A Burial at Sea

by Charles Finch

  When at last this happened the fierce decorum of the first glasses of wine fell off and people began to converse companionably. Lenox had already forgotten half the names he had heard, but to his pleasure he discovered that the person seated to his left, a second lieutenant called Halifax, was an agreeable sort.

  “How long have you been with the Lucy?” Lenox asked him.

  “About five months,” said Halifax. He was a plump fellow with a face slick and red from the warmth and wine. He seemed somehow gentle, though—not the card-playing, hard-drinking type Lenox might have expected. His voice was soft and melodious and his face was more than anything a kind one.

  “What brought you on board?”

  “Captain Martin’s previous second lieutenant had been lost at sea just before, and I met the ship at Port Mahon to replace him.”

  “Poor chap.”

  A troubled look passed over Halifax’s face, and his eyes ran along the faces at the table. “Yes. Unfortunately the navy can be unkind. Not all men get their wishes—not all lieutenants are made captain, for instance, however much they may feel they deserve it. Or take my case: nobody likes getting work at another man’s expense, of course, but I admit that I’m happy for the time at sea. Shore is dull, don’t you find?”

  “I don’t,” said Lenox, “but then I’ve nothing to compare it to.”

  “Very true. Do you fish, at least?”

  “When I was a boy I did. Not since then.”

  “I’ve a spare rod—you must come with me to the quarterdeck some time.” Halifax smiled to himself, his eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance. “Watching your line bob along the water as the sun goes down and the ship is quiet—a mild wind, leaning over the rail, cool breeze, perhaps a cigar—it’s the only way to live, Mr. Lenox.”

  “What do you catch?”

  “It depends where you are. My last ship, the Defiant, was broken up, but I sailed with her to the northern waters with Captain Robertson. There you found char, sculpins, cods, gunnels. Any number of things. We raked over a fair few hundred jellyfish. Have you ever seen one?”

  “I haven’t, except in pictures.”

  “They’re enormous, several feet long. Harmless, though their sting hurts like the dickens. Rather beautiful. Translucent.”

  “And on our way to Egypt what will you find?”

  A delighted look came into Halifax’s face. “The Mediterranean is a treat, from all I hear, enormous tuna fish, bream, mullet, marlins, swordfish. A velvet-belly shark, if we’re very lucky.”

  “I must strike off my plans to go for a swim.”

  “Nonsense—most refreshing thing in the world! If you’re sincerely afraid of sharks the captain will put a net out alongside of the ship, which you may swim in. Oh, but wait—a toast.”

  The white-haired chaplain was rising, wildly inebriated, and when he had (not without difficulty) attained a standing position, proclaimed in a loud voice, “To a woman’s leg, sirs! Nothing could be finer in the world! And to my wife Edwina!”

  There was a raucous cheer at this, and as anyone might have predicted who witnessed that moment, the wardroom’s supper went on very late into the night.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Eat this,” said Lady Jane, and thrust out an orange at him.

  “For the fiftieth time, dear heart, I’m not likely to come down with scurvy.”

  They were walking down to the docks now. Behind them were two sailors from the Lucy, carrying Lenox’s effects: a large steamer trunk and two smaller bags. Lenox himself carried a small leather case full of documents that he thought it best to keep in his possession at all times. They were from his brother.

  “Indulge me, won’t you?”

  With a not unhappy sigh he took the piece of fruit she held out and began to peel it with his thumb. “I make this the sixteenth orange I’ve eaten in the last fortnight, and I’m not even counting the lemons you sneak onto every piece of fish I put in my mouth or those lime-flavored sherbets you plied me with at the admiral’s supper. I’m heartily sick of citrus fruits, you know. If I do get scurvy that will be the reason.”

  “I would prefer you to return with all of your teeth, Charles. You can’t blame me for that.”

  “I knew I was marrying a noblewoman. Such discrimination!”

  She laughed. “I’ve packed a few more oranges in your trunk—eat them, will you?”

  “I’ll make you a deal. I promise to choke down these oranges you give me if you promise in return to stay off your feet after I leave.”

  “Oh, I shall,” she said. “Shake my hand—there, the deal is finished. I’m ahead of you anyhow—I told Toto I would let her read to me in the afternoons while I stayed in my bed.”

  “Dr. Chavasse’s book?”

  “I threw that away. Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children, indeed—that man knew no more about real mothering than Kirk does, or a bear in the woods. It’s more a book to frighten women than help them.”

  “But he’s a doctor, Jane, and—”

  “And what sort of name is Pye Henry Chavasse, too? I don’t trust a person who can’t have an honest name. Just call yourself Henry if your parents were foolish enough to burden you with ‘Pye,’ I say.”

  “I’m not sure anyone related by blood to a man called Galahad Albion Lancelot Houghton can cast such aspersions.”

  “He has the humility to go by Uncle Albert, doesn’t he? Pye Henry—for shame. At any rate I don’t need a book to tell me about what our child will be like. I have friends, oh, and cousins, all sorts of people who have been through it before.”

  “That’s true enough.”

  They turned into a small street that led straight down to the water. It was swarmed with bluejackets in the last minutes of their shore leave, some wildly drunk, others buying shipboard provisions at the general store, and still others kissing women who might equally be sweethearts from home or prostitutes working out of the coaching houses. As he was taking it all in he felt Jane clutch his arm.

  “Stop a moment, will you?” she said softly.

  He stopped and turned to look at her. “What’s wrong?”

  There were tears standing unfallen in her gray eyes. “Must you go?” she said. Her bantering tone had vanished.

  His heart fell. “I promised that I would.”

  “I wish you hadn’t.”

  She put her face to his chest and started to cry. Embarrassed, the two sailors carrying Lenox’s trunk and bags both studied a bill of goods in the window of the grocer’s they had stopped by, though Lenox knew for a fact that the smaller one, LeMoyne, couldn’t read.

  “We’ll meet you by the water,” he said to the men, and shepherded Jane toward a tea shop next door. “Call it twenty minutes.”

  He knew there to be a private room in the back, and as they entered he handed over half a crown to the landlady that they might take it. She obliged them by leaving them alone.

  It was a small room, with Toby jugs—old clay mugs from Staffordshire, brown salt glazed and molded into human figures—lining a shelf on one wall. They sat opposite each other in the low wooden chairs.

  “What’s happened to make you change your mind?” he asked Jane gently, taking her hand in his.

  She wiped her eyes and tried to calm herself. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you have to go. It’s only—it’s only—” She burst into fresh tears.

  “Darling,” he said.

  “I know I’m foolish!”

  “You’re not. Shall I stay with you? We can go back to London this evening if you prefer.”

  “No! No, you must go. I know it’s important, oh, in every sort of way. And I know you want to go! But it will be hard to be alone for two months, and just when I’m with child.”

  The landlady came in now, carrying a tray laden with tea cakes, biscuits, sandwiches, mugs, a milk jug, a sugar pot, and a teakettle. She avoided looking at them as she transferred the tray’s contents to their small table with rapid precision. �
�And take your time,” she said before she hurried out.

  When they had discovered Jane was pregnant, a week or so after Lenox had committed to this trip for his brother, both had been immensely happy. Strangely it wasn’t the chattering, social sort of happiness their marriage had been: both found in the next days that more than anything they would prefer to sit on the sofa together, not even talking much, perhaps reading, eating now and then, holding hands. It was a joy both of them preferred to experience almost silently, perhaps because it was so overwhelming.

  When it occurred to Lenox that leaving might mean missing two months of that joy, he had immediately decided that he wouldn’t do it. In fact it had been she who convinced him he still must, after he told her the reason Edmund had asked. Since then she had always been staunchly in favor of the voyage. This was the first hint to Lenox that she felt otherwise.

  Sitting at the table, looking despondent, not touching the steaming cup of tea in front of her, Jane said, “This is silly—we’ll be late. We should go.”

  “I’d rather sit here,” he answered. “Will you eat something?”

  “No.”

  “I should, then.”

  He picked up a sandwich with butter and tomato on it, no crusts, and took a bite. He found that he was hungry—the orange was still in his jacket pocket, half peeled—and when he had finished the sandwich he took a tea cake too and started to butter it.

  Through her tears she smiled. “You can always eat, can’t you?”

  He stopped chewing his cake in the middle of a bite and, with a look of surprised innocence, said, “Me?”

  “You, Charles Lenox. I remember you as a seven-year-old, stuffing your face with slices of cold cottage pie when you thought nobody was looking, on hunt days.”

  They laughed. Tenderly, he put his hand to her stomach. “I’ll be back soon, you know.”

  “I worry you won’t come back at all. What do you know about a ship, Charles?”

  “Ever so much now. How many sails it has, what it’s made of, who all the officers are, what the midshipmen do, where one sleeps and eats…”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean you’re liable to fall off and vanish into the ocean because you thought you could lean on the railing…” She trailed off and gave him a miserable look.

  “You can’t think how careful I’ll be, Jane,” he said, and again grasped her hand.

  “I’ll worry myself sick, is all I know.”

  “I’ll write to you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That will do me no good—you’ll beat your letters home, I’m sure.”

  “It’s not a far sail, and the weather is calm. Captain Martin has a great deal of experience. She’s a good ship.”

  “Oh, I know all that! Am I not allowed to be irrational once in a while?”

  “You are, to be sure you are.”

  To his sorrow their conversation progressed this way and ended inconclusively, as he promised again and again to be safe and avowed his disappointment at missing two months of her company, and as she said again and again that well, it was all right, even though plainly it wasn’t.

  Just as they absolutely had to leave, however, she reached up for his cheek and gave him a swift kiss. “It’s only because I love you, Charles,” she whispered.

  “And I you.”

  They went out and walked the final street that slanted sharply down to the docks, which were loud with bickering voices and smelled of heat, fish, salt, wood, and rope.

  He took some mild solace in thinking of the letter he had left behind on her pillow in London: it was a very good sort of letter, long and full of thoughts and declarations of love and speculation about what their child would be like and ideas for what they might do when he returned to London. She would be comforted by that at least. He hoped.

  They found the sailors with Lenox’s effects, and then Lady Jane pointed off to the right.

  “Look, there they are—your brother and Teddy. The poor boy looks green with fear.” She looked up at him. “I still find it difficult to believe you and your nephew will be novices aboard the same ship, don’t you?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  This was indeed the case. Lenox had discovered it during the course of his fateful conversation with Edmund two months before. On that snowy evening the older brother had offered the younger an explanation of his request.

  “We’ve had a disaster, Charles. That’s why I’ve been in these meetings with the prime minister.”

  “What happened?”

  Edmund sighed and rubbed his eyes, weary from long days and worry. He took a deep sup of whisky. “What do you know of our intelligence systems?”

  “Very little. What they say in the papers, perhaps a bit more.”

  “Our officers are all across Europe, of course, Charles,” said Edmund, “and despite this peace—this tenuous peace—many of them are still concentrated in and around France. The prospect of another war is very real, you should know.

  “Eight days ago an Englishman named Harold Rucks, resident in Marseille, was found dead in a bedroom above a brothel near the docks. He had been stabbed in the heart, and the woman who worked from that room—a new recruit to her work, you’ll note—was nowhere to be found.”

  “I take it he was one of your men?” said Charles.

  “Yes. In Marseille he was considered a simple expatriate drunk, but that was merely the façade he had adopted. He was quite a competent man, if violent-tempered. At first we considered the possibility that he had died in an argument over something personal—money, let’s say, or indeed what he was paying for—but the next day another Englishman died, this time in Nîmes. His name was Arthur Archer. He was garroted in an alleyway. Nasty death.”

  “I see.”

  “You can guess what happened then. Three more men, two in Paris, one in Nice. All dead. Five of ours.”

  “How were their identities discovered?”

  Edmund sighed and stroked his cheek pensively, looking for all the world like a farmer anxious over crops. But these were higher stakes.

  “A list went missing from our ministry. Eight names on it. The three who weren’t killed were fortunate: two were back in England, one who just managed to get out of Paris with his life, though he left all of his possessions behind. He was fired upon as he got into the ferry.”

  “The French mean business.”

  “You can see that the peace is … a complex one,” said Edmund with a wry smile. He took another sip of his drink. “What’s fortunate is that none of them were tortured for information. There’s some evidence that Archer was to be kidnapped, but struggled enough that they simply killed him. The same may be true of one of our men in Paris, Franklin King.”

  “Does this mean that someone in our government is working for the French?”

  “I fear it does. We’re looking into it, you may rely on that.”

  “Treason.”

  “Yes. We haven’t found the man yet, but we will, and in the meantime all of our activities—our intelligence activities—have been suspended.” Edmund looked uneasy then. “Well. Except for one.”

  “Egypt.”

  The brothers sat in silence for a moment. Charles, for his part, was knocked backwards, though through some ancient childhood wish to seem strong to his older brother, he acted calm. But he had had no idea that such arcane and troubling matters fell within his brother’s bailiwick. Edmund had been a good member of the party, but devoted his time (as far as anyone knew at least) to broader public issues like voting or the colonies.

  Worse still, he saw that it was taking a toll on Edmund, who looked tired and dogged with worry.

  As if sensing Charles’s thoughts, Edmund said, “I didn’t ask for the responsibility, but I couldn’t decline it, could I?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “You see the problem.”

  “Well, tell me,” said Charles.

  “We don’t know how much information the French have. Is it everything, every name?
Are they sticking to this list of eight men to make it seem that they know less than they do? Or do they really know nothing beyond those eight names?”

  “We need to find out what they have, then.”

  Edmund rolled his eyes. “They need ice water in hell, too, but I doubt they get much of it.”

  “Tell me about Egypt.”

  “In our disarray we’ve accepted that we must sacrifice certain knowledge we had hoped to acquire about the French munitions, their navy, so forth and so on. Rucks was particularly well placed to study their navy, being in a port city, but so be it. Still, there’s one thing we must know.”

  “Yes?”

  “Whether the French mean to strike at us preemptively. To start another war.”

  “They wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be in their interests, would it?” said Charles.

  As Edmund pondered how to answer this question the fire shifted, a log breaking in half. Both men stood up and started to fiddle with it, one with the poker and the other with a sort of long iron claw that could pick up bits of wood.

  “We’ve still the finest navy that has ever gone afloat,” Edmund said at last, “but the margin is shrinking, I can tell you frankly, and on land they may be just as strong as we are. The colonies have spread us a bit thin. If they have any ambitions of greater power … let’s say it’s not impossible.”

  “I see.”

  “Making matters worse, of course, is that we still don’t know quite where we are with this government. Napoleon the Third has been gone for three years now—and for that matter died in January—and this third republic is unpredictable. We can never be sure whose voice matters there. We had thought these bouleversements might cease, but the deaths of our men … this is where we need you to step in.”