“And Butterworth? You can tolerate this?”
“I can tolerate anything in my family, Mr. Lenox,” said Butterworth. “Row faster. Master Billings, water?”
“Yes.”
“Why must you call him master? He’s a man grown.”
Nobody spoke, until Butterworth said, “Faster, I told you faster. Here, give me one of the oars.”
They sat and rowed, all exchanging looks, for ten, fifteen minutes. Lenox tried to speak and Billings raised the gun. Ten more minutes, fifteen. The Lucy was getting farther and farther now, Lenox realized with a surge of panic.
“Was it because they passed you over as captain?” Lenox finally said, increasing his pace slightly.
A transformation took place in Billings. The manic liveliness of the past hour gave way to the self-possession of the first lieutenant Lenox had thought he knew. “It was a damned travesty, I can tell you that.”
“Oh?”
“Halifax wasn’t a bad sort in the wardroom. Genial enough. He had no place at the helm of a ship, however.”
“And yet he had great interest.”
Billings laughed bitterly, but he still seemed to be the better Billings, the professional man. “You might say that. His grandmother gave birth to, oh, forty admirals or thereabouts.”
“The system is unfair.”
Suddenly the mad version of Billings returned. “Let me put my penknife in him,” he said to Butterworth. “Let me, Father.”
“No,” said Butterworth. “You, row.”
Lenox rowed on. The Lucy continued to recede from view, until he could no longer distinguish between the people on board her deck.
Some part of him wanted to plead for his life now; but another, resistant part forbade it. Foolishness, if it got him killed, but then men lived and died all the time by the peculiarities of their soul, which they could never expect one another to understand.
All he could manage was, “You really ought to let me go.”
“We’re going to keep you, deal with you on land,” said Billings, eyes demonic, purposeful.
Butterworth gave him an appraising glance. “You say that now.”
“You have my word, you will not be followed,” said Lenox.
“Let me put my penknife in him!” said Billings.
“No!” roared Butterworth. “Give us your shoes and your coat, Lenox. They look comfortable.”
“Please don’t kill me,” he managed to choke out.
Butterworth shook his head, and then gave Lenox a tremendous shove into the water.
As he emerged, he heard Butterworth say, “If you can make it back, you can live. It’s a fairer bargain than many a sailor I know has had.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
There was the cold, sharp shock of the water, and then the brilliance of the sky and sun. He kept himself afloat and turned, turned, panic in his heart, looking for the Lucy, until at last he spotted her.
He started to swim.
His arms were already tired from oaring, and after twenty feet or so of swimming they burned. Should’ve kept up more regular exercise, he thought, but then Parliament tended to be a sedentary place, full of late-night meals at committee meetings. How many months had it been since he took his scull on the Thames? Now, with the current against him, he wished dearly he had kept in better fitness.
He swam for what felt like an hour, more, and then permitted himself to look up. To his despair the Lucy was no closer, although the Bumblebee was by now a landward speck. He rested on his back for a while. Thanked God that it was the middle of the day, and warm enough.
He kicked off his socks, his trousers, and swam on.
In the next four hours there were times when he thought he might give up. He had thrown up, had swallowed seawater and thrown that up too. He would have promised to walk from Mayfair to John O’Groats for a drop of fresh water, after two hours. After three the seabed seemed a comforting thought. His friend Halifax was there.
The sun began exert a terrible pressure on his head, in his temples. On he swam, or, more accurately, drifted with some purpose.
The Lucy came closer, it seemed, but never very close.
He swam on.
He had never known such fatigue, or for his body to be in such open rebellion against him: actions he had taken for granted once upon a time, in the life before he was in the water, seemed impossible now. He couldn’t turn his head more than a fraction of an inch. He couldn’t swallow, quite.
It was when he kicked hard for ten yards and looked up to see that the ship seemed farther away than it had, much farther, that he felt certain he would die.
It was just as he was drifting out of consciousness, when even the thought of Jane couldn’t make him put one arm in front of the other, that great strong hands pulled him up underneath his arms.
“We’ve got you, sir,” said a voice that in some distant chamber of his mind Lenox recorded as belonging to McEwan.
Then he fainted dead away.
There was a blur of light and hurried voices when he woke, a feeling of being rumbled along over the planks of the deck. A bright light appeared in his eyes, and Tradescant’s anxious face, inspecting him.
At last he managed to croak a word, “Water!” and immediately, blessedly, received a small sip of the stuff. Instantly he threw up. He took a little more, then, and finally could bear to have half of a glass tipped into his face.
After that he fell into a sweet, undreaming sleep.
When he woke up it was to a voice saying, “A middling fever. Don’t think he’ll be delirious.” Lenox opened his eyes and saw Tradescant and Carrow standing five feet off, speaking in low voices. They were in Tradescant’s surgery. The other beds were all empty.
“Some good news, that,” Lenox managed to croak.
Carrow turned at the voice and strode over to Lenox, his face filled with worry. “My dear man,” he said, “I can’t tell you the pleasure it gives me to see you awake.”
“How long has it been?”
“We pulled you on board twenty hours ago,” said Tradescant.
“Am I well?”
“You took a bad sunburn unfortunately.”
Lenox tried to open his eyes wide and felt his skin fill with fire. Once he had started to feel the sunburn it was impossible to stop feeling it, and maddening. “Balm,” he said. “My cabin. Jane sent it.”
Tradescant smiled and held it up. “Mr. McEwan found it for you,” he said. “And is ready with food, should you need it. Your nephew will be beyond happiness—he has been here every fifteen minutes.”
Despite Tradescant’s jolliness, Carrow still looked unhappy. “Still, we must apologize, Mr. Lenox, both I and my officers and even Her Majesty’s navy.”
Of course, Lenox thought stupidly. He’s the captain now.
“No need,” said Lenox. “Glad to be alive. Found Billings?”
Carrow frowned. “No. We have fixed the rudder. At the moment we are on his path, but I shall leave it to your discretion: shall we follow him or take you to Egypt?”
“You’re the captain,” said Lenox.
To Lenox’s surprise Carrow looked as if this were natural enough; he didn’t seem overawed. “We shall follow him on for six more hours, then. After that we will be near enough in sight of land to tell whether we may catch him. Frankly I doubt it, but I would sail to the Arctic to catch him, the fiend.”
“A dangerous man. I have seen it before.” Lenox coughed then, and his lungs and throat burned, but he went on. “Capable of maintaining a professional life and obeying a private devil simultaneously.”
“He was always rather peculiar, Billings. Spoke to himself. If anything I would have said he was too gentle for the service, however.”