The Ice Child (7 page)

When he was ten, Doug had offered to take John to Port Royal. But Alicia had drawn the line at Jamaica. It was too long, she said. Two weeks, in the height of summer. What was she expected to do with herself for two nights, while they sunned themselves?

They went to the Royal Dockyards at Portsmouth instead.

“It rains in Jamaica too,” Doug had told him, trying to cheer John up the first morning. They were standing in line to see the
Victory
. John was vastly disappointed: the glamorously painted black-and-gold timbers were too much like the pirate ship in Disney World. He wanted to see the kind of ships his father worked on: he had looked for hours at report photographs, and knew that the only really interesting stuff was a raft of carefully numbered fragments.

The wreck of the royal yacht of Henry VIII was more like it.

“I knew some of the crew who raised her,” Doug had told him, as they went through to the
Mary Rose
. They looked in the museum at the registered remains: the worsted clothing, the bronze muzzle-loading guns, the mattress packing, powder scoops and powder flasks and arrows and yew longbows.

His father had stood for some time, deep in thought, before one of the displays. John had wanted to hold his hand. He tried hard to resent him and all the times he had not been at home, and all he could find in his heart that day in Portsmouth was this overwhelming hope that his father would put his arm around his shoulder, or grasp his fingers. He wanted his hand to be gripped, to feel his father’s skin. He wanted to bring Doug back from wherever he had drifted to.

But his father never really came back to them at all. Even when he
was
home, even when John was sitting next to him in the car or watching TV, or at the dinner table, he would look up and see a familiar expression on Doug’s face: he wasn’t with them. He would be immersed, instead, in some private, inner picture. He would be at the wreck of the
Lord Western
in British Columbia, suspended in a murky tide over the ship’s log cargo in Sydney Inlet. Or near Nice, in the middle of the Baie de Villefranche-sur-Mer, fifty feet down, the wreck leaning forty-five degrees to port in sand and mud sediment, the wreck that had been sunk in a hurricane in 1516 with her transport of artillery. Or he would be in Aboukir Bay in Egypt, on the body of
L’Orient
, which went to the bottom in August 1798, blown to her death by Nelson off the beaches west of Alexandria.

Nowhere that he could ever be reached.

By the time John reached sixteen, he no longer wanted to go anywhere with Doug. He’d given up on ever commanding his father’s true attention. He’d accepted, with adolescent bitterness, that he was somewhere in the sidelines of Doug’s life. That he came maybe second. Maybe third. Maybe fifth, sixth, or worse, after dozens of sea-covered ships. He came after Franklin, he suspected. The Franklin enigma that constantly preoccupied his father, especially after Greenland. He suspected that he meant less to Doug than Franklin or Crozier, Franklin’s first officer. Crozier, the one that supposedly survived for a long time after Franklin, who had lived out on the ice after the ships sank. The hero Crozier, trying to command over a hundred dying men after
Erebus
and
Terror
went down. He grew hot, stifled, at the idea of these men who lived in his father’s heart.

“I’m fucking alive,” he wanted to say. “I’m not a dead hero. I’m alive.…”

That was where the first thought of eclipsing his father’s achievements had begun, he supposed. It was a secret he had silently nourished for some time now. Years. Maybe all of five or six years. The thought had grown in his head until it seemed it had always been there, a kind of preordained quest. He dreamed of finding what his father had never been able to find. Some relic of the Franklin expedition. Some astonishing clue. Maybe even a last journal from the ships. Perhaps then his father would give him some respect, for the first time.

Much as he tried to keep the bitterness out of this picture, he found that whenever Doug was the center of attention, as he was now, a mean little voice would inhabit his head, a voice full of teenage grief that would build itself to a fury. He leaned his head on his hands now, picking at the leather seam of the chair. He had an incredible, irrational urge, sometimes, simply to punch his father’s face. Just to get him to look … really look. The pain between them might almost be worth it, he thought, if he could see a flash of realization in that older face. See something like
My God, I’ve hurt him. Like this. Like blood on the fist. Blood in the mouth
.

He sighed deeply now, rubbing his hands over his hair. He stood up, stretched. He looked around at the bookcase, stuffed full of site reports. His eye trailed along the titles on the spines, the names of excavations.

The year that John was sixteen, there had been an excavation in Turkey at Serçe Limani, a Hellenistic wreck that had been carrying a wine cargo when it had gone down in the eleventh century. That name—the very name he could see right now, in Doug’s handwriting on one of the reports—held a crucial meaning for them both.

Doug had arranged for John to go with him to Turkey. It had been done as a birthday present. A coming of age.

“I don’t want to go,” John had told Doug.

His father had been surprised. He had already bought the flight tickets, and had been holding them in his outstretched hand.

“Don’t worry about your mother, I’ve spoken to her about it,” Doug had said.

John knew. He’d heard the argument.

“I don’t want to go,” John had repeated.

Doug had stared at the tickets, then back at his son. “It’s three weeks in Turkey, in the summer,” he said, still mystified. “Look, we go from Gatwick—”

“I’m not going.”

Doug had put the tickets, slowly and carefully, on the table between them. “Why?” he’d asked.

“Does there have to be a reason?”

“Yes, John. There does.”

“Because you’ve spent the money,” John said.

Doug had frowned. “Well, yes, I’ve spent the money.…”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“No,” Doug said. By now it was obvious that he was trying to keep his voice level and calm. “But the money doesn’t matter. I want you to dive with me, John. I want to teach you to dive.”

“Well, I don’t want to dive.”

“You don’t?”

John had leapt up from his chair, blushing at his own lies and the inexpressible fury that coursed through him. He had wanted to go with Doug for years, of course.

“I’m going to Cornwall this summer,” he’d said. True, but only a loose arrangement.

“To do what?”

“To surf.”

There had been a long pause. “I didn’t know you liked to surf,” Doug told him.

“Well, that’s just it,” John had retorted. “You don’t know a fucking thing about me, do you?”

John clenched his fists now, as he stared at the site report, tears tight in his throat.

There had been other invitations, and John had accepted them. But they were not surprises, and he and his father were never relaxed together. Serçe Limani always came between them.

The doorbell rang.

John looked over his shoulder in surprise. He took a deep breath, shook his head at his memories. He went over to the window and looked out.

A girl was standing on the step below him. He couldn’t make out much of her. He opened the window. She stepped back, reading from a scrap of paper in her hand.

“Yes?” he called.

She looked up.

“I’m trying to find John Marshall,” she said.

He stared down at her. The first thought that came to his mind was that the upturned face was not English. In fact, it was like no other face he had ever seen. Not here. Not in this country.

“Wait there,” he called.

He ran down the stairs two at a time, his heart thudding with anticipation, and opened the door to her.

She was smiling a little, standing half on and half off the step.

“You …” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’ve seen you,” he said.

She adjusted the bag on her shoulder.

He could do nothing but stare at her. She was tall, perhaps a little taller than he. She must have been five foot ten, maybe eleven. She had dark hair, tied back. A loose ponytail draped over her shoulder. He suddenly felt incredibly awkward and stupid. How could he say to her, “You’re like the women in the books.” She wouldn’t know which books. She wouldn’t know about De Long, or Kane, or McClintock, or any of the others. And yet …

“Where do you come from?” he asked.

“I’m at King’s,” she said. She held out her hand to him. “My name is Catherine—”

“John Marshall,” he replied, grasping her fingers.

He held on too long; she glanced down at his grasp on her hand. Releasing her at once, he did a thing he could never recall having done before. He blushed beet-red. This was what it was like, then, he thought, to be faced with your own fantasy. Here was a woman from the McClintock and Kane journals, an Inuit girl with a black snake of hair down her back, looking at him with the same kind of slightly knowing expression that he had seen in photographs from the last century.

Fantastic. Impossible. He actually blinked, half expecting her to have vanished when he reopened his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You really remind me of someone. People. Some people I’ve read about.”

Stop gabbling
, he told himself silently.
Stop that, for God’s sake, before she turns tail and runs
.

But the girl did not run. Instead, she calmly finished her original introduction. “My name is Catherine Takkiruq,” she told him. “Could I talk to you,” she asked, “about your father?”

At eleven that same morning, Jo was in Westminster Abbey.

She had intended to go to the House of Commons—there was a contact there, a journalist for one of the tabloids, who had promised her useful background for an interview with an MP that she had scheduled next week. But at the last moment she found herself outside the doors of the Abbey, standing in line at the ticket desk.

The place was heaving with tourists. Standing looking up at the ornate doorway, Jo had realized that, despite working in London for the last four years, she’d never actually been inside the Abbey. She’d never been inside St. Paul’s, or the Tower of London, for that matter. She didn’t know anyone who lived in London who had either.

The queue moved forward, into the relative darkness of the church, and Jo asked the attendant behind the counter where the John Franklin memorial was.

“Around to your left, first on the left.”

She followed the crowds, slowing down as they slowed, surprised by the atmosphere. Probably more than a thousand people were inside this church, but it still dominated them. The roof soared above a wealth of gilt and marble; the voices were hushed by the sheer size. Jo stopped when she had gone a few yards, and fished the papers about Franklin out of her bag. She had run off some sheets from one of the Web sites, and shuffled them now, looking for the description of the memorial.

There was a lot she didn’t need—the muster lists of the crew, for instance. Her eye traveled rapidly down them.

The printout was from an American university; their history faculty was apparently manned by Franklin obsessives. They had listed every single name from the
Erebus
and
Terror
.

Next to each name was a brief biography, compiled, the Web site had noted, from O’Byrne’s
Naval Biographical Dictionary
, published 1849. Just four years after they sailed, Jo thought. The faces and voices and careers of these names would have been fresh in people’s minds when their portraits were drawn up.

Lieutenant Graham Gore
, entered the Navy in 1820.

Jo tilted the page to the side, to get more light from the high chancel windows.

Took part in the Chinese war … portrait in the Royal Naval Museum … “He plays the flute dreadfully well, draws sometimes very well, and sometimes very badly.…”

Jo smiled. She drew pretty badly too. She couldn’t even sketch a map.

Lieutenant James Walter Fairholme
… captured by the Moors in April 1838 when second-in-command of a captured slave-ship.…

Harry Goodsir
, acting assistant-surgeon and naturalist …

Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier
, born in County Down in 1796, second-in-command, an authority in terrestrial magnetism …

James Reid
, ice master, a whaling captain, “rough, with a broad North Country accent, but honest hearted …”

And there were boys, two on each ship.

She bunched the papers together and walked on, looking to the left to see where the small chapel would be. When she found it, she saw that a vast marble monument to General Wolfe dominated the entrance. Jo glanced up at it, and read its inscription.

Slain in the moment of victory …

She looked at Wolfe, lying in the arms of his men, under the flag.

Did anyone die like that anymore? she wondered.

Perhaps in battle. She thought of Bosnia, of muddy erratic trenches through a hillside. Were there any great national causes anymore? She had interviewed so many people who saw their country only in terms of their own success or failure. She hardly ever heard anyone—even those in government—refer to their country’s glory. And yet men like these had died for exactly that, the greater glory of an idea.

She went into the chapel and passed Franklin without seeing him. She turned at the end and came back. Only then did she notice the modest little portrait halfway up the wall.

A marble bust of the commander, in uniform and wreathed in what looked like a fur cape, stared out into the main body of the Abbey. Below him
Erebus
and
Terror
were carved in marble. The ships were shown with their rigging weighed down with ice and icebergs encroaching onto the decks.

As she stopped and looked at it, tourists pushed past.

“Franklin,” said an American voice. “Not ours.”

She smiled to herself. Like her, all anyone knew of the name belonged to another man on another continent. She read the small, neat lettering.