Cutthroats of the Coast

Chapter 8 - Blood!

Mandrake and I descended into the dank heat of the orlop to find that we were not the only ones there.  The Betsy's surgeon, Macphail, was singing some ballad popular several years ago to the discordant fife of a badly scarred cockney, called Jack Frith, whom I had learned to avoid.  To this horrible noise a soft headed sailor, who I knew to be the surgeon’s man-servant, pirouetted around the deck in a crazed jig. 

 MacPhail had placed quite a number of lanterns around the dim and cramped orlop deck, which was painted white to help reflect the meagre light. It was still not sufficient enough to really illuminate the deepest recesses, within which the occasional pair of bright spots blinked, betraying the presence of The Betsy's rats, driven to the lower decks by the activity above.

Stuffy, hot and stinking, the orlop was barely large enough to hold the surgeon, his mates and his equipment.  Occupying the centre of the cleared deck were two of the galley's butcher's blocks.   These were great wooden tables, scored and gouged by the cooks over many voyages.  They lay end to end, bound together.  A number of ropes lay across them and were also fastened to each leg.  I shivered at the sight of these, thinking of what service they would perform, binding a screaming, writhing man down as the surgeon hastened through his flesh.

There was light enough to see MacPhail's tools.  Laid out in a line on a sea chest were a dreadful array of long knives, probes, pincers and saws.  Dwarfing all of these, a cook's cleaver lay at the end of the line.  The edges of the knives shone and MacPhail himself stood beside his tools, slowly scraping his whetstone up the length of one particularly vicious looking blade.  As Mandrake and I reached the foot of the companionway he looked at us and smiled.  He was a short man, quite bald, and was stripped to his shirt in the stifling heat of the orlop. I thought his shirt most peculiar.  It was extremely dirty, stained all over with stiff brown paint, though the sleeves were worse, which were thick with it to the elbows.  

"Come to help?  And you've brought the Captain's moll, too.   How pleasant,” he said brightly, sharpening the blade with nary a pause.  "It will be a most convivial engagement even though you have caught me in my working clothes.” He belched, swayed back on his feet, then paused in his grinding to steady himself against one of the butcher's blocks.  "Bugger!"  MacPhail exclaimed, dropping the knife to the deck and sticking his finger in his mouth, sucking on it like a babe at a tit.

Mandrake glared at him, "Drunk again, you clumpish sot?  And you'll be cutting your mates in that state?"

"What of it, you sodomising goat!"  MacPhail slurred.  "Ye think it'll be better cutting if I'm shober?  Shall we have a parson down here so that he can pray over 'em when they cry for their mas and shit themselves? Will that make it better for ye, Mandrake?"  He bent down and brought out a stone jug from under the blocks.  "Will you bashtards join me in a swig or are you just going to stand there with your cods in your hands?"

The heat, the stench, the glinting steel and the horrifying butcher's blocks got the better of me.  I pushed past the purser and rushed to MacPhail.  "I'll drink with you, sir!"  I gabbled like a Michaelmas goose and grabbed the flask.  Putting it to my lips, I filled my mouth with the sweet fire of rum.

"Now there's a man that knows how to drink!"  MacPhail cried as I took a second gulp.  "You can stay!"  He snatched the bottle off me and threw it to the dancing sailor.  “Pass it round, French Bob, pass it round and we’ll go again.”

The fool stood still and drank deeply from the bottle, wiped his mouth then skipped over to Frith to hand him it.  Mandrake stepped forward and snatched the bottle from him.

“Give it to me, you dumb bastard.  Mind your manners when there’s an officer present,” he snarled, raising his hand to French Bob.

Gibbering and weeping, he cringed away from Mandrake, covering his head with his hand.