Collector of Lost Things (12 page)

‘I don’t sleep, Eliot.’

I tried to remain composed, but felt quarried by a changing situation. She must have planned this, intending either to reveal something to me, or extract it. ‘Is it the motion of the ship?’ I asked.

She smiled, quickly. ‘No, it is not that at all. I am afflicted with night terrors. If I sleep, I have
visions
.’

She looked at me with a directness that effortlessly pinned me to the spot. I felt paled by the force behind her eyes.

‘What visions?’

‘The cruelties of mankind,’ she replied, quickly. ‘When I dream, I see people—some are my family, but most are unknown. Blue devils. They are real and very present in my room. They sit and tell me what is in their hearts, and it feels as if they have no concealment. It is quite horrible.’

As she told me this, I closed the sketchbook, unable to continue. I conjured up the image of how she had been as a girl of just sixteen, her name not Clara Gould, but Celeste Cottesloe. How she used to whisper similar things to me, through the locked door to her bedroom. Her nightmares and daydreams, a world full of anguish and fear. I had heard this same voice in that chilled corridor at the top of her parents’ house. My poor Celeste! She had told me about visions she’d had of a poacher living in the woods. A frightening man wreathed in smoke, who would not cease to chase her.

My mouth felt dry. ‘Do these visitations appear every night?’

‘No. Sometimes my medicine is very strong. It renders me a dreamless sleep that I remember nothing of.’

‘And it is only at night that you suffer in this way?’

She considered the question carefully. ‘There are times, during the day, when my mind relaxes. I feel that my mind, it …’ she did a curious motion with her hand, a sliding motion, ‘… it slips. At those moments I feel as if I am among shadows. That I am not entirely alone.’

Celeste,
I thought,
just reach out your hand and hold me. Remember I loved you, I wanted to save you, I still want to save you.

‘May I be honest with you, Mr Saxby?’ she continued. ‘I sometimes care little for my well-being. You may be shocked but I care little whether the ship is cut open by the ice and is quickly sunk.’

‘Please, do not talk like this.’

‘You asked why I am on this voyage? Well, I feel I can tell you. I sometimes think I would like to walk across the ice sheet into that total whiteness you spoke of, and—’

‘And what?’

‘
Vanish.
’

‘Clara,’ I insisted. ‘You
must
stop talking like this.’ Instinctively I leant forward and held her hand. It felt cool and thin in my own, and totally without resistance. I continued to hold her, and gradually I felt her fingers begin to curl into my own. She gave a shy smile.

At that moment, a cabin door was wrenched open, and like a gust of wind Bletchley was standing in the saloon, in disarray, with wild hair and an expression of having just woken. Instantly he saw that I was holding hands with Clara and he gave me a most livid glance. Quickly, as soon as it had appeared, he managed to control it, collecting himself and turning to his cousin.

‘Why, are you feeling all right, my pippin?’

Clara, immediately composed, met her cousin’s question head on. ‘A little faint, Edward. I wonder what concoction you have for me in your doctor’s chest?’

Bletchley ran his hands through his hair, brushing it one way, then the next, confused and placed on the spot. ‘Now, now, Clara,’ he said. ‘Don’t be silly.’

I saw that I had released her hand. Bletchley walked up to her and took her by her wrist. He did it quite firmly.

‘Let me take you for a lie down,’ he said, giving her no choice in the matter. As he led her away to her cabin, she smiled gracefully at me.

‘You have a poetic soul, Mr Saxby. I will listen to the mast, as you have taught me to do. Thank you.’

I found it difficult to sleep that night. I lay, troubled, worrying that Clara might be visited by known and unknown visions. The sea sounded restless beyond the ship’s wall. Increasingly, I had found the ocean harder to contemplate at night. During the day, the horizon gave both a connection and continuity to a world I understood. There was always busy work and duties to be performed around me. But the night was different. The sea had a terrible black depth, fathomless and intense, which gave it a menacing aspect. It seemed to disappear, becoming a noiseless void that terrified me. Looking down the side of the
Amethyst
I would see a glimmer of black water, nothing else. Sometimes a passing flicker of phosphorescence. I would quickly retreat to my cabin, but the lamplight shining on the wooden surfaces only emphasised what was out there, beyond the ship. Nothing.

Perhaps it was for this reason that the crew drank heavily in the evenings. The alcohol mollified them, they became more relaxed, but I had also noticed they became more reflective. It was at these times they told me their true feelings about the Arctic. During the day the stories tended to be practical: the hardships of working with ropes that have iced over, or the effort of cleaning and storing sail. They bragged about a cold so intense that skin would freeze to metal, how it burnt inside the nostrils with a hot dryness, how a mug of boiling tea would turn to ice as it was thrown, and how the ship’s woodwork, exposed to a frost-rime, became as serrated as a saw, as if it had grown multitudinous rows of shark’s teeth. There were tales of frostbite, of applying spirits of lime to blackened fingers or rubbing them with snow. Some of these tales were tall, and were said to impress me, I knew. Or scare me. But at night, when rum had been drunk, different stories emerged. They described seawater growing thick and sluggish, as if it developed a new nature that was not entirely lifeless. How it spat and hissed as a wave rolled through it. Some had seen God in the water there, in the way the ice would encircle a ship. They’d told me of the air that arrives, gritty and stinging, although it looks no different. Or the beasts that surface from time to time through the limpid water. Dead fish, floating with monstrous size, their bodies inflated with gas, passing the side of the ship. Or pale bleached whales—the solitary beluga or the spectral narwhal—seen at midnight across the distance of the ice sheet, with risen tusks, jousting in the ice pools.

In all these stories, I felt the presence of ice itself. Frightening, moving unpredictably, spreading in brittle sheets across the ocean—reaching out with living intent for the small pocket of warmth that is brought with each person who ventures to the Arctic. It is as though the ice searches for the glimmer of fire that burns in the hearths, and the pulse of warm blood that flows through our veins.

‘O
VER THERE,’ CONNOR HERLIHY
said, ‘you see the blink?’

He was standing at the bow of the ship, his boot wedged into the hawse hole, so he might lean on one leg. In his hand he held a smoked bloater, and was eating the flesh of the fish straight from the skin.

‘Blink?’ I asked.

He held his hand level, towards the distant horizon. ‘Some of the lads say they see the blink already. It’s the light shining off the ice sheet. A glow’s what it is, you might say.’ He grinned and turned his level hand into a questioning gesture. ‘Meself, I’m not so sure, not till I’m standing on it. But you have good eyes, sir?’

‘Yes, good eyes.’

‘So, will that be an ice blink or not?’

I stared towards the horizon, where the sea was black and solid. A perceptible glow was there, low in the sky, in a wide band. But it was difficult to tell what it might be.

‘There is something there—a lightness.’

‘Aye,’ he replied, taking another bite of the fish. ‘You’ll be a sailor, sir, for sure you will. You have good eyes.’

He threw the remainder of the bloater over the side and wiped his hands across the front of his jacket.

‘Look at the water,’ he said. ‘The snow’s not melting in the sea. Them grains is the ice crystals that are quite happy to raft.’

‘Yes, I see. It’s thicker.’

‘Aye.’

A small flock of birds flew below us, their wings beating in great haste in groups of threes and fives, hurrying northwards to an empty horizon.

‘Razorbills,’ I said.

‘Ah, is that right? Do you know all the names?’

‘Most of them. The razorbill is easy to identify—the beak is distinctive, and if they have a good hunt, they will hang the fish from the sides of the beak—like gentlemen with beards.’

‘I was told you’re looking for a dead bird.’

‘An extinct bird.’

‘If it’s extinct, then it can’t be found, sir.’

‘It seems so.’

‘I like that,’ he said, pointing to the woollen smock I was wearing.

‘Thank you, it’s a gansey I had knitted in Sheringham, in Norfolk. All the fishermen from that port wear them. It has a pattern here, see, of hailstones and lightning in the weave.’

‘I see ’em,’ he replied. ‘I have this,’ he added, showing me a tattoo on his forearm of a Celtic cross. ‘Same thing.’

‘How so?’

‘Same purpose. So they knows our bodies if we drown,’ he said, laughing.

After he’d gone, I studied the horizon closely, suspecting any gradual shifts in the quality of light to be an indication of ice. Instead of wonder, I felt that we were approaching a frontier to endlessness. A border where the world was rubbed away, and in its place was nothing but a wide, blank fear.

I was still there when Edward Bletchley sought me out.

‘Ah, Eliot,’ he said. ‘Sorry about yesterday. I was confused and had only just awoken.’ He was nervous. ‘My cousin is a fragile person, you must understand. She is still quite ill and must not become excited.’

‘She asked me to sketch her likeness,’ I explained.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, impatiently, ‘but she is …’ He trailed off. ‘Do you think her an odd person?’

‘In what way?’

‘I was considering it this morning. She is very beautiful, that is certain. But quite odd, don’t you think?’

‘I think she is very sensitive.’

‘She feels she has a connection with you, Eliot. Quite strange: you hardly know each other.’

I felt cautious. ‘I am flattered that she feels that way, but you are quite right. I hardly know her.’

‘Of course, I know her better than anyone. When we were children our families kept us apart. I was’—he adopted a proud whisper—‘
considered a bad influence
.’ He tapped his temple, as if asking me to keep it a secret. ‘You know what we used to do? I bet you don’t—we used to take to our beds, at prearranged times, and we would communicate with each other.’ He laughed, manically. ‘I know, it sounds crazy, but our minds would talk. Yes, she is skilled.’ He sighed, examining his fingers, looking blithe and relieved.

‘Yet she is beautiful,’ he repeated, almost talking to himself now. ‘Quite a rare beauty.’

From the top of the mainmast, a shout was heard: ‘The ice, captain!’

Bletchley sprang up, excited as a young foal. ‘Tremendous! Did you hear that! We’ve spotted the ice!’ He was almost too giddy to contain himself, and for a second I thought he might tip himself over the side. He straightened his jacket, as if expecting a visit from an aunt and, as if not knowing what else to do, actually polished his shoes against the backs of his trousers. He looked out to sea, rubbing his hands.

‘But where the
devil
is it?’ he asked, loudly, to no one in particular. Finally, he looked back at me, seeing that I was amused and a little bewildered by him.

‘Forget what I was just saying, before,’ he said, grandly. ‘I was a little carried away.’

French and Captain Sykes were on deck, studying the changes in weather. A bucket had been lowered over the side, containing a thermometer, and when they brought it back on deck Sykes beckoned me over to have a look.

‘You will smell the ice, soon,’ French said, standing above me.

‘If only these damned clouds would leave us, then we could take our sighting,’ Sykes muttered, staring up at the masts. ‘Run the log-line,’ he ordered.

Wishing to see the ice for himself, Sykes began the long climb to the top of the mainmast, moving rigidly and purposefully, one hand above the other, his little booted feet stepping stiffly in the rope holds. He resembled a beetle climbing broad-backed up the wavering length of a stem, with little speed or pleasure. He soon disappeared into the maze of the rigging, the blocks and pulleys, knots, cleats and carcasses of meat that hung around him.

He was there for a long time, standing inside the barrel on top of the mainmast, turning his telescope this way and that. It must have been cold up there, for he kept stamping his feet like a woodcock. When he descended, he did it rather more swiftly, with that light-footed walk of his inching along the yardarms, inspecting the knots and fixings of the main sail. Finally he returned to the deck, jumping off the rail and landing with surprising grace. He walked swiftly to me, with a wink in his eye.

‘Do you have the inclination for a climb, Mr Saxby?’ he asked, not at all out of breath. He pointed at the lookout above. ‘If you would like to see the ice, then you must climb for it.’ He stepped closer, lowering his voice, conspiratorially. ‘I trust you with your footing rather more than I do Mr Bletchley, so you might notice I’m not asking him. I don’t particularly want my passengers falling onto my deck.’

‘I have no wish to fall on your deck, either, sir.’

‘Good, so you will climb, then,’ he asserted.

‘I will?’

‘Of course, man.’

‘Is it safe?’ I asked, incredulous.

‘
It
is safe. It is only men who are not safe. If you’re a fool, you will drop.’

By the persistence of his expression I realised this was no casual invitation, but the setting of some form of test.

‘Well then, yes, of course, captain,’ I replied, firmly. ‘I would like to see what you have hidden in that barrel of yours up there.’

He laughed, satisfied. ‘Good man. The crew will teach you the ropes. Take my coat and hat.’

With little ceremony he placed his hat on my head and handed me the coat, pointing me towards two of the crew who were already waiting, with what I perceived to be an executioner’s welcome.