A Burial at Sea

“In that case, gentlemen, all sail set!” Carrow’s voice boomed out, and the men of the Lucy burst into action.

As for Lenox, he asked McEwan for a cup of tea, and drank it by the taffrail, where he watched Port Said recede very slowly from view, with that occasional feeling one has in life of leaving a place to which one will likely never return.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The next two weeks of sailing were full of happy, golden days. It was as if the gods of the sea had decided to offer some small compensation for the benighted journey to Egypt, with its murders, its storms, its threat of mutiny. The wind was steady and the sun warm, and all the men were in excellent spirits, both the sailors and the officers.

Carrow’s presence helped enormously. After three or four days Lenox perceived that the young man had the makings not of a good but of a great captain. Martin had been good; Carrow would exceed him. What had seemed dourness in the third lieutenant now seemed like the poise and reserve of a man with responsibility. There was nothing tentative or halting about him. He commanded by instinct.

In turn everyone on ship trusted him instinctively, and with good reason: Carrow knew more about sails than the sailmaker; more about the Lucy’s provisions than the purser; could set a mast as well as a forecastleman who had been on the water thirty years; could swab the decks if he had to; could make two provisions of salt beef seem like four; could give a speech; could fight a battle; could set a broken limb; could weather a storm; could laugh with his inferiors without losing their respect; could lead men. The bluejackets no sooner heard his words than they fell to his commands. With a different third lieutenant raised to the captaincy it might have been a different voyage.

Lenox had friends in the upper reaches of the navy, and as each day passed his conviction grew that he must tell them what he knew of Carrow’s talent. It was impossible to say with an institution as self-regarding and hidebound as the admiralty, but he hoped that in fact the fate that Billings had assigned himself—to take the Lucy in the absence of another leader—would fall instead to Carrow. At least some good might come of the whole foul chain of events.

For his part Lenox spent his afternoons reading and his mornings writing an account, by the end some forty pages, of his impressions of Egypt. This was an accompaniment of his official six-page report, and he planned to circulate it among certain key allies in Parliament, for it argued well, he hoped, for England’s greater involvement in Egypt’s affairs. There were a select few issues that he had argued passionately about on the floor of the House of Commons—cholera safety, for instance, suffrage, Ireland—and now, almost accidentally, almost by the way, he felt he had found another.

The only blot on Lenox’s happiness was Teddy’s behavior. He was still in a preoccupied and restless mood, and he seemed to have less to do with his fellows in the gunroom. It was a pity, after they had all seemed to get along so well. When Lenox tried to ask the boy, he met with a definite—if polite—rejection. What would Edmund say, if he found his son this way?

For that matter, he wondered, what would he say, or Jane, when they learned about the murderer who had been loose aboard the Lucy? Lenox thought of this and felt a certain gladness that the world was still a large place; it was getting smaller, to be sure, distances were collapsing—why, the Suez was an example of that! Yet it was a relief to him that he hadn’t been able to, say, telegram Jane from the deck of the Lucy. Fifty years hence it would be possible, but for now it had saved her, and his brother, a great deal of worry. Then, there was a feeling of majesty to sailing back from Egypt, of wide distances traversed. Though he loved progress, part of him hoped the steamship wouldn’t make Egypt a mere two-day voyage away, and take that feeling of majesty with it.

On the sixth day of their voyage he woke to find that they were becalmed. He went on deck and found Lieutenant Lee staring with a look of puzzlement at the water.

“What’s down there?” said Lenox.

“I just wonder whether we might give the men a swim. Perhaps I’ll ask the Captain.”

So it was that Lenox witnessed the men as they dipped a sail into the water and bound it off at the end to form a kind of swimming pool just beside the ship. The sailors—many of whom were appalling swimmers, or couldn’t swim at all—spent hours that morning splashing in the water, with great happiness neglecting their duties as the officers looked indulgently on.

Lenox, meanwhile, had another plan for the windless day. After he had spent an hour or two at his desk, he wandered over to what had been Halifax’s cabin. Its contents were intact, and in the corner there stood, still, his fishing poles and his tackle box.

Lenox had some experience fishing, in the lakes and ponds of Sussex, where he had grown up. With Carrow’s permission he cast off over the rail and spent a happy two hours there. The sun was wonderfully warm without being too hot, and the sky was a clear, cloudless blue. He realized that he would miss being on the water, when the voyage was over.

His luck was indifferent. Two bites in the first hour came to nothing, and it was only when he had nearly given up that he felt a powerful tug on his line. McEwan, who had been fetching up a couple of sandwiches, helped him tug the great fish in.

“What is it?” Lenox said when they caught a glimpse of silver beneath the water. “You, fetch the cook!” he said to a passing sailor.

They had pulled the fish in when the cook came and told them it was a sea bream. “And twelve pounds or I’m a liar,” he added.

That night the wardroom ate the fish in white wine and lemon, and toasted many times over to the memory of Halifax.

The next day there was wind again, and the ship sailed upon it again. Lenox felt an urge to see Billings.

The Lucy’s former first lieutenant was in a brig on the lowest deck, with the rats, the supplies, and the goods for trade that the ship had taken on in Egypt. It was lightless and bleak there, and the brig itself was a very small room, without room for a grown man to lie down fully. When he saw it Lenox felt a pang of sympathy for Billings. Softness, that.

“Lieutenant,” he said.

“That you, Lenox?”

“Yesterday I went fishing with Halifax’s rod and reel.”

“Go and throttle yourself with the reel, if you please.”

“Do you feel any remorse?”

There was a pause. “I want to do it again.”

“So now you admit that you killed them?”

“It’s my word against yours, down here.”

Lenox sighed. “You’re getting enough to eat and drink?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Good day, then.”

These were the last words he ever exchanged with Billings. Within eight months the man was hanged, though not before he gained a measure of Fleet Street notoriety as the “Surgeon of the Lucy,” a sobriquet that seemed terribly unfair to Tradescant. Lurid details emerged of Billings’s childhood, of his father, and a report from Egypt indicated that a hastily covered corpse answering to Butterworth’s description had been discovered near Port Said.

The episode had one sequel that mitigated the awfulness of the murders in Lenox’s mind. Some three months after he was back in London Lenox received a call from Halifax’s father, Mr. Bertram Halifax. In person and character he was exactly like his son: gentle, quick to smile, kind-spirited.

“I came to thank you for your letter, Mr. Lenox. It was most thoughtful of you.”

“Your son seemed a wonderful fellow.”

“Ah, he was! Never cried as a baby, you know. That’s rare. Always smiled, from birth on.” The father’s voice was shaky now. “A splendid lad, I swear it.”