Ship of Fire Read online

  I questioned my skill as I sat there in the sea-rocked vessel, mariners barking orders beyond us on the deck. I knew well that surgery was difficult enough in a quiet city, on a steady floor in my master’s chamber. Shaken by feeling, and a newcomer to medical practice, who was I to undertake even a very minor operation on this great seaman—on board an increasingly unsteady war-vessel?

  I tried to imagine what my master would have advised, but instead I heard the lesson of my sword-teacher.

  If you would strike fast you must strike straight.

  One instant, and the splinter was withdrawn.

  Chapter 22

  “They have one little saker, there in the prow,” Jack Flagg said.

  He was indicating an indistinguishable glint on the distant ship as we approached. “They’ll have a few more guns covered over with sailcloth,” he added.

  “Hidden?” I suggested.

  “Making their peaceful intentions clear,” said Jack.

  He hesitated, and then he added, “The seam in the gun was weak, as nobody could have known.”

  I did not have the words to weigh my feelings just then.

  “When that cannon sundered, Tom,” he continued, his voice hoarse with sorrow, “my heart stopped dead in my body, and I doubt it’s started beating again. You’re in my prayers.”

  I thanked him, strong feeling choking my speech.

  “I have a token for you,” he said. He stretched out his hand, and into mine placed a barbed claw-like thing, a talon, it seemed, carved of wood. I closed my grasp around it, gingerly, aware that this was no common gift.

  “It’s the fighting spur of Pepper John,” said Jack. “The best rooster to ever draw blood on the Southbank. I traded a hanged man’s knuckle for it. It’s yours, Tom, and may it bring you luck.”

  I wanted to protest. This gift was too gracious, and too valuable. How could my friend load and fire war-engines if he was stripped of every charm against ill-fortune?

  Jack and I fell silent as a mariner relieved his bladder in the piss-barrel nearby. The big containers were kept tied to the ship’s side in case of fire—nothing damped a blaze like urine. Fire was a great threat on a sailing vessel. One of the most potent weapons of sea battle were the legendary fire-ships, vessels packed with pitch and set alight, and set forth with the wind in their sails to ram and destroy enemy craft.

  A soldier vomited down his stockings before he could reach the rail, and a muffled cry rose up from the galley, where rumor had it the cook was having trouble keeping his great copper stock pot on the fire. And then the master gunner called for Jack, and I realized, as my friend hurried off to attend to the guns, that there was little time for heart-to-heart conversation on a warship.

  A mariner’s song flavored the breeze as men climbed the mainmast to work the softly thundering sails.

  We captured a Flemish carrack that afternoon, a stocky little merchantman with two masts and gold paint about her stern.

  Her sailors hauled the ship up out of the wind, and made no attempt to flee or fight as we approached. Our pikemen stood by with gleaming points at the end of their shafts, some of them armed with a weapon called Welsh-hooks, a stout staff with a long sharp bill at the end. Gunners stood by, wicks at the ready, giving off soft feathers of smoke.

  Our purser and his mates climbed aboard the Sint Joachim to inventory the bales of wool and the barrels of medicinal spirits, supervising the wrestling of the cargo up and into our own hold. When all was done, in the space of an hour or two, the Flemish sailors waved farewell and set sail for the east, apparently relieved to have come so close to the famous sea fighter without loss of life.

  I felt relieved, too—that the first act of war I had ever witnessed was a matter-of-fact act of plunder, carried out with efficiency and an air of mercy. If this was sea battle, I thought, perhaps I would live to see England again.

  My master’s body was committed to the sea before a sunset blotted by clouds. The mortal remains of William Perrivale, worshipful Latinist and gifted physician, were sewn into a swaddling of sailcloth weighted with shot.

  The yellow-bearded chaplain hunched into the sea spray whipped through the air by the rising wind, and protected the leaves of his leather-bound book with his mantle. I knew the prayers, even though I could not utter them out now as the chaplain recited them in the rising storm. I wept as never before in my life.

  A few sailing men and gunners attended the service, and Captain Foxcroft and the admiral were present, but I understood the pious brevity of the prayers, and the continued activity as men worked the ship. Shipboard death was mourned simply, and was far more common than I had imagined.

  As the chaplain closed his prayer book, and the last eddy of foam coiled over my master’s remains, someone touched my shoulder.

  Chapter 23

  I was grieved beyond tears by then, and welcomed contact from my shipmates, but this man’s physical appearance stilled my tongue.

  I had glimpsed his bright plume among the crew, but I had not seen him face-to-face before this, and never with his expensive cap removed. This gentleman’s head was bald, and he sported flowing mustachios, but what disturbed me about his appearance was the tint of his skin. He embarrassed me by uttering some patch of Italian—Petrarch, I suspected—and he apologized at once in gentlemanly English when I could not respond in kind.

  “I show off my learning the way a bawd shows off her dimples,” said this tall man in a civil manner. He gave me a hand to help me stay upright—we were both swayed one way and another by the spirited seas. “I am Robert Garr, and I used to take a cup of wine or two with Titus Cox. That worthy doctor used to mention your master as a great friend.”

  “You would have found my master the best man under Heaven,” I said, and then I had to silence myself, close to tears again.

  Sir Robert gave a sympathetic sigh.

  I realized that it was not simply the ashy light of the dying day that gave a strange tint to his features—Sir Robert had in truth a striking and unusual coloration. His skin, his lips, and the moons of his fingernails, were all the same off-hue. This well-known knight and poet was blue.

  He was not bright blue, but the dusty cloud-blue of a fresh bruise. It was a medical symptom I knew from William’s consultations with a few unfortunate scholars in London. Sir Robert’s condition was the result of quicksilver poisoning.

  The mercury that learned men used in their studies seeped into their flesh over months and years. In unlucky instances, it turned them this unholy tint, and in some star-crossed cases it even drove them mad. Many philosophers dabbled in alchemy, believing that base metals could be turned to gold by using quicksilver and other rare elements. Sir Robert’s condition was striking, but one shared by other seekers.

  “Captain Foxcroft whispered a word in my ear,” said Sir Robert. “Something about taking you under my wing, if you seemed in need of my help.”

  I bridled inwardly. The admiral had chosen me to be one of the ship’s officers, and I was determined to live up to Drake’s faith in me.

  “Not that I suspect you’ll need any special advice, good Thomas,” said Sir Robert with polite haste.

  “We are lucky to have such a spirited shipmate,” I offered, liking him despite my stung pride. “You are a well-famed playwright and poet, as I hear.”

  Gentlemen scholars were often carried on a ship, and were expected to work the vessel and to fight, when the occasion rose. Such men of letters helped fund the voyage with fat donations, and with any luck would survive to write a glorious history of the vessel.

  He gave a quiet chuckle. “The truth is, I wrote my heroic poem ‘The Liver in Her Glory’ when I was but twenty years of age, and I am much fallen from my former knowledge.”

  “I regret I did not attend a performance of your play,” I heard myself say smoothly, like any gentleman in a London wine-shop. I appreciated Sir Robert’s honesty, and relished a chance to talk with such a learned man. In my sadness, I remembered to con
verse as my master had taught me, trying to be both kind and truthful. “I’ve heard little but praise for it,” I said. It was nearly true.

  “Oh, I can’t pen a good line of ten-syllable verse to save my life,” he said. “The play was all speeches and sallies. Sword fights, you know, actors running on and off stage in red stockings.”

  “I do wish I’d seen it,” I said, sincerely.

  “Look, Captain Foxcroft is watching us.”

  The ship’s master was indeed looking on, his arms folded as he stood in a corner of the quarterdeck. The strong wind stirred his mantle.

  “Let us pretend that I shall act as your advisor,” said Sir Robert in a gentle tone, “just to deceive our worthy captain.”

  Perhaps I hesitated, because Sir Robert added with a smile, “Good Thomas, I shall do nothing to offend you. I am dying from the elements I have brewed and bubbled in my study, as you see. I hope to be killed after I’ve sent a hundred enemy to the Devil.”

  Chapter 24

  “Do not set a cup down, sir,” Hercules instructed me patiently, “unless you have finished drinking from it.”

  I would forget, and my cider would spill, knocked over by the plunging of the ship. In weather so heavy we ate in our own quarters, stock-fish—mummified cod—and ship’s bread of rye and wheat, along with apples and pears, and all the beer or cider we could pour into our bellies.

  Every knife seemed alive, and nothing remained where I had put it down. Jars lost their pewter lids, and flasks tossed on their shelf.

  “Have you been to sea before, Hercules?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes, sir, on the Mountjoy, which sank.”

  “She was shipwrecked?”

  “She was a much used wine-ship and rotten, and off Ostend she went down.”

  This was a great tale to be offered in one breath, but it certainly increased my respect for Hercules.

  “You will tell me next,” I said, “that you sank to the bottom and drowned, except some hero saved you.”

  “No, sir,” he said in a matter-of-fact sing-song, “a ship’s boat took us off and we were preserved, except for those who died.”

  “Are many children taken to sea?”

  “Sir, the Admiralty pays our parents and we learn the trade of seamen.”

  I was shaken by the sudden death that awaited every mortal on a warship, and wondered that children should be so exposed to danger.

  “Besides,” Hercules was saying, “being small we fit the crowded ship life, if it please you.”

  I asked how old he was. Hercules confided that he had seen eleven winters—I had reckoned him very much younger.

  “And now that I am a surgeon’s boy,” he continued, “some day I’ll grow to be surgeon’s mate, and, if it please the Admiralty, some day I may set splints and drink my wine spiced, just like a gentleman surgeon.” He caught himself, and put a hand out to a chafing dish that was dancing its way across our tabletop.

  “Unless I’m wrong, sir,” he added questioningly, “to dream of such things?”

  Our ship crashed into seas over the coming days, the admiral commanding the captain to crowd on canvas, and the mariner who was manning the whipstaff—the device that worked the vessel’s rudder—was often thrown off his feet by the force of the waves.

  Even as I mourned my master, a succession of drenched and shivering seamen limped into the surgeon’s cabin presenting dislocated shoulders, hobbling sprains, and black eyes where tackle had broken loose and smashed into the men trying to secure it. The cook himself, a stout man with tufted eyebrows, presented a broken thumb. The stubborn stock pot had once again leaped from the sputtering fire—“cold soup all over my knave of a galley-mate.” I set a splint, and was entirely sincere in wishing him the speediest recovery.

  Our first shipboard patient, Davy, his hand bandaged, often accompanied the injured with praise and reassurance, recounting how his finger had dropped into the waiting bowl with “a merry note, like a little chiming bell.” He showed the mangled digit to his friends, suspended in a green-glass jug of spirits of wine—my master had long emphasized the keeping of specimens.

  Days passed, wet and cold, with no sign of our fleet.

  Jack Flagg confided to me that under any other officers the crew might have been apprehensive, but under Admiral Drake, “We would sail singing ‘hey-ho’ into the teeth of Hell.”

  Later I would wonder if my friend had some gift as a prophet.

  Chapter 25

  Late on the afternoon of our tenth day out, a cry came down from our top castle, the viewing platform high on the mainmast.

  “A sail, dead ahead!”

  I made my way to the main deck and joined soldiers and seamen in gazing out over an ocean alive with white caps and wind-foam, clouds parting and showing feeble blue for the first time in several days. As before, there was no sign of our fleet to our stern. The ships had been scattered by days of hard weather; although Jack had confided that the Golden Lion had been seen “hull up on the horizon, when the rain parted and the wind took a breath.”

  Now a sail tossed on the gray seas ahead of us as men tried to guess her nationality and cargo. She was a good-sized ship, Jack murmured, and the admiral paced the quarterdeck, rubbing his hands together.

  All the rest of that day our ship gave chase to this mysterious set of sails. The weather was heavy, and while it filled our canvas and drew us ever nearer to this unknown ship, the stranger made every show of not wanting to be caught.

  Intercepting a privateer—a ship licensed to intercept merchant shipping—would win us her stolen cargo. Even better, the chance capture of a Spanish galleon, blown off course by this bad weather, would earn us all a share in gold from the New World.

  A chase at sea, however, is nothing like a foot race, all over in the space of a few heartbeats. Hours would pass, and the fugitive ship would be only a slightly more vivid ghost on the sea far ahead, like a drawing an invisible artist was limning in, sail by sail, mast by mast. Even by the following dawn the vessel was merely a pretty phantom, still far out of range of even our most powerful guns.

  But our soldiers took their morning beer-and-biscuit with a determined air, and as the weather grew more calm the pikes were handed around, and sword belts were shaken out and buckled on. Some of the pikemen powdered their hands with resin from a bucket, the sticky, chalky stuff whitening their fingers.

  It took a long time even now to work our vessel into range, and a sleepy unreality had by then turned the chase into a story-tapestry unwound so slowly and so haltingly that the tale would never reach its end.

  And then, by late morning, it began to end after all.

  The strange ship was very much closer now, as we approached her from off her starboard quarter, rapidly closing the gap. The invisible artist had sketched in rigging and yard arms, tackles and the fine woodwork decorating her stern. A thread of smoke drifted from her hull, rising up around her in the wind.

  “She’s English,” Sir Robert offered in a matter-of-fact tone. “And a merchantman—by my guess a wine-ship.”

  I asked the knight how he could be sure of her nationality. He explained. “Her sails are unpainted. The Spanish love crosses and lions on their canvas. And look at the prow, how simple it is, not like a galleon’s great painted beakhead, sticking out over the front of the ship.”

  We shortened the distance even more, the merchantman not able to continue to sail with anything like our speed. “She’s English without doubt,” said the knight, “and she’s been in a fight—look at the loose rigging where some attacker has cut it, and the powder burns around her gun-ports.”

  Our own guns were being primed, and Jack bent over the breech of a long, golden-bronze piece on the maindeck, giving the weapon an affectionate pat. Our larger guns, on the gun deck below, had been forged with decorations, lion faces and roiling dragons, and gunners had worked hard to keep this bestiary gleaming.

  To my surprise our ship flags and pennons, including Drake’s personal i
nsignia, had been hauled down, and replaced by Flemish colors.

  “Master surgeon,” came the call, the admiral’s voice. In my distraction, and unfamiliarity with my new duties, I did not respond at once, not until the captain had joined in, barking my name.

  “Be ready to board the ship, as soon as she’s our prisoner,” said the admiral with purposeful smile when I had hastened to his side. “I know this vessel, the Barbara Grace, a cargo ship out of Southampton. She’s run across pirates, by the look of her.”

  “We’ll nose gunpowder soon,” said Captain Foxcroft. “Some fool is double-cracking the merchantman’s stern gun.” Ramming a double charge of powder into the rear cannon, he meant, and Admiral Drake gave a laugh.

  “This,” said the admiral, “will be greater sport than I’d hoped.”

  A tiny human figure at the stern of the merchant ship crouched low over the stern gun with its bronze-green barrel. The report of the cannon followed by several heartbeats the flash of smoke and the sight of a shot skipping fast across the water. It crossed the sea before our bow. A few other men, tiny insects at this distance, opened gunports and ran out the round mouths of cannon.

  The Barbara Grace vanished in the sudden burst of gun smoke, and shot screamed overhead.

  Chapter 26

  “Open the gunports, Captain Foxcroft,” said Admiral Drake, quietly, like a man requesting another pitcher of cider.

  Perhaps the captain hesitated for one moment. But then he strode, smartly enough, to the quarterdeck rail and sang out the orders.

  Archery screens were arrayed now over the sides of our ship, and wood and linen screens were set up around the guns. Even more screens were being put into place between the cannon on the gun deck, when I took a glance below. Called fightings, these shelters would protect the guns from sparks thrown off by adjoining weapons.

  I evidently could not disguise the alarm I was feeling, because the admiral took one measuring look at me and laughed. “Wear a smile, Tom. This is the lively conclusion to a merry chase.”