John Masters (31 page)

"I close now," Old Joe the publican growled. "You go." He rattled his keys menacingly. Eliott Conquy rose to his feet, stifling a yawn. His table companion cried, "Stow your blather, man, d'you think I'd be staying where I'm not wanted?" He rose, weaving, and fumbled in his fob. Eliott said, "It's paid for, Mr. O'Brien." He swept several pieces of paper off the table, stuffed them into his pocket, and left the tavern at O'Brien's heels.

They started along Engineer Lane, O'Brien continuing his discourse from the tavern as though he had not been interrupted. "So ye see, me boy, that stuff I'm telling you about the heart and the spleen and the kidneys is just what we know now, and if that's all we know, that's all we can teach, isn't that right? But because it's what we teach doesn't make it right, d'ye see? Because..." He stopped, teetering and pointed. "There! That's disease. That's where it's bred." Eliott started, for they were at the corner of Bell Lane, and O'Brien was pointing at the Shaar Ashanayin synagogue. Old Mr. Aboab's scandalized face, under a nightcap, was peering down at them from an upper window.

"I'm not pointing only at your religion, Eliott," O'Brien said. "Mine's as bad ... worse ... I mean that in religion, it's a matter of
believing.
In medicine it's a matter of
not
believing, but of finding out. But why do I tell you, who want to be a rabbi?"

"I don't know what I want," Eliott said.

"Well, you're young. Holy Mother of Mary, I want to piss."

"Here," Eliott said. They were by Mr. Pitt's new Garrison Library. Behind it, the garden sloped uphill under scattered trees. O'Brien went up a few paces, and Eliott waited, looking into the garden and listening with amused affection to the torrential sound of Mr. O'Brien's relief. O'Brien was a square, short man with a big mouth and ears and a trembling hand. He was surgeon to the 54th Foot and in his forties: he might have been great and rich, but for the curse of the Irish.

It was a night of the levanter, mid-August, hot, close, the gray cloud mass stifling the town. Eliott was sweating, though wearing only a thin shirt, cotton trousers, and sandals. The moon gave a hazy dispersed light, s
hin
i
n
g through the cloud, and by it he now saw a dark shape under a fig tree in the library garden and two more beside. They were men, one lying and two standing.

"There's a man ill there," he said.

"Ill or drunk," O'Brien said. He staggered a few steps up the garden. One of the men came down at once, stopped a few paces off, and said, "Para,
para, senor. No se acerca
mas.
"

Eliott saw by his leather leggings, deep sash, and the Huelva hat perched over a bandanna that he was an Andalusian. He answered in Spanish, "We thought we saw a man down. This gentleman is a doctor."

The Andalusian said, "Our friend has drunk too much, nothing more."

"What's he saying?" O'Brien demanded. Eliott told him and moved away. O'Brien joined him a few moments later. He said, "I wonder where those fellows come from."

"Spain," Eliott said, for of course the men were smugglers: that is, they were agents of Spanish merchants come to buy tobacco. England was at war with Spain, and the land frontier was closed, but the Gibraltar merchants saw to it that the smugglers could come in and out of the garrison at will, war or no war, regardless of what orders the governor gave.

"Does it not worry you that these men come and go as they please?" O'Brien said.

"It's not our business," Eliott said.

"Ah, you scorpions!" O'Brien said. "Nothing that does not happen on the Rock exists for you. But man, there's a world outside, and you're tied to it, for better or worse, in a hundred ways. If you're to be a physician, you have to think always, ask yourself, why is this happening? where has this come from? where is it going? ... But you're not going to be a physician, are you?"

"I don't know, Mr. O'Brien," Eliott said. "Good night, Mr. O'Brien." He turned up Forty Steps and a minute later let himself into the family house on Flat Bastion Road and crept up to his room as silently as the creaking stairs would allow. He drew the curtains, lit the lamp, and sat down at the table. A copy of Albo's
Book of Principles
lay open at the section denouncing heresy, with on one side a torn volume of Maimonides'
Guide for the Perplexed
and on the other the
Book of Criticism
by Abraham ben David of Posquieres. Pages of notes in his own careful but ill-formed Hebrew, written with a scratchy quill and spotted with ink where the quill had spluttered, littered the table. Every time his Teacher came in, the old man shook his head sadly to see the word of G*D so disfigured and said, "If it weren't for the spirit in you, David, I'd think you had no respect for the Word"; and he'd stoop and pick up the sheets that had blown to the floor.

From his pocket David Eliott Conquy pulled the sheets he had swept up from the tavern table and spread them over the Hebrew texts. Here was a diagram of the heart; Mr. O'Brien must have had half a dozen glasses of brandy by the time he drew that, for it would not have been very clear even in a good light. Even so, it was hard to imagine just how the heart functioned. He would have to see a heart, a real one, to know what these muscles and arteries looked like. He turned to the next sheet; the digestive system...

He looked at the medical drawings and the half-hidden texts. Which was it to be? Sometimes the Word of G*D filled his thoughts, sometimes the formation and function of the human body. Or should he give them both up and learn to be a merchant worthy of his employer and future father-in-law? But did he want to marry Esther, or was he doing it only because the fathers had arranged it...?

The lamp was guttering when Nahum Conquy quietly opened the door two hours later, at three in the morning, and came in. He looked down at his son, head on the table, arms spread, asleep. He looked at the medical drawings that covered the sacred Hebrew books and the copied sections of the Torah and raised his eyes to heaven. Then he touched his son's shoulder and said, "Come, David ... it is time you slept. What will Mr. Matania think if you appear before him red-eyed and haggard?"

David Eliott stumbled to his bed, flopped flat, and returned at once to sleep. His father noticed that there was no smell of alcohol on his breath. That craving, at least, he had not learned from the Irish surgeon. He looked again at the medical drawings, muttered, "Blasphemy," and pushed them all into a drawer, leaving the religious works displayed on the table.

Eliott sat on a high stool in Baruch Matania's counting house on Bomb House Lane, looking out the window. The blue water danced in the sun. The wind blew gustily, and he watched a young woman's light dress blowing about her as she walked along the Line Wall. The dresses of the officers' ladies scandalized his mother, for they wore only a single thickness of muslin, often damped, and now the wind was pressing it to their bodies. He yawned.

The familiar sharp nasal voice aroused him with a jerk. "Would it not be more comfortable if I were to provide you with a bed here, Mr. Conquy?"

Baruch Matania was small and hunchbacked and heavily perfumed. He wore a black wig to hide his thin gray hair and held a silk handkerchief to his lips when in the presence of young women to catch the saliva that then dripped, uncontrollable, from his jaws.

Eliott stood up. He said, "I'm sorry."

Mr. Matania limped to the window, his gold-handled cane tapping. "Sit down, David. I know why you're tired. Your father's told me.... Let us make a bargain. I will release you from this clerkship if you will promise to give up the medical studies and concentrate on the rabbinate. And marry Esther at once, as soon as the Teacher gives us a date. I'll settle five hundred pounds a year on you. I have made all the money I need, and it is time I paid some back to bring forth a respected Teacher in Israel. You shall be that Teacher, David."

"Thank you, sir," Eliott muttered. " 'Tis most generous of you. I'm not worthy."

"I often have doubts myself, on that score," Mr. Matania said testily. "Well, consider my proposal carefully."

He tapped out. Sighing, Eliott returned to the ledgers ... bill of lading, tobacco, Wilmington, North Carolina ... Sight draft, Navy Victualing Commissioner, £ 13,000 ... His head drooped.

Theodore Whittle, master of the Schooner
Partridge
, shifted his quid from the left cheek to the right and shot a stream of tobacco juice over the side into the harbor. "Come aboard, Eliott," he called, "—always welcome." Eliott hesitated. He had been getting manifests from a ship at the New Mole and was on his way back to Mr.

Matania's; but Mr. Whittle was an old friend, English, an ex-navy boatswain settled now on the Rock and doing well by running cargoes between Gibraltar, Moroccan ports, and England.

Mr. Whittle called again, and Eliott went on board. Mr. Whittle knew better than to offer him liquor but gave him lime juice instead. Mr. Whittle settled himself on the upturned dinghy and looked up the gray-green slope of the Rock to the levanter cloud hiding the crest. He shook his head. "It'll be worse tomorrow. I hate the levanter—masters run their vessels aground, husbands and wives fight.... Do you have the fever ashore?"

Eliott said, "Not that I have heard. Why?"

Mr. Whittle said, "Three days ago
Dido
stopped a xebec, but the crew shouted they was from Malaga, and the fever was killing off three hundred people every day there, so the captain said shove off, don't touch them."

Eliott said, "Why would he do that?"

"Because there's some believe the fevers and pestilence is passed from one man to another, contagious-like, and doesn't breed by itself."

Eliott thought, that would mean the fever could come here from somewhere else. From Malaga. And if it could come by sea, then it could come by land. Mr. O'Brien's interest in the smugglers in the library garden of two weeks ago suddenly became understandable, as also his upbraiding of Eliott's insularity.

Mr. Whittle said, "Mind, I don't know about this contagion, myself. I think there has to be conditions that the fever likes, and then it comes of its own accord."

Eliott wondered whether Mr. O'Brien had heard about the pestilence in Malaga. He thought he ought to tell him and after a few more minutes' gossip excused himself and hurried along the mole. On reaching the shore he did not go to Mr. Matania's establishment but to Town Range Barracks, where the 54th Foot was quartered. He found O'Brien in his little room off the sick ward. Fifty men of the regiment were drilling on the tiny square inside the buildings, sweating profusely in their heavy scarlet coats and high leather stocks. O’Brien glanced up from a thick book he was writing in and said, "Eliott, me boy! I was just going to ask you to come. I'm thinking we have some cases of the Bulam fever, and I'm thinking, if that's true, I'm going to be terrible short-handed. I was going to ask, could you come and give me a hand an hour or two a day? Ye said once ye'd give an eye to work with me, so..."

Eliott felt the manifests in his pocket. The hard edges of them suddenly made up his mind for him. He gave them to O'Brien and said, "Just send a man with these to Mr. Matania, and I'll stay with you as long as you need me." O'Brien clapped his hands eagerly. "That's me boy! Now I want you to help me get a full record of everything we can about the patients. Everything! I wish we had time to put down all about their fathers and mothers and where they spent every hour of the past thirty days ... and that's what we're going to have to do one day ... but with only you and me and Thompson the hospital mate we'll just have to do what we can." He gave Eliott the book and went into the sick ward. "Now write this down, Eliott ... 'Private Richard Tamlyn, 54th. Born Haworth, Yorks. Age twenty-four. Town Range Barracks, in Corporal Lindwall's room. Admitted August 31, 1804, ten A.M.' ... Got it? Now write that Tamlyn was in here with ophthalmia from the seventh to the fourteenth of August. We've had a deal of ophthalmia in the garrison, and there just may be a connection with the fever. We don't know. We don't know
anything,
Eliott, always mind that. Now let's go and see the man. He's in the end bed there. I'll speak, and you write down."

The ward was an ordinary barrack room, with ten beds on either side. The floor was of stone paving, well scrubbed. One sick man slept, a couple of others sat on the edge of their beds in trousers and shirts, playing cards on an empty barrel between them. The thud of the drum beating time for the drilling soldiers echoed loudly between the whitewashed walls.

The man in the end bed was tall and lantern-jawed, with thin, lank brown hair. "Write that down, how he looks," O'Brien said. He turned to the patient. "Now, Tamlyn, how d'ye feel?"

"Bad, sir, bad," the man replied in a scratchy voice. "Sir, am I..."

"Where's the pain now?"

"All over ... like I'd been beat, doctor. Ooh, ooh." O'Brien laid a hand on his forehead and said, "Chill... write it down, Eliott.... August 31, eleven A.M. Chill. Violent pains back and limbs. Throat sore ... Stick your tongue out.... tongue furred, whitish. You look queasy.... Head, stomach? Both. When was your last stool? ... Shit, Tamlyn. Last stool yesterday, can't remember what it was like, didn't look ... but we have to, Eliott, it's very important in fevers.... Urine—piss?"

"I wants to, but I can't. I wants to now."

"Under the bed. Hold it for him, Eliott. There. Let it go.

... Hm. Not much. Write, 'Wants to urinate often but with little success; urine produced' is thick, high-colored. Pulse—one hundred, full.' "

"Doctor, am I going to die?"

"Of course not. Cheer up, man. Holy Mary, let's have some air to breathe in here." He walked down the ward to the far door and opened it. The thudding of the drum and the yelling of the sergeants burst in louder. "That noise won't disturb
our
patients," he said. "They'd think they was dead without it. Write in Tamlyn's report, 'Very nervous.' That's a common symptom in the beginning of this fever. Depression, nervousness, fear."