“Who told you such things?” Rodney asked.
“I have heard men talk since I was a child of the hurts they have suffered. It was a favourite topic of conversation at my father’s table. I know, too, a little of the healing properties of herbs and the cleaning value of raw spirit. Can I have the aqua vitae?”
Quickly, because he could not find the words to refuse her, Rodney sent a ship’s boy to his cabin for a bottle.
The man cursed and swore as Lizbeth poured it on his wound, but when she had bound it up he thanked her.
There were three men left to bandage and Rodney waited until Lizbeth had finished with them. There were splinters which had to be extricated from a seaman’s burly chest with very inadequate instruments in Dobson’s medicine-case. Another man had lost a foot, but Lizbeth knew
