Voyager - Diana Gabaldon [355]
A quick canvass of the surviving crew had turned up two men pressed from a county gaol where they had been imprisoned for brewing illicit liquor. I had seized on these gratefully and put them to work building a still in which—to the horror of the crew—half the ship’s store of rum was being distilled into pure alcohol for disinfection.
I had posted one of the surviving midshipmen by the entrance to the sickbay and another by the galley, each armed with a basin of pure alcohol and instructions to see that no one went in or came out without dipping their hands. Beside each midshipman stood a marine with his rifle, charged with the duty of seeing that no one should drink the grimy contents of the barrel into which the used alcohol was emptied when it became too filthy to be used any longer.
In Mrs. Johansen, the gunner’s wife, I had found an unexpected ally. An intelligent woman in her thirties, she had understood—despite her having only a few words of broken English, and my having no Swedish at all—what I wanted done, and had done it.
If Elias was my right hand, Annekje Johansen was the left. She had single-handedly taken over the responsibility of scalding the goats’ milk, patiently pounding hard biscuit—removing the weevils as she did so—to be mixed with it, and feeding the resulting mixture to those hands strong enough to digest it.
Her own husband, the chief gunner, was one of the victims of the typhoid, but he fortunately seemed one of the lighter cases, and I had every hope that he might recover—as much because of his wife’s devoted nursing as because of his own hardy constitution.
“Ma’am, Ruthven says as somebody’s been a-drinking of the pure alcohol again.” Elias Pound popped up at my elbow, his round pink face looking drawn and wan, substantially thinned by the pressures of the last few days.
I said something extremely bad, and his brown eyes widened.
“Sorry,” I said. I wiped the back of a hand across my brow, trying to get my hair out of my eyes. “Don’t mean to offend your tender ears, Elias.”
“Oh, I’ve heard it before, ma’am,” Elias assured me. “Just not from a lady, like.”
“I’m not a lady, Elias,” I said tiredly. “I’m a doctor. Have someone go and search the ship for whoever it was; they’ll likely be unconscious by now.” He nodded and whirled on one foot.
“I’ll look in the cable tier,” he said. “That’s where they usually hide when they’re drunk.”
This was the fourth in the last three days. Despite all guards set over the still and the purified alcohol, the hands, living on half their usual daily ration of grog, were so desperate for drink that they contrived somehow to get at the pure grain alcohol meant for sterilization.
“Goodness, Mrs. Malcolm,” the purser had said, shaking his bald head when I complained about the problem. “Seamen will drink anything, ma’am! Spoilt plum brandy, peaches mashed inside a rubber boot and left to ferment—why, I’ve even known a hand caught stealing the old bandages from the surgeon’s quarters and soaking them, in hopes of getting a whiff of alcohol. No, ma’am, telling them that drinking it will kill them certainly won’t stop them.”
Kill them it did. One of the four men who had drunk it had died; two more were in their own boarded-off section of the sickbay, deeply comatose. If they survived, they were likely to be permanently brain-damaged.
“Not that being on a bloody floating hellhole like this isn’t likely to brain-damage anyone,” I remarked bitterly to a tern who alighted on the rail nearby. “As if it isn’t enough, trying to save half the miserable lot from typhoid, now the other half is trying to kill themselves with my alcohol! Damn the bloody lot of them!”
The tern cocked its head, decided I was not edible, and flew away. The ocean stretched empty all around—before us,