Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [349]
He was very close to me, the sun from the hatchway overhead striping the linen of his sleeve, the skin of his hand a deep ruddy bronze where it cradled my own white fingers, and the glinting silver of my wedding ring.
“It does,” I said softly, speaking to his thought. “You know it does.” I laid my other hand against his chest, its gold ring glowing in a bar of sunlight. “But where one vow can be kept, without damage to another…?”
He sighed, deeply enough to move the hand on my chest, then bent and kissed me, very gently.
“Aye, well, I wouldna have ye be forsworn,” he said, straightening up with a wry twist to his mouth. “You’re sure of this vaccination of yours? It does work?”
“It works,” I assured him.
“Perhaps I should go with ye,” he said, frowning slightly.
“You can’t—you haven’t been vaccinated, and typhoid’s awfully contagious.”
“You’re only thinking it’s typhoid, from what Leonard says,” he pointed out. “Ye dinna ken for sure that it’s that.”
“No,” I admitted. “But there’s only one way to find out.”
* * *
I was assisted up onto the deck of the Porpoise by means of a bosun’s chair, a terrorizing swing over empty air and frothing sea. I landed ignominiously in a sprawl on the deck. Once I regained my feet, I was astonished to find how solid the deck of the man-of-war felt, compared to the tiny, pitching quarterdeck of the Artemis, far below. It was like standing on the Rock of Gibraltar.
My hair had blown loose during the trip between the ships; I twisted it up and repinned it as best I could, then reached to take the medicine box I had brought from the midshipman who held it.
“You’d best show me where they are,” I said. The wind was brisk, and I was aware that it was taking a certain amount of work on the part of both crews to keep the two ships close together, even as both drifted leeward.
It was dark in the tween-decks, the confined space lit by small oil lamps that hung from the ceiling, swaying gently with the rise and fall of the ship, so that the ranks of hammocked men lay in deep shadow, blotched with dim patches of light from above. They looked like pods of whales, or sleeping sea beasts, lying humped and black, side by side, swaying with the movement of the sea beneath.
The stench was overpowering. What air there was came down through crude ventilator shafts that reached the upper deck, but that wasn’t a lot. Worse than unwashed seamen was the reek of vomitus and the ripe, throat-clogging smell of blood-streaked diarrhea, which liberally spattered the decking beneath the hammocks, where sufferers had been too ill to reach the few available chamber pots. My shoes stuck to the deck, coming away with a nasty sucking noise as I made my way cautiously into the area.
“Give me a better light,” I said peremptorily to the apprehensive-looking young midshipman who had been told off to accompany me. He was holding a kerchief to his face and looked both scared and miserable, but he obeyed, holding up the lantern he carried so that I could peer into the nearest hammock.
The occupant groaned and turned away his face as the light struck him. He was flushed with fever, and his skin hot to the touch. I pulled his shirt up and felt his stomach; it too was hot, the skin distended and hard. As I prodded gently here and there, the man writhed like a worm on a hook, uttering piteous groans.
“It’s all right,” I said soothingly, urging him to flatten out again. “Yes, I’ll help you; it will feel better soon. Let me look into your eyes, now. Yes, that’s right.”
I pulled back the eyelid; his pupil shrank in the light, leaving his eyes brown and red-rimmed with suffering.
“Christ, take away the light!” he gasped, jerking his head away. “It splits my head!” Fever, vomiting, abdominal cramps, headache.
“Do you have chills?” I asked, waving back the midshipman’s lantern.
The answer was more a moan than a word, but in the affirmative. Even in the shadows, I could see that many of the men in the hammocks were wrapped in their blankets, though it was stifling hot here below.