By the fifth round there were four men left. Easily the best of them, to Lenox’s shock, was McEwan. He had earned the crowd’s support early on, perhaps because he cut such a rounded, unathletic figure, and despite it moved with the ease of a man taking a Sunday stroll through Hyde Park.
It was McEwan’s turn to lead now. With startling quickness he climbed hand over hand up the mainmast. When he was no more than a fattish dot in the sky, it seemed, far up in the crow’s nest, he hooked his legs over the ledge of the crow’s nest and waved down. Then he let go.
The sound of two hundred and nineteen men gasping at once must have filled McEwan’s ears as he fell. One poor soul, a leading seaman named Peter Lee, cried out “No, not McEwan!” in a high-pitched squeal, an utterance that he would find it difficult to live down for the rest of the voyage.
For one horrifying moment Lenox felt sure that his steward was going to crash heavily into the deck, mangled out of all recognition, for the sake of a game. Just when it seemed as if he had been falling for about ten minutes, however, McEwan reached out a hand with almost casual grace and found a length of rope. Having caught on to this he made his way to the mainmast, and then, as something like an encore, climbed down it backwards—that is, with his face pointing toward the deck and his legs toward the sky.
When he achieved the deck there was a moment of breathless silence, followed by overwhelming applause, wave after wave of it, always getting louder just as you thought it might begin to fade. McEwan continued to bow and wave with great grace. When all eyes turned to the other competitors, some moments later, they, in a unanimous gesture, bowed to Lenox’s steward, admitting their defeat.
Even Carrow was grinning. “Wish I had bet on him. Couldn’t, as an officer, of course.”
“I did!” said Lenox.
“He hasn’t played for four or five years. Did the same thing last time. Poor Pimples gave terribly long odds, didn’t he? Then again memories are short, and two of the other fellows had won it in recent years. Still—such a performance!”
The performer waddled over toward Lenox now, shaking hands distractedly along his way. “There,” he said, “aren’t you glad of that ten bob now, sir?” he asked.
“I congratulate you, my good man—but here now, why are you a steward? You should be up amongst the tops all the time.”
“Oh, no, sir. Much more comfortable below deck, you see. Always a bite to be had when one feels peckish. Speaking of which, sir, could I fetch you a glass of wine or a biscuit?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
After the singing had gone on for some time longer, and in fact grown quite maudlin, the officers began to go down the hatchway to the wardroom. A group of men, though drunk, cleared the chairs off the quarterdeck with great alacrity and efficiency. Another group rerigged the ship that she might sail steadily through the night. Soon the visible signs of the evening’s festivities had been effaced, but their happy mood lingered.
Lenox, for his part, wanted to speak to Pettegree.
He caught the purser in the wardroom and invited him to take the air of the quarterdeck.
“Did you enjoy the game?” Pettegree asked when they were alone. Each man had a glass of port in hand.
“Very much, yes. It determines me to climb to the crow’s nest.”
“I’ve been afloat twenty years and I’ve never ventured that high. Leave it to the sailors, I say.”
“You may well be right.” Lenox thought of Jane, pregnant and perhaps, though he hoped not, fretting about his safety. “At any rate, I had hoped for a word with you earlier.”
“The inventory.”
“Yes. Was there anything missing?”
Pettegree shook his head. “I’m happy to report that there wasn’t.”
“It was unlikely, I suppose. Thank you for telling me.”
“There was one thing I noticed, scarcely worth mentioning—”
Lenox laughed. “I wish I had a shilling for every time I heard that preface in the course of my career, only for it to be followed by a decisive piece of information. Pray, go on.”
“We’re short a bottle of whisky.”
“From the spirit room?”
“Yes, precisely.”
Just near the gun room was a small closet with a caged metal door and a large, impressive lock. It held the ship’s spirits, wine and brandy for the captain and the officers, rum for the men’s grog, as well as a bottle or two of harder alcoholic drinks. When ships were foundering or there was mutiny afoot, sailors were occasionally known to break into it, an offense punishable by hanging.
“How many bottles had there been, and how many are there now?”
“The captain keeps them on hand to entertain only,” said Pettegree. “We have two bottles of decent whisky at the start of every voyage, and the same at the end of every voyage. The same two bottles for almost a decade. But at the moment there’s only one bottle there.”
“You don’t seem put out that the other one has vanished.”
“It’s not my place to question the captain’s choices.”
“The captain’s choices, you say? Is he the only one with access to the spirit room?”
“He and I have the two keys. Mine hasn’t left my person while we’ve been at sea, and his—”
“Neither of your assistants has borrowed it?”
“Never. And the only other key is his.”
“Did he not have to—to check out the bottle? Keep a record?”
“Oh, no, the whisky is quite his property.”
“I see.”
“If you like I can ascertain from him that he was the one who took it, though I can’t imagine any other possibility.”
Lenox’s mind flashed back to his visit to the captain’s quarters. On his desk had been an ebony ashtray with several cigar ends in it, and next to that a bottle of spirits, half empty. It might well have been whisky.
“If you wouldn’t mind keeping it between us, I’d be grateful,” said Lenox. “If it comes up I may mention it, but it doesn’t seem our place—he’s been under a great deal of stress between Halifax and the rolled shot—”
Pettegree nodded vehemently. “Oh, of course, of course. I’ll not say a word of it.”
Lenox went straight to the wardroom from there in search of Tradescant. The surgeon was absent from the dining table, however, where a few men were playing at cards, and also from his cabin.
Making his way forward to the surgery, Lenox looked at his watch. It was late; he ought to go to sleep. But it was worth speaking to Tradescant as soon as possible.
The surgeon was in a small, leather-backed chair in one corner of the surgery, a candle on a ledge at the level of his snow-white hair, reading a book. He looked up.
“Hello, Mr. Lenox,” he said, and from the faint slur in his words Lenox concluded that the surgeon had gone one or two drinks past sober. “Did you enjoy the game?”
“Very much, yes.”
“Your steward won! He was terrifically impressive, I thought. I hope he won’t need convincing that he’s still a steward.”
Lenox smiled. “I don’t think it’s gone to his head.”
“How may I help you?”
“Are your patients quite well?”
“Oh, yes. The one long-termer.” He gestured toward the back of the room, where the man who had been smacked in the head with a beam not long out of Plymouth Harbor slumbered on. “I believe he’ll come out of his sleep sooner or later, though to be honest it’s taking longer than I would have liked. Then there are these two chaps, leftover from the storm. Both should be back on duty tomorrow, a few nasty bruises left but not much else.”