“I never went down!”
“Teddy. It’s I, your uncle. Think of your father.”
The internal struggle played out on the midshipman’s face, but before long he relented. “Well, fine. But Mr. Carrow made me promise not to tell! Said he’d been ill, too, and I could tuck down in the hallway, so the other mids wouldn’t laugh at me.”
“Mr. Carrow said that?”
“You won’t tell, Uncle Charles?”
“Thank you for being honest. I must leave you now.”
So. A new fact. He could use it. He left the gun room and went off to meet Billings, his mind racing, adding bits and pieces of what he had seen in the last week—but not truly seen, at the time—all of which confirmed his suspicions.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Billings was in the captain’s dining room when the detective arrived, cutting an apple with a sharp silver knife. Not his penknife, Lenox noted, and didn’t blame the switch; it would have been too gruesome.
“Mr. Lenox, I hope that the urgency of Mr. McEwan’s request means that you have discovered who murdered our captain?”
“I think I have.”
Relief flooded Billings’s face. “Oh, thank the Lord. The strain and tension of it—you can’t imagine, Mr. Lenox—my first ship. Thank the Lord … who did it?”
“If we are to catch him out, it will take tremendous craft on our parts, Mr. Billings. I don’t want you flying off half-cocked and confronting him on your own. I suggest we congregate tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. Then you will know.”
“Mr. Lenox, I demand that you tell me who killed my captain.”
“I cannot, yet, Mr. Billings. I apologize. I fear you would attack him, or arrest him. Please, trust me. We will get a confession from him, I promise you.”
“You are aboard my ship, Mr. Lenox. You have my absolute word that I will not confront this … this fiend, though I should long to do so. But you must tell me.”
Lenox relented. “Very well, then. I will tell you that I have learned in the last ten minutes Mr. Carrow was alone with both corpses—”
“Carrow! I cannot believe it. I cannot.”
“The story runs much deeper than him, Mr. Billings. Can you trust me until the morning?”
Now it was Billings’s turn to relent. “As you wish, then,” he said. “I’ll tell everyone at eight bells.”
“Excellent. Now, I must be off to the crow’s nest.”
“I’ll send someone with you,” said Billings, but his heart wasn’t in it. His eyes were cast on the floor, searching for an answer that wouldn’t appear there, and he muttered to himself, “Carrow? Carrow of the Lucy?”
“No need. I have McEwan. Until supper, Mr. Billings.”
He went up to the deck as quickly as he could, and found McEwan waiting for him there, a thermos tied to his belt by a heavy piece of rope.
“Mr. Lenox!” he called out.
“Mr. McEwan. Well, if ’twere done, ’twere well if ’twere done quickly.”
“Sir?”
“Let’s go up.”
He had thought that knowing the way up, its arduousness and its perils, would make the journey easier. In fact he couldn’t stop thinking about the remote view of the deck from the crow’s nest, and how little he wished to share the fate of the pitiable Topman Starbuck, who had fallen to his death from a similar height—and he more experienced by a lifetime of days than Lenox at this sort of venture.
Still, Lenox had his rope, and he had the unbelievably nimble McEwan. There seemed to be two of him among the rigging, one clearing debris out of the way such that it wouldn’t block Lenox’s path, one hovering nearby or beneath him, offering quiet, excellent advice and even, very respectfully, moral support. This was a man in his element. Or would have been, had there been a larder halfway up to the nest.
Forty feet from the top he stopped, his muscles quivering in his arms and legs. A beautiful pink sun was in the middle of its descent. That meant there were twenty or thirty minutes before dark. Better conclude his business quickly, or he would have to spend the night up here. Anything was preferable to the idea of a dismount in the darkness of night. He started up again.
“Mr. Evers!” he called out when he was close. “A hand up through the hole?”
A face, seemingly unconnected to any body, popped through the hole. “Mr. Lenox? Can that be you?”
“It’s I.”
“Come to sketch with me?”
“Ha, ha,” said Lenox weakly, and took Evers’s proffered hand, and shortly McEwan’s as well. “No, I came here looking for conversation with you.”
He had observed Evers during the past few days, and knew that this was the hour when he climbed to the crow’s nest for solitude. And this was a conversation that demanded they be alone, something that was never easy on a ship of several hundred souls.
“How can I help you?” asked Evers.
“There are two things you may do for me, my dear man. First, I would ask of you another drawing. This one for my wife, Jane, whom I would wish to see what I saw here. Any price you think reasonable—”
Evers, blushing, his face angry, said, “No, no, no payment necessary. I’ll leave it off with McEwan.”
McEwan smiled gently, and Lenox recalled that the two men, so superficially dissimilar, were friends. “Hey now, go on, Johnny, take a payment. A couple shillings, Mr. Lenox?”
“I would have thought at least a crown or two. Call it two crowns?”
“For a drawing?” said Evers doubtfully.
“For a drawing.”
“A fool and his money are soon parted, I suppose.”
“Oy! Have some respect!” said McEwan, a drop of genuine anger in his voice.
“’Pologies, ’pologies, ’pologies. Yer can have it for a crown, Mr. Lenox—there, I bargained you down, how do you like that?”
“Very well—a prime sort of transaction.”
“What was the other thing you wanted to ask of me?” said Evers.
“Ah. Now that … that is trickier by far, I’m afraid…”
Fifteen minutes later Lenox began the descent, well pleased with the conversation, and having even given himself a moment to stand in the crow’s nest and admire the Mediterranean. He found that they were within sight of land—“Oh, have been for days,” McEwan said offhandedly—which meant that he was gazing upon Africa for the first time.
Once, before Jane, really, travel had been a great preoccupation and passion of his, and he had spent hours with mapmakers and travel booksellers, had read of the great Arabian and African and Arctic adventures. Now those wintering roots stirred, life shooting up through them. To be in Africa! The savannahs, sparsely dotted with trees, the great game—lions, zebras, elephants—and of course the natives, so mysterious to him, frightening if he were honest with himself. Were they truly savage?
It was easy, he had always felt, for an Englishman, dotted at the center of a great empire, with London as a heart pumping blood out to the most distant veins, to feel that he too was the center of the empire. Of the world. But it was state of mind that Lenox deplored in his own class; he was happy to hunt fox at Lenox House, and drink tea, and watch the local blacksmith bowl cricket. But he never presumed that these things were all the world could offer, or that they were right. He had very little time for the red-faced squires, convinced of French beastliness and Victoria’s place at God’s right hand, who did? Unfortunately they populated the benches of Parliament.
With McEwan’s encouragement and aid, Lenox made it down the rigging and to deck with only seven or eight moments of utter terror, which was an improvement on his previous rate.