Ship of Fire

by Michael Cadnum

  We could not be put into chains simply for treating a man in disfavor with the Star Chamber, that deliberative body at the heart of our Queen’s government. The cheerful beer-banter and laughter in the tavern downstairs fell silent, and the sound of heavy feet resounded from below.

  “Nicholas,” said my master, “you are the most white-livered man I have ever known.”

  Our landlord straightened his back and set his mouth. “I, my lord, am not the one with a document of state hidden in my robe.”

  But before my master could respond, and better hide the scroll he had accepted from our landlord, heavy feet thundered up the stairs.

  The door was flung open, and a helmeted pikeman thrust his head into the room. The crested, highly polished helmet gleamed in the light from our lamp. He gave us a measuring look. Then he stepped back, and had a quiet word with a shadowy figure.

  A man in a long, sea-dark cape stepped into the room.

  Chapter 9

  Any Londoner would have recognized him.

  All of us had seen Howard of Effingham, the Lord Admiral of the Queen’s navy, as he arrived for one of his audiences with the Queen, plumed and silked in the bow of a royal barge. One of the most powerful men in England, he was renowned as a man who liked his starched collar and Flemish linen as well as any man, but who could plot a ship’s course and trim a sail, too.

  His cape was dripping with the rain that must have begun falling again in the street, and his high, flare-topped boots were beaded with wet. The plume on his cap was bright copper red, a long, sweeping feather that showed no ill effect from the evening damp. He kept one hand on the pommel of the rapier at his hip, and gave my master a correct bow in return to my master’s own flourish-and-leg, a courtly act of homage.

  “I know you by reputation, Doctor Perrivale,” said the Lord Admiral. “You saved my predecessor’s life when his own wife had given him up for dead, and it pleases me to meet you at last.”

  “Bring us a pitcher of your best Rhine wine, Nicholas,” said my master, bowing his thanks to Lord Howard for this compliment. “And quick-red coals for our hearth.”

  Nicholas scuttled sideways, bowing and looking up through his eyebrows, his shadow lurching and following him out of the room. A pikeman at the door shut the barrier fast, and I heard the pike-butt strike the floor as the guard positioned himself at the top of the stairs.

  Lord Howard approached the sickbed. He stood there, not moving or making a sound, while a spatter of rain crossed our roof.

  At last he gave a long sigh. “Can he hear us?”

  “The sick can hear, my lord,” said my master, “within their sleep.”

  Lord Howard sighed again, and turned to study the rows of books on the shelf, volumes of the ancient medical authority Galen in Latin, and anatomies from Padua and Verona—diagrams of wombs and spleens.

  “Who is this young man?” asked Lord Howard.

  “Thomas Spyre, my lord, my most worthy assistant.”

  “But is he worthy of trust?” asked the Lord Admiral meaningfully.

  “As I am myself, my lord,” said my master.

  Lord Howard sat down in our best chair. We all kept our silence as Nicholas and his wife, in a dazzling white apron still creased where it had been folded and stored against some great occasion, made a show of arriving with a silver pitcher and green-glass cups, none of them chipped. Mrs. Nashe set a taper candle in the middle of the table, and cocked her eyes at each of us in turn as she poured the drink.

  A lad brought a brazier of coals, placed them with tongs in our dormant hearth, and thrust kindling into the fireplace. When the landlord departed from us again we inhabited a chamber as fit as any in London—except for the sound of Titus Cox’s shallow, rattled breathing from the sickbed.

  I remained standing, as was proper, holding the chair courteously as my master sat down at the table in our second-best chair, the one twice mended with glue. William extended the beribboned scroll, and Lord Howard accepted it with no evidence of relief at recovering this state document.

  “Master Titus was sick, shivering at our meeting this morning,” said Lord Howard. “He told me it was a fever that came and went, as such cold-sweats will, and that he would be fit enough to sail with the fleet.”

  “Drake’s fleet, my lord?” asked my master.

  Lord Howard tilted his head to eye me in the candlelight. He was a ruddy-faced man, with gray salting his beard, and a white, heavily starched collar.

  My master said, “If it please you, my lord, speak before young Thomas as you would any honest subject of our gracious Queen.”

  “Will Titus recover?” asked Lord Howard.

  “If my lord will forgive me,” said my master, “he is beyond my power, or even the command of prayer.”

  Lord Howard broke the seal on the document. The scroll fell open, exposing black lines of writing. “As you will have guessed, this is a commission naming our friend Titus to act as surgeon to Sir Francis Drake and his fleet.”

  My master paused in the act of pouring the wine. “We took it to be a secret of state, my lord,” said my master. “I had no dream of what it was.”

  Lord Howard smiled for the first time, taking a drink from a glass cup. “It is a secret, believed in by many but known as a fact by few. Drake will sail within the week, to raid the Spanish port of Cadiz, and sack every ship.”

  Cadiz was a celebrated harbor, where the richest ships in the world found shelter. A grizzled sea scholar had once explained to me that the ancients, the Phoenicians and the Romans, had moored there in ages past. The words thrilled me. I put a hand on the back of my master’s chair, and I could feel him tense with excitement, too, a shiver running through his body.

  “Can this be true?” breathed William. In years past Drake had bled the Spanish treasure fleets, and set ports in the Indies alight. In his legendary ship the Golden Hind he had sailed around the world. But never had this great sea captain, the most famous Englishman alive, accepted such a daring command.

  As I stood there in the dancing hearth light I would have given my life for the chance to sail on such a voyage.

  “It’s true, before God,” said Lord Howard in a matter-of-fact tone, but unable to completely hide his own thrill.

  He hesitated, and measured out his next words carefully. “It does seem, however, that Drake will sail without a surgeon.”

  Barely aware what I was doing—acting on an impulse—I bent to my master’s ear.

  I was amazed at what I was bold enough to suggest.

  William turned to look at me, his gray eyes gazing up into mine in wonderment. And then he smiled, looking at once years more youthful.

  He turned back to the Lord of the Admiralty. “I myself sailed as a young ship’s surgeon, my lord, on the Gillyflower, out of Plymouth. This no doubt was why good Titus sought me out.”

  Lord Howard made no sound, his long golden plume making a graceful arc in the glow from the fireplace.

  My master continued, “My lord, Sir Francis Drake can sail, his health and that of his crew well attended by two medical men.”

  I straightened, proud of the sound of this.

  Lord Howard drained his green-glass cup. He said nothing further.

  “My lord,” continued my master, “our gracious Queen has no more loyal subjects than the two of us.”

  “The men I appoint,” said Lord Howard at last, his manner softening, “will be required to take an oath.”

  “We are yours to command,” said my master.

  Lord Howard’s eyes, bright with firelight, looked hard into mine.

  An oath, a contract sworn before God, was an agreement no man would knowingly violate. I hesitated, uncertain in my soul what I was about to undertake.

  “My lord,” I said, my voice as steady as my master’s, “I am your servant.”

  “If you accept this charge,” said the Lord Admiral, leaning forward and lowering his voice, “you will be surgeon and surgeon’s mate on the Elizabeth Bon
aventure, Drake’s flagship.”

  My heart leaped.

  “And you will be something even more important, in my view.” The Lord Admiral spoke in a steel whisper. “Some say Drake is the sunlit seaman, that he can do no wrong. Others say he is sinfully ambitious, that he will sail halfway across an ocean, risking men and ships, for a button of gold to further round out his already ample money bag. It is whispered that of the treasure he brings back to the Exchequer, as much as one-fifth or even one-third disappears into his own strong box.”

  He looked from one of us to the other.

  “If you swear this oath,” he continued, “you serve as doctors to a war-fleet. And you will, in addition, be my eyes and ears—secretly reporting, after all is done, to me.”

  I silently prayed that God, through his Son Jesus Christ, might fulfill my life-long dream of adventure.

  “You will be intelligencers,” the Lord Admiral was saying. He leaned forward, into the candlelight, to make his meaning clear. “You will be Admiralty spies.”

  Chapter 10

  The single sail on our boat was swollen with the wind, and her prow cut the dawn-gilded river.

  Our pinnace, a ten-ton scout-boat, was fast. She carried us down the River Thames, out of London, and past Greenwich, where the officers of the Admiralty met to plan for naval glory, and the dry dock where the storied ship the Golden Hind was kept in state.

  The three slender masts of this famous vessel, in which Sir Francis had sailed around the globe a few years before, were barely visible in the early light as our pinnace made short work of passing the early river traffic. The high waters of the evening before had receded with the low tide, and the night’s rain showers had fled before a strong wind out of the west.

  I had never seen my master look so happy, his satchel of medical supplies stowed safely in a stout chest. “I was up this early every morning on the Gillyflower,” he was saying, the breeze in his hair. My master was habitually a late-riser these days, waking early only if an emergency called him forth. “I stood on the deck and watched the dawn. I saw a mermaid one day in the sea swells, a bowshot from the ship—did I ever tell you?”

  Three dozen times, I could have responded. But moved by affection for my master, I offered truthfully, “I never tire of hearing of your voyage.”

  “She was like a beautiful woman,” he said dreamily. “But her skin was—”

  An oysterman, squat in his floppy hat, called out a deep-voiced halloo from his homely boat, not in greeting but to encourage us in sailing so fast.

  “I am filled with delight, Tom,” said my master, “that you’ll see for yourself what full sails and clear sky do for a town-weary spirit.”

  We had sworn a solemn oath of loyalty to both Her Majesty and to the Lord Admiral himself. We had vowed to watch and learn, as only a doctor and his assistant can, the nature of our famous charge, the admiral of the war-fleet, Drake himself. I knew in one corner of my mind that this sacred promise could violate that trust a patient should have in his physician. If Drake fell ill and in his fever babbled confessions, we were bound to betray him.

  I had wondered, too, at our great urgency, hurried into a pinnace before the night was out with only the clothes on our backs. A hasty message was sent in the darkest hour of night to Martin Frizer, a doctor with chambers near Moorgate, and the round-cheeked physician, cowled and armed with a silver-hilted sword, arrived breathless at the summons. One glance at the ready-to-depart Lord Admiral, and an earnest plea from my master, and Martin Frizer promised to preserve the life of our patient Titus Cox “as God gives me the power.”

  I had not been able to bid farewell to dark-haired Jane, or give the chambers that had been my home anything more than a hurried backward glance. All was haste, a solitary rat darting across Fenchurch Street as pikemen escorted us through the night-stunned city toward a wherry that hurried us toward the Admiralty docks. My master had explained that Drake and the Lord Admiral were working fast to complete the fleet and sail before the Queen, who was more changeable than weather, could withdraw her permission for the voyage.

  I gave none of this a thought now as our pinnace took on speed, her ropes taut, the cheerful seaman at the helm calling out that if we kept this pace we’d catch the Golden Lion on her course for Plymouth. Mudhens along the river bank scurried awkwardly, and a chalk white horse watched us pass, our wake stirring the reeds.

  We were the sole gentle passengers on this ship, but there was a crew and a cargo, bales of straw packed into the hold, and small wooden kegs, each marked with a red daub I recognized as the Admiralty’s insignia. These barrels were ranked in tight rows, and held tightly in place by the straw. There were so many of these kegs that the hatch could not be closed, and bits of straw spun off into the wind. I would have taken the containers to be rare wines, knowing that sailors enjoyed their drink whether land-bound or at sea, except that the barrels were double-lashed with new black iron hoops, thick and sturdy.

  My master took a cup of morning wine with the vessel’s captain, a short-legged mariner with a well-trimmed beard. I asked a young man spreading a thick canvas over the hatch, protecting the kegs from the rising spray, what the nature of our cargo might be.

  He laughed. “Such a cargo as could carry us well, sir, and carry us far, all the way into the sky.” He extended his explanation by adding, “Such cargo as could turn us into carrion, sir.”

  At that moment the canvas flapped, a great, breathy thunder, caught by a sudden wind. The captain gave a great cry, and the canvas would have taken off across the river if I had not reached for it, fumbled, and held on.

  I kept a grip on the edge, and stretched the canvas tight while a seaman tied it into place.

  “Well done, sir,” said the young man. He leaned close to me. “Our hold is stuffed with gunpowder,” he said. “Black as hearth dust and packed tight in kegs, for the culverins and serpentines of the fleet.”

  I nodded, as though I quite naturally understood such matters—which in part I did. Culverins were cannon of great girth, made for lobbing shot high and far. Serpentines were long-barreled guns. I had seen—and heard—gunnery practice in London just outside Bishopsgate, the bronze and iron pieces primed and fired with volumes of blue smoke, and I had dreamed of firing such a gun myself some day.

  But this was real gunpowder, not the stuff of my imaginings, and it was packed under our feet. “It’s safely stored, I see,” I offered with the air of a man who cares nothing for his own safety.

  “Nothing in the nature of gunpowder is safe, sir,” said my new friend with a laugh. “I’ve seen a cask of new-mixed fine-grain blow up as soon as sunlight hit it. No, sir, you’d be wise to pray the straw doesn’t heat up in the hold, and blast us to Gravesend.”

  It was true that decaying straw, like manure in a pile, can ferment and grow warm. But I doubted that this clean straw could flicker into flame. My skepticism was confirmed by the twinkle in my new friend’s eye.

  “I’ll work hard to surmount my fear,” I said in the dry tone I had heard my master use on men of heavy wit.

  My new friend laughed again. “I’m called Jack Flagg,” he said. “I’ve signed on aboard the Elizabeth Bonaventure as a gunner’s mate.” He was my age, with a youthfully wispy beard, like mine, both of us trying to compete with the full sets of well-trimmed whiskers sported by the older men around us. He was liberally freckled, on both his face and his hands, and his eyes were sharp blue. Bruises marred his lively features, especially around his left eye, and his lower lip was swollen. His knuckles were scuffed, his right hand puffy, and I wondered if this injury had caused him trouble, grappling with the canvas.

  I introduced myself, and wanted to add: and I have cured fevers and picked a splinter from a gunner’s eye.

  Jack squared the long, tasseled cap he wore more squarely on his head and said, “We have both corn powder, coarse-grained, and serpentine powder, fine as sifted flour, but a gentleman like yourself is safe enough. It’s the gunners who
risk their lives, sir, not a scholarly surgeon’s mate, such as yourself.”

  I had noticed that kind-hearted seamen in the tavern often took an attitude toward me that was both respectful and patronizing. Respectful because I was the son of a gentleman, and assistant to a gentle doctor, and because I could read both Latin and English. But patronizing because they had sailed before the wind, ice-daggers glittering in the rigging, while I had been studying learned treatises on the varieties of vomit.

  Jack went on, “I was sent to the arsenal to collect this shipment of powder, and make sure it didn’t get wet.”

  I envied this young man, still unable to sprout a full beard and yet entrusted with such an important duty.

  “I would have disembarked last night,” he added, “but I had my wits knocked out of my head by a giant and three of his mates outside the Red Rose Inn.” He lowered his voice and confided, “I cannot drink wine or beer without swelling up in a fighting mood.”

  This explained the bruises, where someone’s right fist had found its target. And it further impressed me. This was a youth of spirit, already a man of the world. To further dampen my pride, I had stowed my rapier in a large chest, near the sea bag that held spare stockings and my cloak. Jack Flagg sported a seaman’s dirk—a short, all-purpose knife in a leather sheath at his hip.

  “But no doubt you have had many medical adventures,” said Jack warmly, perhaps recognizing that his personal accounts had put me in his shadow. “You’ve certainly stuffed wounds with gun-wadding in your time, and sawn off limbs by the dozen.”

  I looked aft, to make certain I was out of earshot of my master, and lied. “I’ve cut off more legs than I can count.”

  “Have you then?” said Jack, his eyes wide with respect.

  “Of course,” I added, and as I spoke I reached out to a strand of rigging, fine-woven rope, to steady myself against the bucking of our vessel. It was not strictly an untruth. I had cut off none.

  A voice called out from the helm, a husky bawl, “Hands off the sheets, sir,” someone directed me, “lest you spoil her trim.” Or words to that effect—the accent was strange to my ear and the sailing terms all but foreign.