The Surgeon's Lady

“Hopefully not. That’s our secret.”

He rolled up the drawings, but left them on the table. “Fifty men are dead, Nana, and others are wounded.”

“Mr. Ramseur?” Nana asked. “He’s Oliver’s first mate, Laura.”

“Hale and hearty.”

He stirred in his chair and Laura thought he would get up again, to roam the room. “Nana, Matthew was injured badly in the fight.”

She gasped. “You didn’t tell me!”

“A splinter on the gun deck took off his arm.” He pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to Nana. “He’s a powder monkey, Laura. He stayed with Nana at the Mulberry once. He’s eleven now.” He leaned closer to his wife and toyed with her hair. “He lost a lot of blood, Nana, and I won’t say I’m not worried.”

Nana blew her nose and gave her husband a defiant look that told Laura that she was not quite the biddable creature her usual deportment suggested. “I must go to Stonehouse at once. Oliver, he has no one!”

Oliver shook his head. “I’ll not have you and our baby jouncing over bad roads to tend him in a place that will frighten even you, oh fearless one.”

This is easily solved, Laura thought, watching the mutiny in her sister’s eyes and the equal firmness on her brother-in-law’s face.

“I’ll go tomorrow.”

Why did I say that? she asked herself immediately, even as Nana’s eyes lightened up and Oliver looked relieved. I want to help my sister, she assured herself. It has nothing to do with Lt. Brittle’s offer of employment. I can scarcely imagine being influenced by something so totty-headed. He must think I am truly bored.

She had occasion to think about that as she composed herself for sleep later. She climbed into bed with her usual feeling of gratitude, even after the past three years, to know that her late husband would never open her door again. It was dark and there was no one in sight to scold her for feeling that way. She could even allow herself a moment to consider Lt. Brittle’s startling offer.

Laura couldn’t help remembering how Lt. Brittle had tucked up her blanket last night, and patted her shoulder. It was her secret alone: next to Nana’s heartfelt embrace, that was the kindest touch she had ever felt in her life.

“I will visit a powder monkey and I will return to Torquay,” she said out loud to the plaster whorls in the ceiling. “I would have to be an idiot to even consider what Lt. Brittle is suggesting. No one is that bored.”

Chapter Four

Perhaps I will see Surgeon Brittle again, Laura thought, as she walked to the administration building. The Marine at the entrance to the complex had pointed it out as a good place to begin searching for one little boy.

Neat walkways, well-tended courtyard … She didn’t know what she had expected, but it hadn’t been this. She counted ten substantial buildings connected by covered walkways of Italianate style. That’s intelligent, she thought. Patients with contagion can be isolated in distinct buildings.

The administration building appeared to be a warren of small offices and cubicles, staffed by a flotilla of clerks. Other than a glance or two in her direction, none of the men she passed seemed interested in offering help, so she continued down the hallway to a large desk, where another clerk sat.

“Good afternoon. I am looking for Matthew Pollock, a powder monkey from the Tireless,” she said, determined not to feel intimidated by the way he looked at her over the rim of his spectacles.

“Are you a relative?” the man asked.

“No. I …”

“Then there are no visitors.”

The clerk turned his attention to the ledger in front of him, as though she had already vanished. When he looked up again and saw her still standing before him, he even appeared surprised.

“I can’t disappear like an apparition,” Laura told him. She set down her valise. “I still want to see Matthew Pollock.”

A door opened down the hall and a man came out, resplendent in blue, with gold bullion and lace on his sleeves and collar. The clerk stood up at once.

She didn’t know his rank, but his appearance indicated someone considerably more exalted than the clerk. She wanted to speak to him, but he surprised her by striding directly to her and standing too close for comfort.

“You’re a day late.” He sniffed the air. Laura resisted a powerful urge to slap his face. “You don’t smell of gin, at least. You were to report to the clerk in room 15. Are you illiterate, as well as tardy? Well?”

He was too close. She was a tall woman, but she stepped back, reminded too much of her own father and Sir James, with their shouting and demands. She wanted to turn and run down the corridor and out into the quadrangle. Not this time, Laura, she told herself. Not ever again. Putting her hands behind her back so he would not see them tremble, she stood her ground, not moving an inch.

“You have me confused with someone else.”

The clerk gasped. Obviously no one else had ever contradicted this exalted personage before. It’s high time someone did, she told herself, even as her stomach began to churn.

“I don’t make mistakes.” He bit off each word like a dog snapping a bone for the marrow.

“I never knew that the Lord Almighty wore a naval uniform,” she snapped back.

She heard a strangled sound from the clerk, but knew better than to take her eyes off the man intimidating her. Maybe this was what she had wanted to say to her own father. Maybe she had stored it up in her heart and mind, waiting for the opportunity.

“I’m sacking you before you even begin!” the officer roared, perhaps thinking he was on a quarterdeck of a most unfortunate ship and she was his lowliest powder monkey.

“You think I came here for employment?” She pitched her voice deliberately low, so he was forced to listen. “I wouldn’t work for you if I was starving, and I most certainly am not.” She unclenched her hands from behind her back and brought them around to her front, so she could fish in her reticule.

She yanked out a sheet of paper. “My brother-in-law, Captain Oliver Worthy of the Tireless, thought I might need this. I told him it wouldn’t be necessary, but he insisted. Obviously he knows you better than I do.”

With a loud exhalation of air, the officer stepped back, as though propelled by his own breath. With a thunderous look at his clerk, he grabbed the note and read it.

Laura jerked the strings of her reticule together, wishing they would make a loud noise like a thunderclap, instead of a harmless little whish. Maybe I am like my sister, tough as a Cornish tin-pit pony, she thought. Wasn’t that what Lt. Brittle said about Nana? Couldn’t I use a champion, about now?

No champion appeared, but none was necessary, not after Captain Worthy’s brief note apparently. As the officer’s complexion turned from red to a mottled gray, she felt her own composure returning. She didn’t know what Oliver had written, but she suspected the note involved Lady Taunton, rather than plain Mrs. Taunton.

“Lady Taunton, a mistake was made,” the officer had the grace to say. It wasn’t much of an apology, but couldn’t have been easy, not with his clerk right there. “We must be so careful here.”

“I understand completely,” she replied, in what she hoped was her kindest voice. Then she could not resist. “I imagine there are female spies who attempt to weasel their way into naval secrets by talking to powder monkeys. Wise of you to be so cautious.”

She assumed what her late husband used to call her “pudding face,” and smiled at the officer, who wasn’t quite certain if he had just been held up to ridicule. Pudding face, indeed. Even her late husband—he who only complained—would have been impressed with the bland face she presented to the stuffed shirt in epaulets harassing her now. “Sir, I wish to know whom I have been addressing.”

Reminded so gently of his dereliction, he bowed again. “Admiral Sir David Carew at your service,” he replied. “I am chief administrator and physician.”

She curtsied again, thinking that if he could make a better beginning, she could, too. “Sir David, can you kindly direct me to the office that knows where such a little powder monkey might be found? He serves … served … on the Tireless.”

The physician indicated a door back down the corridor. “Room 12, my lady,” he said. “Let me escort you there.”

“I needn’t take you from your work,” she said, not wishing his escort at all.

“It is of no consequence,” he assured her.

She had no choice. She did manage to catch the look that passed between the clerk and admiral; the admiral gave the poor man such a glower that Laura was almost certain that no word of what had just happened would ever leave the clerk’s lips. The poor clerk would probably be set adrift in a lifeboat on the Amazon River at the mercy of headhunters, Laura thought, as she reassumed her pudding face.

The clerks in room 12 appeared astonished to see their chief administrator, which made Laura suspect Sir David seldom did his own legwork. And why should he, she thought. He is the Lord Almighty, after all. She managed to turn her laugh into a cough.