Over the next several days there were more meetings. For the sake of getting to and from them on time he moved back to the consulate after two nights on board the Lucy—the days were too taxing otherwise. At his meetings he heard a great many statistics about customs, about sugar production, about shallow and deep draft vessels. Ismail had been correct: it was, in fact, like Europe here. But when Lenox went back through the streets of Port Said on a tour, he saw that at the same time it was different, and perhaps always would be.
Finally all of his responsibilities were concluded—an amiable supper with several important Frenchmen, Sournois not in their number. It was the morning of the Lucy’s departure. She was in fine shape, according to McEwan, having taken provisions on board and made a few minor repairs. The representative of the admiralty in Port Said had charged Carrow with returning the ship to England.
They set out for the Lucy early in the morning, seen off by a not very regretful Chowdery, who looked eager to get back to his library, and his imperious wife, who bestowed on Lenox a small parcel of books and letters that she asked Lenox—with more of the air of an order than a request—to deliver to several addresses in London for her.
For his part McEwan was carrying a bundle of packages that were larger than anything he had taken away from the Lucy. Food, Lenox suspected. It was gray and cool as the Bootle carried them through the water. From a thousand yards away it was obvious that the Lucy had been painfully, thoroughly cleaned; she sparkled in her masts and her rigging. An involuntary smile made its way onto Lenox’s face.
“Welcome!” said Carrow when they came back on board. “You two, help them with the trunk. Yes, you can put down your cocoa, it will still be here in a moment. Go, go.”
(It had been a surprise to Lenox, who associated the navy so strongly with rum, to discover how strongly affectionate the men felt for their breakfast cocoa and biscuits.)
“Your work went well on land, Mr. Lenox?” said Carrow.
“I thank you, Captain, very well.”
“Excellent. No more trips to shore?”
“No, thank you.”
“In that case, gentlemen, all sail set!” Carrow’s voice boomed out, and the men of the Lucy burst into action.
As for Lenox, he asked McEwan for a cup of tea, and drank it by the taffrail, where he watched Port Said recede very slowly from view, with that occasional feeling one has in life of leaving a place to which one will likely never return.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The next two weeks of sailing were full of happy, golden days. It was as if the gods of the sea had decided to offer some small compensation for the benighted journey to Egypt, with its murders, its storms, its threat of mutiny. The wind was steady and the sun warm, and all the men were in excellent spirits, both the sailors and the officers.
Carrow’s presence helped enormously. After three or four days Lenox perceived that the young man had the makings not of a good but of a great captain. Martin had been good; Carrow would exceed him. What had seemed dourness in the third lieutenant now seemed like the poise and reserve of a man with responsibility. There was nothing tentative or halting about him. He commanded by instinct.
In turn everyone on ship trusted him instinctively, and with good reason: Carrow knew more about sails than the sailmaker; more about the Lucy’s provisions than the purser; could set a mast as well as a forecastleman who had been on the water thirty years; could swab the decks if he had to; could make two provisions of salt beef seem like four; could give a speech; could fight a battle; could set a broken limb; could weather a storm; could laugh with his inferiors without losing their respect; could lead men. The bluejackets no sooner heard his words than they fell to his commands. With a different third lieutenant raised to the captaincy it might have been a different voyage.
Lenox had friends in the upper reaches of the navy, and as each day passed his conviction grew that he must tell them what he knew of Carrow’s talent. It was impossible to say with an institution as self-regarding and hidebound as the admiralty, but he hoped that in fact the fate that Billings had assigned himself—to take the Lucy in the absence of another leader—would fall instead to Carrow. At least some good might come of the whole foul chain of events.
For his part Lenox spent his afternoons reading and his mornings writing an account, by the end some forty pages, of his impressions of Egypt. This was an accompaniment of his official six-page report, and he planned to circulate it among certain key allies in Parliament, for it argued well, he hoped, for England’s greater involvement in Egypt’s affairs. There were a select few issues that he had argued passionately about on the floor of the House of Commons—cholera safety, for instance, suffrage, Ireland—and now, almost accidentally, almost by the way, he felt he had found another.
The only blot on Lenox’s happiness was Teddy’s behavior. He was still in a preoccupied and restless mood, and he seemed to have less to do with his fellows in the gunroom. It was a pity, after they had all seemed to get along so well. When Lenox tried to ask the boy, he met with a definite—if polite—rejection. What would Edmund say, if he found his son this way?
For that matter, he wondered, what would he say, or Jane, when they learned about the murderer who had been loose aboard the Lucy? Lenox thought of this and felt a certain gladness that the world was still a large place; it was getting smaller, to be sure, distances were collapsing—why, the Suez was an example of that! Yet it was a relief to him that he hadn’t been able to, say, telegram Jane from the deck of the Lucy. Fifty years hence it would be possible, but for now it had saved her, and his brother, a great deal of worry. Then, there was a feeling of majesty to sailing back from Egypt, of wide distances traversed. Though he loved progress, part of him hoped the steamship wouldn’t make Egypt a mere two-day voyage away, and take that feeling of majesty with it.
On the sixth day of their voyage he woke to find that they were becalmed. He went on deck and found Lieutenant Lee staring with a look of puzzlement at the water.
“What’s down there?” said Lenox.
“I just wonder whether we might give the men a swim. Perhaps I’ll ask the Captain.”
So it was that Lenox witnessed the men as they dipped a sail into the water and bound it off at the end to form a kind of swimming pool just beside the ship. The sailors—many of whom were appalling swimmers, or couldn’t swim at all—spent hours that morning splashing in the water, with great happiness neglecting their duties as the officers looked indulgently on.
Lenox, meanwhile, had another plan for the windless day. After he had spent an hour or two at his desk, he wandered over to what had been Halifax’s cabin. Its contents were intact, and in the corner there stood, still, his fishing poles and his tackle box.
Lenox had some experience fishing, in the lakes and ponds of Sussex, where he had grown up. With Carrow’s permission he cast off over the rail and spent a happy two hours there. The sun was wonderfully warm without being too hot, and the sky was a clear, cloudless blue. He realized that he would miss being on the water, when the voyage was over.
His luck was indifferent. Two bites in the first hour came to nothing, and it was only when he had nearly given up that he felt a powerful tug on his line. McEwan, who had been fetching up a couple of sandwiches, helped him tug the great fish in.