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Ramy bent over the railing, scrutinizing the dark waves.
‘It’s gone,’ he said at last. ‘He’s not coming up.’
Robin couldn’t speak. He staggered several steps back and vomited onto the deck.
Now, Ramy instructed, they simply went back to their bunks and acted normal for the rest of the voyage. Simple, in theory. But of all the places to commit a murder, a ship midvoyage had to be one of the worst. A killer on the street could at least drop his weapon and flee the city. But they were stuck for two more months at the scene of the crime, two months during which they had to maintain the fiction that they had not blown a man’s chest apart and dumped his body into the ocean.
They tried to keep up appearances. They took their daily strolls around the deck, they entertained Miss Smythe and her tiresome inquiries, and they appeared for meals in the mess, thrice a day on the clock, trying their best to work up an appetite.
‘He’s just feeling under the weather,’ Ramy answered when the cook asked why he hadn’t seen Professor Lovell for several days. ‘He says he’s not very hungry – some kind of stomach affliction – but we’ll bring him something to eat later.’
‘Did he say what’s precisely the matter?’ The cook was a smiling and gregarious man; Robin couldn’t tell if he was prying or just being friendly.
‘Oh, it’s a whole host of minor symptoms,’ Ramy lied smoothly. ‘He’s complained of a headache, some congestion, but it’s mostly nausea. He gets dizzy if he stands up for too long, so he’s spending most of his days in bed. Sleeping quite a lot. Could be seasickness, although he didn’t have any problems with it on the way over.’
‘Interesting.’ The cook rubbed his beard for a moment, then turned on his heel. ‘You wait right here.’
He strode out of the mess at a fast clip. They stared at the door, stricken. Had he grown suspicious? Was he alerting the captain? Was he checking on Professor Lovell’s cabin to confirm their story?
‘So,’ Ramy muttered, ‘do we run now, or...?’
‘And go where?’ Victoire hissed. ‘We’re in the middle of an ocean!’
‘We could beat him to Lovell’s cabin, perhaps—’
‘But there’s nothing there, there’s nothing we can do—’
‘Shush.’ Letty nodded over her shoulder. The cook was already striding back into the mess, holding a small brown sachet in one hand.
‘Candied ginger.’ He offered it to Robin. ‘Good for upset stomachs. You scholars always forget to bring your own.’
‘Thank you.’ Heart hammering, Robin took the sachet. He tried his best to keep his voice level. ‘I’m sure he’ll be very grateful.’
Luckily, none of the rest of the crew ever questioned Professor Lovell’s whereabouts. The sailors were none too fascinated by the daily dealings of scholars they’d been paid a pittance to transport; they were more than happy to pretend they did not exist at all. Miss Smythe was a different story. She was, likely out of sheer boredom, desperately persistent in making herself useful. She asked incessantly about Professor Lovell’s fever, the sound of his cough, and colour and composition of his stool. ‘I’ve seen my share of tropical diseases,’ she said. ‘Whatever he’s got, I’ve surely seen it in among the locals. Just let me have a look at him, I’ll get him fixed right up.’
Somehow they convinced her that Professor Lovell was both highly contagious and painfully shy. (‘He won’t be alone with an unmarried woman,’ Letty vowed solemnly. ‘He’ll be furious if we let you in there.’) Still, Miss Smythe insisted that they join her in a daily prayer for his health, during which it took Robin all he had not to retch from guilt.
The days were terribly long. Time crawled when every second contained a horrible contingency, the question will we get away? Robin was constantly sick. His nausea was wholly different from the roiling unease of seasickness; it was a vicious mass of guilt gnawing at his stomach and clawing at his throat, a poisonous weight that made it hard to breathe. Trying to relax or to distract himself was no help; it was when he slipped up and lost his guard that the sickness redoubled. Then the buzzing in his ears grew louder and louder and black seeped into the edges of his vision, reducing the world to a blurry pinprick.
Behaving like a person demanded tremendous focus. Sometimes the most he could do was to remember to breathe, hard and even. He had to scream a mantra in his mind – it’s all right, it’s all right, you’re all right, they don’t know, they think you’re just a student and they think he’s just sick – but even that mantra threatened to spin out of control; if he relaxed his focus for just one second, it morphed to the truth – you killed him, you blew a hole in his chest and his blood’s all over the books, all over your hands, slick, wet, warm—
He was scared of his subconscious; of letting it wander. He could dwell on nothing. Every thought that passed through his mind spiralled into a chaotic jumble of guilt and horror; always solidified into the same bleak refrain:
I have killed my father.
I have killed my father.
I have killed my father.
He tortured himself with imagining what might happen to them if they were caught. He projected the scenes so vividly they felt like memories – the short and damning trial, the disgusted looks from the jurors; the manacles around their wrists and, if not the gallows, then the long, crowded, miserable journey to a penal colony in Australia.
What he couldn’t wrap his mind around was what a truly fleeting moment the actual killing had been – no more than a split second of impulsive hatred, a single uttered phrase, a single throw. The Analects of Confucius made the claim sìbùjíshé;* that even a four-horse chariot could not catch a word once uttered, that the spoken word was irrevocable. But this seemed like a great trick of time. It did not seem fair that such a minuscule action could have such reverberating consequences. Something that broke not only his world but Ramy’s, Letty’s, and Victoire’s should have taken minutes at least, it seemed; should have required repeated effort. The truth of the murder would have made more sense had he stood over his father’s body with a blunt axe, bringing it down over and over into his skull and chest until blood sprayed across both their faces. Something brutal, something sustained, a true manifestation of monstrous intent.
But that did not describe what had happened at all. It had not been vicious. It had not taken effort. It was all over so fast, he hadn’t even had time to deliberate. He couldn’t remember acting at all. Could you intend a murder if you couldn’t remember wanting it?
But what kind of question was that? What was the blasted point of sorting through whether he’d desired his father’s death or not, when his ruined corpse was incontrovertibly, irreversibly sinking to the bottom of the ocean?
The nights were far worse than the days. At least the days offered the temporary distractions of the outdoors, the rolling ocean and spraying mists. At night, confined to his hammock, there was only the unforgiving dark. Nights meant sweat-drenched sheets, chills, and shakes, and not even the privacy to moan and scream out loud. Robin lay with his knees curled up to his chest, muffling his frantic breathing with both hands. When he managed snatches of sleep, his dreams were fragmented and horrifyingly vivid, revisiting every beat of that final conversation until the devastating finale. But the details kept changing. What were the last words Professor Lovell had said? How had he looked at Robin? Had he really stepped closer? Who had moved first? Was it self-defence, or was it a preemptive strike? Was there a difference? He wrecked his own memory. Awake and asleep, he examined the same moment from a thousand different angles until he truly no longer knew what had happened.
