The Ice Child (5 page)

Stopping outside a pub, Jo thought about Alicia. Thought of her smiling. Laughing, even. Thought of opening her arms to welcome her husband home, have a meal waiting, a warm bed.

No, it did not compute.

Alicia Marshall’s face was colder than Greenland itself.

Jo shrugged. There was nothing here, other than the fact that Douglas and Alicia Marshall had a terrible relationship, which enabled him to go ice-hopping at regular intervals without a moment of regret. He probably wasn’t the kind of man, anyway, to sit down in the snow and weep over his private life.

Yet she wondered. She still wondered.

Most of all, she wondered who Franklin had been, what the lure could be. Someone who, by Bolton’s own admission, had been the passion of Marshall’s life.

She looked briefly at the blackboard menu, propped on the wall outside the pub, and went in.

Three

The bear lifted her head. She could hear the plane.

She was on hard-packed floe, and the weather was startlingly clear.

Space lost all perspective here, where there was nothing to measure distance or size. Alone, she was the center of a perfectly flat and featureless world, and the horizon was a line that might have been ten miles away, or twenty. Ice crystals in the atmosphere created a double sun, a central light source with a circle of glowing satellites.

She turned away, toward the dull drone of the aircraft engine.

The Twin Otter was flying low. Richard Sibley, swathed in layers of expedition clothing, sat forward, waiting to take shots through the copilot’s window. He had spent the last week at Resolute, begging space from the base there both to stay over and to take whatever flights he might be able to charter now that the historians had left Beechey Island.

When conditions were right, and luck was in, it was theoretically possible to take the kind of photographs that kept him in business. As far as he knew, he was one of only a handful of Arctic specialists. Because you needed to be more than a little crazy, or bloody minded, to endure subzero work.

Still, when the rewards came, they were huge. Last year Sibley’s image of a semicircle of bull and cow musk-ox, shielding their yearlings, apparently against a blue-gray blizzard—but in reality against him—made him a good income for a few weeks. The fixed, ochre-glowing eye of the bull ox, almost lost in its prehistoric mane, its brow covered by the base of thickly ridged horns, formed the entire frame of one photograph. Almost, but not quite, lost in the center of the pupil was a faint ghost of the ice ridges on which it stood. It was one of those pictures that stopped people dead in their tracks. It was almost impossible to look away from that primeval glare of endurance.

But the musk were evasive today. After making a fuel run to Prince of Wales Island, the plane was heading back. They were skimming the desolate hills, heading out for Peel.

Sibley had the edge of the island in his sight. Rippled ridges of land—much like the corrugated sand left on a shoreline by a retreating tide—swept underneath him. The colors were hypnotic—gray ridges of stunted vegetation, threadbare lichen, striped with snow. Or what had once, perhaps, been snow. Now, he knew, the consistency would be more like icing sugar or thin flour—powdery, fragile. On the ground the thermometer was at minus thirty; the wind speed about fifteen. The equivalent temperature, down on the approaching sound, was probably about minus sixty, or more. It would freeze his flesh in seconds.

It was just then, as they crossed the indeterminate border between land and icebound ocean, that he saw her.

The bear was standing stock still, though the plane was heading straight for her. As he stared down in amazement, he saw, through the lens, the crescent scar on her forehead. His heart skittered through several uneven beats; she seemed to be looking through him, without even lowering her sights in the familiar pose of aggression, let alone turning away from the engine noise.

They passed over her twice. She might have been carved from stone, her fur shimmering in the oblique light.

He had the most unearthly feeling that she was guarding something, though he knew that she had no cubs yet. There was no tag on her, and no lettering on her coat.

It was as if she had materialized from nowhere.

He ran out of film as they made the third and final pass. Cursing, he reached for another camera, and only then did he see that she had turned away. She was facing down the sound, looking south.

He had that last sight of her, her head slowly swinging from side to side, as if seeking a scent.

And then he lost her again, in the glare of the ice.

Four

Jo was at
The Courier
at half past seven the next morning.

Balancing a coffee cup, the morning’s edition, and her shoulder bag, she invaded Gina’s office, sitting down on the corner sofa. Down the corridor she could hear a few voices, but for the main part
The Courier
was barely awake. She kicked off her shoes, glancing at the mound of papers and memos in Gina’s tray. Her editor’s computer screen was scrolling her own design, of an aged tortoise meandering across a five-lane motorway.

Jo smiled to herself and began unloading the contents of her bag.

Within a couple of minutes the sofa was covered, not only with the photocopied sheets on Doug Marshall that Gina had originally given her, but with several dog-eared magazines, a couple of sheaves of cuttings, and four videotapes. Grabbing the first, she crossed to Gina’s TV and slotted the tape home.

As it rewound, Jo glanced to the river outside.

The day was soft, and still, and gray. The water was high, the tide rushing inland. Over Tower Bridge the traffic already flowed, a tide as constant as the Thames below.

Downstairs, in the public reception areas,
The Courier
had maps showing this exact spot on the Thames from the second century to the present day. There was an artist’s impression of Caesar, perched with his legions on the narrowing of the river over the gravel beds at Southwark, preparing to cross to defeat Cassivellaunus. There was the wooden church raised in the seventh century. There were the tenth-century cargoes that in only three hundred years had swamped the whole estuary—ships, in this picture, now streamed past that same crossing.

In the fourteenth-century picture London Bridge at Southwark led to the eighty-one churches in the city, enclosed by the Tower to the east and the River Fleet to the west. The map of medieval London was the first in the group to show wharves on the river, and in Tudor London, quays filled the northern bank.

But by the eighteenth century the Thames had truly disappeared under its floating army of masts; the river was log-jammed with ships from every country in the world. Riverside Wapping was congested with alleys holding every maritime trade, and the London docks took most of the country’s imports—tobacco, sugar, silks, tea, china, drugs, indigo, rum, coffee, and rice. The East India Docks warehouses held palm oil, elephant tusk, wine, and fruit; the Baltic were stacked high with timber and hemp and linens. Tea and tobacco warehouses and exchanges sprang up by the Pool of London.

The videotape clicked as it reached its start point. Jo walked over and pressed play.

After a moment’s static, up came the opening titles of
Far Back
, a television series that had last been shown five years before. Watching it critically, Jo frowned at the amateurish effects of city walls and the cross-section diagrams of ships. As the music died away, it surprised her to see the very image that she had just been looking at from Gina’s window: the Thames on a gray morning, the water choppy as the tide turned. She picked up the tape case and checked the black scrawl along its spine.
Episode 4
, it read.
Maritime London, Douglas Marshall
.

Jo flopped down on Gina’s sofa, and pressed the volume up on the remote. Doug Marshall came into view, standing on London Bridge, looking east on a winter morning. Jo considered him while unconsciously chewing on her thumbnail. She had remembered now the thick thatch of sandy hair, the tall, almost awkwardly long-limbed body. And the smile.

“When I was a kid,” Marshall began, “I didn’t much like boats. The thing I wanted for my ninth birthday was a bike.” His grin became even broader. “A massive bike with a racing saddle, but there you go. I got a book about a boat.”

He turned to lean on the parapet.

“It wasn’t even a new book,” Marshall went on. “I don’t know where my mum had laid her hands on it. It was called
Arctic Explorations.
”

Jo pulled both knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

“Maybe the spine caught her attention,” Marshall said. “There was a guy with a mustache about a foot long, and he was dressed in a fur coat and he was holding a saw, and he was using the saw to cut through a huge thickness of ice to get to a seal swimming underneath.” Marshall started to laugh. “That was more like it,” he said. “Going after a seal with a saw.” He shrugged. “Nine-year-old boys are like that,” he said.

Jo smiled in response.

Marshall was gesturing along the length of the river in front of him.

“You see an empty river now,” he said, “compared to Franklin’s time. Sir John Franklin, who set out from just down this same river in 1845, would have known a city within a city, where every language of the world was spoken and every commodity that could be traded changed hands. The West India Docks were half a mile long, berthed six hundred ships, and were surrounded by a twenty-foot wall. And they weren’t the only ones. Farther down still was the Admiralty’s Royal Victualing Yard at Deptford.”

Marshall turned back to the camera, looking straight into the lens, his expression now more serious. “Vanished,” he said, “like Franklin himself, and the greatest maritime nation on earth.”

The office door suddenly opened. Gina paused a moment before coming in, taking off her coat. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you,” she observed mildly.

Jo smiled. “Hello,” she said. “Sorry. Won’t be long.”

Gina hung the coat up. “What’re you doing?”

Jo waved the tape case at her. “I got these from a guy at the BBC this morning,” she said.

“He must work the night shift,” Gina observed, opening a polystyrene cup of coffee.

“He does.”

“Want some?”

“Um … no.”

“Bacon roll?”

Jo grinned. Gina put a paper bag on the desk, opened it, tore the hot bacon baguette in two, and gave Jo half. They sat watching the screen. Jo had pressed pause, and Doug Marshall’s face was blurred in the shot.

“Ever heard of Franklin?” Jo asked.

“Benjamin?”

“John.”

“Give me a clue.”

“Victorian.”

Gina considered. “No. Never heard of him.”

Jo finished her breakfast, wiping her fingers on a scrap of paper from the wastebasket. Then she reached for the nearest sheet from the pile on Gina’s couch. “You wanted me to find out about Marshall, I found out about Marshall,” she said. “You know what really drives him? Some Victorian explorer called Franklin.”

“Excuse me,” Gina interrupted.

“You know who Franklin was?” Jo went on. “He went to the Arctic to find the Northwest Passage. He set out in 1845 with two enormous ships and a hundred thirty—odd men, and they all disappeared. Just like that. Just vanished into thin air.”

“Excuse me,” Gina repeated.

“What?” Jo asked.

“Did you miss a day?” Gina said. “The one where I asked you to stop chasing up Marshall? There is no angle on this story, Jo.”

Jo smiled. She shoved the papers in Gina’s direction. “Look at those,” she said. Gina looked down on a printout from an Internet search engine.

Franklin, Sir John …

1–10 out of 1,264.

“Franklin, Sir John,” Gina said. Her index finger traced an entry. “
Gaaad
…” She shook her head. “John Franklin born 1786, Arctic explorer … command of an expedition in 1845 … blah blah … some forty expeditions were sent to look for traces …”

“Forty,” Jo repeated. “Victorian England went crazy trying to find him.”

Gina gave her a deeply quizzical look. “And so?”

Jo sighed. “Nothing so,” she retorted. “Just interesting.” She flicked the tape on again. “Here he is,” she said.

The picture on the screen had changed. Now Douglas Marshall was standing in central London, near Admiralty Arch, his fingers tracing a bronze plaque. The camera panned back from the close-up of the memorials to the Franklin crews.

“It wasn’t only the Victorians who had an obsession with finding the Northwest Passage,” Marshall said, “that elusive—and some said illusory—route over the top of the world. John Cabot started it in the 1490s, when he said that there must be a way to the Orient through the ice.” Marshall glanced back at the plaque. “The hypnotic lure of tea and silk and dusky maidens was all it needed for any man worth his salt to start packing his bags,” he observed.

He walked forward. Behind, the traffic of Waterloo Place could be seen threading its way along the road. “Cabot started an Arctic rush,” Marshall went on. “Martin Frobisher in 1576. John Davis in 1585. Henry Hudson, in 1609, who was the first man ever to overwinter in the Arctic, and who—along with his son—was cast adrift in a small boat by his mutinous crew. Button … Baffin … Parry … Ross, who tackled both the Antarctic and the Arctic, and found the North Magnetic Pole.”

“Jo,” Gina said, “it’s a detail, but I sometimes work here.”

“Sorry?” Jo said, not taking her eyes off the screen.

“This is my office,” Gina reminded her.

By way of reply Jo leaned forward to catch what Marshall was now saying.

“The Victorian British, with their mastery of the universe and of everything that crept on the face of the earth—including a few dark continents—were convinced that, if any generation at all was destined to conquer the route, it was them. What was the Passage, after all?” Marshall asked. “Just a few short miles of ice. What was that to the greediest colonizing nation in the world? What were the months of darkness, and the strongest sea currents on the planet? The finest nautical minds of the age talked about it as if it were an afternoon jaunt, brushing aside a few natives, bears, and bits of tundra. So”—Marshall sighed—“they sent their best. They assembled the finest ice masters, royal marines, able seamen, stokers, sailmakers, blacksmiths, quartermasters, carpenters, doctors, and engineers, and Sir John himself, a mere slip of a lad at fifty-nine, and Her Majesty’s Ships
Erebus
and
Terror
sailed from Greenhithe on May 19, 1845. The best-equipped polar expedition that ever set sail.”