A Burial at Sea

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 one 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?”

“Oh, no, sir,” said Pimples. “They’re not allowed.”

“What a shame that these must go to waste, then,” said Lenox, unrolling a soft leather case that held half-a-dozen cigars. “For myself I don’t smoke them that often, and I have a dozen more in my cabin.”

“Sorry,” said Pimples.

All of the boys looked at them longingly, but nobody spoke. Lenox smiled inwardly, trying not to let it show. “Well,” he said at last, “what if you had to smoke them—orders of a member of Parliament? Who would tell the captain as much?”

They were still silent but Lenox could feel their willpower sapping. At last Teddy said, “Might I hold one?”

He took one, paused, and then, apprehensively, took a candle from the table and lit the cigar.

There was a moment of stillness and then the other four boys nearly leaped at Lenox, their voices bursting out of them at last—“Oh, thank you,” “If you insist,” “Shame to let them go to waste”—and took the remaining cigars.

After this the formality of the earlier part of the evening vanished, and the boys’ formality was replaced by a definite bonhomie born of the late hour, the champagne, and Lenox’s cigars. Pimples did an extensive and deadly accurate impression of the chaplain teaching them Scripture every morning, which Lenox laughed at despite himself. Then there were a round of toasts, remarkably similar to the wardroom’s, in fact, the Queen, various sweethearts from home, the admiralty—but also, rather touchingly, the boys collectively toasted their mothers. Lenox raised his own glass and thought of his mother, dead now, and felt a stir of emotion within.

When the wine gave out nobody wanted to go to bed, but of course the midshipmen had lessons in the morning. Lenox, thinking perhaps he ought to leave Teddy to bask in the glory of having indirectly provided them cigars and food, thanked them for their hospitality. Each boy in turn shook his hand and clapped him on the shoulder and said with great ardor that he ought to come back any time.

“Why not tomorrow?” one of the younger boys even said, thinking perhaps of further hams and loaves of bread, an invitation that drew a look of disapproval from Cresswell.

“We oughtn’t to tax Mr. Lenox with our company, but I hope he will return later in the trip.”

“With great pleasure,” said Lenox.

He walked through to his cabin somewhat tipsily. It was the end of the first watch, nearly midnight, and he heard the increasingly familiar creaking of the ship as one watch turned into another, a wave of men going downstairs to their rest and another wave rising to the deck to assume their duties.

As he sat at his desk, drinking a glass of cold water to sober himself, he started another letter. This one was to Edmund, a report on Teddy’s high spirits and seeming good cheer. He fell asleep over his pen, and so missed the cry that went up on deck some minutes later.

Only the next morning did he hear that the first breath of that most dreaded movement had been whispered on board: mutiny.