Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

'Those?' replied his guide, looking at them with narrowed eyes. 'Those are what we call birds, your worship. And there, before Joselito's warehouse, is the hospital itself.'

Stephen looked at it with some concern, a low building with very small barred windows, the flat mud roof barely a hand's reach from the filthy ground. Prudent, no doubt in a country so subject to earthquakes, but as a hospital it left to be desired.

'The hospital, with a hundred people at the least, lying on beds raised a good span from the ground. And there I see a vile heretic coming out of it, with his countryman.'

'Which? The little small fat yellow-haired gentleman, who staggers so?'

'No, no, no. He is an old and mellow Christian - your honour too is an old and mellow Christian, no doubt?'

'None older; few more mellow.'

'A Christian though English. He is the great lawyer come to lecture the university of Lima on the British constitution. His name is Raleigh, don Curtius Raleigh: you have heard of him. He is drunk. I must run and fetch his coach.'

'He has fallen.'

'Clearly. It is the tall black-haired villain who is picking him up, the surgeon of the Liverpool ship, that is the heretic. I must run.'

'Do not let me detain you, sir. Pray accept this trifle."

'God will repay your worship. Farewell, sir. May no new thing arise.'

'May no new thing arise,' replied Stephen. With his pocket spy-glass he watched the birds for a while, their name hovering on the edge of his mind. Presently, as don Curtius' coach rolled into the square, silent on the dust, they flew off, one carrying the desiccated cat, and the other snatching at it. They flew inland, towards Lima, a splendid-looking white-towered city five or six miles away with an infinitely more splendid series of mountains behind it, rising higher and higher in the distance, their snow at last blending with the white sky and the clouds.

The carriage rolled away, drawn by six mules, don Curtius singing Greensleeves.

Stephen approached the remaining Englishman, took off his hat, and said, 'Francis Geary, a very good day to you, sir.'

'Stephen Maturin! I thought for a moment it looked like you, but my spectacles are covered with dust.' He took them off and peered myopically at his friend. 'What happiness to see you! What joy to find a Christian in this barbarous land!'

'You are just come out of the hospital, I find.'

'Yes, indeed. One of my people - I am surgeon of the Three Graces - has what looks to me very like the marthambles, and I wished to isolate him, under proper care, until it declares itself, rather than infect the whole ship. It is as deadly as measles or the smallpox to islanders, and we have many of them aboard. But no. They would not hear of it. So I went to see Mr Raleigh, who had travelled out with us, and who is a Roman, in case he could persuade them - he lectures on law at the university: an influential man. But no, no and no. They gave him a bottle or two of excellent wine, as I dare say you noticed, but they would not yield. On the way from Lima he told me that he did not expect to succeed, their memory of the buccaneers, the sacking of churches and so on being so very vivid; and he was right, I suppose. At all events they do not choose to have anything to do with me or my patient.'

'Then I am afraid my case is hopeless, for my patient is not only a Protestant but a clergyman too. Come and drink a cup of coffee with me.'

'I should be very happy. But your case would have been hopeless had he been the Pope. The place is so low and airless and fetid, the numbers so great and indiscriminately heaped upon one another, that they would never have left your parson there.'

Geary and Maturin had studied medicine together: they had shared a skeleton and several unclaimed victims of the Liffey or the Seine. Now, as they sat in the shade, drinking coffee, they spoke with the uninhibited directness of medical men. 'My patient,' said Stephen, 'is also my assistant. He was as devoted to natural philosophy as you, particularly to birds, and although he had followed no regular course, attended no lectures, walked no wards, he became a useful surgeon's mate by constant attendance in the sick-berth and frequent dissection; and since he was a well-read, cultivated man, he was also an agreeable companion. Unhappily, he recently came to suspect that he had contracted a venereal disease, and when during an exceptionally long period without fresh water to wash our clothes he developed salt-sores, he thought his suspicions were confirmed: it is true that his mind was very much perturbed at the time for reasons that it would be tedious to relate and almost impossible to convey - the distress of jealousy, imagined ill-usage and homesickness entered into it - and that his lesions were far more important than any I have seen at any time. Yet even so, how a man of his experience could persuade himself that they were syphilitic I cannot tell; but persuaded he was, and he dosed himself privately with calomel and guaiacum. Naturally enough these had no effect; so he took to the corrosive sublimate.'

'Corrosive sublimate?' cried Geary.

'Yes, sir,' said Stephen, 'and in such amounts that I hesitate to name them. He brought himself very low indeed before he told me: our relations were by then far from cordial, though there remained a deep latent affection. Fresh water, the proper lotions and a conviction that he was not diseased have improved the state of his skin remarkably, but the effects of this intolerable deal of sublimate remains. Young gentlewoman," he called towards the dim recesses of the wine-shop, 'be so good as to prepare me a ball of coca-leaves.'

'With lime, sir?'

'By all means; and a trifle of llipta too, if you have it."

'What are the symptoms at this point?' asked Geary.

'Strongly marked vertigo, perhaps aggravated by the loss of an eye some years ago; difficulty in following the sequence of letters; some degree of mental confusion and distress; great physical weakness of course; a most irregular pulse; chaotic defecation. Thank you, my dear' - this to the girl with the coca-leaves.

They carried on with Martin's present state, and when Stephen had said all that occurred to him without reference to his notes Geary asked, 'Is there on the one hand a difficulty in telling right from left, and on the other a certain loss of hair?"

'There is,' said Stephen: he stopped chewing and looked attentively at his friend.

'I have known two similar cases, and in Vienna itself I heard of several more.'

'Did you hear of cures, at all?'

'Certainly. Both my men walked away from the hospital unaided, one quite well, the other with only a slight impediment: though in his case there had been a baldness of the entire person and loss of nails, which Birnbaum cites as the criterion; but the treatment was long and delicate. What do you intend to do with your patient?'

'I am at a loss. My ship is about to be docked, and he cannot remain aboard. I had hoped to find him a room in the hospital until I could arrange for his passage home in a merchantman: we may cruise for a great while, and in any case a privateer is no place for an invalid. Perhaps Lima...' Stephen fell silent.

'When you speak of a passage,' said Geary, 'I presume the gentleman is not the usual indigent surgeon's mate?'

'Never in life. He is an Anglican clergyman with two livings; and he has done well in prize-money. If you were to look into the bay you would see two captured ships, a clearly-determined share of which belongs to him.'

'I say this only because our captain, a paragon of nautical virtue and of many others, is answerable to his owners, insatiable men who know nothing of charity or good-will. Yet since there is no question of either, why does not your patient sail in the Three Graces'? We have two empty state-rooms amidships; and she is a remarkably steady ship.'