A Burial at Sea

CHAPTER THREE

“Eat this,” said Lady Jane, and thrust out an orange at him.

“For the fiftieth time, dear heart, I’m not likely to come down with scurvy.”

They were walking down to the docks now. Behind them were two sailors from the Lucy, carrying Lenox’s effects: a large steamer trunk and two smaller bags. Lenox himself carried a small leather case full of documents that he thought it best to keep in his possession at all times. They were from his brother.

“Indulge me, won’t you?”

With a not unhappy sigh he took the piece of fruit she held out and began to peel it with his thumb. “I make this the sixteenth orange I’ve eaten in the last fortnight, and I’m not even counting the lemons you sneak onto every piece of fish I put in my mouth or those lime-flavored sherbets you plied me with at the admiral’s supper. I’m heartily sick of citrus fruits, you know. If I do get scurvy that will be the reason.”

“I would prefer you to return with all of your teeth, Charles. You can’t blame me for that.”

“I knew I was marrying a noblewoman. Such discrimination!”

She laughed. “I’ve packed a few more oranges in your trunk—eat them, will you?”

“I’ll make you a deal. I promise to choke down these oranges you give me if you promise in return to stay off your feet after I leave.”

“Oh, I shall,” she said. “Shake my hand—there, the deal is finished. I’m ahead of you anyhow—I told Toto I would let her read to me in the afternoons while I stayed in my bed.”

“Dr. Chavasse’s book?”

“I threw that away. Advice to a Mother on the Management of Her Children, indeed—that man knew no more about real mothering than Kirk does, or a bear in the woods. It’s more a book to frighten women than help them.”

“But he’s a doctor, Jane, and—”

“And what sort of name is Pye Henry Chavasse, too? I don’t trust a person who can’t have an honest name. Just call yourself Henry if your parents were foolish enough to burden you with ‘Pye,’ I say.”

“I’m not sure anyone related by blood to a man called Galahad Albion Lancelot Houghton can cast such aspersions.”

“He has the humility to go by Uncle Albert, doesn’t he? Pye Henry—for shame. At any rate I don’t need a book to tell me about what our child will be like. I have friends, oh, and cousins, all sorts of people who have been through it before.”

“That’s true enough.”

They turned into a small street that led straight down to the water. It was swarmed with bluejackets in the last minutes of their shore leave, some wildly drunk, others buying shipboard provisions at the general store, and still others kissing women who might equally be sweethearts from home or prostitutes working out of the coaching houses. As he was taking it all in he felt Jane clutch his arm.

“Stop a moment, will you?” she said softly.

He stopped and turned to look at her. “What’s wrong?”

There were tears standing unfallen in her gray eyes. “Must you go?” she said. Her bantering tone had vanished.

His heart fell. “I promised that I would.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

She put her face to his chest and started to cry. Embarrassed, the two sailors carrying Lenox’s trunk and bags both studied a bill of goods in the window of the grocer’s they had stopped by, though Lenox knew for a fact that the smaller one, LeMoyne, couldn’t read.

“We’ll meet you by the water,” he said to the men, and shepherded Jane toward a tea shop next door. “Call it twenty minutes.”

He knew there to be a private room in the back, and as they entered he handed over half a crown to the landlady that they might take it. She obliged them by leaving them alone.

It was a small room, with Toby jugs—old clay mugs from Staffordshire, brown salt glazed and molded into human figures—lining a shelf on one wall. They sat opposite each other in the low wooden chairs.

“What’s happened to make you change your mind?” he asked Jane gently, taking her hand in his.

She wiped her eyes and tried to calm herself. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you have to go. It’s only—it’s only—” She burst into fresh tears.

“Darling,” he said.

“I know I’m foolish!”

“You’re not. Shall I stay with you? We can go back to London this evening if you prefer.”

“No! No, you must go. I know it’s important, oh, in every sort of way. And I know you want to go! But it will be hard to be alone for two months, and just when I’m with child.”

The landlady came in now, carrying a tray laden with tea cakes, biscuits, sandwiches, mugs, a milk jug, a sugar pot, and a teakettle. She avoided looking at them as she transferred the tray’s contents to their small table with rapid precision. “And take your time,” she said before she hurried out.

When they had discovered Jane was pregnant, a week or so after Lenox had committed to this trip for his brother, both had been immensely happy. Strangely it wasn’t the chattering, social sort of happiness their marriage had been: both found in the next days that more than anything they would prefer to sit on the sofa together, not even talking much, perhaps reading, eating now and then, holding hands. It was a joy both of them preferred to experience almost silently, perhaps because it was so overwhelming.

When it occurred to Lenox that leaving might mean missing two months of that joy, he had immediately decided that he wouldn’t do it. In fact it had been she who convinced him he still must, after he told her the reason Edmund had asked. Since then she had always been staunchly in favor of the voyage. This was the first hint to Lenox that she felt otherwise.

Sitting at the table, looking despondent, not touching the steaming cup of tea in front of her, Jane said, “This is silly—we’ll be late. We should go.”

“I’d rather sit here,” he answered. “Will you eat something?”

“No.”

“I should, then.”

He picked up a sandwich with butter and tomato on it, no crusts, and took a bite. He found that he was hungry—the orange was still in his jacket pocket, half peeled—and when he had finished the sandwich he took a tea cake too and started to butter it.

Through her tears she smiled. “You can always eat, can’t you?”

He stopped chewing his cake in the middle of a bite and, with a look of surprised innocence, said, “Me?”

“You, Charles Lenox. I remember you as a seven-year-old, stuffing your face with slices of cold cottage pie when you thought nobody was looking, on hunt days.”

They laughed. Tenderly, he put his hand to her stomach. “I’ll be back soon, you know.”

“I worry you won’t come back at all. What do you know about a ship, Charles?”

“Ever so much now. How many sails it has, what it’s made of, who all the officers are, what the midshipmen do, where one sleeps and eats…”

“I don’t mean that. I mean you’re liable to fall off and vanish into the ocean because you thought you could lean on the railing…” She trailed off and gave him a miserable look.

“You can’t think how careful I’ll be, Jane,” he said, and again grasped her hand.

“I’ll worry myself sick, is all I know.”

“I’ll write to you.”

She rolled her eyes. “That will do me no good—you’ll beat your letters home, I’m sure.”

“It’s not a far sail, and the weather is calm. Captain Martin has a great deal of experience. She’s a good ship.”

“Oh, I know all that! Am I not allowed to be irrational once in a while?”

“You are, to be sure you are.”

To his sorrow their conversation progressed this way and ended inconclusively, as he promised again and again to be safe and avowed his disappointment at missing two months of her company, and as she said again and again that well, it was all right, even though plainly it wasn’t.

Just as they absolutely had to leave, however, she reached up for his cheek and gave him a swift kiss. “It’s only because I love you, Charles,” she whispered.

“And I you.”

They went out and walked the final street that slanted sharply down to the docks, which were loud with bickering voices and smelled of heat, fish, salt, wood, and rope.

He took some mild solace in thinking of the letter he had left behind on her pillow in London: it was a very good sort of letter, long and full of thoughts and declarations of love and speculation about what their child would be like and ideas for what they might do when he returned to London. She would be comforted by that at least. He hoped.

They found the sailors with Lenox’s effects, and then Lady Jane pointed off to the right.

“Look, there they are—your brother and Teddy. The poor boy looks green with fear.” She looked up at him. “I still find it difficult to believe you and your nephew will be novices aboard the same ship, don’t you?”