EQMM, Sep-Oct 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Harriet?” said Philip's voice, out of nowhere. “Hallie, my dearest!"

  He stood motionless in the open door of the companionway, his fair hair drifting in the sea breeze, his grey eyes wide and fixed. “God in heaven,” he whispered, staring up at the body.

  I did not reply. As my cousin entered the room I noticed a sound of running water from beyond the green velours curtain that concealed the captain's stateroom and bath. But aboard ship one exists in a womb of water, the sound of it filling even one's dreams. I stood listening, trying to sort the real from the unreal.

  I did not succeed. The birds flew up again. Overwhelmed, I sank down on the long, brown plush sofa built into the curve of the stern and forced myself to take deep breaths.

  "Has no one else seen her?” Philip murmured. “It's gone eight bells. Surely Stoddard and McKenzie have been here?"

  They were the first and second mates—Stoddard middle-aged, foully profane, with a face like a steamed pudding; McKenzie in his thirties, with dark auburn hair, a courtly Scots’ manner, and wide boyish eyes that reminded me of my cousin's.

  "I have seen neither of them,” I told him. “And this is the captain's private parlor. Even they must have his permission to enter."

  "They'll pay hob getting it now,” he said quietly. “We've searched every inch of the ship for him. Logan's not to be found."

  "But,” I objected, “we won't make port at Gabinea for another day. Unless he took a lifeboat—"

  Philip knelt down by me and took my hand. “Hallie, there are no boats missing. He's gone over the side."

  I could feel his warm breath and smell the pipe tobacco he always kept in his breast pocket. His gentleness reached so deeply into me that it frightened me, just as it had back in Devon. Control, I thought. Control yourself. I took my hand away.

  "Nothing can be done at Gabinea beyond a decent burial,” he said, looking up again at Eliza's dead body. “But there's sure to be an enquiry once we reach Singapore. The American consul, and their maritime courts-martial. I think we must assemble what facts we can before then. Will you keep a record of anything we discover? With good records kept, we may be delayed for a shorter time, and with your father so ill—"

  "Of course,” I agreed.

  Philip went to the desk that was suspended from the bulkhead and rummaged for pen and paper. “What brought you here so early this morning?” he said. “I feared for you when you were not at breakfast."

  "Mrs. Logan had invited me to help her cut out a new gown,” I replied—and everything in the room testified to the truth of what I said. A length of rose-colored calico, the ten yards it would require for a decent plain gown, lay folded on the sofa, along with Eliza's workbox, pincushion, measuring tape, a worn muslin pattern, and two pair of shears. “She said I must come early, before the table was needed for charting."

  There was a ladderback chair lying on its side just under the body, and Philip picked it up. It was not high enough to have served Eliza as a scaffold. He laid a hand on her bare foot. “She still has a little warmth,” he said. “The deed was done no earlier than first light, I should say. Logan must have come to himself and realized the horror of his crime. He'd have had to go over the side before the watch changed at six."

  "You make your assumptions very easily,” I snapped suddenly. “I have seen no proof of Captain Logan's guilt."

  "Oh, Harriet, be reasonable. She is dead. He has disappeared."

  It was too facile, and all circumstance. “There are no signs of struggle, either about her body or within this room,” I said, “and surely she would have fought against a murderer, even her husband. If she took her own life, Captain Logan may have found her afterwards, been overwhelmed with grief, and so joined her in death. Or some third party may have done for both of them."

  He shook his head. “If she did it herself, then how did she manage? It would take a ladder, but where is it? Who put it out of sight?"

  "It is a puzzle,” I admitted. “But if it was murder, why kill her in such a difficult way? Why not smother her, strangle her, slit her throat as she slept?"

  My cousin was as stubborn as myself. “Very well. If she meant to die, why put out all this dressmaking gear? Why plan a new gown?"

  "Even a suicide may intend to live, Philip, but she—or he—may be taken unawares. Seized in a moment.” I reached out my hand into the liquid sea-light that all but overwhelmed the room now that the sun was fully up. “My mother went off to Hastings market with a careful list of things to buy and her string bag over her arm. She turned a corner, saw an omnibus, and walked in front of it. My father exiled us both to the other side of the world, and now he will die in Hong Kong and his penance will be complete."

  "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.

  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.