‘I’ve been on this ship for more than fifty years,’ he said sharply, his metal eye staring straight at me. ‘You think I don’t have a key to everywhere and anywhere?’
‘Of course—’
‘I know everything that goes on here and I come and go wherever I please.’ His voice was brusque, commanding. ‘Trust has to be earned, sir, by hard work, and loyalty. Knowledge of our ways, our methods, is not simply given.’ He turned his head, the light shifted, and once again that piercing gaze was nothing more than paint on metal. His real eye looked frightened and tearful. He dabbed at it with his cuff, and then he pulled open the tank’s wooden lid and flung the rat inside. ‘This room is never locked,’ he said, suddenly affable. He smiled up at me, toothless and benign. ‘Who would feed Minimus and Maximus here and keep the fire going if it were?’ We watched as the dark muscular length of Maximus started to uncoil. ‘I’ve got rather a soft spot for this fellow. Comes all the way from India, you know – probably wishes he was back there too, on a day like this. There was another one, but he died. We’re hoping to stop this one from suffering the same fate.’
‘We?’
‘That pestle girl – what’s her name? She looks after the frogs too. And Proudlove’s sister helps. Says she feels sorry for anything kept as a pet, or trapped in a cage.’ He shook his head. ‘Dr Cole torments them both – offering a rat then snatching it away. He has tested whether the creatures feel pain too – you see the wound upon the back of each of them? An experiment, he said. Miss Proudlove was furious. And Aberlady too, when he found out. The snakes are Aberlady’s pride and joy, especially Maximus. He loves Maximus.’ He frowned at me. ‘I’m sorry, my dear fellow, but – who did you say you were?’
‘Flockhart, sir. The new apothecary.’
‘Ah.’ He turned back to the snake. The rat was now lodged in its throat, Maximus’s mouth stretching effortlessly around the furry corpse. The snake’s body gave a ripple, and the rat eased out of sight. ‘Extraordinary,’ murmured Dr Rennie. ‘You know, it doesn’t even chew. It just swallows! Its jaws expand – and its body too. Like rubber! I believe it could take a man, you know, if it were big enough. A big enough snake, I mean, and a small enough man – one like Sackville, perhaps, or Antrobus.’
‘Let us hope we never find out, sir.’
‘On the contrary,’ Dr Rennie laughed, a thin hissing sound, which I thought at first might be coming from the snake. His metal eye glanced at me wickedly. ‘I would be more than happy to find out!’
‘Did you light the stove in here, sir?’ I said, mopping my brow.
‘I don’t light stoves, man. I’m the ship’s surgeon!’
‘Of course—’
‘The stove’s always on in here. Got to keep the place warm for the snake and the frogs. And moist for the frogs – you see they have water? The snakes prefer a dry heat. Especially Maximus. Minimus, however.’ He peered into another tank, inside which the smaller, brightly coloured snake was draped across a log. I saw its tongue flicker. ‘I don’t really know what he likes. Sometimes I drop a live pigeon in there. He’s very quick and the poison works instantly.’
I noted the feathers at the bottom of Minimus’s tank. ‘I think it is not long since he dined,’ I said. I looked at the narrow brass bed, the rumpled bedding. ‘And Aberlady slept in here?’
‘Slept in the apothecary mostly,’ Dr Rennie replied, reaching into the tank and running his hand down the snake Maximus’s smooth body. ‘Or on shore. I’ve no idea whose bed he slept in then.’ He shuffled over to a tank of tiny coloured frogs. ‘And what about these beauties?’ he said. ‘Just look at them! What colours they are! Like fragments of the sun and the sea, or living drops of blood!’ It was true, for the tiny frogs, some no bigger than my thumb nail, were luminous – daffodil yellow, lime green, cobalt blue and a glowing vivid crimson. Some were mottled with patches or stripes of black. All of them glistened moistly, shamelessly brilliant against the dark green foliage, like splashes of living oil paint. ‘Poison dart frogs,’ he said. ‘Beautiful.’
He pulled a tobacco tin from his pocket and opened the lid. Within was a scrambling tangle of earwigs, woodlice, ants and weevils. ‘Breakfast,’ he said. He reached up and scattered the insects into the frogs’ tank. ‘This old ship is home to an army of insects. No doubt she’ll be glad there’s a few dozen less of them tickling her ribs.’ He put the tin away. ‘I have something to show you.’
In the corner of Aberlady’s room, between the two snake tanks, was a small door no more than five feet high. I had assumed it was a cupboard, for it seemed to be embedded in the hull of the old ship. When Dr Rennie pulled it open, however, I saw that inside was a steep and narrow flight of stairs.
It was dark, once the light from the door was behind us, so that I almost missed my footing as we plunged down into the reeking bowels of the ship. Dr Rennie, two steps ahead, moved with easy assurance. Through the ancient hull I could hear the muffled sounds of the waterfront – the shouts of dock workers, the creak and scrape of loads being hauled, the rumble of wheels. From overhead came the sound of footsteps and voices. I felt my skin turn cold as the darkness closed in. I told myself that my growing fear was irrational and foolish, that I might go back the way I had come at any moment, should I choose to. It did not make me feel any better.
‘Where are we going?’ I cried. ‘Sir, I must protest. I have the ward rounds to attend to—’ My voice sounded absurd, high-pitched and frightened, even to my own ears. Up ahead, Dr Rennie heard it too, and gave his thin, hissing laugh.
He opened a door, and led me into a room, dark, but dimly lit from a skylight cut into the deck above. The square of light it emitted fell directly onto an operating table, scrubbed bone-white. On the floor, the sawdust glimmered against the black shapes of the blood box and the broom, but the rest of the room was dark. Was this where Aberlady had crouched, deep in the shadows, his pen clutched in his shaking fingers? Come quickly, Jem, but come ready to face the Devil. The wooden walls that surrounded us, sticky with pipe smoke and long dried blood, were as dull and lustreless as knitting.
‘I’ve seen this place full of wounded men,’ said Dr Rennie, his voice suddenly loud. ‘Nothing like you see it now, but packed with bodies and deafening with screams, the ship rolling and heaving beneath us, the air trembling from the roar of cannons and the crack of muskets. Chloroform? There was no such thing when I was your age. Speed, sir, that was what counted. It was the only way any of them stood a chance.’ He shook his head. ‘Blood? You never saw so much of it. I was red from my wig to my boots – all of us were.’
He leaned in towards me, his tin eye alive and glittering, as though he drew strength and purpose from the fabric of the old ship. His real eye was hooded, as if sleeping beneath the drooping skin of its lid. The light from overhead threw the rest of his face into a chiaroscuro of shadows, like a mask of the Devil from a medieval morality play. I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye, and saw the scaly tail of a rat slip out of sight. All at once the place felt hot, hot as hell and sticky and feverish. They had the cholera there, sometimes, and gaol fever too. Dr Rennie was speaking again now, but I could hardly hear him for the buzzing in my ears.
‘Nothing for you here,’ I heard him say. His real eye stared at me now, wide and fearful as he seized my lapels, his bony hands tight as tree roots. ‘Leave this place. Leave it while you still have your soul.’ He pointed to the wall, only dimly visible in the gloom, and upon which generations of seamen, doctors, students, patients had scrawled and gouged their names in a criss-cross of black scars. ‘There,’ he said. His voice was a whisper. ‘D’you see? D’you see it?’
Perhaps it was the close, dark space in which we were standing, perhaps it was the image he had put into my mind of bloody bodies and ruined limbs, the stink of powder and shot and fear, but the floor seemed to heave beneath my feet. I put up a hand to steady myself and felt the warm sticky wood of the ship’s ancient timbers, the carved graffiti-scabs beneath my
fingers. I saw the bone-white operating table, Dr Rennie’s glittering eye, his corpse-hands reaching out to me – some months earlier, up at Angel Meadow Asylum, I had been bludgeoned into unconsciousness and trapped in a coffin. I thought I had put that fearful episode from my mind, thought I had mastered the terrors that had assailed me during the nights that had followed. It seemed I had not, for they came at me now like great shadowy wraiths, pulling the walls closer, turning them as dark as the earth in which I had been buried, making my skin crawl as though worms writhed upon it. I tried to conjure up thoughts of air and light and space, of the blue skies that the Blood had once sailed beneath, the open seas – but my mind flew instead to the few black inches of caulked and tarred planks that lay between me and the choking waters of the Thames. I reeled, and stumbled, sinking down into the darkness.
I heard voices, as if from far away, and a roaring sound in my ears. I felt as though I was nodding my head, nodding it up and down, and saying ‘Yes, yes, Dr Rennie, I saw what was chalked upon the wall at the back of the operating theatre, though I did not understand what it meant.’ I felt my body move and sway, as if caught in an undertow, I sensed a brightness around me, and then came a terrible smell, so strong that it was like a physical assault at the base of my brain. My eyes flew open and I batted away the bottle of salts that a stranger’s hand was wafting beneath my nose. Around me were the faces of people I didn’t know. I recognised Mrs Speedicut’s amongst them.
‘Fainted,’ she said, knowledgeably. ‘Must o’ been the heat of the place. And the stink.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ I said. I staggered to my feet, dusting myself down. I saw some of the nurses exchange smirks. I knew how absurd I must look, struggling to appear dignified after being carried up the ward steps to the weather deck like a sack of laundry. What did it matter that the Blood was overheated, dark and stinking, I was supposed to be used to such places. And so I was – when I was not required to descend into unlit, ill-ventilated spaces in the company of a man with a mind half lodged in the past and half befuddled by the present.
‘Bet you ain’t had your breakfast, neither,’ said Mrs Speedicut. ‘That’s enough to make anyone dizzy—’
‘Where’s Dr Rennie?’ I said.
‘He’s gone downstairs,’ came the reply.
I remembered the operating theatre, the darkness, the writing upon the wall. What had it said? I had thought I knew, but now I was not so sure. I seized the salts and took a few hasty sniffs. I pushed aside the nurses and orderlies who had gathered around me, and headed back down the steps to the ward below, stalking between the beds and through the doors at the stern that led to the operating theatre. Inside, a lamp was burning on the table, and a man laboured with a mop and bucket. The sawdust had been swept up and dumped into the blood box. A wet chamois leather was draped over the edge of the bucket, the walls running from where he had clumsily lathered them with soap and wiped them down. I saw his clipped ear, his tattooed forearms—
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘Cleaning, sir,’ he said, swirling his mop about the floor. His bald head glinted with sweat in the lamplight. ‘Like we was told to.’
‘But why here?’
‘I done everywhere else.’
‘Did you clean that writing off the wall?’ I snapped, eyeing the chamois.
‘I didn’t see no writing,’ he said. He grinned, revealing teeth that were broken and stubby, as if he had been gnawing on stones. ‘Perhaps you’re having another turn, sir. Like one of the ladies.’
I clicked my tongue and stalked out. I did remember the writing, though it made no more sense to me now than it had done then. I closed my eyes, picturing the space, the darkness, the light from overhead falling dim against the wall. It had been written low down, some two feet above the sawdust-scattered ground as if its author had been crouched and afraid. Had it been Aberlady’s hand? That I could not say, for it had been written in capital letters. Seven capital letters, scrawled in haste, forming a single curious word: ICORISS.
Chapter Ten
The smell of carbolic on the top ward was so strong that my eyes smarted. Beside the stairs a large brass bell hung, and I rang it four times for silence, the way Aberlady used to. ‘Gentlemen,’ I cried, as the ward sank into a muttering silence. ‘My name is Mr Flockhart and I am your apothecary. I knew Mr Aberlady, and am here to continue his work amongst you—’ I was more nervous than I had expected. It had been a while since I’d been in charge of an infirmary, and I had never before stepped into a dead man’s shoes. Around me the men coughed and muttered as I droned on about cleanliness and discipline. My voice sounded flat and dead to me, absorbed by the wooden walls, by the beds mounded with ragged blankets. How many other voices had roared out instructions in that confined space? Smoke hung in the air in layers of blue and grey. No one spoke. I saw Mrs Speedicut at the bow, sitting in an armchair beside a giant pot-bellied stove. She leaned upon a deck brush held upright in her hand, her legs wide beneath her damp-hemmed skirts, like a slatternly Britannia.
I went from bed to bed. I wondered whether I should ask about Aberlady, but the men were subdued, and seemed reluctant to talk about anything but their own ailments, upon which subject they were loquacious. I asked about the man with ‘something like yaws’ that Dr Sackville had spoken about the day before, but I was told that he had died in the night and been taken away.
A number of patients sported the yellowed skin of the malaria sufferer, and to these I gave cinchona, along with ginger, and cinnamon against the fever. Others were plagued by a profound lethargy that I understood to be a form of sleeping sickness prevalent in the Congo. I had never seen the symptoms before, though I had read of them. The outcome was almost certainly death, and there was little in my apothecary to ameliorate the condition. I administered cinchona to these too, along with tincture of Kola nut, the stimulant properties of which I hoped might offer some relief. Another man had what looked to me to be the beginnings of tetanus, though there was nothing in the apothecary on the Blood that would help him. I resolved to bring what I needed from my apothecary on Fishbait Lane. Overall the place seemed well ordered, with the prescriptions being the usual mixture of purgatives, sedatives and iron tonics, and I passed through the wards quickly enough. I wondered where the doctors were, for I had seen no one but Dr Rennie that day. When I asked I was informed that the others rarely arrived before eleven o’clock in the morning. ‘Six bells,’ said the orderly with the clipped ear. I looked at my watch. It was approaching noon.
Back on deck, I heard the sound of raised voices – men’s voices – coming from inside the consultants’ sitting room. I knocked, and opened the door, the voices within falling silent instantly. The room was warm and smelled of dried-out books, and rosemary, citrus and cedar wood from a bowl of pot pourri on the mantel. A tray of hot nuts rested on the stove top, the hearth scattered with their empty shells. The stove belched out a fierce heat, so that I longed to remove my coat. Dr Cole and Dr Antrobus were lounging in armchairs; Dr Birdwhistle was standing with his elbow resting on the mantel. His face was crimson, and moist with sweat.
‘Did you run all the way, from Siren House, sir?’ I said.
He smiled, and swabbed at his face with a handkerchief. ‘So much to do, Mr Flockhart, so many places where I am needed.’
‘Do we need you, Birdwhistle?’ said Dr Cole languidly. ‘I’m not sure that we do. You would probably be more use on board if you helped with the cleaning. There seems to be the devil of a lot of it going on today.’
Dr Birdwhistle ignored him, though his pimpled cheeks turned pink with annoyance. ‘Have you met Dr Cole and Dr Antrobus, Mr Flockhart?’
I admitted that I had. ‘Don’t get up, gentlemen,’ I said, though neither of them had made as if to rise.
He saw me looking at a small galvanic battery that stood on a table in the sunlight. Its wires were attached to the legs of a large dead frog. ‘One of Dr Antrobus’s little projects,’ he said, by way of expla
nation. ‘There are a number of such things about the place.’ He cleared his throat, his face flushing. ‘Mostly one has to approve of such attempts to further our knowledge of God’s creations, though Dr Cole’s attempt to graft a cock’s comb to a mouse’s back was, I still maintain, an abomination.’
‘You weren’t supposed to see that,’ said Dr Antrobus. ‘If you will insist on barging in—’
‘Dr Cole and Dr Antrobus are our fiery young men,’ said Dr Birdwhistle in a tone of forced brightness. ‘Full of ideas, and questions, both of them.’
‘Yes, well, I fear you find us rather un-fiery this morning, Flockhart,’ said Dr Cole. ‘And you were perhaps wondering why we were not on the ward rounds with you.’ He sighed, and stretched out his long limbs. ‘But you seemed to be doing a good enough job on your own. And Dr Sackville isn’t in till later, so we thought we may as well leave you to it.’
‘Mr Flockhart, you are the answer to our prayers,’ said Dr Birdwhistle. ‘A replacement for poor dear Mr Aberlady.’
‘I make no prayers, Dr Birdwhistle,’ said Dr Antrobus sharply. ‘For “poor dear Mr Aberlady”, or anyone. God is no more than a figment of a credulous imagination. Science shows us that well enough.’
Dr Birdwhistle coloured further. ‘I will not discuss theology with you, sir.’
‘Nor I with you,’ the fellow retorted.
‘Replacing Aberlady?’ said Dr Cole. ‘Are you sure, Birdwhistle?’
‘Merely acting apothecary,’ I said. ‘Until a proper replacement is found.’
Dr Cole reached out to shake my hand, though he still did not stand up. ‘Welcome aboard, sir. Come along, Antrobus, shake hands with the fellow. He’s one of us now.’
Dr Antrobus regarded me sullenly, his hands thrust into his pockets. The pause was long enough for us all to see it was a snub, and when he took my hand his grip was as cold and disinterested as his manner.
‘And don’t forget it was this fellow here who brought us that corpse yesterday. Most lucrative.’ Dr Cole jangled the coins in his pockets. ‘I must thank you, sir. Had you not sent for Antrobus and me then St Saviour’s Dr Graves would have won yet another prize for his insatiable anatomy students. The fellow has quite enough as it is.’
The Blood: What secrets lie aboard? (Jem Flockhart Book 3) Page 12
