Billy Bird had among his company a fellow that they called the Doctor. He was not, in reality, a physical doctor or a doctor of anything for that matter, but he had been an apothecary’s assistant, and through much trial and error among the Brethren of the Coast he had learned a few things about the surgeon’s art.
Even as the Elizabeth Galley was standing toward the harbor entrance, Billy ordered the man to see Marlowe carried below and attended to. Billy had no real hope of Marlowe’s living. But then he didn’t really think any of them would live to see the open ocean.
The breeze was good, but the tide was flooding, and they were having some trouble in stemming it. At the rate they were going, they would be under the Quail Island battery for fifteen minutes, long enough for the point-blank fire to sink them and then some. But Billy set the Doctor to work on Marlowe because he was by nature an optimist.
The first shot did not surprise him, not as much as the fact that they missed. He did not see how they could. But they would get their range with the second shot, and then it would be a hailstorm of iron.
He braced, waited for it, and waited some more. It was absolute torture. He felt like a mouse being toyed with by a cat. Looking straight into the muzzles of those big guns, he felt as though he were standing naked on the quarterdeck.
The Indian Ocean was opening up before them and they were beyond the arc of fire of half the battery’s guns before Billy allowed a spark of hope to burn in his heart. Ten minutes later they were past the battery entirely, out of the harbor, with no pursuit that he could see and not one hit from the great guns on the island. Billy Bird did not know what had happened. He was not even very curious. He was just thankful.
Forty minutes later the Doctor came topside, his apron covered with blood. He was holding something wrapped in a bloody piece of canvas, which he threw overboard, then ambled over to Billy Bird, wiping his hands uselessly on his apron.
Billy pointed with his chin to the spot where the Doctor had thrown the bundle overboard. “Marlowe’s arm?”
The Doctor nodded. “What was left of it.”
“Will he live?”
The Doctor shrugged. “He’s a strong one, and the arm come off clean. He’s got as good a chance as any. Better than most, I guess.”
Billy nodded. He knew this routine well enough. The Doctor had done what he could, and now there was nothing for it but to wait, and Marlowe would live or he would not, and there was nothing more that they could do.
Billy wondered if he might have some claim on Elizabeth’s affection, some chance with her for something more lasting, if in fact Marlowe did die. And then he flushed with embarrassment that he could think such a thing, cleared his throat and looked away, as if the Doctor might guess at the callous thoughts that had crossed his mind.
They had poured some rum down Marlowe’s throat, prior to the operation, and mostly by reflex he had gagged it down. Three men had held him while the Doctor did his business with knife and saw, pulling the arteries out with a tenaculum and tying them off and then covering the stump with a clean wool cap.
Marlowe passed out halfway through the procedure. Elizabeth sat at his other side, holding his still-intact hand, staring at his face through her tears. Had he been awake, she would have forced herself to be more stoic, but as he was not aware at all of his surroundings, she let her grief and her fear go, and those feelings made her eyes brim over with tears, which ran down her cheeks, soaked into her cotton shirt.
Soon after the operation was complete, the fever set in. The Doctor came below every hour, felt Marlowe’s forehead, took his pulse, tried to say something encouraging to Elizabeth, who remained at his side. But he sounded less and less optimistic.
Elizabeth swabbed Marlowe’s brow, spooned broth into his mouth, sang softly to him as she would have to a sleeping child. The fever raged on, and Marlowe remained unconscious.
He was unconscious when Madagascar disappeared below the horizon.
He was unconscious when they wrapped Francis Bickerstaff’s body in old sailcloth, two round shot at his feet, his Bible and his folio of Hamlet clutched to his chest. Those were the two books, Elizabeth knew, that he would have wished to have with him for eternity, and even if Francis himself would have scoffed at the idea of such things accompanying one’s earthly remains untold fathoms to the bottom of the ocean, still she felt better for doing it.
In the early-morning overcast they hove the ship to and buried those who had died during their final run from St. Mary’s, and last of all was Francis Bickerstaff. Marlowe, racked with fever, did not see Elizabeth reading the sermon, did not see her break down halfway through, doubling over as if the weight of her grief were pushing her down, Billy Bird stepping over to her, gently taking the Bible from her hand, placing his arm around her, and pressing her weeping face into his chest as he read the last of the words.
“We commit to the deep the body of our friend, Francis Bickerstaff. May God have mercy on his soul.”
More ceremony than was common among the Red Sea Rovers. Billy didn’t really know this Francis Bickerstaff, had only met him the month before in the Gulf of Aden, but from the looks of genuine grief on the faces of the men who had sailed with him, and Elizabeth, her hand twisting his cloak, sobbing against his chest, he reckoned this was some man going over the standing part of the foresheet.
He closed the book, nodded, and the men at the inboard end of the plank lifted it high.
Marlowe did not see the body of Francis Bickerstaff slide off the plank, splash into the Indian Ocean, a dull white spot, circling down and finally swallowed up by the blue-black depths. He did not see it, and that was a blessing as far as Elizabeth could figure, because the grief would have killed him faster than the fever ever would.
Marlowe remained in a state of burning delirium for another week, sweating and shivering, racked by wild, disjointed dreams with profound overtones of guilt and loss, liquid dreams that made no sense save for the horrible emotions suspended within them.
Elizabeth stayed by his side, feeding him, bathing him, talking and singing to him, sleeping in a cot set up at his side. The Doctor came regularly, checked Marlowe’s condition, bled him and applied poultices and administered Peruvian bark.
Overhead, on the brightly lit deck, the ship settled into a routine of sorts, Billy Bird in command of the Elizabeth Galley, Honeyman elected quartermaster, the crew shaken down to their watches. But Elizabeth saw little of it, sequestered below in her twilight netherworld, stinking of disease and medicine and bilge.
Just after noon on the tenth day, around thirty-three degrees forty-five minutes south latitude, Marlowe’s fever broke. His mind was suddenly clear, and his skin felt cool. Not the unhealthy chill that led to trembling and chattering teeth, but cool, comfortable. He opened his eyes, turned his head, and he was looking at Elizabeth and she was looking at him, and tears streamed down her cheeks, and he wanted to reach out and comfort her.
He reached his right hand over to her, but there was something wrong because move as he might he could not see his hand, or his arm. He looked down, puzzled, looked to Elizabeth for some explanation.
She smiled, and the tears came faster, and she swallowed and reached over to him and stroked his face. “It’s not there anymore, my love,” she whispered, “but you will not need it because I am here.”
She fed him, gave him water, changed his clothes. She told him what had happened and called for Billy Bird, who was pleased to see him alive and likely to stay that way. Billy filled in those parts of the fight that Elizabeth did not know.
“But what of Francis? Where is Francis?” Marlowe asked, and he was not happy to see the looks on the others’ faces.
There followed on the heels of Marlowe’s recovery and his finding out what had happened in those last moments on St. Mary’s the blackest sort of grief, from which he could not surface. Nor did he try very hard, like a man overboard who has given up and lets the ocean take him.
He sat in the great cabin, staring out the windows at the sea rolling away astern of them, pictured Francis Bickerstaff’s body sinking down, down, down to depths the likes of which no living man could go, inhabited by creatures no one could imagine. He pictured the bound body coming to rest in the sand and the blackness.
Over and over, day after day, he tortured himself with that image. He ate little, spoke little. Elizabeth stopped
