down the hatchway to the wardroom. A group of men, though drunk, cleared the chairs off the quarterdeck with great alacrity and efficiency. Another group rerigged the ship that she might sail steadily through the night. Soon the visible signs of the evening’s festivities had been effaced, but their happy mood lingered.
Lenox, for his part, wanted to speak to Pettegree.
He caught the purser in the wardroom and invited him to take the air of the quarterdeck.
“Did you enjoy the game?” Pettegree asked when they were alone. Each man had a glass of port in hand.
“Very much, yes. It determines me to climb to the crow’s nest.”
“I’ve been afloat twenty years and I’ve never ventured that high. Leave it to the sailors, I say.”
“You may well be right.” Lenox thought of Jane, pregnant and perhaps, though he hoped not, fretting about his safety. “At any rate, I had hoped for a word with you earlier.”
“The inventory.”
“Yes. Was there anything missing?”
Pettegree shook his head. “I’m happy to report that there wasn’t.”
“It was unlikely, I suppose. Thank you for telling me.”
“There was
Lenox laughed. “I wish I had a shilling for every time I heard that preface in the course of my career, only for it to be followed by a decisive piece of information. Pray, go on.”
“We’re short a bottle of whisky.”
“From the spirit room?”
“Yes, precisely.”
Just near the gun room was a small closet with a caged metal door and a large, impressive lock. It held the ship’s spirits, wine and brandy for the captain and the officers, rum for the men’s grog, as well as a bottle or two of harder alcoholic drinks. When ships were foundering or there was mutiny afoot, sailors were occasionally known to break into it, an offense punishable by hanging.
“How many bottles had there been, and how many are there now?”
“The captain keeps them on hand to entertain only,” said Pettegree. “We have two bottles of decent whisky at the start of every voyage, and the same at the end of every voyage. The same two bottles for almost a decade. But at the moment there’s only one bottle there.”
“You don’t seem put out that the other one has vanished.”
“It’s not my place to question the captain’s choices.”
“The captain’s choices, you say? Is he the only one with access to the spirit room?”
“He and I have the two keys. Mine hasn’t left my person while we’ve been at sea, and his—”
“Neither of your assistants has borrowed it?”
“Never. And the only other key is his.”
“Did he not have to—to check out the bottle? Keep a record?”
“Oh, no, the whisky is quite his property.”
“I see.”
“If you like I can ascertain from him that he was the one who took it, though I can’t imagine any other possibility.”
Lenox’s mind flashed back to his visit to the captain’s quarters. On his desk had been an ebony ashtray with several cigar ends in it, and next to that a bottle of spirits, half empty. It might well have been whisky.
“If you wouldn’t mind keeping it between us, I’d be grateful,” said Lenox. “If it comes up I may mention it, but it doesn’t seem our place—he’s been under a great deal of stress between Halifax and the rolled shot—”
Pettegree nodded vehemently. “Oh, of course, of course. I’ll not say a word of it.”
Lenox went straight to the wardroom from there in search of Tradescant. The surgeon was absent from the dining table, however, where a few men were playing at cards, and also from his cabin.
Making his way forward to the surgery, Lenox looked at his watch. It was late; he ought to go to sleep. But it was worth speaking to Tradescant as soon as possible.
The surgeon was in a small, leather-backed chair in one corner of the surgery, a candle on a ledge at the level of his snow-white hair, reading a book. He looked up.
“Hello, Mr. Lenox,” he said, and from the faint slur in his words Lenox concluded that the surgeon had gone one or two drinks past sober. “Did you enjoy the game?”
“Very much, yes.”
“Your steward won! He was terrifically impressive, I thought. I hope he won’t need convincing that he’s still a steward.”
Lenox smiled. “I don’t think it’s gone to his head.”
“How may I help you?”
“Are your patients quite well?”
“Oh, yes. The one long-termer.” He gestured toward the back of the room, where the man who had been smacked in the head with a beam not long out of Plymouth Harbor slumbered on. “I believe he’ll come out of his sleep sooner or later, though to be honest it’s taking longer than I would have liked. Then there are these two chaps, leftover from the storm. Both should be back on duty tomorrow, a few nasty bruises left but not much else.”
“I’m pleased to hear it.”
“In fact I was just thinking what a quiet trip it had been, and then remembered poor Mr. Halifax. Though it wasn’t five days ago it seems like a dream, doesn’t it?”
“May I ask you a peculiar question?”
“Yes, but please, sit down, have a glass with me.” Tradescant lit another candle and uncorked a dusty, roundish bottle of some richly ruby-colored liquid. He poured two very small glasses of it. “To Halifax!” he said, and drained his glass.
“To Halifax.” Lenox drank his off too, and then smacked his lips. “Delicious wine. Where did you come by it?”
Tradescant’s eyes flickered in the candlelight and he smiled. “It’s an 1842 Burgundy. My father gave me six cases when I first went to sea. They’re quite valuable, and I think he intended for me to sell them and live off of the profits. But it was the only present he ever gave me, you see, and so I take two bottles on each voyage. I only drink it with others. It gives me a kind of pleasure.”
“Better than money.”
“Dissimilar—but yes, perhaps better. I don’t mind about money. I suppose he would give me some of that, too, if I needed it especially. He gave me a house in town some years ago, and he’s just about alive. I’m a bastard, you see. My father is—” and here Tradescant named one of the great dukes of the realm, of a family second only to the royal family in prestige, nearly ninety now, who in his day had been one of the few political and social rulers of Europe.
“I didn’t know,” said Lenox. “A very great man indeed.”
“In some respects, yes. My mother was a charwoman, may she rest in peace, and I think it very likely she had more wisdom than he did, and more kindness beside.” Tradescant laughed. “Now I am nearly fifty. It’s an age when parents don’t matter as much as they did … or they matter more in some ways, and less in others. I’ve been happy in my life.”
It was a singularly confessional speech, and Lenox smiled—not too broadly, but encouragingly, grateful for the man’s confidence. “If all you had out of your father was that wine, it wouldn’t have been too hard a transaction.”
“We agree, Mr. Lenox! Now, your peculiar question?”
“Ah, yes. I wondered about the contents of Halifax’s stomach when he died.”
“Oh?”
“Not the food, so much as whether—well, it sounds indelicate, but my friend Thomas McConnell, who is a doctor, will smell the stomach for alcohol, if the body is … fresh enough. I realize it sounds morbid.”
“I do quite the same, and in fact I think I’ll have made a note of it … yes, here’s the book, this little hardbacked one.”
Tradescant flipped through the pages. “Well?” said Lenox when he had stopped.
