The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: A Novel (68 page)

'Afternoon, Mr Wren. All well?'

'Never better, sir,' says the dashing, ugly Second Lieutenant.

Passing the canvas-screened galley, Penhaligon peers through a loose flap into the sooty, steamy enclosure where the mess-men help the cook and his mate chop food, keep fires alight and prevent the coppers overturning. The cook puts chunks of salt pork - Thursday being a pork day - into the bubbling mixture. Chinese cabbage, slabs of yam and rice are added to thicken the stew. Sons of the gentry may turn up their noses at the starch-and-salt-rich victuals, but ratings eat and drink better than they would ashore. Penhaligon's own cook, Jonas Jones, claps a few times to earn the galley's attention. 'The wagers're all in now, boys.'

'So let the games,' declares Chigwin, 'begin!'

Chigwin and Jones each shake one chicken into a state of terror.

The dozen or so men in the galley chant in unison, '
A-one, a-two, a-three!
'

Chigwin and Jones snip off their hen's head with a pair of secateurs and set them on the galley deck. The men cheer the blood-spouting headless corpses as they skid and flap. Half a minute later, when Jones's fowl is still kicking on its side, the referee pronounces Chigwin's 'One dead fowl, boys.' Coins change hands from scowlers to gloaters, and the birds are taken to the benches for plucking and gutting.

Penhaligon could punish the servants with the feeble charge of Disrespect to the Officers' Dinner but carries on past the galley to the sick-bay. Its wooden partitions reach not quite to the ceiling, allowing a little light in and disease-bearing airs out. 'Nay nay
nay
, you headless tit, it goes like this . . .' The speaker is Michael Tozer, another Cornishman sent as a volunteer by the Captain's brother Charlie to the
Dragon
, the brig whose second lieutenancy Penhaligon held eleven years ago. Tozer's band of ten - now all able seamen - has followed their patron ever since. His broken and tuneless voice sings:

'Don't you see the ships a-comin'?

Don't you see them in full sail?

Don't you see the ships a-comin'

With the prizes at their tail?

Oh my little rollin' sailor,

Oh my little rollin' he;

I do love a jolly sailor,

Gay and merry might he be.'

' 'Tweren't "gay", Michael Tozer,' objects a voice, ' 'twere "blithe".'

' "Gay", "blithe", who humps a hog? What matters is what's next so cork it:

'Sailors they get all the money,

Soldiers they get none but brass;

Oh I do love a drink-me-down sailor,

But soldiers may all kiss my arse.

Oh my little rolling sailor,

Oh my little rolling he;

I do love a jolly sailor,

Soldiers may be damned for me.

'
That
's what the Gosport whores sing and I'd know 'cause I had one after the Glorious First o' June an' sunk my fork up her figgy-dowdy--'

'Though come mornin',' says the voice, 'she'd gone with his prize money.'

' 'Tain't the point: the point is we'll be pluckin' a Dutch merchantman stuffed with the reddest, goldest copper on God's Beautiful Globe.'

Captain Penhaligon stoops through the sick-bay's entrance. The half-dozen bedbound inmates stiffen to guilty attention and the loblolly, a pock-scarred Londoner called Rafferty, stands, putting to one side the tray of tenaculums, ball-scoops and bone-rasps he is oiling. 'Afternoon, sir: the Surgeon's down on the orlop deck. Shall I send for him?'

'No, Mr Rafferty: I make my rounds, is all. Are you mending, Mr Tozer?'

'Can't say my chest is better-knitted than last week, sir, but I'm grateful to be here at all. 'Twas a fair old fall without a pair of wings. An' Mr Waldron's been saying as he'll find a space for me on one of his guns, so I look on it as a chance to learn a new trade an' all.'

'That's the spirit, Tozer, that's the spirit.' Penhaligon turns to Tozer's young neighbour. 'Jack Fletcher: do I have it?'

'Jack Thatcher, beggin' your pardon, sir.'

'Your pardon, Jack Thatcher, and what brings you to the sick-bay?'

Rafferty answers for the blushing youth: 'Big round of applause, Captain.'

'The clap? A souvenir of Penang, no doubt. How far advanced?'

Rafferty answers again: 'Mr Snaky's as scarlet as a Roman bishop's hat, sir, an' oozin' curds, an' Jack's one eye's all blurry, an' widdlin's a torture, is it not, lad? He's been fed his mercury, but there'll be no shuntyin' along the yards for a while yet . . .'

To blame, Penhaligon reflects, is the Navy's policy of charging sailors for the treatment of venereal disease, thereby encouraging the men to try every Sea-Daddy's cure before coming to the ship's surgeon.
When I am made a peer in the Lords
, thinks Penhaligon,
I shall rectify this pious folly
. The Captain, too, once contracted the French Disease at an Officers Only bagnio on St Kitts and was too scared and too shy to speak to the
Trincomolee
's surgeon until passing water was the purest agony. Were he a petty officer still he'd share this story with Jack Thatcher, but a captain should not dent his authority. 'One trusts you learnt the true price a doxy's cully must pay, Thatcher?'

'I'll not forget it in a hurry, sir, this I swear.'

Yet you'll lie with another
, Penhaligon foresees,
and another, and another . . .
He speaks briefly with the other patients: a feverish landsman pressed at St Ives, whose crushed thumb may or may not have to come off; a luckier Bermudan, glassy-eyed with pain from an abscessed molar; and a Shetlander with more beard than face and a severe case of Barbados Leg which has swollen his testicles to the size of mangoes. 'I'm fit as a smashed fiddle,' he reports, 'God bless you for asking, Captain.'

Penhaligon rises to leave.

'Beg pardon, sir,' asks Michael Tozer, 'might you settle a dispute for us?'

Pain shoots through Penhaligon's foot. 'If I may, Mr Tozer.'

'Shall sailors in sick-bay still get their rightful slice of the prize, sir?'

'The Naval Rule Book, which I uphold, states that the answer is yes.'

Tozer fires an 'I told you so' glare at Rafferty. Penhaligon is tempted to quote the proverb about birds in hands and bushes, but leaves the
Phoebus
's rising morale untouched. 'There are some miscellaneous matters,' he tells the loblolly, 'on which I should like to consult Surgeon Nash, after all. He is most likely in his cabin down below, you mentioned?'

A mongrel stink smothers the Captain as he descends, step by jolting step, to the berth-deck. It is dark, cold and damp in winter, and dark, hot and airless in the summer: 'snug', the ratings call it. In unhappy ships, despised officers are well advised not to venture too far from the companionways, but John Penhaligon has no undue worries. The larboard watch, about a hundred and ten men, are sewing or whittling in the wells of dim light from above, or moaning, shaving or curling up for a cat-nap in improvised booths between sea-chests, hammocks being unstrung during the day. The Captain's shoes and buckles are recognised before the rest of him: a cry rings out, 'Captain on deck, lads!' The nearest sailors stand to attention, and the Captain is gratified that resentment at his intrusion is concealed, at least. He hides the pain in his feet. 'I'm on my way down to the orlop, lads. As you were . . .'

'Shall y' be needin' a lantern or a support, sir?' one of the men asks.

'No need. Blindfolded, I'd find my way around my
Phoebus
's guts.'

He continues down to the orlop deck. It reeks of bilge-water; though not, as on a captured French ship he once inspected, of decayed corpses. Water sloshes, the sea's belly churns, and the pumps clunk and squelp. Penhaligon grunts as he reaches the bottom, and half feels his way down the narrow passage. His fingertips identify the powder-store, the cheese-hold, the grog-store, with its heavy padlock, the cabin of Mr Woods, the boys' careworn tutor, the rope-store, the Surgeon's dispensary and, last, a cabin no bigger than his water-closet. Bronze light escapes and boxes are shifted. 'It is I, Mr Nash, the Captain.'

'Captain.' Nash's voice is a husky West Country wheeze. 'What a surprise.' His lamp-lit face appears, like a fanged mole, betraying no surprise at all.

'Mr Rafferty said I might find you here, Surgeon.'

'Aye, I came down for Sulphide of Lead.' He places a folded blanket on the chest by way of a cushion. 'Take the weight off your feet, if you'd care to. Your gout bites back, does it, sir?'

The tall man fills the poky cabin. 'Is it so obvious, then?'

'Professional instinct, sir . . . Might I inspect the area?'

Awkwardly, the Captain removes his boot and sock, and places his foot on a trunk. Nash brings his lamp close, his apron stiff and rustling with dried blood, and frowns at Penhaligon's maroon swellings. 'An angry tophus on the metatarsus . . . but no secretions, as yet?'

'None as yet, but it's looking damned similar to this time last year.'

Nash pokes at the swelling and Penhaligon's foot jerks in pain.

'Surgeon, the Nagasaki mission cannot afford for me to be invalided.'

Nash polishes his glasses on his grimy cuffs. 'I prescribe Dover's Remedy: it speeded your recovery in Bengal, it may postpone the attack this time. I want six ounces of blood from you, too, to reduce friction against the arteries.'

'Let us waste no more time.' Penhaligon removes his coat and rolls up his shirt-sleeves while Nash decants liquids from three different medicine bottles. Nobody could accuse the Surgeon of being one of those gentleman-physicians one occasionally meets in the Service, men who adorn the ward-room with erudition and verve - but the steady Devonian can amputate one limb per minute during engagements, pulls teeth with a steady hand, bends his accounts no more than is decent, and never blabs about officers' complaints to the ratings. 'Remind me, Mr Nash, what goes into this Dover's.'

'A variant of Ipecacuanha Powder, sir, being opium, ipecac, saltpetre, tartar and liquorice.' He measures out a spatula of pale powder. 'Were you a common Jack, I'd add castoreum - what the medical fraternity call rancid cod-oil - so you'd feel properly physicked. This trick I tend to spare the officers.'

The ship rolls and her timbers creak like a barn in a gale.

'Have you considered turning apothecary ashore, Mr Nash?'

'Not I, sir.' Nash does not smile at the pleasantry.

'I can see Nash's Patented Elixir arrayed in a row of china bottles.'

'Men of commerce, sir . . .' Nash counts out laudanum drops into the pewter beaker '. . . for the most part, had their consciences cut out at birth. Better an honest drowning than slow death by hypocrisy, law or debt.' He stirs the compound and hands the beaker to his patient. 'Down in a single draught, Captain.'

Penhaligon obeys and winces. 'Rancid cod-oil may improve it.'

'I shall bring a dosage daily, sir. Now for the blood-letting.' He produces a bleeding dish and a rusty lancet and holds the Captain's forearm. 'My sharpest blade: you shan't feel a -'

Penhaligon bites on his
ouch!
, his oath and a shudder of pain.

'- thing.' Nash inserts the catheter to prevent scabbing. 'Now . . .'

'Stay still. I know.' Slow drips of blood form a puddle in the dish.