It was as well that I had stopped short just beyond the room's threshold — for there was barely space to walk among the pallets. I stifled a gasp of disbelief as I gazed about me — how many men had Mrs. Braggen described? Forty, in a room better suited for half that number? At least ten were arranged around two tables at the rear of the room, playing at cards; but they alone were upright of the entire assembly. The rest lay in suffering at my feet, some as still as death, some moaning piteously for water. Others thrashed about as though pitching with the roll of the waves; and I saw, with failing looks, that these men's legs were bound with hemp to prevent them kicking at those who would aid them.

The atmosphere, though cold and damp, was sharp with the smells of blood and human waste, and putrefying wounds; with the heavy must of unwashed men. The animal odour of tallow mixed chokingly with the charcoal smoke from a single fire at one side of the chamber. There had recently been meat roasting somewhere on a spit.

I felt my gorge rise, and fumbled in my reticule for a handkerchief. Cecilia Braggen was right to fear the spread of contagion, when it found its source in such a room.

“Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, madame?” cried the voice of one grizzled old card player

“Le medecin,” I returned, after an instant's panicked retrieval of my schoolgirl French. “M'sieur Hill. Est il ici?”

A small figure rose up from the floor like Beelzebub, and saluted me with a bow: Mr. Hill, I did not doubt. He was spare of form, with a periwig affixed rather carelessly on a bony head; shirtsleeves turned back, forearms bare, and a heavy black apron over his shirt-front and trousers. I should have known him for a naval surgeon in a moment; his very air suggested shipboard economy.

“You one of the naval ladies, I trust?” he enquired without preamble.

“My name is … Miss Austen,” I stammered. “And you are … Mr. Hill?”

His eyes surveyed me shrewdly; it was a measuring glance, as my brother Edward might assess the points of a prospective hunter, and I quailed at the surgeon's calculation of my fitness or courage. The awful truth of my careless undertaking had fallen full upon me. When Mrs. Braggen proposed the duty this morning, I accepted with the view to a little French conversation. I thought to soothe a fevered brow, and discover, in the process, whether any of the Manon's crew was held at Wool House. But I found myself in the midst almost of battle. There was nothing of frivolity here; no easy passage for deception. These men represented the harsh spoils of war, in all their misery and deprivation; and however soon they might be exchanged, I should not lightly forget them. I fought the impulse to turn and pound heartily upon the door in expectation of die Marines.

“You are some relation to Captain Frank Austen?” Mr. Hill enquired.

“His sister, sir.”

The surgeon wiped an instrument absently on his canvas apron, and nodded. “I met with the Captain some once or twice, while serving in the Indies. You'll do. Pray follow me.”

I took up the basin he thrust into my hands, and commenced to spoon weak gruel between the cracked lips of one unshaven face after another. And presently— as though I had been no more than an insect that came to light upon a table — I was dismissed from the interest of the French, as care for their own consuming anxieties superseded the novelty of my presence. The card players returned to their gambling, and the sick to their pitiful moaning. I followed Mr. Hill in a sort of macabre dance, stooping and rising, from one sad pallet to the next, and felt that the line of suffering should never come to an end.

The contagion was of a peculiar kind: some of my patients were o'erspread with red spots; others suffered trembling so acute, they could neither stand nor hold a spoon; all were racked with fever. But I detected no inflammation of the lungs — no catarrh, that might be manifest in coughing; whatever the ill, it could not be laid to the account of Southampton's raw weather.

“What ails these men?” I whispered once.

“Gaol-fever,” replied Mr. Hill grimly. “A common enough complaint, when so many are forced to shift together like beasts in a barn. But there is little a surgeon may do for such a malady. I have bled them; I have given water; and for the rest — God shall provide.”[8]

From the look of the poor wretches lying about the floor, all that God was likely to provide, I knew, was a foreign grave.

WE WORKED IN SILENCE, BUT FOR THE FEW WORDS OF direction Mr. Hill deemed necessary. I emptied chamber pots through the barred windows into the Southampton gutters; I cleaned wounds with rags dipped in hot water; I pressed cold compresses against fevered brows; and once, to my horror, I was required to hold steady the shoulders of a man while Mr. Hill probed his angry flesh for the bullet buried there. Far from interrogating the assembled enemy, I was tongue-tied with pity and horror. At this rate, I thought despondently, I should learn nothing that might support Captain Seagrave's claims of innocence.

My passage among the pallets had revealed one item of intelligence, however. Members of the Manon's crew were certainly among the inmates of Wool House. I learned this not from any words of French that were spoken, but from a lady's skill at observing the fine points of dress. It is a seaman's habit to embroider ribbons upon his shiny tarpaulin hat; the ribbons invariably bear the name, in bright letters, of the ship that he serves. Four at least proclaimed the Manon. Three lay by the sides of men tossing upon the floor; but the last still rested upon the head of a fellow who seemed in better health than his brothers.

He was sitting up, shaky and weak, and though desperate to consume some hot broth, looked unable to hold the spoon that Mr. Hill had afforded him. I judged him to be a seaman, of perhaps fifty years or so; but whether he should be rated Ordinary or Able, I not entirely say.[9] I inclined towards Able: from the length of his hair, which was knotted in a queue that reached to the middle of his back, I suspected him of naval pride; and, of course, there was the hat, with its handsome red ribbons embroidered in blue and white. Manon.

I took bowl and spoon from the man's shaking fingers and helped him gently to eat. His jaw trembled as the broth trickled into his mouth, and he closed his eyes. “Merti, madame.”

“De rien, I replied

His eyes flew open. “Vous parlez francais?”

“Un peu, settlement. II y avait beaucoup de temps …”

He fluttered a thin hand in dismissal of my excuses. His red-rimmed eyes were dangerously over-bright “Avez-vous du papier?”

Did I have paper? I stared at him in consternation. I could not have understood the words correctly.

“Pour les lettres,” he insisted. “Je voudrais écrire à Provence…”

Letters home. But of course. He was probably illiterate, and would depend upon the skill of others to despatch his intelligence to France. Somewhere in the south of that country, there might be a wife or a child — someone who could fear him dead, were it not for the arrival of a missive penned in a strange hand. A whisper of excitement rose up within me. For surely this fellow — so recently taken prisoner — must desire to relate every detail of the Manon's engagement with the British? Should he not be likely to recount, in tedious detail, the moments that led to his ship's capitulation?

“I shall find you paper,” I said without regard for French or English, and set down the man's bowl. His gaze followed me in hopeful confusion as I hurried towards Mr. Hill.