Charles Lenox Mysteries 05 A Burial at Sea by Charles Finch

Author:Charles Finch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-11-07T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Lenox went to sleep not long afterward, his stream of consciousness racing but muddied by drink. The next morning he woke with a single, clarified thought: Might Jacob Martin have murdered his second lieutenant?

It would account for the whisky; for Halifax’s apparently willing attendance at a midnight meeting halfway up one of the masts; Martin’s self-possession the night of the murder; the theft of the medallion and the penknife (presumably to shift blame away from himself) would have been easy, as nobody questions a captain’s movements aboard his own ship. And of course, most of all, he was a figure beyond suspicion.

Which meant he was the first person Lenox ought to have considered.

Still, some small part of him rebelled against the idea of Martin as a murderer. It wasn’t the man’s religious faith; that was so common among murderers as to be mundane. Nor was it his leadership of the Lucy. Rather, it was some intrinsic conservatism that seemed to define Martin’s character, a deficit of fury. The crime had been at once savage and plotted, and the mind behind it didn’t seem to be the mind Lenox thought the captain to have.

Then again, Pettegree had identified Martin as a man of violent temper.

The alternatives that his mind kept circling toward were Lieutenant Lee, despite the man’s placid temperament, and Lieutenant Mitchell. Mitchell was the more obvious suspect, because of his temper and because he was new aboard, the only change to the wardroom. For years the Lucy had sailed without violent incident, and within a few weeks of Mitchell’s arrival on board a man was dead.

As for Lee, there was the matter of his steward, who slept not in front of his door but down below deck amid the guns, with the rest of the sailors. It would have been difficult for the other officers to slip past their sleeping stewards, all situated in the hallways outside of their cabins. It would have been easy for Lee.

Or Martin.

After Lenox had accepted coffee, kippers, and eggs from McEwan, he took one of the last of Lady Jane’s oranges and sat down to write her a letter as he ate it. In it he spoke of Follow the Leader, of Teddy, of life aboard the ship. He reassured her that he had yet to succumb to scurvy. The letter ended with a short benediction, not too intrusive he hoped, for her and their child, after writing which he sealed the letter in an envelope and placed it next to the other letter he had written her, which sat in the battered Paul Storr toast rack that had always served as the organizer of his correspondence.

It was a still sort of day, not much wind, and while Lenox strolled the quarterdeck a huge indolent sailmaker’s mate named McKendrick played softly on his flute, sitting along the bowsprit. In the empty vastness the sound seemed to carry with special purity, and it lent a magic to the engrossing rhythm of the waves.

Maybe

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