The Ice Child (40 page)

“No, not really,” he agreed. “But pressure gets to all of us. And I wanted to know.”

“He’s a match,” she echoed, hardly daring to believe him. “How good a match?”

“Almost perfect.”

“Perfect …” she breathed.

He took a scrap of paper out of his pocket. He had written a number on it.
AZMA 552314
. He pressed it now into Jo’s hands. He had a desperate, really desperate, urge to take her in his arms, to hold her, to give her strength, to take the pain from her. But he stopped himself, fearing to take advantage of her and of the moment.

“This is the donor number of the match,” he said. He closed Jo’s fingers over the piece of paper. “Among John’s things will be a donor card. On the card will be written that number. If you ever wanted to double-check, that would be your proof.”

“A match,” she repeated. She closed her fist over the paper and brought it to her lips, still looking at him. “Oh … thank you so very much,” she whispered.

Thirty-two

The snow was falling softly, drifting without wind. It had traveled for days down the empty stretches of Victoria Strait, silent, phantomlike, heavy with thick, palm-sized flakes. A thousand-mile curtain being drawn across the sea.

In such weather the whales in Lancaster Sound broke the surface in huge numbers, raising themselves out of the life-rich water and into the fantastic silence of the air. There was no sky anymore, only a compressed white world. There were no stars at night. There was not a breath of wind.

It was very rare to have such a prolonged snowfall. In any one year the falls in the Arctic might not be more than four or five inches, at most. But 1848 was not a year like any other year. This was the year that the Eskimo, for decades to come, would call
tupilak
. The ghost.

Nothing lived in it.

Or, at least, nothing lived in it for long.

Three months before, the men of
Erebus
and
Terror
had found four miles of ice ridges between them and the King William coast. They set out at eleven o’clock on April 21, and had only gone for an hour before they reached the first ridge. One of the officers, Fairholme, had climbed to the top of it, to assess the route forward. The jagged fold of ice was forty feet high, and when he got to the top, he saw the ridge extending at least a mile in each direction, and directly ahead the ice lay scattered about in acres of rubble. Sometimes, between the blocks, the frozen floe showed through, looking like a flat sand beach rippled by retreating waves. He had turned and called down to the first sledge party.

“There’s no other way,” he shouted.

They ascended the ridge.

Four men went first, trying to flatten the ice with spades and picks, to make a channel through which to haul the boats. Once done, a dozen men were attached to the front of the boat with harnesses and ropes; the remaining eighteen were stationed on either side and at the back. They were already cold, but the effort of simply standing their ground on the racked ice shelves made their feet colder still, as they jammed their boots into the ledges to get purchase.

As they leaned on the ropes, those at the front felt the weight dig into their shoulders, arms, and backs, almost cutting the blood circulation from their chests and throats, such was the load. Those hauling at the sides slipped and fell, slipped and fell, the ropes slipping through their gloves. Each loosening of the ropes dropped them into the snow; they took hold again of cables coated with snow and ice. Eventually, even before they got to the top of the first ridge, their gloves were soaked through, their boots caked with ice, their coats and trousers wet.

The boats on their wooden runners were hell on earth to pull, let alone lift. The contents, wrapped in tarpaulins and secured with rope, might as well have been blocks of marble. The sweat broke out on their skin and froze. Their hair, slick with sweat, froze on their scalps. The sun goggles cut into their faces.

It took an hour and a half to negotiate the very first ridge. By the time that they stood on the summit, it was one in the afternoon. And as each man labored to the top, he fell silent. For there was nothing else to see when he got there but another ridge, and another, and another.

Not a man said a word. They descended the ridge, heaving and leaning backward on the ropes to prevent the boat from careering to the bottom on its own. And as soon as they reached the bottom themselves, they walked hardly ten paces before they started to climb again.

It was six o’clock before they stopped for the night.

They put up the tents, muscles aching, lungs scorched with the effort. Everything that they touched froze and stuck to their fingers; within minutes the canvas tents were rigid, their material cold enough by morning to have snapped in pieces had the breath of the occupants not kept a tiny current of warm air. As the men camped, the cooks melted down ice, and brewed tea from a fire that took an age to take light. They ate lukewarm bouilli from the tins, and raisins that they had to keep in their mouths before the fruit thawed. Crozier recorded a temperature of minus thirty-two that night.

It was four days before they reached King William.

It was almost as if Fitzjames had waited to get there.

The second-in-command had been carried in the boat for the last mile, wrapped in bearskins, and when the surgeon came to look at him once they had erected the first tent, the man looked peaceful.

“James,” Goodsir said, “can you hear me?”

Fitzjames barely opened his eyes.

“James …”

“I am tired,” Fitzjames said.

Unpacking the boat for the cooking utensils, they found that even the whiskey that had been under Fitzjames’s feet was frozen solid.

“Don’t sleep,” Goodsir said. With his own hands numbed beyond feeling, the surgeon chafed Fitzjames’s hands, chest, and arms. He leaned him against his own body and rubbed his back through the thick wool coat and sealskin wrap.

Fitzjames’s gaze flickered to the tent flap and came back to the surgeon. He whispered something.

“What is it?” Goodsir asked.

“Apple blossom now,” he murmured. “In England.”

Goodsir held his hand. “We shall all be in England before long,” he told him.

Fitzjames shook his head. Goodsir listened to his shallow, scratchy breathing. Outside, the wind picked up. The last party was having trouble pitching their tent. Goodsir could see two men sitting on their sledge, heads drooping. He dreaded that bodily look.
Sleepy comfort
, the men called it. The desire to sleep when you did not feel the cold any longer.

He looked back at Fitzjames.

In the short interval of his looking away the man had died.

They buried him in the morning, using precious energy to cut down through nine inches of ice to lower him into the scant water of the shoreline, the ground behind them being far too hard to dig.

Finding the cairn left by Gore the previous year, they had unearthed his message and added their own.

Fitzjames had insisted upon writing the account; it had taken him almost an hour. Crozier had indulged him the time, and was glad now that he had. For James had fretted at his own invalidity. He had sat painfully upright inside the first pitched tent, composing the message while one of the able seamen had held a light for him.

25th April 1848
.

H.M.Ships
Terror
and
Erebus
were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues NNW of this, having been beset since 12 September 1846. The Officers and Crews consisting of 105 souls
—
under the command of Captain F.R.M. Crozier here—in Lat 69 37’ 42”, Long 98 41’. This
paper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831, 4 miles to the northward
—
where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in June 1847. Sir James Ross’ pillar had not however been found, and the paper has been transferred to this position, which is that in which Sir J. Ross’ pillar was erected
—
Sir John Franklin died on 11th June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 Officers and 15 Men
.

James Fitzjames, Captain H.M.S
. Erebus.

The message had been shown to Crozier when Fitzjames had finished.

Crozier had looked at it for some moments, regretting that so long had been spent describing the location of the cairn pillars. There was no room left for him to note their proposed direction, other than to squeeze a few words at the very bottom of the page.

F.R.M. Crozier, Captain and Senior Officer

And start on to-morrow 26th for Backs Fish River
.

They lightened the sledges here. If they were to encounter any more ridges, they needed less weight.

They threw aside clothes and cooking stoves, pickaxes, tin cups, a medicine chest with all its contents, a sextant, a gun case, canteens, and books.

Crozier almost screamed in frustration. He looked at the pile left behind—stacked neatly in rows—and saw the stoves and axes and shovels, but felt sick at heart and crushed. He walked over and kicked at the stoves with his boot.

“We have four more, sir,” Fairholme told him. “They are all duplicates.”

Crozier stared at him. “We’re overloaded.”

“There’s nothing else. Sir.”

“Show me your pack.”

Fairholme was shocked. “
My
pack?”

“Show me your pack!”

Fairholme turned out his things from the sledge. Crozier unwrapped a brass curtain rod and a piece of lightning conductor, and a brass handle and plate. “What are these for?” he demanded.

“To deflect lightning,” Fairholme said. “It was your own instruction, sir. Lightning conductors on the tents.”

Crozier paused a second. He couldn’t remember what his orders had been only the day before, let alone when they had left the ships. “Leave them,” Crozier ordered. “Brass handle, brass plate …”

“For barter,” Fairholme told him. “Metal … your order, sir.”

Crozier flushed scarlet. “Don’t recount my own orders to me!” he shouted. “Leave them!” He hauled the package from the sledge himself and threw it onto the pile. Incensed, he walked up and down the waiting rows of men. “If there is anything of weight in these packs, dump them,” he yelled. “Everything of weight except weapons and cooking apparatus. Everything!”

The men did not move.

“Everything!” Crozier yelled.

No man stirred.

Crozier stared at them, seeing the exhaustion. He knew that they couldn’t think what was in their packs, most of them. Let alone decide what to jettison. He felt morbidly, dangerously angry. Acid rose in his throat. Their implacable, dogged expressions stared back at him: dumb, loyal beasts to the slaughter. Ice flurries, vicious little ripples blowing off the packed snow, cut at their faces.

“Move on,” he ordered.

He caught a look of the deepest disappointment and injustice from Fairholme, but he couldn’t bring himself to say a word to the man.

They walked.

The journey along the King William coastline was a little better; they made an average of two miles a day, and the temperatures were up, almost ten below.

For a whole day they walked through snow gullies. The ridges of ice were not as bad as those by the ships, but they were bad enough for all three sledge parties to find it easier to follow the troughs between the ridges, which were fortunately lying northwest to southeast. The wind was less in the lee of the ridges, but the snow was worse, thick and cloying.

Augustus Peterman had been the lead man on the first sledge, and only relinquished his place at midday. He handed over his rue raddie—the line arranged to draw as near as possible to the line of the center of gravity—to one of the ship’s stokers, a fierce little Liverpudlian, whose hands still bore the grimy marks of his trade.

“You did well,” Crozier told the boy.

Gus looked at him with empty eyes.

The team, having changed men, tried to get the sledge started again, but it was terribly hard. The snow was knee deep, and the weight of the load drove the runners into it, so that there was only any real forward movement when a little speed had been achieved. Both Gus and Crozier joined the team at the back, pushing and heaving until the forward runners lifted slightly, and the men leaned hard on the traces, hauling with their bodies at a thirty-degree angle to the ground.

No one commented anymore at an officer doing the men’s work. A pair of hands standing idly by could not be tolerated.

Once they were moving, Gus stood up. He passed his hands over his eyes.

“What is it?” Crozier asked him.

“Nothing, sir.”

Crozier looked hard at him. The lad’s eyes were running with water, smarting at the snow. It wasn’t sunny, but nevertheless the color and cold made the eyes stream, the head pound.

“Where are your goggles?”

“I can’t wear them, sir.”

“Why not?”

Gus looked at his feet, his arms hanging by his sides. “Imaginings,” he said.

“Imaginings?” Crozier repeated. He glanced around. The sled and its team were ahead by thirty yards. “You must wear the glasses,” he said.

“When I get warm, the sweat makes my eyes sting,” Gus told him. “And then, when I’m not pulling, the sweat ices.”

“If you walk without them, you will get snow blindness, and then someone will have to lead you,” Crozier pointed out.

“I don’t care,” Gus whispered.

“Put them on,” Crozier ordered.

Gus did so with exaggerated slowness. When he had finished, he looked at the crews ahead. “How many are there?” he asked.

Crozier frowned at him. “How many what?”

“Men, sir.”

“On this team? Thirty-one, Gus.”

“Thirty-one,” Gus muttered. “Thirty-one.”

Crozier took his arm, worried by the question and by the dead note in Gus’s voice. “Walk with me,” he said.

Gus did as he was told.

“Wipe your face of sweat, and cover it,” Crozier told him.

“I am cold inside,” Gus said.

“Wrap the scarf tighter.”

“Inside my skin,” Gus murmured.

Crozier pushed the boy in front of him and began to talk, as their boots sank into the drifts.