An Echo in the Bone, Page 43

  search, taking off legal goods what he says are contraband—and we take leave to doubt that any of it ever sees the inside of a Customs warehouse!” he added, obviously quoting something he’d heard more than once. “But it was what happened with the Annabelle, really.”

  The Annabelle was a large ketch, owned by Captain Hickman’s brother. The Pitt had stopped her and attempted to press men from her crew. Theo Hickman had protested, resistance had broken out, and Stebbings had ordered his men to fire into the Annabelle, killing three crewmen—Theo Hickman among them.

  There had been considerable public outcry over this, and an effort was made to bring Captain Stebbings to justice for his deeds. The captain had insisted that no local court had the right to try him for anything, though; if anyone wished to bring an action against him, it must be done in an English court. And the local justices had agreed with this.

  “Was this before war was declared last year?” I asked curiously. “For if after—”

  “Well before,” young Zenn admitted. “Still,” he added with righteous indignation, “they are cowardly dogs and ought be tarred and feathered, the lot of them, and Stebbings, too!”

  “No doubt,” I said. “Do you think—”

  But I had no opportunity to explore his opinions further, for at this point the ship gave a violent lurch, throwing us both onto the damp floorboards, and the sound of a violent and prolonged explosion shattered the air around us.

  I couldn’t at first tell which ship had fired—but an instant later, the Asp’s guns spoke overhead, and I knew the first broadside had been from the Teal.

  The Asp’s reply was ragged, the guns along her starboard side going off at more or less random intervals overhead, punctuated by the flat bangs of small-arms fire.

  I resisted Abram’s gallant attempts to throw his meager body protectively on top of mine and, rolling over, got up onto my hands and knees, listening intently. There was a lot of shouting, none of it comprehensible, though the shooting had stopped. We appeared not to be leaking water, so far as I could tell, so presumably we had not been struck below the waterline.

  “They can’t have given up, surely?” Abram said, scrambling to his feet. He sounded disappointed.

  “I doubt it.” I got to my own feet, bracing a hand against a large barrel. The main hold was quite as crowded as the forward one, though with bulkier items; there was barely room for Abram and me to worm our way between the netted bulk of crates and tiers of casks—some of which smelled strongly of beer. The ship was heeling to one side now. We must be coming about—probably to try again. The wheels of the gun carriages ground on the deck above; yes, they were reloading. Had anyone yet been hurt? I wondered. And what the devil was I going to do about it if they had?

  The sound of a single cannon-shot came from overhead.

  “The dog must be fleeing,” Abram whispered. “We’re chasing him down.”

  There was a long period of relative silence, during which I thought the ship was tacking but couldn’t really tell. Maybe Hickman was pursuing the Teal.

  Sudden yelling from overhead, with a sound of surprised alarm, and the ship heaved violently, flinging us to the floor once again. This time I landed on top. I delicately removed my knee from Abram’s stomach and helped him to sit up, gasping like a landed fish.

  “What—” he wheezed, but got no further. There was a hideous jolt that knocked us both flat again, followed at once by a grinding, rending noise of squealing timbers. It sounded as though the ship was coming apart around us, and I had no doubt that it was.

  Shrieking like banshees and the thunder of feet on deck.

  “We’re being boarded!” I could hear Abram swallow, and my hand went to the slit in my petticoat, touching my knife for courage. If—

  “No,” I whispered, straining my eyes up into darkness as though that would help me hear better. “No. We’re boarding them.” For the pounding feet above had vanished.

  THE YELLING HADN’T; EVEN muffled by distance, I could hear the note of insanity in it, the clear joy of the berserker. I thought I could make out Jamie’s Highland screech, but that was likely imagination; they all sounded equally demented.

  “Our Father, who art in heaven … Our Father, who art in heaven …” Abram was whispering to himself in the dark, but had stuck on the first line.

  I clenched my fists and closed my eyes in reflex, screwing up my face as though by sheer force of will I could help.

  Neither of us could.

  It was an age of muffled noises, occasional shots, thuds and bangs, grunting and shouting. And then silence.

  I could just see Abram’s head turn toward me, questioning. I squeezed his hand.

  And then a ship’s gun went off with a crash that echoed across the deck above, and a shock wave thrummed through the air of the hold, hard enough that my ears popped. Another followed, I felt rather than heard a thunk, and then the floor heaved and tilted, and the ship’s timbers reverberated with an odd, deep bwong. I shook my head hard, swallowing, trying to force air through my Eustachian tubes. They popped again, finally, and I heard feet on the side of the ship. More than one pair. Moving slowly.

  I leapt to my feet, grabbed Abram, and hauled him bodily up, propelling him toward the ladder. I could hear water. Not racing along the ship’s sides; a gushing noise, as of water gurgling into the hold.

  The hatchway had been closed overhead but not battened down, and I knocked it loose with a desperate bang of both hands, nearly losing my balance and plunging into darkness but luckily sustained by Abram Zenn, who planted a small but solid shoulder under my buttocks by way of support.

  “Thank you, Mr. Zenn,” I said, and, reaching behind me, pulled him up the ladder into the light.

  There was blood on the deck; that was the first thing I saw. Wounded men, too—but not Jamie. He was the second thing I saw, leaning heavily over the remains of a shattered rail with several other men. I hurried to see what they were looking at, and saw the Teal a few hundred yards away.

  Her sails were fluttering wildly, and her masts seemed oddly tilted. Then I realized that the ship herself was tilted, the bow raised half out of the water.

  “Rot me,” said Abram, in tones of amazement. “She’s run onto rocks.”

  “So have we, son, but not so bad,” said Hickman, glancing aside at the cabin boy’s voice. “Is there water in the hold, Abram?”

  “There is,” I replied before Abram, lost in contemplation of the wounded Teal, could gather his wits to answer. “Have you any medical instruments aboard, Captain Hickman?”

  “Have I what?” he blinked at me, distracted. “This is no time for—why?”

  “I’m a surgeon, sir,” I said, “and you need me.”

  WITHIN A QUARTER HOUR, I found myself back in the small forward cargo hold where I had roused from my fainting spell a few hours earlier, this being now designated as the sick bay.

  The Asp did not travel with a surgeon, but had a small store of medicinals: a half-full bottle of laudanum, a fleam and bleeding bowl, a large pair of tweezers, a jar of dead and desiccated leeches, two rusty amputation saws, a broken tenaculum, a bag of lint for packing wounds, and a huge jar of camphorated grease.

  I was strongly tempted to drink the laudanum myself, but duty called. I tied back my hair and began poking about among the cargo, in search of anything useful. Mr. Smith and Ian had rowed across to the Teal in hopes of retrieving my own kit, but given the amount of damage I could see in the area where our cabin had been, I didn’t have much hope. A lucky shot from the Asp had holed the Teal below the waterline; had she not run aground, she would likely have sunk sooner or later.

  I’d done a rapid triage on deck; one man killed outright, several minor injuries, three serious but not instantly life-threatening. There were likely more on the Teal; from what the men said, the ships had exchanged broadsides at a distance of no more than a few yards. A quick and bloody little action.

  A few minutes after the conclusion, the Pitt
had limped into sight, her contentiously mixed crew having evidently come to a sufficient accommodation as to allow her to sail, and she was now occupied in ferrying the wounded. I heard the faint shout of her bosun’s hail over the whine of the wind above.

  “Incoming,” I murmured, and, picking up the smaller of the amputation saws, prepared for my own quick and bloody action.

  “YOU HAVE GUNS,” I pointed out to Abram Zenn, who was rigging a couple of hanging lanterns for me, the sun having now almost set. “Presumably this means that Captain Hickman was prepared to use them. Didn’t he think there might be a possibility of casualties?”

  Abram shrugged apologetically.

  “It’s our first voyage as a letter of marque, ma’am. We’ll do better next time, I’m sure.”

  “Your first? What sort of—how long has Captain Hickman been sailing?” I demanded. I was ruthlessly rummaging the cargo by now, and was pleased to find a chest that held lengths of printed calico.

  Abram frowned at the wick he was trimming, thinking.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “he had a fishing boat for some time, out of Marblehead. Him—he, I mean—and his brother owned it together. But after his brother ran afoul of Captain Stebbings, he went to work for Emmanuel Bailey, as first mate on one of his—Mr. Bailey’s, I mean—ships. Mr. Bailey’s a Jew,” he explained, seeing my raised eyebrow. “Owns a bank in Philadelphia and three ships as sail regularly to the West Indies. He owns this ship, too, and it’s him who got the letter of marque from the Congress for Captain Hickman, when the war was announced.”

  “I see,” I said, more than slightly taken aback. “But this is Captain Hickman’s first cruise as captain of a sloop?”

  “Yes, ma’am. But privateers don’t usually have a supercargo, do you see,” he said earnestly. “It would be the supercargo’s job to provision the ship and see to such things as the medical supplies.”

  “And you know this because—how long have you been sailing?” I asked curiously, liberating a bottle of what looked like very expensive brandy, to use as antiseptic.

  “Oh, since I was eight years old, ma’am,” he said. He stood a-tiptoe to hang the lantern, which cast a warm, reassuring glow over my impromptu operating theater. “I’ve six elder brothers, and the oldest runs the farm, with his sons. The others… well, one’s a shipwright in Newport News, and he got to talking with a captain one day and mentioned me, and next thing I know, I’m one of the cabin boys on the Antioch, her being an Indiaman. I went back with the captain to London, and we sailed to Calcutta the very day after.” He came down onto his heels and smiled at me. “I’ve been a-sea ever since, ma’am. I find it suits me.”

  “That’s very good,” I said. “Your parents—are they still alive?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. My mother died birthing me, and my pa when I was seven.” He seemed untroubled by this. But after all, I reflected, ripping calico into bandage lengths, that was half his lifetime ago.

  “Well, I hope the sea will continue to suit you,” I said. “Do you have any doubts, though—after today?”

  He thought about that, his earnest young face furrowed in the lantern shadows.

  “No,” he said slowly, and looked up at me, his eyes serious—and not nearly so young as they had been a few hours ago. “I knew when I signed on with Captain Hickman that there might be fighting.” His lips tightened, perhaps to keep them from quivering. “I don’t mind killing a man, if I have to.”

  “Not now… you don’t,” said one of the wounded men, very softly. He was lying in the shadows, stretched across two crates of English china, breathing slowly.

  “No, not now, you don’t,” I agreed dryly. “You might want to speak to my nephew or my husband about it, though, when things have settled a bit.”

  I thought that would be the end of it, but Abram followed me as I laid out my rudimentary tools and set about such sterilization as could be managed, splashing out brandy with abandon, ’til the hold smelled like a distillery—this to the scandalization of the wounded men, who thought it waste to use good drink so. The galley fire had been put out during the battle, though; it would be some time before I had hot water.

  “Are you a patriot, ma’am? If you don’t mind me asking,” he added, blushing with awkwardness.

  The question took me back a bit. The straightforward answer would be “Yes, of course.” Jamie was, after all, a rebel, so declared by his own hand. And while he had made the original declaration out of simple necessity, I thought necessity had now become conviction. But me? Certainly I had been, once.

  “Yes,” I said—I couldn’t very well say anything else. “Plainly you are, Abram. Why?”

  “Why?” He seemed staggered that I would ask, and stood blinking at me over the top of the lantern he held.

  “Tell me later,” I suggested, taking the lantern. I’d done what I could on deck; the wounded who needed further attention were being brought down. It was no time for political discussion. Or so I thought.

  Abram bravely settled down to help me and did fairly well, though he had to stop now and then to vomit into a bucket. After the second occurrence of this, he took to asking questions of the wounded—those in any condition to answer. I didn’t know whether this was simple curiosity or an attempt to distract himself from what I was doing.

  “What do you think of the Revolution, sir?” he earnestly asked one grizzled seaman from the Pitt with a crushed foot. The man gave him a distinctly jaundiced look but replied, probably in order to distract himself.

  “Bloody waste of time,” he said gruffly, digging his fingers into the edge of the chest he sat on. “Better to be fighting the frogs than Englishmen. What’s to be gained by it? Dear Lord,” he said under his breath, going pale.

  “Give him something to bite on, Abram, will you?” I said, busy picking shattered bits of bone out of the wreckage and wondering whether he might do better with a swift amputation. Perhaps less risk of infection, and he would always walk with a painful limp in any case, but still, I hated to …

  “No, that’s all right, mum,” he said, sucking in a breath. “What do you think of it, then, youngster?”

  “I think it is right and necessary, sir,” Abram replied stoutly. “The King is a tyrant, and tyranny must be resisted by all proper men.”

  “What?” said the seaman, shocked. “The King, a tyrant? Who says such a naughty thing?”

  “Why… Mr. Jefferson. And—and all of us! We all think so,” Abram said, taken aback at such vehement disagreement.

  “Well, then, you’re all a pack of bleedin’ fools—saving your presence, mum,” he added, with a nod to me. He got a look at his foot and swayed a bit, closing his eyes, but asked, “You don’t think such a silly thing, do you, mum? You ought to talk sense into your boy here.”

  “Talk sense?” cried Abram, roused. “You think it sense that we may not speak or write as we wish?”

  The seaman opened one eye.

  “Of course that’s sense,” he said, with an evident attempt to be reasonable. “You get silly buggers—your pardon, mum—a-saying all kinds of things regardless, stirrin’ folk up to no good end, and what’s it lead to? Riot, that’s what, and what you may call disorderliness, with folk having their houses burnt and being knocked down in the street. Ever hear of the Cutter riots, boy?”

  Abram rather obviously had not, but countered with a vigorous denunciation of the Intolerable Acts, which caused Mr. Ormiston—we had got onto personal terms by now—to scoff loudly and recount the privations Londoners endured by comparison with the luxury enjoyed by the ungrateful colonists.

  “Ungrateful!” Abram said, his face congested. “And what should we be grateful for, then? For having soldiers foisted upon us?”

  “Oh, foisted, is it?” cried Mr. Ormiston in righteous indignation. “Such a word! And if it means what I think it does, young man, you should get down on your knees and thank God for such foistingness! Who do you think saved you all from being scalped by red Indians or overrun
by the French? And who do you think paid for it all, eh?”

  This shrewd riposte drew cheers—and not a few jeers—from the waiting men, who had all been drawn into the discussion by now.

  “That is absolute … desolute … stultiloquy,” began Abram, puffing up his insignificant chest like a scrawny pigeon, but he was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Smith, a canvas bag in hand and an apologetic look on his face.

  “I’m afraid your cabin was all ahoo, ma’am,” he said. “But I picked up what bits was scattered on the floor, in case they—”

  “Jonah Marsden!” Mr. Ormiston, on the verge of standing up, plumped back onto the chest, openmouthed. “Bless me if it isn’t!”

  “Who?” I asked, startled.

  “Jonah—well, ’tisn’t his real name, what was it… oh, Bill, I think it was, but we took to calling him Jonah, owing to him being sunk so many times.”

  “Now, Joe.” Mr. Smith—or Mr. Marsden—was backing toward the door, smiling nervously. “That was all a long time ago, and—”

  “Not so long as all that.” Mr. Ormiston got ponderously to his feet, balancing with one hand on a stack of herring barrels so as not to put weight on his bandaged foot. “Not so long as would make the navy forget you, you filthy deserter!”

  Mr. Smith disappeared abruptly up the ladder, pushing past two seamen attempting to come down these, handling a third like a side of beef between them. Muttering curses, they dropped him on the deck in front of me with a thud and stood back, gasping. It was Captain Stebbings.

  “ ’e’s not dead,” one of them informed me helpfully.

  “Oh, good,” I said. My tone of voice might have left something to be desired, for the captain opened one eye and glared at me.

  “You’re leaving me… to be butchered… by this bitch?” he said hoarsely, between labored gasps. “I’d ra-rather die honhonorablblbl…” The sentiment gurgled off into a bubbling noise that made me rip open his smoke-stained, blood-soaked second-best coat and shirt. Sure enough, there was a neat round hole in his right breast and the nasty wet slurp of a sucking chest wound coming from it.

  I said a very bad word, and the two men who had brought him to me shuffled and muttered. I said it again, louder, and, seizing Stebbings’s hand, slapped it over the hole.

  “Hold that there, if you want a chance at an honorable death,” I said to him. “You!” I shouted at one of the men trying to edge away. “Bring me some oil from the galley. Now! And you—” My voice caught the other, who jerked guiltily to a halt. “Sailcloth and tar. Fast as you can!”

  “Don’t talk,” I advised Stebbings, who seemed inclined to make remarks. “You have a collapsed lung, and either I get it reinflated or you die like a dog, right here.”

  “Hg,” he said, which I took for assent. His hand was a nice meaty one, and doing a reasonably good job of sealing the hole for the moment. The trouble was that he undoubtedly had not only a hole in his chest but a hole in the lung, too. I had to provide a seal for the external hole so air couldn’t get into the chest and keep the lung compressed, but had also to make sure there was a way for air from the pleural space around the lung to make an exit. As it was, every time he exhaled, air from the injured lung went straight into that space, making the problem worse.

  He might also be drowning in his own blood, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do about that, so I wouldn’t worry about it.

  “On the good side,” I told him, “it was a bullet, and not shrapnel or a splinter. One thing about red-hot iron: it sterilizes the wound. Lift your hand for a moment, please. Breathe out.” I grabbed his hand myself and lifted it for the count of two while he exhaled, then slapped it back over the wound. It made a squelching sound, owing to the blood. It was a lot of blood for a hole like that, but he wasn’t coughing or spitting blood…. Where—oh.

  “Is this blood yours or someone else’s?” I demanded, pointing at it.

  His eyes were half shut, but at this he turned his head and bared his bad teeth at me in a wolf’s grin.

  “Your… husband’s,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

  “Wanker,” I said crossly, lifting his hand again. “Breathe out.” The men had seen me dealing with Stebbings; there were other casualties from the Teal coming or being carried along, but most of them seemed ambulatory. I gave cursory directions to the able-bodied with them, regarding the application of pressure to wounds or the placement of broken limbs so as to avoid further injury.

  It seemed an age before the oil and cloth arrived, and I had sufficient time to wonder where Jamie and Ian were, but the first-aid supplies came at last. I ripped off a patch of sailcloth with my knife, tore a longish strip of calico to use as field dressing, then pushed Stebbings’s hand away, wiped off the blood with a fold of my petticoat, sloshed lamp oil over his chest and the sailcloth patch, then pressed the cloth down to form a rudimentary seal, putting his hand back over it in such a way that one end of the patch remained free, while I wound the improvised field dressing round his torso.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll need to stick the patch down with tar for a better seal, but it will take a little time to warm that. You can go and be doing that now,” I advised the sailor who had brought the oil, who was once again trying to execute a quiet sneak. I scooted round to view the casualties squatting or sprawling on the deck. “Right. Who’s dying?”

  For a wonder, only two of the men brought in from the Teal were dead, one with hideous head wounds from flying splinters and grapeshot, the other exsanguinated as a result of losing half his left leg, probably to a cannonball.

  Might have saved that one, I thought, but the moment’s regret was subsumed in the needs of the next moment.

  Not all that bad, I thought, working my way quickly down the line on my knees, doing a hasty triage and issuing instructions to my unwilling assistants. Splinter wounds, two grazed by musket balls, one with half an ear torn off, one with an embedded ball in the thigh, but nowhere near the femoral artery, thank God…

  Bangings and shufflings were coming from the lower hold, where repairs were being effected. As I worked, I pieced together the actions of the battle from the remarks passed by the wounded men awaiting my attention.

  Following a ragged exchange of broadsides, which had brought down the Teal’s cracked mainmast and holed the Asp above the waterline, the Teal—opinions differed on whether Captain Roberts had done it a-purpose or not—had veered sharply toward the Asp, scraping the side of the ship and bringing the two