Sea Change (35 page)

"Charlotte, are you making this up?" he asked suspiciously, but there was a faint smile on his lips.

"No, Uncle, this is truly how the story goes. Atalanta knew she couldn't be happy as a human girl married to a human man. She was very fleet of foot from her years living as a bear, and proclaimed that she would only marry a man who could beat her in a foot-race. Many tried, none succeeded, but one, named Melanion, prayed to Aphrodite for help. Aphrodite heard his prayers. When Melanion raced against Atalanta, he had three golden apples. When Atalanta would pull away from him, for she was the faster runner, he would throw out a golden apple. Atalanta was distracted by the shiny object and stopped to pick it up. Melanion did this two more times, and deceitfully beat Atalanta and won her as his wife."

"I do not suppose the moral of this story is true love wins over all?"

Charley smiled sadly.

"No, Uncle, true love doesn't win in my version. However, I am like Atalanta in that I have been distracted from my goal by bright, shiny things." She stroked the rich satin of her silver gown, then raised her head and looked at him in the lamplight.

"I am sorry, Uncle Curtis. I have tried, really I have, but I feel like I am losing myself and losing my mind."

She knelt next to his chair, looking up into the lined face that was now so dear to her.

"I came to live with you, Uncle, because you are such a fine physician as well as a fine man. My father always said so and I know he was right. I thought if I was here, you would teach me as he taught me. But when you look at me, you don't see me, you see my mother," she said softly. "Who, I'm told, loved to go to dances and parties and wear pretty frocks."

"And you are your father's daughter, is that what you have been trying to tell me?"

"Yes, Uncle," she said with a sigh. "I have spent my youth being useful and practicing medicine with my father, and then again as a doctor at sea, not going to parties and picnics. There's nothing wrong with an occasional outing, and I adore my new clothes, but I miss helping people. I hate feeling useless when I could be useful."

She looked up at him earnestly.

"Try to imagine what it would be like for you, Uncle, if tomorrow you were told you could never do another examination, stitch another wound, heal another ill person."

"I cannot imagine that," he said. "But I cannot change what is, Charlotte. You are a woman, and I am not."

Charley's spirits fell as flat as her dancing slippers.

"However," Dr. Wilson continue, "I do not want to see you unhappy."

Charley looked up.

"It goes against everything I believe is proper for a young lady, but I suppose you can help me in the delivery of babies, and treating women's diseases. And you can work in the stillroom preparing medications, for that would be part of your education if you were my male apprentice."

He awkwardly patted the curls atop her head.

"Do not look so forlorn. I am no radical, and this is a huge step for me to take. Perhaps, with time, there will be more we can do...Charley."

Charley rose to her feet and went to refill their glasses.

"It will help. If I am busy, then I do not think so much about my time aboard the
Fancy.
"

"Is this also about the man you met while you were at sea?"

She spun around on her heel.

"I am an excellent diagnostician, Charlotte, and I know the signs and symptoms of a broken heart. Too well."

Dr. Wilson was standing now. He walked over to his desk and opened it, pulling out a miniature, and motioned to Charley. Charley took it from his hands and angled it to see it in the lamplight. The girl in the picture was dressed in the fashions of twenty years earlier, and had a sweet smile and brown ringlets.

"Miss Johnson and I were to be married. I met her here in Jamaica when I came to establish myself. Her parents hoped she would marry someone of more status who would take her back to England, but they gave us their blessing." He gazed at the miniature Charley held. "Clara succumbed to yellow fever before we could be wed."

He took the picture from Charley's hand, sighed, then put it away.

"I know the look of someone who has loved, and lost the one they loved, Charlotte."

Charley nodded. "I lost my heart to an American privateer, Uncle. He is gone now, but he took my heart with him when he died."

She took a deep breath. "Working keeps my mind occupied so that I am not thinking about what happened. Or what might have been."

"A broken heart may ease over time, Charlotte."

She said nothing to this, so he patted her on the arm. "I am off to bed then. In the morning we will discuss your schedule. Goodnight, my dear."

"Goodnight, Uncle Curtis."

The course of study Dr. Wilson set out for Charley on the healing plants of Jamaica kept her busy through the sunny days of winter, and into spring and summer, the change in seasons barely noticeable. She was assisted in her lessons by Mrs. Mansfield. The housekeeper came from a long line of healing women and was happy to share her knowledge, especially since she had no daughter of her own to pass the information on to.

"There's wisdom, and then there's women's wisdom, Miss Charlotte. Men don't concern themselves with women's health unless it affects them. They don't think about what a woman needs, or how her courses come in and out like the moon. They just think about her courses as something that inconveniences them, and how soon they can get back into bed with her after she births their sons. You will learn from me what women share.

"Some of this is information Dr. Wilson doesn't need to hear about," Mrs. Mansfield said with a steady look at Charley. "For example, how if a woman's courses are late, she can take calabash to get regular again."

"I understand," Charley said. "Women seem to be so woefully ignorant of how their bodies work."

"White women, maybe." Mrs. Mansfield sniffed. "Or rich women. Poor women learn, soon enough. They cannot afford not to know."

They had these discussions when Dr. Wilson was not around, lest they be subjected to his opinion on "native nonsense and superstitious trash," but Charley enjoyed chatting with the middle-aged housekeeper as they sat in Mrs. Mansfield's cozy parlor or worked in the stillroom. Charley learned Mrs. Mansfield had been with Dr. Wilson nearly since he arrived in Jamaica, and if Charley wondered if there was anything more between her godfather and the stoutly handsome widow, she also figured it was none of her affair. But the housekeeper's knowledge of the plants around them was invaluable, and Charley took copious notes and drawings.

Jamaica was a regular pharmacopeia surrounded by the ocean. The guaiac tree so common to the island yielded not just the valued lignum vitae wood, but also guaiacum for the treatment of syphilis. The "fresh cut" plant's bruised leaves were a plaster for lacerations, and red lily was good for skin sores. When called to the side of a birthing woman, Charley would fix "Juba's Bush" tea with a few drops of whisky to ease the labor.

Some of the women were uncomfortable at the idea of a young woman assisting Dr. Wilson, but most of them were easy enough to deal with, though they did not seem sure how to address her. Was she a servant like a midwife? Dr. Wilson's niece, and therefore a young lady?

One or two ladies made it clear that they did not want anyone but their trusted physician to assist them during their lying-in, and Charley tried to take it with good grace.

But it was hard. It was especially hard after months of being "Dr. Alcott," the final word in the health and welfare of a hardened crew of privateers. Did these pampered women with their homes full of slaves and servants to wait on them hand and foot think they were better than the men of the
Fancy
?

Charley had to bite her tongue more than once, but it paid off in those cases where she could establish a good relationship, and the reward was helping someone deliver a healthy boy or girl.

Somewhat to her surprise after the Erskine ball, Charley still was active in society, and was approached by men at dances and suppers to partner them. They were all quite pleasant, some of them were quite handsome.

None of them, however, were Black Davy Fletcher.

Her months at sea seemed now almost a dream, a time where she had been transformed into something different from what she had been, but also a time that transformed her into the person she was now. More confident about herself and her abilities, more comfortable as a woman.

And she was a woman who having had the heights of rapture was not willing to settle for less.

While her days were full now, taken up with her work with Dr. Wilson, she was still unsatisfied with her life. She had never wanted to be a midwife or an apothecary, but that seemed to be her fate in Jamaica.

That was why she was thrilled one July morning when James, the younger houseboy, tracked her down to the patio garden where she sat in the shade writing notes on native plants. Pirate kept her company, sunning himself on the flagstones, lazily blinking at a doctor bird hovering over a hibiscus.

"Miss? There's a gentleman here, says he needs to see the doctor."

"You told him Dr. Wilson isn't in?"

"Yes'm, but he says it won't wait."

"Take him to Dr. Wilson's examining room, James."

Charley's heart beat just a little faster as she smoothed down the lavender-striped muslin of her skirt. Maybe he needed to be sewn, or have a bone set, or would present an interesting disease! She could dazzle her mentor at dinner with tales of how she'd dealt with the emergency, efficiently and competently, and Dr. Wilson would give her more responsibility.

Charley hurried into the examining room where a man stood with most of his face turned toward the window. But she knew in an instant who it was. She must have made some noise, for he turned his head. The sunlight coming into the room seemed too bright, and Charley heard a buzzing in her head that wasn't from the insects in the garden. She put her hand on the wall to steady herself and wondered with detachment if fainting was the normal response to seeing a dead man standing before you.

"Charley? Is that you?"

David Fletcher looked as startled by her as she was by him, for different reasons. He stared at her, and she stood there, rooted to the floor.

"But...you are dead! I saw the explosion!"

"It was a near thing, Charley," David Fletcher said, turning fully toward her. For all of her experience Charley couldn't stop the gasp as her hand rose up to cover her mouth.

She slowly walked over to him, and said, "Step into the light."

He did, and the bright tropical sunlight pitilessly revealed the extent of the damage. His left eye was covered by a black patch, and a deep scar twisted along his cheek up past his forehead into his hairline, where a swath of white stood out in the black hair around it.

"Take off the patch."

He slowly reached up, watching her with his good eye, and undid the patch. The socket was empty, the burned flesh around it pitted and scarred.

"After I was blown off the
Fancy
I managed to cling to a hatch. A full day I drifted, but then I had the good fortune to be picked up by a whaler returning to Nantucket. I made it home to Baltimore. The doctor there did what he could for me, but it was too late." He looked down at the ground, then back at her, and took a deep breath. "I suppose I should have written to you, especially with the war over. But I was not sure you would want me, Charley, since I no longer had a ship."

He swallowed, his brown throat moving, and she pressed her fingers harder against her mouth to keep from touching him.

"I was not sure you would want me, now that I can no longer be called 'Handsome Davy.' Look at you, Charley Alcott! You are so beautiful and I am--" He didn't finish, his voice trailing off.

Charley stepped closer to him and he seemed about to take a step back, then stopped, his hands loose at his sides.

"Mmmm," she said, putting her hand on his chin and turning his face so that she saw the undamaged right side, the clean lines a parody of what had been before. The skin she remembered so well was warm beneath her fingers, pulsing with life and vitality.

"Is there any residual pain, Captain?"

"Not to complain of," he said. "I sometimes get headaches."

"Are you having one now?"

"No."

"And what about here, on the undamaged side. Any pain at all?"

"No."

"You are certain?"

"There is no pain in my head."

"Good," she said, and hauling back her arm, slapped him for all she was worth--on his undamaged side.

"Ow! What the hell was that for?"

She was pleased to note that while she may hit like a girl, she'd hit him hard enough to rock him back on his feet.

"You think all I care about is your
face
?" she hissed at him. She shook her hand to make sure she hadn't broken it. "Honestly, I have never been so angry in my entire life! You show up after all this time worried about how you
look
? You know very well that eye patch only makes you look more dashing, you pirate! And who cares about your ship? It is you I wanted! Oh, go away! You are a prize idiot and I am an even bigger idiot for falling in love with you!"

She turned to stomp back into the house but he stopped rubbing his reddening face and grabbed her arm, ruining her dignified exit. He compounded the transgression by swinging her about, and kissing her within an inch of her life.

While one part of her was pleased to note that he hadn't lost an iota of function or skill with his mouth due to his injury, another part of her was encouraging her to forget everything else and leap into his arms.

But she was made of stronger stuff than that, and eventually broke away from him with a sigh.

"Oh, Charley my darling, I have missed you so much! And I am very glad I never taught you to box! Damn, now I really do need a doctor." He moved his jaw, somewhat tentatively, then he smiled, that beautiful dimpled smile that led her to many evenings in his bunk. "I'm glad I am more to you than a pretty face. I truly was worried that my ugly phiz would scare you away."