A Burial at Sea Read online

  When he woke it was dark out, and Tradescant was leaning over him. “Fever almost gone. All that’s wrong with you now is a sunburn and your … perhaps less than optimal physical condition.”

  “Too many parliamentary dinners,” said Lenox.

  “It was certainly an unaccustomed amount of exercise,” said Tradescant, and laughed dryly at his own joke. “But rest again, please. Rest again.”

  Only in the morning did Lenox at last feel himself. His skin still tingled and prickled with heat, as it might when he overpeppered his food, but he felt clear-eyed.

  It was neither Tradescant nor Carrow whose footsteps woke him now, but McEwan’s, and, behind him, Evers’s.

  The small deal table beside Lenox’s sickbed had been empty the night before, but since then had become a smaller replica of his desk. There was his Darwin, his letter paper, his pen and ink, his water pitcher, his toast-rack-correspondence stand, even the small picture of Jane.

  Lenox was touched. “You did this?” he said to McEwan. “Thank you.”

  “You must be hungry by now,” said McEwan. “Surely, sir.” His voice was pained.

  “I am, in fact. I have a roaring appetite.”

  With a great exhale of relief McEwan left, saying not so much as a word.

  Evers sidled up to the bed. “Paying my respects, sir,” he said.

  “I’ve yet to thank you properly for your acting performance. The stage lost a star when you went to sea I think, Evers.”

  The bluejacket laughed. “Well, and perhaps the sea lost a sailor when you took up to politicking and detecting and all sorts. You’re a proper Lucy, now you’ve half drowned yourself.”

  “Out of the way!” McEwan bellowed from the doorway, and came past Evers with a heavy tray, laden with every manner of fowl and pastry and vegetable he had been able to conjure. Lenox took a piece of lightly buttered toast and a cup of tea, to see how they would sit with him. Evers touched his cap and left with a promise to be back, but McEwan, rather disconcertingly, watched every bite go down, each of them a small drama to him, full of suspense until Lenox had completed the ritual of mastication and ingestion.

  After the tea and toast Lenox made his way through a leg of cold chicken and a half of a new potato.

  McEwan took the tray away with a promise to be back soon. Lenox read Darwin and dozed, still physically worn out, pleased to be alive. Occasionally the feeling of the water, or the terror of being at the mercy of Billings, came back to him, but he felt safe on the ship. There was a cool breeze that reached him now and then, and he thought he might almost attain the quarterdeck, if a chair could be placed by the railing there.

  When McEwan returned it was with a treat. With great ingenuity he had somehow manufactured a small cup of cool sherbet. It was orange-flavored—“Saved the peels of your oranges,” he said with a hint of entirely justifiable arrogance—and Lenox thought he had never tasted anything sweeter or more refreshing. It took all the heat out of his cheeks and soothed him to no end.

  The next morning he wrote at length to Lady Jane, a letter he might never send so as not to alarm her, and then, with McEwan’s help and Tradescant’s permission, began the slow climb to the quarterdeck. It was arduous work, as difficult in its way as attaining the crow’s nest, but eventually he reached the hatchway.

  When he poked his head through, his breathing labored, he heard all the chatter of the deck stop.

  He looked up to see that every pair of eyes was on him, from the foremast to the mizzenmast, the deck to the crow’s nest. Then, spontaneously, the men and the officers broke into a long ringing applause.

  “Three cheers!” said Andersen, the Swede, and the men gave Lenox three cheers, before clustering around to help him to his chair.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  They reached Port Said two days later. On the final morning of their voyage Lenox felt truly well for perhaps the first time since his long swim, still greatly weakened but now capable of moving about the ship on his own. He spent a great many hours with his nephew Teddy, whom, though the ship was shorthanded for officers, Carrow permitted some degree of latitude in his duties.

  The men seemed to bear a philosophical attitude toward Billings’s actions, and now his disappearance. Death was not uncommon at sea, perhaps. There were words of sadness for Captain Martin (still unburied) and at first a great deal of gossip on the decks, but even twenty-four hours after Lenox’s swim, while Lenox was only just returning to consciousness, the ship had apparently become itself again—albeit with a much reduced wardroom. Evers was back in his crow’s nest, Andersen back on the rigging, and Alice Cresswell walking the poop deck as a fourth lieutenant with all the pride and pomp of a king at his coronation.

  Lenox watched their approach to the port from the railing at the Lucy’s spar. It was a marvel, this city. He realized that he had previously thought of the Suez Canal as a modest piece of imperial construction, for all of its expense and fame. Now he saw that it was unlike anything else in the world.

  There were ships of every nation, Dutch flags, French ones, a dozen others, crowding the waters of the port. The air was black with steam, the docks frantic with action, and the sheer multitude of small craft on the water was overwhelming. In fact the water seemed more densely populated than the town. Men in skiffs went between all the larger ships, selling fresh fish and Egyptian delicacies. There were pleasure boats with prostitutes crowding their decks, official boats levying taxes and examining goods. Every one of them seemed to linger in the Lucy’s path until the last possible moment.

  When they were quite close to dropping anchor, Carrow came to stand beside Lenox. “And this is what we’re hoping to buy into?” he said.

  “I believe so.”

  “It’s closer to Gehenna than anything I ever saw.”

  “Certainly it gives an overpowering impression.”

  “Filth, children running loose, any manner of ship crowding our boards. The men will love it. Hauling them back onto the Lucy at the end of a week’s time would be no pleasure, so I fear I must keep them on board. Still, I doubt they’ll mind if I permit them the freedom of the pleasure barges—most of them are close to jumping off and swimming every time one passes anyhow.”

  “How will you spend your time in port?”

  “There is a great deal to do about the ship, taking inventory, that sort of thing. I don’t doubt there will be congenial company if I do go on land.”

  “You must come to dine with me, at least,” said Lenox.

  “I should be honored. And there may well be other officers I’ve met, of our nation and others, staying at the officers’ club here.”

  “You’re a captain now,” said Lenox, half as a question.

  Carrow laughed. “Hard to believe, I know, and I never imagined how bitterly I would regret fulfilling my boyhood dream. Martin dead, Halifax gone, Billings a monster living in our midst all this while. Even Butterworth I thought I knew. Not a talkative chap, but not unkind either.”

  “I think he felt a very great sympathy for Billings,” said Lenox. “A sense of protectiveness, even.”

  “You heard Costigan’s tale?”

  “Secondhand.”

  “Billings attacked him. I thank God that someone was in the surgery at all times, per Tradescant’s orders, or I don’t doubt Billings would have slipped in to finish the job himself. It was lucky Costigan mended at all.”

  “Will it be difficult to sail back to England with so few officers? Will you recruit here?”

  “Oh, no,” said Carrow. “If we were near Brazil or India, perhaps. The trip back should be a jaunt. Now, we must see you into the Bootle very shortly, and onto land. You have great work to do, I know. I feel honored to help you; truly, I do, Mr. Lenox. Shake my hand, will you, before you go?”

  The Bootle was the ungraceful little tub, previously a lifeboat, that had replaced the Bumblebee as the ship’s jolly boat. Lenox and his trunk went aboard with the help of the bosun and McEwan, Carrow at the raili
ng to wave goodbye, Teddy and his fellow midshipmen behind the captain, waving too. (Lenox had left them two bottles of wine, to enjoy during his absence, and rather doubted they would survive the night. “Just keep Teddy off the pleasure barges,” he had muttered to Cresswell. “Surely I can count on a vicar’s son for that much?”)

  It was a short journey to the dock; to Lenox’s surprise there was a delegation of four waiting for him there, one of them a young Egyptian boy struggling under an enormous flag bearing Saint George’s cross, which, seen in a certain light, was no inapt representation of England’s presence on the continent.

  He stepped out of the Bootle and onto the dock, wearing his finest suit, and looked at the three white faces who waited for him there, two men and, to his surprise, a woman.

  It was she who greeted him, a young, pale, and sturdy creature, who spoke in a strong Welsh accent. “Mr. Lenox, may I welcome you? We saw the Lucy’s color this morning and have been anticipating your arrival since. We have sore need of your authority in dealing with these Egyptians—I count myself very pleased that you have come. My name is Megan Edwards.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you. This is my steward, McEwan.”

  “May I introduce you to my husband, please? Sir Wincombe Chowdery. I didn’t fancy being Megan Chowdery, however old a name it might be. I find I like being Megan Edwards better.” If this was unconventional talk, even brazen, she didn’t seem particularly to care.

  Chowdery stepped forward; Lenox knew him to be Her Majesty’s consul in Port Said. He had looked at his wife throughout her initial speech with adoring eyes, a very small, stooped gentleman, well past fifty, with a squint and thick glasses. “And quite right,” he said, when she had concluded speaking, and then added, “May I welcome you. This is my associate, Mr. Arbuthnot—very promising young gentleman from Cambridge, don’t you know—fly-half—terrific hunter.”

  Arbuthnot was a hale chap of only twenty-five or so, in truth better suited to Chowdery’s young wife than Chowdery himself was. For all that Lenox saw Lady Megan grip her husband’s hand and shoot him an adoring look while Lenox shook the younger man’s hand.

  “Most pleased to see you,” said Arbuthnot. “Are these your things? Here, boys!”

  He clicked his fingers and three boys from a group of fifty or so won the race and picked up the trunks, carrying, it seemed to Lenox, much more than their collective weight. After he had said goodbye to the sailors manning the Bootle, he followed his trunks to a carriage, Arbuthnot and the Chowderys alongside him. The shillings he gave the boys were met with almost disbelieving gazes of happiness; Arbuthnot tried to step in and give them a more appropriate tip, but Lenox waved the boys off. They vanished before he had time to see them leaving, back into the great, hot masses moving among the docks. McEwan mounted the seat beside the driver in order to look after the trunks, lashed as they were to the roof of the carriage.

  The carriage rode over very rough streets, and in the few blocks close to the port the buildings were shifting sorts of slums, crowded with drying laundry and seemingly overflowed with people. Food sellers and other merchants operated out of small stalls, and shouted over each other. Because Port Said had been truly settled as a major city only fifteen years before, as part of the creation of the canal, everything had an air of shoddy newness.

  Gradually, however, the streets cleared and the houses grew slightly larger; then larger still; and finally, as they ascended away from the port, there were villas and manors. All of these were new and sparklingly colored. Some of them had small signs outside with names on them, many more in French than in English, and also in a variety of other languages of Western Europe. It was the most international city Lenox had ever found himself in. The population was only about ten thousand, and yet there must have been two dozen nationalities represented among them.

  It was Mrs. Edwards who spoke for most of the journey, informing Lenox of his various duties and reporting to him on recent developments in the competition between the French and English for use of the canal. She also spoke about the wali, Ismail the Magnificent, whose vision had dragged Egypt into modernity and whose spending threatened to ruin all of that progress. In truth she seemed more competent and informed than her husband, whose few conversational gambits all seemed to involve books. Lenox thought he understood: Chowdery himself was more than happy to let his wife hold the reins, while he sat and sipped cool drinks and read Seneca, Coleridge, Sallust, Carlyle.

  It was enlightened, Lenox would acknowledge. But he would have been mortified to marry a woman like her, however pretty she might be. So modern!

  “Ismail is a strange creature,” said the consul’s wife. “He prefers gadgets to all things—I trust you have brought him gifts of state?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Lenox, “and the appropriate ministers. There is English marmalade, an engraved silver tea set for the gentleman who manages the canal’s revenues, and who I understand fancies himself an English gentleman, and for the wali himself there is a time-saving device, a self-winding desk clock. I can’t imagine it works very well. And a dozen things beside. They are all in the other trunk, packed tidily by my brother’s assistant.”

  Chowdery spoke. “We have a supper scheduled for this evening,” he said. “I trust you are well enough after your voyage to attend?”

  He still felt that swim in every fiber of his body, but said, “Oh, yes.”

  “And tomorrow you tour the canal,” said Arbuthnot. “A bother, but they will insist on showing it to everyone.”

  “I suppose I would too, had I dug it,” said Lenox, and everyone in the carriage laughed. “It’s an embarrassing question, but would you tell me the date? One loses track of such things at sea.”

  “Not at all,” said Chowdery. “It’s the fourteenth.”

  “Ah. Excellent.”

  Tomorrow, then, he would have his secret meeting with the Frenchman Sournois. His heart gave a small flutter at the prospect of it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  It was interesting, that evening, to consider the men and women whom the winds of empire had blown to Port Said. There was a naturalist, apparently of some renown, who was raising funds for a trip to the center of the continent. There were half-a-dozen lean, hungry young men, all on the lookout for their fortunes in this fertile land, who variously described themselves as shipping consultants, exporters, or, most commonly and simply, “in business.” Many of them were based in Suez, and in town for Lenox’s meetings, sensing a chance of advancing their interests on his back, and therefore they were all extremely deferential and welcoming to him. There was a retired colonel from the Coldstream Guards, complete with family, whose continued good health required warm and dry weather. He had just been eight months in Marrakech, and had come to Port Said on a whim.

  Perhaps most surprisingly there was a man Lenox had known at Oxford, an earl’s son, Cosmo Ashenden, who had killed a member of the House of Lords in a duel and never thereafter returned to English soil. He bore an angry scar over his eye. The woman who had been at issue Lenox still saw in London. She had married an elderly bishop, in the end, and been widowed young and rich.

  “We thought there would be plenty of occasion for you to meet the Egyptians,” said Lady Megan. “All of us are British here this evening, whatever small expatriate community we can claim.”

  When he finally reached his bed Lenox was staggeringly fatigued, worn down in body and bone, and he slept almost instantly, a vague thought of Jane passing through a far reach of his mind before he was gone.

  As he had with each sunrise since his involuntary swim, Lenox felt better the next morning than he had the day before. His room was a wide, high-ceilinged, light-filled chamber, with an Englishman’s essentials—bookshelf, desk, bed—overlaid by an Egyptian’s detailing, from the prints on the wall to the perforated geometric patterns in his brass lamps. He ate a positively luxurious breakfast by his window, which was flung open for the breeze and the warmth of the day. As he spread some of J
ane’s marmalade, still made by her childhood nanny, over buttered toast, he wrote to his wife, a letter to supersede all the others, and which he planned to send first that she might not fret about his condition. He took two or three cups of very strong African coffee, then, and dressed for the day.

  “McEwan!” he called.

  The steward’s face popped around the door. “Yes, sir?”

  “You can have the Egyptian boys clear away my breakfast things, but I need you to post this letter.”

  McEwan nodded. “Of course, sir. You know the Lucy will likely beat it home?”

  “Never mind that.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And I’ll take my gray suit, wherever in hell you’ve secreted it.”

  “Here in your wardrobe, sir,” said McEwan, pulling it out.

  Lenox laughed. “I don’t know how you expected me to find it there.”

  “Sir?”

  “Only a joke. You’ll send that letter? Perhaps their secretary here can tell you how to do it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Half an hour later Lenox was bouncing over the road to the mouth of the canal, while Chowdery and his wife offered advice on the proper forms of greeting in Egypt.

  As it happened he didn’t need them; the man who greeted them at their carriage was dressed in a suit that looked as if it might have come from Savile Row, and after greeting Chowdery gave Lenox a firm handshake.

  “I am Kafele, emissary of the Magnificent Ismail, khedive of Egypt and Sudan,” he said.

  “Charles Lenox, member of Parliament.”

  “It is our profound honor to welcome you, sir.”

  “And mine to visit your country. I look forward to seeing the canal.”

  “May I lead you this way?”

  They were at the door of the most solid-looking building Lenox had seen in this makeshift city. “Most impressive,” he murmured.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the wali’s emissary. “As a man of the world you will appreciate the difficulty of constructing a city from scratch. She had no fresh source of water, Port Said, for the first ten years of her existence, and no stone either. Everything had to be dragged across the desert or floated across the sea. Yet here you stand, in our noblest building.”