by S. W. Perry
In clearer weather the apprentices would check the sun’s inclination above the horizon with an astrolabe. But today the sky is a bruised, sullen grey. Sheets of rain drive across the reeling deck, making the planks dark and treacherously slick. And although everyone is clad in oilskin slops and leather jerkins, no one has been truly dry for two days.
Nicholas watches the apprentices throw the knotted log-line astern to calculate the ship’s speed. As it runs off the spindle and disappears over the side, they time how many knots have passed, using a smaller, half-minute sandglass. Then the helmsman checks his course against the compass iron. When the mate is satisfied no errors have been made, he reports the measurements to Connell, who plots their position against the course drawn on his goatskin chart. He seems satisfied they are not lost. But for all Nicholas can tell, they could be sailing off the edge of the world.
‘You look a little whey-faced, Dr Shelby,’ Connell says with a cold grin as Nicholas braces himself against another lurch of the deck. ‘If you’re going to retch you’d best be facing leeward or else you’ll be wasting good vomit.’
Refusing to give Connell the petty victory he desires, Nicholas swallows hard. ‘How long do you think this will last, Captain Connell?’
‘Not long now. She’s mostly blown herself out.’
‘Are we making progress?’
‘We’re not drowned, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Is that so? I wasn’t sure.’
Connell gives him a smile Nicholas has seen before: a smirk of contempt for the outsider. ‘In two days we’ll be off Cape Finisterre. We can run into Vigo for fresh victuals and water.’
‘But Vigo is under Spanish rule,’ Nicholas says doubtfully. ‘Won’t we be in danger of seizure?’
Connell laughs. ‘Mercy, Dr Shelby, do you think trade stops just because our queen and the Don king get a little fractious from time to time?’
‘But I’m carrying letters from Sir Robert Cecil. If I’m taken—’
‘They’ll say you’re the English queen’s spy and hang you,’ Connell says helpfully. ‘Then that handsome Mistress Bianca will have to turn to a rougher fellow to warm her sheets for her.’ He laughs and claps Nicholas on the shoulder. ‘Don’t trouble yourself. I’ll send the Marion close inshore to take a look. She’s proper handy. If there’s a Don galleon at anchor, we can be away before the Spanish can hoist their breeches. Besides, even this far north we’re as likely to encounter Barbary corsairs as we are the Spanish.’
‘Barbary corsairs?’ Nicholas says, adding the thought to his rapidly growing list of seafaring perils. ‘They range to these latitudes?’
‘Aye, they raid the Portuguese and Spanish coastal villages for slaves. Sometimes they’ll take a bite at the French coast, too. And not just the Barbary Moors. Even the Levantine pirates will stick their heads out into the Atlantic if they’re hungry enough. But we’re safe enough at the moment. In these seas a galley can’t row for shit, and they’re lubbers with a sail, so they are.’
‘But you said the storm was almost blown out. What happens when the seas calm?’
‘Then you’d best hope my gunners know their business.’
‘But surely the letters I’m carrying to the sultan’s court will guarantee us free passage?’
Connell gives a dismissive laugh. ‘Number one, there’s not one Moor in a thousand as can read English. Number two, a Moor is not just a Moor. They have their own heretics, like we do. Then there’s the tribes: a Wattasi wants the blood of a Saadi, who abhors a Turk, who holds an Alevi to be little better than a dog… I could go on, but you’ll take my drift. And they all hate a Christian. Unless, of course, they have need of him.’ Connell propels a contemptuous gobbet of spit over the side of the Righteous. ‘But don’t fret, Dr Shelby. The Moors know me, by reputation if not by sight. Aye, they know the Conn-ell well enough.’
It’s said so enigmatically that Nicholas decides to ask Connell what he means. But even as he opens his mouth to speak, he hears a sound as concussive as every demi-culverin and falconet aboard the Righteous firing as one. He turns – and sees a huge wave slam against the forecastle.
For a moment he thinks the vessel has run into a cliff of dark-green bloodstone crystal. The Righteous seems to stop dead in the water. Nicholas feels his knees give way. Then the wave breaks, roaring across the main-deck and shattering into a foaming mist that momentarily blinds him.
Wiping his eyes free of stinging salt-spume, he looks down from his place on the sterncastle. To his surprise, the Righteous is still in one piece. The crew are laughing wildly. Their lucky escape has carried them past terror into a sort of jubilant delirium.
All, that is, except for one of the apprentices, whose body – hurled by the wave against one of the demi-culverins – lies drenched and motionless on the deck like something the sea has spewed up in its passing.
As she walks back from St Olave’s Lane, Bianca can still smell Goodwife Willders’s broth in her nostrils. It reminds her she hasn’t eaten since breakfast. Her stomach yearns noisily for one of Farzad’s specialities. But before she can eat, she has an apothecary’s work to do. How is parish gossip to spread freely if Jenny Solver doesn’t have a basilicon of white pepper, oil of dill, serpillum and euphorbium to keep her migraine in check? How can Walter Pemmel’s grumbling be kept bearable if he has no nettle salve to rub on his pustule? How is Parson Moody to read his Bible in comfort if he has no electuary of liquorice juice and eyebright to strengthen his vision? There are trials enough to be endured on Bankside, without Bianca Merton neglecting her duties. So she elects to return to Dice Lane. Eating can wait.
Two hours later, she has almost finished. The hunger has disappeared. But in its place has come an unaccountable weariness.
At first she tries to make light of it. I have a sound constitution, she tells herself. I am not made of meadow-grass. I don’t blow over at the first hint of a breeze. It’s just tiredness.
She embarks on a half-hearted stocktaking. She checks the pots and the boxes, the drawers and the jars, sprigs, roots, dried leaves, parings… She is interrupted on several occasions by customers, though when they linger to chat, she feels unusually disinclined to indulge them. Her bones are beginning to ache abominably. If I feel like this tomorrow, she thinks, the journey to Cecil House will have to wait. I feel as though I’ve fought three rounds with old Sackerson the bear.
Reluctantly she closes the shop. She makes herself a general fortification of fleawort and quince, then retires to her sleeping chamber above. She closes the shutters, takes off her gown, bathes herself with a wet cloth soaked in a distillation of coltsfoot to ease the aches and, when she’s dry, crawls into bed.
As she lies there, wincing at the discomfort in her joints every time she moves, Bianca wonders where Nicholas is now. For all the horror of Farzad’s story, she cannot imagine he is in danger from Connell, not if he’s carrying Robert Cecil’s commission. No, charming the Crab can wait upon the morrow. A few hours’ sound sleep and she’s bound to feel better.
But sleep does not come. The ache in her joints gets worse. Her stomach begins to turn. And even if she could ignore these discomforts, her brain is fizzing with thoughts of how to get closer to Gault, and Robert Cecil. The St Saviour’s bell has tolled the hour three times before a troubled sleep finally takes her. But in the moment before it does, the answer comes to her in a sudden flash of clarity.
His name is Edmund Hortop. He is sixteen years of age, a shepherd’s son from the Weald of Kent. He has never been to sea before.
All this Nicholas learns from the sailors who carried his broken body from the demi-culverin to the small measure of shelter behind the sterncastle ladder.
Nicholas had yelled at them not to move him, but the howl of the wind had drowned his voice. Now young Hortop is staring up at him with frightened eyes, his face shiny with seawater and sweat, the flesh alarmingly grey.
Nicholas tries to gauge the measure of his injuries. There is no sign
of blood, just a raw indentation on his right jaw, which Nicholas ascribes to his colliding with the cannon’s iron trunnion. But from his experience as a surgeon with the army of the House of Orange in the Low Countries, he knows an absence of blood is no guarantee his patient might not be mortally hurt.
Nicholas talks to the boy while he unlaces his sea-soaked gabardine. For the first time since boarding the Righteous, he feels a measure of authority – no longer an unskilled hindrance to be pushed aside with a shout of Away, yarely!
‘Where is the pain, Edmund? Can you tell me?’
‘It was everywhere, Master,’ the boy says in a faltering voice.
‘Was?’
‘It is better now. It is dying away.’ He grips Nicholas by the wrist. His fingers feel like bands of ice. ‘Does that mean I’m dying also? I should not like to die in the midst of the ocean, Master.’
‘You’re not dying, Edmund. You’ve just received a bad blow. Lie still.’
In Holland he had often reassured a pikeman or a pistoleer, an archer or a matchlock-man, in this manner – knowing full well that he was lying to them. But sometimes comfort is the only medicine a physician can give.
But setting broken bones, cleansing and suturing torn flesh, this is practical medicine he can he sure of. All he has to do is mend. And if he can’t mend, it will be because the wound is beyond healing, not because he has trouble reciting pages of Galen and Hippocrates in faultless Latin.
Sending one of the other apprentices below to fetch his physician’s chest, Nicholas peels the boy’s gabardine open and gently probes for broken ribs. The chest seems sound, even if the breathing is shallow and rapid. Hortop remains silent throughout this exploration, staring up at the swaying sky.
The limbs, too, seem unbroken. ‘You may have done naught but bruise yourself, Edmond,’ he says encouragingly, though a warning voice in his head tells him the boy will be fortunate to have escaped so lightly. He is about to ask Hortop to move his limbs when another wave crashes into the Righteous. She rolls sickeningly. Standing over Hortop’s prone body, one of the apprentice lads stumbles forward, his boot stamping down hard onto Hortop’s right ankle.
Hortop does not cry out. He doesn’t even move his leg out of the way.
‘Edmund, will you try to move your feet for me?’ Nicholas says as the Righteous settles herself.
But Hortop remains immobile.
‘I cannot, Master. They refuse my will.’ His voice is barely audible. Nicholas can see the effort it takes to make the words leave his mouth. He pushes the heel of his palm into the flesh of Hortop’s right thigh, halfway between the knee and the groin.
‘Can you feel that?’
The boy mouths, ‘No.’
Nicholas rises and turns to Connell, speaking low so that Hortop will not hear him above the noise of the wind. ‘I think the boy is afflicted by a palsy of the limbs. There may be damage to the spinal marrow.’
‘Can he be cured?’ Connell asks. ‘He is worth some amount of money to me.’
Appalled by Connell’s callousness, Nicholas struggles to keep a neutral voice. ‘The prognosis is not good. For lesser damage, it is sometimes recommended by the ancients that walking on the spine can relieve the pain, or having the body suspended from a frame. But Hortop is not overly discomforted. That worries me.’
‘There must be something you can do – with all that learnin’ inside you.’
‘In extreme cases the French surgeon Paré recommends cutting away the fragments of damaged vertebrae. I tried to do that once, in the Low Countries, with a Swiss mercenary who’d taken a ball in the back. It wasn’t entirely successful.’
‘What happened?’
‘He died.’
Connell considers this for a moment. Then he says, ‘I’ll send him ashore in Vigo then. The Portugals have hospitals and sisters of mercy. They can have him.’
‘Abandon the lad in a foreign land, palsied from the neck down?’
‘What else is there to do?’
‘Hope that the Moors can treat him,’ Nicholas says.
‘The Moors?’ replies Connell with a contemptuous grunt.
‘Their physician Albucasis has written on the condition of paralysis to a greater extent than Christian physicians,’ Nicholas says, knowing he sounds like a man losing an argument.
‘And if they are successful?’
‘He might live. But I fear he will be a great burden to his family when he returns. His father is a shepherd, I understand. He’s unlikely to have the money to care for a crippled son.’
Nicholas thinks of the poor vagabonds he’s seen on the roads of England, half-starved, clad in rags, begging for food, chased out of towns with the threat of a branding. Many of them were crippled soldiers from the Low Countries, or maimed sailors discharged from the fleet. It might have been better, he thinks, if the wave had carried Edmund Hortop out of this world entirely.
Connell studies the straining sails while he considers what Nicholas has said. ‘Safi it is, then,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Let us hope your faith in heathen physic isn’t misplaced, Dr Shelby. For my own part, I’d rather the Devil mixed my medicines.’
The raucous ill temper of next door’s cockerel brings Bianca awake. A single shaft of watery grey light falls reluctantly on the bedroom wall. As she sits up against the bolster, her aching joints cry out in protest. She feels no better now than when she went to sleep.
But her hunger has returned with a vengeance. The smell of Goodwife Willders’s broth pops into her head. Her stomach begins to rumble. In her present state, she thinks, a good broth might make all the difference.
She wistfully recalls the one her mother used to make for her when she was young: the carcass of a mountain bird – tetraone or fagiano – boiled for hours with asparagus, parsley and fennel. There had been times when that broth kept her sane: her falling-out with Antonia Addonato, for instance; or that occasion when – aged fourteen – she’d thrown all the feminine wiles she imagined she possessed at Paulo Vianello, the mason’s son, only for him to humiliate her in public by telling her to come back when she was a year older, and then only after she’d contrived to grow a pair of breasts. There had never been a trial that couldn’t be put in its proper place by that wonderful broth.
Feeling a little better at the mere thought of it, Bianca swings her legs onto the floor, washes from the bowl of well-water in the corner, puts on a clean smock and goes down stairs, infused with renewed purpose.
Admittedly, grouse or partridge might be difficult to find at short notice.
But St Saviour’s market will be opening at daybreak, and the fowlers might have caught a few in their nets. And if not, she could always use a capon as an alternative. By midday, she should have the magic completed. Then she’ll be in a better state to put on her green brocade kirtle and her carnelian bodice and set forth to enchant the Crab into sending a fast pinnace to fetch Nicholas home from the clutches of the cruellest man in the world.
She is in the process of gathering the other ingredients from her kitchen when Jenny Solver rushes into the shop, her face flushed.
‘Am I first in, Mistress Merton?’
‘You are, Mistress Solver. I haven’t really opened – it’s barely daybreak.’
‘So there hasn’t been a run?’
Bianca looks puzzled. ‘A run? On what?’
‘Vinegar.’
‘No. Should there be?’
‘In that case, I shall need’ – Jenny Solver starts crossing off her fingers – ‘at least a quart of vinegar… tincture of squills… three scruples of wormwood… four drachms of water germander… camphire…’
‘Wait a moment, Mistress Solver,’ Bianca says, trying to slow her down. ‘These are the ingredients for a fumigant: to protect against the pestilence.’
Jenny Solver looks at her as if she’s the village clod-pate. ‘Why else do you think I’m here at cock-fart, Mistress Merton? It’s crossed the river. There’s plague on Bankside.’
; Bianca’s usual habit is to ignore Jenny Solver’s gossiping. But something about the look in her eyes says this isn’t just rumour. ‘How do you know?’
‘Parson Moody told me. He buried the first body, late last night.’
Bianca lifts a hand to her mouth. ‘No! Who was the poor soul? Did he say?’
‘Do you know Constable Willders’s daughter, Ruth, the one who married that glover’s son? They live on Pocket Lane. Only she’d been across the bridge for a while, see, an’ when she come back—’
Bianca feels a wave of cold dread surge through her, taking all the strength out of her legs. She can hear Goodwife Willders’s voice in her head: He’s just gone down to our daughter Ruth’s place on Pocket Lane with a pot of my broth. Ruth’s taken a little poorly…
And she recalls the way that Willders, on his return, had seemed somehow distracted. He knew, she tells herself. He knew. And yet he kept silent. God alone knows how many people might already be infected!
For a moment Bianca thinks she’s going to faint. She steadies herself against the table. Jenny Solver is leaning very close to her, her eyes rolling, her lips drawn over her teeth to emphasize the horror of it all. Her voice seems unbearably loud – as if she’s shouting into Bianca’s face.
‘Imagine it: Constable Willders having to confine his dying daughter in a plague house an’ all the time wondering if he’s tainted himself – an’ anyone who’s been near him. So if it’s all the same to you, Mistress Merton, I’ll have that fumigant just as soon as you can manage. Mistress Merton… Mistress Merton… are you alright?’
16
At night Nicholas sleeps in a hammock, rigged in a little alcove where the cases of matchlock muskets destined for Sultan al-Mansur’s armoury are stored. On the Righteous, that is as close to privacy as anyone – save Connell – can get, a meagre nod to his position as a messenger of the Privy Council. It reminds Nicholas of a crypt in a mausoleum. The only light – until dawn breaks and the hatch forward of the foremast is thrown open – comes from a single horn lantern swaying on a hook from a deck beam. When that happens, the resulting shaft of lurching grey luminosity makes Nicholas fear the sea has broken in. The hatch is open now.