A Burial at Sea

by Charles Finch

  What is this name? That you shall hear from my own lips, not four weeks hence, in London. Until then I remain, as above, your most loving Charles.

  He signed and sealed this letter and put it between two pages of The Voyage of the Beagle. Then, feeling much better for it, he extinguished the candle with his thumb and forefinger and climbed his bunk again to fall to sleep.

  When he woke the storm was gone—indeed, might never have been at all, but for the demeanor of the sailors: the sky was a motionless pale blue, glittering at one end with brilliant white sunlight. Lenox ate an apple on the quarterdeck and watched the men work. They appeased every single one of them at once exhausted and blissful. Even Lenox, though he might have been an albatross, received warm looks from some of the sailors.

  Martin, too, was still on deck, and he came to the detective after fifteen minutes, looking pale and unshaven but as happy as everyone else aboard the Lucy.

  “The storm has passed.”

  “So I had observed,” said the captain. “The crew came through it beautifully.”

  “But what of the purser?”

  Martin frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Carrow told me that these pursers dislike storms.”

  Now Martin laughed. “Oh, yes—well, I daresay he lost some dry biscuit, and he won’t be happy that I’ve ordered double rations of grog for the men when they have their dinners at midday. Nevertheless they deserve it.”

  “I congratulate you,” said Lenox. “No injuries?”

  “Oh, a host of them! Tradescant has been up all night—eight or twelve of them down there, every kind of scrape and contusion and concussion you can imagine. Still, we may count ourselves lucky in such a storm that nobody died.”

  “Will you go to sleep now?”

  A stern look. “No. Not until the last man has gone off duty, and all have rested. There is work to be done—bilging, repair work—and of course we are fearfully off course, and must make up time. My steward should be bringing me coffee, however.”

  The steward appeared as if on cue, carrying a tin mug letting off fragrant steam from the top. Martin took it down in three gulps and then set off for the orlop. As for Lenox, he went down to fetch a cup of coffee, too, and drank it as he gazed over the becalmed sea.

  When the captain passed the quarterdeck again, Lenox waved him down.

  “Yes?” said Martin.

  “I need to interview Amos Lee, your fourth lieutenant. And I might as well have a word with the warrant officers, too.”

  “Lee will be awake in an hour, I daresay—could you leave him to then? He put in a hard shift overnight. In fact I must think of raising up one of the oldsters to acting lieutenant, just for this voyage.” This put more to himself than his interlocutor.

  “Oh, of course,” said Lenox.

  “Who do you think killed Halifax?”

  “I don’t know. But there are enough clues that it shouldn’t be long before I do, I hope. I simply need a more complete picture of the suspects.”

  “The suspects?”

  Lenox described his suspicion that someone living in the wardroom had done the murder, enhanced now by the theft of the medallion. For a common bluejacket to be wandering around the wardroom would have been uncommon in the extreme, Martin agreed.

  A steely look came into his eye. “When he is found out there will be no mercy, you may be sure of that,” he said. “A four-bag and a hanging.”

  Lenox had to find out some minutes later from McEwan, who was eating about six breakfasts, that a four-bag meant forty-eight lashes on the back.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Amos Lee was almost completely different than Mitchell, his fellow officer: tall and fair where the other was small and dark, placid where the other bristled, of excellent manners where the other was rude. Of course Lenox had watched men who had seemed the gentlest of souls in his acquaintance swing from the gallows, for crimes that would have made thugs from the East End widen their eyes.

  They spoke in the wardroom. Lee had an accent that Lenox had noticed among the younger generation of aristocratic public school graduates, which elongated every vowel, so that the word rather sounded like “raaawther” and London had about six o’s in it. The accent seemed to match Lee’s somewhat tired, heavy-lidded eyes. There was an air of boredom to him despite his polite attention to Lenox’s questions.

  “How did you discover that Halifax was dead?”

  “Mr. Mitchell told me the following morning.”

  “May I ask how long you’ve been on the ship?”

  “Certainly. I think it’s twenty-six months now, or thereabouts.”

  “You must have been friends with Halifax, then.”

  “Friendly, to be sure—there’s no way around that in the wardroom.”

  “Do you have any inkling of who might have killed him?”

  “No. I wish I had. Perhaps it was one of his men?” Lee ventured.

  “I had heard he was quite popular among them?”

  “It may be so, he and I carry—carried—different watches. He seemed perfectly competent from what I did observe of him, however.”

  “Do you know anyone aboard ship who has a…” Lenox paused, searching for the right word. “A morbid air? Anyone who seems a little too cold-blooded?”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

  “Among the officers, perhaps?”

  Lee looked troubled now. “I wouldn’t like to say.”

  “Please, it might be important.”

  “Well, if it is in the strictest confidence—”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “Lieutenant Carrow has always struck me as a cold fish. An able officer, exceedingly able, but not endowed too plentifully with warmth or happiness.”

  Lenox had observed Carrow’s demeanor now more than once, and agreed. Then there was the medallion. “It may simply be reserve,” he said.

  Hastily Lee agreed. “I’ve no doubt of it. I wouldn’t for a second accuse him of killing poor Halifax. But you asked me.”

  “I did—thank you for answering. May I ask, have any of the stewards struck you similarly?”

  Again Lee thought. “I suppose Mr. Butterworth is never overly friendly. I don’t know that I would call him cold-blooded, however.”

  “You surprise me—Lieutenant Billings being so amiable.”

  “Yes, I know. They seem like a mismatch.”

  Lenox paused, and then said, “How often have you borrowed Billings’s penknife?”

  “Sorry?”

  He decided to lie. “His penknife—he said you had borrowed it now and then.”

  “I shouldn’t like to call him a liar, but I can’t remember ever seeing the thing, much less borrowing it.”

  “I must have misheard. Thank you, Mr. Lee.”

  “Of course.”

  A thought occurred to Lenox now and he went to the surgery to speak to Tradescant, who was treating the casualties of the storm. One sailor had a particularly nasty blue and green bruise across half of his face. Tradescant ordered a cold salt compress for it, and then stepped into the galley with Lenox.

  “I wondered in passing,” said Lenox, “whether either of your assistants in surgery strikes you as a likely suspect? The cuts on Halifax seem surgical, don’t they?”

  “I suppose they do, and yet I should sooner believe that you had done it, or the captain. My first assistant would have been on duty here in the surgery, Wilcox. I suppose he might have left to do it, but it would have been a strange risk—his presence on deck being so much less usual than anyone else’s, and there being a whole empty room, the surgery itself, to which he might have invited Halifax.”

  “What to do with the body, then?”

  “True; and yet Wilcox doesn’t have that in him, I swear to you. The second assistant I have is little more than a simpleton, Majors he’s called, good for fetching things, lifting things. No more knowledge of surgery than a dog has.”

  Lenox sighe
d. “It was a shot in the dark, I know.”

  The problem was the preponderance of suspects. It was strange to think so, given that his cases in the old days had usually taken place in London, with its millions of men and women flung into every corner of every building. Now two hundred and twenty seemed an impossibly large number. Was it a random sailor whose face, much less whose name, Lenox didn’t know? Was it an officer, or an officer’s steward? The definite clues he had—the penknife, the medallion, the strange nature of Halifax’s wounds—seemed to point in every different direction.

  Perhaps, he thought, the time has come to search not for the murderer but for the victim. Why had someone wanted to kill the man at all, much less with such brutality?

  He went back to his cabin with his mind unpleasantly fuzzy, the specifics of the case receding before him, and realized as he sat down at his desk to think that he was extremely tired. The first night he had spent aboard was interrupted by the murder, and the second by the storm. He would rest.

  When he woke up some hours later it was already past the middle of the afternoon.

  “McEwan!” he called out.

  The steward appeared in the doorway. “Sir?”

  “What time is it?”

  “It’s just gone four, Mr. Lenox.”

  Lenox groaned. Nearly five hours of daylight wasted. “Could I have some tea, please?”

  “Yes, sir. And if it’s any consolation the captain has been asleep for ever so long, sir, just as long as you.”

  Some men could wake up from a nap and spring immediately into action. Lenox had never been one of these. He preferred a gentler awakening, of the sort he had now: teacup encircled in one hand, his book laid flat on his desk, a warm jacket resting loosely over his shoulders against the chill of the oncoming night.

  The book was the most important part, and he had chosen the right one. In The Voyage of the Beagle Darwin described his youthful trip through the Atlantic to South America, during which he had collected fossils and plants; Lenox had chosen it because it was first and foremost a tale of the sea, written aboard a ship not all that dissimilar from the Lucy. Both, in fact, had left from Plymouth. (Darwin himself only ever took a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost on his trips, but that was varsity stuff, slightly pale in interest, to Lenox’s taste.) And yet the book was an escape, too: Darwin’s Beagle had been full of interesting men, watercolorists, botanists, naturalists, and a captain, the great Robert FitzRoy, who was himself a pioneering observer of weather phenomena.

  The Lucy, by contrast, sailed with a murderer and a wide variety of surly officers.

  On every page of the book some quotation or another struck Lenox enough that he wrote it in his commonplace book, and now here was another one, just as he poured a second cup of tea and helped himself to a shortbread biscuit: “No one,” Darwin wrote of the forests he had visited in Brazil, “can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of body.”

  This was precisely how Lenox felt about the quarterdeck of the Lucy, and the great solitude of the ocean. Though it had been a fraught few days, he was beginning to love the ship, to internalize and comprehend her pitch and roll. For instance she had just met a great wind and was running very close to it, very quickly. He watched the sun-dappled water pass by at an astonishing speed through his porthole and felt at one with the vessel.

  After sitting in silence for some time, having forgotten even about his book, Lenox came back to himself. “McEwan,” he called out, “please lay out a suit of clothes and parcel out some of my food. I’m due at the gun room for supper in an hour. I’m just going to look around on deck for a moment first.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At five minutes before seven o’clock Teddy Lenox, bound up like a mummy in his stiff wool midshipman’s uniform, came to the wardroom to fetch his uncle. They stole a few words as they walked toward the gun room.

  “How are you?”

  “Very well, thanks. I was ever so sick the first night—nerves, I think—but I’m fine now.”

  “How are you getting along with the other fellows?” Lenox asked.

  Teddy seemed much more at ease than he had when they were making their way out to the Lucy from the docks at Plymouth. “They’re splendid chaps,” he said. “Alastair Cresswell—we all call him Alice—will be an admiral one day, if he can keep off the gin, everyone thinks so, Pimples even—Mercer, that is. They’re the two older midshipmen.”

  “I don’t know that gin is always an impediment to success in the navy, at that,” Lenox said.

  “It’s ever so different than school.” He said this word with particular scorn. “The watches are very long, you know, and in the morning you have to learn about, oh, celestial navigation, and shipbuilding, and that sort of thing. But only from the chap.”

  “The chap?”

  “The chaplain—all of us call him the chap.” Teddy paused. They were near the gun room. “I say, Uncle Charles. When we’re in there you won’t mention … things about home, will you? Christmas or anything?”

  Lenox felt a great swelling of tenderness for the boy then, and thought of his brother Edmund, who lived very close to Lenox’s heart indeed. The previous winter the family’s old dog, a spaniel named Wellie, had taken himself to a warm and obscure corner of the enormous house and died. It had been Teddy who was closest to him; it had also been Teddy who found him, the others diffident in their searching. And it had been Teddy who wept so bitterly throughout Christmas Eve, while his parents tried to console him with platitudes about old age and good lives.

  “I’m much more curious to hear about all of you than to talk about anything like that,” Lenox said, and the young midshipman nodded with studied nonchalance.

  The gun room looked rather as it had the evening before, though the playing cards were nowhere to be seen and there was a decided absence of wine and cigars, too. The other four midshipmen were ranged around the cabin’s blue circular bench, and rose when Lenox entered. Only Fizz, the little black-and-tan terrier, was rude enough to keep his seat on the floor.

  “Hello!” he said to the boys. “I’m Charles Lenox.”

  He met Alastair Cresswell, a very tall, leggy, black-haired lad whom Lenox had seen around ship, and then Mercer, or Pimples, from the night before—these were the two older boys. The two younger ones, slightly older than Teddy, had names he didn’t quite catch.

  “I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. And look at this feast!” he added, waving a hand out at the small dish of potatoes, the single roasted chicken (which must have been a scrawny bird when it had walked the earth), and the halfhearted mash of carrots. “Would it insult you if I ventured to append a few small items to it? I could scarcely improve it, of course, but if we had heartier appetites.”

  Here he took the parcel of food that McEwan, never one to stint, had packed. There were a dozen slices of rich cold ham, a bottle of Pol Roger, a loaf of Plymouth bread, kept fresh in wax paper, and lastly a large, dense fig cake, honeyed on the outside. As these were unpacked the table came to seem much richer in its contents.

  The gratitude on the boys’ faces gave Lenox a great deal of pleasure, though he had been planning to save the fig cake for the trip back from Egypt. If it was true that the longtime Lucys, however, had been eating skinned vermin, they deserved it more than he did. What they did have, perhaps because it was early in the trip, was a fair bit of wine. All at the table drank.

  Conversation was formal and limited, as each of the midshipmen fervently scarfed down the ham and the chicken and the bread, but eventually, as the pace slowed, they managed to speak.

  “Tell me, each of you, how was it that you first went to sea?” Lenox asked.

  Two were college boys, and two were practicals, including Pimples, who had been afloat for nearly a decade. Cresswell had a bit of both in him.

  “My father was a vicar in Oxshott,” he said, “in Surrey. I doubt anyone in his entire family tree set foot on on
e of Her Majesty’s ships. On my mother’s side, however, there was a great naval tradition, and after a tremendous row it was decided that I should be a naval man rather than a vicar. Thank God,” he added without apparent irony.

  “I went to the college at Portsmouth for a year. I would have gone back, too, but when I was eleven one of my mother’s brothers heard of a berth in the Warrior, which has been sold out of the service now, but which was at that time a highly reckoned ship.”

  “Our first ironclad, was she?”

  “Just so, Mr. Lenox. At any rate I went into London to see the captain there, he and his first lieutenant. They made me write out the Lord’s Prayer, jump over a chair naked, tie a Turk’s head knot, and then the first lieutenant gave me a glass of sherry on being in the navy!”

  There were titters from the other midshipmen at this tale, and then when Lenox laughed they all did. “A strange examination,” he said.

  “It was, just—the captain was of the old school, I can promise you. But do you know who the first lieutenant was?”

  “Who?”

  “Captain Martin! I’ve sailed with him ever since.”

  Teddy interjected. “Alice will be a lieutenant on his next ship.”

  Cresswell frowned. “Well, that’s as may be. One can only do one’s best.”

  One of the other smallish boys piped up. “Is it true you were a murder solver?” he said in a high-pitched voice.

  Pimples shot the boy a dirty look and, before Lenox could answer, apologized. “Excuse him, sir.”

  “Not at all. It’s true, once upon a time I did that. Now my work is much less exciting, I’m afraid. I sit in an office and read papers all day. But here—did I spy you boys smoking cigars last night?”