CHAPTER I I

THE VICTIM

THE SECOND EVENING OF THE VOYAGE:
IN WHICH A CERTAIN IMPORTANT PASSENGER IS
INTRODUCED TO THE READER.

12°49W; 51°11N.
- 8. 15 P. M. -

The Right Honourable Thomas David Nelson Merridith, the noble Lord Kingscourt, the Viscount of Roundstone, the ninth Earl of Cashel, Kilkerrin and Carna, entered the Dining Saloon to an explosion of smashing glass.

A steward, a Negro, had stumbled near the doorway, bucked by a sudden roll of the vessel, letting slip an overloaded salver of charged champagne flutes. Someone was performing an ironic slow-handclap at the fallen man’s expense. An inebriated mocking cheer came from the farthest corner: ‘Huazzah! Bravo! Well done, that fellow!’ Another voice called: ‘They’ll have to put up the fares!’

The steward was on his knees now, trying to clear the debris. Blood was rivuleting down his slender left wrist, staining the cuff of his brocaded jacket. In his anxiety to collect the shards of shattered crystal he had sliced open his thumb from ball to tip.

‘Mind your hand,’ Lord Kingscourt said. ‘Here.’ He offered the steward a clean linen handkerchief. The man looked up with an expression of dread. His mouth began to work but no sound came. The Chief Steward had bustled over and was barking at his subordinate in a language Merridith did not understand. Was it German, perhaps? Portuguese? Saliva flew from his mouth as he hissed and cursed the man, who was now cowering on the carpet like a beaten child, his uniform besmirched with blood and champagne, a grotesque parody of commodore’s whites.

‘David?’ called Merridith’s wife. He turned to look. She had half risen from her banquette at the Captain’s table and was gaily beckoning him over with a bread-knife, her knotted eyebrows and pinched lips set in a burlesque of impatience. The people around her were laughing madly, all except the Maharajah, who never laughed. When Merridith glanced back towards the steward again, he was being chivvied from the saloon by his furious superior, the latter still bawling in the guttural language, the transgressor cradling his hand to his breast like a wounded bird.

Lord Kingscourt’s palate tasted acridly of salt. His head hurt and his vision was cloudy. For several weeks he had been suffering some kind of urinary infection and since boarding the ship at Kingstown, it had worsened significantly. This morning it had pained him to pass water; a scalding burn that had made him cry out. He wished he’d seen a doctor before embarking on the voyage. Nothing for it now but to wait for New York. Couldn’t be frank with that drunken idiot Mangan. Maybe four weeks. Hope and pray.

Surgeon Mangan, a morose old bore by day, was already pink in the face from drinking, his greasy hair gleaming like a polished strap. His sister, who looked like a caricature of a cardinal, was systematically breaking the petals off a pale yellow rose. For a moment Lord Kingscourt wondered if she was going to eat them; but instead she dropped them one by one into her tumbler of water. Watching them with a sullen undergraduate expression sat the Louisiana columnist, Grantley Dixon, in a dinner jacket he had clearly borrowed from someone larger and which gave his shoulders a boxy look. Merridith disliked him and always had, since being forced to endure his socialistic prattle at one of Laura’s infernal literary evenings in London. The novelists and poets were tolerable in their way, but the aspiring novelists and poets were simply insufferable. A clown, Grantley Dixon, a perfervid parrot, with his militant slogans and second-hand attitudes: like all coffee-house radicals a screaming snob at heart. As for his imperious guff about the novel he was writing, Merridith knew a dilettante when he saw one, and he was looking at one now. When he’d heard Grantley Dixon was going to be on the same ship, he had almost wanted to postpone the journey. But Laura had told him he was being ridiculous. He could always count on Laura to tell him that.

What a collection to have to abide over dinner. A favourite expression of his father’s came into Merridith’s mind. Too much for the white man to be asked to bear.

‘Are you quite all right, dear?’ Laura asked. She enjoyed the role of the concerned wife, particularly when she had an audience to appreciate her concern. He didn’t mind. It made her happy. Sometimes it even made him happy too.

‘You look as if you’re in pain. Or discomfort of some kind.’

‘I’m fine,’ he said, easing into his seat. ‘Just famished.’

‘Amen to that,’ said Surgeon Mangan.

‘Excuse my lateness,’ Lord Kingscourt said. ‘There are two little chaps I know who insist on being told bedtime stories.’

The Mail Agent, a father, gave a strange, baleful smile. Merridith’s wife rolled her eyes like a doll.
‘Our girl Mary is ill again,’ she said.

Mary Duane was their nanny, a native from Carna in County Galway. David Merridith had known her all his life.

‘I don’t know what’s come over that girl,’ Lady Kingscourt continued. ‘She’s barely left her cabin since the moment we boarded. When usually she’s hale as a Connemara pony. And quite as bloody-minded as one too.’ She held up her fork and gazed at it closely, for some reason gently pricking her fingertips with the ends of the tines.

‘Perhaps she is homesick,’ Lord Kingscourt said.

His wife laughed briefly. ‘I hardly think so.’

‘I notice some of the sailorboys giving her the glad eye,’ said the Surgeon affably. ‘Pretty little thing if she didn’t wear so much black.’

‘She was bereaved of her husband not too long ago,’ said Merridith. ‘So she probably shan’t notice the sailorboys I should think.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear. Hard thing at her age.’

‘Quite.’

Wine was poured. Bread was offered. A steward brought a tureen and began to serve the vichyssoise.

Lord Kingscourt was finding it difficult to concentrate. A worm of pain corkscrewed slowly through his groin: a stone-blind maggot of piercing venom. He could feel his shirt sticking to his shoulders and abdomen. The Dining Saloon had an ashy, stagnant atmosphere, as though pumped dry of air and filled up with pulverised lead. Against the cloying odour of meat and over-bloomed lilies another more evil stench was trying to gain. What in the name of Christ was that filthy smell?

The Surgeon had clearly been in the middle of one of his interminable stories when Merridith had arrived. He resumed telling it now, chuckling expansively, enfeebled by duckish clucks of self-amusement as he gaped around at the dutifully simpering company. Something about a pig who could talk. Or dance? Or stand on its hind legs and sing Tom Moore. It was an Irish peasant story anyway: all of the Surgeon’s were. Gintilmin. Sorr. Jayzus be savin’ Yer Worship. He tugged his invisible forelock and puffed out his cheeks, so juicily proud of his facility for imitation. It was something Merridith found hard to stomach, the way the prosperous Irish were never done lampooning their rural countrymen: a sign, they often claimed, of their own maturity on matters national, but in truth just another form of cringing obsequiousness.

‘Will you tell me now,’ the Surgeon chortled, his bright eyes streaming with excess of mirth, ‘where else could that happen but darlin’ auld Oirland?’

He spoke the last three words as...