A Burial at Sea (17 page)

It was McEwan’s turn to lead now. With startling quickness he climbed hand over hand up the mainmast. When he was no more than a fattish dot in the sky, it seemed, far up in the crow’s nest, he hooked his legs over the ledge of the crow’s nest and waved down. Then he let go.

The sound of two hundred and nineteen men gasping at once must have filled McEwan’s ears as he fell. One poor soul, a leading seaman named Peter Lee, cried out “No, not McEwan!” in a high-pitched squeal, an utterance that he would find it difficult to live down for the rest of the voyage.

For one horrifying moment Lenox felt sure that his steward was going to crash heavily into the deck, mangled out of all recognition, for the sake of a game. Just when it seemed as if he had been falling for about ten minutes, however, McEwan reached out a hand with almost casual grace and found a length of rope. Having caught on to this he made his way to the mainmast, and then, as something like an encore, climbed down it backwards—that is, with his face pointing toward the deck and his legs toward the sky.

When he achieved the deck there was a moment of breathless silence, followed by overwhelming applause, wave after wave of it, always getting louder just as you thought it might begin to fade. McEwan continued to bow and wave with great grace. When all eyes turned to the other competitors, some moments later, they, in a unanimous gesture, bowed to Lenox’s steward, admitting their defeat.

Even Carrow was grinning. “Wish I had bet on him. Couldn’t, as an officer, of course.”

“I did!” said Lenox.

“He hasn’t played for four or five years. Did the same thing last time. Poor Pimples gave terribly long odds, didn’t he? Then again memories are short, and two of the other fellows had won it in recent years. Still—such a performance!”

The performer waddled over toward Lenox now, shaking hands distractedly along his way. “There,” he said, “aren’t you glad of that ten bob now, sir?” he asked.

“I congratulate you, my good man—but here now, why are you a steward? You should be up amongst the tops all the time.”

“Oh, no, sir. Much more comfortable below deck, you see. Always a bite to be had when one feels peckish. Speaking of which, sir, could I fetch you a glass of wine or a biscuit?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After the singing had gone on for some time longer, and in fact grown quite maudlin, the officers began to go down the hatchway to the wardroom. A group of men, though drunk, cleared the chairs off the quarterdeck with great alacrity and efficiency. Another group rerigged the ship that she might sail steadily through the night. Soon the visible signs of the evening’s festivities had been effaced, but their happy mood lingered.

Lenox, for his part, wanted to speak to Pettegree.

He caught the purser in the wardroom and invited him to take the air of the quarterdeck.

“Did you enjoy the game?” Pettegree asked when they were alone. Each man had a glass of port in hand.

“Very much, yes. It determines me to climb to the crow’s nest.”

“I’ve been afloat twenty years and I’ve never ventured that high. Leave it to the sailors, I say.”

“You may well be right.” Lenox thought of Jane, pregnant and perhaps, though he hoped not, fretting about his safety. “At any rate, I had hoped for a word with you earlier.”

“The inventory.”

“Yes. Was there anything missing?”

Pettegree shook his head. “I’m happy to report that there wasn’t.”

“It was unlikely, I suppose. Thank you for telling me.”

“There was
one
thing I noticed, scarcely worth mentioning—”

Lenox laughed. “I wish I had a shilling for every time I heard that preface in the course of my career, only for it to be followed by a decisive piece of information. Pray, go on.”

“We’re short a bottle of whisky.”

“From the spirit room?”

“Yes, precisely.”

Just near the gun room was a small closet with a caged metal door and a large, impressive lock. It held the ship’s spirits, wine and brandy for the captain and the officers, rum for the men’s grog, as well as a bottle or two of harder alcoholic drinks. When ships were foundering or there was mutiny afoot, sailors were occasionally known to break into it, an offense punishable by hanging.

“How many bottles had there been, and how many are there now?”

“The captain keeps them on hand to entertain only,” said Pettegree. “We have two bottles of decent whisky at the start of every voyage, and the same at the end of every voyage. The same two bottles for almost a decade. But at the moment there’s only one bottle there.”

“You don’t seem put out that the other one has vanished.”

“It’s not my place to question the captain’s choices.”

“The captain’s choices, you say? Is he the only one with access to the spirit room?”

“He and I have the two keys. Mine hasn’t left my person while we’ve been at sea, and his—”

“Neither of your assistants has borrowed it?”

“Never. And the only other key is his.”

“Did he not have to—to check out the bottle? Keep a record?”

“Oh, no, the whisky is quite his property.”

“I see.”

“If you like I can ascertain from him that he was the one who took it, though I can’t imagine any other possibility.”

Lenox’s mind flashed back to his visit to the captain’s quarters. On his desk had been an ebony ashtray with several cigar ends in it, and next to that a bottle of spirits, half empty. It might well have been whisky.

“If you wouldn’t mind keeping it between us, I’d be grateful,” said Lenox. “If it comes up I may mention it, but it doesn’t seem our place—he’s been under a great deal of stress between Halifax and the rolled shot—”

Pettegree nodded vehemently. “Oh, of course, of course. I’ll not say a word of it.”

Lenox went straight to the wardroom from there in search of Tradescant. The surgeon was absent from the dining table, however, where a few men were playing at cards, and also from his cabin.

Making his way forward to the surgery, Lenox looked at his watch. It was late; he ought to go to sleep. But it was worth speaking to Tradescant as soon as possible.

The surgeon was in a small, leather-backed chair in one corner of the surgery, a candle on a ledge at the level of his snow-white hair, reading a book. He looked up.

“Hello, Mr. Lenox,” he said, and from the faint slur in his words Lenox concluded that the surgeon had gone one or two drinks past sober. “Did you enjoy the game?”

“Very much, yes.”

“Your steward won! He was terrifically impressive, I thought. I hope he won’t need convincing that he’s still a steward.”

Lenox smiled. “I don’t think it’s gone to his head.”

“How may I help you?”

“Are your patients quite well?”

“Oh, yes. The one long-termer.” He gestured toward the back of the room, where the man who had been smacked in the head with a beam not long out of Plymouth Harbor slumbered on. “I believe he’ll come out of his sleep sooner or later, though to be honest it’s taking longer than I would have liked. Then there are these two chaps, leftover from the storm. Both should be back on duty tomorrow, a few nasty bruises left but not much else.”

“I’m pleased to hear it.”

“In fact I was just thinking what a quiet trip it had been, and then remembered poor Mr. Halifax. Though it wasn’t five days ago it seems like a dream, doesn’t it?”

“May I ask you a peculiar question?”

“Yes, but please, sit down, have a glass with me.” Tradescant lit another candle and uncorked a dusty, roundish bottle of some richly ruby-colored liquid. He poured two very small glasses of it. “To Halifax!” he said, and drained his glass.

“To Halifax.” Lenox drank his off too, and then smacked his lips. “Delicious wine. Where did you come by it?”

Tradescant’s eyes flickered in the candlelight and he smiled. “It’s an 1842 Burgundy. My father gave me six cases when I first went to sea. They’re quite valuable, and I think he intended for me to sell them and live off of the profits. But it was the only present he ever gave me, you see, and so I take two bottles on each voyage. I only drink it with others. It gives me a kind of pleasure.”

“Better than money.”

“Dissimilar—but yes, perhaps better. I don’t mind about money. I suppose he would give me some of that, too, if I needed it especially. He gave me a house in town some years ago, and he’s just about alive. I’m a bastard, you see. My father is—” and here Tradescant named one of the great dukes of the realm, of a family second only to the royal family in prestige, nearly ninety now, who in his day had been one of the few political and social rulers of Europe.

“I didn’t know,” said Lenox. “A very great man indeed.”

“In some respects, yes. My mother was a charwoman, may she rest in peace, and I think it very likely she had more wisdom than he did, and more kindness beside.” Tradescant laughed. “Now I am nearly fifty. It’s an age when parents don’t matter as much as they did … or they matter more in some ways, and less in others. I’ve been happy in my life.”

It was a singularly confessional speech, and Lenox smiled—not too broadly, but encouragingly, grateful for the man’s confidence. “If all you had out of your father was that wine, it wouldn’t have been too hard a transaction.”

“We agree, Mr. Lenox! Now, your peculiar question?”

“Ah, yes. I wondered about the contents of Halifax’s stomach when he died.”

“Oh?”

“Not the food, so much as whether—well, it sounds indelicate, but my friend Thomas McConnell, who is a doctor, will smell the stomach for alcohol, if the body is … fresh enough. I realize it sounds morbid.”

“I do quite the same, and in fact I think I’ll have made a note of it … yes, here’s the book, this little hardbacked one.”

Tradescant flipped through the pages. “Well?” said Lenox when he had stopped.

“Hmm. Whisky, it says here, Scotch whisky. Strange, now that you’ve drawn my attention to it—we don’t get whisky on the ship much, the men preferring rum and the officers brandy—but there was a definite odor of whisky.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Lenox went to sleep not long afterward, his stream of consciousness racing but muddied by drink. The next morning he woke with a single, clarified thought:
Might Jacob Martin have murdered his second lieutenant?

It would account for the whisky; for Halifax’s apparently willing attendance at a midnight meeting halfway up one of the masts; Martin’s self-possession the night of the murder; the theft of the medallion and the penknife (presumably to shift blame away from himself) would have been easy, as nobody questions a captain’s movements aboard his own ship. And of course, most of all, he was a figure beyond suspicion.

Which meant he was the first person Lenox ought to have considered.

Still, some small part of him rebelled against the idea of Martin as a murderer. It wasn’t the man’s religious faith; that was so common among murderers as to be mundane. Nor was it his leadership of the
Lucy
. Rather, it was some intrinsic conservatism that seemed to define Martin’s character, a deficit of fury. The crime had been at once savage and plotted, and the mind behind it didn’t seem to be the mind Lenox thought the captain to have.

Then again, Pettegree had identified Martin as a man of violent temper.

The alternatives that his mind kept circling toward were Lieutenant Lee, despite the man’s placid temperament, and Lieutenant Mitchell. Mitchell was the more obvious suspect, because of his temper and because he was new aboard, the only change to the wardroom. For years the
Lucy
had sailed without violent incident, and within a few weeks of Mitchell’s arrival on board a man was dead.

As for Lee, there was the matter of his steward, who slept not in front of his door but down below deck amid the guns, with the rest of the sailors. It would have been difficult for the other officers to slip past their sleeping stewards, all situated in the hallways outside of their cabins. It would have been easy for Lee.

Or Martin.

After Lenox had accepted coffee, kippers, and eggs from McEwan, he took one of the last of Lady Jane’s oranges and sat down to write her a letter as he ate it. In it he spoke of Follow the Leader, of Teddy, of life aboard the ship. He reassured her that he had yet to succumb to scurvy. The letter ended with a short benediction, not too intrusive he hoped, for her and their child, after writing which he sealed the letter in an envelope and placed it next to the other letter he had written her, which sat in the battered Paul Storr toast rack that had always served as the organizer of his correspondence.

It was a still sort of day, not much wind, and while Lenox strolled the quarterdeck a huge indolent sailmaker’s mate named McKendrick played softly on his flute, sitting along the bowsprit. In the empty vastness the sound seemed to carry with special purity, and it lent a magic to the engrossing rhythm of the waves.

Maybe because of the music, or because of the sunny gentleness of the day—and certainly because of McEwan—Lenox decided to climb to the crow’s nest. The murder could wait half an hour.

He checked with Mitchell, the officer on bridge watch, who shrugged and sent along a strong forecastleman to keep Lenox safe. The forecastlemen were the best seamen the ship had—by contrast the quarterdeckmen, for example, were of an advanced age that they no longer liked to go aloft, though Old Joe Coffey didn’t seem to mind—but evidently Mitchell could spare this one, a short, grinning, towheaded Swede named Andersen. He spoke in a rudimentary dialect of English that was almost wholly naval in origin, and therefore shockingly explicit. His stock of obscenities he seemed to view as ordinary, even courteous, and the rest of the crew found Andersen too funny to disabuse him of that impression.

“Fucking top, here you going!” he said cheerfully, then for the sake of decorum added, “Sir!”

Lenox felt a fool for it, after McEwan’s performance, but in his heart he knew from the outset that the ascent was the hardest physical task he had ever essayed. More than once he felt himself slipping and thanked the Lord for the rope looped around his midsection.