A Burial at Sea

the first time since his long swim, still greatly weakened but now capable of moving about the ship on his own. He spent a great many hours with his nephew Teddy, whom, though the ship was shorthanded for officers, Carrow permitted some degree of latitude in his duties.

The men seemed to bear a philosophical attitude toward Billings’s actions, and now his disappearance. Death was not uncommon at sea, perhaps. There were words of sadness for Captain Martin (still unburied) and at first a great deal of gossip on the decks, but even twenty-four hours after Lenox’s swim, while Lenox was only just returning to consciousness, the ship had apparently become itself again—albeit with a much reduced wardroom. Evers was back in his crow’s nest, Andersen back on the rigging, and Alice Cresswell walking the poop deck as a fourth lieutenant with all the pride and pomp of a king at his coronation.

Lenox watched their approach to the port from the railing at the Lucy’s spar. It was a marvel, this city. He realized that he had previously thought of the Suez Canal as a modest piece of imperial construction, for all of its expense and fame. Now he saw that it was unlike anything else in the world.

There were ships of every nation, Dutch flags, French ones, a dozen others, crowding the waters of the port. The air was black with steam, the docks frantic with action, and the sheer multitude of small craft on the water was overwhelming. In fact the water seemed more densely populated than the town. Men in skiffs went between all the larger ships, selling fresh fish and Egyptian delicacies. There were pleasure boats with prostitutes crowding their decks, official boats levying taxes and examining goods. Every one of them seemed to linger in the Lucy’s path until the last possible moment.

When they were quite close to dropping anchor, Carrow came to stand beside Lenox. “And this is what we’re hoping to buy into?” he said.

“I believe so.”

“It’s closer to Gehenna than anything I ever saw.”

“Certainly it gives an overpowering impression.”

“Filth, children running loose, any manner of ship crowding our boards. The men will love it. Hauling them back onto the Lucy at the end of a week’s time would be no pleasure, so I fear I must keep them on board. Still, I doubt they’ll mind if I permit them the freedom of the pleasure barges—most of them are close to jumping off and swimming every time one passes anyhow.”

“How will you spend your time in port?”

“There is a great deal to do about the ship, taking inventory, that sort of thing. I don’t doubt there will be congenial company if I do go on land.”

“You must come to dine with me, at least,” said Lenox.

“I should be honored. And there may well be other officers I’ve met, of our nation and others, staying at the officers’ club here.”

“You’re a captain now,” said Lenox, half as a question.

Carrow laughed. “Hard to believe, I know, and I never imagined how bitterly I would regret fulfilling my boyhood dream. Martin dead, Halifax gone, Billings a monster living in our midst all this while. Even Butterworth I thought I knew. Not a talkative chap, but not unkind either.”

“I think he felt a very great sympathy for Billings,” said Lenox. “A sense of protectiveness, even.”

“You heard Costigan’s tale?”

“Secondhand.”

“Billings attacked him. I thank God that someone was in the surgery at all times, per Tradescant’s orders, or I don’t doubt Billings would have slipped in to finish the job himself. It was lucky Costigan mended at all.”

“Will it be difficult to sail back to England with so few officers? Will you recruit here?”

“Oh, no,” said Carrow. “If we were near Brazil or India, perhaps. The trip back should be a jaunt. Now, we must see you into the Bootle very shortly, and onto land. You have great work to do, I know. I feel honored to help you; truly, I do, Mr. Lenox. Shake my hand, will you, before you go?”

The Bootle was the ungraceful little tub, previously a lifeboat, that had replaced the Bumblebee as the ship’s jolly boat. Lenox and his trunk went aboard with the help of the bosun and McEwan, Carrow at the railing to wave goodbye, Teddy and his fellow midshipmen behind the captain, waving too. (Lenox had left them two bottles of wine, to enjoy during his absence, and rather doubted they would survive the night. “Just keep Teddy off the pleasure barges,” he had muttered to Cresswell. “Surely I can count on a vicar’s son for that much?”)

It was a short journey to the dock; to Lenox’s surprise there was a delegation of four waiting for him there, one of them a young Egyptian boy struggling under an enormous flag bearing Saint George’s cross, which, seen in a certain light, was no inapt representation of England’s presence on the continent.

He stepped out of the Bootle and onto the dock, wearing his finest suit, and looked at the three white faces who waited for him there, two men and, to his surprise, a woman.

It was she who greeted him, a young, pale, and sturdy creature, who spoke in a strong Welsh accent. “Mr. Lenox, may I welcome you? We saw the Lucy’s color this morning and have been anticipating your arrival since. We have sore need of your authority in dealing with these Egyptians—I count myself very pleased that you have come. My name is Megan Edwards.”

“I’m very pleased to meet you. This is my steward, McEwan.”

“May I introduce you to my husband, please? Sir Wincombe Chowdery. I didn’t fancy being Megan Chowdery, however old a name it might be. I find I like being Megan Edwards better.” If this was unconventional talk, even brazen, she didn’t seem particularly to care.

Chowdery stepped forward; Lenox knew him to be Her Majesty’s consul in Port Said. He had looked at his wife throughout her initial speech with adoring eyes, a very small, stooped gentleman, well past fifty, with a squint and thick glasses. “And quite right,” he said, when she had concluded speaking, and then added, “May I welcome you. This is my associate, Mr. Arbuthnot—very promising young gentleman from Cambridge, don’t you know—fly- half—terrific hunter.”

Arbuthnot was a hale chap of only twenty-five or so, in truth better suited to Chowdery’s young wife than Chowdery himself was. For all that Lenox saw Lady Megan grip her husband’s hand and shoot him an adoring look while Lenox shook the younger man’s hand.

“Most pleased to see you,” said Arbuthnot. “Are these your things? Here, boys!”

He clicked his fingers and three boys from a group of fifty or so won the race and picked up the trunks, carrying, it seemed to Lenox, much more than their collective weight. After he had said goodbye to the sailors manning the Bootle, he followed his trunks to a carriage, Arbuthnot and the Chowderys alongside him. The shillings he gave the boys were met with almost disbelieving gazes of happiness; Arbuthnot tried to step in and give them a more appropriate tip, but Lenox waved the boys off. They vanished before he had time to see them leaving, back into the great, hot masses moving among the docks. McEwan mounted the seat beside the driver in order to look after the trunks, lashed as they were to the roof of the carriage.

The carriage rode over very rough streets, and in the few blocks close to the port the buildings were shifting sorts of slums, crowded with drying laundry and seemingly overflowed with people. Food sellers and other merchants operated out of small stalls, and shouted over each other. Because Port Said had been truly settled as a major city only fifteen years before, as part of the creation of the canal, everything had an air of shoddy newness.

Gradually, however, the streets cleared and the houses grew slightly larger; then larger still; and finally, as they ascended away from the port, there were villas and manors. All of these were new and sparklingly colored. Some of them had small signs outside with names on them, many more in French than in English, and also in a variety of other languages of Western Europe. It was the most international city Lenox had ever found himself in. The population was only about ten thousand, and yet there must have been two dozen nationalities represented among them.

It was Mrs. Edwards who spoke for most of the journey, informing Lenox of his various duties and reporting to him on recent developments in the competition between the French and English for use of the canal. She also spoke about the wali, Ismail the Magnificent, whose vision had dragged Egypt into modernity and whose spending threatened to ruin all of that progress. In truth she seemed more competent and informed than her husband, whose few conversational gambits all seemed to involve books. Lenox thought he understood: Chowdery himself was more than happy to let his wife hold the reins, while he sat and sipped cool drinks and read Seneca, Coleridge, Sallust, Carlyle.