The Ice Child (9 page)

The two men faced each other before Smith, spitting out of the corner of his mouth, turned away.

Torrington squeezed Gus’s shoulder. “Pay no heed to the sound of wind,” he whispered, and smiled. “Find yourself a berth.”

Gus looked, but the men had commandeered the hinged-lid boxes to stow their gear, and there was nothing left for him to do but to put his canvas roll down in a corner. He pushed it hard up against a stack of cartons, all with the stenciled marking,
Soup and bouilli
—
Goldner’s Patent Preserved Provisions
—
137 Houndsditch, London
.

“They cans got here yesterday,” another man told him. “Supposed to have been here and stowed a month ago. But got here yesterday,” he repeated, grumbling. “Now can’t get them below.”

Gus didn’t care. The high boxes were proof against drafts, at least. He could make himself a bit private if he were careful, curled up. And the thought that this was a true navy ship, and down the deck only a few feet away were true navy officers—the captain only just past the ladderway—and the idea that this ship would not smell of whale oil like all the others he had known, but have men aboard who knew botany and medicine and magnetism and trade, and had sailed to the southern spheres—well, that made it a floating palace, a kingdom of the favored and few. Franklin himself—whom Gus had not yet seen—had been governor in the Australian colony of Tasmania, and was refined and religious and soft voiced, they said, and a man of many talented parts, and a gentleman, and of respectable age and figure. No such man ever went to sea in a whaler and stank of grease. No such man would talk to crew like his uncle’s.

While he scrubbed the deck—his daily task—he thought of the difference between Crozier and Franklin. Crozier was a plain-speaking working seaman, they said. He could be relied upon, and he knew the Arctic and the natives who endured their lives upon it, the Esquimaux. Crozier, Smith told him after barely a week at sea, was a hunter who could bring down the caribou and trap foxes. Crozier was a singing man, Smith said, with a fine Irish voice, quite fair and light. And Crozier could dance, and did dance, with the Esquimaux women, and he could play a penny pipe, and he could tell good stories, and he arranged theater plays and helped the men act in them. And he was a jolly sort, Smith said—all this information imparted while Smith hung in a hammock bunk above him at night, and the ship heaved and rolled—yes, the captain was a true jolly sort when he was not black dogged, as all men were black dogged sometimes without light or women or change of company.

“Course,” Smith told him one night as they ate at the galley table, “he’ll never take command of a voyage, like Franklin.”

Gus had stuffed the last piece of bread greedily into his mouth. “Why?” he asked.

“Never command an expedition. He ain’t no gentleman.”

“He is too,” Gus objected.

Smith just laughed. “He weren’t brought up with a silver spoon in London,” he said. “He’s like the rest of us, ballast. Be he the best that ever were on the sea, bring his ship through fire and storm and monster, even find the Orient—you’ll see. They’ll not give him a knighthood like Ross. They’ll not have him to see Her Majesty. Not him.”

There was a silence around the table.

“I’m not ballast,” Gus finally said.

“We all are, boy,” Smith retorted. “Think we’ll partake in the glory when we get home? Think that? Think you’ll sit down with fine ladies? Think Parlyment will grant yer a living? Think they’ll hold any parade for yer?” Smith began to laugh. “No, they won’t. And neither will they for he.”

A couple of the seamen opposite nodded assent as Gus glanced around the table.

“Ballast,” Smith repeated, wiping his tin plate with his sleeve. “Needful for a ship, boy. Make no mistake. But not one of them, like Sir John. Not us, lad. And not Crozier. Not him.”

The voyage across the Atlantic was stormy.

The
Erebus
carried heavy sail, and the ship roared on through high seas, occasionally losing sight of the
Terror
. On June 27 a thick fog came down as they rounded Greenland. On board the
Terror
they could see nothing, not even the sturdy little
Baretto Junior
, the transport that accompanied them.

Gus was allowed up on deck that morning. Alongside him at the rail was Wildfinch, a boy of nineteen from Woolwich, who had suffered terribly with seasickness and was able to stand, in the little swell of the fog, for the first real time.

“Are there Esquimaux here, Gus?” he asked.

“Yes,” Gus said. “All down this shore, and Danish.”

“And where we dock, in Disko?”

“Yes.”

Wildfinch turned to look at him. He had a broad, flat, open-looking face, very thin hair for a lad, and skin with little red lesions, like red fleabites. Torrington had said that Wildfinch came from Whitechapel, a place that Gus knew only by reputation. There was a rumor that Wildfinch’s mother was a pure-gatherer, scouring the streets at night for animal droppings to sell to tanneries. The other men said it as a joke, but Gus thought it a better living than others in Whitechapel. At least Wildfinch’s mother wasn’t a whore, or a thief.

He felt sorry for the lad, who, at seven years his elder and a good foot taller than him, nevertheless seemed lost.

“Are they wild?” Wildfinch asked.

“Who?”

“The Indians.”

Gus smiled. “Not as wild as anything in Whitechapel,” he said.

Wildfinch reddened.

“They are good hunters,” Gus said. “They’ll come alongside. They’ll barter. You can give them something, a piece of soap, or candles, or cloth, and they’ll give you maybe a tobacco pouch. It’s all in skin, Robert. They sew skins something perfect, they do. Furs and the like.”

Wildfinch looked out in the direction of the coast, east of them somewhere in the drifting gray mist. “Hunters,” he said to himself.

By next day the fog had cleared. The ships sighted each other, and they ran in a fine show up the Greenland coast. They saw the first ice, all they ever hoped to see, bergs floating in open water. The ice masters of each ship were out in navigation; Crozier was up on deck for hours.

On June 30 they crossed sixty-six degrees north.

A small case was brought up from Crozier’s cabin, and the first of the cylinders unpacked. Gus saw it tossed into the sea, a little copper rod that soon faded away.

By July 4 they were in Disko. It was bedlam in port. Everything from the transport ships was unloaded and reloaded again onto
Erebus
and
Terror
. The ten bullocks that they had brought from Stromness were taken out of the hold of the
Baretto
, led blinking onto the dock, and slaughtered before the ships. Gus went down with a contingent of men and helped butcher the meat, stripping out the bone and tendons and parceling it up for freezing in the hold. As soon as they left port and headed west, the ships would become natural refrigerators.

Gus didn’t mind the guts and bone and blood. He was well used to it from the whalers, where they flensed the carcasses on deck and stood knee-deep in warm fat and flesh. It never entered his mind to question the necessity, and he held the bullocks’ ropes and beat them about the head to stun them when they pulled against the tethers. There was nothing to it. Life was meat. Meat was survival. That was the only equation that mattered.

When it was all done, the ships were weighed low down in the water, groaning with foodstuffs and coal and barrels. The weather turned fair; the sun beat down on them. Word went around the ships that the ice was far open to the west; it was very warm, the sea would be warmer than usual, the passage easier than anticipated. The bergs that floated in the Baffin Sea were testimony enough. All the Passage lay waiting for them, its gates unguarded in the Arctic summer. In less than eight weeks, they said, they would be in Alaska.

They sailed from Greenland on July 12.

The atmosphere in the
Terror
was unlike anything that Gus had known in the hard business of whaling. There was a recital on the open deck one night; there was singing; there was a service and prayers. There was even a little dancing. They felt the sharp stream of the ice-laden wind, like a small painful blow to the chest when first breathed in. And the seas were bright, and the icebergs beautiful, and the sails dazzling, and they felt they were God’s ships in God’s ocean, on the highest mission, with God’s mercy and blessing. They were the most fortunate of men.

And the only thing that spoiled Gus’s sailing in these few summer days was the sight of Crozier himself.

The officer stood late in the day, every day, looking forward from the very edge of the bow. And on the very day that they entered Lancaster Sound, and hailed the whaler
Enterprise
as they passed, Gus saw a strange expression on Crozier’s face.

He hid it well as he came down and passed the boy.

Crozier even smiled then, and nodded toward him, making a show of pulling at his cuffs and wrapping his coat closer around him. He went below, and Gus watched him, worried for the first time, more worried than he had ever been on any ship.

For the look in the captain’s eye had not been confidence in God’s mercy and grace, nor pleasure in the ship, nor excitement at the conquests they were about to make.

It was less complicated than any of that.

It was fear.

Six

The phone rang in the early hours of the morning.

Jo struggled up from sleep. “Hello?”

“Jo, it’s Gina.”

“God, Gina. What time is it?”

“Nearly one.”

“Where are you?”

“At work. Listen …”

Jo rubbed her hand over her face. “What the hell are you doing at work at this time?”

“You call this late?” Gina replied. “You want to work on a real newspaper.” Jo made a face into the receiver. “Listen, they found him.”

“Who?”

“Who d’you think? Marshall.”

Suddenly, Jo was wide awake. “Doug Marshall?”

“Your very man. Frozen like a fish finger, but alive.”

Thank you, God
, Jo thought, and surprised herself at the rush of emotion. “And his guide?” she asked.

“Marshall broke a leg,” Gina told her. “It was the Inuit guy that got through. Big hero stuff. They picked Marshall up an hour ago.”

Jo stared out through the curtains that didn’t meet. She saw nothing but cloud, the low sky yellowed by the light of the city.

“Are you there?” Gina said.

“I’m here.” She swung her legs out of bed. “When’s he due in England?”

She could almost hear Gina smile. “I’m going home,” she said. “Chase your own story, girlfriend.”

The night was beautiful.

John thought that he had probably never seen a night so beautiful, and then, slipping as he came around the corner of Trinity Lane, just past the gates of Caius, he thought that probably it wasn’t so much that it was beautiful, but that he was drunk.

He steadied himself on the wall, and ahead of him she stopped and looked back.

“Got a stone in my shoe,” he said.

Catherine Takkiruq laughed softly, not fooled.

“Hey,” he said.

“What?”

“Come here.”

He could hardly make her face out in the shadows, but he could see that hair. She had taken off the fabric band as they had come out of the bar, and in the streetlights he had seen the blue sheen of it.

“Stand up and walk straight,” she murmured, half laughing, half reproving.

He did as he was told. Or the best he could.

They emerged at last in his road and stopped by the door to his flat. He gazed up at the sky and saw the stars between scudding clouds.

“I’m going home from here,” Catherine said. She held out her hand.

“Going,” he repeated. He looked down at the hand, shook it with a sense of ridicule. He wanted to kiss her, not shake her hand. “You can’t leave me,” he said. “I was going to show you the Franklin stuff.”

“Maybe another time,” she said.

A little bolt of panic shot through him. She would turn up this street, and he would never see her again. “I never thanked you properly,” he said. “For the news and everything.”

This time she did laugh, out loud. “You thanked me twenty times, John,” she said, “and bought me four drinks. You thanked me all night, every time someone bought
you
a drink. Now I go home, okay?”

He caught her arm as she turned. “I’m going there,” he told her, abruptly.

“Where?” she asked.

“Where you come from. King William Island.”

She prized his fingers from her wrist. “I come from Arctic Bay,” she reminded him. “And I haven’t lived there since I was six years old, remember?”

“I’m going there,” he repeated. “My secret. Now you know it.”

She leaned against the wall. “Thanks for telling me.”

“No,” he said, trying to sober up. “Thank
you
. Your dad, and all that. E-mailing you to tell me about Dad’s rescue before the papers got it.”

“That makes twenty-one times,” she observed. But she was not impatient at all. “François is Dad’s cousin.”

“Yeah. Brave man. Saved Dad’s life.”

“Maybe,” she said. She looked at the ground, smiling to herself.

He straightened up. “Come upstairs just a second,” he said. “Just want to show you. I know all about your country. All those places. Got a whole mass of stuff. Just a minute, that’s all. Then I’ll come with you to your door, see you home. Promise.”

She paused. “One minute,” she murmured. “Okay.”

She followed him up the two flights of stairs. When he got to his door, he looked back at her, his heart making a lazy little flip of desire. He fumbled with the lock. Then the door opened from the other side.

Amy was standing there.

She looked him over, then Catherine. She flushed deeply at the sight of the other girl. Then she stepped back. “Come in,” she said. “I’m just going.”

John spread his hands. “Amy, this is Catherine Takkiruq,” he said. The sight of Amy’s face had had the effect of a bucket of cold water: he felt suddenly dead sober.

“Is it,” Amy said. She had walked across the room and picked up her bag.