The Ice Child (27 page)

For a moment all their thoughts flashed to the cooking galleys. To the pots and utensils, the knives, the plates. Their eyes strayed to the glasses of port before them all.

“No one knows what causes it,” Stanley said, “or how it can be prevented.”

“But all the food is boiled,” Fitzjames commented.

Crozier opened his eyes and leaned forward. “What did Sir John last eat?” he asked.

The officers’ cook, Richard Wall, was brought in. Wall had been sitting morosely outside, aware that Stanley thought the food was somehow to blame for Franklin’s death, and whispering his fears to John Diggle, from the
Terror
. When called, he felt that he was testifying in a court—perhaps his own court-martial. He was already flushed as he stood in front of them.

“I washed everything,” he said, when questioned. “My stoves are clean, sir. My cooking pots too. You may see them, sir. Please, sir, examine them. I am a clean cook.”

“What did Sir John eat two nights ago?” Crozier prompted.

Wall pressed one set of fingertips into the knuckles of the other hand, to stop himself from obviously wringing them. “The officers ate roasted beef.”

“From the tins.”

“Aye, sir. But Sir John ate pork.”

Crozier looked at Fitzjames. “He ate a different meat from the rest?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. He expressed a wish for pork.”

“It’s true,” Fitzjames said. “I remember.”

“And the pork was boiled, the same as the beef?” Crozier said.

“Yes, sir …”

Crozier frowned. “And?”

Wall had blushed deeply. “I put the pork in last of all,” he said. “But it boiled the same, sir.”

“For the same amount of time?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, Wall,” Crozier said. The man was dismissed.

Inside the great cabin, Crozier rested back on the seat and rubbed his eyes with one hand. “Is it your opinion, Mr. Stanley,” he asked, “that this disease could be present in the tins of pork? Perhaps is some illness that was introduced during the canning, and is not here on the ship, but inside the tins? And has been there since we took them on board?”

Stanley glanced at Fitzjames. He did not want to contradict a senior officer. “I don’t know, sir,” he said, finally. “In all truth I do not know.”

“We have eaten pork before,” Goodsir said.

“Yes,” Crozier agreed. “We have.”

Abruptly, he stood up.

Every man there looked at him: an Irishman who had worked his way through to his rank, whose bearing was not that of an officer such as Fitzjames, but who now was promoted to lead them all. When Francis Crozier had been given the second-in-command in England, no one believed that he would ever succeed to such a position. He bore his newfound responsibility poorly, Fitzjames thought. His eyes were red rimmed. Crozier had been weeping—Fitzjames had seen him weep at Franklin’s bedside. He disapproved of such behavior, but he did not say so. He merely looked away from Crozier’s face.

“No man is to eat anything more of the pork, until every tin has been examined for leakage or damage,” Crozier said. “We will continue to eat the beef.” He drew his coat around him.

The officers withdrew.

Crozier watched them go; then, left alone in the cabin, he paced the lockers.

He could not rid himself of one other thought, a thought so terrible that to mention it again—he had hinted at something like it on Beechey, to Sir John—would only cause greater alarm. He could not rid himself of the idea that there was something else wrong with the tins. When he looked around himself daily at the crew, especially at boys like Augustus Peterman, he could not help thinking that they seemed worse than might be expected. Even accounting for the winters and the lessening of rations, and the scurvy, there was something else wrong. They were too pallid, too irritable, too easily tired.

What obsessed him most of all was that, when a man fell very ill, as Torrington had done, and they gave him officer’s rations from Goldner’s tins, he seemed to get worse, and not better. He ought to have rallied, at least for a while, eating the richer food. But he had not.

He had noticed something else. Men like himself, who did not always relish meat and preferred the pickled fish or vegetable, or even the caramelized fruit, seemed to him to be much better in spirit than their colleagues. Men who—here he bit his lip and smiled wryly—men who liked their drink, as he did, and who perhaps occasionally drank in favor of eating … men like him seemed fitter.

Why should that be? he wondered. It did not make sense. If it was something in the tins, something besides this filthy botulism, would it not have made itself manifest by now? They had checked and re-checked on Beechey. They would check again now, for leaking, for decay. They would boil the food. But if it were something else …

He frowned, frustrated. He could not shake the fear that there was some invisible enemy among them, weakening them by degrees.

But he had no idea what.

His fingertips trailed along the books.
The Vicar of Wakefield …
Shakespeare’s sonnets. Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
. Tennyson and Wordsworth. He had been thinking of Sophia all day. He had been thinking of that canister, and his message.
And the stately ships go on
. What had possessed him to do such a thing? It was not a pretty poem. It was full of despair. He had not felt particular despair on the morning he had written it. He had only felt what he had felt all along … unhappiness at losing her, and dismay at Franklin’s reliance upon certain courses of action. But he had not had a broken heart … or, more precisely, he had a heart that had now mended.

It was perhaps an ungentlemanly thing to do, to write that message. If the canister was picked up, and it were returned to Lady Jane Franklin, and her niece read the inscription, then Sophia would know. She would realize that he was speaking of her. He had said the same line to her, half in humor, the smile fading on his face, on the day that she had refused him. “Well,” he had said, “my stately ship shall go on, Sophia. I shall be a lone sailor.”

She had not replied. She had looked up at him sorrowfully.

He had pressed his case too fast, he knew. Forced her to react too swiftly. If he had waited, perhaps another year, she might have accepted him, no matter what the pressure from Franklin and his wife to refuse him still.

He should not have written the line.

She would be angry with him for that, when he returned.

As he held the volume of Tennyson in his hand, there was a knock at the door. Surprised, he turned around. It was Stanley.

“What is it?” he asked.

Stanley came in and closed the door behind him. “I am thinking of Lieutenant Gore,” he said.

“Gore?” Crozier asked. “In what respect?”

Stanley’s face was grim. “What, of Goldner’s provision,” he asked, “did Lieutenant Gore take with him?”

It was June 22 when Gore’s party returned to the
Erebus
and
Terror
.

They saw them coming across the ice, and Crozier himself went out to meet them.

Gore had marched to the coast of King William Land, a distance of four miles from the ships. It had taken him four days. There he had left a note in a stone cairn, on May 28. He had put it in a canister and secured the tin case with solder. The note had given the position of the ships, and continued,

…
having wintered in 1846–7 at Beechey Island in Lat. 74.43.28 N., Long. 91.39.15 W., after having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat.77, and returned by the West side of Cornwallis Island
.

Sir John Franklin commanding the Expedition
.

All well
.

Party consisting of 2 officers and 6 men left the Ships on Monday 24th May, 1847
.

Gm.Gore, Lieut
.

Chas. F. Des Voeux. Mate
.

The note had been written on the
Erebus
before Gore had left. He and Des Voeux signed their names. Franklin, too, attached his signature, although in an unfamiliar handwriting. No one noticed that the years quoted at Beechey were wrong.

After leaving the note at the cairn, Gore had marched south for twelve miles and reached the south side of Back Bay, where he had built another stone cairn and left a duplicate of the first message.

He and his men saw that Victoria Strait did indeed continue to the west, as Franklin had always said, and that, if the ice melted, there was a wide way forward.

On June 11, the very day that Franklin had died, the party turned back for the ships, and by way of celebration at the enormous effort of their mission, and having done all that was demanded of them, they cooked themselves a meal, opening the second case of Goldner’s tins.

Lieutenant Gore died three days later, on June 14.

When Crozier met them out on the ice, Gore’s body, and that of two others of the men, were being pulled behind them on the second sledge.

Twenty-one

It was early on Tuesday morning that Jo saw her doctor.

She had been there only the day before, at Eve’s insistence, for a blood sample to be taken from Sam.

“I’m not worrying about this,” Eve had told her then, “and neither should you. It’s a precaution, that’s all.”

All last night, bathing her son and putting him to bed, Jo had repeated this information to herself, even after the receptionist had telephoned late in the afternoon to tell her that an appointment was fixed for eight forty-five the following morning.
Eve is not worried
. It was the last thing she thought of before finally falling asleep.
There is nothing to worry about
.

“Has the blood test come back?” she had asked the receptionist over the phone. “Is that why I have to come in?”

There had been a rustling of paper. “I think so” was the reply.

“What was the result?”

“I think that the doctor would like to discuss that with you.”

She drove into the parking lot now, narrowly missing another car that was trying to reverse out. The driver scowled at her; she barely noticed him. Behind her Sam was fretting. He had already thrown his toys—kept in a hanging affair on the back of the driver’s seat—onto the floor of the car.

“We’re here,” she told him. She got out of the car, and retrieved his Beanie Baby, and gave it to him while unlocking him from his baby seat. She hoisted him onto her shoulder. “Be good now,” she whispered. “Show Dr. Jowett what a good boy you can be.”

They were waiting for her when she got in. Looking over her shoulder at the patients waiting, she realized that she had been given an appointment before regular doctor’s hours. The little gnawing ache in the pit of her stomach grew suddenly.

Dr. Jowett stood up as she came into his office. He came around the side of his desk. “Hello, Sam,” he said.

Sam hid his face in Jo’s shoulder. “He’s in a bad mood,” Jo said. “I wouldn’t get out of the driver’s seat in traffic to get Beanie back from the floor.”

Jowett smiled. He indicated the chair to one side of the desk. Jo sat down, with Sam cradled in her lap.

“How has Sam been?” Jowett asked.

“Fine,” Jo said. It was a reflex action, a defense. Against what, she didn’t know. “Well,” she relented, “not exactly fine. All the usual baby things.”

Jowett glanced at his notes. “We had a chest infection a couple of months ago,” he said. “An ear infection …”

“The usual baby things,” she repeated. “I mean, it was winter. A lot of kids had that cold that wouldn’t go away.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “And his mouth ulcers …”

“He hasn’t had one for ages. It was when I weaned him. He was allergic.”

“Did you find out what to?”

“Very milky stuff,” she replied. “Some yogurt … cream desserts …”

“Right,” he said.

“He was a bit sick.”

“Right,” he repeated.

She stared at his profiled face. Quite suddenly she saw a pulse beating in Jowett’s throat, at the side.
He’s afraid
, she thought, quite objectively.
He’s afraid to tell me
.

“What is it?” she asked.

He looked up. “Jo,” he said, “I’m afraid that Sam is a sick little boy.”

All she could think of, at that moment, was that she had been right. Jowett
had
been afraid. He’d just said so.

“Is it the blood test?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why? What did it say?”

Jowett shuffled the slip of paper and Sam’s notes before replying. “He had a deficiency in his blood,” he told her. “A low platelet count. Low red count too.”

Instinctively, she tightened her grip on Sam. He objected to the pressure, turning his face up to hers. She stared at Jowett. “What does that mean?” she said.

“Well,” Jowett said, “many conditions lead to a reduced blood count. It means that the body is fighting something. It might be a viral infection.”

“Like a chest infection?”

“It might be a viral infection,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken. “A disorder of the immune system, or a result of drug treatment, a dozen things. Whenever we have a serious illness, our body fights back. It has to produce the right kind of blood. At the moment Sam’s blood isn’t doing that. It’s laboring, if you like. Trying to keep up, but not achieving it.”

“And did that cause the bruising?” she asked.

“Perhaps.”

“But”—she hesitated—“don’t you get that with meningitis? Bruises that don’t go away? That’s septicemia, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t that kind of bruise,” Jowett said.

She laughed. “How many kinds of bruise are there?” she said. “A bruise is a bruise.”

“We need to do more tests, a full blood count, and a blood film report, and possibly something called a chromosome analysis.”

She shook her head. “Just for a bruise …” Suddenly her face was on fire. Her skin seemed to hurt all over. “He fell on his tractor,” she whispered, as if, in some distorted way, this was where Sam’s problem had come from.

“You need to take Sam to the hospital,” Jowett was saying. “I’ve made an arrangement for you this morning.”

She tried to concentrate. “Now?” she asked.

“Yes. Straightaway.”

“I have to go to the hospital right now?”