The Rendering

Chapter One: The Wage No One Else Would Take

Agnes Rowntree had learned that the trick of passing for a man was not the coat, nor the boots, nor the way she had cropped her hair with her own scissors in a rented room above a chandler's shop in Hull. The trick was stillness. Men expected other men to occupy space without apology. So she stood on the quay in the grey light of the third of October, 1851, with her instrument case at her feet and her chin lifted, and she did not fidget, and nobody looked at her twice.

The Perseverance was a stout, ugly brig of two hundred and ten tons, black-hulled, her bows sheathed in iron for the ice. Men swarmed her rigging. On the quay, casks of salt beef and barrels of flour and coils of new rope went up the plank in an endless chain, and above it all a gull screamed with the particular flatness of a Yorkshire gull, and Agnes thought: this is the last ordinary sound I will hear for a year.

"Surgeon?"

She turned. The man who had spoken was somewhere past forty, weathered to the colour of a saddle, with a beard trimmed close and eyes that had the deep-set look of a man who slept badly and had made peace with it. He wore a plain blue coat with no braid.

"A. Rowntree," she said. She had practised the voice for six weeks. It came out lower than her own and slightly flattened, as though she had a cold. "Signed on at the shipping office Tuesday."

"I know what you signed," said Captain Henry Gorton. "Come with me."

He did not take her aboard. He took her to the end of the quay, where the water slapped against green stone and a dead dog turned slowly in the current, and there he stopped and looked out at the Humber for a while.

"I read your credentials," he said. "Dresser at the Whitby infirmary. Four years with your father, who was surgeon to the whaler Mary Deane, deceased 1848. Certificate of proficiency from a lecturer in anatomy whose name I recognise. All of it good. All of it true, I imagine."

"All of it true."

"And all of it belonging to a woman."

The gull screamed again. Agnes felt the cold come up through her boot soles. She had rehearsed a dozen denials and every one of them died in her throat, because he had not asked a question. He had simply set a fact down between them like a stone on a table.

"How long have you known?"

"Since Wednesday. I made enquiries in Whitby. Your father had no son." Gorton turned to face her. "Do you know what wage the owners have set for a ship's surgeon on this voyage? Forty pounds. Forty pounds for eleven months in the ice, and no share of the oil. I have written to nine men. Six did not reply. Three laughed." He pushed his hands into his pockets. "You did not laugh."

"I need the post."

"Why?"

"Because there is no infirmary in England that will let me hold a scalpel," Agnes said, and heard the edge come into her voice, and did not bother to file it off. "Because I can set a fracture and cut for stone and I have taken off eleven legs, and because there is a place at the top of the world where nobody will look closely at the hand holding the knife so long as the arm stops bleeding. I need a voyage. I need three voyages. Then I shall have a record, and a record is harder to argue with than a woman."

Gorton was silent long enough that she thought she had lost.

"Twenty-six men," he said at last. "Some of them are decent. Some of them have been in gaol. If they find out, I cannot promise you protection at all times, in all weathers. Do you understand me plainly?"

"Plainly."

"Then here are my terms. You berth alone in the surgeon's cabin and you keep it locked. You do not bathe forward. You do not drink with the men, ever, not one glass. And if you are discovered, you come to me before you go to anyone else." He held out his hand. It was a large hand, scarred across the knuckles. "Henry Gorton. I have buried more men than I care to count and I would rather not bury you."

She shook it, and that was the beginning.

*

They warped out on the evening tide and were past Spurn Head by dark.

The surgeon's cabin was a coffin with a shelf in it: six feet by five, a bunk, a fold-down table, a lamp on a gimbal. Agnes stowed her case, laid out her instruments in their velvet beds — the amputating saw, the tenaculum, the catlin, the trephine that had been her father's and had never once been used by her — and then sat with her back to the bulkhead and listened to the ship come alive around her.

There is a particular music to a working brig. Timber talking to timber. The slack thud of a sea against the bow, then another, then the long dragging hiss down the side. Feet overhead. Somebody laughing forward. Somebody else, further off, being sick.

By the end of the first week she knew them all by their sounds before she knew them by their faces.

Perry Hatch, the first mate, was a heavy careful tread and a voice that never rose. He was a broad man of thirty-five with a face like a boxer gone soft, and he was very good at his work, and he was drinking. Agnes knew it on the second day, from the sweetness under the tar smell when he passed, and from the tremor in his left hand that stopped an hour after breakfast. On the fourth day he came to her for a powder against headache and she gave it to him and said nothing, and he looked at her with sudden naked gratitude, as though silence were a rarer commodity than laudanum.

Thomas Gilpin, second mate, was a lighter tread and a voice that carried. He was younger than Hatch, better-looking, and he had a way of standing at the rail with his arms folded, watching the captain, that made Agnes think of a clerk auditing a ledger he expected to find wrong. He had been promised a command of his own two years running and had not got it. He mentioned this frequently, in the manner of a man mentioning the weather.

Reuben Broadley, the bosun, was the steadiest sound on the ship: a slow, even, unhurried step, and a hoarse cheerful bark that made men move without resentment. He was fifty-one, bandy as a pair of tongs, and on the ninth day out he knocked on Agnes's door, shut it behind him, sat down on the edge of her bunk, and lifted his shirt.

She put her hands on him and did not need long.

The mass was under the right costal margin, hard as a knot in oak, and it had a shape to it she did not like at all — irregular, fixed, dragging the liver down with it. His eyes had a faint tea-coloured tinge in the lamplight.

"How long have you known?" she asked, and thought of Gorton on the quay.

"Since Lady Day. Physician in Hull told me it was a scirrhus of the liver. Said six months, maybe eight." Broadley pulled his shirt down and smoothed it, carefully, as though tidiness mattered. "Told him I'd take the eight at sea rather than six in a back bedroom."

"Does the captain know?"

"No, and he won't." The bark went out of his voice; what was left was flat and absolutely immovable. "I can do my work. When I can't, I'll say so. Until then, Mr Rowntree, you'll oblige me by keeping your mouth shut and giving me something for the pain that don't stupefy me."

She gave him a tincture. He thanked her and went out, and she sat for a while afterwards with her hands flat on the table, thinking about all the things men carried aboard ships in place of luggage.

*

The others assembled themselves in her mind over the following days.

Edgar Baines, cook: a lean man of forty with a face like a hatchet and forearms cross-hatched with old burns, who had been transported for manslaughter in 1834, had served his time in Van Diemen's Land, had come home on a ticket-of-leave, and told anyone who asked exactly that, in the first minute of acquaintance, flatly, so that nobody would have the pleasure of discovering it later. He ran the galley like a chapel. His food was better than it had any right to be.

Barnabas Crookes, harpooner: a Shetlander, sixty if he was a day, with hands like knotted cable and a habit of stopping mid-sentence to listen to something nobody else could hear. He had killed, by his own count, one hundred and eleven whales. He did not seem proud of it. He said grace before he ate even when the Reverend was not present.

The Reverend Colin Speight had been put aboard by the investors to see to the crew's souls, which the crew found variously amusing and insulting. He was young — thirty at most — with the pale, scoured look of a man recovering from a long fever. He had been three years in India with a missionary society. He preached on the first Sunday out of Hull, on the theme of God's providence over the deep, and Agnes watched him do it and thought: he does not believe a word of what he is saying, and it is costing him blood.

Ned Wragby, able seaman, was nineteen, from Grimsby, and this was his first voyage north. He had a wide, easily delighted face. He wanted to be shown everything. He asked Crookes to show him how a harpoon was warped and Crookes did it three times without complaint, which told Agnes something about both of them.

And then there was Doctor Alastair Pinnock.

Pinnock had come aboard with eleven crates, four of which contained nothing but empty jars. He was a naturalist, sent by the Admiralty, and he had the Admiralty's manner: courteous, incurious about anyone else's opinion, absolutely tireless. He was perhaps forty-five, with fine sandy hair going back off a high forehead and small round spectacles that he polished constantly. He collected. He dredged the ship's wake for jellyfish and sat up half the night sketching them by lamplight, and he shot seabirds off the yard with a fowling piece and skinned them at the galley table until Baines threatened him with a cleaver.

Agnes liked him at first. He was the only man aboard who spoke to her as an intellectual equal, which was a kind of pleasure she had almost forgotten.

It was ten days out, off the Norwegian coast, that she noticed the journals.

He kept them in an oilskin wallet, three slim volumes bound in cracked vellum, and he read them at night, at his little table in the cabin he had been given aft — read them, and made notes, and turned back and read the same pages again. They were not in English. Agnes, passing in the alleyway, saw the crabbed hand and the long s's and the word *walvisch*, and understood: Dutch, and old.

She thought nothing much of it. Naturalists read.

She thought about it a great deal later, when she was trying to work out the exact moment at which the whole thing might still have been stopped, and could not find one.

*

On the fourteenth day out they lost a man.

The wind came round to the northwest in the small hours and rose to a full gale in twenty minutes, the way it does off Norway. Gorton had them reefed down before the worst of it, but a seaman named Sowerby went out on the foreyard to pass a gasket and the ship took a sea on the bow that stood her up like a startled horse. Agnes was on deck. She saw him go — not a scream, not a flailing, just a shape detaching from the yard and dropping past the belly of the sail into black water, gone so completely that for a moment she doubted he had ever been there.

They brought the brig round. They looked for forty minutes with lanterns. There was nothing.

Afterwards, in the streaming grey dawn, Gorton stood at the weather rail with rime in his beard and his jaw set, and Agnes went and stood near him because it seemed to her that somebody should.

"You did everything that could be done," she said.

"I know it." He did not look at her. "That is the trouble with everything that can be done. It is so seldom enough."

She waited.

"Two years ago I had a barque called the Doris," Gorton said. "Off Jan Mayen. I stood into a bight of open water because there was oil in it, and the wind backed, and the ice came round behind me in nine hours. She was nipped and stove and down in a night. Eight men drowned in the fo'c'sle because the deck buckled over the scuttle and we could not get it open. I could hear them." He said it without any drama at all, which made it far worse. "I heard them for three hours. Then I did not."

"Captain—"

"Nobody in Hull would give me a ship after that," he said. "Except these gentlemen. They came to my lodgings in July with a contract and a chart and a very great deal of money, and they did not ask me a single question about the Doris. Not one." Now he did look at her, and his eyes were tired and clear. "At the time I thought that was Christian of them."

He pushed off the rail and went below to write up Sowerby, aged twenty-eight, of Hull, drowned.