A Burial at Sea (11 page)

He would have to have a word with Carrow, to be sure.

“Interesting,” Lenox said at length. “Well, keep it to yourself, please, no talk of it to that Evers chap.”

“No, sir.”

“And don’t look at my things again, please. I know it’s your job to tidy my cabin, but there must be some proper expectation of privacy.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lenox paused. “Incidentally, could you go to the galley and sort me out a piece of that cinnamon toast? And maybe a cup of that Chinese tea I brought, the dark stuff?”

“Oh, of course, sir.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The body of Lieutenant Thomas St. James Halifax having been thoroughly examined and, of course, confirmed dead, that night the men of the
Lucy
made preparation for its burial at sea.

As the hour of the ceremony marched closer—all men on board knew from their superiors, down to the purser’s third assistant, that it was to be at half past five—a deep melancholy took hold of the ship. The men were quiet in their preparations. Lenox observed them, two sailors letting the starboard gangway out, a group of others clearing the main deck and furling the mainmast’s sails tight around it, four more bringing a long mess table onto the deck and setting it beside the open gangway.

Martin himself supervised them, and also ordered the sails set in counterpoise to each other, so that the ship would be as perfectly still as possible. Then he called out, “Top gallant yards, acock bill,” an order that sent men scurrying up the rigging.

As soon as the gangway was folded out and the
Lucy
was as near motionless as the rocking of the ocean would permit, men began to head below deck, the officers, the warrant officers, the midshipmen, the bluejackets, the marines, all in a great drove, to change into their best dress.

Lenox, already in a black suit, stayed above, and found himself nearly the only person there.

Downstairs, he knew from Tradescant, the sailmaker was sewing Halifax’s body into a snow-white sheet, with two cannonballs at his feet to weigh him down. The last stitch would go through his nose, by old naval custom, as a final confirmation that he was dead.

At five fifteen the men began to assemble on deck in long, tidy rows, all dressed in their white duck trousers, blue shirts, and blue caps. Usually a gathering of this variety on ship was loud, but nobody spoke now. Then the officers came on board; each, Lenox saw, was carrying a white flower.

“You will stand with us, Mr. Lenox?” said Martin, coming up from behind him with his tricorn hat tucked under his arm.

“I should be honored.”

When several minutes later they were all assembled and the body in its white sailcloth had been hauled onto the deck and laid out on the long mess table, the bosun—a sort of head sailor, in charge of various small crews of seamen, generally the soundest naval mind at a captain’s disposal—piped, and then called out “Ship’s company, off hats!” in a loud voice that seemed to carry unnaturally in that great void of ocean.

The men removed their hats.

The chaplain stepped forward before the men and began to speak. In their short acquaintance he had been a figure of fun, of comedy, to Lenox, but in his vestments now he looked terribly grave, and his booming voice seemed free of the slur it took when he drank spirits.

“We come here today to bury at sea a good and God-fearing man, Lieutenant Thomas Halifax. May he rest in peace.

“I shall read from the book of Job, and from the book of John.” The chaplain sighed heavily, and then spoke. “‘He brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’”

“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” the ship’s company chanted back.

The chaplain went on. “‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’ Amen.”

“Amen.”

Now the chaplain began to read from Lamentations, following them with two psalms, the thirtieth and the ninetieth. Lenox listened to them more as music than as words, and found himself staring into the soft golden twilight, the birds wheeling through it, the ocean mapping the light, the sky clear and more white than blue. A great hollow feeling came into his chest, almost like tears, of something inarticulate and enormous, something he only vaguely understood.

The chaplain finished and motioned the four remaining lieutenants, Billings, Carrow, Lee, and Mitchell, forward. Each took one corner of the mess table upon which Halifax, sewn into his sail, was laid. As the chaplain spoke again they walked the table down the starboard gangway and slowly, agonizingly slowly, began to tip the body into the sea.

“We therefore commit the body of our brother and shipmate Thomas Halifax to the deep, looking for general resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ; at whose Second Coming in glorious majesty to judge the world, the sea shall give up her dead; and the corruptible bodies of those who sleep in him shall be changed, and made like unto his glorious body; according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless and keep him. The Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him. The Lord lift his countenance upon him, and give him peace. Amen.”

“Amen,” the ship’s company called back.

The body slid heavily from the table and for a brief moment seemed to hang in the air, then broke the water’s surface with a tremendous crash. For a moment, not longer, a white ghost lingered in the sea, but before anyone could be sure they had seen a final glimpse of the ensheeted body it was already speeding toward the depths.

The officers and the captain now went to the rail and each threw his flower onto the water.
Full fathom five thy father lies,
went through Lenox’s head, an old schooldays’ memorization,
of his bones are coral made: Those are pearls that were his eyes; nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange. Sea-nymphs hourly ring his bell: Hark, now I hear them, ding-dong bell.
There was something far worse about a body going into the water than into the ground; far worse.

Now the captain stepped forward and gazed out over the men he commanded. He was such a very religious man that Lenox expected words of Christian emphasis, but apparently that role had been filled by the chaplain. For his part, Martin spoke of Halifax as a naval man.

“This is an unhappy burial, I know—but refuse to believe, for to be buried at sea is a great honor for a proper man of Her Majesty’s navy, as Thomas Halifax was, and though his virtues would have well adorned a longer life, though his service to our Queen was too brief in duration, though his death was an unfair and bitterly hard-fought one, at the hands of a peasant and coward, nevertheless he goes to the same deeps Drake did, the same deeps to which his grandfather’s body fell. And in that there must be great honor. He is numbered among us, a man of our ship the
Lucy
. May none of you forget that, until the last who stands among us on this deck draws his final breath. Whomever it shall be.”

The bosun stepped forward again. “Ship’s company, on hats!” he cried. The men put their blue cloth caps back on and started, with a low murmur of conversation, to go back below deck to change, and many of them soon to eat.

The officers watched them go and then Martin, his face flushed red—though it was impossible to say whether with emotion or cold, for the sun had all but gone—turned and said, “I invite you all to my dining room for supper. The midshipmen will be with us too. In honor of Halifax.”

The officers murmured their assent, and began to go below deck themselves.

This supper was a downhearted affair despite the captain’s excellent food and wine, although for Lenox the affair was somewhat enlivened because he was able to snatch a few moments of conversation with his nephew.

“How has your first day been?”

Teddy shrugged. “Well, Lieutenant Halifax…”

“Aside from that? Are you settled in?”

“Oh, yes. I know one of the chaps from the college, and they all seem decent enough. In fact they asked me to invite you for supper in the gun room.”

“I should be delighted.”

“If you might bring provisions, Uncle Charles…” Teddy’s earnest face was screwed up in concentration, trying to phrase his request with some measure of delicacy. “The lads themselves don’t have much aboard, and by the end of the last trip out they were roasting rats.”

“Say no more—it shall be a feast.”

Slowly people began to tell stories of Halifax, beginning with the captain and then to Carrow—whom Lenox thought perhaps he might manage a word with after supper—and the engineer Quirke, who spoke amusingly about his own attempts to fish off the side of the
Lucy
with Halifax.

As they were drinking their port, however, something arrived out of the sky—which had been clear all day—that would distract them all from their stories and, indeed, from Halifax’s murder: a storm.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was Mitchell, Lenox’s antagonist of that afternoon, who drew their attention to the situation. He had stayed on deck, being the duty officer, while the others ate, and had taken the ship back on course after it had fallen still for Halifax’s burial. Now he came into Martin’s cabin.

“With pardon, sir, there’s weather above,” he said to the captain.

Martin’s brow furrowed. “It was clear not an hour ago.”

“Yes, sir.”

Martin stood. “Only a passing squall, I imagine, but I had better go upstairs. Gentlemen, please finish your port.”

Lenox turned to Carrow after the captain had gone. “What will you do in a squall?” he asked.

“Would you care to see? It shouldn’t be too bad yet. You might come up on deck.”

“With pleasure.”

It looked ominous outside to Lenox’s eyes, but he had learned enough of his own lack of comprehension of naval matters to keep quiet. There were huge clifflike black clouds toward the east, and the air carried a peculiar salt tang.

“More than a squall,” Carrow murmured as they reached the quarterdeck.

“Do you think?”

The captain was on the main deck delivering orders. “Reef the topsails!” his voice boomed out. “Prepare for heavy wind, gentlemen!”

The crew were in action even before he had finished speaking, moving in a kind of symphony of coordination. Soon the masts looked barer than they had when Lenox and Carrow came on deck.

For his part Carrow was watching not the men but the clouds. “This is an overnighter,” he said. To Lenox’s surprise the young man, usually so stern and pinched-looking, was now beaming.

“Might we not outrun it, using coal?”

“We might,” said Carrow, not taking his eyes off of the storm clouds, “but then again we might not. And if we did not, we would have used half our coal and worn our men to the bone just before a storm, just when everyone must be at their sharpest.”

“I see.”

Now he turned to Lenox. “You needn’t worry. A storm is the best fun in the world, I promise you—once you make it out alive, at any rate.”

The other officers evidently agreed, for they were drifting onto deck now, giving orders along with the bosun—lash down this, ship that below deck—and soon the sailors came above too. Those who didn’t work chewed their tobacco and leant on the railings, looking out at the black clouds just as Carrow had.

One man was unhappy, however: the purser, Pettegree, who tailed the captain, occasionally offering a comment when his superior’s attention was less than fully occupied.

“Why does he look so anxious?” Lenox asked Carrow.

“A purser always hates a storm—and since they were never proper sailors, but always purser’s mates, they never shall grow to love them, either.”

“He rose to the position of officer?”

“Oh, yes, he would have started out in hammocks with the rest of them. Now he’s a warrant officer, but still—” Carrow made a gesture that seemed to indicate this wasn’t worth much count.

“And why does he hate a storm?”

“Water is terrible for the purser’s stores, you see. It gets the flour wet, or rolls crates around and destroys them … he’ll be asking Captain Martin for help. To give him his due, he’ll have a difficult night.”

Indeed, Martin finally gave Pettegree his full attention, and once he had heard—with no great measure of patience—the purser’s request, he detached four stout-looking men from their work and sent them below deck.

It was clear now that no amount of coal would have pushed the
Lucy,
fast as she might be under sail and steam, beyond the reach of the storm. Fat drops of rain started to dot the deck dark.

“Reef the mainsails!” cried Martin.

When this was accomplished the masts looked all but bare—there were a few small, tough-looking sails at the center of the ship, presumably to guide the ship without encouraging her to too great a speed.

“Had I better go below deck?” Lenox asked Carrow.

“If you prefer.”

Martin came charging past them toward aft, stopping long enough to say, “Now you will see my men at their best, Mr. Lenox. Tell the boys in Parliament. Tell Her Majesty, for that matter.”

“I shall.” When he was gone, Lenox went on, “I say, Lieutenant Carrow, why are we running into the wind now?”

“It’s the best way to keep the ship from capsizing,” Carrow answered with a dry smile, “and so I deduce that such is the captain’s desire.”

Lenox went rather pale. “Is there a chance of that—of us capsizing?”

Carrow laughed. “Oh, no. A chance in a thousand, perhaps, but no. This is only a bad storm, from the look of it, not what we call a survival storm. The wind will run us along at eight or nine knots—stiffly enough, mind you!—but not more than that. If it were more we couldn’t sail. In a nine-knot wind you have the great advantage of still being able to use your sails.”