A Burial at Sea

by Charles Finch

  This book is dedicated with love to my grandmother, Anne Truitt, who loved sea stories. In memory.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Also by Charles Finch

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  A Burial at Sea required perhaps more research than the previous four Lenox books combined, and correspondingly there are a large number of people to thank. Chief among these is Jeremiah Dancy, naval historian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, who patiently answered dozens of my questions, small and large, and offered me an excellent bibliography. The most useful of the books he recommended to me were The Navy in Transition by Michael Lewis and The Royal Navy: An Illustrated Social History, 1870–1982. by Captain John Wells. I also want to mention the two writers who inspired this book’s setting, C. S. Forester and the incomparable Patrick O’Brian.

  As usual, the team at St. Martin’s Press, from Charlie Spicer to Yaniv Soha to Andy Martin, was wonderfully generous and helpful. So was my agent, Kate Lee.

  Thank you to Dennis Popp and Linda Bock. I owe them gratitude beyond reckoning for all their loyal support and friendship in recent years, and it seems appropriate that I completed this book in their beautiful sunroom.

  Emily Popp and Mary Truitt each read early drafts, and each changed the final manuscript considerably for the better with their suggestions. Thanks and love to both of them.

  For the name of the Bootle, thanks to Gerald Durrell, and for the name of the Lucy, thanks to Lucy.

  Because I had so much help this time around, I must insist with more than the usual vehemence that all the book’s mistakes are my own.

  CHAPTER ONE

  He gazed out at the sunfall from an open second-floor window, breathing deeply of the cool salt air, and felt it was the first calm moment he had known in days. Between the outfitting, the packing, the political conversations with his brother, and a succession of formal meals that had served as shipboard introductions to the officers of the Lucy, his week in Plymouth had been a daze of action and information.

  Now, though, Charles Lenox could be still for a moment. As he looked out over the maze of thin streets that crossed the short path to the harbor, and then over the gray, calm water itself—smudged brown with half-a-dozen large ships and any number of small craft—he bent forward slightly over the hip-high window rail, hands in pockets. He was past forty now, forty-two, and his frame, always thin and strong, had started to fill out some at the waist. His trim brown hair, however, was still untouched by gray. On his face was a slight, careworn smile, matched by his tired, happy, and curious hazel eyes. He had been for much of his life a detective, more lately a member of Parliament for the district of Stirrington, and now for the first time, he would be something else: something very like a diplomat.

  Or even a spy.

  It had begun two months before, in early March. Lenox had been at home on Hampden Lane. This was the small street just off Grosvenor Square, lined with pleasant houses and innocuous shops—a bookseller, a tobacconist—where he had lived nearly his whole adult life. For much of that time his best friend had lived next door to him, a widow named Lady Jane Grey whose family was also from Sussex: they had grown up riding together, fidgeting through church together: together. Just three years before, to his own confused and happy surprise, Lenox had realized how very much he loved her. It had taken some time to gather the courage to ask her to marry him. But he had. Now, in the winter of 1873, they were just getting used to the upside-down tumble their lives had taken. Their houses, side by side as they were, had been rebuilt to connect, and now they lived within a sprawling mishmash of rooms that matched their joined-up lives. They were a couple.

  Lenox had been in his study that evening in March, making notes for a speech he hoped to give the following day in the House of Commons about India. There was a gentle snow outside the high windows near his desk, and the gaslights cast a dim and romantic light over the white, freshened streets.

  There was a knock at the door.

  Lenox put down his pen and flexed his sore hand, opening and closing it, as he waited for their butler, Kirk, to show the guest in.

  “Sir Edmund Lenox,” Kirk announced, and to his delight Charles saw his older brother’s cheerful and ruddy face pop around the doorway.

  “Ed!” he said, and stood. They clasped hands. “Come, sit by the fire—you must be nigh on frozen. Well, it’s been two weeks nearly, hasn’t it? You’re in the country too often for my taste, I tell you that frankly.”

  Edmund smiled widely but he looked exhausted. “In fact I wasn’t at the house, so you can’t lay that charge against me,” he said. The house being the one they had grown up in together, Lenox House.

  “No? But you said you were going to see Molly and the—”

  The baronet waved a hand. “Security reasons, they say, but whatever it is we were at Lord Axmouth’s place in Kent, five of us, holed up with the admiralty, the chaps from the army, a rotating cast of ministers … with Gladstone.”

  The prime minister. Charles furrowed his brow. “What can it have been about?”

  In person Edmund Lenox looked very much like his younger brother, but he was perhaps less shrewd in the eyes, more open-faced. He served in Parliament out of a sense, not of ambition, but of duty, inherited from their father, and indeed preferred the country to London. Perhaps as a result he had a countryish air. He seemed heartier than his brother Charles.

  This innocent, candid mien, however, concealed a more intelligent mind than one might immediately have suspected. It had been to Lenox’s great shock when he first learned, five or six years before, that Edmund wasn’t the stolid backbencher he had always appeared to be, but in fact a leading member of his party who had declined important posts again and again, preferring to work behind the scenes.

  Now he surprised Charles again.

  “You know something of my purview?” Edmund said.

  “Something.” Lenox himself was still a backbencher, but could say without undue immodesty that he was a rising man; long hours of work had seen to that. “You advise the ministers, consult with the prime minister on occasion, find votes—that sort of thing.”

  Edmund smiled again, an unhappy smile this time. “First
of all, let me say that I come to ask a favor. I hope you’ll agree to do it.”

  “With all my heart.”

  “Not so quickly, for love’s sake, Charles.”

  “Well?”

  Edmund sighed and stood up from the armchair, staring for a moment at the low, crackling glow in the hearth. “Might I have a drink?” he asked.

  “The usual?” Lenox stood and walked over to a small, square, lacquered table crowded with crystal decanters. He poured them each a glass of Scotch whisky. “Here you are.”

  “There are other parts of my job, that I haven’t mentioned to you before,” said Edmund after a sip. “A role I play that you might call more—more secret.”

  Lenox understood instantly, and felt well inside him some mixture of excitement, tension, surprise, and even a slight hurt that he hadn’t heard of this before. “Intelligence?” he said gravely.

  “Yes.”

  “What branch?”

  Edmund considered the question. “You might call me an overseer, of sorts.”

  “All of it, then.”

  “Since the new prime minister came in, yes. I report to him. These weeks we have been—”

  “You might have told me,” said Charles, his tone full of forced jocularity.

  With comprehension in his eyes Edmund said, “I would have, believe me—I would have come to you first were I permitted to speak of it.”

  “And why can you now? This favor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “It’s France,” said Edmund. “We’re worried about France.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Everything has been cordial, hasn’t it? Uneasily so, I suppose, but—”

  Edmund sat down. “Charles,” he said with a hard look, “will you go to Egypt for us?”

  Taken aback, Charles returned his brother’s stare. “Why—I suppose I could,” he said at last. “If you needed me to.”

  So that spark had burst into this conflagration; Lenox would set sail twelve hours from now aboard the Lucy, a corvette bound for the Suez.

  A cool breeze fluttered the thin white curtains on either side of him. He felt his nerves shake slightly, his stomach tighten, as he contemplated the idea of leaving, of all his fresh responsibility. This Plymouth house—a cream-colored old Georgian in a row, let by the week or month to officers and their families—had in just two weeks come to feel almost like home, and he realized with a feeling of surprise that he would be sorry to leave it, even though he had looked forward to nothing else for two months but his voyage. Then he understood that it wasn’t the house he would miss, but the home that his wife had made of it.

  He heard the door open downstairs.

  “Charles?” a voice rang from the bottom of the stairs. It was Lady Jane.

  Before he answered he hesitated for a brief moment and looked out again at Plymouth Harbor, under its falling golden sun, savoring the idea, every boy’s dream, of being out at sea.

  “Up here!” he cried then. “Let me give you a hand.”

  But she was clambering up the stairs. “Nonsense! I’m already halfway there.”

  She came in, pink-faced, dark-haired, smallish, pretty in a rather plain way, dressed all in blue and gray—and holding her belly, which, though her dress hid it, had begun to round out.

  For after hesitation and dispute, something wonderful had happened to them, that daily miracle of the world that nevertheless always manages to catch us off guard, no matter our planning, no matter our dreams, no matter our circumstances: she was pregnant.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The next morning was bright, and now the harbor shifted and glittered brilliantly. Anchored some way out, close enough that one could see men moving aboard her but far enough that their faces were indistinct, lay the Lucy, bobbing up and down.

  She had come into dry dock some six weeks before, after a two-year tour in distant waters, and had since then been refitted: her old and tattered sails, mended so often they were three-quarters patch, replaced with snow-white new ones, the dented copper below her waterline smoothed and reinforced, her old bolts refitted, her formerly bare engine room again coaled. She looked young once more.

  Lucy had come off the same dockyards as Her Majesty’s ship Challenger in the same year, 1858, and both were corvettes, ships designed not for firing power, like a frigate, or quick jaunts out, like a brig, but for speed and maneuverability. She carried three masts; from stem to stern she measured about two hundred feet; as for men, she held roughly two hundred and twenty bluejackets—common seamen—and twenty-five or so more, from the rank of midshipman to captain, who belonged to the officer ranks. The Challenger, which was well known because of its long scientific mission to Australia and the surrounding seas, was quicker than the Lucy, but the Lucy was thought to be more agile and better in a fight.

  In her means of propulsion she embodied perfectly the uncertain present state of the navy’s technology. She was not steam-powered but rather steam-assisted, which is to say that she used the power of coal to leave and enter harbor and during battle, but the rest of the time moved under sail, not all that differently than her forebears in the Napoleonic Wars sixty years earlier might have. Using coal added several knots to the Lucy’s speed, but it was a problematic fuel source: coaling stations were few and far between and the burners were thin-walled and had to be spared too much taxation lest they falter in an important situation. (New, thicker burners were being manufactured now, but even in her Plymouth refitting the Lucy didn’t receive one of them.)

  Lenox had learned all of this information three nights before from the captain, Jacob Martin, a stern, youngish fellow, perhaps thirty-five, extremely religious, prematurely gray but physically very strong. Edmund said that he was much respected within the admiralty and destined for great things, perhaps even the command of a large warship within the next few months. Martin politely did his duty by welcoming Lenox to the ship and describing her outlines to him, but all the same didn’t quite seem to relish the prospect of a civilian passenger.

  “Still,” he had said, “we must try to prove our worth now, the navy. It’s not like it was in my grandfather’s day. He was an admiral, Mr. Lenox, raised his flag at Trafalgar. Those chaps were heroes to the common Englishman. Now we must stretch ourselves in every new direction—diplomacy, science, trade—so that you mathematical fellows in Parliament will continue to see the use of us. Peacetime, you see.”

  “Surely peace is the most desirable state of affairs for an officer of the navy?”

  “Oh, yes!” said Martin, but in a slightly wistful tone, as if he weren’t entirely in agreement but couldn’t tactfully say as much.

  They were in a private room at a public house near the water, where many officers regularly took supper. It was called the Yardarm. “I realize there must be fewer men afloat than during war,” said Lenox, trying to be sympathetic.

  Martin nodded vehemently. “Yes, too many of my peers are on shore, eking out a life on half-pay. Dozens of children, all of them. Meanwhile the French have started to outpace us.”

  “Our navy is much larger,” said Lenox. He spoke with authority—he had read the world’s driest blue book (or parliamentary report) on the subject.

  “To be sure, but their ships are sound and fast and big, Mr. Lenox.” Martin swirled his wine in his glass, looking into it. “They were ahead of us on coal. Our Warrior was based on her Gloire. Who knows what they’re doing now. Meanwhile we’re all at sixes and sevens.”

  “The navy?”

  “It’s a period of transition.”

  “Coal and steam, you mean, Captain? I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “I thought so, at any rate. Please enlighten me.”

  “It’s not as it was,” said Martin. “We must now train our men to sail a full-rigged vessel, as we always have, and at the same time to coal a ship to fourteen knots under steam even as we fire a broadside. Because she’s built for speed the Lucy is very light in guns, of co
urse—only twenty-one four-pounders, which would scarcely trouble a serious ship—but still, to be worried at once about sail, steam, and shooting is no easy task for a captain or a crew. And the Lord forbid you find yourself without coal.” He laughed bitterly and drank off the last of his wine.

  “I understand the depots are few and far between.”

  “You might say that. I think it’s more likely we’ll see three mermaids between here and Egypt than three proper depots where we can take our fill.”

  Lenox tried good cheer. “Still, to be at sea! It’s stale to you, but for me I confess it’s a thrill.”

  Martin smiled. “I apologize for sounding so negative, Mr. Lenox. I’ve been afloat since I was twelve, and I wouldn’t be anywhere else for money. But a captain’s job is a difficult one. When I’m on the water all of my problems are soluble, you see, but on land I can think over them and fret and worry myself half to oblivion. Before we leave, for instance, I must meet with the admiralty to discuss the prospects of my lieutenants. I’m bound to break one of their hearts. Well, but let us speak of other things. You’ll have a child soon, as I hear it? Might we drink to your wife’s health?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Lenox fervently, and signaled to the waiter at the door for another bottle.

  If supper at the Yardarm had been morose in stretches, due to Martin’s heavyhearted fears over the future of his service, Lenox’s visit to the wardroom of the Lucy had been entirely different.

  It was in the wardroom where the rest of the officers took their meals. They were a far more rollicking, jovial set of men than their captain, and they had insisted Lenox actually visit the ship by way of introduction.

  In the wardroom itself—a low-slung, long chamber at the stern of the ship with a row of very handsome curved windows, where lanterns swung gently from their moorings in the roof, casting a flickering light over the wineglasses and silver—Lenox met a bewildering array of men. All were seated at a single long table that ran fore-to-aft through the entire room. There were the ship’s five lieutenants, each of whom hoped one day to take on the responsibilities that Martin bemoaned; two marines, dressed in lobster-red, a captain and lieutenant, who commanded a squadron of twenty fighting men in the ship, and were thus part of the navy and not quite part of it at all; and finally the civil officers, each with a different responsibility, from the surgeon to the chaplain to the purser. Each of the fifteen or so people present sat in a dark mahogany chair, upholstered in navy blue, and as Lenox had learned from the rather rough quarterdeckman who had fetched him from shore, none could speak out of rank until the Queen was toasted.