A Burial at Sea Read online

  After he had taken several turns on the quarterdeck and filled his lungs with the fresh, saline air, Lenox went down to his cabin. McEwan was seated on his stool, munching on something loud, and polishing Lenox’s brown boots with intense concentration.

  “Oh, sir,” he said, rising, crumbs flying from his mouth.

  “Charming,” said Lenox.

  McEwan smiled. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Not at all. Could you find me something to eat? A sandwich would do.”

  “Of course, Mr. Lenox.”

  “And then I shall need several hours undisturbed.”

  “Yes, sir. I shall leave your boots till then.”

  Lenox had decided that he would decode the Alpha document that he had received from Edmund on the docks in Plymouth. If he left the case for an hour or two he might find it looked different upon his return.

  As he reached for the document, which lay on his desk, Lenox brushed a letter onto the floor. Picking it up he saw that it was one Jane had sent with him, a sweet, short, and loving note. He unfolded it and read it over again, and felt his heart become very full. The air of menace on the Lucy hadn’t affected him enormously—he was used to it, from his days as a detective—but reading the letter he thought of all he had to live for, his wife, his child, the house on Hampden Lane, the two dogs Jane had given him three years before, Bear and Rabbit, one golden, one black. A domestic life. With a flash of insight he saw that while he thought he had been giving up the drama and danger of detection for his seat in Parliament, perhaps in fact it had been his love, his soon-to-be family, for which he had sacrificed his old life. The thought made him feel homesick.

  There was a knock on the door, and McEwan squeezed in with a plate full of roast beef sandwiches with a dollop of Fortnum’s horseradish, courtesy of Jane’s hamper, and a great pile of cold roasted potatoes, sea salted and studded with twigs of sage and rosemary.

  “Do you want a fork for the potatoes, sir?” McEwan asked.

  “No, I can eat them with my fingers if you fetch me a napkin. Many a time in my bachelor days I ate worse with my hands.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “I’ll take some ketchup, too, from the small white pot. Dickens recommends it with breaded lamb chops, you know, but I prefer it on roasted potatoes.”

  “Right away, Mr. Lenox. Any wine?”

  “A half bottle of the Burgundy—why not?”

  He ate happily, and with great care not to spill on the papers began to decipher the list of his official duties in Egypt.

  These were both relatively straightforward and, in the customs they involved, inordinately complex. For example, on his first day in the country he was scheduled to take a tour of the Suez Canal. Simple enough, and yet the list of things he could not mention—the slave deaths during its construction, the new and crippling taxes levied on every poor soul in the country, even the word “Ethiopia,” for Egypt was engaged in a futile war there—was daunting. The financial situation was so bad that the current Parliament had debated long and hard sending an envoy to the country to inquire into the state of affairs, and many held the opinion that national bankruptcy was inevitable.

  The great sultan, whom Lenox would meet once, was called Ismail the Magnificent, and he too was a compromised figure: He lived in unimaginable opulence, and in many ways had made Egypt the most advanced country outside of Europe, and yet his vast public expenditures had made him profoundly reliant on help from France and England, among other countries.

  As he read through his instructions, Lenox rather began to wish he had brought a secretary after all. By rights he might have had two, as many men in government did when they traveled, but he had known the Lucy to be a small ship, and besides that hadn’t wanted to pull his own closest confidant and personal secretary, his former butler Graham, away from London. With good reason, he thought. There was a story Lenox had heard as a boy of the great orator Cicero leaving Rome to administer a colony for several years; when he returned he walked into the Senate and said to the first man he met, “I’m back!” To which the man replied, “Where did you go?” Lenox was out of sight, but Graham might keep him in the minds of the men in Parliament.

  If he couldn’t have Graham, he decided, he didn’t need anyone. The ship would provide a steward. Now, though, faced with this forbidding list of duties, he regretted the decision. Hopefully the English consular staff in Port Said would be competent.

  He was reading about one of his final appointments several hours later. Apparently the wali prided himself on his commitment to the scientific methods of Western Europe.

  It was then, with the murders far, far from his mind, that the pieces jumbled together once more and fell into their places, as neatly as pegs into holes.

  He thought he knew who had killed Halifax and Martin. He stood up.

  “McEwan!” he called out excitedly. “Find me Captain Billings!”

  “Right away, sir,” called out the steward.

  Lenox left his cabin and strode toward the hatchway that would take him on deck, hoping he might find Billings sooner than McEwan, and arrange a meeting of the officers. It would take a bit of stagecraft, to be sure. He needed a few hours to plan it. Maybe longer; better make it tomorrow, perhaps, in the forenoon.

  McEwan bumped into him coming down the hatchway. “He is working, he says, sir, but will attend you in fifteen minutes in the captain’s dining room.”

  “Excellent. Listen, I may want to go to the crow’s nest again. Could you accompany me there, in half an hour, say, after I meet Billings? I trust you more than Andersen.”

  “Oh, with great pleasure. Will that be all?”

  “Yes,” said Lenox, suddenly distracted.

  “Sir? Are you all right?”

  “Fine, fine. Meet me on deck then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was one snag that Lenox could see, something from the captain’s log. Before he looked into that, though, he took the silence of the wardroom to steal into an officer’s cabin.

  There he found what he had needed. Verification.

  Then, all action, he went to the gun room. Only Pimples was there. (Lenox noticed a faint sallowness to the boy’s face that he had not perceived before. A remnant of his illness, perhaps.)

  “Do you know where Teddy is?” he asked.

  “He should be back any moment.”

  Indeed, he opened the door to the gun room, his face full of excitement—perhaps to relate Lee’s story to Pimples—not a few seconds later.

  “Oh! Uncle!”

  “Teddy, may I have a private word?”

  “Here, you may be alone,” said Pimples. “I need to be on deck anyhow.”

  “Thank you.”

  When they were alone, Lenox sat down. “Teddy, you told me that on your first night aboard the Lucy you were badly ill. Isn’t that so?”

  Teddy’s eyes were hooded with caution. “Yes, I suppose. Why?”

  “You must answer me truthfully: Did Mr. Carrow send you below deck to sleep it off?”

  “No,” said Teddy stoutly.

  But his face told a different story. “You never saw Halifax’s body, did you? I read in the captain’s log that a sick midshipman on his first night was sent below. On a different voyage.”

  “I never went down!”

  “Teddy. It’s I, your uncle. Think of your father.”

  The internal struggle played out on the midshipman’s face, but before long he relented. “Well, fine. But Mr. Carrow made me promise not to tell! Said he’d been ill, too, and I could tuck down in the hallway, so the other mids wouldn’t laugh at me.”

  “Mr. Carrow said that?”

  “You won’t tell, Uncle Charles?”

  “Thank you for being honest. I must leave you now.”

  So. A new fact. He could use it. He left the gun room and went off to meet Billings, his mind racing, adding bits and pieces of what he had seen in the last week—but not truly seen, at the time—all of which confirmed his s
uspicions.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Billings was in the captain’s dining room when the detective arrived, cutting an apple with a sharp silver knife. Not his penknife, Lenox noted, and didn’t blame the switch; it would have been too gruesome.

  “Mr. Lenox, I hope that the urgency of Mr. McEwan’s request means that you have discovered who murdered our captain?”

  “I think I have.”

  Relief flooded Billings’s face. “Oh, thank the Lord. The strain and tension of it—you can’t imagine, Mr. Lenox—my first ship. Thank the Lord … who did it?”

  “If we are to catch him out, it will take tremendous craft on our parts, Mr. Billings. I don’t want you flying off half-cocked and confronting him on your own. I suggest we congregate tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. Then you will know.”

  “Mr. Lenox, I demand that you tell me who killed my captain.”

  “I cannot, yet, Mr. Billings. I apologize. I fear you would attack him, or arrest him. Please, trust me. We will get a confession from him, I promise you.”

  “You are aboard my ship, Mr. Lenox. You have my absolute word that I will not confront this … this fiend, though I should long to do so. But you must tell me.”

  Lenox relented. “Very well, then. I will tell you that I have learned in the last ten minutes Mr. Carrow was alone with both corpses—”

  “Carrow! I cannot believe it. I cannot.”

  “The story runs much deeper than him, Mr. Billings. Can you trust me until the morning?”

  Now it was Billings’s turn to relent. “As you wish, then,” he said. “I’ll tell everyone at eight bells.”

  “Excellent. Now, I must be off to the crow’s nest.”

  “I’ll send someone with you,” said Billings, but his heart wasn’t in it. His eyes were cast on the floor, searching for an answer that wouldn’t appear there, and he muttered to himself, “Carrow? Carrow of the Lucy?”

  “No need. I have McEwan. Until supper, Mr. Billings.”

  He went up to the deck as quickly as he could, and found McEwan waiting for him there, a thermos tied to his belt by a heavy piece of rope.

  “Mr. Lenox!” he called out.

  “Mr. McEwan. Well, if ’twere done, ’twere well if ’twere done quickly.”

  “Sir?”

  “Let’s go up.”

  He had thought that knowing the way up, its arduousness and its perils, would make the journey easier. In fact he couldn’t stop thinking about the remote view of the deck from the crow’s nest, and how little he wished to share the fate of the pitiable Topman Starbuck, who had fallen to his death from a similar height—and he more experienced by a lifetime of days than Lenox at this sort of venture.

  Still, Lenox had his rope, and he had the unbelievably nimble McEwan. There seemed to be two of him among the rigging, one clearing debris out of the way such that it wouldn’t block Lenox’s path, one hovering nearby or beneath him, offering quiet, excellent advice and even, very respectfully, moral support. This was a man in his element. Or would have been, had there been a larder halfway up to the nest.

  Forty feet from the top he stopped, his muscles quivering in his arms and legs. A beautiful pink sun was in the middle of its descent. That meant there were twenty or thirty minutes before dark. Better conclude his business quickly, or he would have to spend the night up here. Anything was preferable to the idea of a dismount in the darkness of night. He started up again.

  “Mr. Evers!” he called out when he was close. “A hand up through the hole?”

  A face, seemingly unconnected to any body, popped through the hole. “Mr. Lenox? Can that be you?”

  “It’s I.”

  “Come to sketch with me?”

  “Ha, ha,” said Lenox weakly, and took Evers’s proffered hand, and shortly McEwan’s as well. “No, I came here looking for conversation with you.”

  He had observed Evers during the past few days, and knew that this was the hour when he climbed to the crow’s nest for solitude. And this was a conversation that demanded they be alone, something that was never easy on a ship of several hundred souls.

  “How can I help you?” asked Evers.

  “There are two things you may do for me, my dear man. First, I would ask of you another drawing. This one for my wife, Jane, whom I would wish to see what I saw here. Any price you think reasonable—”

  Evers, blushing, his face angry, said, “No, no, no payment necessary. I’ll leave it off with McEwan.”

  McEwan smiled gently, and Lenox recalled that the two men, so superficially dissimilar, were friends. “Hey now, go on, Johnny, take a payment. A couple shillings, Mr. Lenox?”

  “I would have thought at least a crown or two. Call it two crowns?”

  “For a drawing?” said Evers doubtfully.

  “For a drawing.”

  “A fool and his money are soon parted, I suppose.”

  “Oy! Have some respect!” said McEwan, a drop of genuine anger in his voice.

  “’Pologies, ’pologies, ’pologies. Yer can have it for a crown, Mr. Lenox—there, I bargained you down, how do you like that?”

  “Very well—a prime sort of transaction.”

  “What was the other thing you wanted to ask of me?” said Evers.

  “Ah. Now that … that is trickier by far, I’m afraid…”

  Fifteen minutes later Lenox began the descent, well pleased with the conversation, and having even given himself a moment to stand in the crow’s nest and admire the Mediterranean. He found that they were within sight of land—“Oh, have been for days,” McEwan said offhandedly—which meant that he was gazing upon Africa for the first time.

  Once, before Jane, really, travel had been a great preoccupation and passion of his, and he had spent hours with mapmakers and travel booksellers, had read of the great Arabian and African and Arctic adventures. Now those wintering roots stirred, life shooting up through them. To be in Africa! The savannahs, sparsely dotted with trees, the great game—lions, zebras, elephants—and of course the natives, so mysterious to him, frightening if he were honest with himself. Were they truly savage?

  It was easy, he had always felt, for an Englishman, dotted at the center of a great empire, with London as a heart pumping blood out to the most distant veins, to feel that he too was the center of the empire. Of the world. But it was state of mind that Lenox deplored in his own class; he was happy to hunt fox at Lenox House, and drink tea, and watch the local blacksmith bowl cricket. But he never presumed that these things were all the world could offer, or that they were right. He had very little time for the red-faced squires, convinced of French beastliness and Victoria’s place at God’s right hand, who did? Unfortunately they populated the benches of Parliament.

  With McEwan’s encouragement and aid, Lenox made it down the rigging and to deck with only seven or eight moments of utter terror, which was an improvement on his previous rate.

  “Thank you, my dear man,” he said when they had successfully gained the deck.

  “Not at all, not at all,” said McEwan, who was rather irritatingly breathing as gently as if he had been out for a spring stroll. “You must be next door to famished though, I reckon. Sir.”

  “At the moment I would prefer a glass of brandy to a piece of mutton.”

  McEwan clicked his tongue. “Oh, I’ll never understand that, not ever. But here we are, come along.”

  And so Lenox retired to his cabin, to think over the next morning’s assembly.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  The ship’s low morale, its air of suspicion, was still present when Lenox walked the quarterdeck at eight o’clock the next morning. He wondered how the discovery of the murderer would alter that mood. It would come as a shock to the men, he imagined.

  He ate a breakfast of mushrooms and eggs, fried together in one of the many scruffy cast-iron pans that McEwan hung on nails near his hammock; he feared that the cook would steal them if they were left in the galley, and swore that their heavy bottoms made foo
d taste better. After Lenox had eaten this breakfast he took, for fortification, a small glass of wine, savoring it as he looked through his porthole. He thought of home.

  When it was nearly ten o’clock he had a quick word with McEwan, sent the steward to do a small task, and then went to the wardroom. Soon all the men who ate there every night were gathered around. There was Billings, of course; the grim Carrow; Mitchell, with his temper; Lee, with his drawl; Rogers, the drunken chaplain, a figure of affectionate fun among the bluejackets; quiet Tradescant, Quirke, and Pettegree, who always stood rather apart. Alastair Cresswell had been temporarily elevated to the post of fourth lieutenant, but he was on deck, strutting around and giving his old gun roommates orders. At any rate Lenox had no need of him.

  “Gentleman, welcome,” he said.

  “Who did it?” asked Mitchell without preamble.

  “We must go more slowly than that.”

  “Puffery and showmanship,” Mitchell muttered.

  “Good lord,” said Carrow, “some respect for Her Majesty’s representative.”

  “You will speak with deference, Mr. Mitchell,” Billings added.

  “Thank you, Mr. Carrow. Mr. Billings. We do need to move slowly, Mr. Mitchell, not to indulge my rather poor sense of showmanship, but because there is a long story to be told.”

  “Well?” said Mitchell.

  “First I wonder whether you would be so kind as to permit me to look outside of the doors. I have no wish to be overheard, even by your stewards.” Lenox rose and checked the doors. Nobody lurked behind any of them, though Lee’s man was cleaning his cabin.

  “Here, follow me into the wardroom. Would you mind stepping up on deck for the half part of an hour or so?” said Lenox.

  The steward looked at Lee. “Go on, do it,” said the lieutenant, and the man went.

  Lenox sat again. “I confess that after Halifax died I suspected all of you, at one time or another. Mr. Tradescant, you have a surgeon’s hands; it crossed my mind that you might share the same predilections as some of your less honorable brethren. Please accept my apology.”