A Burial at Sea

CHAPTER FIFTY

When Sournois came back into the room, Lenox asked him a question before he had even closed the door, hoping to catch the Frenchman off guard. “The British spies who died on French soil—does your government have more than a list of eight names?”

Sournois smiled and came to the small table, where he sat down. From an inner pocket of his jacket he produced a gold flask inlaid with three rubies. “My father was a modest man—a petit fonctionnaire, yes?—but when I received my offer to join the government, a very prestigious office, you understand, he took several months’ salary and commissioned this flask for me, as a present. Before I betray his pride I must have a drink, must I not?”

The dagger was in Lenox’s pocket, and he kept a hand around the hilt. He nodded. “Very well.”

There were glasses on a stand near the bed, and Sournois poured two glasses of dark liquid. Lenox hesitated until the other man drank his off, and then followed suit. It was a liqueur that tasted of apples, very strong.

“Thank you for drinking with me,” said Sournois. “Now, your question.”

“The eight names.”

Again Sournois reached into his pocket. “Here is the letter I received on the subject. Your officials may inspect the stamps and signatures for authenticity. You see, of course, that I have removed my name and offices from the document.”

Lenox took the pages and put them in his own breast pocket. “And?”

“My government killed your men, yes. What’s more, we have a list of sixty-five other gentlemen we know to be in the secret employ of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. Should any of them set foot in France, their lives would be forfeit.”

Lenox’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “Sixty-five,” he repeated. Remarkable news that: It meant that if this trip achieved nothing else, it had protected these men.

“The money you have paid me, perhaps it will buy their safety back. That is some comfort—to spare unnecessary suffering, all the pink-cheeked English girls who would have lost their fathers.” Sournois laughed, and took a sip straight from his flask.

“Does this mean war?”

“At the moment my government is fiercely protective of its rights. You fear war, I know, but so do we. What would you do if you discovered French spies in London and Manchester?”

“I cannot say.”

“You would not hear, whether or not you are in Parliament, I venture to say.”

“Perhaps not. But are your fleets readying themselves? Your armies?”

“Of course. They can scarcely do otherwise, can they? And yet, we may buy peace yet, you and I.”

“What do you mean?”

Sournois drank again. “Are you curious about my finger?”

“No.”

“Most men are. This same father, who gave me the flask, took my finger away.”

“How?”

“When I was nineteen I was a handsome boy, and the daughter of a great merchant in my hometown, Lille, wanted to marry me. But I had a different idea. She was plump and had … like this, you see,” he said, pulling his mustache. “Hair. So I ran off with my true love, a postman’s daughter. Penniless.”

“Your father took your finger for it?”

“When we returned to Lille he took me out for a glass of wine. He was already drunk, you understand. Our conversation began amiably enough, but when we began to discuss my marriage he grew angry, very angry. Violent. I stood, and he pushed me back into a bookshelf. There was a sword on the shelf, his father’s sword, a man who fought with Napoleon, and the sword took my finger off—fftt—just below the knuckle. Cleanly. Do you know why I tell you this story?”

The ship bobbed in the water gently, and from the next room there was a burst of women’s laughter. Lenox’s grip on the hilt of the dagger tightened again, his unease back. “Why?”

“It is more intelligent to marry for money than love, Mr. Lenox. Our countries must share a financial interest.”

Lenox understood. “You mean Egypt. The Suez.”

Sournois nodded. “Precisely. Egypt. The Suez.”

Neither man spoke for a moment, and then Lenox said. “Very well. There are more questions.”

“Of course.”

For the next two hours Lenox asked all the questions that his brother had told him to, mixing in some of his own, and Sournois dutifully answered, once even producing another piece of documentary evidence. Troop numbers, strength, movement. France’s own spies within England. Information about the men who formed the French government, their martial or pacific inclinations, and private inclinations too, that might be used against them. Sournois told Lenox all of it, in between sips from his gold flask. The price paid to him must have been very steep indeed.

Again and again, however, he stressed that France did not desire war—that he did not desire war. Lenox remained impassive in the face of these declarations, though inwardly he agreed.

All of this information Lenox wrote in a shorthand he had used since school, and which he and his brother had both agreed would be relatively difficult to decipher should it be seen by the wrong pair of eyes.

When he had gone through all of Edmund’s questions and taken a sheaf of notes for himself, Lenox checked his watch. It was past four in the morning. His attention had been focused so firmly on this task—and on its uncertain execution—that he had pushed Billings almost entirely out of his mind. Yet he could still, if he stopped thinking for a moment, feel the knife at his throat. He took a deep breath.

“All is well?” said Sournois, looking genuinely concerned.

“Oh, quite well, thank you. Is there anything else?”

“You have had it all.”

“We will leave, then. Separately I think.”

“Of course.”

“Where do your men think you are, if they know you’re gone?”

Sournois laughed. “Here. I have been making a point of visiting the pleasure boats every evening. I am perhaps later than usual, but not much so.”

“Very well.”

Sournois stood and offered his hand. “We will not see each other again, Mr. Lenox, and yet I will scarcely be able to forget you.”

They shook hands and Sournois left. Lenox spent ten minutes tidying his notes, rewriting them in places, and then felt the boat begin to slow, and finally to stop. There was a voice on deck, and then the boat began to move again.

As he left the room he caught a glimpse of a roomful of six women, garishly painted, sipping mint tea and speaking to each other in bored voices. There were brothels in London, he knew—innumerable ones—and yet he felt shocked, to see these women, and in some measure as if Africa was responsible. Nonsense, and yet he could not persuade himself otherwise. He wanted to be back in Mayfair suddenly, and then laughed at the desire. How much pride the English took in their empire, and how little they understood its alien ways, its strange, disconcerting newness!

On deck the mute Egyptian was smoking a European cigar. He nodded when Lenox appeared and then left him alone, vanishing into one of the boat’s many small rooms.

It was still dark but a pale blue light had begun to rise on the edges of the horizon, pure and deep in color, heralding the day. There was a thin rain beating down, and from the deck Lenox caught a glimpse of Sournois, walking down the small dock where they had left him and toward a beach covered with upturned fishing boats. A great swell of some unnameable feeling—melancholy, perhaps, or homesickness, a longing for Jane—filled Lenox’s breast. He turned and stared at the lightening sky, his gaze there steady until they were back at the docks.