A Burial at Sea

“There’s never a meal to be had in Port Said after ten.”

He will then answer all of the questions your brother has instructed you to ask. He will not ask about payment; it has been arranged.

- When your meeting is concluded, take the exit marked B in the diagram on the reverse of this page. The corridor outside of it will lead to the street. Return to your hotel. Write the answers Sournois gave you in cipher,

without copying down names, dates, or figures

. These you must commit to your memory. Should you be followed, fall in with other people and make your voice and presence conspicuous.

- When you reach Port Said, the consular staff will greet your ship. In all matters other than your meeting accept their guidance.

- Should anything go amiss, you must for your own safety immediately make your way to the consulate, and then with all possible haste to your ship.

- Destroy this document once you have memorized its contents.

As he read this Lenox’s nerves began to tense. It had seemed simple in the warmth of his London library: go to Egypt and perform a variety of official functions, and while off duty receive information from a French spy. Now it seemed like a mission fraught with danger.

Mingled with this new anxiety, however, was excitement. He was eager to arrive at their destination: Port Said, a city that lay at the north of the canal, near the top of the continent, just as the city of Suez lay at the canal’s southern point. He wondered what it would be like, and a series of images flashed through his mind: the nomadic Bedouins of the desert, almond-eyed women whose mouths were covered with veils, dancing in dimly lit dens, curved swords, camels, tin lanterns carved with Moslem symbols. All the stuff of boyhood books about the great Arabic world.

It was impossible to know whether any of that still existed. Of course the canal had changed Africa drastically, permitting goods from the center of the continent to reach its northern edge, around Port Said, and then to be absorbed into the great trade currents of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. There would be Europeans crawling all over the city—a concern, now that he came to think of it, though thankfully he and Sournois both had legitimate business to conduct, from all Edmund had said.

Now the implications of this document, the one in his hands, returned with full force to Lenox’s mind: conflict between the world’s two greatest nations, its two greatest navies, its two greatest armies. A war across the channel. It was within his power to help England, either by avoiding the war or by giving her a head start if the war was inevitable. A daunting thought.

He read through the letter twice more, and then looked out at the waning light and thought for a while.

“McEwan, would you fetch me a cup of tea?” he called out to the hallway at last.

“Yes, sir,” McEwan’s voice rang back.

“And while you’re at it I’ll take some toast.”

“And cakes, sir?”

“And cakes, why not.”

Lenox hid the document marked Alpha and then shredded his translation of Omega, the original, enciphered document, and his key, and again dumped the confetti out through his porthole. His tea arrived just as the last scraps of torn white paper sank beneath the water. He took a sip and contemplated what they had said, and what the next week of his life might be like.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Before supper that evening, Lenox took himself to the quarterdeck. Two men were there already, Billings and Quirke, leaned up against one rail and smoking cigars.

“How do you do?” said Quirke, and Billings nodded affably.

“Fairly well—unhappy still about Lieutenant Halifax, but fairly well, I thank you.”

“We were just discussing the subject,” Billings said.

“What did you conclude?”

“Nothing to merit your consideration—only the anxiety we both feel that his death is somehow linked to this pathetic attempt at mutiny.”

“I had wondered about that too,” said Lenox. “What puzzles me is that the Lucy kept so many of her men, all but two, men who could easily have left the navy forever should they have wished. Now we are to believe that one of them can have had such a change of heart in the past five days that he should murder a man and foment a mutiny? It seems impossible.”

“I quite agree,” said the engineer, pushing his red hair out of his eyes. “Yet the facts remain.”

The wind had picked up now, and above them from the poop deck Lieutenant Lee called out an order. “Reef the topsails, gents! Quickly now!”

“Yes,” murmured Lenox in response to Quirke. He lit his own cigar, and tucked a hand into his waistcoat pocket. “They’re inconvenient.”

Something had occurred to him, and for a moment it engaged his whole attention. The thought was this: the Lucy’s last two second lieutenants were dead. He recalled dimly Halifax telling him that the man who had held his job previously had been lost at sea.

What if there had been a more subtle variety of foul play in that death, too?

“Tell me, Mr. Billings,” he said. “I never heard the details of the death of your previous second lieutenant. Or his name, for that matter.”

A look of pain came into the first lieutenant’s eyes. “He was a good fellow, named Bethell, born not five miles from Portsmouth Harbor and leaving it only to sail to sea. He died during a storm—was taken overboard.”

“Was his death unusual?”

Quirke and Billings recognized at once what the implication of the question was, and in vehement unison shook their heads. It was Billings who spoke. “No, it was the commonest thing in the world, a heavy storm. He had gone fore to instruct the men to lash down the boats, and a great wave thundered us and, as we suppose, sent him overboard.”

“Nobody saw it happen, then?”

“No, but several of us saw him go forward, and within not fifteen seconds felt the tremendous wave. I don’t think anybody was surprised that he was lost. Saddened, of course, but not surprised.”

“Did the captain elevate Lieutenant Carrow to the rank of second lieutenant?”

“Yes,” said Quirke, “but he was reckoned too young to keep it. Now he will.”

There was motive, if you liked, and Quirke, sensing as much, hastened to add, “But Carrow would never have done it. Bethell was his closest friend aboard the Lucy.”

Billings looked less convinced, but said nothing.

“Do you disagree?” asked Lenox.

“No! No, not at all. That is to say, I know Carrow and Bethell had a falling-out, at some point, but I would no more believe Carrow capable of murder than—”

Lenox here forestalled Billings’s defense of his friend, interrupting him to say, “Yes, I see. Thank you.”

Quirke flung his cigar end into the sea. “Anyhow it’s a filthy business, and I shall enjoy seeing the bugger who did it hang,” he said. “Until supper, gentlemen.”

After he had gone Billings begged off too, leaving Lenox alone with his thoughts and Fizz, the dog of the wardroom, who leaped up onto his lap—being not much bigger than a rugby ball—and snoozed happily there for some while, while Lenox contemplated his duties in Port Said, and, more often, the half-empty bottle of liquor he had seen in Captain Martin’s cabin. Impulsively he decided he would go confront the captain now about it. He put an indignant Fizz on the floor and walked toward the captain’s cabin.

Martin was sitting in an armchair by his lovely, curved bow window, which looked out upon the ship’s wake. In one hand was a small black calfskin Bible. At Lenox’s entrance he carefully marked his page in the book and placed it upon the window ledge.

“How are you, Mr. Lenox?” he said. His smile was dry. “I heard of your ascent to the crow’s nest.”