Doktor Hargreaves

Narrative bio

How a Bristol-trained surgeon ends up holding a saw above a man's leg by lantern light at sea

He was apprenticed to his father at thirteen — the older Hargreaves a coroner with a small private practice on the side, the kind of man who sewed up dockyard accidents at half the going rate because the dockworkers paid in fish and gossip. The son learned anatomy from the dead and bedside manner from his mother, who lost three of her own children and still came to other women's beds without flinching.

Edinburgh was paid for by a great-aunt's estate. Two years and he was running out of money; he sailed for Bridgetown to make it back. The Royal Navy caught him at Plymouth on a customs technicality and put him in their hulks as ship's-surgeon-by-coercion; he worked off four years under brutal masters and developed his only enduring opinion about the world — that a man's character is what he does when no one is keeping accounts.

Discharged with a forged commission and a small purse, he set up coastal practice on Barbados. Six years. He delivered babies, set bones, pulled teeth, talked to ghosts when asked, refused to talk to magistrates when not. He saved more than he lost. He was, for the first time, content.

Then in the spring of 1716, a Dutch brig called the Schaduwhond ran a sandbar off Speightstown and Hargreaves was rowed out to attend to the captain's mangled foot. He sawed the foot off, sutured the stump, stayed for grog, and woke the next morning to find the brig under different ownership: Dissolved Dream repainted on her stern, Varro Kane on her quarterdeck, and a polite young man with a pistol explaining that the new captain had a use for him.

Kane wears chains as jewelry. He had a use for everyone.

His moral qualms

On being impressed to Varro Kane

The first three weeks Hargreaves refused to operate on anyone he knew to be a pirate by trade. He attended the boarded merchants — the casualties Kane's crew dragged across deck after a taking — and let his own captors bleed into their hammocks. Kane did not order this changed. Kane simply waited.

What broke him was a quartermaster named Tobias Drew, twenty-two years old, who took a musket ball in the lower belly during a botched fight off St. Lucia. Drew was a freed African of Barbadian birth, a quartermaster only because he had outlived three previous incumbents, and he was the only man aboard who had bothered to learn Hargreaves's first name. He bled for six hours while Hargreaves sat in his cabin pretending he did not hear it.

In the seventh hour, Hargreaves walked aft and operated. Drew lived. Hargreaves has not slept through a night since.

"It is a thing to know that you would have let a man die for a principle, and a worse thing to know that you finally did not."— Hargreaves to himself, journal entry undated

The oath he persuaded himself to swear, after Drew, was small and private: I will save whoever comes to me. I will not ask their trade. I will not refuse the king's man or the rebel's man. I will keep my own ledger. It is the kind of oath a younger man would find ridiculous and an older one tragic. Hargreaves is the age at which it can still feel like a victory.

He has not seen Bristol in twenty-two years. He writes his mother three times a year. The letters do not reach her, and he knows they do not, and he writes them anyway.

Story arcs

Threads in motion

• The Quartermaster's Debt active

  Tobias Drew owes Hargreaves his life. He has paid it back in small ways — warnings, a recovered instrument, an extra ration — and is keeping a tally Hargreaves does not know about. Drew is convinced he will need to repay the surgeon catastrophically, one day, and is rehearsing for it.

• Kane's Long Look brewing

  Varro Kane has noticed that Hargreaves does not flinch around him. Kane finds this rare and dangerous and, in his own way, attractive — not romantically; in the way a collector regards an instrument he has not yet figured out how to break. There will be a test.

• The Letter Bag brewing

  Hargreaves has been writing his mother for two decades. The undelivered letters live in an oilskin bag in his sea-chest. Someone aboard the Dissolved Dream will find them; what they choose to do with them is the question.

• A King's Pardon, Conditional brewing

  A Saltwell-aligned go-between will offer Hargreaves the pardon his forged Plymouth commission could never deliver. The cost is information — routes, intentions, Kane's anchorages. Hargreaves will not betray Kane, but he will not refuse the conversation either. The information he gives will be just true enough to be useless.

• The Operation He Cannot Perform brewing

  A patient will come to him who can be saved only by killing another patient first — a triage of the kind his Plymouth years prepared him for and which his Barbados years let him forget. The choice will go either way and will define what kind of pirate-surgeon he is for the rest of his career.

• Carleton or Saltwell brewing

  Hargreaves has refused to take a side in the war. The war will eventually refuse to let him refuse. When the day comes, he will pick the side his ship picks, and tell himself afterwards that he had a reason of his own.