Landfalls (22 page)

“What are you talking about?” Langle demanded.

“Please just come up, sir.”

Climbing up the stairs, Langle guessed the natives had come back out in their canoes, hopeful of getting more iron, and that one or more of them had managed to clamber up onto the deck. Both he and Lap
é
rouse had instructed the men to keep the natives off the ships that morning. While pretending to work out a trade, they would take things—axes, iron bars, rope, clothing, anything not lashed down. Too few men remained on board to guard against this right now.

But once on deck, he saw that that wasn't it at all. He joined a small crowd—everyone still on the ship—at the port rail and looked down. The
Boussole
's small boat was pulling away from the
Astrolabe
. Langle recognized Lieutenant de Boutin. There were six other men in the boat with him, all of them soaked. Water sloshed in the bottom of the boat. Boutin had lost his hat.

“The soundings expedition,” Langle said. “Back already?”

For a moment no one spoke. Tr
é
ton de Vaujuas, recently promoted from ensign to lieutenant, looked around as if hoping to find an officer more senior than himself. Finding none, he cleared his throat: “Sir, Monsieur de Boutin said they were caught in a violent outgoing tide at the pass.”

“The
pass
? What were they doing there?”

Vaujuas hunched his shoulders as if to deflect the question. “He said the current drove them there. He managed to get free of it. But their pinnace did not.”

Langle felt an electric surge of alarm. “It capsized?”

Vaujuas nodded.

“But its men—Lieutenant d'Escures—?”

Vaujuas shook his head.

“And
our
pinnace?”

Vaujuas shook his head harder. “Monsieur de Boutin lost sight of it in the confusion. He thought they might have come back before he did.” He stopped, but as Langle continued looking at him, added shakily, “They haven't, sir.”

Langle looked behind him, toward the southwest, the direction in which the three boats had gone that morning, willing the pinnace to reappear from behind the island. Perhaps the La Borde brothers and the seven crewmen they had gone with were still out there, wending their way back. Perhaps they had managed to help the men from the
Boussole
's capsized pinnace. Perhaps in his distress and hurry to return, Boutin had missed all of this. But there was no sign of them. Instead, Langle saw a group of native canoes approaching—canoes rowed with great speed and urgency, the speed and urgency of bad news. No, he thought. No, make this not be. Turning back to the rail, he put his glass to his eye and watched as Boutin and his men were helped up the side of the
Boussole
. One sank to his knees on reaching the deck and had to be helped away. Boutin was the last to climb aboard. Langle watched as Lap
é
rouse, his round face looking oddly deflated, stepped forward and grasped Boutin by the arm. In the moment before he led his officer away, he looked across and seemed to catch Langle's eye. Confusion, disbelief, dread, entreaty—was it possible for a single look to convey all that? Langle put the glass down. He wondered what his own face betrayed. The only sensation he felt was a creeping dryness at the back of his throat.

The natives arrived in their red cedar canoes, all of them talking at once in their highly fricative, sing-songy language that even the expedition's savants could make no sense of. But no interpreter was needed to read the horrified excitement on their faces. Their lithe hand gestures were clear enough: they'd watched from the shore as two boats capsized at the mouth of the bay. The same mouth that had nearly devoured both frigates the day they arrived—how was it possible? They all knew the danger. And the La Borde brothers—oh, why had he let them both go? Langle clenched himself against a dizzying wave of shock and anger and regret.

“Monsieur de Langle!” Lap
é
rouse was calling over through a speaking trumpet. “Lower gifts to the canoes. Make it clear there will be more, much more, for the rescue of even one man!”

Langle shook off his torpor and motioned for Vaujuas to comply; the young lieutenant leaped into action, relieved to have something to do. Lap
é
rouse called over again. He was sending the
Boussole
's longboat to search the southern shoreline. “Send your longboat to the northern side,” he shouted. “Do you have an officer to spare for the task?”

“I'll go myself,” Langle shouted back.

*   *   *

The entrance to the bay was now so still it seemed impossible that a disaster had just occurred there. Langle, standing at the stern of the longboat, felt his panic and grief evaporate strangely at the sight, as if the drama of the last hour had been so much playacting. He could see several native canoes and the
Boussole
's longboat making their way along the opposite shore. With one of his own men bent over the side taking depths to ensure against running aground, Langle could almost imagine that they were in fact the soundings expedition, and that nothing was amiss.

“Sir, there's something over there among the rocks,” one of his men called back.

Langle put his glass to his eye and scanned the area the crewman had pointed out. Yes, there was something there, something not part of the natural landscape. He felt a sickening return to the task at hand as he directed the rowers to approach the object.

“It's the grapnel from Monsieur de Boutin's boat,” the same keen-eyed man announced. “Shall we try to grab it, sir?”

“Yes.” Langle watched as the men wrestled the anchor off the rocks with a long pole and hauled it on board. Its cablet was still attached to it, and the men clucked in wonder as they examined the end that had sheared off the boat. Langle said nothing, but he knew what they were all thinking: only a boiling sea could have spat an anchor back out onto the rocks. He tried to imagine for a moment such a sea, the two doomed boats floundering in its waves, the cries of drowning men inaudible over the roar, their open throats filling suddenly and fatally with tide water.

“Captain de Langle.”

He looked up; his men were waiting for him. “There's a convenient landing just ahead,” he said. He chose four men to join him on foot, then instructed the men left in the boat to continue their search along the shore. They agreed to meet when the sun was directly south. He knew they would not be late; the fear of getting caught in the reverse current when the tide came back in through the pass weighed heavily on all of them.

He headed southwest with his men, toward where the northern side of the bay ended in a long, low spit of land. It curved in toward the mouth of the bay like a lupine fang, and was a place that might snag survivors, wreckage, bodies. They spread out along the bay side of the spit, and Langle found himself alone, with the silent bay before him and a narrow band of spruce trees separating him from the ocean on the other side. Sometimes a gap in the trees would let in a windy blast and the roar of the ocean. Langle stepped into the bay once, thinking a shiny thing he saw there might be a button from one of the officer's jackets. But it was a flat yellow pebble, rubbed perfectly round by its time in the sea. He pocketed it to send home to his son, Charles, who was almost two years old. By the time it reached him, of course, he would be closer to three.

He spotted something gray and rounded on the rocky shore, and his stomach contracted with dread and hope. But a step closer revealed that it was just a dead gull. He was relieved, but only for an instant. The only thing they had recovered so far was the anchor from Boutin's boat, the boat that escaped. An apprehension that they would find nothing—no one to bury, no mementos to send home, no spar from the lost boats, nothing even to confirm that the accident had occurred—grew in his mind. It would be as if two boats and all their men had simply vanished from the world. He kicked the dead gull into the water with a curse.

A voice made him spin around. A native girl, eleven or twelve years old, he guessed, stood under a spruce tree watching him. He didn't understand what she'd said, of course, but he did notice how the language that sounded so harsh spoken by the native men was less grating coming from her. She was barefoot, wore a sleeveless goatskin shift that hung unevenly above her knees, and at her hip held a small round basket filled with berries. An assiduous berry-picker, Langle thought, noting the twigs and leaves stuck in her black, shoulder-length hair. Her lips were purple. She had a drop of juice trapped below her lower lip—but no, it was a piercing. He wondered what she was doing there; the spit didn't seem like a place where berries grew. He smiled at her, but she didn't smile in return.

He stepped closer and sat on a boulder. She didn't speak again, but she didn't seem afraid either. Even in his distress he was pleased by this. He liked to think he was the sort of European who put natives at ease. “We experienced a calamity today,” he said. He took his copper canteen from its pouch, pulled off the cork stopper, and drank a long, cool draught of water. “We're looking for survivors,” he said, then took another sip. The girl watched him in silence, her eyes betraying nothing he could read—not compassion, not wonder, not understanding, not even curiosity. He offered her the canteen but she drew away, her purple lips thinning in what he guessed was disapproval.

“This water,” he said, “it's the best thing about this sorrowful place.” He drank again, then found his eyes filling with tears. He was aware of the girl's nearness, and his body tensed with the certainty that she would touch him. But instead she stepped back, her eyes looking past him up the beach. Langle turned to see one of his men approaching.

“We haven't found anything, sir,” the man said when he came within earshot. He looked wary, frightened even, but when he noticed the girl, he stopped, and his pale eyes widened in open interest.

Langle stood up and glanced behind him at the position of the sun. “We should go back,” he said. “The tide will be in soon.”

The sailor stood, still ogling the girl. Langle spun the man around by the shoulder. “She is a
child
.”

“Oh, no, sir, I—” the man protested as Langle marched him off.

Langle looked back once, but the girl was gone. He was sorry. He felt sure she knew about the accident; perhaps she'd even witnessed it from this lonely strip of land. She must have surmised he was looking for survivors or bodies. Yet they could not talk to each other. Something about that—the shared knowledge and the inability to communicate about it—had been soothing.

They were in the longboat, rowing back to the
Astrolabe
, before he missed his canteen. The girl—she must have taken it. She had distracted him with her voice and her purple mouth and that dispassionate stare.

*   *   *

It could not be put off any longer: his next duty was to go to the
Boussole
and meet with Lap
é
rouse. First he returned to the
Astrolabe
to wash up and put on his formal coat. When he entered his cabin, the sight of the dead otter on the table startled him extremely. Its exposed flesh looked painfully raw, like a burn. The whiskered face, so charming in life, looked cruel—one eye half-shut, the other open and staring, while the stiffened jaw muscles revealed a sharp row of bottom teeth. Had it only been that morning when he'd been cheerfully skinning the creature while disaster struck not one league away? He tried to swallow, but his throat felt sandy, his tongue large in his mouth. He moved to the wash basin and rinsed his face, then reached for his pewter water pitcher but knocked it to the floor.

“Fran
ç
ois,” he called. “Fran
ç
ois!”

The boy appeared in the doorway, rubbing the back of his hand under his nose.

“Clean this up,” Langle said. “But first, get me some water.” Waiting for Fran
ç
ois to return, he watched the spilled water spread across the floor then sink into the grain of the wood, staining it dark. He imagined it melting from the snows and glaciers above the bay, then growing brackish as it flowed toward the ocean, brackish and turbulent, turbulent enough to drown two boatloads of men. Fran
ç
ois returned with the refilled pitcher, but Langle waved it away. “My coat,” he said hoarsely.

A few minutes later, sitting in the
Astrolabe
's small boat with only the silent boatswain's mate for company, his mind lulled into numbness by the rhythmic slap of the oars, Langle wished the short trip between the two ships could last forever. It wasn't that he didn't wish to see Lap
é
rouse; he wanted—
needed
—to see him. Only with the commander, his friend since the American War, could he allow himself the luxury of grief. But he also understood that once they saw each other, it would become impossible to ignore the enormity of what had happened. The expedition would not sail the next day, of course. They would have to continue searching for the lost men, no matter how futile the endeavor. Then there would be the surviving men to console, burials for any bodies they recovered, a memorial for all the dead, the sale of the lost men's possessions, the reassignment of their duties, and afterward, reports for Paris, and—oh, God—letters to the families.

He thought of the powerful Marquis de La Borde, and his mind recoiled. The marquis had not wanted his sons to serve on the same ship. “An ocean voyage is still a dangerous endeavor, even in this scientific age,” the marquis had said. Langle had promised to keep them safe. He'd specifically promised not to assign the brothers to off-ship expeditions together. That was when most mishaps occurred—when men left the safety of their ships. And until this morning, he had kept his word. But the brothers' request—it had been so reasonable! Refusing would have seemed churlish, arbitrary. But how could he explain this to the marquis, now that both sons were lost?