A Burial at Sea

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The naval day began properly at noon.

Of course in the forenoon there was sailing to be done, an officer on watch, and men up among the rigging and down on deck doing their work. (In particular the forenoon was when the entire deck, regardless of its cleanliness, was soaked, cleaned, and beaten dry in preparation for the day.) It was in the forenoon as well that the midshipmen received their instruction.

But it was at noon when the officers took a sighting of the sun to help establish their position, the captain there to hear it. Immediately afterward all the men were piped for dinner. This was the main meal of the day: the purser’s mate issued the men salted beef, dried peas, and beer or grog depending on the ship’s stores. They ate where they had slept the watch before, in what they called their mess—the narrow area between two great guns that they shared with seven other men. This day there was a steady hum of gossip; they had been ordered to appear in full uniform on deck after dinner, something usually reserved for Sundays, when church was rigged.

Lenox woke up a bit before noon. When he called for McEwan, the assistant, with a note of genuine sympathy in his voice, said, “Which you must be starving, sir. Would eggs in toast do you?”

“And tea, if you please.”

“And tea, of course, and you’ll be needing biscuits, and I think I saw some marmalade, and…”

Lenox was still tired—and his mind still racing—but the strong, dark tea refreshed him. Better still, McEwan could cook. The eggs, cracked into an oval hole in the middle of two pieces of toast, cooked until brown on either side, and served with the cut-out ovals toasted on the side, were wonderfully flavorsome.

“Chickens laid ’em this morning,” said McEwan when Lenox complimented the breakfast. “We call it a spit in the ocean.”

“What other animals do you keep on board?”

“Why, I don’t rightly know, sir, leastways on this voyage.” McEwan chewed an edge of toast himself, ruminating. “Though I imagine there’s a goat, sir, and a mess of chickens, and it might be as there’s a lamb.”

As was customary among men with the means to do so, Lenox had brought his own provisions on board: hams, cheeses, wine, biscuits, and whatever else Jane had thought he might need. They were stowed in locked hampers outside his cabin, where McEwan had taken to lovingly stroking them every time he passed.

Lenox took a second cup of tea, reading from a copy of The Voyage of the Beagle he had brought on board. When he heard the men being piped to dinner he went to his cabin and, with a smile, took an orange Jane had packed for him. This he ate while leaning over the rail of the quarterdeck, thinking of Halifax and Halifax’s murderer, tossing the rind over the side but savoring the fruit both for its taste and the person it recalled to mind.

Soon all the officers and all the men—everyone afloat on the Lucy, from McEwan to Martin—stood on deck, all dressed ceremonially. A drummer played a short burst of formal rhythm and then the captain spoke.

He had come to Lenox only a moment before the drummer began.

“Is there anything you can tell me? Anything to draw out the murderer? Anything I should omit?”

“I wouldn’t mention the murder weapon.” Lenox had told Martin about the pocketknife that morning, just before he had gone to sleep. “You might mention that we have a strong suspicion of whom the murderer is—it would make us seem as if we have the situation in hand.”

“Which we don’t,” the captain said flatly.

“It might also induce a confession.”

In the end Martin followed this advice. His voice booming over the brisk sounds of the water and the wind, the sails, he said, “For three years now I have been proud to call the Lucy my command. I say with complete confidence that there is no finer ship in Her Majesty’s navy. She is a taut ship; a fast one; a friendly one; a dangerous one. She can outsail and outmaneuver anyone in the ocean, and though she has fewer guns than most she can outshoot many of them, too. That’s down to her crew.

“Perhaps that is why I am doubly downcast at what occurred during the middle watch last night. You may as well know what many of you will have heard in differing accounts: Lieutenant Thomas Halifax was murdered. And, after a fashion, was the Lucy. She cannot be the same ship now.”

It was clever, thought Lenox, to appeal to their pride in the ship they sailed. But futile, too, he expected. Whoever murdered Halifax had too cool a head to succumb to such manipulation.

“I ask the man who committed this foul deed to step forward now,” Martin said. He took a deep breath. “If he does so, his family and friends on land will think he died during a storm. There is no need for such a stain to extend to a wife or a son. The name can remain good. I don’t think you could reckon a fairer bargain than that.”

The men evidently agreed. A murmur of assent rippled through the multitude, and they all turned their heads back and forth and round to see if anyone would rise.

But nobody did, and Martin, nodding as if it was only in confirmation of his expectation, said, “Very well. I see this murderer—one of you—is every bit as cowardly as I anticipated he would be. Let it fall on your own head, then. Stand in three lines now, bare-chested, and Mr. Lenox, Mr. Tradescant, and I will inspect you all. The midshipmen shall divide the groups by mess, that no man may go unaccounted for.”

The surgeon, the captain, and the member of Parliament briefly huddled and agreed to send anyone with a suspicious wound into the surgery. This was Lenox’s thought, one last gambit to encourage guilt: the suspects would be standing over Halifax’s body.

“Consider particularly the forearms and the faces,” he added before they split into groups.

Privately he wondered whether they should be making a similar examination of the officers. It was a point to raise to Martin later.

If the sailors had thought Lenox was bad luck previously, this murder was, it seemed, all the verification they required. Each man he inspected gave him a dirtier look than the last.

He noticed Evers—the man who had told McEwan Lenox was an albatross—standing back several places in line. When their eyes met Evers spat into his cap and turned away.

McEwan himself was in Lenox’s grouping. His hands, arms, face, and chest were all free of suspicious markings, and he somberly nodded to Lenox when dismissed. As he left he appeared to pluck a small parcel from his own cap (pockets were forbidden in the navy, by tradition if not written rule) that looked suspiciously biscuit-shaped.

In the end nine sailors assembled in the surgery, not counting the patient who slumbered peacefully on, deep in coma, in the corner of the room.

Halifax’s body was beginning to decay; Tradescant uncovered it as the sailors filed into the room. Each crossed himself when he saw it.

The review was thorough but inconclusive. The first man they interviewed had a great scrape across his right forearm, but claimed—and in the captain’s opinion it seemed probable—that a rush of rope from a slack sail had given him the burn. Two or three more had such shipboard injuries. Evers had a great welt on his chest, which he said came from a drunken stumble down the streets of Plymouth.

“What did you land on?” Lenox asked.

“Dunno. Sir. I woke up with it.”

“It looks fresh.”

“It’s only from yesterday.”

Two more men had injuries that looked older than eight hours. In the end Martin, Tradescant, and Lenox dismissed the men; Lenox marked two in his mind for continued observation, but felt relatively sure that he had ended up down another blind alley.

“Back to work for me, then,” said Martin.

“Have you slept?” asked Lenox.

“Tonight. You’ll continue to look into this?”

“Yes.”

Lenox took to the quarterdeck. In the early afternoon the sky was hot and brilliant, cloudless.

Idly he examined the pocketknife Halifax had been killed with, as if it might unfold not just three knives and a compass, but, more useful than any of these, some kind of answer to this puzzle.

Suddenly he spotted something he hadn’t seen before.

Along the broad side of the smallest knife was a faint inscription. He had believed Tradescant’s statement as true, that the pocketknife had been unmarked, but then these words were all but faded from wear and would have been easy to miss in the wrong light. The white sun helped Lenox read them now.

For my son, Aloysius Billings, they said, July 1861.