Duncan paused a moment, considering the dangers, and opportunities, before him. “He is a frequent visitor then?”
“Starting last autumn the Ardent started calling every few weeks, a stopping point in the bay patrol.”
Duncan kept examining Lloyd as he spoke. “She’s been here several days,” he observed, keeping his tone casual. Their chances of escape would be far greater if the brig and her men were gone.
“Three or four months ago she started flying a pennant of Virginia and tends toward more extended stays now.” Mrs. Dawson hesitated, studying Duncan a moment. “The navy is using the old mill that lies around the point in the river as something of a headquarters for provincial business. We have a wharf that accommodates ocean ships.”
“And a smokehouse where fresh meat is hung,” he stated. She turned her head down, and began fidgeting with a corner of the doctor’s comforter.
“Do you have strong spirits?”
“Some brandy.”
“We must rub it into his limbs. It will draw out the heat.”
She stepped to the door, spoke a few words to someone waiting in the hallway, and moments later the housemaid who had cleaned Duncan’s waistcoat appeared with a decanter.
“Nancy and I can do this, Mr. McCallum,” Mrs. Dawson said as she lowered herself into the chair beside Lloyd’s bed. “Polly will take you to the brig to retrieve such medicines as you find there.” She nodded toward the doorway, where the plump woman from the kitchen, her apron removed now, waited with a basket in her hand. He glanced back at his hostess. Polly must have been instructed to make ready for the ship even before Mrs. Dawson had met Duncan.
Feeling as if he were caught up in some strange theater performance, Duncan followed the cook slowly, studying the house. The hallway on the opposite side of the stairway was blocked off by a row of chairs, and seemed to have a stale, unlived-in atmosphere. Portraits lined the stairway, of elegant women in silk dresses, a stern but prosperous-looking man holding a tobacco leaf in one hand and a long-stemmed clay pipe in the other, and a young boy with his arm resting on the back of a large russet-haired retriever with a brace of ducks at its paws.
In a frame at the bottom of the stairway, in a place of prominence, was a peculiar document, which caused him to pause. It was a land charter. To his astonishment he saw it was the charter for the Virginia colony, which seemed so unlikely he leaned in for a closer examination.
“If they ever lost the real one, old Mr. Dawson would say, the governor could come and just cut this out of the frame.”
He turned to see Polly grinning at him, then he studied the framing. It was not an actual parchment under glass, but rather a very clever reproduction on a canvas, a seemingly perfect reproduction, right down to the royal seal. “The artist must have worked in the king’s court,” he suggested. Polly just laughed, and gestured him out the front door.
The Ardent was moored at the deepwater plantation wharf, with a guard at the top of the gangway. Polly explained their business, then produced a fresh pie from her basket, which quickly warmed the face of the stern young officer on the deck. He removed his bicorn hat to them and gestured him down a hatch, ordering a mate to guide them to the sick bay. Duncan asked the mate about the light blue band he and the rest of the men wore on their sleeves.
“In the service of the colony. Seconded to the Virginia navy, which I never knew existed until they brought out these armbands.”
“Eighteen guns,” Duncan observed-he had quickly surveyed the single fighting deck before descending into the shadows-“but you don’t have nearly the men to work them.”
“Aye,” came the mate’s weary response. “Over half the crew is seconded to the cutter and the yacht and most of the marines have been split between here and’’-he paused and eyed Duncan more deliberately-“elsewhere.”
“Yacht?”
“It’s what the Commodore calls the ketch when he is aboard. Like the king’s royal yacht.”
“Now leave the good doctor be,” Polly scolded the man as they reached the physician’s station, and when the mate retreated she took up a position in front of the cramped chamber as if to assure Duncan’s privacy. Opening the wooden chest that served as the brig’s dispensary, he stared in amazement. It was filled with drugs, bandages, bleeding cups, lancets, even a bone saw neatly inserted into tiny brackets under the lid. He dropped a vial of laudanum, the tincture of opium, into each of his waistcoat pockets then began filling two sacks. Into the first he dropped another vial of laudanum and little jars of the diaphoretic James’s Powder, and set it aside. Into the second he dropped more laudanum, wrapping each vial in a linen bandage to protect it, a small tub of unguent, and two sharp scalpels, also carefully wrapped. He stepped behind the curtain that provided privacy for the little alcove where surgery was performed, quickly removed his waistcoat and shirt, then fitted the drawstring of the second sack over his shoulder and dressed again.
As they reached the gangway to the dock, the mate put a knuckle to his forehead and dipped his head. “Give Mr. Lloyd our best, sir. Tell him we look forward to his showing us a step or two at the great ball.”
Duncan paused. “The great ball?”
“When the Commodore arrives. That’s what they call him, thought he ain’t got no commission, just a right pretty uniform, and letters from London he takes out whenever anyone questions him. Special orders from the Lord High Admiral and the governor, they say.”
“There’s to be a ball?” he asked Polly as they walked back along the lilac-lined path.
“A right grand affair.”
“Sometime soon?”
“Ten days or so. Word came from the Commodore that it couldn’t take place until the magistrate’s affairs are settled in Williamsburg.”
Duncan considered the words with new foreboding. “What affairs would those be?”
“Lord, Mr. Duncan,” Polly laughed. “Surely I wouldn’t know. I just cook the meals and make sure the Commodore’s chambers are washed down with vinegar. His rooms always have to be just so,” the cook said, her voice getting tighter. “Lemon water in basins at each corner. Logs stacked just so in the hearth. He has his own peculiar ways, and may the Lord have mercy on ye if ye don’t respect them.”
Back in his patient’s room Mrs. Dawson sat holding a cold compress to the officer’s head. Duncan examined Lloyd once more, then carefully arranged the medicines he had brought on the nightstand and explained their dosages. “Without the bark, his fever will just have to run its course. The laudanum will help him sleep through most of it. Twenty drops in a cup of tea every four hours should do.”
Mrs. Dawson nodded gratefully. She sank back into her chair and closed her eyes, about to drift off herself. Duncan stepped to the window. The bright, comfortable chamber was something of an oasis, removed not only from the torment of the slaves living half a mile away but from the world outside. He found the woman’s devotion to the sick man strangely comforting. He had been living in a world of murder, torture, and deceit so long he had grown unaccustomed to simple human kindness.
A breeze stirred the curtains, bringing with it the sweet scent of the lilacs. “I wish these days could go on forever,” Alice Dawson said behind him. “In another few weeks we will be getting the hot fetid air off the bay. But today I can smell the lilacs and the bergamot in the kitchen garden. There were wrens nesting in an old shoe on a beam at the back of the cooperage. Polly showed me the tiny eggs. Little seeds of song, she calls them.”
The words sparked an unexpected memory of spring in a different world. To his surprise, Duncan began speaking of visiting eider nests with his grandfather, telling of how they would whisper to the brooding birds to make them comfortable, then take a handful of down from each nest for their winter comforters. She gave a weak laugh and told him of how one of her great joys as a girl was to be taken out on the river by a maiden aunt to watch an island rookery of night herons.