The Ice Child (15 page)

“They wintered in Beechey Island in 1845–6,” Bolton said. “They left in a hurry, leaving behind hundreds of artifacts.”

“Why?”

“Why the hurry?”

“Yes.”

Bolton shrugged. “The most popular theory is that the ice suddenly broke, and they had a favorable current. That’s the way it went in those polar ships; you had to keep watch daily, wintering or sailing, for the change in the ice. If you didn’t, you might lose your opportunity, at best. At worst, you could be dead.”

“What kind of thing did they leave on Beechey?” she asked.

“The remains of excursions they had made, in that first winter, to the north of Erebus and Terror Bay, and to a place called Caswell’s Tower, a rock mass a few miles away.”

“To do what?”

“Mapping, primarily,” Bolton said. “Collecting items for the botanists, recording wildlife migrations and sea currents, and the extent and depth of ice, the temperatures …”

“And these things were recovered from there?”

“No,” he said. “A great deal of the relics on or near Beechey were things like rings of stones, to hold down tents, empty meat and soup tins, bottles. Bones of birds that they had killed. And two pieces of paper.”

“Oh?” Jo asked. “What did they say?”

“They were just fragments. One had the name of the assistant surgeon to the
Terror
, Mr. MacDonald. Only that. The name. Then the other said,
To be called
…”

“But how did paper survive,” Jo asked, “in conditions like that?”

“The Arctic is like no other landscape,” Bolton told her. “An item left there, even paper if sufficiently protected, will simply stay put for hundreds of years. Skeletons of animals, or the very occasional Inuit bone, have been tested and found to be hundreds, even thousands, of years old, remaining where they fell. There’s nothing to disturb them, you see. And the permafrost preserves them. Like Torrington.”

Jo glanced up at him. “Torrington?” she asked.

“Petty Officer John Torrington, leading stoker on the
Terror
. His grave is on Beechey. His, and two others’ from the expedition. John Hartnell—an able seaman on
Erebus
—died three days after Torrington. William Braine died three months later.”

Jo remembered Doug’s words on board HMS
Fox. Three died
.

“And the graves are still there,” she murmured.

“Yes. They’ve even been exhumed and examined, by a team led by an anthropologist, Owen Beattie.”

She was surprised. “Torrington, and these others?”

“Yes.”

“But aren’t they … decayed?”

“They’re incredibly preserved,” Bolton told her. “Their burials and bodies provided amazing information, not just about the expedition, but about medical science in the middle of the nineteenth century.”

“Like …”

Bolton shrugged. “Hartnell had had an autopsy. No one had ever seen evidence of such a thing before.”

“And the ship’s surgeons would have done that?”

“Yes,” Bolton said. “It was probably Harry Goodsir. He was trained in anatomy. He was the assistant surgeon on the
Erebus
. The
Erebus
was Hartnell’s ship. Torrington was from the
Terror.
”

“Goodsir,” Jo repeated, almost to herself. Goodsir’s name had been on the Internet printout, she remembered. Goodsir had studied at Edinburgh; he was the younger brother of Professor John Goodsir, an anatomist and morphologist. He had practiced medicine with his father at a place called Anstruther. He had been appointed to
Erebus
not for his medical ability, but because he was a talented and pioneering naturalist. And the character note alongside his name in the muster list had said that Commander Fitzjames had called him “a very well-informed man, who was a pleasant companion.”

She recalled Goodsir’s photograph too. Young, with a very pronounced, intense expression, he had seemed almost schoolboyish.

“Had Torrington had an autopsy?” she asked.

“No. Just Hartnell.”

“Would that mean Hartnell’s death was a surprise?”

“Yes, probably.”

“Three days after Torrington. Unexpectedly,” she said.

“Of course, quite a high proportion of the population had TB then,” Bolton said. “Consumption, they called it.”

“Wouldn’t that frighten the crew?” she asked. “On a closed community like that, another young man dying?”

“It could have spread panic if it hadn’t been properly managed,” Bolton said, nodding. “Perhaps Goodsir was anxious to show the reason.”

“And you said Hartnell’s autopsy showed things we didn’t know.…”

“That’s right,” Bolton told her. “The incision, what they call the Y incision, was upside-down, for instance. Nowadays a cut is made with the arms of the Y extending to each shoulder, and the straight line going down the front of the chest. Goodsir did it the other way around, with the Y arms coming from the point of each hip, and the straight line going up toward the throat.”

“Was he interested in Hartnell’s stomach, then?”

“Well, no,” Bolton said. “Although it certainly suggested that from the shape of the incision. But when Roger Amy and Beattie—who unearthed these bodies—started the new autopsy on Hartnell, they found that Goodsir must have believed that the problem—the cause of Hartnell’s death—was in the heart or lungs, because those were the organs that had been removed and examined.”

Jo frowned. “And Goodsir found TB?”

“He must have done,” Bolton said.

“And then he’d have told Franklin.…”

“Yes,” Bolton nodded. “He’d have told Franklin and the captains, and then the job would have been to bury Hartnell as soon as possible.”

Jo shivered. Her own grandmother had had a word for that sensation.
Someone just walked over my grave
.

“Tell me about Torrington,” she said, trying to rid herself of the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of her stomach. “He was preserved, you said?”

“He certainly was,” Bolton replied. “When they lifted Torrington from the grave in 1984, he was limp, and his head rolled onto Owen Beattie’s shoulder. Beattie said that it was just as if he were unconscious, after they had thawed the grave.”

Jo stared at him. “My God,” she whispered.

“The exhumation was an expert job,” Bolton said. “Beattie and his team really felt for these people. They showed them the utmost respect.”

“I’m sure,” Jo said. But still she shuddered.

“Torrington died of tuberculosis and pneumonia,” Bolton said. “He was only twenty. Everything about him was as if he’d only been buried hours before. There was even a layer of snow on the coffin. It must have been starting to snow as they put him in the ground.”

“You mean there was no decay?” Jo said.

“Basically, Torrington was intact. His eyes were a little open. His skin, fingernails, hair, flesh—his clothes—all intact. As for Hartnell, who died so soon after him, his preservation was nearly as good.”

“And did he die of TB too?”

“Ah,” Bolton said. “This is where it gets really interesting.”

Jo eyed him warily. She wasn’t at all sure what Bolton meant by
interesting
.

“Take William Braine,” Bolton continued, really into his subject now. “He was a tough fellow. A royal marine. He’d seen action, earned his colors. He had a scar on his forehead, his teeth were in poor condition. So poor that the pulp in one of the front teeth was exposed. It’d been broken, and had no treatment. Must have caused him agonies. Now, here was a man used to privations, used to a hard life, used to the sea. He’d survived much worse than this. Yet he weighed only eighty-four pounds. He was really emaciated, a starvation victim.”

“But …” Jo thought. “He died in April, right?”

“Right.”

“Less than a year after they started out?”

“Yes.”

“But they had all those provisions. Enough for years …”

“That’s right.”

“Thousands of cans …”

“Yes.”

She stared at him. “So how could a man die of starvation, with all that food aboard?”

A bell rang down the corridor. The student behind the reception desk came out into the corridor, glancing up at the clock. It was ten o’clock; the doors were opening to the public.

Jo looked away, back to the framed exhibits under her hand. So very few fragments, from the huge bulk of those ships. Three graves, out of 129 men.

Bolton looked down, too, at the few remnants enclosed in glass.

“Both Braine and Hartnell had TB, like Torrington,” he said, quietly. “Both probably succumbed to pneumonia. But it was the speed that it took hold. Because they were, in all probability, weakened already.”

Jo looked back up to him, frowning.

“By what?” she asked.

“They were poisoned,” Bolton replied.

Jo walked out into the fresh air, taking deep lungfuls as she walked alongside Midsummer Common. It was a lovely morning, the air very still, the sounds of the city muted, as if the world were standing still for a moment to appreciate the day.

Still, she couldn’t rid herself of the image of the Y incision, of the examination in the candlelit dark of the ship, of the muted fear of the men. She said a little prayer to herself, to thank God for being born in the twentieth century, for being born female—anything, in fact, that had preserved her from having been born at the dawn of the nineteenth, and of serving on a ship like
Terror
.

She stopped at a florist’s and bought an enormous bunch of pinks. She had no idea how Doug Marshall would react to being bought flowers, and she didn’t really care. They were as much for her as for him. She had to have their scent and color in her arms for a few minutes, to banish the images of Torrington and Hartnell, which lingered in her head.

Doug answered the ring on the bell immediately.

“Come up,” he said through the intercom. “The door’s open. Four flights of stairs.”

He was sitting on a couch with his leg propped on a stool in front of him.

“Well,” she said, “you’re looking fine.”

“I feel okay,” he said.

“Are you working?”

“Just messing.”

She shifted from one foot to the other before she realized that she still had the flowers in her arms. “These are for you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll put them in water.”

“Can you make tea while you’re there?” he asked. “I’d do it myself, but …”

“No problem.”

As she waited for the kettle to boil, she glanced around the room. It was obvious that Doug slept on the same couch that he was now sitting on; a pile of blankets and pillows was stacked alongside it. “This must be really difficult for you, with the leg,” she said.

“Friends come in,” he told her. “One of the secretaries has taken pity on me. She shops.”

“And cooking?”

“I can cook. Anything quick.”

She hesitated. “I was surprised when you gave me the address,” she said. “I thought you’d be at Franklin House.”

“Franklin House isn’t my home,” he said. “My wife lives there.”

She turned to make the tea, feeling awkward. Behind her back, as she filled the mugs and set out the tray, Doug added, “We’ve been separated for five years.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She omitted, tactfully, to tell him that she had already guessed.

Doug was sitting back. Glancing in his direction, she caught a fleeting look of pain. He shook his hand, as if swatting away an irritation.

Jo brought the tray over. “Is there a nurse coming in?” she asked.

“Yes, the district one.”

She considered him. “Is there some medication you want now?” she asked.

He paused a minute, then made a submissive gesture, spreading his hands. “Shit, I thought I’d fool you,” he said. “Top drawer. Just here, next to the couch.”

She looked, took out the bottle, gave it to him. She went over to the sink and got him a glass of water. He swallowed the tablet. As he passed the glass back to her, his hand brushed hers. She felt herself blush.
Damn it
, she thought,
what’s this? I haven’t blushed since I was twelve
.

She busied herself with the glass and replacing the medicine bottle, hoping he hadn’t noticed. “You should be in hospital, or some sort of convalescence,” she said, over her shoulder.

He rested his head against the couch, then looked up at her. “Look, Jo,” he said, “if we’re to get on at all, don’t fuss.”

She said nothing. She sat down opposite him and drank her tea, smiling a little.

She wasn’t at all offended: in fact, rather the opposite. Her father, while he had been alive, had been just this sort of man. Older than her mother by twenty-two years, and fifty when he had fathered Jo, he had been short on conversation and temper, and his turn of phrase could cut to the quick. But he had a soft heart that regularly brought tears to his eyes at the least expected times: watching the TV news, or reading an article in a newspaper. He had been six foot three, and heavily built, and wore a three-piece suit with the inevitable scattering of ash from his cigars. She could summon him at will, sitting in the front row of her school nativity play, looking like an elder statesman, and blotting his eyes with a handkerchief.

“What are you smiling at?” Doug said.

She jolted back to the room. “Nothing.”

“Me?”

“Not you. My father.”

“Great,” he said. “I remind you of your father.”

She grinned at him. Putting down her mug, she picked up the nearest book, which had fallen from the couch, and had been lying with its pages bent back against the spine. She looked at the title,
Field Anthropology
.

“I’ve just been hearing about an anthropologist,” she told him. “Owen Beattie.”

“Ah,” Doug said. “Brilliant. Beechey Island.”

“And this lead,” she said. “The lead soldering on the tins from Goldner.”

“Who’s this from?”

“Peter Bolton. I’ve just been down to the Academy.”

“Why?”

“To talk to Peter Bolton.…”

“But why? For an article?”

“No,” she said. “I’m curious.”

“Never met a woman curious about Franklin,” he said.

“You told me that on the ship.”

“Did I?”

“Yes,” she replied. “You said that your wife had told you that Franklin bored women rigid. Something like that.”