A Burial at Sea

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 sighed. “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.”