Chapter Text
Mostly, John remembered the haar.
Rising from the sea and dreeping over land, it smothered the coast like a dream, nothing before or beyond it, soaking everything and all like rain never could. It hung in the air, seeping right through to bone, the damp weighing down hair and clothes. One could easily catch a chill, John knew well, brought down from the north in the spring to dissipate like smoke in the autumn.
The haar would take him to sea. That was what his mother warned when he wandered off too far, getting lost in the mist. The haar would lead him to the sea, and in the sea he would drown.
Sucking on the scar atop his upper lip, John thought of his mother.
He recalled much less of her than he knew of her for certain. Her piousness came in parable, but her tenderness came in memory. To him, she existed in her entirety not as the godly women people spoke of, though it was no false assumption of her character, but as his mother.
Once, halfway around the world, David had asked him how she spoke, how she smiled, how she looked. Aggrieved, he couldn’t remember much of her, but only because he didn’t think he would have to. Just a babe of four, no one had warned him to prepare. So, he told him about the lilt in her voice, the spread of her teeth, the stutter of her laughter. Most importantly, though, he told him she was beautiful. She was only beautiful because John loved her, David had complained, like he thought his brother better than such bias.
John was not.
If she were here, things would have turned out differently. Things would have turned out better. Of that John had no doubt.
For certain she would have never allowed him to go to sea. Through the haar, just a voice, he could hear her telling him stay close, my darling but he had already strayed too far. A panic arose inside him. Mother, he thought desperately, staggering blind, hands groping before him. Mother, I don’t want to drown. Mother—
Tap, tap, tap.
John roused and the haar retreated. In the cold, empty space it left behind stood Edward Little.
“I’m on watch,” he said, gloved fingers curling around the door panel he had pushed aside. It did not feel as intrusive as it should. “Will you—I need you to supervise the men taking Seaman Johnson down to the hold. The doctors need the space—”
“Aye, sir,” he said, sitting now.
Edward’s face twitched with a moment’s relief, his mouth ajar with a thank you he need not give. It quickly closed. His brow dropped, followed by his chin. John followed the line of his sight down to his pocket from which he produced the key to the Dead Room. Taking a step inside, he placed it on the table and together they watched it slide to an inch before the edge, following the downward tilt of the ship towards the bow.
As if they required the reminder, the ship screamed in the strangle of the ice.
“I must be off,” Edward told him, then nodded, pausing another moment before he finally did so.
Left alone once more, John stared at the key on his desk but did not reach for it. In his lap, his hands had tightened into fists, the hangs and catches of his fingernails providing an allaying sting across the face of his palms. He flexed them flat against his thighs when the punishment seemed sufficient.
Do not, he began to warn himself, but stopped before he let the thought live.
Steering his thoughts as far from Edward—Lieutenant Little—as he could, he dressed for a trip below, coddling himself in a scarf before stepping out into the narrow passageway. He proceeded along to the crew’s quarters, Mr. Diggle’s profanity already scorching his ears as he passed both he and the others that slept in their hammocks, until at last he reached the sickbay. A small group of men where huddled by the partition, but they parted in his presence.
“Men,” he said in brief acknowledgment, then stepped inside.
The sickbay, fashioned from every spare inch of the forepeak, was full. Some men, nursing missing fingers and toes, were sat pressed into a bunk together, while others, much less alert to the world, rested in hammocks. His fellow countrymen, doctors Peddie and McDonald, were both present; the former assisting a man in the consumption of some watered-down gruel, while the latter was bending his head over that of a man sleeping, like a mother marvelling in the glory of her babe’s breathing. Between them both, wrapped in canvas, was Seaman Johnson.
“Lieutenant,” said Dr McDonald, straightening from his bend. “Here to take Mr Johnson, I presume?”
“Yes,” he said, eyes drifting to where he could make out the impression of Johnson’s nose in the canvas. He did not like the sickbay. “I know how—busy you are.”
“You’ll have plenty of volunteers for assistance, I’m sure,” Dr Peddie said then, head gesturing towards the dividing wall, beyond which the men waited. John thought, briefly, who might be so concerned with his own bones and body when he went, but his mind remained startlingly void. No one on this ship. “He was a good man.”
“God is just. I’m sure his suffering will be nothing in the scheme of his reward,” he said, then lifted his eyes to the room. “Why else would we wish to return to our Father, if it were not better than all of this? Better than beyond our greatest comprehension?”
It was meant as comfort, but it was clear that these men of science—and faith, John had no doubt of that, good Church of Scotland men that they were—did not appreciate such sentiments. Not in their sickbay. They strived ceaselessly for the body to endure, burdened by the taking of another man’s cross, but nothing endured. Nothing was as lovely in this world as with the knowledge that there was no permanence to it, that it might wholly belong to you and no other.
He departed the sickbay with four men: three living and one dead, but each a man all the same.
One thing he knew of Charles Johnson now, John thought as he clambered down to the orlop deck, the temperature plummeting with him, was that he was not so very far from home. Nova Scotia was so tantalisingly close that maps baring its name often caused his heart to skip a beat.
But no, that was not his Scotia.
Crouching, John lifted the lower hatch to the hold and let the men descend before him. The one holding the lantern, William Jerry, went first, his cursing of the cold no doubt tempered by his presence. From below, he called for the others to be careful with Johnson, and mindful of the rats.
Down in the hold, icy water sloshed at their ankles, melted by the residual heat from the locomotive engine that puffed and clanged directly below John’s cabin. So bad was the sound, he had dreamt one evening that he’d been thrown on the lines at Haymarket station as a train passed, though for what transgression he had never quite been able to surmise. With the sound of the engine was the constant scuttle and scratch of rats, their little bodies falling over each other to escape from the light.
Where do you suppose they keep them?
John startled. With the glow of the lantern disappearing towards the Dead Room, he turned towards the engine room. He could taste the coal in the air. He could smell the sewage and waste. He could hear his brother’s voice.
He had asked the question when another one had died. A baby—it had been just a baby, new on earth but still a son of Adam, marked with the sin of humankind. They would be saved by grace if God willed it to be so. That was what the ministers aboard had said: that He was fair and perfectly right in all things, and the question was not how they can be returned to us, but how we can be returned to them.
They should both have been asleep by such an hour, prayers long said, but the mother in steerage had not ceased in her wailing. In Gaelic, he remembered. No doubt ran or burned from her home, the ship to Australia her baby’s cot and coffin.
Do you suppose the babe is on her person? David had asked in an absent whisper.
John turned as he had done in rough sheets. Somewhere in their cabin, a pencil rolled to the floor with a climb and crash of a wave he now longed for against the starboard side. He had squeezed his eyes shut against the pillow, thinking, hoping, praying that wherever they might be, there were no rats. God above, he prayed for there to be no rats.
“Lieutenant Irving!” came a voice from along the hold. “Do you—"
“I’ll be right with you!” he called back, beginning to stagger towards the light by the Dead Room. He fell shoulder-first into the wall when he reached it, thrown by the tilt, and fished the key from his pocket. “Be quick,” he said and unlocked the door.
*
He had never known fear quite like it.
It was akin, he supposed, to the torturous apprehension that marooned in his chest when the time between Malcolm’s letters breached the limit of circumstance. I have offended him, he would fret, trying to remember what he had written. I have upset him. I have displeased him. Most of all, however, he worried: I have lost the only true friend that I have. The only person in this world not bound by blood to tolerate him, gone forever.
But it never came to be. Malcolm, a better man than him, forgave all his wretchedness and kept him in all his nightly prayers. There would always be letters.
He imagined a pile steadily growing throughout the years in the top drawer of his father’s desk, kept safe and ready for his return, God willing. What a joy it would be to be reunited with the single greatest pleasure in his life, the quiet correspondence of his best friend. John smiled into his book.
He was sat in the wardroom, halfway through his book—Rob Roy, a favourite of his on account of his childish wonderment of the Highlands more than any affection his father held for Sir Walter, though George teased him otherwise—when he heard a commotion on the upper deck. Footsteps were racing above him. No sooner had he risen to his feet did Gibson appear with news that a sledge party had been spotted approaching from the southwest.
Edward’s party.
He dressed and joined the men on the deck, searching out George to stand by him. Around them, men cheered the return of their shipmates until it became noticeably clear that something was wrong—that some men were missing.
“Is Lieutenant Little among them?” George called up to the lookout.
In the fifteen, maybe twenty seconds it took him to respond, John felt his heart, stomach and lungs do no quantifiable manner of leaping and squeezing, a nausea tightening his chest and burning the back of his throat. Past foreboding, his mind and body had gone straight to the worst. Grabbing the taffrail with mitten-clad hands, he felt he might be sick.
“Aye, sir,” came the voice from above. “In the boat, sir.”
Like a marionette cut loose of its strings, John let his head fall atop the back of his hands. George slapped his back in exhilaration.
Edward had been blinded by the snow, but only temporarily. In good humour, bandages over his eyes, he told them, “I shall welcome the respite from your unpleasant visage, George,” his fingers curling around the edge of the treatment table, knuckles white. He’d been lucky not to lose a finger, John thought, tucking his own against his chest as he watched Dr Peddie sear a man’s wound where a toe used to be. He gave an unconscious lick of his upper lip.
His good mood did not keep.
Within two days he had forced himself from the sickbay back to his cabin, insisting that he was ready to make a full report to Sir John, sight or no sight, and that he would travel to Erebus if need be. Captain Crozier, in a bout of rationality, had called him a bloody idiot for suggesting as much, an ordered him to rest until better. While the blindness did not bother him much, the headaches certainly came for their vengeance. John could hear his whimpering from his own cabin, over the sound of the encroaching ice and Mr Blanky’s snoring.
Stepping from the wardroom, he stopped by Edward’s door. Raising a hand to knock it, he gave a fleeting look down either end of the passageway and snatched it back as if burnt. This is ridiculous, he scolded himself, moving to return to the solitude of his own cabin when—
“John, I know it’s you. Stop skulking and come inside.”
Like a child caught, John’s cheeks burned a healthy red. By his side, his fingers twitched before pulling back the partition to Edward’s cabin and ducking inside. Though he could not see him, he kept his face to the floor, the heat radiating down the front of his chest and pooling in his gut.
“My apologies, I—”
“Sit,” he said, like an order. John did, pulling the chair from beneath Edward’s desk. “How fares Terror?”
“She’s well.”
Edward hummed. He was propped up on a pillow, a hand tucked behind his head while the other rested flat on his stomach. Most of the skin on his face was peeling where it had been burnt, but shiny with the balm Dr McDonald had applied to soothe it. It had the aroma of what John imagined the inside of a Papist church might smell like.
John shifted. His knee was wedged into the side of Edward’s bunk, the handle of a drawer cutting into the bone. He opened his legs a little wider, letting his hands fall into a clasp between them.
“And the ice?” he asked. “Is there—”
“Nothing for miles,” Edward told him, dour. “No water, no land, no game. Just ice.”
John pressed his thumbs together and brought them to his mouth to gnaw on the nail. Soon he would have to start moving along his fingers, he thought, pulling his hands away again to inspect the damage. Not nearly enough. He returned them to his mouth, eyes set on the swell of Edward’s bicep against which he rested his head, face turned in John’s direction. If he knew what he was doing, he did not tell him to stop.
“I used to love the snow,” he said suddenly. “The way it looked atop of hills.”
He thought of Garbh Choire Mòr, a wound of snow and sharp granite rising suddenly to disappear into the cold grey void above it. But it was not to nothing. Once escaped from its jaws, it plateaued into long, languid waves of landscape that only God Himself could have mastered.
“Not so pleasant up close, is it?”
John rubbed his thumb over his lip.
“No, I don’t suppose it is,” he said. “Should God permit our leave of this place, I shan’t be back.”
Edward breathed out a laugh, humourless.
Inside the cabin, the heat had grown exponentially with the shared warmth of their bodies. It could be like this always, a sordid little voice in his head said, a fire licking down his loins. How much warmer he would be, he thought, rubbing at the damp peak of his sternum as he dared not look at Edward. As if you would know, it spoke again, crueller this time. As if anyone would hold such a shameful man in such a way.
“Do you believe He will?” Edward asked then, startling him from a strange stupor. He sat straight in his seat. “Do you believe God will see us through this?”
“Do you distrust Him?”
“No,” he said, which John suspected was the truth, but maybe not the whole truth.
“Then He will guide you to what He wills for you, for all of us,” he said, as sure in this as his own wickedness. He reached out, placing a hand on the wall of Edward’s berth. “And don’t fret, I’ve warned George what a sin it is to lead a blind man astray.”
*
After breakfast, John returned to his cabin.
By his desk he sat, great coat hung neatly over the back of his chair, and moved his bible—opened at this morning’s choice of scripture reading—to the side. In its place, he reached from his shelf and brought before himself a copy of The History of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland. Once belonging to his brother Lewis, it had fallen into his possession on his last visit home.
Though he held John Knox in no particular esteem, the book, dogeared as testament, had been for him a great source of understanding. Everything was as it was because of this, that, or the next thing. It settled him. It soothed him. He turned to the page most worn. The ink seemed to be leaking from the page into his fingertips, the tiny writing barely legible—as though, he thought with great foolishness, Edward Little had written it himself—and lightening like bones under the sun.
Printed into his memory, it read:
Consider and mark, beloved in the Lord, what we read here to have chanced to Christ’s disciples, and to their poor boat, and you shall well perceive, that the same thing hath chanced, doth and shall chance to the true Church and Congregation of Christ (which is nothing else in this miserable life but a poor ship) travelling in the seas of this unstable and troublesome world, toward the heavenly port, and haven of eternal felicity, which Jesus Christ hath appointed to his elect.
He smiled in strange amusement, thinking Terror a church of any kind.
Should she be freed from the ice, or should she not, John knew better than to question what means or instruments by which it would be done.
Certainly there were no seas to harm her, no storm but that of snow to be fearful. The Devil’s malice and hatred would not come to them like the invisible winds that, but for the divine power, worked to steer them off course. Instead, or so he thought to be the case, it moved within the ship itself, concealed in the earthly body of a reprobate.
Of—no.
John shook his head and smoothed down the bristles of his beard around his mouth.
Too often his thoughts had drifted back to that afternoon on the orlop deck, as if that, above all things, was what should concern him most. Upholding the ship’s articles was part of his job, he reasoned, but he knew this was not why it occupied him so dreadfully. He imagined it so clearly, such depravity. Depravity which, as he had agonised over, might not have even taken place.
And what if that was so? What if it was not? He could scarcely imagine what the limit of Cornelius Hickey’s insolence might be.
He had pondered, briefly, asking Edward what he might do, but he very soon talked himself out of such nonsense. It was neither fair nor appropriate to ask another officer how he might do his job and impart and burden upon him such scandalous claims. Not when he was preoccupied with other, more serious matters, the concern so hopelessly etched into his features that it may as well have been keeping them together.
To soothe him, John thought, was the single tether of joy left to him on this earth.
He shook his head once more, eyes flitting to the bible by his side. Still opened, he closed it. His fist curled atop its cover and he let his thumb caress a line down its spine. Like this, he thought. I would touch him like this or not at all.
Then came a knock at his door.
He pulled his hand away, sharp, cracking his elbow on the surface of his desk. Bringing it to his person, he felt like crying. Instead, he stiffened his upper lip and rose to his feet. He pulled the door back to reveal Gibson with a tea tray and stepped into the threshold.
“May I come in, sir?” he asked quietly. “I wouldn’t presume to ask if it weren’t important.”
John swallowed, fingers fidgeting against the door behind him. He twitched himself around, following the line of Gibson’s concerned gaze down to where Hickey was loitering, for once in the process of doing work. It was not to quell Gibson’s comfort but his own that he ducked himself back inside the safety of his cabin, urging him to follow with a, “If you must.”
*
He was born in the shadow of the Nelson Monument.
In the distance, perched on Calton Hill, he could see it from his father’s study, looking down Princes Street, if he leaned out the window far enough. It never occurred to him, for most of his youth, to take the short journey up past the Observatory and women laying out their washing in the grass, to see the monument for himself—until one day he did.
It had been a pleasant day, bright. Women abandoned their coats for lace shawls, walking arm-in-arm with their husbands as dogs ran alongside children. He climbed quickly to the top. Though as bookish as his younger brothers, he enjoyed play just as much; a conundrum that would trouble both he and his father to find himself a place to settle in the world. He had not sought the answer at the bottom of the Nelson Monument, but he had found one.
The monument, or so it read, had been erected not to express sorrow or celebrate, but: by his noble example, to teach their sons to emulate what they admire, and, like him, when duty requires it, to die for their country. His grandfather had died for his country. It struck a chord. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
England expected.
Sir John had fought at the Battle of Trafalgar. His stories on the subject were fleeting, an undercurrent of grief throughout, but he had done his duty.
It was hard to now think of him gone.
Away from Terror, they walked in a long procession. A step behind, John watched the snowflakes fall and gather on the shoulder of Edward’s coat as he went, counting as they clustered together before melting, the heat of his body radiating through. Perhaps his hands would be warm, he let himself think, lost in a dream of swirling white as he rubbed his own fingers together and tried to tuck them into the cuff of his own coat. He wished they’d been permitted to wear their mittens.
It was a short affair.
John had not yet digested the words of Sir John, spoken by his captain, when the call and fire of the marines shot through his thoughts. He returned the bicorn to his head. For a moment he searched the great whiteness with eyes open, but nothing appeared to him.
Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.
It had never occurred to him, as it had done to others, that God might have forsaken this place. He had told Hickey as much yesterday. So what if there was a dreadful beast roaming the ice? It was no more or less sinful than those it preyed upon, as corrupt in its creation as man.
They went back, had dinner. The rest of the day had been left for mourning, though John doubted it an order of his own captain’s volition. They said their farewells to the rescue party, led by his counterpart on Erebus, Lieutenant Fairholme—born, as he had come to understand, due north and many years after him. Smart and competent, he was a mirror of the officer he might have been, that his father and uncle wanted him to be, if only he’d been better.
He never asked why he was never asked to lead the rescue party. He didn’t think it right to ask.
“Oh, cheer up, John,” George said, removing the pipe from his mouth. “I almost mistook you for our dear old Edward just there.”
John’s gaze moved to where Edward was sat at the farthest away edge of the table, staring down his arm at a glass of neat rum in his hand. His eyes seemed to be trying to conjure a small storm within it. George’s quip at his expense did not rouse him from his thoughts.
“Sir John has died, George.”
“And he above anyone else would expect us to be cheerful for the sake of our men,” he said, which wasn’t without merit, annoyingly. Sir John was nothing if not a great leader of men. “Even if it is insincere. I tell you what, chaps, why don’t I put on a bit of music—”
“Good grief, no,” Edward spoke finally.
“—and we can celebrate the life of our dear brother Sir John. We can even start with a hymn, John, if you would find that most agreeable.”
John would, but he shook his head, called on Gibson and sank the last inch of rum that remained in his glass. He set it down with a tad more firmness than necessary and wiped away the evidence from his mouth. It burned uncomfortably in his throat but spread a pleasant warmth in his belly. He hoped it kept.
“Sir,” Gibson greeted him from the door.
He looked troubled. John hoped Hickey had nothing to do with it, for the sake of Gibson alone.
“Mr Gibson, please fetch my slops and inform Mr Thomas that I will be taking over his next watch,” he told him, then turned to his fellow officers. “I need to—” he began but did not finish, chewing down on the words that might have followed. “I’ll speak with you later.”
As he moved to the door, Edward caught him by the sleeve of his jacket. He shrugged off the touch as though burned, drawing his arm to himself in feeble protection. Oh, how he longed to touch him, and oh, how he dared not let Edward touch him. He would surely feel the molten fire beneath his skin and wonder why the Devil had put it there.
“I hope you’re not looking for a ladder,” Edward said, to which John had no reply.
*
Once, when he was still a midshipman, Kingston had told him in no uncertain terms that he would be best not speaking if he could help it. Kingston, a good fellow, had suggested such in good faith, but John, to his discredit, had not always applied the well-meaning advice of his friends with the spirit that was required.
But he did so now, on the orlop, working in silence with Mr Sinclair.
Owing to his size, the able seaman had become a sort of store jockey of Mr Diggle and had alerted the ship’s cook to the growing putrid smell way aft. John could smell the rot as he approached, but he speared the top of a tin and pried it open just to be sure, immediately being hit by an odour so vile he almost dropped the tin in his haste to press a handkerchief to his mouth. Only an empty stomach stopped him from being sick.
“This will have to be moved onto the ice,” John told Sinclair, still muffled by his handkerchief. “At night, after the men have gone down to sleep. You are to tell no one, understand?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Sinclair.
John looked upon the tins and rotated the one he still held within his grasp. With famine they would be persecuted, he thought, and with famine they would go. He set the tin down. It was not ideal, but if bread should not come from heaven, then the good Lord had made it so.
He counted the spoiled provisions, then those that were left. Above him he could hear the boisterous games of men upstairs, the booming voice of the marine sergeant. He paused briefly in his calculations, pencil poised against the page, the only other sound by him that of Sinclair’s laboured breaths as he made a clear line of what was to be abandoned on the ice.
Perhaps the ship next, he thought.
“Mr Sinclair, you may return to the lower deck,” John said, reaching to pull the lantern closer to himself. “I’ll see to it that Mr Diggle is generous with your dinner this evening, for your exertions.”
Sinclair leant upon a crate and nodded, “Sir,” before disappearing back towards the light by the ladders.
Only when he was sure Sinclair had gone did John drop his pencil into the crease of his notebook, balanced atop his thighs, and let his face drop into his hands. He moaned in a strange, soul-deep agony, an echo of the ship’s cries. His fingers scorched and nipped against his breath, blisters from the cold refusing to close no matter if Dr Peddie said they should. The next time he was stupid enough to get himself frostbite, Crozier had slurred in his direction, he would see to it that his fingers were cut off. Maybe then he would learn.
He pushed his sore fingers up through his hair and clawed at his scalp.
Pull yourself together, John, he admonished himself. The world is not as you would have it, but it is not for you to decide. He dragged his fingers back down his face, watched the darkness loom beyond them. This evil world is only temporary.
His breath shuddered as he rose to his feet.
Temporary. This was all only temporary, he thought as he walked the companionway to his quarters. If it weren’t to be his end then it would make for a fine letter home for his dear Malcolm, or an enthralling chat in Lewis and Katie’s sitting room. He did not usually allow himself to indulge in such hope and nostalgia, but he thought it a reasonable enough balm for his distress for the moment.
It was as he stepped into the passageway that he saw Edward leave the captain’s cabin and pull open the door to his own.
“Lieutenant Little,” he called, ducking his way out of hanging stores. “About the officers’ meeting—”
“There won’t be one today,” he said, turning to him, laboured. “Our captain is—indisposed.”
John stood stooped. Edward had no need. Still he seemed a greater presence, slouched slightly towards the wall with the ship’s incline, his temple resting on the edge of his door. John looked down at his notebook clutched to his middle and rubbed his thumb across its face, wanting desperately not to add to Edward’s growing misery, but seeing no real way around it. It was a shock then, when Edward’s hand came upon his, pushing his notebook away.
“If it’s not good news,” Edward said, the pressure of his hand keeping John’s by his side, “spare me of knowing.”
His mouth twitched around a complaint, but John let himself settle only on, “If you wish.”
Edward raised his hand from John’s notebook to his shoulder, giving it a firm clap. John almost lost his balance under the force of it but steadied himself with an aching hand on the wall. The gaze Edward shot him was curious, but it saddened a moment later. It was ever so easy to lose one’s balance now.
“She’s getting precarious,” Edward said, eyes falling somewhere beyond him, where he could hear the men singing now. It’ll be bricht both day and nicht when the Greenland lads come hame. “It won’t be long before—"
“Spare me,” John whispered, an echo.
What a great tragedy it was when an officer must abandon his ship. They shared a sad smile.
*
“A ship’s boy,” Edward said from where he stood, then repeated it, thumping a fist atop a cabinet. “A ship’s boy. What the hell—”
“Edward,” George said gently.
“He should never have left this ship,” he continued, taking a step towards George and stabbing a finger in his direction, “and you know it.”
“It came on the ship, Edward! This—this beast, whatever it may be, came on this ship and took a man. He was as safe out there as he was in here. We are all as safe in here as we are out there,” George said, then shook his head. “Not that the ice isn’t also consuming us as we speak.”
At that, John finally raised his gaze from the middle-distance. In his left hand he held a teacup, the right too sore, but the tea had long gone cold. He was thinking of—nothing. Nothing that he could discern, anyway, as if his thoughts had been written on the water of rough seas. He looked first at Edward, his palms flat on the table, silenced, and then George, his own tea abandoned. Neither of them was looking at him.
A few hours ago, Crozier had headed to the flagship to speak with Fitzjames alone. It was late. Absent of a captain, Edward could not sleep—would not sleep—until the last of the day’s search parties had returned. John and George found themselves with him in unvoiced solidarity.
“There shouldn’t even be any search parties,” he groused, swaying his body as he leaned on his hands. “They’ll be dead by now. Peddie said so. We will lose more men, more fingers, and more toes, and for what? Our captain’s guilt!”
“Well, at least I know if it should take me, it shan’t be you looking for me.”
Edward swung his body back, head turned to the heavens, swaying in despair. “Be serious, George,” he said to the rafters, palms showing in his plea. He looked down again. “You know this to be nonsense as well as I do.”
“And you wouldn’t expect us to keep looking for you?” George asked.
“I would expect you to act within reason,” he said.
John sucked on his teeth, feeling them firm enough in his gums still. He thought about it. There was a selfish part of him that would like to think that the very bones of him were worth searching for, but he dared not think at what cost. Not another man’s life at least, he concluded. Of that he agreed with Edward, but he would follow his captain’s orders. It seemed the only order they had left.
Where he stood, Edward ran a hand over his face and back through his hair, musing what had been pressed into place by his Welsh wig. John shifted his eyes away, but they rose again when a thumping could be heard from above. Not exactly a raucous, none of them moved until footsteps could be heard clattering down the passageway towards them. Not Gibson or Jopson or Genge, John thought, but—
There was a hurried knock.
“Yes?” George called.
Through the door appeared a rather agitated looking seaman Crispe, red nosed with the snow on his jacket not yet melted from his person. If John remembered correctly, he was not part of the final search party they had been waiting on, but on the last dogwatch.
“Sirs, you need to come up on deck,” he told them. “It’s Strong and Evans.”
John looked at George, who gave Edward a pointed look.
“What?”
“Please, sir,” he said to Edward this time. Beyond him, there was noise beginning to stir in the crew’s quarters. “It’s urgent.”
With one short, exasperated look between the two of them, Edward pulled on his hat. He gestured for them to follow and for Crispe to lead the way. Foregoing their outer clothes, they trailed the seaman up to the main deck and out from the shelter. Through the swirling snow and crowd of men, he could not see it at first. He took a step forward on the icy deck towards the stern and ordered the men to disperse, letting Edward and George step into the circle before him.
“Christ alive,” he heard George say, voice lost a little to the wind.
Edward looked back at him, then forward. John followed the line of his eye to a frozen corpse on the ground. It was cut in two. Not wanting to look, he returned his eyes to Edward, who was now sending him a plea he dared not speak in the knit of his brow and twitch of his lip.
What do I do?
“Lieutenant Hodgson,” he began at last, “gather four men to take the bodies down to the sickbay. Wake McDonald and Peddie if you must. Sergeant Tozer, Mr Crispe, I want a full report on what happened here. John—Lieutenant Irving, proceed immediately to Erebus and inform Captain Crozier.”
John felt the wind catch in his throat, choking him. He turned to the white emptiness that separated Terror from her flagship, then turned back.
Why me?
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Edward seemed to deflate, shoulders hunching. As John went to move, he brought a hand down on his forearm, as if to pat it, but he clutched at his sleeve instead. “Not on your own, John,” he said, then looked up, scanning the crowd of men that still lingered. “Mr Shanks! You will accompany Lieutenant Irving to Erebus. Inform Mr Armitage and retrieve a musket from the armoury.”
John stared down at where Edward’s hand stayed like a vice against arm.
“I’m sorry,” Edward said, “but you’re the only man on this ship I believe God might still protect.”
*
Dirtiness.
He let the word roll around on his tongue, let the r roll like the Navy had taught him not to. Vowels extended like waves; consonants crushed like a ship in ice. It was only savage in the mouth of the pretender, but it simply would not do.
The ship shrieked, cinched at her bow and rising. She had seen more licks of a cat than any man, he ventured, and heard more cries of mercy than God. But not those of Cornelius Hickey. He had been quiet where Hartnell had groaned and Manson had wept, like his mind had left his body, or the Devil had left his vessel. Perhaps she knew, he thought, eyes on her walls, and was purging all evil at the expense of herself.
He shook his head of the thought.
Instead, he pulled off his gloves and gnawed at his fingernails. It hurt. His fingertips were tender against the scratch of his beard. If you don’t stop that, he could almost hear his old nanny say, you’ll worry them right down to the bone. He always stopped, but only for a little while.
It was only when he heard the slow, loath steps of the First Lieutenant that he busied his hands with something else—a pocket chronometer, cracked along the glass but still ticking. A fidgety little thing, it could not have been more than two and a half inches across its enamelled face, the silver case nippy to the touch when freezing. It served as a constant, torturous reminder that time still passed here even when the seasons refused to change. That the world was going on without them.
Edward entered the wardroom, letting himself stumble with the incline. He threw a small book upon the table and sank into the chair across from John.
“What is it?” John asked, craning his neck to see.
“A list,” Edward said, which John had deduced, “of volunteers. To berth on Erebus.”
John reached over and brought the page of near-illegible scribbles before him. There were a lot of names, he thought, running his finger down the margin. Looking up, he began to ask, “How—”
“All but ten.”
“Oh.” It came out rather pitifully, without intention. He supposed it was not a surprise, after what happened. Not that John did not believe Crozier was well within his right to—to punish those men as such. To quash the hysteria. To keep them from falling into a chaos from which they could not be revived. “Is the Captain aware?”
Wordlessly, Edward shook his head, but his eyes remained on him, as though he were an axis on which to spin.
John swallowed, hard and audible. If he were a braver man, he thought as he safely set his gaze upon his hands, he would reach out and try to settle him of his every earthly sorrow. Even if he couldn’t, he would reach out anyway, hold him gently, hold him tight. But as it was, he was no such man. Only his duty was on offer. He set his hand upon the list once more.
“I’ll inform him,” he said.
A small, relieved huff escaped Edward. It sent a strange flutter through him. Like the fools he shamed in Archie’s soppy poems, he remembered without reason. The ones that spoke of love.
“I must stop sending you to do my bidding,” Edward said.
Rising to his feet, John told him, “It’s no trouble,” but did not tell him, not for you.