A Burial at Sea

by Charles Finch

  “Skylarking,” said a thin, rather dour lieutenant on the quarterdeck, Carrow by name, but Lenox perceived that this disapproval was almost unwillingly mingled with a faint but detectable dash of admiration. Even joyfulness. Everyone on board, it seemed, was happy to be out of harbor.

  He only left the busy quarterdeck at nearly seven in the evening, knowing that he had to dress for dinner in the wardroom; the first lieutenant, a fellow called Billings, had extended him a standing invitation to supper. Martin had done the same but with considerably less enthusiasm, which made sense when Lenox learned from Halifax over their meal aboard the Lucy that the captain preferred to dine with a book in his private stateroom.

  He had been very fortunate in the cabin he received, which his steward informed him had generally belonged to the chaplain on previous voyages, and which he had seen before his supper earlier that week with the officers. It was ranged alongside the wardroom, like several other officers’ cabins, toward the larboard side of the ship. He could only just stand up straight inside it, but it was nevertheless much larger than he had expected.

  Immediately to the right of the door (which swung out, thankfully) was a narrow bunk lying over a nest of drawers, while farther back there were a desk that looked out through the cabin’s two small windows and a row of bookshelves built into the curved wall. Opposite the bed, just far enough for the drawers underneath the bunk to extend all the way out, were a washstand and a small but eminently serviceable bathtub, circular and made of copper.

  While he had been on deck Lenox’s steward had unpacked for him, and he arrived to find his drawers full of clothes, his bookcases quarter-filled with the twelve or so volumes he had brought, a leather satchel full of papers on the desk, a cup of pens with an inkstand by it, and, best of all, beside the windows, the framed pen drawing of Jane he had brought. It had been done by Edmund’s wife, who was an accomplished sketcher, and given to Lenox the previous Christmas. It captured beautifully the prettiness of Jane’s eyes and nose and also, more difficult, her innate mildness, her gentleness.

  This steward (who would bring Lenox his meals, stand behind his chair in the wardroom, fetch him water, clean his clothes, and perform a hundred other minor offices) was a Scot called McEwan. He slept in the tiny hallway between Lenox’s door and the wardroom, where apparently he strung up his hammock. It must have been a strong hammock, too, for he was perfectly enormous.

  Better still he had the astonishing ability, it seemed to Lenox, never not to be eating. During their initial encounter McEwan had been holding a cold chicken wing that he glanced at longingly from time to time while Lenox tried to make conversation, and since then McEwan had consumed, at various moments, a piece of salt beef, some buttered brown toast, a large slab of cake, and a wing from the same unfortunate bird. Halifax had mentioned, confidingly, that McEwan was one of the few men on board who didn’t drink or carouse on land, saving his pay packets instead for the various delicacies he stowed in secrecy about his living quarters. Little wonder that he weighed twenty stone.

  As Lenox walked through the wardroom he heard a voice, and stopped just shy of the corridor that would have led him to his cabin.

  “These political gennlemen,” the voice said with deep disdain, “don’t know their arses from their foreheads—”

  “Elbows,” McEwan interjected.

  “Or elbows,” said the voice triumphantly, “and what’s worse I bet you six to one he’s a bad luck and’ll get us sunk from some ship hearing we have treasures and the like, or worse yet papers. They all want papers, don’t they.”

  “He has some, too,” McEwan whispered.

  A dissatisfied grunt. “Wish he weren’t aboard, the bugger, and I don’t care who knows it. Joe Meddoes reckons he’s an albatross, like.”

  “He brought a fair bulk of food, though, I will say as much as that for him.”

  Lenox swung the door open. Both men looked at him in surprise, and then each took their cap off. The one he didn’t know, who was a very large, strong-looking fellow with black hair and a dark complexion, spat his tobacco into the cap. This was custom when speaking to an officer, Lenox had seen that afternoon. Otherwise he would have been disgusted.

  “Hello, McEwan,” he said. “Who is this?”

  “Only Evers, sir,” said McEwan. In his cap was not a plug of tobacco but a single hard-boiled egg. “Which he got turned the wrong way and lost, like.”

  “By the wardroom.”

  “Oh—yes,” said McEwan.

  Lenox tried to look severe. “Since he has seen it once he shan’t get lost here again. Good day, Mr. Evers.”

  “Sir.”

  Evers stalked out past him, his face black, and Lenox, doing his best not to seem perturbed, asked McEwan to lay out his evening wear.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The meal they had that night passed in a haze of goodwill and excitement over the new voyage, with many toasts being proposed to the continued health and florescence of the Queen and various other gentlewomen.

  Lenox still hadn’t seen Teddy since they came over the gunwales together, but during supper Billings, the first lieutenant, assured him that his nephew was doing well. This Billings was a willowy, straw-haired chap with a great deal of native intelligence in his face, in contrast to the kinder mien of Halifax, his immediate subordinate and close friend.

  Billings told Lenox, “He’ll take the middle watch, being a youngster and the new boy. The oldsters—that is to say, the sixteen- and seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys—are the day men.”

  “Forgive my ignorance, Lieutenant, but when is the middle watch?”

  “From midnight to four, Mr. Lenox. It’s fearfully unpopular, of course. Primarily because the midshipmen take their lessons in math and navigation in the forenoon.”

  “What will he do during his watch?”

  “Practically speaking, nothing. As he gets to know the ship better he will spend his watch time keeping men in line, giving orders, and performing whichever tasks the officer of the watch might want him to.”

  “How many men are on deck at night, if I might ask?”

  “Not many—one officer, one midshipman, and a few dozen seamen, who will be relatively inactive bar some change in the wind or the sighting of an enemy or land. Of course the helmsman will be steering the ship and watching the course.”

  “It sounds rather desolate.”

  “On the contrary, I find it peaceful. If I could only have a glass of my favorite whisky and a stout cigar during the watch it would be my favorite time of the day.”

  “Not too frightening, then?”

  “Oh, not at all,” said Billings, and smiled kindly.

  “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  He hoped Teddy would no longer be afraid; if he were, a watch in the dark, with the ship pitching and rolling in the wind, with men awaiting orders from his inexperienced lips, might be a dread thing to him. Even as this thought occurred to Lenox, however, he realized that it was a mistake to assume that he knew what would be good for Teddy and what would not. If nothing else that day had proved to him his own ignorance. He perceived that it would be dangerous to offer his nephew any sort of aid or comfort that might interfere with his progress on the ship, however kindly intended it might be.

  McEwan stood behind Lenox’s chair at dinner, refilling his wineglass, running to the galley to clear dishes and silverware, alert if Lenox needed a snuffbox or cigar or glass of port after supper. All the officers had their servants behind them, too, though McEwan was notable for being swathed in an enormous, perfectly shipshape uniform with its brass buttons nearly popping off because the cloth of his shirt was so taut over his stomach.

  After supper he fetched warm water for Lenox to shave and wash in, and then a glass of water to drink.

  Shaving, Lenox asked McEwan, “Out of curiosity, where do you get the water? Fresh water? From barrels, I know, but…”

  The assistant was scrubbing the floor in Lenox’s tiny hallway with a
stiff bristle brush, in a place where he had evidently spilled a small bit of his own food. From his girth Lenox would have guessed McEwan to be lazy, but nothing could have been farther from the truth; like all the men on the Lucy he seemed to spend an almost preposterous amount of time cleaning things that were already clean. Lenox’s shirt from dinner had gone straight into a basin of warm water and his cabin had been swept twice in the five hours since they had left harbor.

  “It’s in the hold, Mr. Lenox.”

  “That’s farthest down.”

  “Yes, sir, below the waterline.”

  Lenox pondered this. “For fear of sounding stupid—”

  “Oh, no, sir.”

  “Doesn’t it change the weight of the ship? Emptying out the barrels of water? I mean to say, if we leave Plymouth with a hundred tons of water and return with none, won’t she sail differently?”

  “Why,” said McEwan with some of the same astonishment Halifax had betrayed when Lenox hadn’t known what the bowsprit was, “we fill ’em up, of course.”

  “With what?”

  McEwan laughed. “What’s most out there, of course.” In his amazement he evidently had forgotten all about saying “sir.” “Water.”

  “Oh, seawater.”

  “Yes!” McEwan, so surprised that anyone might not have known this that he had stopped scrubbing, went on to say, as if speaking to an infant, “It’s called ballast, sir.”

  “I knew there was a word for it. Well, I’ve learned more today than I have in a while, at least.”

  McEwan, shaking his head and muttering to himself—and somehow also chewing—returned to his task.

  Over dinner Lenox had had a chance to round out his circle of acquaintance, all of the people he had met in the wardroom before without fully remembering. He had a better idea of the ship’s hierarchy now.

  There was the captain, of course, who in this floating world was more akin to a king than anything. Then there were his lieutenants: Billings, who must have been about thirty and, it was obvious from the way he carried himself, longed for a command of his own, and as his second, Halifax, red-faced and gentle. There was also Carrow, the dour lad who had nevertheless taken pleasure in the “skylarking” the mainmast men had done among the sails that afternoon; he was the navigating lieutenant, who had particular skill in navigation by compass and the stars, and who knew the waters they were to sail for, from the Atlantic through the Mediterranean. Two more lieutenants—young men, just graduated from the rank of midshipman—stayed quiet, so Lenox didn’t learn their names from Halifax, who had been seated to his right.

  As for the civil officers, the chaplain of the Church of England was named Rogers. Based on their two suppers together Lenox concluded without much hesitation that he was a drunkard—but then a harmless one, jolly and foul-mouthed. (“Much better than a nervous teetotaler—at sea at least,” Halifax had said of him, still somehow respectfully.) The surgeon was a silent, smallish man, quite old, named Tradescant (“not entirely a gentleman,” Halifax said without malice, “but a fine medical man”), who spoke only with the engineer, a similarly aged and quiet soul, though instead of Tradescant’s white hair he had a bright red top. His name was Quirke. Finally there was the purser. He was a pale and harried-looking man who had risen from the position of captain’s clerk to command all of the ship’s provisions. He didn’t even merit “not entirely a gentleman” as a description, for he was quite clearly of lower stock. For this reason, perhaps, he was deferential in the extreme, though Lenox sensed in him some bitterness or maybe ambition that would bridle against any admission of inferiority to his nominal superiors. He was named Pettegree.

  In addition to all of these the wardroom had one other occupant, who was easily the most beloved among the men of the Lucy, however much they might favor their captain or their first lieutenant. This was a dog, named Fizz. He was small, probably not more than nine pounds, but he was, Lenox would come to learn, a noble beast. He was a black-and-tan terrier of mixed origins, with bright brown eyes, a black nose, and two sharply pointed ears. He never barked, and slept on a rug under the dining-room table; as for food he ate like a king, for every man on board had a soft spot for him. If you told him to roll over he would do it, or if you asked him to dance he would do a little pirouette. The men fought over who got to haul him up the rigging, for he loved to visit the perches along the mast.

  At any rate these were the men of the wardroom: Billings, Halifax, the grim Carrow, Rogers the drinker, quiet Tradescant and Quirke, and Pettegree, plus the two other lieutenants. By the next afternoon all but one of them would be a suspect.

  “Could you tell us, Mr. Lenox,” said Billings after their desserts had been cleared away, “what your purpose in visiting Egypt is?”

  “With pleasure. As seafaring men you have all heard of the canal in that country, I hope, the Suez?” All of them nodded their affirmation that they had. “Then you will understand its great importance is linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, and therefore the Indian Ocean. A few hundred miles of digging have opened up tens of thousands of miles of waterways to Europe. Rather than going overland or around the southern tip of the continent, for instance, goods may come from East Africa—from Kenya, from Tanganyika, from Abyssinia, from Sudan—by water. I scarcely need to tell you how financially significant that is.”

  They looked suitably awed now, and Lenox went on, “For much of its life the canal has been primarily a French concern.”

  General and humorous hissing at this. “Not for long,” said Billings, which led to an inevitable toast in the Queen’s honor.

  “Be that as it may,” said Lenox after he had drunk his wine along with the rest of them, “Britain is only now coming to hold a stake in the region. When they started digging fifteen years ago, only the French had the foresight to see how dramatically it would change the world’s commercial ventures.”

  “I had understood that we didn’t approve the use of slave labor there,” said Halifax.

  “Very true,” Lenox said. “But since it’s already been dug … at any rate, it’s crucial that we catch up with the French. I’m an emissary of the prime minister, officially, sent to affirm our rather weak alliance with Egypt. Fortunately the governor there, a chap called Ismail, is open to our use of the channel. I’ll take him presents, flatter him, attend an audience with him, impress his friends…”

  “All this over a canal,” Billings said. It wasn’t a disrespectful statement, exactly, but it seemed to reflect the mood of the room.

  “It could be worth ten million pounds one day, this meeting. A hundred million.”

  To men who would have felt themselves quite rich on eight hundred pounds a year this number was nearly unfathomable, but it effectively undercut whatever unvoiced dissatisfaction they had collectively felt with Lenox’s mission. Worth sailing to Egypt a hundred times for that sort of meeting, they would say to each other confidentially, out of his hearing.

  To his explanation there was in fact some truth. His trip to Suez would help British interests there. But of course it was secondary to his true purpose in making this voyage.

  “And you? Why were you sailing for Egypt?”

  “In part to take you,” said Billings. “The navy has orders to prove itself useful.”

  “A friend in Parliament wouldn’t go amiss.” Halifax chuckled as he said this but Lenox felt stares of evaluation directed at him.

  Billings went on. “We also like to patrol the trade waters. The prevention of piracy is still essential, though it’s not the old swashbuckling sort of the last century.”

  Then Quirke spoke, the redheaded engineer. “They also like to give a ship like the Lucy a short mission after they give her a long one. Bless the Lord, for we’ve been afloat a very long time.”

  “That’s sensible.”

  “Mr. Lenox, by traveling with us won’t you miss your time in Parliament?” asked Carrow, the third lieutenant. “Votes—meetings—that sort of thing?”

/>   “Yes, although we’re close to recess. I suppose this is more important.”

  “Parliament,” said one of the anonymous young lieutenants with some wonderment, almost as if he were speaking a magic word. “What is it like?”

  “It took some getting used to,” Lenox said. “But now I wouldn’t trade it for anything. There’s a great deal of shouting, there are many long, tedious meetings, but with that said there’s more camaraderie and excitement than I expected.”

  “You know the lads—the midshipmen—are eager to ask you about murders and all that,” said Halifax, smiling. “They say you were a detective.”

  “Once. A long while ago, it seems now. I don’t do anything in that direction nowadays.”

  In his cabin later (after he had finished his ablutions and McEwan had finished scrubbing) he stretched out in bed feeling some queer emotion that was neither sadness nor quite melancholy. For the longest time he couldn’t think what it was, until it hit him: homesickness. It had been so many years, thirty perhaps, since he had felt it.

  But almost as if by magic the diagnosis cleared the sensation itself away, and immediately after promising himself that he would write Lady Jane a long letter in the morning, he fell into a heavy and dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  An urgent hand shook him from it.

  “Mr. Lenox!” a man’s voice said. “Mr. Lenox! Come, wake up!”

  It wasn’t McEwan, Lenox knew even in that bewildered state of half wakefulness that follows a startle from rest. But who then?

  A yellow light that had seemed to be emanating dimly from the floor of the cabin rose, and as he came into self-possession Lenox saw that it was a lantern. It illuminated the face of the ship’s captain.

  “Mr. Martin?” said Lenox in surprise.

  Martin spoke in his usual dry, imperturbable voice, but there was a tremor beneath it that Lenox hadn’t yet heard. “I would ask you to come to my mess, Mr. Lenox. Please, be quick about it if you will.”