Ship of Fire Page 7

  I was nearly deaf, too, even as I struggled onto one elbow, and worked myself to my feet, Jack helping me. I read the words on his lips, but even then took a shaky moment to comprehend.

  An explosion.

  A gun had burst. The gun, the one I had fired.

  I understood this all now.

  I put my hands to my head, reassured to feel my skull in one piece. Jack was beseeching me to tell him if I was hurt badly. I could not answer, upright on my weak, unsteady legs. Like a drunkard far gone in wine I pieced together what I would say, some weak jest, as soon as I could move my lips.

  I groped across the deck through metal fragments that my hands and booted feet struck and knocked aside, bits of what looked like a bronze bell shattered and strewn about the planks. I did not know fully what I sought, or what person. I felt my way through the thick, parting smoke, and fell to my knees beside the stretched form of my master.

  I seized his hand and rubbed it, to work life into his pulse, as I had seen done by William himself in reviving a patient suffering a swoon. I tugged at his arm, and spoke, my voice muffled and strange in my own ears.

  I implored him to speak to me.

  Hands stretched out, other men coming to my aid, but I did not have a glance for them, or a thought. I bent down over my master hearing my own, foreign-sounding voice like a sound from many fathoms down, calling for him to look at me. I begged him to turn his eyes and look into mine. I put my hands on his chest, and on the pulse points of his neck, but my senses were too unsteady to be trusted, a ringing sound in my ears.

  My master’s unseeing eyes were unmoving, his limbs slack where he sprawled on the deck. His pupils were fixed and wide. A fragment of dark bronze was fixed in the center of his forehead, a ragged star shape of metal, a fine trickle of blood threading down, across his temple, to the wooden planks.

  Ross Bagot put a hand out to me. I was beginning to be able to make out sounds as Captain Foxcroft joined him, his steps causing subtle vibrations in the deck. The captain addressed me solicitously, words I still could not hear clearly. The smoke had been driven clear by the wind now, and I wondered which of these men to send for medicines, vinegar to splash on my master’s face, spirits of wine to awaken his tongue.

  I caught the eye of a ship’s boy, a wide-eyed lad with hair the color of straw. My voice was heavy, my words sluggish, as I directed the lad. “Bring me the doctor’s satchel from the shelf.”

  The boy stared. The captain murmured something to the child, and he scampered off. I leaned over my master and slapped his cheeks. I told him we’d see him right, and very soon, too, imitating the manner and speech William himself had employed during similar crises.

  The ship’s boy hurried back with my master’s satchel, and I found the lancet and bleeding cup within. I would open a vein and drain a cup of blood—a sure remedy for a host of emergencies.

  Like many fighting ships, our vessel had a man of God on board, a straw-haired man with a wispy yellow beard, with no ornament to show that he was a cleric. With every show of prayerfulness this man knelt beside me. I was grateful at the sound of Our Father, in straight-forward prayer-book English. Christ Jesus would aid my master’s recovery.

  I was confused, too. More than confused—the prayer awakened me to a feeling of inexpressible uncertainty. The chaplain offered a prayer for “our departed shipmate,” and I felt an unsteady surge of anger.

  My master was not dead, I wanted to protest, and it was unseemly in the extreme to pretend that he was. I put out a hand to silence the chaplain, and Jack Flagg put his arm around me, despite my protest, saying, “Come away, Tom.”

  I struggled.

  The chaplain and my friend the gunner’s mate were both misguided. My master could look to me for good judgment. I would open a vein, release the dark humors that had captured my master’s senses, and he would be sitting up and asking for a cup of rhenish wine in no time at all.

  “On deck there,” sounded a clear, commanding voice that cut through the ringing in my ears.

  The captain, the gunner, and all the present ship’s company on the main deck straightened immediately.

  Admiral Drake leaned over the quarterdeck rail and gave the order, “Take the surgeon’s mate into my cabin.”

  Firm hands seized my arms.

  “And Captain Foxcroft,” the admiral added crisply, “look to the ship.”

  Chapter 20

  I sat in an oak-paneled cabin.

  Pewter flagons perched on a shelf, held in place by a restraining rail against the movement of the ship. Rolled-up charts peeked out of leather sleeves, sepia coastlines marked with dark brown writing. A compass was fastened to the tabletop, set within a box and kept steady by gimbals, brass pivots that secured the compasss against the motion of the swells.

  A ship’s boy brought a pitcher and poured cider into one of the flagons, a large drinking vessel with a hinged lid, and set it before me.

  “Admiral Drake sends his best compliments,” said the lad, my hearing improving with each heartbeat, “and begs you await him with good cheer.”

  Despite my numb senses, the fact that I was about to have an interview with the great sea fighter made me apprehensive. Was I going to be blamed for the accident with the gun, and its consequence? William would be very angry with me, when he recovered.

  The lad left me alone with my disordered fears. I would be accused of some felony, and spend the voyage in chains, my future among rats. I made no move to drink, although I kept my hand on the flagon to keep it from skittering off the table.

  I stood at once as Admiral Drake entered the cabin.

  His cheeks were ruddy, flecks of spray even now soaking into his brightly colored doublet. He unfastened the rapier from his waist, and set the weapon on the floor. He motioned for me to sit, but I would not.

  He poured cider from a silver pitcher and drank.

  “He’s dead,” said Admiral Drake.

  My ears were still ringing somewhat, but I could make out his speech, and indeed the subtle sounds of the ship all round, clearly enough. The admiral’s words, however, carried no meaning that I wished to take in.

  The admiral continued, “We’ll have the prayer book service for burial at sea this evening, at the set of sun. It is a pity. He was a good doctor, and an honest man by every account, but now he’s gone to God.”

  I kept my mind a perfect blank.

  “You understand me, don’t you?” said the admiral in a gentle but probing voice.

  “I need to go to him,” I heard myself manage to say.

  “Your master is killed,” he said, “as you must know. The gun burst into pieces. It’s rare but not unheard of. A fragment smote him, and you will not serve him anymore.”

  His accent was very much that of the Dartmoor neighbors of my boyhood. Yew-er mauster iss killt.

  “I know far more about medicine,” I said, forgetting every courtesy, “than any of this ship’s company.” I was immediately ashamed of myself for speaking so bluntly to this great man, and I silenced myself.

  “It delights me to hear it,” said the admiral. “But your master is with Jesus.”

  Each heartbeat hammered this tidings into me. I looked away. I closed my eyes and opened them again, perhaps hoping that this ship’s cabin, the vessel, would prove a mere nightmare.

  “Then,” I rasped, “I must go back to England.”

  “How?” he asked.

  “In one of the ship’s boats,” I said. “A pinnace, perhaps.”

  He gave a gentle laugh. “Thomas, you will voyage with us.”

  “But with no master to serve—” I faltered.

  I wept, then, wordless, a breaking of my soul that left me baying like a beast for a long while.

  When I could speak again, I heard the admiral’s gentle command, “Take a sip of good cider, Thomas. And sit down.”

  I did sit, and the admiral joined me, pouring himself another serving of golden brown cider. I could not keep from noticing that he
handled both the pitcher and the flagon a little clumsily, using his gloved right hand sparingly.

  “Sir, I will go home,” I insisted, taking a swallow of this strong, warming drink.

  “And leave my ship without a surgeon, Thomas?”

  “I am no surgeon, my Lord Admiral.” Despite my great grief I was clear-headed enough to employ proper courtesy.

  “If I say you are a surgeon,” said Admiral Drake, “then you are one.”

  “I know too little of green bile,” I protested, “or the dangers of excess phlegm, or the right quantity of aniseed for curing fever—if that is what it’s for.”

  “A surgeon bleeds the feverish,” said the admiral, “cuts off the blasted limb that offends the body’s health, and gives strength to the uneasy soul.” He leaned forward. “We are two red-haired men with accents much alike, and I’ll wager you, too, have a preference for cider over beer.”

  “I like beer as well as cider—” But I recognized the truth in what the admiral was asserting. Our cider is a bracing fermented drink, and West Country apples are renowned.

  “Your family must have lived near mine, Thomas.”

  “I was a boy in Moreton.”

  “Not a day’s walk from Tavistock,” said the admiral, “where my family fished the river and milked the cows for many a year.”

  “I know,” I said truthfully, “that every hamlet of Dartmoor is proud to be associated with your fame.”

  “We’re two fellows who waded the River Tavy,” said the famous knight with a brisk good cheer. “And I’ll not see you turn into a coward over the death of your good master.”

  Coward or not, I wanted to respond, my own honor did not matter to me.

  “Do you think your master is the last man you’ll see dead within the fortnight, Thomas Spyre?” continued Admiral Drake. “We’re voyaging to singe the beard of the king of Spain, right into the harbor of Cadiz. There we’ll burn everything we can set spark to, and you’ll see Spanish blood. It will run down the decks. You’ll win glory and perhaps a few reals of Papist gold. And you’ll be surgeon of this ship, or I’ll set a knotted lash to your back.”

  “If my patients die, my lord,” I persisted woodenly, “if they sink away and lose their lives under my care, sir, the fault is yours.”

  To my great puzzlement—and perhaps my relief—the admiral laughed. “Thomas, surgeons do little to save a man’s life. What a doctor knows about the ways of breath and bone could be written on the side of a thimble. Our Lord Jesus cures us, or takes us, as he chooses. You’ll be as sound a doctor as any under the sky, or I’m a goose.”

  To my further surprise I found myself wryly smiling through my tears, understanding at least a part of the admiral’s ironic view of my profession. “Because you have such a low opinion of medicine, you know I’m equal to the challenge.”

  “I’ll have the sailmaker stitch you a scholar’s hat,” he replied, “a floppy one, the sort philosophers wear when they dispute the weight of the moon’s shadow.”

  I could not keep myself from laughing, despite my grief. “My Lord Admiral, dressing me like a learned gentleman will not make me one.”

  “It will,” said Admiral Drake, “if I say it does.”

  He spoke with such a spirit of self-assurance that I was dazzled—and very nearly convinced.

  “Can you set a splint?” he asked with a smile.

  “I have done it, sir.”

  “And cauterize a wound?” he continued, his bright, steady eyes on mine.

  Many doctors advised searing an injury, especially gunshot wounds, with a hot iron. My master had taught me that cauterizing did more harm than good. “My lord, if you desire it.”

  “Tell me, Thomas—how old are you?”

  I recalled then my vow to the Admiralty in London, swearing that I would spy on this great Englishman. Such a promise could not be lightly broken. It would be an advantage to my mission to stay on as surgeon.

  “My lord,” I said, adding more than three years to the truth, “On the next anniversary of my birth, I shall be twenty-one.”

  “Old enough,” he replied with satisfaction.

  I felt a dash of my own pride, and a spirit of my own that prompted me to ask, “My Lord Admiral, is your gloved right hand unhurt?”

  He withdrew his hand, and placed it below the table.

  “Why,” he said, “do you ask?”

  Chapter 21

  Before I could respond, a distant cry reached us, a call from a mast top.

  “Sail, off the port beam,” I thought I could make out—the nautical phrasing was both foreign and dimly audible to my ears.

  “Thomas,” he said, his cheeks flushing, “we’ll see if we can’t pluck a few fat hens.” He left the cabin, cradling his gloved right hand in the other.

  He returned at once with Captain Foxcroft, the two of them in rapt conversation. The vessel the lookout had spied on the horizon was no doubt well armed, the captain was saying. More important, our fleet, including the Golden Lion, had been left behind by our rapid progress, and scattered by the increasingly heavy weather.

  Captain Foxcroft hesitated to say more in my presence, but the admiral waved his yellow-gloved hand impatiently, and so both men continued a discussion laced with naval jargon. The admiral could order the ship’s master to sail in any direction or circumstance, but some courtesy made the sea-knight take pains to explain his commands.

  “If we voyage alone, what does it matter?” concluded Admiral Drake. “We’ll teach our enemies that God fights for Her Majesty on the high seas as well as on land, or any heathen shore.”

  “May it be so,” said the captain with little heart.

  Captain Foxcroft accepted a flagon of cider, and then studied me for a long moment as he drank.

  “I am making Thomas Spyre here,” said the admiral briskly, “our new ship’s surgeon.”

  “There is logic to the choice, Admiral, it might be said,” said the captain after a long moment. “I have heard that he can handle a sword.”

  “So if he cannot cure,” said the admiral with a laugh, “then God grant that he can kill.” He had a way of rising to his tiptoes for a moment to emphasize certain statements, and his cheeks colored, as I am told mine do, with feeling.

  “But forgive me for suggesting,” the captain continued, “that this surgeon’s youth argues against him. We have Sir Robert Garr on board, a playwright and scholar of seven languages, who wrote that famous poem about the liver. He has cured fevers with his knowledge of stars and planets—”

  “Thomas is older than he looks,” said Admiral Drake. “And he is from the West Country moorlands—a place that breeds canny men.”

  “I’ve seen evidence of that,” said the captain, with the faintest trace of a smile.

  “Sir Robert,” said Drake, “wrote a play about John Hawkins, called ‘Knight of the Something Something.’”

  “‘Knight of the Ocean Sea,’” said the captain. “It was quite good, by my reckoning.”

  “The speeches were badly metered,” said the admiral, “the swordplay childish—I did not like it.” John Hawkins was a well-known sea fighter, and Drake had sailed with the storied captain early in his career. Drake had become far more famous. “I know Sir Robert studied medicine and alchemy and can brew poison from a dried scorpion—but he’s not in good health.”

  “We could wait for the Golden Lion to come up,” said Captain Foxcroft. “No doubt the vice-admiral could spare us a medical man.”

  “The master surgeon of that ship,” said Admiral Drake, “is a man pickled in wine, with a mate little better.”

  “Vice-Admiral Borough,” said the captain, with a courteous smile, “is a good friend of mine.”

  “And a stubborn man,” said Admiral Drake, “sailing—as God has willed it—on a creeping-slow ship.”

  The captain parted his lips, to defend his friend or counsel caution, I did not wait to hear which.

  “If the admiral will permit me,” I said, pu
tting as much maturity into my tone as I could muster, “to attend to his own injury, I would be grateful.”

  “I wear this kid-skin glove to protect a hurt,” Admiral Drake said when we were alone, “as you have guessed.”

  “May I examine your wound, my lord?”

  He tugged the fingers of the glove, wincing, and stretched his hand before me, palm down.

  “If it please you, sir.” I tenderly turned the hand over, and moved the lamp from the side shelf to the tabletop.

  The inner ball of his thumb was swollen, angry, and I could easily spy the cause.

  “Some splinter has lodged here,” I said. “And it gives you grief.”

  “An armorer tried to sell the Queen’s navy a few score bill-hooks,” said the admiral, pepper in his voice. “Halberds with a protruding blade, for ship-to-ship fighting. We’ll need such weapons, and very soon.”

  To hear this famous sea-knight mention battle brought a thrill to my heart, despite my stricken spirits.

  “The shafts of the weapons were some whoreson wood,” the admiral continued, “nothing like the fine-grained ash they should have been. When I tried one out, battling with a sergeant, the poxy thing broke in my grasp.”

  “I’ll tweezer it out, with your consent—”

  He smiled, his storm-blue eyes narrowing.

  The ship’s boy brought my master’s satchel.

  “What is your name, lad?” I heard Admiral Drake ask the boy as I searched among the steel and bronze tools.

  “My lord,” said the boy self-consciously, “I am called Hercules.”

  “And was some ancient Greek divinity your father?” asked the admiral.

  “Hercules Biggand is my name,” said the boy, surely no older than six or seven years. “With your permission,” he added.

  “Stay here, lad,” said the admiral, “and hold this lamp for the two of us, while our ship’s surgeon drags a spear from my skin.”

  Hercules had a steady hand, and his help was necessary to keep the motion of the ship from shifting shadows. I bent close.