Read Online A Shot Rolling Ship by David Donachie - Free Book Online Page A

speaking, her own presence aboard was forbidden, but admirals had been captains once and knew what to see and what to ignore. A ship was a world apart as soon as the anchor was fished and catted, governed officially by the Articles of War, in truth presided over by her husband, who had much say in how such rules were applied. The only plain fact, explained to her, was that they could not be applied in total at all times, otherwise the captain would have more of the crew in chains than he would have left to sail the ship.
    The smell of the forward maindeck, sweat, unwashed clothing, the animals in the manger, with trapped flatulence added to the stench of the bilge water, was one Emily knew she would never get used to; not even the nosegay she pressed to her face could overcome it. The odour grew overpowering as she made her way down to the white-painted orlop deck, to where there was barelyenough air to keep lit the flickering flames in the lanterns. The surgeon’s sick bay was a screened-off space only big enough for a cot and a stool to sit on, the lantern slung close to both providing the only illumination.
    Lieutenant Roscoe lay there covered by a blanket, pale of face, eyes closed, breathing slowly but regularly. He had suffered from an affliction of the face before being wounded, which gave him, because of half his features being immobile, a palsied look. He had also expressed himself in an abrasive manner, though that was in part due to the poor relationship he had had with her husband. In repose, hovering between life and death, that had disappeared, to be replaced by a look of serenity, and it was possible to see the child he had once been.
    But she could never look on his face without recalling the cockpit on the night of that raid on Lézardrieux. So many wounded had come back, and she had elected to aid the surgeon and the gunner’s wife in treating them. Emily was no stranger to death; in the company of her mother she had visited enough blighted hovels in her native part of Somerset – a duty imposed on her by her station in life – to be upset by the sight of a cadaver. In her time, she had seen innumerable dead bodies; women expired in childbirth, or parents prematurely aged by toil and deprivation, and had come to look on them, if not without emotion, as least with some sense of equanimity. Children were harder; little wasted bodies, some yet to reach a first birthday, always evoked tears.
    But the cockpit had not been like that, had not beensilent grieving. It had been blood-soaked and noisy, with men screaming in pain, and the surgeon Lutyens shouting to the sailors holding them to get a grip as he set to with razor sharp knife and toothed saw to amputate a limb, an act he was able to carry out in under a minute, be it a shattered leg or an arm. More quietly he had worked on those, like Lieutenant Roscoe, who had been wounded by musketry, picking gently at the cloth taken into the wound by the ball, using a clear spirit which smelt of herbs to cleanse the wound. It was only an interlude, for even a comatose body reacted to the long probe he inserted to seek and remove the lead, with Emily required to keep the hole clear of the flowing blood so that he could see what he was about.
    The world of quiet prayer over a deceased soul had no connection to such mayhem, yet it was pain and death just as it was in a household struck by cholera or the misery of a still birth. As ever, before she began to read, Emily said a quiet prayer for the recovery of the man on the cot.
     
    ‘Mrs Barclay, you are here again, your sainted self.’
    ‘Hardly that, Mr Lutyens, just a captain’s wife doing what she sees as her duty.’
    ‘May I offer you some coffee?’
    ‘That would be most appreciated.’
    Lutyens exited, to instruct his assistant, the loblolly boy, to have made and fetch back some coffee from the gunroom, then re-entered his sickbay, looking down with an acute degree of concentration on the lovely face of