Ship of Fire (3 page)

“For only a year or so I worked the whipjack's trade,” said Bruce confidingly.

A whipjack is a beggar with a forged license to seek alms. Licensed beggars are usually old mariners, spent by years of service with the Queen's sailing fleet, jaundiced or scurvy-spent, if not reduced to amputated stumps or blind from cannon sparks. My master had a soft heart for sailors, having signed as ship's surgeon on a vessel bound for the Canaries as a young man, a voyage he now recalled as rich with every manner of adventure. When he drank enough beer he would even tell the tale of how he had once seen a mermaid.

“I had to give up whipjacking,” Bruce was recalling. “It took patience and a sort of acting talent you might see at the Rose Theater, or the Globe, but fell beyond me.”

I pressed the old penny into the nip's palm and he offered a wry smile of thanks in return. “Your master once cured the Lord of the Admiralty himself of a deadly ague,” said Bruce Hollings. “Everyone on both banks of the river knows that a greater and kinder master of physic never lived.”

“He is as you say,” I agreed.

I never wearied of hearing my master praised, but I was concerned in this slowly increasing rain. An apprentice depends on his master for coin, and now that my purse was entirely empty we were two of the poorest men in England. We would have to go into debt simply to take a boat back home across the roaring current of the Thames.

“I lost the contents of my purse just now,” my master was saying, “trusting the fighting skill of that storied Russian bear.”

“Alas, good my lord!” said Bruce. “Not that bear everyone was talking about, for the last week?”

“That very animal,” said my master.

“That Muscovite brute of a bear,” said Bruce, “was starved weak in a cage out behind St. Savior's church.”

“Starved?” my master echoed bleakly.

“I wouldn't have bet a thimble of vinegar on the poor beast,” said Bruce. He showed perhaps more than a glimmer of pleasure in being, in this instance, wiser than a well-known master of medicine.

“Forgive me, Thomas,” said my master giving me a sidelong glance.

“We can't take coin,” said Bruce, “from two such unlucky gentlemen on a damp evening. Peter and Jamie here will see you across the river.”

Peter, or perhaps Jamie, flipped the penny back to me, and I was grateful to see it return. It was all the money we had under Heaven, and would have to last us until a sea master staggered into our chambers with scurvy, or brought in one of his sailors half dead with yellow jack.

My master and I perched in a wherry, a river vessel, rowed by Peter and commanded by Jamie, who had teeth like a horse and a strong voice, calling the traditional river man's
way, make way
, the sing-song cry I had heard often as I drifted to sleep in my bunk.

Twilight lingered. The river was a void slashed with light, tallow-torches along either bank, and lanterns on the looming bridge not far from us downriver, casting streaking reflections on the brown water. The river was crowded with boats, each craft guided by an expert rower and kept well upriver from the troubled water around the London Bridge.

It was clear from the start that we should have come to some agreement with a more proficient wherry-keeper. Peter and Jamie were friendly enough, now, but knew nothing about the river. Peter rowed all out of rhythm, one oar in the current while the other circled in the air.

“You'll see us drowned!” called Jamie from inside his hood.

Our wherry was drifting quickly downriver toward the arches and high, dark stalls of the bridge. The Thames, high with spring rain, was rumbling through the arches of the ancient structure. The white water seethed and tumbled, our boat turning one way and another in the boiling current.

“You told me you were a rowing man!” Jamie was exclaiming.

Peter was too overworked to retort, his yellow teeth exposed in a grimace of effort.

“Take the oars, Tom,” said my master sharply.

Boats during spring floods often circled in a sudden whirlpool and collided with each other, and river men were famous for the vehemence of their curses. It was evident that Peter was far less skilled, or perhaps more drunk, than he had seemed. And the river, which had been rough enough on our way across earlier in the day, had grown more surly.

I stood in the unsteady craft, and at once nearly fell into the water.

Chapter 4

But I knew the nature of rivers.

I had been born in a village in the heart of Dartmoor, among sheep pens and shepherds' songs. When I was a small boy my father had taken me on day-long rambles out to the River Tavy. He had taught me how to pilot a rowboat. Now I steadied our wherry, using the oar as a lever against the mossy groin of the bridge.

I nearly toppled into the Thames as our craft slipped under the bridge, and into the gentle eddies that circulated in the river beyond.

“Well done, Tom,” said my master, putting his hand on my shoulder.

Before my father followed my mother into Heavenly bliss, he penned a letter to the old friend he had known at the long oak tables of the university. As a ten-year-old boy with no more knowledge of the world than a field mouse, I had been carried by a friendly carter as far as the ruined abbey, where the Crown and Vixen shelters guests for a fee. There I met a stranger down from London, wearing a physician's mantle and a city man's sword. I knew him at once from my father's promise,
You'll know he's a good man from the first
.

Now the rain had stopped, and the evening was warm.

Thankful to be alive, for a few moments of quiet we enjoyed the rising darkness on the river. The current was calmer here, the city a haphazard collection of candlelit windows and half-closed shutters, a scattering of cheerful lamps and embers as the smiths and brewers banked their fires, and through wide-flung shutters we could see wealthy folk lighting tapers to see their way up stairwells, their quaking shadows preceding them. The bank was marbled where slaughterhouses poured fat and blood down their gutters, and the heavy current foamed yellow where a brewery gushed dregs.

Ahead of us a great vessel was afloat in the river.

“Row down to the ship,” my master urged, and Peter, so recently frightened, was a reformed boatman now, making timid but effective strokes with both oars. We coursed out to mid-river, and made our way down to the tall ship.

It was unusual to see a fighting ship so far upstream from the boating yards. With four masts and two castles—elevated wooden structures for guns and archers fore and aft—the vessel towered over our river-vessel. The ship's name in gilt letters was hard to make out in the growing dark, but my master knew ships and their masters, having loved them all his life.

“It's the
Golden Lion
,” my master breathed. “Anchored upriver, closer to the finer houses, so gentlefolk can board her.” Lords and ladies supported Queen Elizabeth's hungry efforts to rebuild her forces with occasional, much-needed patronage. Sometimes a man of noble name purchased a berth for an adventurous son—or for himself.

Peter and Jamie were both open-mouthed at the sight of the great cable that angled up from the river, and the helmeted head that looked down over the side of the ship, a soldier, judging from his mail shirt and his gloves. Laughter drifted down from the ship, ladies, no doubt being shown the cannon and the swivel-guns, excited by the sight of so much power afloat. And I was open-mouthed, too.

I had never come so close to a warship.

“God keep you, sergeant,” called my master, who always knew the proper tone of voice and title in addressing a stranger.

“And you, my lord,” said the soldier, gazing down at us. He wore a flowing red mustache, and held a boarding pike, a tall, gleaming weapon, polished so it reflected torch light. London had been alive with rumors. There was trouble on the wide seas. King Philip of Spain had ordered the detaining and harassment of English merchants in his ports, and tavern whispers told of an even more sinister turn of events.

In this year of Our Lord 1587, Spanish ships cowed the known world. They parted every sea, freighting gold from the New World, sometimes harried by a brave English privateer. The proud Spanish had grown impatient with this nuisance. Tavern reports held that the king of Spain was building an Armada, a navy bigger than any ever seen before.

Fear of this war-fleet woke us long before dawn, dread shadowing our steps. Spain was the richest, and best armed, kingdom in the world. Our smaller ships and more meager navy would be as chaff against this storm.

Brew-house rumor further held that the famous sea captain Sir Francis Drake was storing shot and gunpowder, gathering a force in the southern port of Plymouth, preparing a fighting voyage to destroy the Spanish warships before they could sail north.

“Surely the Spanish,” said my master with an air of hopeful bravado, “have no idea what an English sword can do.”

“Spain's a dog needs whipping,” said the soldier. He shifted his pike and gave a quiet laugh. “And a pricking, too.”

As pleasing as these strong words sounded, they did little to dispel my unease at the thought of our small kingdom locked against Spanish might.

We sat there in the current-rocked wherry as gentlefolk were handed down into river craft and departed the
Golden-Lion
.

And then, as the darkness became complete and the ship was little more than a vague, darker shape in the night, we saw the bright splashes as her sweeps, the long oars ships use in the absence of wind, turned her bow downriver, and the current took her.

I had long dreamed of sailing with a famous ship's master and winning glory under sail. It was a boyish longing, I knew, and beneath the dignity of a young man destined to practice medicine.

Nevertheless my pulse quickened at the sight.

Chapter 5

My master lit the stub of a candle downstairs, where the fragrance of roasting cheese and toasted bread made my stomach growl.

In debt for a month's rent, we had tried to avoid the eye of the tavern's owner, and we succeeded, tiptoeing up the stairs. My master was the perfect example of how a man of name should look, from his quilted doublet, with its high shoulders and tapered profile, down to the fine red riding hose on his legs. I, for my own part, looked much the young gentleman, if I may say so. My hair is copper-red, and damp weather has always caused it to become tangled and knotted, but I am tall enough to look down on many men. To further improve my appearance, my master sent me to a skilled tailor, in those seemingly long-past days when we could afford one.

William and I sat to our supper, a pilchard so old it curled up at either end, the ancient fish giving off a sharp smell. We ate that, and a heel of barley loaf patched with mold, cut evenly down the middle with a knife.

“So that's it,” said my master when we had supped, with a degree of ceremony so we would not feel as poor as we were.

My master had put on a velvet robe, and sported the cap he wore indoors, the one embroidered with golden thread. To see him you'd have thought him as rich as the owner of a counting-house, where foreign coin was weighed and exchanged for the Queen's silver.

“That's it, and here we are,” he said with an air of affable finality. “Hungry and thirsty and surrounded by dark.” He uttered this stark knowledge as though to make light of our condition, and nearly succeeded.

“Many men must have lost good coin,” I ventured, “betting on a cozened bear.” To
cozen
was to cheat, or to make a false appearance. Cozened wine was a mix of dye and water, and cozened beef was bulked out with red sawdust.

My master gave me a sad smile, the shadows of the sputtering candle dancing in the folds of his robe. “You'll make a wise physician someday, Tom,” he said. “To calm the sufferer is often to heal him.”

I had much to learn about medicine, but as always I was grateful for my master's kind encouragement.

“I want to ask you to forgive your foolish master, Tom,” he said. “If it please you. I shall find the inner resolve—I promise—to cease from wagering.”

He had said this before on such occasions.

I could remember my mother mostly as a smile and a warm touch, a kiss on my forehead. I did possess one clear memory—vivid and plain as though I were still there in my parents' cottage. One Lady Day she gave me a fragment of honeycomb on a wooden plate, and cautioned me not to eat “the poor, spent bodies of the bees, only the wax and sweetness.”

She died before I had seen four Easters, and in truth I wonder if this deep-dyed memory was a real morning from my life, stored in my soul, or the result of my spirit's handiwork, creating a recollection when there was none. But I do remember her reading from Foxe's well-known book of Protestant martyrs, and believe I hear her voice even now, sometimes, reciting prayers.

I owed my master my learning, and, thanks to his roof and bread, my life. And yet I did wish I could find a way to tell my master that it was time he lived up to his promise to give up wagering. Could he not make the most solemn oath, his right hand on Holy Scripture, the sort no one would break?

“My lord,” I began, “I do believe we must change the way we live.”

“And we shall!” he asserted, slapping the table.

“But in months past we had a choice, my lord,” I continued. “Now, left with only one bad penny, and forced to hide from our landlord—”

I let my thought complete itself in his mind.

“I shall become a new man,” he said in a tone of finality, even resolve.

“My lord, you must,” I said.

He was not pleased at such honesty from me, for a moment. But his eyes softened at once, and he nodded, gazing into our cold hearth. “Thomas, I will.”

There was a tapping at the door. It was a knock we recognized, and then there followed a continuing, more persistent pounding, which we recognized all the more.