A Burial at Sea (12 page)

“I see.”

“Even if we couldn’t, however, no, I shouldn’t imagine we’d capsize. And now I really might go below deck, Mr. Lenox,” said Carrow, “or else look sharply about yourself—one hand for you and one for the
Lucy,
you know!”

Carrow tipped his hat good-bye and went to the aft of the ship, where several men were preparing a line with a drag—or a drogue, as Lenox would learn it was called—to hurl behind the ship, slowing them down, in case they caught the wind fully.

When Carrow had recommended that he go below deck, the weather had been relatively consistent, wetter now, slightly windier, but not bad. Suddenly, though, as if from nothing, the wind went from a heavy breeze to a force so powerful and unrelenting that it nearly lifted Lenox from his feet. As it was he lost his hat, and did well to grab on to a lifeline running down the boat, which he used to retreat below deck.

When he put up his head a few moments later there was a torrential rain; there were great crashes of whitecap onto the deck; brilliant flashes of lightning in a sunless, midnight sky; and that wind, always that wind. Martin’s voice was the only audible one. Everywhere else men worked in grim, silent concentration, always keeping one hand along a lifeline that they might not be swept overboard.

The ship looked in utter disarray. Strips of canvas were streaming out to leeward, sails were running from their boat ropes. He had seen enough, and ducked below the main hatchway and below deck.

“McEwan!” Lenox said when he reached his cabin and found the steward in his tiny hallway outside it, seated on a stool and polishing Lenox’s boots. “Have you ever seen such a storm?”

McEwan considered the question seriously and then responded, “Oh, only seventy or seventy-five times in all, sir.”

“Is it so common? I’ve never seen its like, I swear to you!”

“Here, take a towel, sir, and I’ll find you a fresh shirt. This is a fair storm, I’ll grant you that, but in the Mediterranean we had a twelve-knotter once. That, I can tell you, sir, was fearful. We hove to it and just barely managed to keep our masts upright. This was when I was a younger man, sir. We lost nine.”

“Nine men? How?”

“It was so dark and the rain was so thick that you couldn’t see a foot in front of your face. Men would take their hands off of the lifeline for a fraction of a second and be gone forever. Now then—a towel. And you’ll be wanting something warm to drink.”

McEwan trotted off to start a pot of tea.

If his speech had been designed to reassure Lenox, it failed. With a heavy feeling in the pit of his stomach he patted himself dry, keeping one ear bent toward the deck. Occasional claps of thunder seemed to shiver every board and plank of the ship. Suddenly it seemed the most insane chanciness, a madness, to be afloat on a man-made vessel out here in the middle of nothingness. Why should he have the slightest faith that the mast was well constructed? Or the sails? It was well-on impossible to find a decent carpenter in London, he had learned when he and Jane rebuilt their houses together, and yet here they were in a ship that hundreds of men had worked on, each capable of any of a multitude of small mistakes that might see them all dead.

This panic lasted in Lenox’s breast for some half an hour, and only subsided when he recalled the slapping of the swabs on the deck that morning, and the great cleanliness McEwan kept in his cabin. Perhaps that was the secret to it: in the navy one was always far too careful, to the point of absurdity, because when it mattered lives were staked to that precision and effort. Not in matters of cleanliness, perhaps. But the cleanliness was simply in keeping with the rest of the service’s fastidious care. Thank God.

Glumly he followed his cup of tea with half an orange. He would have traded the storm for scurvy in a heartbeat.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Each man at sea endures his first storm differently. Lenox knew he was lucky not to be seasick, and in fact when he lay still upon his bunk the pitching of the ship and the lashing rain had more of a somnolent than a terrifying effect on him. Just as he was actually dozing off, however, he remembered Teddy.

This woke him up, and, putting on a warm jacket, he lurched through the soaked middle deck toward the gun room. He prayed for Edmund’s sake that the boy wasn’t on deck. Better to start, surely, with a storm that wasn’t so immense. If it had been a squall, perhaps …

He needn’t have worried. When he reached the gun room and knocked on the door there was a pause, and then the door cracked slightly.

“How do you do?” said an older boy, perhaps seventeen, with terribly red, inflamed skin.

“Whosit, Pimples?” a voice called out.

“May I come in?” Lenox said.

It was a snug room, rounded with a blue leather bench that ringed the entire room, including the back of the door. At the center of this circle was a large, very rough table. Beneath the bright orange glow of two swinging lanterns five boys sat there, with hands of cards out, bottles of (no doubt contraband) ale on the table, and cigars crooked in their fingers. Their noisy chatter quieted when Lenox entered.

He spotted Teddy at one corner of the table, looking very young but also very definitely a part of the group.

“I’m Charles Lenox, gentlemen. I was just coming to see—”

As he was about to say Teddy’s name, however, he saw a desperate plea on the boy’s face not to do it. He didn’t want babysitting, apparently.

“Sir?” said Pimples.

“I was just coming to see Lieutenant Billings. But I appear to have been turned around. He’ll be nearer the wardroom, I expect.”

To Lenox’s slight disappointment they evidently found it entirely plausible that he would commit such an immense stupidity as mistaking the gun room, halfway across the
Lucy,
for a cabin next door. What a landsman he must have seemed to them!

“He’ll be on deck,” said a senior-looking midshipman gently. “Perhaps you might wait until the morning?”

“Just so,” said Lenox. “Thank you.”

As he closed the door laughter exploded behind him. It didn’t aggrieve him to hear it, however—it delighted him.

He returned to his cabin then, to wait out the storm.

It lasted throughout the night, and maybe longer, for Lenox couldn’t see from his cabin what was the darkness of night and what was the darkness of the storm. The rain fell torrentially the entire time, though the wind would occasionally subside. When this happened the waves gentled down too, only to rise in great heaving motion when the wind, seemingly without reason, erupted back into life.

He slept only fitfully, and in between sleeping he rolled off of his bunk and down to his desk, where by the light of a candle stub he wrote a long letter to Lady Jane, telling her of the storm and Teddy’s progress. Only in a postscript did he mention Halifax’s death, and concede that he was looking into the matter on the captain’s behalf.

What he wanted most of all was a word on that medallion with Carrow. It would have to wait until the storm was over, of course, but even through the worst weather it rankled in Lenox’s mind. What was the significance of two objects belonging to other officers being found in or near the murdered body of a third? And why would anyone other than Carrow, for whom it might have had sentimental reasons, take the risk of stealing it back?

It was puzzling, and Lenox worried that the part of his brain that had once sprung to life when it met this sort of clue was atrophied now, flabby with disuse. Suddenly he wished Dallington were aboard too. The way the young man had handled the poisoning in Clerkenwell that January, for instance … exemplary. He still made errors, but these were fewer and farther in between now. And—somewhat to Lenox’s unhappiness, he found—fewer and fewer cases came to Dallington through his mentor. The boy was building a reputation that wasn’t contingent on Lenox’s. As for Lenox’s own reputation: it was more exalted now, but he wondered whether people even remembered what he had once been.

All of this he considered writing to Jane, but in the end he decided not to trouble her with it. And so as to end on a happy note he wrote a second postscript:

Incidentally, you may be wondering why I haven’t written anything about what the child shall be named, which in Plymouth seemed at times like our only subject of conversation, other perhaps than the dangers of scurvy and pirates (neither of which, you will be pleased to learn, has beset the
Lucy
as of yet). This is because I have alighted in my mind on the perfect name for our daughter, should the child be a girl—as I feel convinced she will be—and as I well know your taste in these matters we may both consider the question as answered and put to rest.

What is this name? That you shall hear from my own lips, not four weeks hence, in London. Until then I remain, as above, your most loving Charles.

He signed and sealed this letter and put it between two pages of
The Voyage of the Beagle
. Then, feeling much better for it, he extinguished the candle with his thumb and forefinger and climbed his bunk again to fall to sleep.

When he woke the storm was gone—indeed, might never have been at all, but for the demeanor of the sailors: the sky was a motionless pale blue, glittering at one end with brilliant white sunlight. Lenox ate an apple on the quarterdeck and watched the men work. They appeased every single one of them at once exhausted and blissful. Even Lenox, though he might have been an albatross, received warm looks from some of the sailors.

Martin, too, was still on deck, and he came to the detective after fifteen minutes, looking pale and unshaven but as happy as everyone else aboard the
Lucy
.

“The storm has passed.”

“So I had observed,” said the captain. “The crew came through it beautifully.”

“But what of the purser?”

Martin frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Mr. Carrow told me that these pursers dislike storms.”

Now Martin laughed. “Oh, yes—well, I daresay he lost some dry biscuit, and he won’t be happy that I’ve ordered double rations of grog for the men when they have their dinners at midday. Nevertheless they deserve it.”

“I congratulate you,” said Lenox. “No injuries?”

“Oh, a host of them! Tradescant has been up all night—eight or twelve of them down there, every kind of scrape and contusion and concussion you can imagine. Still, we may count ourselves lucky in such a storm that nobody died.”

“Will you go to sleep now?”

A stern look. “No. Not until the last man has gone off duty, and all have rested. There is work to be done—bilging, repair work—and of course we are fearfully off course, and must make up time. My steward should be bringing me coffee, however.”

The steward appeared as if on cue, carrying a tin mug letting off fragrant steam from the top. Martin took it down in three gulps and then set off for the orlop. As for Lenox, he went down to fetch a cup of coffee, too, and drank it as he gazed over the becalmed sea.

When the captain passed the quarterdeck again, Lenox waved him down.

“Yes?” said Martin.

“I need to interview Amos Lee, your fourth lieutenant. And I might as well have a word with the warrant officers, too.”

“Lee will be awake in an hour, I daresay—could you leave him to then? He put in a hard shift overnight. In fact I must think of raising up one of the oldsters to acting lieutenant, just for this voyage.” This put more to himself than his interlocutor.

“Oh, of course,” said Lenox.

“Who do you think killed Halifax?”

“I don’t know. But there are enough clues that it shouldn’t be long before I do, I hope. I simply need a more complete picture of the suspects.”

“The suspects?”

Lenox described his suspicion that someone living in the wardroom had done the murder, enhanced now by the theft of the medallion. For a common bluejacket to be wandering around the wardroom would have been uncommon in the extreme, Martin agreed.

A steely look came into his eye. “When he is found out there will be no mercy, you may be sure of that,” he said. “A four-bag and a hanging.”

Lenox had to find out some minutes later from McEwan, who was eating about six breakfasts, that a four-bag meant forty-eight lashes on the back.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Amos Lee was almost completely different than Mitchell, his fellow officer: tall and fair where the other was small and dark, placid where the other bristled, of excellent manners where the other was rude. Of course Lenox had watched men who had seemed the gentlest of souls in his acquaintance swing from the gallows, for crimes that would have made thugs from the East End widen their eyes.

They spoke in the wardroom. Lee had an accent that Lenox had noticed among the younger generation of aristocratic public school graduates, which elongated every vowel, so that the word
rather
sounded like “raaawther” and
London
had about six
o
’s in it. The accent seemed to match Lee’s somewhat tired, heavy-lidded eyes. There was an air of boredom to him despite his polite attention to Lenox’s questions.

“How did you discover that Halifax was dead?”

“Mr. Mitchell told me the following morning.”

“May I ask how long you’ve been on the ship?”

“Certainly. I think it’s twenty-six months now, or thereabouts.”

“You must have been friends with Halifax, then.”

“Friendly, to be sure—there’s no way around that in the wardroom.”

“Do you have any inkling of who might have killed him?”

“No. I wish I had. Perhaps it was one of his men?” Lee ventured.

“I had heard he was quite popular among them?”

“It may be so, he and I carry—carried—different watches. He seemed perfectly competent from what I did observe of him, however.”

“Do you know anyone aboard ship who has a…” Lenox paused, searching for the right word. “A morbid air? Anyone who seems a little too cold-blooded?”