A Burial at Sea Read online

  The chaplain finished and motioned the four remaining lieutenants, Billings, Carrow, Lee, and Mitchell, forward. Each took one corner of the mess table upon which Halifax, sewn into his sail, was laid. As the chaplain spoke again they walked the table down the starboard gangway and slowly, agonizingly slowly, began to tip the body into the sea.

  “We therefore commit the body of our brother and shipmate Thomas Halifax to the deep, looking for general resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose Second Coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless and keep him. The Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him. The Lord lift his countenance upon him, and give him peace. Amen.”

  “Amen,” the ship’s company called back.

  The body slid heavily from the table and for a brief moment seemed to hang in the air, then broke the water’s surface with a tremendous crash. For a moment, not longer, a white ghost lingered in the sea, but before anyone could be sure they had seen a final glimpse of the ensheeted body it was already speeding toward the depths.

  The officers and the captain now went to the rail and each threw his flower onto the water. Full fathom five thy father lies, went through Lenox’s head, an old schooldays’ memorization, of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes; nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his bell: Hark, now I hear them, ding-dong bell. There was something far worse about a body going into the water than into the ground; far worse.

  Now the captain stepped forward and gazed out over the men he commanded. He was such a very religious man that Lenox expected words of Christian emphasis, but apparently that role had been filled by the chaplain. For his part, Martin spoke of Halifax as a naval man.

  “This is an unhappy burial, I know—but refuse to believe, for to be buried at sea is a great honor for a proper man of Her Majesty’s navy, as Thomas Halifax was, and though his virtues would have well adorned a longer life, though his service to our Queen was too brief in duration, though his death was an unfair and bitterly hard-fought one, at the hands of a peasant and coward, nevertheless he goes to the same deeps Drake did, the same deeps to which his grandfather’s body fell. And in that there must be great honor. He is numbered among us, a man of our ship the Lucy. May none of you forget that, until the last who stands among us on this deck draws his final breath. Whomever it shall be.”

  The bosun stepped forward again. “Ship’s company, on hats!” he cried. The men put their blue cloth caps back on and started, with a low murmur of conversation, to go back below deck to change, and many of them soon to eat.

  The officers watched them go and then Martin, his face flushed red—though it was impossible to say whether with emotion or cold, for the sun had all but gone—turned and said, “I invite you all to my dining room for supper. The midshipmen will be with us too. In honor of Halifax.”

  The officers murmured their assent, and began to go below deck themselves.

  This supper was a downhearted affair despite the captain’s excellent food and wine, although for Lenox the affair was somewhat enlivened because he was able to snatch a few moments of conversation with his nephew.

  “How has your first day been?”

  Teddy shrugged. “Well, Lieutenant Halifax…”

  “Aside from that? Are you settled in?”

  “Oh, yes. I know one of the chaps from the college, and they all seem decent enough. In fact they asked me to invite you for supper in the gun room.”

  “I should be delighted.”

  “If you might bring provisions, Uncle Charles…” Teddy’s earnest face was screwed up in concentration, trying to phrase his request with some measure of delicacy. “The lads themselves don’t have much aboard, and by the end of the last trip out they were roasting rats.”

  “Say no more—it shall be a feast.”

  Slowly people began to tell stories of Halifax, beginning with the captain and then to Carrow—whom Lenox thought perhaps he might manage a word with after supper—and the engineer Quirke, who spoke amusingly about his own attempts to fish off the side of the Lucy with Halifax.

  As they were drinking their port, however, something arrived out of the sky—which had been clear all day—that would distract them all from their stories and, indeed, from Halifax’s murder: a storm.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It was Mitchell, Lenox’s antagonist of that afternoon, who drew their attention to the situation. He had stayed on deck, being the duty officer, while the others ate, and had taken the ship back on course after it had fallen still for Halifax’s burial. Now he came into Martin’s cabin.

  “With pardon, sir, there’s weather above,” he said to the captain.

  Martin’s brow furrowed. “It was clear not an hour ago.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Martin stood. “Only a passing squall, I imagine, but I had better go upstairs. Gentlemen, please finish your port.”

  Lenox turned to Carrow after the captain had gone. “What will you do in a squall?” he asked.

  “Would you care to see? It shouldn’t be too bad yet. You might come up on deck.”

  “With pleasure.”

  It looked ominous outside to Lenox’s eyes, but he had learned enough of his own lack of comprehension of naval matters to keep quiet. There were huge clifflike black clouds toward the east, and the air carried a peculiar salt tang.

  “More than a squall,” Carrow murmured as they reached the quarterdeck.

  “Do you think?”

  The captain was on the main deck delivering orders. “Reef the topsails!” his voice boomed out. “Prepare for heavy wind, gentlemen!”

  The crew were in action even before he had finished speaking, moving in a kind of symphony of coordination. Soon the masts looked barer than they had when Lenox and Carrow came on deck.

  For his part Carrow was watching not the men but the clouds. “This is an overnighter,” he said. To Lenox’s surprise the young man, usually so stern and pinched-looking, was now beaming.

  “Might we not outrun it, using coal?”

  “We might,” said Carrow, not taking his eyes off of the storm clouds, “but then again we might not. And if we did not, we would have used half our coal and worn our men to the bone just before a storm, just when everyone must be at their sharpest.”

  “I see.”

  Now he turned to Lenox. “You needn’t worry. A storm is the best fun in the world, I promise you—once you make it out alive, at any rate.”

  The other officers evidently agreed, for they were drifting onto deck now, giving orders along with the bosun—lash down this, ship that below deck—and soon the sailors came above too. Those who didn’t work chewed their tobacco and leant on the railings, looking out at the black clouds just as Carrow had.

  One man was unhappy, however: the purser, Pettegree, who tailed the captain, occasionally offering a comment when his superior’s attention was less than fully occupied.

  “Why does he look so anxious?” Lenox asked Carrow.

  “A purser always hates a storm—and since they were never proper sailors, but always purser’s mates, they never shall grow to love them, either.”

  “He rose to the position of officer?”

  “Oh, yes, he would have started out in hammocks with the rest of them. Now he’s a warrant officer, but still—” Carrow made a gesture that seemed to indicate this wasn’t worth much count.

  “And why does he hate a storm?”

  “Water is terrible for the purser’s stores, you see. It gets the flour wet, or rolls crates around and destroys them … he’ll be asking Captain Martin for help. To give him his due
, he’ll have a difficult night.”

  Indeed, Martin finally gave Pettegree his full attention, and once he had heard—with no great measure of patience—the purser’s request, he detached four stout-looking men from their work and sent them below deck.

  It was clear now that no amount of coal would have pushed the Lucy, fast as she might be under sail and steam, beyond the reach of the storm. Fat drops of rain started to dot the deck dark.

  “Reef the mainsails!” cried Martin.

  When this was accomplished the masts looked all but bare—there were a few small, tough-looking sails at the center of the ship, presumably to guide the ship without encouraging her to too great a speed.

  “Had I better go below deck?” Lenox asked Carrow.

  “If you prefer.”

  Martin came charging past them toward aft, stopping long enough to say, “Now you will see my men at their best, Mr. Lenox. Tell the boys in Parliament. Tell Her Majesty, for that matter.”

  “I shall.” When he was gone, Lenox went on, “I say, Lieutenant Carrow, why are we running into the wind now?”

  “It’s the best way to keep the ship from capsizing,” Carrow answered with a dry smile, “and so I deduce that such is the captain’s desire.”

  Lenox went rather pale. “Is there a chance of that—of us capsizing?”

  Carrow laughed. “Oh, no. A chance in a thousand, perhaps, but no. This is only a bad storm, from the look of it, not what we call a survival storm. The wind will run us along at eight or nine knots—stiffly enough, mind you!—but not more than that. If it were more we couldn’t sail. In a nine-knot wind you have the great advantage of still being able to use your sails.”

  “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 dark
ness 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.