As she lies there, wincing at the discomfort in her joints every time she moves, Bianca wonders where Nicholas is now. For all the horror of Farzad’s story, she cannot imagine he is in danger from Connell, not if he’s carrying Robert Cecil’s commission. No, charming the Crab can wait upon the morrow. A few hours’ sound sleep and she’s bound to feel better.
But sleep does not come. The ache in her joints gets worse. Her stomach begins to turn. And even if she could ignore these discomforts, her brain is fizzing with thoughts of how to get closer to Gault, and Robert Cecil. The St Saviour’s bell has tolled the hour three times before a troubled sleep finally takes her. But in the moment before it does, the answer comes to her in a sudden flash of clarity.
His name is Edmund Hortop. He is sixteen years of age, a shepherd’s son from the Weald of Kent. He has never been to sea before.
All this Nicholas learns from the sailors who carried his broken body from the demi-culverin to the small measure of shelter behind the sterncastle ladder.
Nicholas had yelled at them not to move him, but the howl of the wind had drowned his voice. Now young Hortop is staring up at him with frightened eyes, his face shiny with seawater and sweat, the flesh alarmingly grey.
Nicholas tries to gauge the measure of his injuries. There is no sign of blood, just a raw indentation on his right jaw, which Nicholas ascribes to his colliding with the cannon’s iron trunnion. But from his experience as a surgeon with the army of the House of Orange in the Low Countries, he knows an absence of blood is no guarantee his patient might not be mortally hurt.
Nicholas talks to the boy while he unlaces his sea-soaked gabardine. For the first time since boarding the Righteous, he feels a measure of authority – no longer an unskilled hindrance to be pushed aside with a shout of Away, yarely!
‘Where is the pain, Edmund? Can you tell me?’
‘It was everywhere, Master,’ the boy says in a faltering voice.
‘Was?’
‘It is better now. It is dying away.’ He grips Nicholas by the wrist. His fingers feel like bands of ice. ‘Does that mean I’m dying also? I should not like to die in the midst of the ocean, Master.’
‘You’re not dying, Edmund. You’ve just received a bad blow. Lie still.’
In Holland he had often reassured a pikeman or a pistoleer, an archer or a matchlock-man, in this manner – knowing full well that he was lying to them. But sometimes comfort is the only medicine a physician can give.
But setting broken bones, cleansing and suturing torn flesh, this is practical medicine he can he sure of. All he has to do is mend. And if he can’t mend, it will be because the wound is beyond healing, not because he has trouble reciting pages of Galen and Hippocrates in faultless Latin.
Sending one of the other apprentices below to fetch his physician’s chest, Nicholas peels the boy’s gabardine open and gently probes for broken ribs. The chest seems sound, even if the breathing is shallow and rapid. Hortop remains silent throughout this exploration, staring up at the swaying sky.
The limbs, too, seem unbroken. ‘You may have done naught but bruise yourself, Edmond,’ he says encouragingly, though a warning voice in his head tells him the boy will be fortunate to have escaped so lightly. He is about to ask Hortop to move his limbs when another wave crashes into the Righteous. She rolls sickeningly. Standing over Hortop’s prone body, one of the apprentice lads stumbles forward, his boot stamping down hard onto Hortop’s right ankle.
Hortop does not cry out. He doesn’t even move his leg out of the way.
‘Edmund, will you try to move your feet for me?’ Nicholas says as the Righteous settles herself.
But Hortop remains immobile.
‘I cannot, Master. They refuse my will.’ His voice is barely audible. Nicholas can see the effort it takes to make the words leave his mouth. He pushes the heel of his palm into the flesh of Hortop’s right thigh, halfway between the knee and the groin.
‘Can you feel that?’
The boy mouths, ‘No.’
Nicholas rises and turns to Connell, speaking low so that Hortop will not hear him above the noise of the wind. ‘I think the boy is afflicted by a palsy of the limbs. There may be damage to the spinal marrow.’
‘Can he be cured?’ Connell asks. ‘He is worth some amount of money to me.’
Appalled by Connell’s callousness, Nicholas struggles to keep a neutral voice. ‘The prognosis is not good. For lesser damage, it is sometimes recommended by the ancients that walking on the spine can relieve the pain, or having the body suspended from a frame. But Hortop is not overly discomforted. That worries me.’
‘There must be something you can do – with all that learnin’ inside you.’
‘In extreme cases the French surgeon Paré recommends cutting away the fragments of damaged vertebrae. I tried to do that once, in the Low Countries, with a Swiss mercenary who’d taken a ball in the back. It wasn’t entirely successful.’
‘What happened?’
‘He died.’
Connell considers this for a moment. Then he says, ‘I’ll send him ashore in Vigo then. The Portugals have hospitals and sisters of mercy. They can have him.’
‘Abandon the lad in a foreign land, palsied from the neck down?’
‘What else is there to do?’
‘Hope that the Moors can treat him,’ Nicholas says.
‘The Moors?’ replies Connell with a contemptuous grunt.
‘Their physician Albucasis has written on the condition of paralysis to a greater extent than Christian physicians,’ Nicholas says, knowing he sounds like a man losing an argument.
‘And if they are successful?’
‘He might live. But I fear he will be a great burden to his family when he returns. His father is a shepherd, I understand. He’s unlikely to have the money to care for a crippled son.’
Nicholas thinks of the poor vagabonds he’s seen on the roads of England, half-starved, clad in rags, begging for food, chased out of towns with the threat of a branding. Many of them were crippled soldiers from the Low Countries, or maimed sailors discharged from the fleet. It might have been better, he thinks, if the wave had carried Edmund Hortop out of this world entirely.
Connell studies the straining sails while he considers what Nicholas has said. ‘Safi it is, then,’ he says with a shrug. ‘Let us hope your faith in heathen physic isn’t misplaced, Dr Shelby. For my own part, I’d rather the Devil mixed my medicines.’
The raucous ill temper of next door’s cockerel brings Bianca awake. A single shaft of watery grey light falls reluctantly on the bedroom wall. As she sits up against the bolster, her aching joints cry out in protest. She feels no better now than when she went to sleep.
But her hunger has returned with a vengeance. The smell of Goodwife Willders’s broth pops into her head. Her stomach begins to rumble. In her present state, she thinks, a good broth might make all the difference.
She wistfully recalls the one her mother used to make for her when she was young: the carcass of a mountain bird – tetraone or fagiano – boiled for hours with asparagus, parsley and fennel. There had been times when that broth kept her sane: her falling-out with Antonia Addonato, for instance; or that occasion when – aged fourteen – she’d thrown all the feminine wiles she imagined she possessed at Paulo Vianello, the mason’s son, only for him to humiliate her in public by telling her to come back when she was a year older, and then only after she’d contrived to grow a pair of breasts. There had never been a trial that couldn’t be put in its proper place by that wonderful broth.