Not knowing quite what he meant, she smoothed the hair from his brow and said: 'Don't worry about the Lynx now, all the hostages are safe.'
'Yardarm . . . both of them,' he murmured and seemed to lose consciousness.
'Yardarm?' she asked Jackson.
'Yes, ma'am,' the American said briskly, touching the side of his captain's throat to check the pulse, 'those privateersmen will hang from a ship's yardarm. Maybe not all of them, but the leaders. Not the Calypso's,' he explained. 'We'll probably take 'em back to England for trial.'
'You have to capture them first.'
'Oh, I'm sure the captain has a plan for that.'
She wanted to shake the American. Did the fool not realize his captain was dying? That he was slipping away from them even now, like smoke in the wind? And they could do nothing to prevent it: the great gash in his arm, now bound up and with a tourniquet above it, was not the problem. He was dying because as his men had swum with desperate haste to the Earl of Dodsworth with him lashed to the raft, his blood had been draining from his body with every pump of his heart. The men who had tied the first tourniquet could not see - did not think to look - that it had come undone.
As she began to weep, she understood that, such was their faith in him that a mention of the Lynx brought the confident comment that the captain would have a plan ... In her imagination she saw him dead, and remembered the funeral service, and the dreadful business of the body sewn up in a hammock and tipped over the side from a plank. One of the seamen had died of a fever off Capetown.
Jackson's body went taut for a moment, then he hurried to the entryport. He came back a few moments later and said: it's the boat with Mr Bowen.'
Obviously they had faith in this man Bowen. It was a pity that the Earl of Dodsworth's regular surgeon was a prisoner along with the rest of the ship's officers and men in the camp on shore.
Suddenly a man appeared out of the darkness behind her and knelt beside Nicholas. A hand went down to his face and a finger pushed back an eyelid. 'You still with us, sir?' The voice had a bantering note which infuriated her. Was this Bowen?
'I didn't cover one of their pawns,' Nicholas murmured. It was an extraordinary thing to say, but Bowen laughed and turned to the plump, elderly man now standing beside him, a man with flowing white hair and carrying a box with a rope handle.
'Put it down there, Southwick. We ought to have brought the chessboard. Now, Jackson, what happened?'
She wanted to tell him first to do something about the terrible pallor of his skin, to make him drink some brandy to stop this awful shivering.
'Cutlass slash across the upper arm, sir. We put a tourniquet on, just as you showed us years ago, and a bandage, and lowered him on the raft to tow him back to the Calypso. We hadn't gone above a hundred yards when Rossi reckons he'd never cover that distance alive, so we made for this ship, sir.'
'Why the devil didn't you go back to the Heliotrope?'
'She's French, sir. All that gabbling and panic with the passengers. They wouldn't keep out of the way once they saw Mr Ramage had been wounded - he'd spoken to all of them, o' course, when he first got on board. Oh yes, and Spurgeon was killed. It was trying to save him that led to Mr Ramage getting cut.'
Cut, indeed, she thought, not knowing that Jackson was using a slang word regularly spoken in the West Indies to describe a sword wound. It originated among the Negroes, when they slashed each other with machetes, but she had never heard the phrase.
Bowen had knelt while Jackson talked and was unwinding the bandage Rossi had just put on.
She said: 'It's a clean wound, I can tell you that.'
'Thank you, ma'am,' Bowen said courteously, and continued to unwind the strip of sheet.
'You might start it bleeding again.'
'It is still bleeding,' Bowen commented. 'But don't you worry. Perhaps you'd like to return to your cabin, ma'am? The sight of blood...'
Jackson coughed and said: 'The lady helped us hoist Mr Ramage on board and she found the tourniquet had come adrift. Then she cleaned the wound - the basin of water is still over there.'
'My apologies, ma'am,' Bowen said, and detecting more in Jackson's words than the bare meaning, added: 'Perhaps you would care to help me. A woman's touch is gentler than that of my clumsy but well-meaning shipmates. Now, Southwick -' he paused as he began to lift the bandage clear '- open the medicine chest for me and stand by with the pad of cloth you'll find in the top left-hand corner. Rossi, let's have that lantern closer. . .'
He now had the wound uncovered and seemed to be talking to himself. 'Ah yes, chipped the humerus bone slightly but no fracture because the blow was directed at a sharp angle downwards... missed the main artery... veins bleeding - that seems to be the main problem... Muscle torn but probably still functional...'
He bent over Ramage's head. 'Still with us, sir? Ah, good. Would you try to move your left hand slightly? Ah - yes, it hurts. Now just wriggle the fingers. That starts more bleeding but tells us that no ligaments have been cut. You'll be able to carve a roast in three or four weeks. Southwick, stand by with that pad... the lady did a very good job of cleaning the wound; nothing for me to do there. Now, I'm going to release the tourniquet for a minute or two, and then retie it. Except for the lady, you all know why, but as it looks rather alarming, should I explain, ma'am?'
She nodded, finding that she now had complete faith in the man: he seemed far removed from her idea of a naval surgeon, which in turn was based on the rather tough individual presiding over the Earl of Dodsworth's medicine chest.
'Well, if we leave a limb cut off from its blood for too long, the flesh can die and gangrene starts, so we release a tourniquet for a minute or two every twenty minutes, and then tie it again.'
He loosened it, waited and retied it with skilled fingers. 'Pad, Southwick - perhaps you would hold it in place, ma'am, while I apply the bandage. No, there's no need to press, and it's not hurting him. He's in pain, but that's from the whole wound.'
As he prepared to roll on the bandage he leaned over and sniffed and commented: 'He's refused the brandy again, eh?'
' 'Fraid so, sir,' Jackson said. 'Even when the lady tried.'
Bowen looked up at her for the first time: up to this moment he had rarely taken his eyes off Ramage's wound or his face.
'You notice, ma'am, that we all seem to be rather familiar with the, er, routine of patching up our captain. The fact is he does get himself knocked about. I remember the last time, at Curaçao, was just like this except that -'
'Jackson told me,' she said hurriedly. The strange thing was she had not felt faint when she had to retie the tourniquet, wash the wound and staunch the bleeding; when she believed he was dying and thought that if he was to be saved she would have to do whatever was necessary. But now, with Nicholas obviously not dying - not even in any danger, according to this surgeon, who was clearly an extremely competent man - she could feel the strength going from her knees, and the lantern was beginning to blur.
'The brandy, Jackson,' Bowen snapped. 'The lady.'
Southwick bent down and caught her as she slid sideways. 'There, m'dear, just have a sup of this . . . gently, it'll make you cough . . . now swallow.'
'Put her down on her back,' Bowen said, 'and get her head on a level with her heart. Now, ma'am, breathe deeply, and when you feel better, I'd be glad of your help.'
Quickly she sat up, the faintness vanishing. 'Yes, what can I do?'
'Just hold his forearm up high enough for me to pass the bandage round... You see, you don't feel faint while there's something for you to do: when you thought he was dying, you took control. Now you've no responsibility, you get the vapours, like some silly young woman in a London drawing room!'