The Ice Child (44 page)

Because she was loved. That’s what it was.

Genuinely loved.

Doug had loved Jo as he never loved her. It had been written plainly in his face. And now he was alive again in his son. Sam. Two years old and the spitting image of his father. In twenty years’ time there would be another Doug Marshall walking around. Looking exactly the same. Smiling exactly the same. Samuel Douglas Marshall …

If he lived.

If he lived
.

It was some time before Alicia roused herself to a sitting position. She eventually looked back at the house. Painfully she got up and walked slowly back to the hall, body sagging with defeat. She sat down in the cool shadows of the house. Listened for a long time to the silence.

She opened the drawer in the front of the hall table and took a bundle of papers from it.

In it were John’s only two letters to her in the past two years. And a photograph of John, herself, and Catherine. She shook her head at it now, smoothing out the picture, where she had folded it to take Catherine from the image and leave just John and her standing together. Reinstated, she saw for the first time how the photograph was not a trio at all. John and Catherine stood with arms linked, their body language relating only to each other. Alicia was standing at John’s side, but it was she—not Catherine—who was the outsider.

Reflectively now, Alicia refolded the photo so that Catherine and John stood together, and she was excluded.

She shuddered.

In the same pile of papers was a small, cream-colored card. She extracted it, looked carefully at it, and then put it, with John’s last letter, in her handbag. Then, grimacing, she wiped her eyes and stood up. She picked up the car keys and went out of the house.

Thirty-six

It was midnight at Great Ormond Street.

Gina had gone home; Jo was asleep on the sofa bed at Sam’s side. The lights in the corridor and in the side ward were turned down.

Jo had been dreaming of John.

He stood in the center of a white space. Hard to see what, if anything, was around him. There seemed to be no ground, no sky, no horizon. She was trying to get to him, but whatever it was underneath her feet only pulled her down. She was fighting with all her strength to lift her body, but she was sinking deeper. She was choking for air, while the outlines of John’s body and the details of his face faded.

That evening had been the worst few hours of them all.

As Gina and Catherine and she had come back into Sam’s room—they had only been out for ten minutes, and he had been sleeping—it was Catherine, going in first, who noticed that something was wrong.

Sam had been awake, his back arched, the gauze vest rucked up under his armpits, and blood seeping from his chest.

“Oh, my God!” Jo had cried. “What’s happened!”

At once Gina turned on her heel and rushed back to the ward desk, to fetch the nurse. Jo scrambled to Sam’s side of the bed.

“It’s the Hickman line,” Catherine said. “He’s pulled the line out.”

“Oh, Christ.” Jo gasped. “What do we do? What do we do?”

Instinctively she pressed on the exit site, hard. She looked up at Catherine. “Where’s it all coming from?” she asked. “Is it from his heart? It must be from his heart. Oh God, oh God …”

Up to now Sam had seemed shocked into silence at his own unexpected strength, and at the size of the tube that had escaped his chest. Now, seeing their panic, he began to scream.

“Don’t do that,” Jo begged. “Sam, Sam … ssssh …”

She gaped at Catherine in horror. The blood was flowing freely between her fingers.

“No!” Sam cried. It was a deafening, high-pitched, inhuman noise. The sound seemed to slice through the room.

The nurse came in, pursued by Gina.

“Where’s the blood coming from?” Jo stammered. “I can’t stop it.…”

The nurse pulled her fingers back a little. “It’s only from the skin tunnel,” she said.

“We only left him a little while … he was asleep.…”

The nurse turned Jo to her. “He’s pulled out the line. It’s not from his heart. It will stop in a minute. It’s all right,” she said, pointedly, slowly, making sure that Jo heard her above Sam’s unearthly screaming. “It’s going to be all right.”

All right …

Jo surfaced slowly, now, from sleep.

For a moment all she saw was the pool of moonlight on the floor, and the blurring of the reflection from the window with the dimmed night-light over Sam’s bed.

And then she sat bolt upright.

Alicia was standing at the door.

The other woman was in complete shadow, seeming more ghost than reality. Then she stepped forward. “Hello, Jo,” she murmured.

Jo stumbled to her feet.

“He’s such a little boy,” Alicia said. “I didn’t realize … so small.…”

Jo followed Alicia’s gaze. Sam was sedated now. He lay peacefully, looking for all the world like an angel, hands crossed demurely at his waist, his face smoothed by sleep. Only a few tiny specks of blood on the very edge of the pillowcase gave any clue to what had gone on just three hours before.

Alicia stretched out her hand and touched Sam’s face.

In an automatic gesture of protection Jo went to Sam’s side, and took hold of his hand. “What are you doing here?” she said.

Alicia still hadn’t taken her gaze from Sam. “I drove down,” she murmured.

“What time is it?”

“Midnight,” she said.

And then she looked up.

Jo couldn’t read her expression at all. She had never seen a true, uncomplicated emotion on Alicia’s face. She had always thought that whatever was in Alicia’s eyes was the product of some theatrical lie—not quite real, not quite true. It had been impossible to fathom Alicia’s true feelings under all the posturing.

But now there seemed to be none of that left. Alicia’s face had been stripped of all its defenses.

“I brought something,” Alicia said.

She fumbled with the catch of her handbag. At last she brought out a card. She gave it to Jo.

The James Norberry Trust
, said the lettering across the top.

And John’s name.

And the number.
AZMA 552314
.

Jo didn’t need to go to her own bag to know that this was the number that Ben Elliott had given her. John’s donor number. The final proof of the match. She didn’t need to check because she had carried that number in her head, knowing that if she ever saw it again, it would be a kind of talisman. A charm to ward off evil.

“There’s something else,” Alicia said.

She had a letter in her hand. She had taken it, with a trembling hand, from a creased envelope.

“John wrote to me,” she whispered. “I went down to see him. He was leaving, I couldn’t stop him. I—” Her voice broke. She took a breath. She held out the handwritten page. “If it would help you,” she said, “this is where he’s gone.”

Richard Sibley’s office number and address were printed along the top.

Jo took the page. She gazed at it.

Quite suddenly Alicia turned away. She got to the door again before stumbling against it, only just managing to hold herself upright.

Jo rushed around the side of the bed, John’s letter still in her hand. She touched Alicia’s shoulder, and just for a second the two women stared into each other’s faces.

Then Jo flung her arms around her.

“Oh, forgive me,” Alicia wept. “Please forgive me.”

Thirty-seven

When he got to the rock, Gus was too tired to sit. He lay down, with his face on the ground and his arm resting on the stones. There was no more snow, no sleet. Not even the wind laden with the fine grains of ice. In fact, the temperature was above freezing, and there had been rain the night before. Gus stared out over Simpson Strait.

They had left the ice behind and had emerged, last week, close to latitude sixty-eight. The sea was unfrozen here. It moved at a sluggish speed, carrying its burden of floes, gray-blue on the deeper blue of the water. Dirty ice, old ice. Ice from the great choked fields where they had left the ships. So many miles south, the ocean had at last freed itself of that solid, suffocating embrace. King William was an island. The Northwest Passage existed, flowing out in front of them. But there was no one to care. Least of all the four men of the
Erebus
and
Terror
who were left alive.

At last Gus managed to raise himself and pull one or two of the larger stones toward him. He pulled and pushed them into place: lifting them was beyond his strength. Then he got the canister out of his pocket. They hadn’t even been able to seal it—they had nothing to make a fire, nothing to solder with. So they had rolled the message and pushed it into the canister and wound a piece of leather around the top, and bound it.

He put the canister on the flat top of the larger stones and scraped the pebbles up and over it. The effort made him want to weep. His naked fingertips stuck to the rain on their pitted, granular surface. Soon the container was covered, but by such a pitiful little heap of rock that he knew no one would ever find it. So much for the final cairn that Franklin’s crews would ever make, he thought.

Two hundred yards away, down the shard-strewn slope, they had pitched their last tent. Looking back now, Gus could see how badly it had been done, now that he was away from it. The tarpaulin was not taut, and it moved. The edges had not been weighted properly: one corner had escaped the stones.

Slowly, Gus raised himself onto his elbow. He scraped at the closest rock with his fingernail. The thin, acid-green covering came off in dry flakes. He opened his mouth and put it on his tongue.

His mouth hurt badly; even the lichen flakes were hard to move around. Yesterday they had shot a bird, but the act of walking out to where it had fallen, and bringing it back, had exhausted them. They had sat crouched over it, using a table knife to cut through the flesh. They tried to chew, but their gums were swollen so much that as soon as they chewed, their mouths bled fiercely.

Gus got to his feet. He set off down the slope at a snail’s pace. He hadn’t walked very fast for weeks. When he had summoned up the courage to look at his feet then, he saw that the toes were black, and he had put his boots back on and not looked again. He had lost sensation from just below the ankle in the right leg; the left was better. He still felt the anklebone there.

At the tent on the shoreline he shuffled down to a kneeling position, hunched against the salt breeze. He didn’t want to go into the tent. He didn’t want to know what was being said in there. He didn’t want to be part of the final conversation. Those prayers and absolutions.

Last night there had been an electrical storm. They had sheltered in the tent, huddled together, wet through as the sleet penetrated the tarpaulin. The lights around them had been truly fantastic, slicing across the water, visible for miles, blue shafts of energy that raced off the sea and swung up the land like racing horses, stallions pounding their hooves.

He’d hoped the devil was coming for him.

He’d hoped it would be quick. If the devil was what sinners deserved, then Gus would no doubt see the devil’s face soon enough. He would know what it was to be swept out of one life and plunged into hell. But the thought didn’t terrify him as it would have done once. Hell at least would be full of fire. He thought that he could exist in an eternity of boiling heat. Heat as penetrating as ice. Heat to set the blood alight. Heat to melt his heart, char his flesh. A burned body would have no desires and have no capacities. Least of all would he think of his starvation. There would be nothing left of him to feel that scourge.

Hunger was not the empty belly of his childhood. He had once thought so—thought he had felt what it was not to have eaten—but now he knew that every other bodily sensation had been just a shadow of this one. Hunger was a rattling drum, coating the throat with saliva. It was a fist squeezing your stomach. It was an invasion, a deprivation. But it was nothing to the last ten days without food.

Starvation was something else entirely. The pain bent you double with its probing shock. It was a knife in the muscles. Eventually you stopped thinking of the meals that would be waiting for you when you reached home. You stopped thinking of the stews with the flour dumplings floating in their delectable grease and gravy. You stopped thinking of potatoes and beef. The smell of fish cooked in port, off braziers right on the dock. You stopped thinking of it, because you forgot what the smell was. You forgot the feeling of food in your hand, your mouth, your gut. Your thinness became wooden, not flesh. You became dry, cracked through like meat smoked for days on end. You were like pemmican, or beef jerky. And, last of all, your heart died inside you.

When men recovered from scurvy, the old skin dropped off their faces in peeling lumps. They unwound, like layers of onion, like the peel from an apple. The skin underneath would be babylike, hairless, fragile.

But that wouldn’t happen to them. They weren’t going to recover. They would die in a few days, even if they took the offering that was being made, and being accepted no doubt, at this moment.

Gus couldn’t remember the name of the man who had died last. He thought it might have been Abraham. Abraham, like in the Bible. Abraham Seeley, from the
Erebus
.

What had Abraham done, in the Bible? Gus wondered.

He tried to think. Offered to sacrifice his own son, Isaac.

There had been no Isaac on the ships.

There was no one, then, to sacrifice, but that man, who may have been Abraham, or may have been one of the others who had come with them from Point Victory. Daniel Arthur, quartermaster. William Goddard, captain of the hold. George Kinniard. Reuben Male, captain of the forecastle in
Terror
.

Any one of them.

Or, none of them.

Because all those men had ceased to exist. They were not men, now, the four of them. They were just shadows of men. They were the very essence and manifestation of their own starvation. Images only. Ghosts in a frosted glass.

He looked across the water, at the blur of gray beyond the sea. Across the strait was Canada. Hundreds of miles away in that direction were the Hudson’s Bay outposts. Fort Churchill, Fort York, Severn Fort, Albany, Moose Fort, East Main, Fort George. They called that country Moosonee, Manitoba, Rupert’s Land. There was a Little Whale River there, and a Great Whale River. The natives spoke Sakehao and Ketemakalemao. His uncle’s ship had gone down that coast once, driven by storms. There were settlements there. At Albany Station there were eighty families. The missionary had told them so.