A Watery Grave

by Joan Druett

  After George’s grandparents had grudgingly consented to allow him to go to sea, he had approached a sailor he’d spied perched at ease on a New London wharf for advice about joining the navy. George could remember the fellow exactly—an extremely weathered and cynical old salt who had risen as high as captain’s coxswain and was now whittling a stick as he sat on a bollard waiting for the captain to return to his boat. Still, a whole five years later, George could bring to mind the way the sailor had spat a great tobacco gob into the sea that rippled about the piles of the pier before calling him a bloody young idiot.

  “Dod dog it, don’t do it,” he’d barked. “Get that crazy notion out of your head! It would be better to hang than turn into a sailor. Study your books, learn a trade, and grow up to be a useful man!” Then, when George had insisted, the coxswain had advised him to go in for the merchant trade and steer clear of the navy. “Look at me,” he’d declared, prodding a gnarled, tarstained finger at his shirtfront. “I’ve been in the navy all me life, and what good has it done me? They don’t teach you nothing better than how to haul ropes, holystone decks, and pull an oar in a boat—they turn you into a confounded dog, to run to a whistle and cringe at a blow. Join the crew of a merchant ship, young man, and learn to be a proper seaman!”

  Which was exactly what Wiki had done, George mused now. At the time he would have been perfectly happy to take the old coxswain’s advice and go along on the whaler with his comrade, but his interfering grandfather had yet again taken a hand. Though finally convinced that George was quite determined to go to sea come hell or high water, he utterly refused to contemplate his grandson going in anything less than a navy ship. He’d made sure that George was set on the right path to becoming an officer by organizing his commission as a midshipman. Both power and wealth were necessary—only the sons of lofty individuals like great navy captains, important merchants, and U.S. senators being eligible—but George’s grandfather was both rich and influential.

  George, himself, had not been at all grateful, since he’d swiftly found that a junior midshipman’s existence was a dog’s life indeed. His job was to keep an eye on the men, report on their behavior, and make sure they obeyed orders, so that in effect he was nothing better than a kind of constable’s informer, regarded with utter contempt by the men. Still worse were the officers who handed down those orders, most being tyrants who considered their midshipmen nothing better than menials, completely at their bidding no matter how capricious the whim. However, with grit, determination, and unflagging enthusiasm, he had somehow survived his seagoing apprenticeship—all three years, ten months, fourteen days, and sixteen hours of it.

  Then he had reported to the Gosport Navy Yard for eight months of instruction in the technical and theoretical aspects of seafaring. George had lived in a boardinghouse in Norfolk and had relished every moment—though, as he remembered it, the dread prospect of the grueling examination to come had cast a bit of a blight on his enjoyment. This had been held in Baltimore before an examining board of senior officers, and he had come through it with flying colors. Not only was he rated as a passed midshipman, but he topped his class—and, because of that, he had been given the command of the dear Swallow. He owed that to Captain Wilkes—not that it made him like the fellow any better—because the commander of the expedition had determined that the smaller ships should be given to recent graduates, reckoning that they, unlike the older officers, had not had the time to forget what they had learned.

  It was ironic, however, that he should command a small brig when all his experience had been on great men-of-war and particularly so that it should be a brig with a forecastle—or so he freely confessed to himself. On the big fighting ships the seamen slung their hammocks between the great cannon, either on the main deck or the gun deck, which was one tier below, while the junior midshipmen slept on the orlop deck, even farther down in the bowels of the ship. Accordingly, George found it quite a novelty that the Swallow seamen should not have just a dormitory of their own but be supplied with permanent berths as well. He wondered if they appreciated the luxury. And having never served on a ship as small as the Swallow, he had blithely assumed that the social situation on board this little brig—just ninety-two-feet long and with a complement of just seventeen (including Wiki and Astronomer Stanton)—would be a lot more democratic than on a frigate.

  Never had he been so utterly mistaken, George meditated. The only place where the brig’s officers mingled with the foremast hands was on deck, and that was just to give them orders. The captain’s cabin, with its chart desk and settee and curtained berth in the starboard quarter, was right in the stern, the whole blessed length of the ship away from the forecastle. Forward of this cabin was the saloon, with its big table built aft of the foot of the mainmast, the doors of the pantry and the two officers’ staterooms running off to either side. Rochester, as captain, ate his meals in this saloon, with just Astronomer Stanton for company—that is, when Stanton deigned to join him, instead of eating from a tray in his stateroom. Erskine, who was in charge of the deck when the captain was below, ate his meals after George had finished.

  Wiki, by contrast, took his mug and plate to the foredeck in fine weather or perched on his sea chest in the forecastle when it rained, and ate in the company of seamen. And Rochester—who on the spur of the moment had decided to join Wiki on the maintop platform, a third of the way up the mainmast, after glimpsing his friend up there while he was parading the quarterdeck in solitary splendor—envied him greatly. Mealtimes in the saloon, he announced to Wiki as he arrived over the futtock shrouds, were an unmitigated bore. Instead of sharing maritime anecdotes and jokes with his old comrade he was forced to try to be polite to Astronomer Stanton, a man he’d decided he disliked intensely.

  “He’s arrogant beyond belief and confounded tedious in the bargain,” he complained, after making himself comfortable on a folded spare trysail. “Most of the time he stays sequestered in his cabin, and when he does condescend to eat at the table he has naught to say but lunars and declinations, just as though a captain don’t deal with calculations ad infinitum already, in the way of navigating the ship. He’s obsessed with astronomics; they’re the whole of his blessed conversation, I swear! And the rest of the time he’s downright discourteous. Instead of listening when a fellow has something to say, he interrupts or reads a book. I doubt he’s looked me in the eye like a decent man even once. I’d never have believed he’d be such poor company.”

  Wiki said, “Because of that banquet?”

  “What banquet? The one at the Pierce place?”

  “Aye, I thought you said he kept the whole table enthralled.”

  “I told you, old boy, he was the very life and soul of the party! Garrulous on the subject of poor Thomas ap Catesby Jones. A story of frustration, I vow!—and one that is highly discreditable to the navy and those who directed its councils. First, there was talk of using the new Macedonian as the flagship, but then that fine little craft was taken away from him—it’s no blessed wonder he resigned from the command of the discovery fleet in a fury of disgust or that the expedition doesn’t kindle the enthusiasm throughout the nation that it deserves!”

  “So Stanton seemed angry when he was telling these tales?”

  “Not at all! In fact, Stanton seemed uncommon cheerful—altogether different to the person he is now. It was like he had something to celebrate!”

  “That’s an interesting way of putting it,” Wiki said thoughtfully. “E hoa—my friend—tell me, did he check his timepiece a lot?”

  “Not that I noticed. Why should he do such a thing?”

  “He didn’t seem as if he was expecting a man to call for a message?”

  “I really couldn’t tell, old fellow. As I said, I doubt I exchanged five words with the chap. He was right near the top of the table, while I,” George said rather broodingly, “was placed near the foot.”

  Wiki’s lips twitched. “The guests were seated in ranking order?”

&nbs
p; “No! Virginia gentry are disgustingly democratic! There was a whole fleet of midshipmen from the Relief storeship between me and the head of the table, along with a quartet of lobsters—marines, if you please!—from the Peacock. I didn’t know a single one of ’em, and I have not a notion why I was placed below the salt.”

  Wiki concentrated on a twist in the splice he was making and then said, “I don’t suppose you took note of what he was wearing?”

  “What? Who? Stanton?” Rochester cast his friend a startled look and said, “Not particularly. Why should I? Coat, vest, trousers, white shirt, white stock, I guess—no different from the other blessed civilians there, not that there was many of them.”

  “And a top hat?”

  “Great heavens, Wiki, I haven’t the foggiest idea! He was not in my boat—he could have worn a varnished hat with a pretty pink ribbon and I wouldn’t have known.”

  Wiki tucked and tidied loose strands in the splice as he remembered what Stanton had looked like when he had arrived on the riverbank to find his wife’s corpse—wearing the outfit George had described, except for riding boots, which George wouldn’t have noticed because everyone was seated at the table. Indeed, it was likely Stanton had traveled to and from Newport News by horse. After getting home and hearing the grim tidings of the discovery of his wife’s corpse, he must have ridden headlong from the plantation to the riverbank. It was no wonder he looked so disheveled.

  George Rochester said curiously, “Why are you asking all this? What does it matter what he wore or what mood he was in?”

  Wiki pursed his lips as he used a fid to knock the splice into shape. Finally he said, “The sheriff asked me to keep on thinking about the identity of the man who came to the plantation house.”

  “Well, I can assure you that it can’t have been Tristram Stanton,” George said rather testily.

  “You and a passel of midshipmen and marines most surely can’t be wrong,” Wiki dryly agreed. “Yet both servants were so positive it was Stanton they saw.”

  “It must’ve been an imposter—just as I heard you say to the sheriff.”

  So his conversation with the sheriff had definitely filtered down the skylight, Wiki realized, and he wondered if Stanton had overheard it, too. “An imposter had to be sure that Tristram Stanton was not at home,” he said. “Though I guess it was commonly known he’d be up at Newport News.”

  “Strangely enough,” said George, his brows lifting as he took on a meditative expression, “that ain’t so. He’d begged off the Pierce banquet on account of wanting to spend the night at his laboratory in Norfolk, tidying up before departure. We was all surprised to see him there.”

  “What!”

  “The man has no blessed manners—he simply changed his mind and went along. What his hosts thought, I can’t imagine,” said Rochester virtuously. “I suppose they simply smiled and laid another place—but don’t it go to show that the fellow’s a perfect philistine?”

  “E hoa, what it goes to show is that he has the luck of the devil! If he hadn’t changed his mind, he would’ve been blamed for the murder and hanged for it, too!”

  There was dead silence while they looked at each other in speculation. Around them the rigging creaked comfortably and canvas billowed out in a series of great white wings. Sixty feet below their perch, the deck of the brig plunged and rose. The man at the helm was steering full and by, but without paying proper attention to the weather clew of the main topgallant sail, so that every now and then water spatted over the rail and along the deck. However, Captain Rochester was too lost in thought to pay heed.

  “Put that way, it looks as if the murderer planned to use Tristram Stanton as a scapegoat,” he said at last. “So who hated him enough?”

  “The sheriff told me about a cousin, John Burroughs; that they are deadly enemies,” said Wiki. “It seems that though Burroughs has pots of money he refused to help out the Stantons when they needed it, and some kind of feud has built up since.”

  “That doesn’t look like a good motive for killing Stanton’s wife, not to me,” Rochester objected. “If there really is a feud, it seems more likely that Tristram Stanton would kill him! And anyway,” he went on, “don’t the astronomics fellows have to work together in some kind of amicable fashion?”

  Wiki frowned, shook his head, and said, “E hoa, what are you talking about?”

  “John Burroughs—he’s with the expedition.”

  “He’s … what? He can’t be!”

  “He’s assistant astronomer, stationed on the Porpoise,” said George with dignity. “I’ll show you the crew list if you don’t believe me.”

  “Dear God,” cried Wiki, struck by a sudden appalling thought. “We have to join the fleet before it’s too late!”

  Six

  Even if he could not comprehend the need for speed, Rochester gallantly responded to the challenge. The elements, however, were not nearly so cooperative. The moderate gale that had been blowing fair and steady hauled to the northeast in the middle watch of the night, which was not only unfavorable but worked up a nasty cross sea as well. For days the waves ran in rows like jackknives, with dark valleys between them, and the brig bounced and banged like a carriage on a rutted road. To Rochester’s mind, the only satisfactory aspect of the weather was that Astronomer Stanton was seasick—laid so low, in fact, that George was spared his silent and surly presence.

  Then even that contrary wind failed utterly, leaving the brig to lurch about unhappily on a sea that looked like a rippling sheet of glass but still held a sadistic swell, effectively keeping Stanton pinned to his berth. Every now and then a puff would come scudding in cat’s-paws across the water, and the sails would billow briefly as they met it, flapping against the masts. Every time, though, they flopped again as the little breeze died, lifeless as wet laundry on a line. Then again the wind would gently gust, but from another quarter, and around the yards would go, while all the time the smell of hot tar rose in the air as the deck boards heated and flexed and tempers on board became short.

  By taking advantage of every breath, they gained five miles; but then they lost it all in a squall. Trying to guess the position of the fleet was equally heartbreaking—had Wilkes been delayed by the same fit of doldrums? It was impossible to tell; all they could do was steer for Madeira and hope to find the ships there. When at long last the wind finally swung back to favorable, the brig was sailing in an ocean that was apparently quite empty. Worse still, Astronomer Stanton was back to making his surly presence felt at the table.

  “‘Mackerel skies and mares’ tales,’” Rochester recited, scanning the cloud-flecked, oyster-colored sky after taking their position at noon; “‘The signs of sweet and pleasant gales’—but whether that signifies we’ll raise the fleet is beyond me. I’ll wager the ships are scattered. The Relief sails like a drover’s nag and is bound to be miles behind the rest.”

  George was on the quarterdeck and Wiki was at the wheel, it being his two-hour trick at the helm. This, Rochester had found, was another opportunity for conversation with his old friend. And now that the trades had returned, the Swallow was back to sailing like the thoroughbred she was. All canvas was set, and her sharp bow was fairly slicing through the waves, tossing the crests aside so that foam raced along her polished black hull. Under Wiki’s sure hands the brig heeled steeply as she strongly strode the sea, every sail iron taut with wind. Aloft, the rigging sang and vibrated, while the timbers of the hull creaked in rhythm, and men had to climb uphill to get from the lee side of the deck to the windward rail.

  Wiki looked at George and then up at the weather clew of the topgallant and said, “I don’t care about the Relief. We have to find the Vincennes first—then the Porpoise.”

  “If you reckon Burroughs might’ve posed as Stanton that night, I can understand the Porpoise,” said Rochester, mightily puzzled, “on account of him being astronomer there—but why the Vincennes?”

  “We have to ask Powell about that note.” Wiki shook his
head in self-reproach, saying, “It’s been nagging me all along. I meant to ask the sheriff about that letter but ran out of time. We don’t know who sent Powell to Newport News to fetch it. We don’t even know if it was delivered to Mrs. Stanton. Did the sheriff ask the servants if a note had come for Mrs. Stanton; and if he did, what did they say? Did any of them see her open it?”

  “Perhaps once the sheriff knew it was murder, not suicide, it didn’t seem important anymore.”

  “The note was vital! When Stanton arrived at the riverbank he jumped to the conclusion that his wife had committed suicide—because he had sent her a message saying he was determined to sail with the expedition, or so he said. You say the note was sent ‘between the mutton and the ham’—what time was that? Did Powell go off in a boat or on a horse? If he delivered the letter early enough, Mrs. Stanton might have taken the opium before the imposter arrived—it might have been suicide, after all.”

  “But someone stowed that body in the boat!” cried Rochester, completely confounded. “Wiki, it don’t make sense!”

  “E hoa, I agree.” Wiki looked aloft, checking the weather clew again, and then back at George’s puzzled face. “But if Mrs. Stanton was conscious, surely she would have created a commotion when the intruder came into her bedroom?”

  “She might’ve been asleep—at midnight it’s likely she was asleep.”

  “You could well be right—which indicates that she didn’t receive the note. If Stanton was telling the truth, the message would have upset her too much.”