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Thomas is not sick, he tells himself. The call to leave the ill, the dying, is unfortunate at best and tragic at worst-- in the event that the men who continue on cannot secure rescue in a timely fashion-- but above all is the most selfish of instincts: the instinct to preserve oneself. For Edward, this means Thomas as much as it means himself.
Thomas is not sick, and thus, Thomas will not die. Thomas is not in any danger, at least not any more danger than are the men who can still support themselves on two legs. One and a half, in Blanky’s case.
Thomas is cold at night, cold to the touch, and he curls into Edward so that he may leech whatever heat his fellow lieutenant has to offer. Edward has little more than he, but all of it he is happy to give. All the men are cold. They have been living in a constant state of cold since they reached Arctic waters.
“Do you remember the day,” Thomas begins to ask, quiet, even though Le Vesconte is on watch and will not return for hours yet, and pauses to close his eyes as if pushing a headache from behind them. Continues. “Do you remember the day the captain had you running back and forth between ships for his whiskey?”
Edward does remember the day.
“You brushed the frost from my eyebrows,” he answers, mirroring the gesture with a swipe of a stiff thumb against Thomas’ brow. For another second, he staves off the memory of Hornby keeling over, dead, from just a handful of paces away from him. The sound the man had made, a corpse as he hit the snow. How quickly he had turned from a man to a body, with no prior warning but Blanky’s advice not to spend an undue length of time between the two ships.
“They do have a way of collecting it,” Thomas goes on to say, brushing his fingertips along the creased jut of Edward’s own brow. “Shelves, they are, when you keep your brow furrowed like that.”
“Much to worry over.”
That has not changed. If anything, the more they lose to the ice and, as of late, to the unrelenting emptiness, they make up for in troubles. By the end of all of this, how many of them will there be left to rescue? Not counting the mutineers, Edward can tally the men on both hands now, and they lose more by the day. They have just lost Captain Fitzjames, and shortly after, Henry Peglar. John Bridgens had followed in the hour, the last man who could claim any amount of medical knowledge among them. It is difficult not to topple headfirst into despair; one can mistake the howling of the wind for the creak of a coffin lid being pulled free, ready to accept their bodies as soon as they drop. Before, even. Their graves are hungrier than even the men are. Edward touches Thomas’ cheeks, careful not to let his clumsy fingers break off the shards of dead skin or the scabs that fleck his new-grown beard. When they are rescued and on their way back to England, he will take Thomas’ face in his hands, gently, like a cup of tea on which to warm his hands, and feel smooth, clean-shaven skin. He will nudge at the line at which Thomas trims his hair and he will remark on its precision, a smile on his lips, and Thomas, also smiling, will answer with something playful. He will call him Lieutenant with all the affection of a pet name. He will tug at his collar to pull him in for a surreptitious kiss, either on the cheek or at the corner of the mouth, and then tug it once more to straighten it.
Edward’s fingers dip into the hollows of Thomas’ cheeks, and he does not look to see the handsome face gone gaunt but no less handsome. Those eyes, like the point at which the sky hits the horizon so far out on the sea, turn away. Thomas has gone stoic. A sudden desperation grips Edward.
“Tom,” he says, doing his utmost to mask it. It still creeps into his voice as he thumbs at the sweep of Thomas’ cheekbones, following the creases of the bags under his eyes outward. Thomas then pulls his mouth into a tight smile, not really a smile at all. He regards Edward with patience that is somehow worse than anger.
“You’re displeased with me,” Edward surmises. “I’ve displeased you.”
“Edward.”
There is the proof of it. The corners of Thomas’ lips dimple stiffly, unhappily. Edward still cannot help but to love the sound of his name from this man’s lips, no matter the tone.
At last, Thomas says, “You plan to leave the men too ill to walk.” That seems to be only the half of it, but he has the tendency to say less, rather than more, of what he means, for the sake of testing the waters. The reminder of his own words would have made Edward wince, callous as they had been. It is not a generous equation he is in the position of calculating; often he wishes John-- Irving, that is-- might be here to tutor him through it.
“That leaves enough of us to haul.”
“They get sicker by the day, Edward,” Thomas points out. Then, quieter, “We get sicker.”
“Yes,” says Edward, “but we’ll find rescue in time.”
Fairholme’s party had not made it far, and certainly not far enough to make contact with anybody but that creature hunting them. Still, the abstract notion of a search party, a rescue, a group of Netsilik hunters, even, cloys like an overripe fruit. None of them know what the impression is, back in England, of their expedition. The Admiralty may already have taken note of their disappearance, maybe even as early as last year, and have been making plans all this time for a second expedition to find them. There may be a ship headed their way, and will find first the Erebus, then the Terror, the ice holding them still, or, perhaps, having thawed around them. They will follow the evidence of camps put up and taken down, those little discarded and forgotten collections of detritus from their walk, the disturbed shale under which they had buried their dead. Those countless bodies of the men slaughtered by the beast at the mutineers’ would-be hanging. I will not lift a spade to dig Tom’s grave, Edward vows to himself, bending his head so that his nose touches Thomas’ cheek.
“I don’t have the strength to haul.”
The admission comes so quietly that Edward feels it in the vibrations of Thomas’ chest more than he hears the words.
“Then I won’t ask you to haul with us,” he promises in turn. “Walk alongside us, or better yet, with the captain. He’ll be glad for your company.”
“And if I can’t?” Thomas asks, as if this is where he expects Edward’s well of answers to run dry. “If I collapse out there and can’t get back on my feet?”
“I’ll carry you.”
Edward draws back just enough so that he can see Thomas’ face in its entirety. There, he reads whatever he can find. The last few embers of hope, smothered by the knowledge of their dire circumstances; some last, dying flicker of romance, the longing to believe what Edward tells him, so Edward says it again to will it into being: “I’ll carry you there, Tom.”
“Where’s there, Ned?” Thomas asks, his lips pinched into a smile that is too wide to be happy, his eyebrows arched up. “Fort Resolution is still farther from us than the distance we’ve already traveled. Think of how many men we lost, just getting this far-- think of how many more we will lose, even the ones who can still walk and haul.”
Would it be selfish of Edward to tell him, then, that he could watch the remaining men fall where they stood, so long as Thomas survived? That each loss would ache, but none would break him as quickly, as entirely as Thomas’ would? No, confessing to such a thought would be worse, in Thomas’ eyes, than his case in favor of leaving their sick in the hopes of finding rescue quicker. It is true, its sincerity only compounded by the way the land seems to grind them down past all pretense, until they are forced to abandon their lies like their books, their shaving kits, their epaulettes. Like Leys, insensate on his bed in what used to be the doctors’ tent, those same canvas walls under which Goodsir had cut open Irving’s stomach-- a caring, truth-seeking act, not at all like the work Hickey and his boat knife had done. The incision would have looked like the same butchery, too, if not for the neatness of the stitches that sealed him back together, one more cut that would never have the chance to heal. Dressed up in what remained of his uniform and cap firmly jammed over his head, the evidence of brutality was hidden, but the set of his face was not something ever found in sleep. Edward remembered seeing John’s face for the last time and needing to clamp a hand over his mouth, for fear of losing hold of his emotions or his lunch.
He had meant to say something, over John’s grave, during the small service that was held, but whatever he had to say flew his mind. No verses offered themselves up for his use. They would have come in John’s voice, anyway.
Too many had been killed by the creature to be given individual services, though they were each put in their own graves. They could not spare what little they had for markers, but between the men, they could discern which grave was whose. Each of them remembered those of their friends, their close companions, enough so that if one man asked who was buried where, another among them would supply the answer. As they walked, an invisible tether linked the living with the dead. It is a tether that stretches without any sign of breaking, the farther they travel.
“We’ll make it, Thomas,” Edward insists, thumbs brushing the corners of Thomas’ mouth, still pulled into that ghostly semblance of a smile. “We will keep walking, and we will get there, or someone will get to us. We just need to… to keep heading South, as we are.”
“I want so badly to believe you,” Thomas breathes. He puts his face in the crook of Edward’s neck, and when Edward’s hand comes up to cup the back of his head, he settles there with a long sigh. “I want to believe you, because I know that you believe it. If only love could fill the gap between hope and foolishness, we might walk across it and find our way home.”
He gives a soft laugh, which Edward can only tell from the puff of breath against his neck. It’s a sad little thing, but still so dear. It may break Edward’s heart in half, which he would lament only because Thomas deserves fine things in the best condition.
“You don’t have to believe me,” he tells Thomas, bending his head so that he barely has to speak for him to hear it. “I will believe it enough for the both of us. For now, trust that…”
“I do.”
“You haven’t even heard what I have to say.”
“Well, go on, then.”
For this, Edward strokes Thomas’ hair, brushing the overgrown fringe from his face and tucking it at his ear. Those eyes of his are in clear view now, and looking right at him, eyebrows raised imploringly. It is such a familiar, beloved sight that Edward has to hide a kiss against the side of Thomas’ head, and, there, he whispers his promise against black hair gone unfashionably long.
“Trust that I’ll be wherever you are,” he begins slowly. The memory comes to mind of Bridgens, unharnessing himself when Peglar fell and summoning some hidden store of strength to carry him to a boat. “Never far. Not for long, anyway. And when we get back to England, I’ll still… even there, if you’ll have me. I’ll find a way for us.”
It is an impossible promise, but that hardly matters, because Thomas presses his face to Edward’s throat, the apples of his cheeks all rounded out. It hardly matters because a year from now, they will be living in a house out in the country, far enough for all the privacy and good air they could ever want for. Their stomachs will ache from overindulgence rather than from hunger, they will lay in bed all stretched out like cats in the sun, they will unpack their trunks and use them to hold linens and sundries instead, complain of the heat and wait on the winter. Perhaps Edward will take a turn at shaving Thomas’ face, and when he leaves it uneven and slightly stubbled for fear of cutting his skin, Thomas will laugh and go the day without fixing it, and he will allow Edward to try again the next day. It does not matter how; it only matters that they will.
When Thomas asks, “Why would you ever think I wouldn’t?” Edward laughs, and when Thomas says, “I want you close to me,” Edward says, “That’s where I will be. Close, Tom.” For a moment, Thomas’ shoulders go stiff, but it is so quick as to be imagined.
Later-- much later, so much later that time seems to have worn itself thin-- it has come to pass as Edward had feared. The men have died around him, in their tents, fighting over the last morsels of poisoned food, or, in the case of the most desperate, over the dead. Few as they were, none had gone to their deaths with the dignity of officers, or of Navy men. They had gone shivering, sweating, boiling and freezing all at once, their stomachs gnawing from the inside, scalps spotted with great, flaking scabs, cheeks hollow, eyes shadowed. They had gone afraid; they had gone stripped to their bare bones.
Now, Edward cannot support himself to sit upright, let alone stand on his own two legs. Sweat has frozen his clothes to his back, his boots to his feet. He will lose all of his toes, he thinks once, through the haze which has fallen over his mind. Once he and the men who are left are found. But they will have been rescued, and he will gladly give both his legs up to the thigh if it means some of them might survive. If they, whoever they are, find him first, he will point them in the direction of the camp where they had left their sick. He will describe for them the blue-eyed and dark-haired man in a steward’s striped shirt, so that they know to help him first.
Every time the wind whips through his barely-standing tent, it toys with the chains in his face, and, for a moment, it carries upon it Thomas’ voice. Close, it whispers, kissing his cheeks.
“Close,” Edward echoes. “Close, close…”