Ship of Fire (5 page)

“If I hadn't passed by, in a hurry to try my luck,” said William, “you'd confront the same ultimate illness as my poor friend. It must have been God's grace that let me see a familiar red-haired young man, big as any farmer, walking into the Wildrose Inn.”

I nodded in red-faced agreement.

I was grateful for my escape from this evil. And yet, I wondered, why was such a dangerous sin so quick to stir desire? Shouldn't a merciful Heaven have created women less beautiful, more unlikely to warm the blood? Because certainly when I closed my eyes at night I still saw the women around the broad, unpainted plank table.

Besides, a certain spirit stirred in me. I wanted to hear my master explain a certain mystery—how a man could be wise on the question of pox, and on many other matters of man and God, and still lose his wealth down to the last bad penny betting on a bear notorious for its feebleness.

I was ready, with the question on my lips.

But loud steps crashed up the stairwell before I could speak. Nicholas, our landlord, burst into our room without the courtesy of a knock, wide-eyed.

“Soldiers!” he said breathlessly. “By Jesus, armed men are coming, good doctors, wearing helmets and carrying pikes.” He let us consider this news, and added, “The tavern-boy has come back terrified, saying they are marching from the Tower itself—on their way here.”

While not strictly yet a doctor, I was sometimes addressed as one, as an additional courtesy, and the title did not displease me.

But I was startled by this news, and so was my master, judging by his shocked silence.

Nicholas knotted his hands together, breathless with anxiety. “Could your patient be a
spy
?” He said the word with special emphasis, dropping his voice to a whip-lash whisper.

Chapter 8

“This sick gentleman is a doctor,” said my master in response. “He is in need of our medicine and your prayers. As you are in need of a cup of strong wine to strengthen your nerves.”

“Oh, let me have my boys carry your sick gentleman friend out the back way, my lord,” said Nicholas, “down into the alley, if it please you. He could prove to be an officer attempting to run off, a naval secret in his heart, before poison lay him down stiff—in my tavern!”

The sound of marching boots echoed down in the street, approaching closer, stride by stride. My master stretched himself to his full height, his mouth set in a determined line—but he had gone pale.

“I will not abandon my patient to the rats behind your kitchen,” responded my master. “Bring us some wine, too.”

“You could be arrested,” said Nicholas, steadying his breath with effort. “For failing to resurrect him, or for preventing him from dying, both. Or either. Forgive me, but the Hart and Trumpet is mentioned at Court as a place where a scholar can order Canary wine in Latin, and be understood.”

Nicholas was a fretful soul, but in his way he was no fool. Everyone knew that there was only one rack left in all of England. Torture was rarely used to force confession from outlaws in our Queen's frequently merciful reign. That one rack, made for stretching joint from joint, causing pain beyond imagining, was kept in the Tower, just a few minutes' march away.

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 Bonaventure
, 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.”