It needed only the mention of smelling salts to put the gentlemanly Scot at my mercy.
“I’ll gladly fetch it myself,” he said, “if you’ve a notion whereabouts—”
But in the instant he was interrupted by an outburst of shouting, followed by the smack of a fist and a sharp yowl from the pimply cabin boy. “Found it?” shouted the first mate, Stoddard, his face red as beet root. “Stole it, you mean, you greasy little bastard! First a good Virginia ham and two bottles of French brandy from the steward’s pantry, and now a necklace, damn your eyes!”
“I didn’t steal nothin’,” whined the boy. “If I’d’a stole it, what’d I come tell you for? Likely it was rats got that ham.”
“Rats cotton to women’s gewgaws, too, do they? I oughta whale the hide off you and dump you over the side! Little bastard!”
Just then Stoddard caught sight of me. He forgot the cabin boy and came lounging over, grinning his usual suggestive grin. “This here brat’s brung me your neck chain, lady,” he said, launching a kick at the boy as he slithered away. “’Spect you’d like it back, eh?”
It was a cheap gold chain, and broken. The two ends dangled, though the clasp remained fastened. If there had ever been a locket or a cameo, it had been lost. “Thank you, sir,” I told Stoddard, and reached out my gloved hand for it. “I shall be glad to have it again.”
But he jerked it away. “That all I get, missy?” he said, leering. “‘Thank you’ won’t keep me warm nights.”
I saw McKenzie’s fists tighten. “Give her the necklace, man,” he said, “and be quiet. Haven’t we enough trouble?”
For a moment, I was certain they would come to blows, but suddenly Stoddard burst into laughter. He relinquished the chain and I slipped it inside my glove.
Without another word, McKenzie took my arm and escorted me to the captain’s quarters. Once we were inside, he closed the door and turned the key in the lock.
“There’s no smelling salts, is there?” he said. “You’re not the kind for it.”
“Nor is this necklace mine.” I removed my glove, took out the little chain, and laid it on the brown plush sofa.
I sat down, but he stood with his hands braced on the chart table. “I bought it for her,” he said, “that day in Tacoya. If I’d known it would be the finish of her—”
He broke off for a moment, trying to recover himself. Then he began to lower the birdcages on their pulleys. The effort of concentration seemed to ease him, and he continued. “She’d never had fancies. Necklaces and such. Not even a ribbon or a bit of lace. Well, I knew how that was. My folk were the same, put on a necktie or give a shine to your boots, they called it vanity. After a time, it scours the world blank and bitter, that kind of narrowness. You have to leave it, or smother.”
He fetched seed and water for the birds, stroking one of them now and then with a fingertip. At last he turned to look at me. “There was nothing shameful between Eliza and me, Miss Burge. I never laid a hand on her, I swear on my life.”
Sailor or not, I believed him. “But her husband thought you had,” I said.
He began to haul the cages up again by their pulleys. “I took her about Tacoya market a bit that day, after I called for her at the Nancy. She was fearful quiet, and her hand was shaking something fierce. I’d have taken her straight back to the Star, but she said no, she wouldn’t go back there, not ever. I thought she and Logan must have quarreled, so I walked her round the stalls to give her time to calm herself. A vendor came up to us with a trayful of trinkets, and I begged her to choose what she fancied, and keep it for my sake, in case... Well, sailors have such notions, miss. I’ve no family that’ll own me now, and I thought, if my time came, I should like to go under thinking it might matter to somebody.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“Not in so many words. But with Eliza, you didn’t always need the words.”
“So she chose this chain from the tray.”
“There was a bit of coral strung on it, and she was fond of the color.” McKenzie drew a deep breath. “I felt — so close to her, miss. Don’t know what I might’ve done. Kissed her, maybe. And then he turned up. Logan. Out of nowhere. Maybe he saw it in my face, how I felt for her, I don’t know. But he caught sight of that coral bead at her throat, and he seized hold of her by it and pulled her up and down Tacoya docks, swearing and weeping and calling her a whore, and the chain sawing at her throat, and people staring. I tried to pull him away, but he picked up a knife from a fishmonger’s stall and he gashed my arm with it.”
“Did she say nothing?”
“‘I am what you’ve made me.’”
“Nothing else?”
“Not another word. But she pulled hard away from him, and the chain broke.”
“She went back to the Star after all. Do you think she meant to make it up with him?”
“What else could she do? Logan would’ve soon fetched her back, he’d the law on his side.”
“Did you speak to her after that day?”
McKenzie let his eyes close, as though he could not bear to look at me, or at anything that was not Eliza. “I feared what he might do to her,” he said. “I never spoke to her again.”
We were both silent for a long while after that. “What is your Christian name, Mr. McKenzie?” I asked him at last.
“Andrew.”
“A good name. Could Eliza have taken her own life, Andrew?”
“How can I say? Locked in here alone, with those bloody birds — She hated them, you know. Wanted me to let them go, but I told her they wouldn’t survive at sea. Land birds, without big enough wings.”
“Do you think Captain Logan ever loved her?”
He looked up at me. “How can you love what you don’t even know?”
“I think,” I said slowly, “that sometimes, when all practical chance of it is gone, knowledge doesn’t really come into it. One falls in love with the hope of loving.”
Not for the first time, I wished I might speak to Dayton Logan. But there were practical matters still to be clarified.
“Tell me, Andrew,” I said, “were you here in the cabin before me on the morning I found Eliza’s body?”
“Nay,” he replied, “I was above-decks with Stoddard, till Mr. Rossiter came and fetched me.”
“Well, someone must have been here. I heard water running in the basin. There was no one to turn off the tap, but when I went to look, it had stopped.”
“Aye, well, these taps have to be pumped up to get pressure. Primed, y’see. They shut off unless you pump ’em up again. Sometimes they shut off when they’re scarce used. I tried to wash myself a bit after I went looking for that sheet to wrap her in, but the tank was empty just then, and there was no water at all.”
So that was how one of his hairs had found its way onto the basin. Trying to wash off his tears so the men wouldn’t notice.
“When you searched the ship for Captain Logan,” I said, “who searched these quarters?”
“Nobody. He’d not been spending his nights here, and we didn’t wish to disturb her, not till we were certain. And then when you found her—”
“What is beyond the dining parlor? Are there other compartments?”
“Stoddard’s stateroom and m’own, and the steward’s. The ship’s kitchen and the steward’s pantry.”
“May I look into the pantry for a moment?” A conviction was growing upon me.
He led me through the dining parlor and into a narrow passage, from which a sliding door gave entrance to the little cubicle. Two walls were lined with wire-netted shelves of canned and packaged and bottled goods that reached from floor to ceiling. “What is kept on the top shelf?” I asked him.