A Burial at Sea

by Charles Finch

  “How?”

  “We have a man in place in the French Ministry of War, working directly under Cissey, their secrétaire d’état de la guerre. This fellow is very high up, very clever, but rather poor. Despite the death of the empire it’s mostly the aristocrats who work in their government as I understand.”

  “How unfamiliar,” said Lenox.

  Edmund laughed. “Well, quite so. Not all that different from here, I suppose. This chap is no aristocrat. He’s clever, though, and he’s a mercenary. For money he’ll tell us all we need to know about the new government’s intentions.”

  “How much?”

  Edmund quoted a figure that made Charles whistle. “It’s not ideal. A man you have to pay is much less reliable than a man who burns with patriotic fervor, but so be it.”

  “How do you know he’s not acting under orders, Ed? Playing a double game?”

  “We have other informants, men who would know if that were the case. But they’re not at so high a level as this gentleman.”

  Charles sat down again and for a moment brooded over all this. “You’re in disarray, then,” he said at last, “and need someone the French couldn’t possibly have on any … any list of names?”

  “Precisely. We need someone who can go to Egypt in a public guise.”

  “Why Egypt?”

  “We don’t dare send anyone to France, because of course they’ll be on guard at such a tense, decisive moment. But this French gentleman, the one who can pass us information, has business he may plausibly conduct in Suez.”

  Charles saw all now. “And you thought you would send me to the canal as a member of Parliament—but in fact to meet this gentleman?”

  Edmund nodded, and then, with a look of eagerness that made his younger brother nearly smile, said, “What do you think?”

  “I’ll do it, of course.”

  “Excellent. What a relief that is.”

  This puzzled Charles. “Why?”

  “Well—because we need someone we trust.”

  “There are other men in Parliament who would do it, I imagine.”

  “But we don’t want a man without any special loyalty to Gladstone and the current government to have this information—this power over the leadership of the party, you see. You’re my brother, and it’s our luck that on top of that you’re a clever and discreet member.”

  “Thank you, then.”

  A brief pause. “There one thing I’ve omitted, however.”

  Lenox had felt it coming. “Oh?”

  “We would ask that you go on the Lucy. Does the name ring a bell?”

  “Vaguely.”

  Edmund looked uncomfortable now. “It will be Teddy’s first ship, you see.”

  Indignation filled Lenox.

  Teddy was his—very beloved—nephew, Edmund’s second son, who had been groomed, like many of his mother’s clan, which had seemingly a hundred admirals lurking in its family tree, to enter the navy at a young age. He had recently turned fourteen, and was just now ready to become a midshipman.

  “So there’s no special task,” said Charles. “You don’t need me. You simply want a babysitter.”

  “No, no!” Edmund, to his credit, looked horribly unhappy. “I feared you would take it this way.”

  “I don’t mind, of course. I’ll do it. But I wish you had been honest.”

  “Charles, no! I view this as nothing more than a lucky coincidence. Your primary job will be to meet our French contact in Egypt, and make some sort of trumped-up speech we give you as cover for that job.”

  “Oh, is that to be my ‘primary’ job?” Charles said, hearing the bitterness in his own voice.

  “Listen, Charles—if this doesn’t convince you nothing will. It wasn’t I who brought your name up. Gladstone did.”

  This gave Lenox pause. “The prime minister? Asked for me?”

  “Yes. And he had no idea that Teddy would be on our next ship to Egypt, either.” Edmund looked hopefully up at Charles, who was pacing toward the snow-covered window. “He likes you. And to be certain, it helped that you were my brother—someone we could trust. But he wouldn’t send an incompetent for loyalty’s sake.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Charles, listen to reason. England needs you. This may be the most important thing you do, you know.”

  “A lucky coincidence?”

  “I swear,” said Edmund.

  “Well, I would have done it either way,” Charles said ruminatively. Then, pouring two more glasses of whisky, he added, “By name, the prime minister asked for me?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lady Jane waved a hand and called out to her brother-in-law. “Edmund! Teddy!”

  The father and son turned around and when they saw Lenox and Lady Jane, both smiled. Edmund’s grin was broad and happy; Teddy’s less enthused. He did look greenish.

  “Hello, Uncle Charles,” he said when they were in earshot. “And Aunt Jane.”

  Everyone shook hands. Edmund really was beaming, but in a low voice he said to Charles, “Remind me to speak to you for a moment before you go.”

  “Are you ready to ship out?” Lady Jane asked Teddy, tapping him on the shoulder in what she must have imagined to be a hearty fashion.

  He clearly longed to say that he wasn’t, but instead choked out the word, “Yes,” with something less than perfect zeal.

  “And are you, Charles?” said Edmund.

  “I am. I’m also ready to be back in London, strangely enough.”

  Lady Jane squeezed his hand.

  The men who had been carrying Lenox’s things had touched their caps and then vanished back into the streets of Plymouth (and, suspiciously, given that they were due on the Lucy soon, in the direction of a public house). The family stood alone over two trunks and four or so bags, waiting.

  Off to their right was the massive, shamrock-green field where Sir Francis Drake had with famous tranquility played bowls while the Spanish armada loomed offshore, on the way to the rollicking Drake ultimately bestowed upon them. Lenox had walked over it several times in the past two weeks, twice with Lady Jane, and in the twilight of evening contemplated all sorts of things: seafaring, wives left at home, children, French spies. To the left was the dock that the famous settlers of America had left from, aboard the Mayflower.

  Closer at hand was the intense activity of the docks. Every day Plymouth handled naval ships, commercial freighters, and several unsavory varieties of black-market transaction that just about managed to avoid the observation of the local constabulary. Men swarmed around them, voices rose in the middle distances, wood smacked against wood. It suddenly felt much more real, this sea voyage, than it had half an hour before.

  The two brothers, Teddy, and Lady Jane waited by slip nineteen, and about five hundred yards out they saw the men who were coming to fetch them. They were easy to spot, these two, because their jolly boat (belonging to the Lucy, pitched up sideways alongside deck during voyages) was a vividly striped yellow and black, with its name, The Bumblebee, scrawled in large letters on one side. It certainly stood out among the dozen odd brownish boats near it. Idly Lenox wondered whether it attracted attention when the Lucy wanted to be stealthy, but perhaps she was too fast a ship, designed for speed as she was, to worry much about that: nothing with very heavy guns would be able to catch her in a fair race.

  “Not long now,” said Edmund.

  Charles felt his stomach turn over. “Perhaps Jane and I will take a short walk,” he said.

  “Of course, of course.”

  They went toward Drake’s lawns, and managed to escape in some small degree the din of the docks. As they walked they spoke to each other in low, earnest voices, saying nothing much and repeating it over and over, all of it tending toward the incontrovertible truth that they loved each other; that they loved the child they would have; that all would be well, even if it seemed bleak at the moment.

  Feeling slightly better, they returned to find the Bumblebee tied on to shore and two able
seamen transferring trunks and bags into its deep middle section. (Captain Martin had permitted Teddy Lenox to come on board with his uncle, but with the caveat that once the boy stepped on the deck of the Lucy all such preferential treatment would be terminated.) Not long now.

  At the last moment Edmund pulled his brother aside, producing a thin sheaf of documents from some inner pocket of his jacket. “Here they are—your orders. Secure them somewhere in your cabin that nobody can find, even your servant, if it’s possible.”

  “I thought I had the information already?” said Lenox, puzzled.

  Edmund shook his head. “Those pages were a dummy. We wanted to leave off committing any facts to paper until the last possible moment. You can get rid of those.”

  “Very well.”

  “Be safe, Charles. On board and on land.” A pained look came into Edmund’s eyes. “And if you could—if it’s not trouble—not that I would ever ask you…”

  Lenox laughed. “I’ll look after Teddy, Edmund. I swear.”

  Edmund laughed too, but looked colossally relieved. “Good. Excellent. I want to see you both back safe, soon.”

  “You shall.”

  Before either of them knew it, Charles and his nephew were in the Bumblebee, and while Lenox could still feel Lady Jane’s final kiss on his cheek, they cast off. Both Lenoxes sat at the rear of the boat gazing back at Edmund and Jane, who stood on shore and waved them off. With the two powerful men rowing the Bumblebee Charles’s wife and his brother were soon indistinct among the hordes on the dock, and then it was impossible to see whether they had even remained by the slip where they had said good-bye. But only when there was really no possibility of making out who was who, or who was waving, or even whether any figure on land was a man or a woman or a shaved ape, did the two turn and look at their ship.

  Teddy was a creature Lenox had always loved—a good-spirited, mischievous, endearingly freckled blond boy—but now Lenox realized that his nephew had come at least partially into manhood, and in that alchemical process become a mystery.

  “Well,” he said, “are you ready? Or were you being brave?”

  Teddy, looking queasy, said with winning honesty, “Being brave.”

  Lenox clapped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “In a day’s time you won’t be able to remember feeling frightened.”

  Teddy nodded but didn’t look as if he believed a word of it. “William says the food will be terrible.”

  This was Teddy’s older brother, a pupil at Harrow now. “I have some provisions,” Lenox answered in a mild way. “You shan’t go hungry while I’m on board. But no word of it to the captain, d’you hear?”

  The boy managed a smile. It was wiped off when they came up alongside the ship, and a row of men leaning on the railing cackled and shouted.

  “This little white-faced beggar won’t see much more of the world, I reckon,” one called out, to general merriment.

  Charles and Teddy climbed the rigging and as they neared the deck rough hands took them under the arms and pulled each up over the gunwale in turn, and onto the Lucy’s main deck. To Lenox they were courteous, and he even heard one murmur to another, “Which he’s the member of Parlyment,” but Teddy received no such deference. There were exaggerated sweeps of the cap to greet him, and an equally exaggerated, “Hello, sir,” followed by laughter.

  Two sorts of midshipmen went to sea: college boys and practicals. The practicals were often from a slightly lower segment of the upper and middle classes, but they had the advantage of knowing the sea and the navy backward and forward, having been in it for many years: since the age of ten, say. They all displayed a deep reluctance to admit the college lads, who had a great deal of classroom learning but very little practical training, and that all done on a battered-up old frigate in the harbor of Portsmouth, as their peers. Yet it was the college boys who would ultimately ascend the highest, through their superior education and interest at the admiralty. This was considered unfair. Teddy, who was fourteen, could speak French, navigate by the stars, do math, and tie any sort of hitch or knot you pleased—the Matthew Walker, the Turk’s head—but his experience at sea was almost nil. Like the men in his mother’s family he would likely be an admiral one day; for now he was almost certainly bound to be an object of scorn.

  All this Lenox had heard from Edmund, whom it quite clearly pained, but the truth of it hadn’t been clear until now. The quicker-witted bluejackets made flippant, ostensibly respectful remarks to the boy, and Lenox spotted another midshipman some yards off, laughing into his sleeve.

  “Enough!” a voice barked out. It was the captain. “Mr. Lenox, you are very welcome on board. Mr. Midshipman, report to the gun room immediately. As for you lot, back to work.”

  Without any grumbling the men dispersed across the ship, and Teddy, whose trunk and bag preceded him, went off obediently to find his way below deck.

  “You know the way to your quarters, I believe?” the captain asked Lenox. “I would show you myself, but there’s a great deal to be done before we may ship. Your man should be there, unpacking your things.”

  “Thank you, Captain.”

  When he was alone, Lenox had a chance to look over the Lucy. It was in a wondrously clean and tight-rigged state; he had thought on his previous visit that the ship had been well maintained but saw now that he had actually witnessed her in a state of almost unprecedented laxity. There wasn’t a rope out of place, nor a blemish on the great polished quarterdeck. The sails were either aloft or furled tightly to the masts. Everything was in faultless order, and for the second time that day he thought that traveling to Egypt by sea might be not any kind of ordeal, as he had feared, but a real pleasure.

  What he couldn’t know, of course, was that the first murder was less than a day away.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Lucy left Plymouth Harbor under steam (somewhere below deck—Lenox suspected it was in the orlop, but couldn’t feel sure—men were shoveling coal as if their lives depended on it) about an hour later. It was nearly five in the afternoon, and in a cloudless sky the great yellow sun had just begun to mellow into orange and broaden toward the curve of the earth.

  When they reached open water Captain Martin ordered the jibs and staysails set. This request precipitated a profound flurry of action and movement among the men at the fore of the ship, and a somewhat stupefied Lenox, ignorant of shipboard terminology, managed to ask his friend Halifax what the directive meant.

  They were on the quarterdeck, that deck of the ship, six steep steps up from the main deck, that was reserved for officers. (It was the sole privilege of the midshipman’s life on board that he could walk on the exalted planks of the quarterdeck; otherwise he slept in a hammock like a common bluejacket and took rather worse food.) Captain Martin had, as was common when dignitaries sailed with the navy, invited Lenox to use it, though he had advised Lenox that the poop deck, one level higher up, was, while not technically off-limits, a place in which he might make mischief among men at work.

  “Quite without meaning to, of course,” Martin had said over that supper of theirs at the Yardarm.

  “I understand, of course. I should never like to be underfoot.”

  When Lenox asked Halifax what it meant to set the jibs and staysails, the officer pointed toward the fore of the Lucy. “If you look toward the bowsprit—”

  “The bowsprit?” said Lenox.

  Halifax laughed his melodious laugh. “I had forgotten there were men who didn’t know what a bowsprit was,” he said, and then, seeing Lenox redden, said, “No, my dear man, I value you for it! The navy can be a confinement, if you let yourself fall oblivious to its limitations. But listen: I imagine you saw the great spar—the great pole—that extends off the prow of the ship?”

  “Of course,” said Lenox, still stung.

  “That is the bowsprit. There are three sails that may be run up from it, all of them triangular—the flying jib, which is farthest out, and two staysails. Can you see?”

  “O
h, yes, now I can.”

  Of course he could, and felt stupid that he hadn’t been able to locate the object of so many men’s attention. Two sailors were all the way out along the bowsprit, hung upside down over the water in a way that looked extremely dangerous. Neither kept more than a casual hand on the spar, however, instead primarily using the strength of their legs to hang on.

  “What are they for, these sails?” Lenox asked.

  “In a medium wind like this—”

  “Medium!”

  “What would you have called it?”

  “A stiff wind—very stiff indeed.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Halifax feelingly, and Lenox could see that he had committed another solecism. “No, this is quite a medium wind—even a light one, you might say. In such a wind the jib and staysails give you a bit of a pick-up, and better still they make you more maneuverable. The captain will want to be able to catch the wind again quickly if it shifts, you see.”

  “Thank you,” said Lenox. “I fear I shall have more questions—if you find them importunate—”

  “Never!” said Halifax, his plump face animated. “It’s a pleasure to have you aboard, Mr. Lenox.”

  There was a deep sensory pleasure that Lenox found in these first hours on board the Lucy. There was the salted wind, the flecks of water that occasionally caught his hands or face, the orange and purple sunset, and always the mesmerizing, muscular gray-blue water. Land had vanished some time since. Then, too, he discovered how much he enjoyed watching the sailors at work. At the very top of the rigging (which acted as a kind of ladder), some fifty feet up, a small number of men were hard at work with the same apparently casual attitude toward danger as the men on the spar had had. For one terrifying moment, in fact, Lenox thought one would die: a man in a blue serge frock and blue trousers who flung himself off the mainmast and for a brief, paralyzing moment was in the open air, only at the last possible moment to grasp safely a rope that led to the foremast.