Surgeon's Mate; book two of the Patricia MacPherson Nautical Adventure Series

Introduction

October 19, 1762

      So much depends on a name.

     My father named me Patricia, called me his little Patra, but didn’t give me his last name, the name, and the legitimacy I wanted. I was born a Kelley, as was my mother, an indentured servant from Ireland who kept my father’s plantation house in Barbados. I have few memories of the woman who gave birth tome, for she died of a tropical fever when I was five.

      After she died, my father shipped me off to England to be raised in a remote boarding school—The Wiltshire School for Young Ladies, a repository for inconvenient daughters such as I. There I grew up—aloof, awkward, lonely—loving horses and the out-of-doors, loathing needlework, French lessons and small talk, waiting impatiently for my father to send for me, to bring me back to Barbados. I had not yet come to terms with the fact that I was merely the product of his desire for my young mother. (I would eventually find out my father had many salacious desires, which he ardently pursued without qualm, yet kept a proper wife and issue in London.) Yet, he was not a bad man, just a man, and had he not gambled his money away I’m certain my father would not have left me to fend for myself.

     Holding tight to the rare letter he sent, I survived my institutionalized childhood, and at sixteen was endowed with neither beauty nor patience. I was too brash and fiery-tempered, I was told, and had no prospects for marriage. My horse was my best friend, and I lived for the day my father would send for me and I would return to Barbados to be mistress of the plantation. All, naught but childish dreams. My father had never paid a penny toward my tuition  and upon his death, when no payment came from his estate, I was dismissed from the school.

      A tall, ungainly orphan, I stowed away on a merchantman bound for Barbados, with a desperate and ill-thought-out scheme to claim the sugar plantation, still not knowing my father had lost it, had gambled it away before his death.

      England was at war with France, in what would later be referred to as the Seven Years War, a rather prosaic name to distinguish it from the various other struggles for land and sea power we engaged in throughout the century. At the time I knew little of our political struggles and even less about the seafaring world, and I had no idea the tubby bark I chose to board was carrying ordinance to the West Indian forts. For me, it was a means to my own ends, and while the course of events that followed were not at all what I had hoped for, my life was forever changed by my impetuous decision to board the merchantman that chill November night in Portsmouth.

      At seventeen, I married Aeneas MacPherson, ship surgeon, and became Mrs. MacPherson, losing my former name and identity in the process. When my husband died of yellow fever less than a year later, his name was important to my survival, along with the skills he taught me, and the instruments of his trade.

      And so I shed Patricia like an inconvenient skin, becoming Patrick MacPherson, surgeon’s mate, of His Majesty’s frigate, Richmond, on its undercover mission to Havana to take part in a pivotal siege that would cripple the Spanish who had recently joined the war against Great Britain.

       One man aboard knew my secret, but even he didn’t call me Patricia. The gunner called me Princess, the somewhat mocking title he gave me in jest when he discovered me, two years ago, hidden away in the bosun’s locker of another ship; which is another story altogether. Now, the gunner called me that teasing endearment in a whisper, when we were alone, which aboard a crowded frigate was too seldom, and most risky. 

Surgeon's Mate is published by Fireship Press, 2011.  All rights reserved.