“I’m pleased to hear it.”
“In fact I was just thinking what a quiet trip it had been, and then remembered poor Mr. Halifax. Though it wasn’t five days ago it seems like a dream, doesn’t it?”
“May I ask you a peculiar question?”
“Yes, but please, sit down, have a glass with me.” Tradescant lit another candle and uncorked a dusty, roundish bottle of some richly ruby-colored liquid. He poured two very small glasses of it. “To Halifax!” he said, and drained his glass.
“To Halifax.” Lenox drank his off too, and then smacked his lips. “Delicious wine. Where did you come by it?”
Tradescant’s eyes flickered in the candlelight and he smiled. “It’s an 1842 Burgundy. My father gave me six cases when I first went to sea. They’re quite valuable, and I think he intended for me to sell them and live off of the profits. But it was the only present he ever gave me, you see, and so I take two bottles on each voyage. I only drink it with others. It gives me a kind of pleasure.”
“Better than money.”
“Dissimilar—but yes, perhaps better. I don’t mind about money. I suppose he would give me some of that, too, if I needed it especially. He gave me a house in town some years ago, and he’s just about alive. I’m a bastard, you see. My father is—” and here Tradescant named one of the great dukes of the realm, of a family second only to the royal family in prestige, nearly ninety now, who in his day had been one of the few political and social rulers of Europe.
“I didn’t know,” said Lenox. “A very great man indeed.”
“In some respects, yes. My mother was a charwoman, may she rest in peace, and I think it very likely she had more wisdom than he did, and more kindness beside.” Tradescant laughed. “Now I am nearly fifty. It’s an age when parents don’t matter as much as they did … or they matter more in some ways, and less in others. I’ve been happy in my life.”
It was a singularly confessional speech, and Lenox smiled—not too broadly, but encouragingly, grateful for the man’s confidence. “If all you had out of your father was that wine, it wouldn’t have been too hard a transaction.”
“We agree, Mr. Lenox! Now, your peculiar question?”
“Ah, yes. I wondered about the contents of Halifax’s stomach when he died.”
“Oh?”
“Not the food, so much as whether—well, it sounds indelicate, but my friend Thomas McConnell, who is a doctor, will smell the stomach for alcohol, if the body is … fresh enough. I realize it sounds morbid.”
“I do quite the same, and in fact I think I’ll have made a note of it … yes, here’s the book, this little hardbacked one.”
Tradescant flipped through the pages. “Well?” said Lenox when he had stopped.
“Hmm. Whisky, it says here, Scotch whisky. Strange, now that you’ve drawn my attention to it—we don’t get whisky on the ship much, the men preferring rum and the officers brandy—but there was a definite odor of whisky.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lenox went to sleep not long afterward, his stream of consciousness racing but muddied by drink. The next morning he woke with a single, clarified thought: Might Jacob Martin have murdered his second lieutenant?
It would account for the whisky; for Halifax’s apparently willing attendance at a midnight meeting halfway up one of the masts; Martin’s self-possession the night of the murder; the theft of the medallion and the penknife (presumably to shift blame away from himself) would have been easy, as nobody questions a captain’s movements aboard his own ship. And of course, most of all, he was a figure beyond suspicion.
Which meant he was the first person Lenox ought to have considered.
Still, some small part of him rebelled against the idea of Martin as a murderer. It wasn’t the man’s religious faith; that was so common among murderers as to be mundane. Nor was it his leadership of the Lucy. Rather, it was some intrinsic conservatism that seemed to define Martin’s character, a deficit of fury. The crime had been at once savage and plotted, and the mind behind it didn’t seem to be the mind Lenox thought the captain to have.
Then again, Pettegree had identified Martin as a man of violent temper.
The alternatives that his mind kept circling toward were Lieutenant Lee, despite the man’s placid temperament, and Lieutenant Mitchell. Mitchell was the more obvious suspect, because of his temper and because he was new aboard, the only change to the wardroom. For years the Lucy had sailed without violent incident, and within a few weeks of Mitchell’s arrival on board a man was dead.
As for Lee, there was the matter of his steward, who slept not in front of his door but down below deck amid the guns, with the rest of the sailors. It would have been difficult for the other officers to slip past their sleeping stewards, all situated in the hallways outside of their cabins. It would have been easy for Lee.
Or Martin.
After Lenox had accepted coffee, kippers, and eggs from McEwan, he took one of the last of Lady Jane’s oranges and sat down to write her a letter as he ate it. In it he spoke of Follow the Leader, of Teddy, of life aboard the ship. He reassured her that he had yet to succumb to scurvy. The letter ended with a short benediction, not too intrusive he hoped, for her and their child, after writing which he sealed the letter in an envelope and placed it next to the other letter he had written her, which sat in the battered Paul Storr toast rack that had always served as the organizer of his correspondence.
It was a still sort of day, not much wind, and while Lenox strolled the quarterdeck a huge indolent sailmaker’s mate named McKendrick played softly on his flute, sitting along the bowsprit. In the empty vastness the sound seemed to carry with special purity, and it lent a magic to the engrossing rhythm of the waves.
Maybe because of the music, or because of the sunny gentleness of the day—and certainly because of McEwan—Lenox decided to climb to the crow’s nest. The murder could wait half an hour.
He checked with Mitchell, the officer on bridge watch, who shrugged and sent along a strong forecastleman to keep Lenox safe. The forecastlemen were the best seamen the ship had—by contrast the quarterdeckmen, for example, were of an advanced age that they no longer liked to go aloft, though Old Joe Coffey didn’t seem to mind—but evidently Mitchell could spare this one, a short, grinning, towheaded Swede named Andersen. He spoke in a rudimentary dialect of English that was almost wholly naval in origin, and therefore shockingly explicit. His stock of obscenities he seemed to view as ordinary, even courteous, and the rest of the crew found Andersen too funny to disabuse him of that impression.
“Fucking top, here you going!” he said cheerfully, then for the sake of decorum added, “Sir!”
Lenox felt a fool for it, after McEwan’s performance, but in his heart he knew from the outset that the ascent was the hardest physical task he had ever essayed. More than once he felt himself slipping and thanked the Lord for the rope looped around his midsection.
After twenty yards or so the muscles in his legs were quivering and tired, and his hands a raw red from clinging desperately to the rope. Andersen, maddeningly, flung himself about the rigging like a monkey, making comments that were supposed to be encouraging, and which after a while Lenox stopped answering.
Don’t look down, he exhorted himself over and over, even though looking up was no treat, but after he had gone about halfway toward the crow’s nest he nonetheless made the mistake of glancing toward the deck.
His stomach went heavy and hollow, all the air sucked out of his midsection.
“We’d better go back down,” he said to Andersen.