“Oh, that…” Cullen stretched out the silence, turning over and over in his fragile memory what he’d been able to glean so far.
After a long time, Willa gave out a huge sigh. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
His answer this time was immediate. “I swear to you, on my mother’s grave, I still can’t remember all of what happened.”
“But you do remember something.” An angry rustling emanated from the bunk.
He could almost see her sitting up, a frustrated scowl on her face, her lips swollen from all the kisses he’d stolen during supper. He wanted nothing more than to go to her, but realized that would be a mistake in the dark, in his current state of dizziness. Carrying a cane on a mission to bed his wife was the least romantic act he could imagine.Steady on, MacCloud.
“Yes,” he finally admitted. “I’ve been getting small snatches of memories of that day off and on while working in the sick bay. And sometimes, they feel so close I could touch them in my dreams. But when I wake up, what I thought I knew with a certainty flees with daylight.”
“But, surely you get some sort of feeling for what led to the battle royal that left you nearly dead in a cemetery. Was…was Ariadne there?”
He ignored the question about his former lover, but tried to reassure Willa he was recovering control of his senses and could lay claim to some of his memories. “A feeling? Yes, there definitely is one. The feeling that you’re in danger is so overwhelming at times, I can’t breathe. Whatever happened that day, it was all about you, and I don’t know why, but I’m afraid the threat isn’t over yet.” With that, he succumbed to a deep sleep and the inevitable snores he knew made Willa want to slap him back awake. He hoped she wouldn’t.
Willa perched on her stool in the surgery, compounding more mercury salts and powders into pills for crew members requiring treatment for the pox. Thank God they’d stayed only long enough in the harbor at Funchal to bring on fresh water and wine provisions.
She knew they’d weighed anchor at four bells in the middle of the Morning Watch, because she’d heard the creak of the capstan and the marines and sailors singing a shanty as they heaved the heavy anchor aboard from its resting place on Funchal Harbor’s sandy bottom. The deck beneath her lifted and fell in a steady cadence now as theArethusaplunged on southward through the Atlantic’s huge, rolling waves.
She put a week’s worth of the small blue pills into each of a hundred small paper packets for dispensing to patients throughout the rest of the voyage to St. Helena. She’d never served aboard a Royal Navy ship where this particular palliative treatment was not needed. Even when men were not allowed shore leave, sometimes local prostitutes managed to slip aboard by riding out with provisioning boats. Although she realized Cullen’s pay would expand with the Admiralty bonuses paid for each pox treatment, the progression of the disease in men aboard the ships she’d served on was the saddest thing she’d ever seen.
The pox began with simple sores which many times were not painful and went unnoticed. Years could pass before more severe symptoms appeared, and finally, some cases spread to the brain and eyes before ending in a painful death.
She was stowing the extra packets in the surgery’s medicine chest when she heard the shouts of men bringing someone down the main hatchway to the middle open cockpit on the orlop deck. By the time she got there, both Cullen and Mr. Parker were already wrapping one of the ship’s gunners in heavy blankets from the sick bay.
“How long was he under water?” Cullen questioned the bo’sun’s mate and captain of the watch who had brought the man down the hatchway.
“A good ten minutes or more.” He nodded to the captain of the watch who had helped carry the man to the cockpit. “We didn’t see him fall in at first, and then one of the topmen spotted the body in the water. The captain of the watch went in with a rope tether and brought him back.”
Cullen bent low over the man’s face and listened for breathing before placing his hand on the man’s chest. His hand rested still as death. No motion was visible from the lungs filling.
“Mr. Parker, and you two men, help me lay him face-down over the surgery table. When they complied, Cullen thwacked the man hard between his shoulder blades and a large quantity of seawater exited the man’s mouth. But when they turned him back over, there was still no sign of breathing. Cullen even had his surgeon’s mate retrieve a small mirror used for shaving in the sick bay to place over the man’s mouth. But no signs of clouding from even faint breath appeared.
“A man that’s been dunked in these frigid waters isn’t dead till he’s warm and dead,” Cullen said, and ordered the man to be taken to the galley and warmed with water from the stove. He and Willa accompanied them to help keep the man warm.
Once they laid him next to the stove and applied flannel-wrapped bottles of hot water to the surfaces of his body, they wrapped him again in warm blankets. But still no pulse. Willa leaned back on her heels at the man’s head and gave Cullen a questioning look.
“What are you thinking?”
She hesitated for a long moment, but then decided to share what she knew. “My father, Dr. Morton, wrote to me about a similar incident on theCerberus.He did something you’ll think really odd, but it worked…”
“Tell me what he did. The man’s dead. We can’t kill him again.” Cullen and all the other men stared at her as if she’d grown a second head.
“Papa blew tobacco smoke through the tube of a pipe down into the man’s throat. It took almost an hour, but eventually, he had a pulse again.”
Cullen’s mouth dropped open. “I can’t believe something that strange worked. It’s like bringing back the dead.”
“I think it might have had something to do with the cold water he fell into, like this man did today.”
At a look from Cullen, the captain of the watch was already moving toward his quarters to retrieve some tobacco. Mr. Parker ran back to the sick bay to find his pipe to use as a tube.
As soon as he had all the pieces he needed to try to save the man’s life, Mr. Parker used his flint to light the tobacco in the bowl of the pipe and directed the smoke down the man’s throat. Cullen tented a blanket at the man’s head to keep the smoke from blowing away.
Willa walked back to the surgery to complete re-stocking the medicine chest. There was nothing more she could do. It was up to the gunner’s heart to respond to the tobacco, if it could.
An hour later, Cullen led the way back to the sick bay through the surgery with the patient being carried on a cot by Mr. Parker and the bo’sun’s mate who had remained below to help.
She looked up, a question in her eyes.
