The Ice Child (12 page)

He shook his head slightly. “Stately ships,” he murmured.

There was a pause. Jo glanced at Hargreaves, who moved at Marshall’s side. At this Doug lifted a warning finger. “If you give me one of those bloody shots again I’ll lay you out cold,” he said.

Hargreaves turned back to Jo. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “See that buzzer on the wall? Ring it if you need to.”

After he’d gone, Doug raised his eyebrows at Jo, as if despairing of the fuss.

“Stately ships,” Jo repeated. She wondered if she was pushing him too much, but the color had come back into his face a little.

As she watched him, he smiled at her, as if really seeing her for the first time. “Are you interested in Franklin?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“I don’t believe you,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Women aren’t.”

She was affronted. “Let’s say I was hooked,” she told him.

“By a Victorian in a frock coat?”

“No,” she said. “By a man in Greenland.”

Their eyes met briefly. He narrowed his gaze.

She glanced at the blanket with the cradle beneath it, and wondered about the leg. A small shot of adrenaline pumped through her system, surprising her. She had suddenly remembered Hargreaves’s apology to John about the injury, the seriousness of the break.

She tore her gaze from the bed and looked again at Marshall. “Crozier’s note …” she began.

“Poor Francis,” he murmured. “And the interest of women.”

“Was he married?” Jo asked.

“Crozier? No. Except to the sea.”

“He was second-in-command, and …”

“You wouldn’t have believed that note,” he said. “We took the canister to the National Maritime and opened it. You wouldn’t think that a piece of paper could survive weeks at sea and then over a century in the ice, but it did.” He passed a hand over his forehead. “No foxing by damp, no discoloration at all,” he said. “Just Crozier’s handwriting on the Admiralty sheet, as if it had only been written yesterday.”

“It must have been eerie,” Jo observed quietly.

“It was,” he agreed. “Crozier seemed to be standing there with us, willing us to understand.” Doug put his hands to his face, then crossed them over his chest. “They wintered the first year at a place called Beechey Island,” he said, his voice beginning to drop very low. His speech was slightly slurred. “Then it started to come true.”

She frowned. “What started to come true?”

“Crozier’s note. Dead days.”

She leaned forward in her seat. “Dead days?”

“They wintered in Beechey Island.…”

The door opened again. Hargreaves was back. Jo walked over to him. John, she noticed, hadn’t moved an inch from his position at the foot of the bed, and was now staring at the floor.

“I don’t understand what Doug is saying,” she whispered to Hargreaves.

The PMO went over and looked at his patient. “Hey, Douglas,” he said. “Tired?”

“Three died,” Marshall said.

“Nobody died,” Hargreaves reassured him.

“Three died and they buried them.”

Hargreaves looked back at Jo. She shrugged,
I
don’t know
.

Marshall gave a labored sigh. “They tried to sail along Lancaster Sound and into Barrow Strait. But the ice was there. They turned around, went back. The ice stopped them again. Three died that winter …”

Jo stepped back to the bed, alongside Hargreaves.

“I gave him morphine,” he said. “It’s okay.”

“The stately ships go on,” Doug murmured. “But it came true. They were dead men.…”

And while they watched him, he fell asleep.

An hour later Anthony Hargreaves loaned her his cabin to write and e-mail the article.

“Come with me,” she told John. “Maybe you can help me.”

Doug’s son followed her grudgingly, it seemed. Like a sulky child. Jo wondered if it were she, or he, or the fact that he was an archetypal teenager. He was still in his teens, wasn’t he? she wondered as she closed the door of the cabin and watched him perch, all folded up awkwardly like a crane, legs tucked under himself, arms looped over knees. Nineteen was still teenage. Just.

“How do you think Doug is?” she asked him.

“He’ll survive,” he responded. “He always does.”

She had been in the act of booting up the laptop. The comment stopped her. She turned in her chair and looked at him. “Is everything okay with you?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“I feel I’ve got under your skin, John. Annoyed you some way.”

“No.”

She made a stab in the dark. “I bet you don’t see much of him,” she said.

“Other people see more of him than I do,” he answered.

Their eyes met.

Ouch. There’s the nerve
.

“You’re doing archaeology too.”

“Yes.”

She glanced at the glowing blue screen in front of her. The blank page. “Where should I start?” she asked.

There was no reply.

“Do you think your father identifies with Franklin?” she asked.

A spark of interest at last showed in John’s face. “Franklin?” he echoed.

“Yes.”

He grinned. “No.”

“Someone I know thought that might be it,” Jo observed mildly. “Why is that funny?”

“Because it’s Crozier,” John said. “That’s the one he’d like to find.”

“Crozier, who wrote the message in the canister?”

“Yes.”

“A message in a bottle,” Jo mused. “Sort of romantic.”

John made a dismissive, huffing sound.

“Not romance, then?”

“Oh, yeah,” John replied. “That’s what some say. The bit he wrote at the bottom of the page,
The stately ships go on
, they think that was for Sophia, Franklin’s niece. Crozier proposed to her and she rejected him.”

“Oh,” Jo said. “Poor man.”

“Do you know what that poem says?” John asked. “The one where that line comes from?”

“No,” Jo admitted. “Who wrote it?”

He raised his eyebrows. “You’re a journalist, and you don’t know Tennyson?”

Jo held up her hands. “Look at me, I’m a philistine.”

John managed a small smile.

“Tell me,” Jo prompted.

John leaned back against the bulkhead of the cabin. The ship was rolling; the light outside was fading. They could hear the routine of the ship going on all around them—the sound of running feet, the raised voices. On Hargreaves’s desk a picture of a middle-aged woman was taped to the tabletop. For a second Jo wondered about being at sea for a long time. How much was put away, put on hold. Lives of the men. Of the wives. Children. Salted away, literally, for months. Or years.

John began to speak. His voice was low.

“
And the stately ships go on
,

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanished hand

And the sound of a voice that is still!

“
Break, break, break
,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.
”

They looked at each other. She saw it then, briefly, acutely, in his face; saw that he had tried to hide it. Rejection.

“Who did you lose, John?” she asked.

He hesitated. For a second she thought that he was going to reply; then, to her surprise, he suddenly got up, almost banging his head on the low ceiling. He wrenched open the door.

“John,” she said.

He went out, without looking back.

She turned back to the computer screen and stared at it.

She drummed her thumb against the space bar on the keyboard.

Nine

In October, the moon was a beautiful thing to see.

She had reached her greatest northern declination and swept around the sky, bold and luminously bright with a color like cream. Sometimes Augustus stood on
Terror
’s deck and watched her. It reminded him of the milk cart that came around the streets in Hull, grass splattered high on the wheel rims, but the board scrubbed nearly white and the churns brushed to mirrors; and when the dairyman lifted the heavy lid, that first glance at the frothy milk head was exactly this moon’s color.

It was strange to think of them being so far north on the surface of the earth that the moon never set, but rolled around the sky. And the snow and water and the shore of Beechey Island itself were lit by the same glorious glow, until the ships, sealed motionless in their winter harbor, seemed to be merely flat pen drawings on a page. As the daylight failed and there was more moon than sun, Augustus wondered why he was not afraid. He had always hated going to bed in the dark, and waking the same, and he had always wanted candles, for a long time, even when first at sea. But somehow that old fear—of being in the dark—had left him. Thank God. Because he was going to be in the dark now—twenty-four-hour, relentless dark, with only this occasionally luminous moon—for weeks to come.

It helped that all the crew were so cheerful, even in the face of the winter. By October they had arranged the ships marvelously well for the winter ahead. The mooring was sheltered. The fires and ventilation fixtures below were able to keep a mean temperature on both
Erebus
and
Terror
of nearly sixty degrees, which was comfortable and warm, like a summer room at home. And even on deck, under the housing, they had still not reached freezing point.

Augustus had been thrilled by the summer. Since July they had sailed along Lancaster Sound and into Wellington Channel, farther north than he had ever been. As they had navigated past Devon Island, that huge barren outcrop rose up like a fortification.

Aboard
Erebus
Commander Fitzjames was keen, as keen as Sir John, to skip forward at a good pace, because he believed that Wellington was a route westward. A rumor flew around the crews that Fitzjames had said they might find the Passage most presently, and be through it in less than three weeks. The wind charged through the rigging, booming through the sail fabric and plucking low notes from the tightened ropes. Standing on deck was like being at the heart of a primitive orchestra, in the percussion, inside a drum.

It was on August 8 that they saw the first walrus.

And the first icebergs.

Augustus was sitting below with John Torrington when John Bailey came down to tell them.

“We’ll have a storm,” Bailey said.

Torrington smiled. “It’ll push us farther on,” he commented.

Augustus was worried for Torrington. John had not seemed right to him for more than two weeks, and for the last four days he had not worked at all. Gus thought he was thin, although Torrington was already a slim, tall man by nature. It was the sight of the bones on Torrington’s face, highlighted white as he turned his face in the evening light at table, that Gus had first noticed. It had been at prayers on Sunday, and Torrington did not get up, and nor did he kneel. But he sat very upright and bowed his head, and turned it toward Crozier as the long chapter from Isaiah was read out. And it was then, as Torrington inclined his face while praying, that the bones showed: a white ridge under each eye.

“Go up and see the walrus,” John said to him now.

“I’ve seen them before,” Gus said.

Torrington smiled and gave him a heavy nudge with his elbow. “Go, Gus,” he said. “I’ll be here when you get back. I shan’t run away to marry.”

It was a strange sort of joke he had. He had told Gus it was what his father always said. “I shan’t run away to marry.” He delivered it in his flat, wry Manchester accent, with its faint lilt at the end of sentences.

Gus ran up on deck.

A large number of walrus were within twenty feet of the ship, shaking their heads, as if mowing through the water with their tusks.

“Bad weather drives them in so close to land,” another man said, as they watched. He pointed past the stern, to a great low brow of clouds on the southern horizon. “Storm,” he added.

But it wasn’t the walrus that caught Gus’s attention. It was the sight of the sea ahead of them, which before had been flecked with small floes, and was now—only two hours since he had gone below—streaming with denser ice. And, bearing down on them quite clearly, high bergs—a whole horizon of them. There was no open sea now.

When he went below, Gus didn’t tell John that Bailey had been right. Torrington had already gone to his bed, the hammock slung past the galley, in the sick bay that measured less than five feet square. Torrington’s knees were curled in to his chest. Gus could hear the rattle of his breathing.

The gale came up fast.

He heard it as he slept, the noise waking him. He lay on the little bed of boxes that he had constructed for himself, and saw the whale-oil lights swaying. Soon they were put out. Men ran up on deck. The officers were all awake. The ship heaved, dancing curiously in the current, as if unseen hands were tugging at the stern. Both the wind and the current had changed, and
Terror
did what ships were not supposed to do—shook itself as if alive, tripping and falling, tripping and falling. He lay in the dark and thought about it, deciding, in the rapidly rising scream of the wind and battering of the waves, that
Terror
was constructed as no other ship, and so would sound like no other ship, and behave like no other.

By three in the morning it was blowing like a hurricane, and ice was driving through the strait. There was no more sleep at all. The gale tore through them. The sea was furious; the feel of the ice-laden air scythed through both ship and man. They lost sight of
Erebus
, which disappeared in the indigo-green mountains of the ocean, and it was as if the whole of the summer sailing along Wellington had been a dream, a mirage promising stillness and relief, and yet luring them into a dead end.

There was no chance of fastening themselves to one of the huge bergs for safety; the captain was of the opinion that, in such a gale, even a ten-inch-thick Manila cable would snap, and the hawsers break, and so they put in the hawse bags and blocks to make her as tight as possible against the sea, and
Terror
was allowed to scud, under canvas enough to keep her ahead of the sea, her main topsail and foresail close-reefed.