal in a long time.’
‘You expect me to feel sorry for him?’ Captain Zeke snapped.
‘He endured the unendurable. He knew the risks, yet went ahead anyway. He must have had an incredibly powerful reason, and he made it all the way to England only to be murdered soon after he achieved his aim. So yes, I do.’
I’d spoken more harshly than I’d intended, but then it was I who had stood over that pathetic body. And Ezekiel Colt wasn’t my captain any more.
He lowered his furious eyes and muttered something that might have been an apology, although I doubted it.
‘I came to ask you something as well as bring you news of the body,’ I said after a moment.
‘What?’
‘Whether you have any idea where your uninvited passengers might have come on board.’
‘Not before Hispaniola,’ he said, with an alacrity that suggested he’d thought long and hard on the matter. ‘You’ve seen the tiny space where they hid, Gabe. We’d have been hauling corpses out of it if they’d been down there during the storm.’
I nodded. ‘That’s what I thought. So, would it have been possible? For them to get onto the Falco without being observed?’
He gave me a withering look. ‘Of course it was possible,’ he said. ‘They were there, weren’t they? Down in my sodding hold, helping themselves to my supplies, pissing and shitting in that fucking barrel that still isn’t empty!’ The last words came out in a furious shout of frustration.
‘Stupid question,’ I muttered. ‘Sorry.’
He gave a curt nod. ‘As to how they managed it, I can’t say. You know what it’s like alongside, Gabe, when you’re taking on supplies before sailing. All manner of men and even a few women come pushing and shoving their way onto the deck and you don’t usually do a head count to make sure they all go ashore again. Great God, who in their right mind would want to sneak down to the lowest, darkest, smallest hold and hide there while we buck and wriggle our way across the Atlantic?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s beyond me, the whole damned, blasted mess.’
I felt very sorry for him. ‘I spoke to a good friend of mine who is my parish priest,’ I said. ‘He has offered to come on board and perform a service of cleansing, if you think it would help.’
Captain Zeke turned to me. I thought his eyes looked slightly moist, but it was probably nothing more than the stiff breeze off the water. ‘You did that? Went to this priest friend and asked for his help?’
‘Yes.’
He slapped me across the shoulders, hard. ‘You’re a good man.’
I was feeling decidedly embarrassed now. ‘Well, the Falco was my last ship,’ I muttered. ‘I’ll always wish her well, and her crew.’
‘Tell him yes, and thank him,’ Captain Zeke said. He must be feeling better, I thought, since his utterances were coming out like orders again, just as they usually did.
I turned to go, hiding my smile. ‘I will. Good day, Captain, and I will be back soon.’
I called in on Jonathan on the way home and told him Captain Zeke would be pleased to accept his offer. ‘He even said to thank you,’ I added.
Jonathan smiled. ‘And that is a rarity?’
‘You have no idea how favoured you are.’
‘I shall go as soon as time permits,’ he said.
‘May I accompany you?’
His smile widened. ‘Yes, Gabriel. Otherwise I shall have to tramp up and down the Plymouth quays until I happen upon the right ship.’
Then, at last, I was riding up the track to Rosewyke. Once again I seemed to have let the day go by without remembering to eat, and I looked forward to asking Sallie to serve up something tasty that with any luck Celia and I could share.
Samuel took my horse, and I paused in the yard to wash the worst of the day’s accumulated filth off my hands. Inside, I added hot water to my list of requirements from Sallie, and she thrust a full jug at me: ‘There you are, Doctor, if you don’t mind taking it up yourself, only I must get on with your dinner.’
I stripped, washed, dressed in clean linen and had a short but welcome sleep. Then I went downstairs to find Celia waiting for me and dinner almost ready.