The Ice Child (14 page)

He looked up at Gus. “What will your mother do, without you?”

Gus hadn’t given it much thought. “I have a brother who can fetch and carry,” he said. “He is six now.”

Crozier smiled. “She will miss you in terms of labor?” he said. “More than that, I think.”

Gus considered. He truly did not think that his mother would miss him at all. She had eight children; he had four brothers and three sisters. His two elder brothers were at sea, like him. His sisters, when not at the school, picked rags, sorting them for sale, and unraveling wool to remake and sell. Christmas in his house, since his father’s death, was a hand-to-mouth nightmare, until his brothers came home with their wages. Then, perhaps, they would have a piece of beef, and their mother would have plenty of beer and porter, and more often than not they would sleep by the fire, so much warmer than their beds, and so much cleaner in the ashes than among the blankets. There were no lice in the ashes.

Gus blushed now, in Crozier’s presence, to remember the house.

“They will think of us,” he said. Because perhaps they would this time. Men in the alehouse would ask his mother about her son on Franklin’s ships.

“Are you happy to have come here, Gus?” Crozier asked him.

It was a curious question.

Men did not ask each other, especially aboard ship, which was a job of work, if they were happy. Many complained, that was true; they complained of the lack of light, and of the oil being rationed so that sometimes they had light only from tapers of cork and cotton floated in saucers; they complained of the smell; they complained of the rats, which even ate their hair as they slept. They complained at strong proof whiskey freezing; they complained that the intensity of the cold made the snow hard to walk upon, rendering it like sand.

On the other hand, when in good temper, they sang, and had, in the last week, even sung carols; they had, when Crozier allowed it, races around the ship, with prizes for the fastest man; they aided each other in the worst jobs.

But they did not ask each other if they were happy.

Gus saw in Crozier’s eye a kind of blindness. Just for a moment he glimpsed the black months, year after year.

It passed in a second.

“Yes, sir,” he replied. “Very happy.”

It was New Year’s Day when John Torrington died.

Gus spent New Year’s Eve with him.

Torrington had been quite jolly toward the end of the afternoon; he played chess—or rather, half a game of chess—with Mr. MacDonald, and he asked for a Bible. They heard him singing for a few bars, then whispering to himself. Gus begged all day to be allowed to see him, and finally they relented, and let him forward in the evening, at eight o’clock.

Torrington was stretched out on a bed that had been made for him; a great concession, for only the officers had beds. Two oil lights burned next to him. The Bible was folded on his chest.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It’s me,” Gus said. “Come to see the New Year with you, John.”

There was silence while Torrington’s hand stroked the Bible. “Eighteen forty-six, Gus,” he said, finally, “and I shall be twenty-one.”

Gus fought for something cheerful to say. “And then you shall run away to marry,” he told him.

The man on the bed turned his head. Gus’s heart dropped as he saw how desperately thin and wasted Torrington had become.

“Have you a sweetheart to marry, Gus?” Torrington asked.

“No, sir.”

“What, never?”

“No, never.”

Torrington gave a very faint smile. “What, not kissed a lass?”

Gus colored fiercely. “No, sir.”

Torrington nodded. His mouth worked a little. “Nor I,” he murmured. The light flickered in the nearest lamp, threatening to go out.

With an effort Torrington tried to rouse himself. “Is it snowing outside?” he asked.

“No,” Gus said. “It is quiet.”

“Any bears, Gus?”

“Not yet.”

Torrington felt for Gus’s hand.

John’s fingers were long. Almost a gentleman’s hand. Someone had scrubbed his skin so that you could hardly see the coal dust any longer. His first three fingers were almost the same length. Below the blue-striped shirt Gus could see every small bone. The knuckles looked huge and ungainly. The skin was parchmentlike, as if there were no blood at all beneath.

“Look under the bed,” Torrington said.

Doing as he was told, Gus found a small tin box.

“Open it.”

There was a letter there, and a key, and a little book of verse, and a leather purse.

“Take it,” Torrington said. “You take it, Gus, and give it to my mother.”

Gus didn’t know what to say. This man, above any except perhaps the captain himself, had been kind to him, talking to him as if he were an equal and not the lowest of the crew. This man, in another time, might have been his teacher, using those fine-fingered hands to help him at his books. Torrington had something in him that was much more than his lowly rank; he deserved more than his hell’s-gate task of tending the fires, working in the clouds of coal dust belowdecks. Gus could see it in his eyes: what might have been, in this fine nature, given other chances.

The boy started to cry.

He didn’t want to. The tears came streaming out unbidden. He choked on them, and laid his head on Torrington’s bed.

It wasn’t for some seconds that he realized that there was a noise other than his own gasping, and in sudden horror he lifted his head to see Torrington, his gaze fixed on him, blood at his mouth.

Gus leapt to his feet. “Mr. MacDonald!” he cried. “Mr. MacDonald!”

For two days the ship’s carpenters, Thomas Honey and his mate Alexander Wilson, constructed the coffin.

It was a fine mahogany, measuring three quarters of an inch thick by twelve inches wide, the lid and coffin bottom each made of three pieces: a long central portion, with two shaped sections, attached by dowels to each side. Gus went up on deck, under the canvas awning, and watched as Wilson kerfed the wood to make the shoulders, to bend it without breaking. The men worked in silence and secured the sections finally with square iron nails.

At midday on January 2 Torrington’s body was brought on deck.

He had been washed, and dressed again in his cleaned shirt and trousers. His limbs had been bound to his body, with a length of cotton wrapped around above his elbows. Smaller strips tied his toes, ankles, and legs, and the long hands rested on his thighs. He was laid down carefully in a sweet-smelling bed of shavings that filled the coffin, his head resting on a larger mound of the same, to make a little pillow. A blue-and-white spotted handkerchief had been bound under his chin, and was tied discreetly at the back of his head, to hold the jaw together; but Gus saw, with a clench of dismay, how Torrington’s mouth was still wide in that final grimace, and his eyes were open.

They put him in the coffin and nailed the lid, wrapping the whole in a navy-blue wool blanket, and draping the bier with a flag. Then, from below, they brought what Gus had helped to make in the last two days: a metal plaque, shaped like a raindrop, on which had been inscribed in white lettering,

J
OHN
T
ORRINGTON

D
IED

J
ANUARY
1
ST
1846

AGED
20
YEARS

They lowered him down the side of the ship and went out in a line across the ice, torches lighting their way. Halfway across they paused, waiting for a second line of torches through the midday gloom: Sir John Franklin himself, muffled, coated, and capped, his head bent against the first fine snow that was falling.

Captain Crozier fell in at his side, with Commander Fitzjames, and the two surgeons. Behind them came the men who would fill the grave, one of them carrying a headboard. The service was brief in the biting wind and the increasing flurries of snow that quickly settled on the coffin and obscured the inscription. No time was lost, when the funeral was finished, in filling the grave with the limestone shards. All Gus could think of, as he watched the shovels at work and the stones falling, was that one of the brass handles on the side of the coffin was still upright, and that he ought to have reached down and righted it before it was covered up.

For the following week a curious atmosphere fell over the ships.

The officers continually ferried between
Erebus
and
Terror;
there was much discussion—to which the men were not privy—in the officers’ quarters and mess. Low voices long into the night.

To all the men’s surprise, on the fifth day after Torrington was buried, Franklin ordered that the storehouse be unlocked and three boxes of Goldner’s provisions opened. Gus did not know what passed afterward, other than it was rumored that a few from
Erebus
were ordered to take the boxes to the northeast slope of the island, and there open the entire stock of tins in each box. It was said that Sir John had the tins emptied, and the empty tins stacked neatly into rows, more than seven hundred tins in all, and the meat that had been in them was taken away farther still, and covered with snow.

Gus did not know what to make of it.

He had eaten from the tins himself, as everyone had. The officers, of course, more than most. Torrington had been given officer’s rations, from the tins and the tins only, and hardly any biscuit at all. Vast quantities of their provisions were tinned, all painted red outside, and stamped with the words
Goldner Patent
.

How could there be anything the matter with the tins? Gus wondered. They were lead-soldered tight. The food in them could not decay. It looked all right when he had been given some for his Christmas feast.

When he asked one of the marines, the man shrugged his shoulders. “They found a bad box, I suppose,” he said.

“But why did they open them after John died?” Gus asked him.

“How am I to know?”

“Did something in the tins kill him?” Gus persisted.

The man laughed in the boy’s face. “Kill him?” he repeated. “Cold and consumption killed Torrington. He’d had it before, boy. Don’t you know that? Enlisted on a sea voyage to cure himself, I don’t wonder.”

He’d put his face, grinning, unwashed, close to Gus’s own. His breath was fetid. “Think I’d still be here if there was something in the tins?” His finger prodded Gus’s shoulder. “Think
you
would?”

Gus turned away, went below. Took up the Bible that Torrington had left him. In an hour or two he had forgotten the leering face and prodding finger, and the tone of sarcasm.

But he didn’t forget the seven hundred tins, taken away out of sight.

A bad box, he thought, afterward.

One bad box.

Ten

Three weeks passed before Jo saw Doug Marshall again.

In that time April turned into May, and the two chestnut trees on Jo’s street came into flower, and the aubretia that had somehow found its way into the wall next to her basement kitchen bloomed an improbable, almost fluorescent, lilac. One morning she found herself staring at it, coffee in hand, thinking what spring might look like in Cambridge.

She phoned him.

He took a long time to answer.

“Hi, it’s Jo Harper.”

“Hello, Jo.”

“You sound out of breath.”

There was a pause, then Doug laughed. “I’m lying on the floor.”

“You are? Did you fall?”

“No,” he said. “It’s quicker to crawl.”

“You’re joking.”

He didn’t respond. She heard a huff of air. “Okay, I’m in a chair, upright,” he told her. “I see you sold the story.”

“I sold it everywhere,” she said. “All over the world.”

“Congratulations,” he said.

“I wondered if …” She bit her lip.
God
, why was this hard? She felt sixteen, embarrassed. Tongue tied. “Look, I owe you lunch, at least.”

“For what?”

“For selling my story.”

“You did that.”

“Okay, then. For being a national treasure. Everybody loves you.”

He laughed again. “I’m beating them off with sticks.”

“If I drove up, say, tomorrow?”

“Feel free.”

They fixed a time; he told her his address. When she put the phone down, she grinned at the aubretia, brilliant in its dark corner. When she turned away, she caught sight of herself in the mirror in the hallway.

“It’s just lunch,” she told her reflection.

Early the next day she went straight to the Academy.

Mrs. Cropp was not on the visitors’ desk; a student, sitting behind the counter and doing her utmost to be helpful, put the call through to Peter Bolton. Jo waited twenty minutes for him to come downstairs. When at last he appeared, she stood up and walked over to him, extending her hand.

“You’re very persistent,” he said.

“Could we start again?” she asked. “I promise not to harass Alicia. Cross my heart.”

He smiled thinly. “I’m not sure you exactly harassed her,” he said. “To be scrupulously accurate.”

“Or get in her line of vision. Four-mile exclusion zone, whatever.”

The smile became real. Bolton nodded down at the copy of
The Courier
that she was carrying. “You did a nice job.”

“Oh, you saw it? I brought you a copy just in case.”

“Yes, I saw it. Thanks for the publicity.”

“Look, I …” She glanced over her shoulder, at the exhibit cases. “The last time I was here, I think you had Franklin pieces?”

“Yes, we do.”

“Do you have any time? Five minutes?”

“What is it you need?”

“Would you explain them to me?”

“Are you doing another article?” he asked.

She blushed a little. “Maybe, I …”

“You got the bug.”

“The paper had a lot of inquiries.”

“Yes, so did we.” He spread his hand. “This way.”

The exhibit case was just as she remembered it; the sepia photographs, the silver spoon with the copper repair; the tiny piece of red tin.

“I know what happened in the first year,” she said, resting her hand lightly above the relics, so carefully preserved and labeled on the green baize below the glass. “They spent their first winter in Lancaster Sound …?”