The Ice Child (47 page)

“I can’t believe this,” Gina murmured. “First you have him, then you don’t have him.…”

“I don’t know why he would go,” Sibley told her. “The bear was a shock, but—well, in all honesty, Mrs. Shorecroft, he didn’t seem too struck by it. Didn’t seem upset at all. I mean, I was carried out of there in a bucket, I have to tell you, but John …”

Gina pressed her hand to her mouth. She could guess what was coming next.

“He seems like he’s got a heavy burden,” Sibley said, at last. “You know what I’m saying, Mrs. Shorecroft. A heavy burden …”

“I know,” Gina replied, eventually. “It’s a long story, Mr. Sibley. A very long, sad story.”

The taxi was coming down toward Whitehall now.

On their left was the beginning of the great string of London parks: St. James’s, Green Park, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens. Jo and Doug had walked along the Serpentine dozens of times to Round Pond. And come down the Mall. Always to the same place, of course. The Franklin Memorial at Waterloo Place, near Admiralty Arch. The bronze plaque that showed Crozier reading the memorial service over Franklin’s body.

Jo ran a hand over her face. The taxi was stifling. Next to her Catherine let down the window, and the dusty, dieselfumed air rolled in. London was sweltering. The traffic was hellishly sluggish. Catherine looked at her watch and sat back, her arm resting on the door handle.

Strange, Jo thought. Less than three years ago she had never heard of Franklin. Never wanted to hear of Franklin, or anyone like him. The endurance of the
Erebus
and
Terror
crews had meant nothing to her. And yet here she was, on the same kind of journey into white space.

There were no maps for where she was going. There was no one to show you the way as you stood at the door of an isolation unit and went through it with your son’s hand holding your own. People told you there was a way through, but no one knew for sure. You had to just go, make the leap. What was there behind you? No way back. No side routes. No detours. There was only this impossible, seemingly insurmountable course ahead of you. You pushed yourself forward into the unknown, sick with fear. Because there was nothing else to do.

And somewhere now, on the other side of the world, a boy was making the same journey as Franklin, because he had become hooked on the idea that absolution was somewhere down that line. He couldn’t know what he was doing any more than she did. He was just as lost. He had no idea of the outcome, and no idea of what consequences his actions might have. And she and Sam were tied to him, being dragged forward into that landscape.

A place of death.

God no
, she thought, as her stomach turned over.
Don’t think that way. Don’t even let that thought come into your head. It won’t be a place of death anymore. It will be a place where they come to life. John, Doug, Sam. You. Catherine. All of us
.

We’ll all come to life there
.

Jo shut her eyes, the familiar names of the dying crew fixed in her head. Doug had told her the story in greatest detail in the weeks when they negotiated the contract for the new program. They had sat down among their packing cases, nearly ready to move into Lincoln Street, and roughed out the treatment for the first few episodes together.

Names had become ingrained then. Names she had pushed to the back of her mind for months after Doug died. They had resurfaced again recently. She thought of them as she sat, unable to sleep, at Sam’s side. Heard the litany of them echoing down the corridors.

McClintock, searching in 1859 along the coast of King William Island, had found the body of Harry Peglar, captain of the foretop in the
Terror
. A few miles east of Cape Herschel, Peglar had been found lying on a small ridge, facedown. They could still make out his double-breasted jacket of fine blue cloth edged with silk braid, and the greatcoat, a blue-and-white comforter around his neck. He had marched in ordinary uniform. Around his skeleton lay personal fragments: a comb; coins; a pocketbook. A large stone lay behind the skeleton, and McClintock’s interpreter decided that Peglar had sat down, resting his back against the stone, and, trying to get up again, he had fallen forward. Perhaps dead. Perhaps simply exhausted. Whichever was the case, Peglar had not stirred from that pitching-forward fall. Nothing had disturbed the body in eleven winters.

Another searcher, Lieutenant Schwatka, found a grave at Point Victory, on the northwest coast of King William, opposite to where
Erebus
and
Terror
had been abandoned. Canvas had been sewn around the body, and a medal was found lying on the ground. It belonged to John Irving. The same searcher found bones scattered all down the King William coast.

Jo opened her eyes now and stared out at the road. The taxi had picked up speed; they were headed out of the city.

She thought of the site where they had planned the first program to be filmed. It was on the eastern coast of King William, about sixty-five miles from the ships.

Doug had thought that the ships’ crews had split up somewhere around here. That probably over half of them had been left behind because they were too sick to travel. He thought that one of the surgeons would have been left in charge of what was effectively a tented hospital. Eskimo said that many bodies had been found here. More than thirty or forty. And the boat, of course. Such a famous boat that forever afterward, the part of Erebus Bay where it had been found was known simply as the Boat Place.

The search crew of the steamship
Fox
, commanded by Leopold McClintock, found a lifeboat resting on a sledge in 1859. The boat was pointing north, as if it had been left there as the few remaining men marched back toward the ships. Perhaps they were the last remnants of the hospital tents, the last few who had not died. Doug thought that a decision had been made to try to get back to the
Erebus
and
Terror
, because at least there was greater shelter there, providing they had not been broken up by storms. And because some provisions were still on board. Better to try to get back, they must have decided, than to wait out the whole winter on the shoreline, under canvas. A small band had started to retrace their steps.

But they didn’t get far.

At least two men were dying. And the boat was ridiculously heavy. By now all reason and logic had deserted the survivors. They were hauling an enormous weight, and the boat, when found, was filled with incomprehensible rubbish. Inside it, beside two skeletons, were boots, towels, soap, sponges, combs, a gun cover, twine, bristles, saws, files, wax ends, bullets, shot, cartridges, knives, needles and thread, bayonet scabbards, two rolls of sheet lead, silk handkerchiefs, and books.
The Vicar of Wakefield. A Manual of Private Devotion. Christian Melodies
. A Bible. A Church of England prayerbook.

In the back of the boat worse was to come. McClintock unearthed spoons, forks, teaspoons, plate, watches, paddles, tins, tobacco, tea, and chocolate. There was no meat or biscuit of any kind, and no fuel.

Writing about the discovery afterward, McClintock had said that everything in the boat was a mere accumulation of deadweight, of little use, and likely to break down the strength of the sledge crews.

No one ever knew who the two men were that had been left with the boat. One, McClintock said, was crouched in the bow. He had been a young man. His bones were in a jumbled state. Large and powerful animals, probably wolves, McClintock wrote, had found the body and torn it limb from limb.

Under the after-thwart lay the second man. Older and larger, he sat propped up, swathed in furs and cloths, with a double-barreled gun on either side of him, both loaded and cocked, and leveled muzzle upward against the boat’s sides.

These two had always fascinated Doug.

An older man and a younger man, he said. Relics of the sick whom Crozier had left behind. Trying to get back to the ships. Left on the shore, with a boatful of books but no food. And the jumbled bones at the older man’s feet. What kind of wolves, Doug had asked her, ripped a body to pieces, and then carefully rearranged the uneaten bones back in a heap in the same boat they had dragged them from?

And then there was Crozier himself. This shadowy figure that John seemed to be chasing. All that had ever emerged from that devastated wasteland was the testimony of the Inuit natives, the people that had once been called Esquimaux. There were plenty of legends among them that Crozier had survived for years, living among the natives, and eventually working his way westward toward Hudson Bay. There was even a story that he had almost got to an outpost when he was killed by a rival tribe. Stories abounded of Crozier being nursed back to life over the winter of 1849, and of him eventually making his way up Backs Fish River, or out toward Repulse Bay, in the east. Some Inuit women even teased the Europeans years later by saying that they had children who were descended not only from Crozier but from Franklin himself.

What was certain among all this mixed testimony and hearsay was that Crozier had been seen on the southernmost tip of King William Island in the summer of 1848. He had met a group of Esquimaux then, and begged for seal meat for his starving men. The meat had been given, but during the night the natives had left, because they were afraid of the sight of the Europeans. Their faces were black, they said. Their teeth were discolored, their gums bleeding. They were terrified that whatever sickness the Europeans had would be infectious, and they were almost starving themselves after a winter and spring of intense cold, and a summer that never seemed to come.

Crozier was left on the shores of Simpson Strait, possibly among the small islands off Point Tulloch.

What was absolutely certain was that neither he, nor any of his crew, were ever seen again after that last meeting. The ships—those huge technical masterpieces of Victorian Britain—had sunk, or been driven onto shore by the storms of subsequent years, and broken up. They, like the men aboard them, had disappeared as if they had never existed.

Jo shuddered involuntarily as the taxi pulled into the airport terminal. Beside her Catherine was grabbing her hand luggage and already leaning forward to open the door.

What if John never comes back?
Jo thought, watching Catherine’s profile intensely.
What if you don’t find him? What if no one ever finds him?

Lady Jane Franklin had mourned for nearly thirty years after Franklin disappeared, she knew. Suddenly she wished desperately that Catherine should never know what it was to live the rest of her life, like Franklin’s wife, without knowing what had happened to the man she loved.

Not for her
, Jo thought.

Not for this girl
.

As they got out of the cab at Heathrow Airport, they were in for a shock.

The first person Jo saw was a news reporter, running toward her, with a cameraman, and other figures, in close pursuit.

“Meridian News,” said the woman. “Have you heard any more about John Marshall?”

“No,” Jo said, flinching at the brightness of the camera light.

“But he’s out there?”

“Yes.”

“How is Sam, Miss Harper?” Another voice.

“He’s okay. Stable.”

“Have you spoken to John’s mother?”

“Yes,” Jo said.

“Are you going out there?”

“No,” Jo said. “Miss Takkiruq is going. She knows the area.”

The microphones turned in Catherine’s direction.

“If he’s there anywhere, we’ll get him,” Catherine said.

Jo reached out a hand toward the reporter. “I just want to make one thing clear,” she said. “John Marshall doesn’t know why we’re looking for him.” She tried to steady her voice. “If we find him, and he decides to come back, that’ll be great. That’ll be wonderful.” She raised her chin and looked directly into the nearest camera. “But if we don’t get him in time, or—or whatever happens,” she added, “it’s not his fault. Please remember that.”

It was two-fifteen before they got Catherine’s luggage checked through. She stood at the departure gate in the Heathrow concourse, gripping her tickets.

“Hug Sam for me,” she said.

“I will.”

“His count was better today.”

“Yes.”

They stared at each other.

“Will you tell John,” Jo whispered, “will you tell him …”

Catherine nodded. “I know what to tell him. I know. It’s okay.”

Jo glanced up at the computer screen over their heads, where the number of Catherine’s flight showed green.
Boarding, Calgary, Gate 79
.

“I wish I could be with you.”

“It’s all right,” Catherine reassured her.

People were pushing forward. A few glanced in their direction, picking up the tension in their body language, looking twice at the faces, occasionally nudging one another as they recognized them.

Jo wrapped her arms around Catherine. “Please take care of yourself,” she whispered.

“I’m going to bring him back, Jo,” Catherine said. “Soon, okay? You’ll be standing right in this airport, right here. We’ll walk back through those gates. I promise you.”

She kissed Jo’s cheek and walked away.

Watching her, Jo felt an almighty wrench in her chest. She knuckled her hand against her heart, trying to draw breath. She wanted so much to run after her, to go with her, to step off that plane in Calgary. To come down into Gjoa Haven. To walk out with her wherever she was going. She wanted to do that. She wanted to help.

And she wanted to be in Great Ormond Street. She wanted to watch the next transfusion, to will the blood through the lines, to stare at Sam’s vein, the little vein showing blue in the crook of his elbow, the pulse. She watched it with a kind of obsession. Not the Hickman line, where the drugs pumped. But just that little blue spot under his skin on his arm. That was her signal of life. While the vein there flickered, he was still with her.

God, it was so much to ask for. So much to demand. The life of a child. The life of John Marshall. Two lives, in a world of daily destruction. Two survivals where so many others did not survive.

The weight of it pressed down on her. The sight of the departure gate swam in and out of focus. She could just see Catherine, her tall frame, her dark hair. She was so frightened that Catherine should be going alone. That she wouldn’t come back.