“Oh, my Harriet,” Philip said. “Oh, my dear.”
He did not love his Cornelia, we both knew that. He drew me against him and kissed my hair.
I sat at Logan’s odd little desk and began my notes, as Philip, the second mate McKenzie, and a passenger called Pruitt took Eliza’s body down from its hook.
They laid her carefully on the chart table and McKenzie went through the green velours curtains to the stateroom to fetch a sheet in which to wrap her.
Mr. Pruitt went off to find something they might use to lash the body to the table, in case we met with rough seas. Once we were alone, Philip came to stand beside me. I thought him about to apologize for the liberties he had taken earlier. But I had offered no resistance, after all.
“Harriet,” he said awkwardly, “you’ve been on these tropical voyages often enough to understand. I mean, the heat — If we are in any way delayed in reaching Gabinea—”
I understood at once. “Of course. She will have to be buried at sea.”
“At Gabinea, there would be a physician to perform a simple postmortem before burial. But here — It would hardly be seemly for me to examine her. Or the Scotsman, either.”
Back in the stateroom, I was certain I could hear McKenzie sobbing.
“As I am the only woman aboard,” I said calmly, “I shall do it, of course.”
They left me alone with the body and I locked the companionway door, so that only the cagebirds could overlook us. Eliza was dressed in the plain calico wrapper she wore for sleeping. A white muslin nightdress, she had told me shyly, was too sheer to be decent if she were forced to appear before the crew, due to “some emergency.”
I drew back the blue-flowered cloth from her. There was a tiny triangular hole near the hem of the wrapper, but I did not regard it. Impossible for a woman to exist aboard ship and not spoil her clothing.
When I saw Eliza’s body completely uncovered, I was taken aback once more by her beauty and by how very young she was, how utterly clean and perfect. I discovered no sign of a beating, nor any mark of Logan’s — or anyone’s — rage.
The cord about her neck had left a cruel burn and a deep cut in the pale flesh, however, and on closer examination I discovered another mark, too — so thin a line that I at first mistook it for one of her dark hairs. It was deeper than a scratch, and I could see that it ran all the way around her throat, as though some leash had been fastened there.
I covered her again, and noted down my observations. The men were, I knew, growing impatient to come in and secure the body. But I had promised myself a private visit beyond those green curtains.
I pushed them aside and stepped into a little corridor. The bathroom opened off to the left; besides the w.c., it contained a marble basin for washing hands, into which water was piped from the ship’s main tanks. Logan’s shaving things were there, though not recently used. He had given up all personal care of himself in the week since we called in at the Palmer Islands.
But someone had surely been here when I discovered the body — the running water I was certain I had heard. The murderer — if murder it was — might have opened the bathroom tap for some reason, and then, hearing my boots on the companionway stair, made his escape in too much haste to shut off the spigot completely.
But the tap was not running now. And where had he gone? If he made for the deck, we should have met in the companionway. And there was no means of escape through the stateroom. Might he not have crossed through the after-cabin, knocking over the chair in his haste, and hidden himself beyond, in the larger forward cabin, which was the dining parlor for the mates and the captain? I had never entered that room. If there were doors leading out from it—
Still, it was all surmise. What I needed was some clue to the man’s identity. I lighted the oil lamp on the wall, took it down from its sconce, and held it to the washbasin. There were several hairs behind the tap, and I picked them out and brought them near to the light.
A few were grey — Logan’s, surely. Two were Eliza’s — long and coal black. But one — only one — was short, wavy, and dark reddish brown.
McKenzie. No one else aboard had such hair. And he had wept just now in the stateroom. Clearly he had felt more for Eliza than duty required. But he had been part of the search for Captain Logan, so unless he was able to be in two places at once, it could not have been he who set the bathroom tap running.
I extinguished the lamp and went along to the stateroom. There were many cupboards and lockers built onto the walls, and there was, of course, the swinging bed of which Eliza had once told me — an expensive feather-mattressed contraption attached to balancing-devices, so that it swung exactly as the ship moved, in storm or in calm. Another of Logan’s baffling kindnesses, to fend off seasickness.
But it was not all that intrigued me about the stateroom. A woman’s bedroom, I puzzled, and not a Berlin-work cushion or a scent bottle or a framed sampler or a china hair-receiver or a tortoiseshell comb? Who had this young woman been, after all, this odd mingling of shy girlishness and Spartan plainness? This child of barely nineteen — had her husband really known her? Had anyone?
“Old Logan was half mad, and everyone aboard knew it,” I had heard Mr. Pruitt say to my cousin. But Captain Dayton Logan had seemed to me a sensible, amiable man until China Star left the port of Tacoya in the Palmer Islands.
“Won’t you come along, Miss Burge?” Eliza had asked me on the morning we docked there. “I see the Nancy Bright is in port. That’s Mrs. Captain Thomas. I made her acquaintance in Suez, you know, and she begged I should call upon her, if we met again.”
The hen-coop wives made it a duty to know one another, and their visits were paid in great state, with parasols and best bonnets. Starved of society, they took their chance at it when they could.
But I am English, and I had not been invited by the hostess. I went sightseeing with Philip instead. And Eliza Logan, dressed in an apricot-colored gown that made her look almost handsome, went alone to the Nancy Bright.
Or did she? When Philip and I returned from our expedition, it was apparent that something more had happened that day than a mere friendly visit. Captain Logan had locked himself into one of the empty staterooms. Eliza could be heard furiously playing hymns on her spinet far into the night. And the Scotsman, McKenzie, had a bandage on his forearm.
No one saw Logan for four days and nights after that, and when at last he did appear on deck, he was unshaven and unwashed, and wore a tattered old dressing gown with his captain’s bars sewn onto the sleeve.
He never regained himself after that day at Tacoya. He had lost himself somewhere, and could not find his way back.
It was well that we had lashed Eliza’s body to the chart table, for on the same night a storm blew up. It did the China Star no great damage, but for two days afterwards we met with strong headwinds. At dawn on the third morning, with no likelihood of making port soon, the Scotsman said a prayer for the soul of Elizabeth Logan, and we gave her to the sea.
“Mr. McKenzie,” I said afterwards, catching his sleeve. “I believe I have left my sal volatile in the after-cabin. Will you unlock the door for me, so that I may search for it?”
In truth, I never carry smelling salts. I despise fainting females. But I had put on my black dress with jet beading for the burial, and with a drift of veil over my fair hair I looked, though I say it myself, like one of Mr. Dickens’ guileless heroines.