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Harry looked down at the corpse, laid out neatly on its back.
The first incision was easy enough. Navel to sternum, then the diagonal cuts to the shoulders. Wet, red flesh splayed out as he spread the skin and pinned it back.
Another few cuts and there would be plenty of meat for the table. Harry shook his head and continued the dissection, hands moving along a well-rehearsed track. The bone saw made a terrible, juddering noise as it broke through the breastbone.
The left-hand ribs came free with some force. He set them aside along with the saw and began to work on freeing the heart. Intercostal muscles parted beneath his scalpel.
There was a heavy weight in his hands. The heart went into a dish for inspection by the gathering of students that surrounded the slab. The stomach, with its reserve of gastric acid, was set apart for preservation. The liver slipped free from the abdomen almost before Harry could lift it out.
Hickey forced his mouth open with rough fingers and put slivers of it beneath his tongue.
“No indication of cirrhosis, as you can see,” said the lecturer. Harry glanced at him over his shoulder. He was holding the liver cupped in both hands. “The subject was a man of few vices.”
The lecture theatre was close and cramped; not purpose built for teaching, it had originally been intended as a morgue. Harry had watched Doctor Knox perform autopsies in this room as a student. It was an unpleasantly cyclical feeling, to be back here with his own hand upon the surgeon’s knife.
Harry only agreed to this demonstration because his brother had asked him directly. The poor man had died of suspected lead poisoning, and as Harry was now an unwilling expert in the matter – he looked down at the chest cavity and closed his eyes against vertigo. He thought of Silna, a shadow on the cold horizon. One of the first men he’d ever cut into while alive was her father.
It was no wonder she’d left. Who could blame her, when this was what Queen and Country offered?
“One kidney is of a notably smaller size than the other,” said the lecturer. Harry hadn’t managed to catch his name. “An indication of developmental abnormality.”
The mesentery pulled away from the intestines with an odd sucking noise. Harry wished he had gloves. On opening the bowel a foul smell suffused the air of the theatre.
He saw several students covering their mouths and tried to hide a smile. He remembered having a similar reaction during his own training. A few of his classmates had gone a very interesting shade of green.
The lecturer indicated the location of the appendix and tested his students on the relative length of the small intestine. “Moving up to the head, now,” he said as Harry replaced the organs in almost the right places.
He still regretted inserting Hartnell’s ribs upside down. He sometimes wondered if that had any affect on his afterlife, if such a thing existed.
The cadaver’s mouth was slightly open, as were his eyes. Post-mortem clouding of the cornea was duly pointed out and the relevant part removed by the lecturer with a scalpel.
Harry struggled to stop looking into the corpse’s eyes. He could feel the weight of the dead’s disapproval. Ridiculous.
He pulled the body’s lips back to assess the state of his gums. The black line was unsurprising.
“Ah, and there’s the tell-tale heart,” said the lecturer, with a wry little laugh. The students laughed along, obliging. Harry thought of poor little Jacko lying spreadeagled on his desk.
She was a very sweet thing, when she wasn’t trying to comb one’s hair for salt crystals or running amok on the orlop. When the lead started to take hold she’d grown more docile, not less, lethargic and unhappy but unwilling to play about with the midshipmen as she once did.
Harry had let her climb about on his shoulders when she felt like doing so; less and less as the weeks went by.
He thought of her as the lecturer asked the class for any other symptoms of heavy metal poisoning. Some referred directly to Harry’s own paper on the subject; the furious thing he’d written on his return, before he was allowed out of his brothers’ sights and had very little to do besides reflect on his mistakes.
The skull would be next, he thought. The progression of the disease affected the mind, and there was growing consensus that it may result from some physical damage to the brain.
“There is news from America of a man whose cranium, impaled by a iron rod more than an inch wide, yet lives and breathes.” The lecturer spread his hands. “We as scientists must consider what parts of our brain are essential, and what may be removed without due harm.”
Private Heather had lived for weeks with half a skull and his soul consumed.
Harry did not want to saw this man’s skull open. He did not want to scalp him as Hickey scalped Lieutenant Farr, as he had wished to scalp John Irving. He did not want to be in this lecture theatre with blood coating him from hand to elbow, the smell of death heavy in the air.
He set down the scalpel beside the bone saw. They would both need boiling.
“Excuse me,” he said, a pathetic waver in his voice. The lecturer turned to look at him, clearly irritated at being interrupted mid-soliloquy. “I think I need – excuse me.”
The students’ eyes were on him as he walked out.
John found him at home in the scullery, scrubbing his arms raw.
Harry didn’t remember his walk back to his brother’s rooms from the theatre. He had a vague idea that he had at least towelled off the worst of the blood in the surgeon’s dressing room, but a terrible suspicion remained that he had left a long trail across the Old Town.
John kept rooms near to St Giles, such that one could hear the bells ringing the hour as if they were in the room beside you. It kept the rent down.
“Are you well, Harry?”
Harry shrugged, still facing the sink. He worked a rag into the webs between his fingers. There was something caught under the skin. Out, damned spot, he thought, without much humour.
The hand on his shoulder made him flinch; he turned, one hand already grabbing at John’s wrist. He knew it was John. He just couldn’t convince his body of that fact. His other hand had gone to the sideboard, where the knives were set neatly out to dry.
“Ah,” said John. His eyes were tight with pain. “Harry, please let go of me.”
Harry wanted very badly to let go. He could feel his brother’s bones grinding together between his fingers. He tried to calm down and only managed one hitching breath. Hickey’s fingers were in his mouth. He could taste the thin layer of grime and blood.
No time to bathe when Sergeant Tozer needed butchering. He let go of John’s wrist, finally, because if he didn’t turn around he was going to be sick on the floor like a child.
He had very specifically not thought about Tozer at all during the lecture. He had kept the man’s vacant eyes separate from those of the poor transient he’d cut open for a paying audience. The cuts for separating muscle from bone were not similar to autopsy, really. And yet now he felt Hickey’s hand on the back of his neck, heard the whisper in his ear. Don’t you want Billy to come out alright?
Two bags full of meat, rough calico kit bags meant for carrying rifles. The camp had gone through it in three days. Three days of Hickey with his fingers in Harry’s mouth, feeding him slivers of liver and marrow. Every time he tried to refuse another threat. The captain came on the fourth, when Hickey killed Gibson. Harry never could have saved him. Billy Gibson was doomed the day of the mutiny – long before, most likely.
He managed not to be sick, at least. John kept his distance as Harry set his hands on the sides of the sink and took deep, measured breaths. His stomach settled slowly, until it felt less like a storm in his chest.
“Sorry,” said Harry. “I – didn’t mean to.”
A child’s excuse. Harry wanted quite badly to do something equally childish to avoid himself; hide under a blanket or in a cupboard, perhaps, knees to his chest.
John looked at him. Harry tried hard not to squirm like a schoolboy about to be thrashed.
“I know, Harry,” John said, eventually. “I came to find you to ask about your morning, actually. Not to send you into a fit of hysteria.”
“I’m not hysterical,” said Harry. “Leaving aside the strict diagnostic criteria, the etymology alone–”
“I was being facetious,” John replied. He sighed, running a hand through his hair. He’d taken after their mother, hair straight and fine. “Doctor Litefoot sent a telegram. He was not pleased to have his assistant surgeon vanish halfway through an autopsy, let alone one I’d told him would be of great diagnostic help.”
Harry couldn’t speak for a moment. His chest felt tight. “Then I apologise for disappointing you, and him. I thought I would be able to – tolerate it.”
“But not enjoy it,” said John. He looked oddly sad, his forehead creased in a frown. Harry wasn’t sure why.
“Was I supposed to?” He remembered feeling excited about autopsies in the past; his anatomical studies had interested him at the time, of course. He didn’t see how it was relevant.
“You used to enthuse about this,” John replied. “Could hardly keep you away from the museum, or the lecture theatre. Always hearing about some new advancement in surgical practice. And now – Harry, you knew you didn’t have to do this, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did,” said Harry, automatically. “I have to do what you tell me, or–” He stopped.
“Or what, Harry?” John’s voice was gentle; it scraped against Harry’s nerves.
Harry said nothing. He set down the rag and went to the sitting room, where John’s pet tortoise was busily eating half a head of cabbage. The cat, an ageing Persian that Harry had helped nurse as a kitten, padded over and pawed at his leg until he sat on the chaise longue and lifted her onto his lap.
She purred happily as he scratched her behind the ears. She was warm and soft and very content to curl up and doze.
John came to stand in the doorway. Harry glanced up at him, words drying in his throat.
“I don’t know what happened, that you’re so frightened of us,” said John. “I wish I did.”
“If you did, you’d wish you didn’t,” Harry said, softly. “I’m quite sure of that.”
Dear Mr Goodsir,
Henry & I were very pleased to receive your letter this past Friday. Not to say that we are elated at your leaving Edinburgh, where we hoped you would be happy, but if Oxford is treating you better then that is a cause for celebration, and it is certainly more convenient for social calls. You ought to have written sooner of course but I cannot blame you for the delay, doubtless you too are inundated with pointless letters from sycophants up & down our Fair Isles.
You asked for news of Henry Collins, if we had any – as it happens the man himself is in our rooms as I write! He has been staying with us for some weeks now as he searches for employment. He is a man of studiously good habits and very neat & tidy which is of course appreciated in any home with my Henry in it
John stop Telling Goodsir I am untidy
And there is the man himself! By the by, if you do know of any work prospects in Oxford it may suit Collins well as the air here has not been good for his health, or so it seems. As you recall his difficulties on the expedition I am sure you understand my meaning when I say this.
Your servant,
John Bridgens
Oxford was agreed upon mostly for the easy travel between it and London, and thence to Edinburgh. Harry participated in the conversation with his brothers only so far as to veto anywhere on the coast.
He took rooms near the Ashmolean and threw himself into his teaching almost before the Honour School had found him students.
It took three months for another episode of the sort he’d had at the lecture theatre to strike in public. He would later tell Henry that it was all little things building up, but this was not strictly true.
There were small things. Things which built up in the blood like poison. The fact he couldn’t bring himself to open the curtains on most days, certain the unforgiving Arctic expanse would greet him. The ever present fear of eating anything preserved, the conviction that the tremor in his hands was some late onset symptom of the lead. Lying awake late into the night to avoid the dreams, until he was so tired each morning he could barely think. Until he woke up one morning and failed to get out of bed.
He wasn’t suited to living alone; there wasn’t anyone who he would condemn to living with him in this humour. He exchanged letters with some of the men who had managed such arrangements and tried to ignore the slow burn of jealousy in his stomach. He lay on top of his covers and stared at the ceiling, until the rapping on his front door grew too loud to ignore.
In idle moments he would imagine which man he would most like to have with him, when his thoughts grew thorns. He thought of Henry Collins, compelling himself to do everything. He hoped he was past that feeling. He hoped he himself had taken it from him, like Atlas taking the world on his shoulders.
There were also moments when he was surprised by being overwhelmed, as if the Tuunbaq had swept him off his feet with one huge paw.
In this case it was during a dinner party at the home of one of his colleagues. He attended these when he couldn’t get away with begging a prior engagement; it was difficult to return to being the sort of person who was invited to dinner parties at all.
He was used to deflecting questions about his time in Nunavut. He could blush and dissemble with the best of them, able to defer anything technical up the ladder to Captain Crozier, and could honestly claim ignorance when asked about the events which led up to their rescue.
“A fine party,” he said, after the toast and before the main course was served.
“I bet you never saw the like in the north, Mr Goodsir,” offered his seatmate, the young wife of his host. “Not much time for parties on the long walk.”
“You might be surprised,” he replied. He hadn’t spent long at Carnivale before it all descended into madness; he remembered it being almost fun. The crew had been so happy. He could hold onto that, in spite of the chaos it descended into. “We had one or two entertainments before we left the ships.”
The sight of Captain Fitzjames as Britannia was still a fond recollection. The costume box had been picked clean by the time Harry had the time to think of finding anything; he could at least excuse his folly with the fact that he had been somewhat preoccupied. Someone had managed to find a fiddle forgotten in the store room and struck up a band with Reid leading the singalong.
He remembered Collins talking about the smell of meat, too. He remembered finding the body of Dr McDonald, slashed from groin to breastbone. A horrible way to die. Silna stumbling into the tent, blood coating her from mouth to collarbones.
“Oh, do tell us about it, Mr Goodsir,” said the man across from him – Doctor Padgett was a professor of ontography, Harry recalled, whatever that was. “I’ve been dying to hear about this expedition – is it true you met a native shaman girl? Must’ve been a fine specimen.”
A specimen. Like Silna was some kind of exhibit to be categorised, a butterfly to be pinned to a card and shut away in a drawer. Harry took a deep breath. “Yes, we met several native people. They were, to a man, kind and considerate. In fact, we would certainly have fared much worse without their assistance.”
He thought of his long nights talking with Silna, learning Inuktitut and trying so very hard to get the information the captains needed from her. Of her soft, forthright tone, lost forever when she bound herself to the Tuunbaq.
All that time he’d been using her, really. It didn’t help that they both knew their time was limited. That she knew what he was doing, even as she helped him with his dictionary, and later when she soothed him in the night. A connection eternally doomed by his own weakness.
“And the women? Come now, sir, we’ve all heard the stories. Such a… freethinking people.” The professor raised his eyebrows, as if inviting Harry into some private joke.
“I’ll thank you to keep such comments to yourself,” said Harry. He felt oddly hot, his collar itching at the back of his neck. “The Lady Silence–”
“Ah, she had a name after all!” Doctor Padgett sat back, clearly satisfied with this crumb of new information. “The woman who could tame a polar bear. Was it the same one that got Sir John?”
Oh, God.
Sir John had screamed so very loudly when the Tuunbaq got hold of him. Even Harry, already scrambling flatfooted over the pressure ridge towards Erebus, had heard it as if they were still in the hide, sat waiting in silence for something none of them could name.
He knew he was still at the dinner table. He never went so far away from himself that he could forget that. And yet once again his body remembered running and told his heart to race. He put a hand on his chest.
“Mr Goodsir?” The young lady by his side had a lovely voice, but it was the wrong one. Christ, he wanted Silna, or Crozier, or Collins. He wanted someone who knew what this felt like, when your thoughts turned in on themselves and splintered.
“Terribly sorry,” he said. “I think this heat is affecting me more than I expected.” What remained of Sir John Franklin loomed in his mind’s eye.
“I suppose you’d be used to the cold by now,” said that insufferable man. He looked so smug about the observation, arms folded over his stomach. Harry wondered what Padgett might look like with frostbitten fingers and toes; with an eye permanently bloodshot and every scar reopened.
“You would think,” said Harry. He was saved from further torment by the arrival of the main course. A plate of beef and vegetables, the sort of reliable cooking he had once missed so dearly.
The party fell quiet as everyone took up their cutlery, and soon the only sound was the gentle scrape of knives and forks against porcelain.
Harry addressed the vegetables first.
As he was busily slicing his roast potatoes into smaller pieces, conversation resumed. The same thrice-damned professor piped up: “Much better than what they were serving out there, eh?”
He ignored the jibe. The slices of beef were much rarer than he had come to prefer since his return. If he didn’t look at the blood oozing from the centre, it didn’t exist.
“Ahoy, Goodsir,” Padgett continued. “I’m talking to you, you know.” He tapped his fork against Harry’s plate, a sharp sound in the still air.
The young woman at Harry’s side gave him a very sympathetic look. Harry didn’t respond. He felt very sure that if he did he might shout at the man. He could feel it bubbling up his throat.
“What’s the matter, Goodsir?” He asked. “Is the beef not to your liking? I’ve heard such terrible talk about what you had to eat out there, when the tins ran out.”
The man’s tone made it very clear exactly what talk he was referring to. The sort of talk that always died down when someone noticed Harry nearby.
The rest of the table, previously involved in their own conversations, were now quite obviously listening in. Harry hated all of them so much that he felt nauseous with it.
He looked up and met the other man’s gaze. He felt a thrill of something nasty in his chest when Padgett visibly flinched.
“When you spend four years in the Arctic circle, sir,” said Harry. His hands were trembling. He set down his knife and fork. “With little hope of rescue, no food or safe water, and most of your friends dead around you – I will be happy to hear your opinion.”
“It’s only a question, my lad,” said the professor, in the sort of patronising tone Harry had always despised. “We were all very interested in the rescue efforts, and the news that came back – by god, what a story.”
“I’m pleased that our suffering made for such entertainment,” Harry replied. Oh, it felt nice to be angry. “Please, do let me know what privations you found most diverting to read about. I should be happy to send a report to Sir Francis. I’m sure he will find it most gratifying.”
Sir Francis, as it happened, despised the knighthood. Harry was still surprised the queen hadn’t dropped dead from the clear loathing in his eyes.
“Mr Goodsir,” his host interjected. He didn’t sound angry, more embarrassed that he’d let this go on so long. “That’s enough.”
“Is it?” asked Harry. He picked up his cutlery and contemplated the beef. The flesh Hickey had forced into his mouth had been very different, really. That had been offal, or the pink fat of marrow. He cut into a slice and watched, feeling his mind drift off somewhere distant, as blood spread across the plate.
He speared a piece on his fork and put it in his mouth. Hickey closed it for him and forced him to chew, his other hand working his jaw and then his throat.
This was not what was happening. Harry knew he was sitting, trying desperately to chew the slice of beef in his mouth. The feeling of Hickey’s hand was a phantom – hysteria, as John had accused him weeks ago.
He stood, abruptly. The young lady at his side put a hand on his arm. He shook it off. Everything was very wrong. The fire was going to spark and set the house alight. The cutlery was sharp enough to open a vein – he wondered idly if any of the dinner guests had seen the scar on his wrist when he reached for his wine glass. The professor was looking at him with an expression of benign contempt, as if Harry was a bumbling undergraduate or perhaps a worm caught beneath a farmer’s fork.
Harry was breathing in quick, stuttering gasps. He could see Morfin’s head spread out on the table, where the carving knife and the joint of beef ought to be.
After that, he was not often invited to dinner parties. He couldn’t find it in himself to mind.
“Mr Goodsir!”
Harry turned his head towards the summons and smiled. John Bridgens stood with one arm raised, a matching grin on his face. His other hand rested on a handsome wooden cane – he’d broken his ankle on the march down King William Land.
“Mr Bridgens,” he replied, reaching out to touch John on the arm. He was reassuringly solid, clearly recovering well from starvation. “It’s a pleasure to see you.”
“You as well, sir,” said John. “You as well.”
They left, before Harry could do something so criminal as starting to cry.
The station was handsomely built. Harry was very happy to leave it behind, however, in favour of a hansom cab towards Redcliffe, where Bridgens and Peglar had made their home.
It was a simple tenement house, two rooms upstairs and two down, with its own outhouse and a shallow cellar. Harry was immediately fond of it, not least for the chance to sit down somewhere quiet after several hours of travel.
“At long last,” said Peglar, on seeing Harry on the sofa closest to the fire. He pointed at Bridgens, who was in the act of hanging up his coat by the front door. “This one was convinced you’d never accept an invitation.”
“You’re exaggerating,” said Bridgens. He slotted his cane into the umbrella stand and came to stand beside Peglar, one arm around his waist. Harry wanted that same touch with such sudden urgency it burned.
He had not been privy to the connection between any of the other men on the expedition until after they had abandoned the ships and begun the long walk. Any semblance of privacy after that point had been a polite fiction; only the mutineers had put serious effort into concealing their activities.
Working alongside Bridgens in the medical tent meant that Harry knew a good deal more than most.
“Hang on just a moment and I’ll have the tea out,” said Bridgens. He pressed his face into Peglar’s hair, eyes closed, before going to the kitchen.
Peglar sat in the chair across from him and offered a tentative smile. He ran a hand through his hair, peppered with grey and long enough now to brush his collar.
“How are you, Mr Goodsir?”
It was odd talking to Peglar on an even footing. As a surgeon Harry had always felt at a remove from the crew, an idler among men constantly on watch and on the move.
“I’m… managing,” said Harry. “And please, call me Harry.”
“Harry, then,” said Peglar. He smiled. He had a lovely smile, even with half his molars gone. “And you must call me Henry. There are quite a few of us around, aren’t there?”
“Indeed,” he said. There had been at least five of them on Erebus, at first count. “I was very pleased to receive your invitation to visit.”
The letter had been on the mat when Harry arrived home from the dinner party. He could admit to himself that he had been clinging to it like a life preserver ever since.
“Of course,” said Peglar. “Letters are lovely, but nothing quite compares to having you here in the flesh.”
At that moment Bridgens emerged with the tea tray, the pot covered with a patchwork cosy and all the cups mismatched.
“Mr Collins knitted the cosy,” said Bridgens, as he set the tray down on the table. “Quite a work, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Harry replied, admiringly. The thing was pieced together from at least twenty different skeins of wool. Mr Collins must have been buying oddments for the project. “Joseph with his coat would be jealous.”
“He’s a fine hand with these things,” said Bridgens. “You’d think he was the steward, not I.”
“How is he?” Harry asked, watching Bridgens pour.
“It’s not my place to say,” Bridgens replied. “But – he’s been doing better than when he was first back.”
When they were first back, none of them had been doing close to well. Collins was among the worst, still jumping at every shadow and itching for the laudanum with every breath. Sweating through his sheets and smiling with such gratitude at even small kindnesses.
It would be difficult to be worse. And yet Harry couldn’t help the relief as a cold fear inside him eased, just slightly.
He accepted his cup of tea with a grateful nod. The willow pattern of the china was pretty enough, contrasting with the saucer’s wild cherry. He took a sip, just the right temperature for drinking, and felt a wave of tiredness wash over him. It had been a long day. His hand trembled as he set down the cup and saucer.
Bridgens handed him the biscuit tin and said, “You look done in, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
Harry did mind, in the part of himself which still clung to the shreds of propriety. On the whole, however, he was too busy feeling caught out. “There’s a reason I didn’t attend Oxford as a student. Too much hard work.” He took a biscuit.
Bridgens laughed obligingly and set his bad leg on the footstool by the fire. “Hard to imagine someone who works harder than you, sir.”
“Hm,” said Harry. “Well, lectures and tutorials are a quite different beast to the work of an assistant surgeon. There’s far more room for one’s own scholarly interests.”
He enjoyed it more than he’d expected to. The lack of a coherent degree course for the natural sciences meant Harry had free reign on the subject of his lectures. He’d thought the scattershot approach would frustrate him; in fact he found it soothing to speak about whatever interested him most, week by week. It was no longer life or death.
“I would imagine so,” said Peglar, who was already on his third biscuit. “The library offers similar comforts for John, I’ve noticed.”
“Have you been told off for reading too long in the stacks?” Harry inquired, mostly for the guilty smile he got in return. “I can’t blame you; the Ashmolean is almost too tempting a prospect for me.”
“We spent so long without books, I can’t seem to stop myself now,” said Bridgens. “Read the same things over and over these past years. I think I could recite King Lear word for word if I put in a little effort.”
“As if you couldn’t before,” Peglar said, teasing. He had one hand on Bridgen’s ankle where it rested on the footstool, his thumb against the nub of bone where his sock slipped down. “I seem to remember some very long recitations, once upon a time.”
“We that are young shall never see so much, nor live so long,” said Harry, absently. “I used to think that was a very pessimistic view of the world.”
Bridgens sighed. “When I first saw Lear, Cordelia lived. I have to say I prefer that version.”
“You know, I think I do too,” Harry mused. “I’m sure there are some scholars who would dislike our saying so.”
It was so cruel, to see her so close to being saved and then killed anyway. To have the feather seem to lift.
“We’ve seen enough death to excuse Cordelia, I should think,” said Peglar, abruptly. He set his cup down. “The scholars can go hang.”
“The old are just as foolish as the young,” Bridgens offered. He took Peglar’s hand and laced their fingers together. Harry looked away.
The reminder of their expedition had slipped into the room so easily. Most likely that would happen for the rest of their lives, Harry supposed, until one blessed day when it no longer made him feel like he was being turned inside out.
They talked of other matters for a while, the expedition neatly avoided once more. Harry thought of Silna, back with her people, and wondered whether she had some way to share her burdens. Friends like the sledge party who Irving had saved from Hickey’s scheming at the last moment, dragged down by the weight of his dead arm.
Harry settled back into the sofa cushions. Heavy curtains were drawn across the window to keep out the chill.
The front door opened. Henry Collins stood in the doorway, already halfway out of his coat.
“I’m back,” he called. He hung up his greatcoat on the coat stand and stamped his boots on the mat. “‘Fraid the grocer had none of your posh tea, John.”
“Ah, more’s the pity,” said Bridgens, amused. “Come and sit down, we were just having a cup of tea. Our last for some time, even!”
Harry couldn’t take his eyes off of him. He looked tired. Harry supposed they all did. And yet he was still as handsome as ever, with his broad shoulders and straight nose.
He waved, as Collins turned towards the party. “Hello, Mr Collins.”
Collins looked poleaxed, but recovered swiftly enough. “Hello, doctor,” he said. He opened and closed his mouth a few times. “Pleased – pleased to see you. You look well.” His cheeks were pink – likely the wind had picked up since Harry arrived.
This was one of the politest fictions Harry had heard in some time. He couldn’t help but laugh, shoulders shaking, as Collins rolled his eyes.
He set his cup and saucer down on the end table. Collins came to sit on the sofa beside him; it felt wonderful to have someone so close and not feel his muscles tense. He wanted, quite badly, to lean on the other man’s shoulder.
“Thank you for the compliment, Mr Collins,” said Harry. “But I’m not sure you’re being honest with me.”
“Oh, no, sir,” Collins replied. “I meant it.” And he must have – he looked so earnest, lips parted and eyes wide.
Harry looked down at his cup. There were only dregs left. He ate the rest of his biscuit, thankful to concentrate on the crumbs for a moment.
Bridgens handed Collins his own teacup and then pinned him with a look Harry couldn’t quite decipher. Collins shrugged helplessly; Bridgens sighed.
“How have you been, sir?” asked Collins, after a moment of silence.
Harry couldn’t contain the sigh. “I’m afraid you missed me regaling John and Henry with news of my work,” he said. “And besides that there isn’t much to tell. I’ve never been the most social creature.”
“Must be interesting, though,” Collins said. “Getting to talk about what you like all the livelong day and get paid for it as well.” He smiled, as if to soften the blow.
Harry smiled back, feeling warm. Collins had a very nice smile. “That part of it is rarely the source of my trouble,” he replied. “The university is well suited to me.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Collins. He touched Harry’s knee, fleetingly, then shifted in his seat.
“And you, Collins?” Harry asked. “How are you faring?”
“I’ve been… better,” he said, after a moment. “And worse. These two have helped.” He motioned to Bridgens and Peglar.
“You do most of the hard work,” said Peglar. Bridgens nodded in agreement. He glanced at Harry; he had a feeling they were both thinking of the laudanum.
Collins ducked his head. “Ah, well. I go to the grocer as needs be. I make up the house and keep my things tidy. I’m still looking for work,” he said, apologetic. “My skills aren’t exactly helping find a job on dry land.”
The admiralty found that was one of the great tragedies of the expedition; the loss of so many good Navy men, to the ice or to the fear of it.
“Well,” said Harry. Bridgens gave him an encouraging look. “If that is what you’re doing already then I – I’ve need of someone. In Oxford.”
That had not been what he meant to say. He had meant to say, Oxford is always looking for staff below stairs. A downgrade from Second Master of a flagship, of course, but something which could be done without references if necessary.
Collins frowned. “In what fashion? I’ve never been much for schoolwork, besides what was needed for the ship.”
Harry couldn’t quite believe what was coming out of his mouth. “I mean – I could hire you as a sort of – assistant. I’m afraid I’m terribly bad at cleaning up after myself, and I’ve no maid or housekeeper.”
There was silence for a few moments. Bridgens looked delighted when Harry glanced across the room.
“I know it’s a step down for you,” Harry continued. His heart pounded. He didn’t know why it felt so vital that Collins agreed. “But – but I think it would be quite suitable. We know each other quite well, I think, and there’s not much else I’m spending my pay on.”
The double pay from four years in the Arctic was still sitting at the bank, unused. It would pay Collins for years if he needed to.
“Alright,” said Collins. He offered Harry his hand to shake. He smiled. “Could do with a change of scenery.”