‘No wonder. They’ll not be wanting the sickness, and no blame to them.’

‘Then I will override their orders,’ I said. ‘Can you and the others here,’ I gestured towards the men playing cards, ‘help me move the men with the flux? They can probably walk, but they will be weak. And I’ll need some to help to clean this place.’

The stench from vomit and diarrhoea was overpowering. I could not understand how they had endured it so long. Why had they not taken some action themselves?

With Tom Barley’s help and the eventual, if reluctant, assistance of the others, I managed to move the flux victims to the far end of the gun deck, so that there was at least some space between the two groups. The men fetched buckets and mops to swab the deck and I persuaded them to open the gun ports so that the cleansing breeze could flow through, although some swore they would be punished for acting without orders from their officers. When the gundeck was clean, Tom Barley and another sailor found some spare sails and set the men to erecting a canvas shelter up on deck.

While my father began to treat the flux victims and to give what relief he could to the others, I went with Tom and three other fit men to visit ship after ship, to try to create some order out of the hellish chaos. On some ships the men were willing, on others there was hardly a man left standing, and the sick stared at me with the dull hopeless look of those who can see Death coming, his sickle already glinting in the corner of their eyes.

And so began our long exhausting days at Deptford. It was fruitless and dispiriting, for the illness, whatever it was, sprang up without apparent cause and we could do little except relieve the terrible fevers which affected the patients and comfort their dying moments. One moment a man would be raging at the heat, throwing aside any bedding, begging for water, the next he would be shaking, crying out that his limbs were frozen. Though his teeth chattered, sweat poured off his brow. The ships echoed with their howls of pain and their hacking coughs. Some imagined they saw snakes dropping from the beams above them, others screamed that monstrous spiders were crawling all over them. Those who lived more than a half a day began to develop a rash, though most died within hours. The worst was the pain they suffered. Headaches which seemed to blow their brains apart, agony in all their joints.

On the third day, as we paused briefly to drink some small ale and eat a pasty which had been sent down to us from the hospital, my father said, ‘I think it is a form of typhus, though it is far worse than any I have seen before.’ He looked resigned.

The diagnosis was not much help to us, for there was no cure. Either the body was strong enough to fight it off or – more often – it succumbed. However, separating the patients may have helped check the spread of the illness. As those with less serious cases of the flux recovered, we sent them to lodge with the fit men up on the open deck. Those who were weaker either died of the flux or contracted the typhus. Tom Barley had appointed himself our lieutenant, helping with some of the treatments, going with us from ship to ship to ensure the men obeyed orders. He also went with me to the shed on the quayside, where I demanded better rations for the men, who were down to maggot-ridden ship’s biscuit and rancid water. No help was forthcoming there, but I sent a letter to Walsingham, begging him to use his influence, and gradually some better stores arrived – fresh bread, ale, some cheap cuts of meat, and a couple of barrels of salted herrings.

I had taken to sleeping on deck myself, when I could spare the time to sleep, and one early morning I found myself being shaken awake by my father.

‘Kit, wake up! Tom Barley is struck down.’

I had feared it, as I had feared that my father, growing old and weak, would take the illness. But my father was spared and it was Tom who now lay in a corner of the gun deck, sweating and raving and striking out wildly. It was impossible to get him into a hammock in that state, so we made him as comfortable as we could on the boards of the deck. I forced febrifuges down his throat, though he fought me, and I bathed his burning limbs, dosed his pain with poppy juice and fed him sage pounded with honey for the cough that wracked him every few minutes.

I blamed myself for using him as an assistant. If he died, it would be my fault. But his body was strong and struggled against the illness. After five days he was no longer delirious, and at the end of a week it was clear that he would recover.

‘I’ve never known anything like it, Doctor,’ he said to me shakily, managing to hold a spoon for the first time himself. ‘My head – it was like, I don’t know . . .’ He moved his head, and touched his temple gently with his finger tips. ‘I can’t find the words. It was like there was a cannon in there, that kept blowing up. Not one shot after another, see. But all the time.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I just wanted to die. Just wanted to stop the pain. If I could have got up on deck I’d have throwed myself in the Thames.’

Tom was one of the last cases. The men who had recovered were sent off to their homes, still without pay. Even those who had refused to go earlier had grown so fearful of the illness which had killed so many that they trudged off, to try to beg their way home. I demanded that the harried officer on the quayside write out licences for them to beg, for without a licence a wandering beggar can be confined to the stocks by any parish official who lays hands on him. The final group of men, weak but recovering, were moved to St Thomas’s, the hospital south of the river. Tom refused to go with them.

‘I’ll manage the walk home to Rochester,’ he said, ‘given I take it slowly. I’ll fare better in the clean air of Kent than shut up in St Thomas’s.’

My father gave him five shillings. ‘It is no more than you deserve in payment for the work you have done for us,’ he said, ‘caring for the sick.’

‘You should buy a place with a carrier,’ I said, ‘to spare you the walk. You are not yet back to your full strength.’

But he merely laughed and shook his head. ‘I’ve better use for five shillings than to waste it on a carrier. My wife will be glad of it.’

The last we saw of him was his back, sturdy but stooped, as he set off along the road leading southeast.

Our work in Deptford finished, the last morning spent moving the final patients, my father and I took a wherry back up river to St Bartholomew’s. We were quiet most of the way and I watched my father nodding in and out of sleep as his chin fell forward on his breast. We stopped at our house for a meal and a change of clothes before reporting back at the hospital. Although my father revived a little with a good meal inside him, I could see he was fighting to stay awake.

I laid my hand on his arm. ‘They don’t expect us until tomorrow,’ I said, ‘and it’s nearly evening. I will go and see what’s to be done in the morning. Do you go and rest on your bed, you’ll be the fitter for work tomorrow.’

‘You’re a good lad, Kit,’ he said, mumbling a little.

A slight shock ran through me. We were alone, and when there was no one to hear he usually relaxed his guard and acknowledged me as his daughter. Bitterly, I thought: Soon even I will forget what I am, who I am.

He allowed himself to be persuaded to bed and I took myself off to the hospital, where I reported to the deputy superintendent before going to the wards. The first person I met there was Peter Lambert.

‘How was it at Deptford?’ he asked, without preamble.

‘Grim.’ I could not bear to say more. ‘Are there many new cases here?’

‘Plenty. Those navy saw-bones have sent on all their bungled work to us.’

I groaned. The naval surgeons, I had to concede, worked under terrible conditions, sawing off half-severed or crushed limbs while cannon balls crashed overhead, in a welter of blood and screaming men. Usually there was no way to save a man’s arm or leg. But the filth amongst which they operated meant that the terrible wounds, even when they had been cauterised with hot iron and coated with tar, almost always became infected and could turn gangrenous. Very few of our men had been killed in the battle itself, but many had died, and were still dying, of the typhus and bloody flux, and of their wounds.