Two sorts of midshipmen went to sea: college boys and practicals. The practicals were often from a slightly lower segment of the upper and middle classes, but they had the advantage of knowing the sea and the navy backward and forward, having been in it for many years: since the age of ten, say. They all displayed a deep reluctance to admit the college lads, who had a great deal of classroom learning but very little practical training, and that all done on a battered-up old frigate in the harbor of Portsmouth, as their peers. Yet it was the college boys who would ultimately ascend the highest, through their superior education and interest at the admiralty. This was considered unfair. Teddy, who was fourteen, could speak French, navigate by the stars, do math, and tie any sort of hitch or knot you pleased—the Matthew Walker, the Turk’s head—but his experience at sea was almost nil. Like the men in his mother’s family he would likely be an admiral one day; for now he was almost certainly bound to be an object of scorn.
All this Lenox had heard from Edmund, whom it quite clearly pained, but the truth of it hadn’t been clear until now. The quicker-witted bluejackets made flippant, ostensibly respectful remarks to the boy, and Lenox spotted another midshipman some yards off, laughing into his sleeve.
“Enough!” a voice barked out. It was the captain. “Mr. Lenox, you are very welcome on board. Mr. Midshipman, report to the gun room immediately. As for you lot, back to work.”
Without any grumbling the men dispersed across the ship, and Teddy, whose trunk and bag preceded him, went off obediently to find his way below deck.
“You know the way to your quarters, I believe?” the captain asked Lenox. “I would show you myself, but there’s a great deal to be done before we may ship. Your man should be there, unpacking your things.”
“Thank you, Captain.”
When he was alone, Lenox had a chance to look over the Lucy. It was in a wondrously clean and tight-rigged state; he had thought on his previous visit that the ship had been well maintained but saw now that he had actually witnessed her in a state of almost unprecedented laxity. There wasn’t a rope out of place, nor a blemish on the great polished quarterdeck. The sails were either aloft or furled tightly to the masts. Everything was in faultless order, and for the second time that day he thought that traveling to Egypt by sea might be not any kind of ordeal, as he had feared, but a real pleasure.
What he couldn’t know, of course, was that the first murder was less than a day away.
CHAPTER SIX
The Lucy left Plymouth Harbor under steam (somewhere below deck—Lenox suspected it was in the orlop, but couldn’t feel sure—men were shoveling coal as if their lives depended on it) about an hour later. It was nearly five in the afternoon, and in a cloudless sky the great yellow sun had just begun to mellow into orange and broaden toward the curve of the earth.
When they reached open water Captain Martin ordered the jibs and staysails set. This request precipitated a profound flurry of action and movement among the men at the fore of the ship, and a somewhat stupefied Lenox, ignorant of shipboard terminology, managed to ask his friend Halifax what the directive meant.
They were on the quarterdeck, that deck of the ship, six steep steps up from the main deck, that was reserved for officers. (It was the sole privilege of the midshipman’s life on board that he could walk on the exalted planks of the quarterdeck; otherwise he slept in a hammock like a common bluejacket and took rather worse food.) Captain Martin had, as was common when dignitaries sailed with the navy, invited Lenox to use it, though he had advised Lenox that the poop deck, one level higher up, was, while not technically off-limits, a place in which he might make mischief among men at work.
“Quite without meaning to, of course,” Martin had said over that supper of theirs at the Yardarm.
“I understand, of course. I should never like to be underfoot.”
When Lenox asked Halifax what it meant to set the jibs and staysails, the officer pointed toward the fore of the Lucy. “If you look toward the bowsprit—”
“The bowsprit?” said Lenox.
Halifax laughed his melodious laugh. “I had forgotten there were men who didn’t know what a bowsprit was,” he said, and then, seeing Lenox redden, said, “No, my dear man, I value you for it! The navy can be a confinement, if you let yourself fall oblivious to its limitations. But listen: I imagine you saw the great spar—the great pole—that extends off the prow of the ship?”
“Of course,” said Lenox, still stung.
“That is the bowsprit. There are three sails that may be run up from it, all of them triangular—the flying jib, which is farthest out, and two staysails. Can you see?”
“Oh, yes, now I can.”
Of course he could, and felt stupid that he hadn’t been able to locate the object of so many men’s attention. Two sailors were all the way out along the bowsprit, hung upside down over the water in a way that looked extremely dangerous. Neither kept more than a casual hand on the spar, however, instead primarily using the strength of their legs to hang on.
“What are they for, these sails?” Lenox asked.
“In a medium wind like this—”
“Medium!”
“What would you have called it?”
“A stiff wind—very stiff indeed.”
“Oh, dear,” said Halifax feelingly, and Lenox could see that he had committed another solecism. “No, this is quite a medium wind—even a light one, you might say. In such a wind the jib and staysails give you a bit of a pick-up, and better still they make you more maneuverable. The captain will want to be able to catch the wind again quickly if it shifts, you see.”
“Thank you,” said Lenox. “I fear I shall have more questions—if you find them importunate—”
“Never!” said Halifax, his plump face animated. “It’s a pleasure to have you aboard, Mr. Lenox.”
There was a deep sensory pleasure that Lenox found in these first hours on board the Lucy. There was the salted wind, the flecks of water that occasionally caught his hands or face, the orange and purple sunset, and always the mesmerizing, muscular gray-blue water. Land had vanished some time since. Then, too, he discovered how much he enjoyed watching the sailors at work. At the very top of the rigging (which acted as a kind of ladder), some fifty feet up, a small number of men were hard at work with the same apparently casual attitude toward danger as the men on the spar had had. For one terrifying moment, in fact, Lenox thought one would die: a man in a blue serge frock and blue trousers who flung himself off the mainmast and for a brief, paralyzing moment was in the open air, only at the last possible moment to grasp safely a rope that led to the foremast.
“Skylarking,” said a thin, rather dour lieutenant on the quarterdeck, Carrow by name, but Lenox perceived that this disapproval was almost unwillingly mingled with a faint but detectable dash of admiration. Even joyfulness. Everyone on board, it seemed, was happy to be out of harbor.
He only left the busy quarterdeck at nearly seven in the evening, knowing that he had to dress for dinner in the wardroom; the first lieutenant, a fellow called Billings, had extended him a standing invitation to supper. Martin had done the same but with considerably less enthusiasm, which made sense when Lenox learned from Halifax over their meal aboard the Lucy that the captain preferred to dine with a book in his private stateroom.
He had been very fortunate in the cabin he received, which his steward informed him had generally belonged to the chaplain on previous voyages, and which he had seen before his supper earlier that week with the officers. It was ranged alongside the wardroom, like several other officers’ cabins, toward the larboard side of the ship. He could only just stand up straight inside it, but it was nevertheless much larger than he had expected.