Ship of Fire (4 page)

“We are caught,” said my master, with at least a little humor.

Our rooms were over a tavern where aldermen gathered to talk about the sprawl of new, poorly joined buildings on Shoreditch, and the way the farmland of Finsbury Fields was being lost, covered over with the high-peaked houses of rich tanners and ship owners. Scholars took beer in the tavern, too, mathematicians from the lecture halls of Leadenhall, men who could predict the eclipse of a moon centuries from now, or recount one that had darkened Earth many ages in the past.

Ship's carpenters drank their ale here, as well, along with those who called themselves gentlemen. The Lord Mayor himself once took a slice of cheese in the Hart and Trumpet. No one would call it a shame to live above a place where a gentle poet, Sir Philip Sidney, once wrote a sonnet in exchange for a tankard of the house's best wine, the same poet whom my master bled one day, opening a vein in his arm to ease a headache.

“Maybe we're mistaken,” said my master in a whisper. “Perhaps some cook has cut off his finger.” A pie maker had suffered just such an injury the year before, cleaving his left forefinger neatly from his hand. My master had looked on as I bound the wound, to the pie man's grateful satisfaction.

I hurried to the door, trying to believe that a patient must surely be downstairs, and, since the evening was well advanced, half expecting a knife wound or broken jaw, or some other drinking man's injury. This would put silver in our purse, and we could finish our supper with a bubbling pudding or—one of my favorites—fresh-baked bread smeared with rare marmalade.

To my distress, in stepped the man we both feared—the tavern owner and landlord of our chambers, Nicholas Nashe.

“Have no fear, good Nicholas,” said my master lightly. “I'll have your rent by tomorrow's ebb tide, or I'm an ape.”

I kept my mouth well shut, but wondered at my master's bold assertion. He was rightly considered a man of honor, but we had so little food in our cupboard that the mice had abandoned it and taken to nibbling his anatomy books on the shelf.

“There's a gentleman downstairs, my lord,” said Nicholas, in a confidential whisper. “Dressed in a surgeon's mantle like your own, wearing a rapier with a rich agate-stone hilt, upon my faith.”

“Is he ill, good Nicholas, or merely drunk?” my master asked in a tone of gentle exasperation. But it was a tone of relief, too—Nicholas was not demanding money.

Our landlord placed his hands together prayerfully. “He is known as a sometime ship's surgeon.”

“Is he bleeding, or cold-sweating, or—”

“My lord, he is called Titus Cox, and he has swooned.”

“Heaven protect us, I know the man!” My master was out of his chair. “But good Nicholas, he will not be the first gentleman to fall on the floor of the Hart and Trumpet and need assistance, surely.”

“The last words he spoke, my lord,” said Nicholas, “were ‘show me to Doctor Perrivale.'” Nicholas delivered this imitation of another's voice, and a sick man at that, with theatrical skill, sounding in accent and tenor very much the mortally stricken gentleman.

My master strode toward the door, but Nicholas tugged at his sleeve, holding him back.

“He said more, my lord, words that made little sense to my ears,” said Nicholas in a hoarse whisper. “In an effort to understand what the pitiable gentleman was trying to communicate,” he added, “I took the liberty, my lord, of slipping this from his sleeve.”

It was a scroll of vellum, the finest sheepskin, sealed with a crisp scarlet crown of wax, and tied around with a blue ribbon. The sight of the seal stopped my breath. I had seen such bright sealing wax, and pretty ribbon, carried by leather-jerkined men in the street, hurrying on some state business. Court documents bore such seals, commissions to have noble criminals arrested.

Death warrants, handed up to hangmen on the gallows, were marked with such wax, too.

My master hesitated to touch the scroll. London was a tangle of spies and government agents. It was reckless to learn another man's secrets.

He set the document aside, unread, but only after he had studied the seal and peered cautiously into the shadowy shaft of this important document.

Chapter 6

We hurried down the stairs.

“Titus Cox is a good master of medicine, although he was never a man to cut a vein,” my master was saying, trying to force a breezy confidence into his words. “He always preferred the leech.”

Nearly any illness responded well to a copious bleeding, measured by the cupful. Most medical masters preferred to sever a vein with a lancet, a sharp blade made for that purpose, but there were those who praised the river leech. My master had trained me in both methods, to answer the needs of every variety of patient.

People needing a tooth pulled or an abscess pricked could see a barber. Such barbers were adept at binding wounds and draining pus, but most men and women with weight in their purses would prefer the attention of a surgeon. Surgeons rarely cut or even set a splint, relying on books and star charts to advise their patients. My master, however, set his hand to every aspect of the medical profession, and studied every drug, including the newly imported
tobecka
, which some doctors considered a cure-all.

I followed, but at the last moment I paused to work a wrinkle out of my stockings. They had been darned at the knee by my own needle. I worked the stitching around so it didn't show from the front. There was no way of knowing what knight or poet might be drinking here tonight.

The tavern was a cockpit of bright plumage. Every man dressed in tight-fitting stockings and a codpiece, to pad out his God-given manliness. Most of the men in the Hart and Trumpet that night had set aside a plumed cap, either soft and loose, in a manner considered French, or stiff and peaked, in a more English style. Even when a man of the town did not wear such a cap, he kept it nearby, as proof of his good taste.

But the place was subdued just now, a mere pale imitation of its usual liveliness, despite Mrs. Nashe's cheer and expert flattery—she was a woman who could nudge a Puritan into a smile.

I caught a glimpse of Jane, Nicholas's dark-haired daughter. She had brought me fresh-baked ale-cakes in recent weeks, and we'd shared a kiss or two when her mother was busy coaxing playwrights and drapers into paying off their accounts. Jane's eyes asked a question I could not answer.

A few gentlemen nodded greetings to my master, and extended the courtesy to me. I nodded in return, but kept what I trusted was a medical-man's solemnity in my bearing. Heads inclined in our direction as we knelt to attend our patient.

The man stretched out in the light from the hearth wore a velvet-lined mantle, and a city man's rich sword. His limbs were rigid and his eyes darting about, an unholy smile twitching his lips. Watery saliva streamed down his cheek. As he tried to extend his hand to greet my master, the arm jerked, and his feet spasmed, making awkward, uncontrolled running motions in the flickering firelight.

“My lord, is it the falling sickness?” asked Nicholas.

The symptoms did resemble
epilepsia
—epilepsy. But something about the way the stricken gentleman tried to rise, working hard to sit up, made me murmur a prayer. I had seen examples of epilepsy, attending a cobbler in Eastcheap who fell to the plank floor of his shop from time to time. The seizures were sometimes troubling to see, but they passed with no harm.

Titus tried to speak, but made only a choking sound. His eyes were full of feeling, fear, and recognition. Silently, I asked Heaven to spare my master's old friend.

“It's been a score of years, Titus,” said my master gently, “since we drank wine together.”

The stricken surgeon struggled to shape a word.

“Is it a stroke of God's hand?” the tavern owner was suggesting, the common phrase for a paralyzing fit. But the rigidity and trembling of the surgeon's arms and legs recalled only one evil illness to my mind.

“Or could it—” the tavern owner was saying, bending close to my ear. “Could it be poison?”

Chapter 7

Nicholas's last guess was far from foolish.

There was much whispering about secret harm—poison, and the bodkin, a long, slender blade, easy to hide up a sleeve, the favorite weapon of both foreign and royal spies. People said that a Portuguese merchant had washed up well gnawed by fish, just downriver from Greenwich, the victim of both poison and stabbing with a slender knife. Portugal had recently been occupied by Spanish men-at-arms, and these days every Portuguese wine-seller was now suspect as a possible spy for King Philip of Spain.

A tailor fitting my new jerkin a few months before, when we had silver pennies to rub together, had murmured to me that a man heard murmuring in Spanish—or was it Portuguese?—on Fleet Street had been hustled into an oxcart by heavily armed men. No one had seen him since.

“A Spanish spy could look as tall and well favored as you, young sir,” said Ned the tailor, removing his spectacles and giving my face a measuring look. “If I may say so. And be evil through to his very soul.”

Now my master had Nicholas send a tavern-boy to the Admiralty, with the message that one of the Queen's men was stricken. “Be quick!” my master added. The boy vanished into the dark street.

Nicholas had been pleased that a gentleman physician, tenant of the tavern, could attend to the crisis so quickly. But now he began to urge, in a hushed voice, that we hurry the sick man upstairs. “With speed, if it please you. Men do not drink and sup with a sick man lying before them.”

That was true enough. Gentlemen, with brightly colored stockings and plumed caps, were entering the tavern, laughing as they stepped inside, only to be silenced by the sight of Titus stretched before them.

“What is your diagnosis, Thomas?” asked my master as we carried our patient up the stairs.

“Adder's venom?” I suggested. It was true that the snake's poison could be milked and kept in a vial. Our landlord remained downstairs, where we could hear his voice through the floorboards, lifted in a convincing show of good cheer.

My master stretched a blanket over the shivering surgeon in our chamber. “Such venom is a possibility, in truth,” said William. “Although it's unlikely.”

My master knew well what was wrong with our sufferer, and so did I, but he was testing my judgment.

I bent over our patient. His tongue and gums showed no lesions, but I knew the disease had passed far beyond that stage. Any examination of the gentleman's male member, and every other body part, would show no pustule, dry or wet—the malady was by many years too far advanced for that.

I said, “I fear this is no such easy complaint as poison.”

We stepped to the sideboard, where, in richer days, a pitcher of wine always used to be kept. I said, in a low voice, “My lord, he is a very sick man.”

“Do I need to pay an astrologer for his future, Thomas?” asked my master, with a bite to his voice.

“My lord, your fellow doctor suffers from the pox.”

The subject of the pox was a painful one for both my master and myself.

That winter, a few days after Twelfth Night, with my master attending a noble woman in Windsor, I had removed a splinter from a shipwright's eye. As a medical man I was green, having nothing of my master's experience. But the shipwright, a West Country man like myself, begged me to pluck the wood from his eye, and I took up the challenge.

It was the first time I had ever used tweezers for such a delicate operation. The offending object was a stubborn little prick of spruce, and painful.

I had been so relieved to have the operation done—the shipwright's thanks still ringing in my ears, his silver in the purse at my belt—that I took a wherry across the river. I wanted to taste some of the south bank's stronger beer, and wanted to dance to some of the minstrels.

To my own surprise, I turned a corner, entered a door, and stumbled right into a stew—a brothel. Once in, I kept on, into the entryway, led in by a mix of curiosity and ignorance. And perhaps a dash of lust.

Finding myself eye-to-eye with the white-bearded man in the short entry hall, I heard his phlegmy laugh, and his greeting: “Go on, young sir, and have a cup of beer with honest women.”

It was a simple room, with a broad plank table, a large fireplace, and sweet-smelling rushes scattered on the floor, new hay and field flowers among them. With the smoke of seasoned wood and the perfume of hops in the air, it smelled like any clean inn along the road. Four women sat at the table, looking like prim servants, waiting for the master of the house to inspect them and pay their weekly allowance—but their clothes were undone about their tops. Even though I struggled not to gape and stare, I could not help myself.

When I heard a familiar voice demanding,
Let me past, whore-monger
, I turned to see my master, red-faced and ordering me to leave the place at once. I have never felt such gratitude and such shame at once.

“And will Titus recover?” my master asked now.

“If indeed he has the pox—and I have no doubt he does—” I could not complete my painful diagnosis, respectful of my master's feelings.

“Will he live?” William insisted in a tone of sad exasperation.

“No, my lord,” I was forced to say. “God forgive us all, he will be as we see him now, but grow worse, over hours or perhaps days. He will surely die.”

“So it is always with the pox, Thomas,” said my master. He was quiet for a moment, unable to continue out of sorrow for his old friend. “And Titus was a good Christian scholar, and knew Ovid by heart, and Sallust by the verse as well as any man. Ten or twenty years ago he galloped with a whore, or even some honest poxy woman—and he caught this curse.”

It was called the
French welcome
, and I knew by my training that it killed as many, over time, as the plague. “My lord,” I said now, my voice hoarse with feeling, “I neither touched nor spoke to any of the women in the trugging shop.” This was not the first time I had made such a protest since my embarrassing rescue.