“Do you mind if I call you so?” I dropped off the foot of the ladder and smiled at him. He smiled hesitantly back.
“Er…no, ma’am. The Captain might mind, though,” he added cautiously. “’Tisn’t really naval, you know.”
Elias Pound couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen; I doubted that Captain Leonard was more than five or six years older. Still, protocol was protocol.
“I’ll be very naval in public,” I assured him, suppressing a smile. “But if you’re going to work with me, it will be easier to call you by name.” I knew, as he didn’t, what lay ahead—hours and days and possibly weeks of labor and exhaustion, when the senses would blur, and only bodily habit and blind instinct—and the leadership of a tireless chief—would keep those caring for the sick on their feet.
I was far from tireless, but the illusion would have to be kept up. This could be done with the help of two or three others, whom I could train; substitutes for my own hands and eyes, who could carry on when I must rest. Fate—and Captain Leonard—had designated Elias Pound as my new right hand; best to be on comfortable terms with him at once.
“How long have you been at sea, Elias?” I asked, stopping to peer after him as he ducked under a low platform that held enormous loops of a huge, evil-smelling chain, each link more than twice the size of my fist. The anchor chain? I wondered, touching it curiously. It looked strong enough to moor the Queen Elizabeth, which seemed a comforting thought.
“Since I was seven, ma’am,” he said, working his way out backward, dragging a large chest. He stood up puffing slightly from the exertion, and wiped his round, ingenuous face. “My uncle’s commander in Triton, so he was able to get me a berth in her. I come to join the Porpoise just this voyage, though, out of Edinburgh.” He flipped open the chest, revealing an assortment of rust-smeared surgical implements—at least I hoped it was rust—and a jumbled collection of stoppered bottles and jugs. One of the jars had cracked, and a fine white dust like plaster of Paris lay over everything in the chest.
“This is what Mr. Hunter, the surgeon, had with him, ma’am,” he said. “Will you have use for it?”
“God knows,” I said, peering into the chest. “But I’ll have a look. Have someone else fetch it up to the sickbay, though, Elias. I need you to come and speak firmly to the cook.”
* * *
As I oversaw the scrubbing of the tween-decks with boiling seawater, my mind was occupied with several distinct trains of thought.
First, I was mentally charting the necessary steps to take in combating the disease. Two men, far gone from dehydration and malaise, had died during the removal from the tween-decks, and now lay at the far end of the after-deck, where the sailmaker was industriously stitching them into their hammocks for burial, a pair of round shot sewn in at their feet. Four more weren’t going to make it through the night. The remaining forty-five had chances ranging from excellent to slim; with luck and skill, I might save most of them. But how many new cases were brewing, undetected, among the remaining crew?
Huge quantities of water were boiling in the galley at my order; hot seawater for cleansing, boiled fresh water for drinking. I made another tick on my mental list; I must see Mrs. Johansen, she of the milch goats, and arrange for the milk to be sterilized as well.
I must interview the galley hands about their duties; if a single source of infection could be found and isolated, it would do a lot to halt the spread of the disease. Tick.
All of the available alcohol on the ship was being gathered in the sickbay, to the profound horror of Mr. Overholt. It could be used in its present form, but it would be better to have purified alcohol. Could a means be found of distilling it? Check with the purser. Tick.
All the hammocks must be boiled and dried before the healthy hands slept in them. That would have to be done quickly, before the next watch went to its rest. Send Elias for a crew of swabbers and sweepers; laundry duty seemed most in their line. Tick.
Under the growing mental list of necessities were vague but continuing thoughts of the mysterious Tompkins and his unknown information. Whatever it was, it had not resulted in our changing course to return to the Artemis. Either Captain Leonard had not taken it seriously, or he was simply too eager to get to Jamaica to allow anything to hinder his progress.
I had paused for a moment by the rail, to organize my thoughts. I pushed back the hair from my forehead, and lifted my face to the cleansing wind, letting it blow away the stench of sickness. Puffs of ill-smelling steam rose from the nearby hatchway, from the hot-water cleansing going on below. It would be better down there when they had finished, but a long way from fresh air.
I looked out over the rail, hoping vainly for the glimpse of a sail, but the Porpoise was alone, the Artemis—and Jamie—left far behind.
I pushed away the sudden rush of loneliness and panic. I must speak soon with Captain Leonard. Answers to two, at least, of the problems that concerned me lay with him; the possible source of the typhoid outbreak—and the role of the unknown Mr. Tompkins in Jamie’s affairs. But for the moment, there were more pressing matters.
“Elias!” I called, knowing he would be somewhere within reach of my voice. “Take me to Mrs. Johansen and the goats, please.”
47
PLAGUE SHIP
Two days later, I had still not found time to speak to Captain Leonard. Twice, I had gone to his cabin, but found the young Captain gone or unavailable—taking position, I was told, or consulting charts, or otherwise engaged in some bit of sailing arcana.
Mr. Overholt had taken to avoiding me and my insatiable demands, locking himself in his cabin with a pomander of dried sage and hyssop tied round his neck to ward off plague. The able-bodied crewmen assigned to the work of cleaning and shifting had been lethargic and dubious at first, but I had chivvied and scolded, glared and shouted, stamped my foot and shrieked, and got them gradually moving. I felt more like a sheepdog than a doctor—snapping and growling at their heels, and hoarse now with the effort.
It was working, though; there was a new feeling of hope and purpose among the crew—I could feel it. Four new deaths today, and ten new cases reporting, but the sounds of groaning distress from the tween-decks were much less, and the faces of the still-healthy showed the relief that comes of doing something—anything. I had so far failed to find the source of the contagion. If I could do that, and prevent any fresh outbreaks, I might—just possibly—halt the devastation within a week, while the Porpoise still had hands enough to sail her.
A quick canvass of the surviving crew had turned up two men pressed from a county gaol where they had been imprisoned for brewing illicit liquor. I had seized on these gratefully and put them to work building a still in which—to the horror of the crew—half the ship’s store of rum was being distilled into pure alcohol for disinfection.
I had posted one of the surviving midshipmen by the entrance to the sickbay and another by the galley, each armed with a basin of pure alcohol and instructions to see that no one went in or came out without dipping their hands. Beside each midshipman stood a marine with his rifle, charged with the duty of seeing that no one should drink the grimy contents of the barrel into which the used alcohol was emptied when it became too filthy to be used any longer.
In Mrs. Johansen, the gunner’s wife, I had found an unexpected ally. An intelligent woman in her thirties, she had understood—despite her having only a few words of broken English, and my having no Swedish at all—what I wanted done, and had done it.
If Elias was my right hand, Annekje Johansen was the left. She had single-handedly taken over the responsibility of scalding the goats’ milk, patiently pounding hard biscuit—removing the weevils as she did so—to be mixed with it, and feeding the resulting mixture to those hands strong enough to digest it.
Her own husband, the chief gunner, was one of the victims of the typhoid, but he fortunately seemed one of the lighter cases, and I had every hope that he might recover—as much because of his wife’s devo
ted nursing as because of his own hardy constitution.
“Ma’am, Ruthven says as somebody’s been a-drinking of the pure alcohol again.” Elias Pound popped up at my elbow, his round pink face looking drawn and wan, substantially thinned by the pressures of the last few days.
I said something extremely bad, and his brown eyes widened.
“Sorry,” I said. I wiped the back of a hand across my brow, trying to get my hair out of my eyes. “Don’t mean to offend your tender ears, Elias.”
“Oh, I’ve heard it before, ma’am,” Elias assured me. “Just not from a lady, like.”
“I’m not a lady, Elias,” I said tiredly. “I’m a doctor. Have someone go and search the ship for whoever it was; they’ll likely be unconscious by now.” He nodded and whirled on one foot.
“I’ll look in the cable tier,” he said. “That’s where they usually hide when they’re drunk.”
This was the fourth in the last three days. Despite all guards set over the still and the purified alcohol, the hands, living on half their usual daily ration of grog, were so desperate for drink that they contrived somehow to get at the pure grain alcohol meant for sterilization.
“Goodness, Mrs. Malcolm,” the purser had said, shaking his bald head when I complained about the problem. “Seamen will drink anything, ma’am! Spoilt plum brandy, peaches mashed inside a rubber boot and left to ferment—why, I’ve even known a hand caught stealing the old bandages from the surgeon’s quarters and soaking them, in hopes of getting a whiff of alcohol. No, ma’am, telling them that drinking it will kill them certainly won’t stop them.”
Kill them it did. One of the four men who had drunk it had died; two more were in their own boarded-off section of the sickbay, deeply comatose. If they survived, they were likely to be permanently brain-damaged.
“Not that being on a bloody floating hellhole like this isn’t likely to brain-damage anyone,” I remarked bitterly to a tern who alighted on the rail nearby. “As if it isn’t enough, trying to save half the miserable lot from typhoid, now the other half is trying to kill themselves with my alcohol! Damn the bloody lot of them!”
The tern cocked its head, decided I was not edible, and flew away. The ocean stretched empty all around—before us, where the unknown West Indies concealed Young Ian’s fate, and behind, where Jamie and the Artemis had long since vanished. And me in the middle, with six hundred drink-mad English sailors and a hold full of inflamed bowels.
I stood fuming for a moment, then turned with decision toward the forward gangway. I didn’t care if Captain Leonard was personally pumping the bilges, he was going to talk to me.
* * *
I stopped just inside the door of the cabin. It was not yet noon, but the Captain was asleep, head pillowed on his forearms, on top of an outspread book. The quill had fallen from his fingers, and the glass inkstand, cleverly held in its anchored bracket, swayed gently with the motion of the ship. His face was turned to the side, cheek pressed flat on his arm. Despite the heavy beard stubble, he looked absurdly young.
I turned, meaning to come back later, but in moving, brushed against the locker, where a stack of books was precariously balanced amid a rubble of papers, navigational instruments, and half-rolled charts. The top volume fell with a thump to the deck.
The sound was scarcely audible above the general sounds of creaking, flapping, whining rigging, and shouting that made up the background of life on shipboard, but it brought him awake, blinking and looking startled.
“Mrs. Fra—Mrs. Malcolm!” he said. He rubbed a hand over his face, and shook his head quickly, trying to wake himself. “What—that is—you required something?”
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” I said. “But I do need more alcohol—if necessary, I can use straight rum—and you really must speak to the hands, to see if there is some way of stopping them trying to drink the distilled alcohol. We’ve had another that’s poisoned himself today. And if there’s any way of bringing more fresh air down to the sickbay…” I stopped, seeing that I was overwhelming him.
He blinked and scratched, slowly pulling his thoughts into order. The buttons on his sleeve had left two round red imprints on his cheek, and his hair was flattened on that side.
“I see,” he said, rather stupidly. Then, as he began to wake, his expression cleared. “Yes. Of course. I will give orders to have a windsail rigged, to bring more air below. As for the alcohol—I must beg leave to consult the purser, as I do not myself know our present capacities in that regard.” He turned and took a breath, as though to shout, but then remembered that his steward was no longer within earshot, being now below in the sickbay. Just then, the ting of the ship’s bell came faintly from above.
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Malcolm,” he said, politeness recovered. “It is nearly noon; I must go and take our position. I will send the purser to you, should you care to remain here for a moment.”
“Thank you.” I sat down in the chair he had just vacated. He turned to go, making an attempt to straighten the too-large braided coat over his shoulders.
“Captain Leonard?” I said, moved by a sudden impulse. He turned back, questioning.
“If you don’t mind my asking—how old are you?”
He blinked and his face tightened, but he answered me.
“I am nineteen, ma’am. Your servant, ma’am.” And with that, he vanished through the door. I could hear him in the companionway, calling out in a voice half-cracked with fatigue.
Nineteen! I sat quite still, paralyzed with shock. I had thought him very young, but not nearly that young. His face weathered from exposure and lined with strain and sleeplessness, he had looked to be at least in his mid-twenties. My God! I thought, appalled. He’s no more than a baby!
Nineteen. Just Brianna’s age. And to be suddenly thrust into command not only of a ship—and not just a ship, but an English man-of-war—and not merely a man-of-war, but one with a plague aboard that had deprived her suddenly of a quarter of her crew and virtually all her command—I felt the fright and fury that had bubbled inside me for the last few days begin to ebb, as I realized that the high-handedness that had led him to kidnap me was in fact not arrogance or ill-judgment, but the result of sheer desperation.
He had to have help, he had said. Well, he was right, and I was it. I took a deep breath, visualizing the mess I had left behind in the sickbay. That was mine, and mine alone, to do the best I could with.
Captain Leonard had left the logbook open on the desk, his entry half-complete. There was a small damp spot on the page; he had drooled slightly in his sleep. In a spasm of irritated pity, I flipped over the page, wishing to hide this further evidence of his vulnerability.
My eye caught a word on the new page, and I stopped, a chill snaking down from the nape of my neck as I remembered something. When I had wakened him unexpectedly, the captain had started up, seen me, and said, “Mrs. Fra—” before catching himself. And the name on the page before me, the word that had caught my attention, was “Fraser.” He knew who I was—and who Jamie was.
I rose quickly and shut the door, dropping the bolt. At least I would have warning if anyone came. Then I sat down at the captain’s desk, pressed flat the pages, and began to read.
I flipped back to find the record of the meeting with the Artemis, three days before. Captain Leonard’s entries were distinct from those of his predecessor, and mostly quite brief—not surprising, considering how much he had had to deal with of late. Most entries contained only the usual navigational information, with a brief note of the names of those men who had died since the previous day. The meeting with the Artemis was noted, though, and my own presence.
3 February, 1767. Met near eight bells with Artemis, a small two-masted brig under French colors. Hailed her and requested the assistance of her surgeon, C. Malcolm, who was taken on board and remains with us to assist with the sick.
C. Malcolm, eh? No mention of my being a woman; perhaps he thought it irrelevant, or wished to avoid any inquiries ove
r the propriety of his actions. I went on to the next entry.
4 February 1767. I have rec’d information this day from Harry Tompkins, able seaman, that the supercargo of the brig Artemis is known to him as a criminal by the name of James Fraser, known also by the names of Jamie Roy and of Alexander Malcolm. This Fraser is a seditionist, and a notorious smuggler, for whose capture a substantial reward is offered by the King’s Customs. Information was received from Tompkins after we had parted company with Artemis; I thought it not expeditious to pursue Artemis, as we are ordered with all possible dispatch for Jamaica, because of our passenger. However, as I have promised to return the Artemis’s surgeon to them there, Fraser may be arrested at that time.
Two men dead of the plague—which the Artemis’s surgeon informs me is the Typhoide. Jno. Jaspers, able seaman, DD, Harty Kepple, cook’s mate, DD.
That was all; the next day’s entry was confined entirely to navigation and the recording of the death of six men, all with “DD” written beside their names. I wondered what it meant, but was too distracted to worry about it.
I heard steps coming down the passageway, and barely got the bolt lifted before the purser’s knock sounded on the door. I scarcely heard Mr. Overholt’s apologies; my mind was too busy trying to make sense of this new revelation.
Who in blinking, bloody hell was this man Tompkins? No one I had ever seen or heard about, I was sure, and yet he obviously knew a dangerous amount about Jamie’s activities. Which led to two questions: How had an English seaman come by such information—and who else knew it?
“…cut the grog rations further, to give you an additional cask of rum,” Mr. Overholt was saying dubiously. “The hands won’t like it, but we might manage; we’re only two weeks out of Jamaica now.”
“Whether they like it or not, I need the alcohol more than they need grog,” I answered brusquely. “If they complain too much, tell them if I don’t have the rum, none of them may make it to Jamaica.”
Mr. Overholt sighed, and wiped small beads of sweat from his shiny brow.
“I’ll tell them, ma’am,” he said, too beaten down to object.
“Fine. Oh, Mr. Overholt?” He turned back, questioning. “What does the legend ‘DD’ mean? I saw the Captain write it in his log.”
A small flicker of humor lighted in the purser’s deep-sunk eyes.
“It means ‘Discharged, Dead,’ ma’am,” he replied. “The only sure way for most of us, of leaving His Majesty’s Navy.”
* * *
As I oversaw the bathing of bodies and the constant infusions of sweetened water and boiled milk, my mind continued to work on the problem of the unknown Tompkins.
I knew nothing of the man, save his voice. He might be one of the faceless horde overhead, the silhouettes that I saw in the rigging when I came up on deck for air, or one of the hurrying anonymous bodies, hurtling up and down the decks in a vain effort to do the work of three men.
I would meet him, of course, if he became infected; I knew the names of each patient in the sickbay. But I could hardly allow the matter to wait, in the rather ghoulish hope that Tompkins would contract typhoid. At last I made up my mind to ask; the man presumably knew who I was, anyway. Even if he found out that I had been asking about him, it was unlikely to do any harm.
Elias was the natural place to begin. I waited until the end of the day to ask, trusting to fatigue to dull his natural curiosity.
“Tompkins?” The boy’s round face drew together in a brief frown, then cleared. “Oh, yes, ma’am. One o’ the forecastle hands.”
“Where did he come aboard, do you know?” There was no good way of accounting for this sudden interest in a man I had never met, but luckily, Elias was much too tired to wonder about it.
“Oh,” he said vaguely, “at Spithead, I think. Or—no! I remember now, ’twas Edinburgh.” He rubbed his knuckles under his nose to stifle a yawn. “That’s it, Edinburgh. I wouldn’ remember, only he was a pressed man, and a unholy fuss he made about it, claimin’ as how they couldn’ press him, he was protected, account of he worked for Sir Percival Turner, in the Customs.” The yawn got the better of him and he gaped widely, then subsided. “But he didn’ have no written protection from Sir Percival,” he concluded, blinking, “so there wasn’ nothing to be done.”
“A Customs agent, was he?” That went quite some way toward explaining things, all right.
“Mm-hm. Yes, mum, I mean.” Elias was trying manfully to stay awake, but his glazing eyes were fixed on the swaying lantern at the end of the sickbay, and he was swaying with it.
“You go on to bed, Elias,” I said, taking pity on him. “I’ll finish here.”
He shook his head quickly, trying to shake off sleep.
“Oh, no, ma’am! I ain’t sleepy, not a bit!” He reached clumsily for the cup and bottle I held. “You give me that, mum, and go to rest yourself.” He would not be moved, but stubbornly insisted on helping to administer the last round of water before staggering off to his cot.
I was nearly as tired as Elias by the time we finished, but sleep would not come. I lay in the dead surgeon’s cabin, staring up at the shadowy beam above my head, listening to the creak and rumble of the ship about me, wondering.
So Tompkins worked for Sir Percival. And Sir Percival assuredly knew that Jamie was a smuggler. But was there more to it than that? Tompkins knew Jamie by sight. How? And if Sir Percival had been willing to tolerate Jamie’s clandestine activities in return for bribes, then—well, perhaps none of those bribes had made it to Tompkins’s pockets. But in that case…and what about the ambush at Arbroath cove? Was there a traitor among the smugglers? And if so…
My thoughts were losing coherence, spinning in circles like the revolutions of a dying top. The powdered white face of Sir Percival faded into the purple mask of the hanged Customs agent on the Arbroath road, and the gold and red flames of an exploding lantern lit the crevices of my mind. I rolled onto my stomach, clutching the pillow to my chest, the last thought in my mind that I must find Tompkins.
* * *
As it was, Tompkins found me. For more than two days, the situation in the sickbay was too pressing for me to leave for more than the barest space of time.