Perhaps, he thought, the time has come to search not for the murderer but for the victim. Why had someone wanted to kill the man at all, much less with such brutality?
He went back to his cabin with his mind unpleasantly fuzzy, the specifics of the case receding before him, and realized as he sat down at his desk to think that he was extremely tired. The first night he had spent aboard was interrupted by the murder, and the second by the storm. He would rest.
When he woke up some hours later it was already past the middle of the afternoon.
“McEwan!” he called out.
The steward appeared in the doorway. “Sir?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s just gone four, Mr. Lenox.”
Lenox groaned. Nearly five hours of daylight wasted. “Could I have some tea, please?”
“Yes, sir. And if it’s any consolation the captain has been asleep for ever so long, sir, just as long as you.”
Some men could wake up from a nap and spring immediately into action. Lenox had never been one of these. He preferred a gentler awakening, of the sort he had now: teacup encircled in one hand, his book laid flat on his desk, a warm jacket resting loosely over his shoulders against the chill of the oncoming night.
The book was the most important part, and he had chosen the right one. In The Voyage of the Beagle Darwin described his youthful trip through the Atlantic to South America, during which he had collected fossils and plants; Lenox had chosen it because it was first and foremost a tale of the sea, written aboard a ship not all that dissimilar from the Lucy. Both, in fact, had left from Plymouth. (Darwin himself only ever took a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost on his trips, but that was varsity stuff, slightly pale in interest, to Lenox’s taste.) And yet the book was an escape, too: Darwin’s Beagle had been full of interesting men, watercolorists, botanists, naturalists, and a captain, the great Robert FitzRoy, who was himself a pioneering observer of weather phenomena.
The Lucy, by contrast, sailed with a murderer and a wide variety of surly officers.
On every page of the book some quotation or another struck Lenox enough that he wrote it in his commonplace book, and now here was another one, just as he poured a second cup of tea and helped himself to a shortbread biscuit: “No one,” Darwin wrote of the forests he had visited in Brazil, “can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of body.”
This was precisely how Lenox felt about the quarterdeck of the Lucy, and the great solitude of the ocean. Though it had been a fraught few days, he was beginning to love the ship, to internalize and comprehend her pitch and roll. For instance she had just met a great wind and was running very close to it, very quickly. He watched the sun-dappled water pass by at an astonishing speed through his porthole and felt at one with the vessel.
After sitting in silence for some time, having forgotten even about his book, Lenox came back to himself. “McEwan,” he called out, “please lay out a suit of clothes and parcel out some of my food. I’m due at the gun room for supper in an hour. I’m just going to look around on deck for a moment first.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
At five minutes before seven o’clock Teddy Lenox, bound up like a mummy in his stiff wool midshipman’s uniform, came to the wardroom to fetch his uncle. They stole a few words as they walked toward the gun room.
“How are you?”
“Very well, thanks. I was ever so sick the first night—nerves, I think—but I’m fine now.”
“How are you getting along with the other fellows?” Lenox asked.
Teddy seemed much more at ease than he had when they were making their way out to the Lucy from the docks at Plymouth. “They’re splendid chaps,” he said. “Alastair Cresswell—we all call him Alice—will be an admiral one day, if he can keep off the gin, everyone thinks so, Pimples even—Mercer, that is. They’re the two older midshipmen.”
“I don’t know that gin is always an impediment to success in the navy, at that,” Lenox said.
“It’s ever so different than school.” He said this word with particular scorn. “The watches are very long, you know, and in the morning you have to learn about, oh, celestial navigation, and shipbuilding, and that sort of thing. But only from the chap.”
“The chap?”
“The chaplain—all of us call him the chap.” Teddy paused. They were near the gun room. “I say, Uncle Charles. When we’re in there you won’t mention … things about home, will you? Christmas or anything?”
Lenox felt a great swelling of tenderness for the boy then, and thought of his brother Edmund, who lived very close to Lenox’s heart indeed. The previous winter the family’s old dog, a spaniel named Wellie, had taken himself to a warm and obscure corner of the enormous house and died. It had been Teddy who was closest to him; it had also been Teddy who found him, the others diffident in their searching. And it had been Teddy who wept so bitterly throughout Christmas Eve, while his parents tried to console him with platitudes about old age and good lives.
“I’m much more curious to hear about all of you than to talk about anything like that,” Lenox said, and the young midshipman nodded with studied nonchalance.
The gun room looked rather as it had the evening before, though the playing cards were nowhere to be seen and there was a decided absence of wine and cigars, too. The other four midshipmen were ranged around the cabin’s blue circular bench, and rose when Lenox entered. Only Fizz, the little black-and-tan terrier, was rude enough to keep his seat on the floor.
“Hello!” he said to the boys. “I’m Charles Lenox.”
He met Alastair Cresswell, a very tall, leggy, black-haired lad whom Lenox had seen around ship, and then Mercer, or Pimples, from the night before—these were the two older boys. The two younger ones, slightly older than Teddy, had names he didn’t quite catch.
“I’m very pleased to make your acquaintance. And look at this feast!” he added, waving a hand out at the small dish of potatoes, the single roasted chicken (which must have been a scrawny bird when it had walked the earth), and the halfhearted mash of carrots. “Would it insult you if I ventured to append a few small items to it? I could scarcely improve it, of course, but if we had heartier appetites.”
Here he took the parcel of food that McEwan, never one to stint, had packed. There were a dozen slices of rich cold ham, a bottle of Pol Roger, a loaf of Plymouth bread, kept fresh in wax paper, and lastly a large, dense fig cake, honeyed on the outside. As these were unpacked the table came to seem much richer in its contents.
The gratitude on the boys’ faces gave Lenox a great deal of pleasure, though he had been planning to save the fig cake for the trip back from Egypt. If it was true that the longtime Lucys, however, had been eating skinned vermin, they deserved it more than he did. What they did have, perhaps because it was early in the trip, was a fair bit of wine. All at the table drank.
Conversation was formal and limited, as each of the midshipmen fervently scarfed down the ham and the chicken and the bread, but eventually, as the pace slowed, they managed to speak.
“Tell me, each of you, how was it that you first went to sea?” Lenox asked.