A Burial at Sea

“Hmm. Whisky, it says here, Scotch whisky. Strange, now that you’ve drawn my attention to it—we don’t get whisky on the ship much, the men preferring rum and the officers brandy—but there was a definite odor of whisky.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Lenox went to sleep not long afterward, his stream of consciousness racing but muddied by drink. The next morning he woke with a single, clarified thought: Might Jacob Martin have murdered his second lieutenant?

It would account for the whisky; for Halifax’s apparently willing attendance at a midnight meeting halfway up one of the masts; Martin’s self-possession the night of the murder; the theft of the medallion and the penknife (presumably to shift blame away from himself) would have been easy, as nobody questions a captain’s movements aboard his own ship. And of course, most of all, he was a figure beyond suspicion.

Which meant he was the first person Lenox ought to have considered.

Still, some small part of him rebelled against the idea of Martin as a murderer. It wasn’t the man’s religious faith; that was so common among murderers as to be mundane. Nor was it his leadership of the Lucy. Rather, it was some intrinsic conservatism that seemed to define Martin’s character, a deficit of fury. The crime had been at once savage and plotted, and the mind behind it didn’t seem to be the mind Lenox thought the captain to have.

Then again, Pettegree had identified Martin as a man of violent temper.

The alternatives that his mind kept circling toward were Lieutenant Lee, despite the man’s placid temperament, and Lieutenant Mitchell. Mitchell was the more obvious suspect, because of his temper and because he was new aboard, the only change to the wardroom. For years the Lucy had sailed without violent incident, and within a few weeks of Mitchell’s arrival on board a man was dead.

As for Lee, there was the matter of his steward, who slept not in front of his door but down below deck amid the guns, with the rest of the sailors. It would have been difficult for the other officers to slip past their sleeping stewards, all situated in the hallways outside of their cabins. It would have been easy for Lee.

Or Martin.

After Lenox had accepted coffee, kippers, and eggs from McEwan, he took one of the last of Lady Jane’s oranges and sat down to write her a letter as he ate it. In it he spoke of Follow the Leader, of Teddy, of life aboard the ship. He reassured her that he had yet to succumb to scurvy. The letter ended with a short benediction, not too intrusive he hoped, for her and their child, after writing which he sealed the letter in an envelope and placed it next to the other letter he had written her, which sat in the battered Paul Storr toast rack that had always served as the organizer of his correspondence.

It was a still sort of day, not much wind, and while Lenox strolled the quarterdeck a huge indolent sailmaker’s mate named McKendrick played softly on his flute, sitting along the bowsprit. In the empty vastness the sound seemed to carry with special purity, and it lent a magic to the engrossing rhythm of the waves.

Maybe because of the music, or because of the sunny gentleness of the day—and certainly because of McEwan—Lenox decided to climb to the crow’s nest. The murder could wait half an hour.

He checked with Mitchell, the officer on bridge watch, who shrugged and sent along a strong forecastleman to keep Lenox safe. The forecastlemen were the best seamen the ship had—by contrast the quarterdeckmen, for example, were of an advanced age that they no longer liked to go aloft, though Old Joe Coffey didn’t seem to mind—but evidently Mitchell could spare this one, a short, grinning, towheaded Swede named Andersen. He spoke in a rudimentary dialect of English that was almost wholly naval in origin, and therefore shockingly explicit. His stock of obscenities he seemed to view as ordinary, even courteous, and the rest of the crew found Andersen too funny to disabuse him of that impression.

“Fucking top, here you going!” he said cheerfully, then for the sake of decorum added, “Sir!”

Lenox felt a fool for it, after McEwan’s performance, but in his heart he knew from the outset that the ascent was the hardest physical task he had ever essayed. More than once he felt himself slipping and thanked the Lord for the rope looped around his midsection.

After twenty yards or so the muscles in his legs were quivering and tired, and his hands a raw red from clinging desperately to the rope. Andersen, maddeningly, flung himself about the rigging like a monkey, making comments that were supposed to be encouraging, and which after a while Lenox stopped answering.

Don’t look down, he exhorted himself over and over, even though looking up was no treat, but after he had gone about halfway toward the crow’s nest he nonetheless made the mistake of glancing toward the deck.

His stomach went heavy and hollow, all the air sucked out of his midsection.

“We’d better go back down,” he said to Andersen.

“You must attain the crow nest!” replied the Swede with unforgivable jollity.

Lenox gulped and resumed the slow, arduous climb. As one went higher every small wavelet that slapped against the ship seemed greater, resonating through her timbers, until, when he was only twenty feet from the top, a gentle whitecap almost knocked him loose.

“So close!” said Andersen, who was hanging upside down by his legs, evidently having been as inspired by Follow the Leader as Lenox had been.

At last the crow’s nest seemed to be within his grasp. It was larger than he had expected, a wide circle of solid oak that could have fit six men snugly around, their legs dangling through the hole in the center. Lenox’s knuckles were white with the strength of his grip on the rope, until, almost reluctantly, he accepted Andersen’s boost through the center.

“Who’s that?” a voice called out as Lenox fell in a lump into the corner of the crow’s nest, panting.

The detective, not as young as he had once been, was trembling, sweat-soaked, and shaky; all he had wanted while aloft was a moment of peace. Instead he had found Evers, McEwan’s friend. The one who thought he was an albatross.

Andersen’s cheerful face popped through the center of the crow’s nest. “Rest now, Mr. Parliament! I have brought you reward as well! From Mr. McEwan—he suspects where you need it.”

To Lenox’s immense gratitude Andersen revealed that he had brought with them a small thermos, which proved to be full of hot, sweet tea, and a napkin wrapped around seven or eight gingerbread biscuits, studded with pieces of rock sugar. Jane had packed them.

Gradually Lenox’s breath returned to a steady rate and his reddened face began to cool. When he had at least some of his composure back he looked at Evers.

“Excuse my intrusion,” he said.

“Not at all, sir,” said Evers, in a voice that seemed to contradict the graciousness of his words. “They said you was going to try to make it up here. I didn’t think it would happen.”

“Why have you come up?”

“No reason.” As he spoke Evers shifted his hands, and Lenox saw for the first time that he was trying to hide something in his lap, his knees drawn up to his chin.

Lenox’s guard went up: was this the murderer? Evers was a large, strong man. Thank goodness for Andersen’s presence.

“You’re not on watch?”

“No, which it’s my time to myself.”

“Do you come up here often?”

“Fairly often, sir.” Again he said this last word with as much insolence as he could muster. He shifted his hands again and something spilled out onto the bare wood of the crow’s nest. Lenox grabbed it just as it seemed to be pitching for the hole at the center.

“Look here, that’s mine!” cried Evers.

Lenox held up the object. It was a charcoal pencil, chunky, with black charcoal on one side and white on the other, for shading. “This?”

“Yes!”

“Are you a draughtsman?”