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him?”
    “I’m not. I did that enough for my husband. I can manage, as long as you wipe around Davey’s neck. That does terrify me.”
    “Fair enough.”
    She hesitated. He seemed to know what she was thinking; maybe he was thinking it himself.
    “You’re wondering how much longer Davey Dabney can live.”
    Laura nodded. He leaned against the linen press and kept his voice low.
    “I don’t know. I wish I did. I want to try two new things tomorrow.” He ushered her out of the room. “I discovered a long time ago that doing the same thing over and over usually gets the same results.”
    While Lt. Brittle held his patient in his arms, Laura changed the sheets. The orderly brought warm water, and began to wash Davey Dabney. When he stopped to help two of the other patients from their beds to the washroom for calls of nature, Laura took his place, sponging off the sailor and listening to the surgeon’s conversation. She wasn’t sure if it was designed to put his patient at ease, or her.
    “Davey’s a foretopman,” he said, while she dabbed at the man’s thin legs and wondered how someone so pale could live. “I tried climbing the rigging once, Davey, and never got past the mainsail. Davey?”
    Laura stopped drying his leg. “He’s asleep,” she whispered.
    “Good.”
    Davey woke when she lowered the nightshirt carefully over his head, but closed his eyes again as she angled his arms into the sleeves. Lt. Brittle put him back in his bed, situating the pillows behind his head so he was nearly upright. He stood a moment longer over the patient, staring at his neck wound.
    “Galen counseled we should do no harm, and some interpret that to mean do nothing,” he said, more to himself than to her. “I disagree, but I am always left to wonder how much I can do before it turns into harm.” He turned to her. “I’m a churl to ask this, but would you stay here for the rest of the day? It may even be after dark. As useless as Maude was, I’m shorthanded now. I can leave an orderly to work both wards. Am I straining a friendship?”
    “I had no other pressing engagements this afternoon,” she assured him.
    He left, after telling her precisely what needed to be done until supper at the end of the first dog watch. The orderly made himself busy in the room, tidying up the invalids, helping others to the washroom or with a urinal. When he was busy, she filled in with the same duties, maintaining a detached air to keep from causing any embarrassment.
    Supper was simple enough: a thin broth for a few of the more fit patients, Matthew among them, and a pale gruel the orderly called “panada,” which looked like watery milk with lumps of bread floating in it. How can anyone regain any strength eating this? she asked herself, as she spooned the gruel down patients who could not help themselves. My chef at Taunton would be aghast.
    After more trips to the washroom, the men began to settle down for the night. She sat beside Matthew, tryingto draw him into conversation as the shadows lengthened and Lt. Brittle did not return. She decided Matthew was shy, and why not? With the exception of Nana and Gran, he probably never spoke much to females.
    She looked around her. Some of the men slept. She was familiar with that kind of exhaustion because she had seen it often enough on her husband’s face: too tired to do much except doze, and store up enough energy for the next day.
    Others were awake, looking as though they wanted to converse with her, but tongue-tied like Matthew, kept silent by their subservience, these men who had so much talent to work a ship, but who might have lived on the moon, for all that she and they shared the same world. She thought of Maude, a woman with no hope ahead of her. She glanced at Davey. She decided she would not feel so sorry for herself.
    She didn’t mind sitting in the dark, when the sun finally left the sky. The orderly lit the lamp on the table where Maude used to sit, and put a smaller