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There had been a part of James that hadn't truly believed that there could be a rainforest in Scotland. He had been to rainforests before, to the tropics on both hemispheres, he knew what to expect from the cloying heat, so humid every item of clothing stuck to him as though he had freshly emerged from the sea. There was no heat here, but somehow the air was still heavy and damp. Instead of lianas and brightly coloured birds, there was moss covering almost every surface, all about him were ferns and sedge, glistening mushrooms larger than his handspan by two or three times, and the otherworldly crackle of capercaillies in the distance. Even just the crown-shy pines above his head creating scattering rivulets of sunset sky between their branches would have been a remarkable sight on their own had he been able to pay attention to anything much beyond the searing pain in his chest and the throbbing in his head.

More remarkable, really, than the temperate rainforest around him, was the man failing to stoke the fire. A man James had thought would have rather left him to die than play nursemaid had proven instead to be a stalwart companion, one who could no longer hide the genuine care beneath his gruff exterior.

"Damn green wood." He muttered before turning to James. "How are you faring?"

"I have been better." He replied as jovially as he could manage, "Though I have also been worse."

In reality there were few times in which James had been worse. There was a gash across his head and another that followed the long swipe of claws from his chest right around his left arm, both of which were still bleeding quite heavily. It had been a stupid decision to come, but he had thought of little more than the prospect of a Royal Commission. Bleeding out on the side of some God-forsaken Scottish mountainside was making his dreams feel somewhat fanciful and vapid.

The advertisement had requested the capture, alive or dead, of a creature attacking the ironworks at Camlett or the shore of Loch Camock, posted by one Mayrick Holme, coal magnate and owner of said ironworks. Sir John had thought it a great investment of their time and resources, and was quietly relieved it was an affordable trip for what was sure to be a generous payout.

However, Sir John was anything but relieved upon arriving to find Terror already causing a stir with their eclectic group, asking all the wrong things from all the wrong people. It was also apparent after only a few days that they were in wildly over their heads.

Francis frowned. "Is there anything I might do to help?"

It was so sincere an expression, James felt his pained expression soften to something worryingly fond. "Tell me a story, Francis."

"You're the storyteller here James, not I."

"But your stories are real." He replied, earnestly. He did not mention, however, that staring up at the trees around them was making him lightheaded, and he feared drifting off never to awaken.

Sighing, Francis sat down next to him. "How about I tell you about the time I punched the handsomest man in the Royal Society?"

"I say, is that Francis Crozier?"

 

A plummy voice cut through the general hubbub as Francis and his crew made their way into the bustling inn. Affordable places to stay were few and far between in Mayfair, unless one was looking to stay in a house of ill-repute in Lisson Grove or down Union Street, and it seemed the Terrors had lost any chance of staking their claim on rooms in the Horse and Dolphin. Not only that but it appeared they had already been recognised, and if there was one thing Francis hated more than anything, it was being recognised.

 

"Mr. Crozier, sir!" The man called, jovially enough to set Francis' teeth on edge. He was tall and slender, waistcoat a fashionable eyesore and his long hair coiffed just so, tied in a loose queue with a fine satin ribbon. He was every bit the kind of ponce that Francis hated on sight, an impression that only seemed to amplify as he weaved through the throng to stand uncomfortably close to him. "Capital to see you here! We were expecting a few more groups but it seems we're the first teams here!"

 

"Teams?"

 

"You're here with Terror to investigate Number Fifty, are you not?" His gaze slipped past Crozier's shoulder to Blanky behind him and Little beyond that. "Or is this an unofficial visit?"

 

"I am, and it is not." Francis replied tersely. "It seems you have me at a disadvantage."

 

"Do I?" The man blinked several times, as though trying to discern whether he was joking, but seeing Francis' grim expression he stuck out his hand amiably. "James Fitzjames."

 

Francis looked at the proffered hand but didn't move to take it. "I see."

 

"I'm here with Sir John Franklin's team, an Erebite, if you will." He continued, somewhat sheepishly withdrawing his hand. "Ah, we've met before, actually. A few times."

 

Crozier's replying grunt was a curt invitation for the man to continue, which he did, albeit reluctantly, his sunny countenance dimming more by the second.

 

"There was a function for the Royal Society, I believe you and Sir John had been invited in honour of the donation of that fantastic Aatxe specimen you'd brought back from the Pyrenees. And then there was a luncheon, one of Lady Jane's benefits, the one with the jelly." Fitzjames laughed lightly as though that in itself was a joke that Francis ought to be in on. It petered out as he observed Crozier's sour expression.

 

"Yes, I remember now. You were telling anyone who'd listen about how you'd caught a 'Gdon in Bombay only to discover it was just a cheetah. As if that were a jape, like putting salt in your tea instead of sugar, rather than a magnificently incompetent mistake I'd be disappointed to see a ten year old make, let alone a grown man claiming jungle experience."

 

There was a moment of startled silence, before Fitzjames flushed with anger and embarrassment. "Now wait just a minute there, Crozier! I never claimed to be an Unnaturalist!"

 

"Certainly." Crozier replied lip curling.

 

"One shouldn't require a doctorate of any kind to participate in such scientific endeavours." Fitzjames continued. "Certainly, I could count perhaps a single man amongst your group who may have even attended university."

 

It was Crozier's turn to flush with anger. "I beg your pardon?"

 

"Oh, don't take that as a slight, it was merely an observation. That in itself is beside the point! Upon our first meeting, I was simply recounting a tale of exploration in a manner appropriate of a polite social gathering. You are familiar with those, Crozier?"

 

"Away and boil your head, Fitzjames!" Crozier spat back.

 

"Look here, just because you're in such a brown study as to have forgotten the meaning of fun doesn't mean every other poor wretch has to stoop to your level. I had thought we might- Oh never mind!" His laugh then was lacking all humour, all joviality entirely discarded. "Perhaps if you deigned to spend time with someone other than your drinks cabinet you might yet understand the concept of a joke."

 

There was a loud crack of flesh meeting flesh, and the room about them fell silent.

James reached to touch the ghost of the bruise on his jaw, the only sound between them the whistle of the wind and the wet crackling of the small, green fire.

"You are too hard on yourself Francis." He said at last, to a grunt of self deprecation. Tutting, James continued. "I knew full well you had battled the drink, and as rude as you were, I shouldn't have pushed you like that."

"Perhaps not, but that does not excuse my raising a hand to you." Francis replied, quiet and not a little forlorn. Such an expression might have been unwelcome not that long ago, but James smiled sadly at it now.

"I'm sure Sir John gave you a piece of his mind enough to wound you equally in turn."

Francis winced.

"I hear you met my new second, Fitzjames." Sir John said, his disapproval evident in his tone. "He's an amiable fellow with Unnatural expedition experience I'm sure will be invaluable to this investigation."

 

Francis' hand still throbbed and Blanky's reprimands were still ringing in his ears. Cruel , he had said, unnecessary and cruel . He was right, but Francis was nothing if not stubborn.

 

"With all due respect, Sir John, this might be Mayfair, but we're hardly here for a society get-together."

 

Sir John's frown deepened. "He came highly recommended and has a good rapport with the rest of the team." More than could be said about you was left unsaid but hanging in the air nonetheless. "I personally vetted him, he might not have your knowledge or expertise in this precise area, but I've yet to find fault with him."

 

Francis wished desperately to voice his own opinions on the faults he could find in the man, but bit his tongue. Sir John studied his face for a moment before sighing heavily. "I truly do regret the manner with which we parted, Francis. I considered you to be a friend as much as a colleague, and I did not wish for our enterprise to have ended on bad terms. Please do not think poorly of Fitzjames by association."

 

Before Francis could form a reply, Sir John had turned and left. In lieu of a cathartic confrontation, he simply cursed, slamming his injured fist against the door frame and hissing through the pain.

 

James' smile was wan and sympathetic. "That was an extraordinarily strange introduction to this business. You were entirely correct though, Francis, I was completely out of my depth there. Trapped in some basement with a horrific creature."

"If I remember correctly," Francis replied. "You held your own quite well given the number of tentacles."

"Can I tell you a secret?" James began, and Francis nodded. "I was terrified."

No. 50 Berkeley Square was a tall, stately townhouse in a fashionable part of the city, adorned with all of the architectural accoutrements one would expect of a palladian home; large, sash windows, tall ceilings with intricate plaster corbels, and a grand marble staircase. However, the house had been empty for a number of years, and the once-stylish decor was now coated in a layer of dust and cobwebs that painted the house in a ghoulish pallor. What made for a more unnerving picture, was the low, unidentifiable moan coming from the upper floors, creaks and groans from below, and the fact that the pattern of checkerboard floors beneath their feet had been seemingly swept clean of dust in a pattern of strange, gangly limbs.

 

"Quite right, quite right! However, there are any number of ways such tracks could have been left." Sir John said assuringly when Graham Gore pointed out as much. "Good catch, Graham, but no need to worry yourself quite yet."

 

Collins shuddered a little beside him, and muttered, "It's a little late for that."

 

Not to be put off so easily, James slapped the man on the shoulder amiably and told him in as friendly a manner as he could to simply "buck up" as with a team of their size and expertise there was "no chance of any harm coming to anyone."

 

These words turned bitter and caustic in his mouth not an hour later as he knelt over the body of poor Graham, face grey and contorted into a rigour of fear James had never had the misfortune of seeing before. Unfortunately, not one of the team were focused on their fallen comrade, instead their gaze had followed the steady drip, drip, drip of slime that had fallen in thin globs onto their shoulders and faces from above. Hanging, gripping with at least a dozen suckered limbs to the beams of the ceiling, hidden in the shadows, was a grotesque creature James couldn't even begin to describe in Natural terms. In amongst the knot of flesh was a nest of eyes, dark as the basement around it, but still clearly watching them all.

 

"Collins," James said in a hurried whisper, not taking his eyes from the Thing On The Ceiling. "The shotgun, if you will."

 

He could hear fumbling behind him, and a few muffled curses before he felt the cold metal of the shotgun in his hand. He raised it slowly, eyes still locked with the Thing. It gurgled a little, and shifted just barely as he squeezed the trigger and the crack of gunfire ricocheted off the bare brick. 

Instead of a clean kill at close range, amidst the smoke James could see the creature rearing forwards, its limbs flinging out in all directions to launch itself at them. The gunshot had brought the rest of Erebus tearing down the staircases, their footfall above them seeming to confuse the Thing for a moment. Mind racing for solutions, any solutions, James untied his coin purse and shook as many silver coins as he could into the barrel, aimed and fired. It fell with a squeal and a great, cold, wet slap as its body hit the flagstones below.

As soon as it fell the door behind them slammed open, the bolt that had been keeping them trapped there had been broken clean from the brickwork and Sir John, as valiant as a Saint, was charging down the rickety basement stairs.

 

"Silver, Sir John!" James cried. "The shotgun shell did nothing on its own, but the coins, the coins hurt it!"

 

Sir John rushed past and as James watched him go, he realised to some horror that the Thing had disappeared entirely. All that was left of their strange and deadly encounter was the sluggish trail of dark ichor leading into the darkness. No matter how they searched, through the house again and into the sewers beneath the grand houses of Grosvenor Square and Curzon Street, and even into the park, as dawn began to paint the Serpentine pink and gold, but the Thing was never found dead or alive.

Sir John had commended him on his quick thinking, and held a memorial for Graham at the next Society meet. The gesture was somewhat dampened by its proximity to the large artist's rendition of the very creature that killed him. James hadn't slept for nearly a week, and refused to stay in London at all for months, fearing every night that he could hear the wet slap of tentacled limbs down every dark alley and from behind every basement door.

Francis was quiet as James finished his tale. "Graham was a good sort. Popular with the men, but a good tracker with instinct to match even Blanky's."

"I am sorry for his loss, Francis. I didn't know him as well as I wished, but in that moment I wished he had been one of your mutineers."

"Mutineers? Splitting from Sir John and Erebus was hardly a mutiny, James. Though I agree, I wish he had been stuck in that blasted inn with us that night. To think, if we'd arrived in time to take those rooms instead of you, and hadn't had to walk to St. Martins and back, it would have been us in that house. At the time I thought it a curse, to have missed out on such a discovery, but now I think it a blessing."

"Tell me, Francis, how did you manage to poach so many members of Erebus?"

Francis sighed heavily and shook his head. "That is not a story you wish to hear, and it is not a story I wish to tell."

"Are we not friendly now, Francis?" James replied somewhat plaintively, and Francis was quick to reassure him that they were, hand squeezing his uninjured shoulder firmly.

"Perhaps, though perhaps we would be less so after such a story."

James studied Francis' face then, there was pain and barely-healed wounds that he daren't broach, not when they had so recently forged this uneasy comradery. "Tell me about them then, your team. I know them all by name, but I can't say I could tell you a thing about them."

"They're a good sort, loyal but not afraid to steer me right."

Upon entering the common room of their lodgings at the Stag and Hound , Francis could see Harry Goodsir examining his equipment as Silna and young Peglar looked on. 

 

Goodsir had been the first of Erebus' team that he had unofficially poached, though to be perfectly fair Francis had had little say in the matter, as the moment Goodsir had met Silna, his presence within Terror was a foregone conclusion.

Though he had some medical training, he was a naturalist and a scholar first and foremost. He had not been a part of the Erebus expedition to the Arctic that fateful year, instead had been helping his brother as acting curator at the Edinburgh Natural and Unnatural History Museum. It was here that he'd had his first encounter with an Unnatural creature up close. Sir John had donated a number of specimens to the museum himself, and had arrived with their entire team to see them on display.

It was there that he first happened upon Silna, engaged in a venomous confrontation with Sir John and a number of other Society members, the context of which he would not learn for many years, but that made it clear even from that first meeting that any star-stuck impressions he may have had of Sir John were to dissipate as quickly as his regard for Silna would flourish. 

 

"Then you slide the sheet of copper into this part here, see." Goodsir demonstrated the plate sliding into place at the back of the camera. "Then when viewing the image you wish to capture, simply remove the lens cover for thirty seconds or so, depending on the lighting, replace the cap then put the exposed plate back into its light-tight holder."

 

"Can we see the images straight away then, sir?" Peglar asked, to which Goodsir replied that they could not.

 

"In order to develop the image so that we might see it, treatment with mercury fumes is required, which is quite hazardous when not instigated by professionals. No, Henry, any images we capture here will need to wait until we have returned to London to be properly seen."

 

Peglar seemed so disheartened by this that Goodsir took pity on the boy and handed him a small lacquered case. "These here are from some of our previous investigations."

 

Francis smiled. Harry was nothing if not kind and patient, and in time even Silna's ire was gentled by his sincerity. He wanted nothing more than to learn about her and her people, so much so that he started compiling a dictionary so that they might converse in her own language and not just in theirs. Silna, who had always seemed a cold, hard person to Francis, softened like butter in the sun at Harry's earnest efforts to better himself and the others around them. It was obvious he was besotted with her, but he was perhaps too patient in this for his own good.

 

Peglar opened the case to see a collection of gold-toned images, some of men in uniform, others of nondescript animals that could easily have been fantastical or mundane. They were not the kinds of photography one would see in the Royal Society halls, but Peglar was fascinated by them all the same.

 

"That one was an excellent capture." Francis interjected at last as he gestured towards the image of an odd, furred serpent. "We were in a small village on the slopes of Mount Adamello, I can't even remember what we were hunting originally, but it was January and we were in desperate need of shelter from the snow."

 

Peglar's eyes widened as he described the small, Italian town perched on a hillside, houses like mountain goats on the rocks. He spoke of the men in masks, dressed as women and hunchbacks, beating drums as they paraded a strange, furred serpent through the town. Of the secrets they spilled and the feast they had afterwards.

 

"The snow was swirling around us, the wind all but extinguishing our lanterns, and all the while this great worm, the size of a calf, eyes burning like hot coals, sat at the head of the table as it was fed sausages and cornmeal by village children."

 

"Then the next morning they let it go." Goodsir said, somewhat wistfully.

 

Francis nodded. As the first grey light of dawn had crept upon the exhausted throngs, much as they had done the night before, the village carried the creature through the streets and down the hill until they reached the edge of the forest. Then the creature simply crawled back into the dark of the woods and the people returned home as though they had not captured a creature of legend, fed it from their table, and exposed every sin the town had committed the previous year. "They called it 'il Badalisc' and were as grateful to it for the cleansing of their sins as they would be on taking the Eucharist."

 

"Papists do have strange customs." Peglar muttered before remembering himself, cheeks ruddy. "Begging your pardon, sir."

 

Francis patted his shoulder. "I believe that creature had been a part of that town for longer than Christendom, Henry, Papist or otherwise."

"Did you truly see a hairy serpent?" James asked then, with boyish reverence. Francis replied dryly that, yes, they had. "I'd thought serpents were perhaps found more exclusively in warmer climes."

"The non-hairy ones, perhaps." Francis' smile was wry and teasing.

"What of Jopson? You seem," James paused. "Close."

"You know that I struggled with drink, and that I eventually fought it off. Well, the time I spent unwell was perhaps the most unpleasant two weeks of my life. Had it not been for Jopson during that time, I feel I might not be here with you now."

The track down from Kincamock to the loch's edge was well-trodden but extemporaneous, little more than rocks and dirt worn down by feet and the occasional cart. They were bracketed on both sides by tall, gangly trees in full summer leaf, but the hills beyond undulated and rose like great waves, each one larger than the last, over the green of the canopy, the peak of Beinn Locar all but invisible amongst the smirr. It was to be a good two hours walk to the spot of the most recent sighting, and the weather was dense and humid around them, but there was talk here and there, of previous Scottish experience, of European mountains, and forests on far continents. Goodsir was noting the flora and fauna of the area in stilted Inuktitut to Silna, who was listening patiently and translating for him when he could not find the words, while Little and Blanky discussed the logistics of the day ahead.

 

"You seem concerned, sir." Jopson said to Crozier, quietly from his left. When Francis shook his head and replied that he was not, Jopson considered him for a moment before continuing. "You shouldn't let it bother you, sir, that Franklin and Erebus are here. I might be biased, but I think that you were in the right with what happened. If you don't mind me saying."

 

Francis' answering smile was small and tired. "Of course I don't mind you saying, Thomas. Though I believe your faith in me is misplaced, as I was certainly not in the right from the start."

 

Jopson frowned slightly. "Mr. Blanky said you always had the right of it, even if it took you some time to come to it. Your judgement has always seemed sound to me. Ned too, though he mightn't have voiced it as well as he could."

 

"Are you familiar with Ned's opinions on the matter?" Francis asked, raising a wry brow at the colour rising to Jopson's cheeks as he did.

 

"Mr. Little was concerned - for your well-being that is - after our return. He made a point of asking after you, and we exchanged a few words from time to time."

 

Francis frowned. "I was unaware that he had concerns."

 

"Not in the way you're thinking, sir. It was a professional concern, but amiable nonetheless. And I mollified him as best I could."

 

Crozier hummed thoughtfully before thanking him. The loch stretched out ahead of them, thirteen miles of  water so deep and dark as to almost be black, the surface churned up by the West winds coming in off the Atlantic. It was strange to think that if he were to board a boat on that very shore they could sail directly back to the icy shores of his greatest shame. There were times he thought on those dark days back on the dreary British soil after years in the terrible white, slowly killing himself with drink and self-flagellation, and wondered how he ever got himself out of it. The feeling was so all-consuming.

He glanced again at Jopson and felt a familiar tug of affection and gratitude. Blanky had dragged him out of it, of course, but Jopson had cared for him as a parent does an invalid child. He had not truly recovered for himself, but for the people around him who had heart enough to care. Even on the darker days, he owed it to them.

Rain had begun to fall as swiftly as the dusk, and Francis had propped his coat up with a number of branches to create a haphazard bivouac above James' head. The fire was smoky and weak, and James wheezed as he adjusted himself to better hide from the smoke and keep himself dry, as Francis dithered about him with poorly-concealed concern. Waving him away ineffectually James instead begged another story from him, and Francis was helpless but to acquiesce.

He began to paint a picture of a Cornish village, white-washed stone cottages and a pleasant, Norman church, whose yard was filled with ancient yew and oak, and other such traditional greenery.

"It was odd to think anything untoward could happen in such a place, it was peaceful and idyllic, in a traditionally bucolic way."

St Aubyn's was mere minutes' walk away from the main village, consisting of two dozen cottages, a small farm shop, and a large manor fallen into disrepair. The approach was through a veritable tunnel of trees which, during the day, was a fairytale of dappled green and birdsong, but as Erebus made their way in the dead of night, the only light that of a handful of lanterns, the trees seemed dark and sinister, crowding over them with morbid interest.

As always, Sir John was in high spirits, they were attending an Anglican church to rid it of foul creatures, doing God's work, which pleased him greatly indeed. Crozier and Little were less than enthralled to be in attendance, the latter because he preferred to be in bed before midnight, and the former because an Irish Catholic was never much pleased to be walking to an Anglican church.

 

"Remind me again, Francis, of our 'Monster of the Week'!" Sir John said, rather too loudly.

 

Francis sighed and gave Little a long-suffering look. "The locals call it the Cowanden."

 

Sir John laughed, a mite unkindly. "And in English, Francis?"

 

"The girls who first caught sight of it described it as an owl the size of a man-"

 

"Aha!" Sir John exclaimed, cutting off Francis before he could continue. "The Owlman! Capital!"

 

Edward coughed loudly in a way that Francis was sure was a poorly-concealed laugh, but in the darkness it was difficult to be certain.

 

"There's no evidence to suggest it's related to any local folklore." Blanky interjected. "There were no sightings of an 'Owl Man' prior to the girls' reports, and only those who specifically went searching afterwards have seen it. It savours strongly of some sort of hoax, rather than anything Unnatural."

 

He did not mention, however, that the girls had been particularly convincing witnesses. It was in all of their natures to disregard the hysterical tales of adolescent girls as nonsense, in fact it was only after a number of young men had set out to confront the beast of their sisters' tales that anyone truly considered there to be a beast at all. Francis thought, somewhat chastised, that had one or more of the girls not had an older brother willing to go to such lengths to prove her wrong, whether to tease or comfort, no one would have thought to investigate at all.

There was a gabled gate that creaked as they passed through, and there was a visible shudder of apprehension that ran through the team as they breached the threshold of the churchyard. All but Sir John felt an unnerving presence, hands tightening on lamps and nets alike, but beyond the rustling of leaves in the wind and the creak of old beams from the church ahead, there was no other sound.

They searched the yard, moving between the graves as respectfully as they could manage, lanterns swung from side to side in search for tracks, feathers, claw marks, or anything of any substance that might provide evidence of the Owlman's existence.

 

"Frank." Blanky hissed suddenly from beside him. 

 

Francis turned to reply, but as he did, his friend had placed a finger to his lips, and gestured with a military man's hands to listen. He could hear nothing. The wind had died, the church had stopped creaking, all that was left was an eery stillness. Suddenly, all around them was a hissing, not from one direction nor another, as though the very air was vibrating. It was an all encompassing sound that rattled their bones and Francis felt nauseous with it. He was vaguely aware of shouting around him from the team, some who were hunched over themselves, hands clamped over ears or arms about their heads, but Francis followed Blanky's line of sight instead. Up.

There, stooped over the crenellated parapet, was the creature. Tall as a man, taller even, and though its form wasn't clear in the sliver of waning moonlight, it was clear to see the burning red eyes, large, wide-set and Unnatural, peering down at them through the gloam. It wasn't until a moment later, when the creature shifted again that Francis could see that the shadows behind it were nothing of the sort, rather great wings, unfurling and trembling slightly with what he could only guess was anticipation.

 

As suddenly as it had started, the hissing stopped, and instead the creature opened it's maw and screeched.

"A formidable beast, Francis!" James interjected. "I saw that specimen in the Society behind glass and thought it terrifying even then. Whatever happened?"

"You were about to hear, before you interrupted." Francis replied wryly. "But it was Blanky who took it down really. Climbed onto the church roof himself and set the thing alight. Nearly lost his leg doing it, too. Damn thing was already dead by the time Sir John fired his shot."

James frowned. "And to think, Sir John took the credit for that too."

Francis sighed. "I do not mean to make you think ill of the man, James, but there are a great many things that Sir John has done in his time that are less than valiant."

"That sounds a tad too charitable, Francis." James said wearily.

"Yes, well." He grumbled. "I don't suppose that is for me to say."

James regarded him thoughtfully from the corner of his eye. "I know you do not like to speak of your time with Sir John, but I have heard so many half-stories of your escapades, and I rather feel that I'm missing the most important parts. Won't you tell me about the sea creature you found in Van Dieman's Land?"

"Please, anything but that story." Francis groaned and at such a reaction James couldn't help but perk up. 

"No, no, now I must know!" He replied with a grin.

"Fine. The waters around Van Dieman's Land are notoriously treacherous. More ships sink in those waters than anywhere else in that part of the world."

There it was, sunning itself along the shore, twenty feet long and almost as much wide. It was bulbous with wiry white spines that covered most of its back, in place of a mouth it had soft, tusk-like protrusions and along its sides were six fleshy arms.

 

"It was a good thing we were in the area, Francis." Sir John said as he lowered the spyglass and handed it to him. "To think, we have the opportunity to catalogue and perhaps even capture and entirely new species without the expenditure of long distance travel."

 

Francis eyed the thing on the beach with some scepticism. "Do you believe it to be Natural or Unnatural, sir?"

 

Sir John blustered somewhat that it hardly mattered, so long as the discovery was of scientific merit and recognised by The Society.

 

"Just think," He continued. "Of the commissions we could receive for such a find!"

 

Francis turned to Little, who had been sketching the scene below for posterity, and raised a brow. "What do you make of it?"

 

Little frowned. "I can't be sure, Mr. Crozier, but I can't say I've seen anything of the like myself."

 

"It almost looks like a very large Tardigradum . Not an Unnatural creature, though they can only be seen under a microscope, so perhaps one so large as this could be some sort of anomaly. An Unnatural Natural creature." Dr. McDonald mused as he himself squinted down his own spyglass.

 

"Very astute!" Declared Sir John as he tromped down the sand bank towards the creature. "Much like melanism or albinism, gigantism should not be discounted as a trivial example of scientific discovery. If we are to capture such a beast, we can be sure it will better our understanding of God's earth."

 

Despite his misgivings, Francis had to admit that the creature on the sand was certainly other worldly. He had been working with Sir John in his Unnaturalist pursuits for a short time, and they had found a few creatures that had turned rid him of any lingering scepticism he had been retaining, but not everything they happened upon was of any significance. In fact, even the Unnatural specimens they had recorded were already well known by the Society, and had received little fanfare back in London, much to Sir John's chagrin.

 

The closer they got, the stranger the creature appeared. Francis could not see any eyes, nor a mouth of any kind, and its entire being appeared to be oddly gelatinous. Upon closer inspection the spines on its side looked more like extraordinarily thick hairs, and what had at one point appeared to be tusks, now seemed to be just another set of strange fleshy limbs. It was the sort of creature one might expect to find in the depths of the ocean where even light could not find it, yet here it was splayed across the beach for all the world to see.

 

As they set foot on the sand, they all became all too aware that however it appeared from afar, the stench was decidedly of this world. It was worse than rotten, the kind of smell that combined the wet stink of decay with the lingering salt and vegetable odour of kelp left out in the sun. It was altogether the most vile being that Francis had ever had the misfortune of happening upon. Behind him Francis could hear Henry Collins emptying the contents of his stomach onto the sand, and the gentle murmur of Jopson's comforting words spoken from behind a handkerchief as he patted Collins' back.

 

"Well, it's definitely dead." Blanky said from beside him, surprisingly nonplussed by the thing.

 

Francis replied that he wasn't certain if it was ever alive to begin with, to which Blanky laughed until the reek crept in with his breaths and his expression became as queasy as the rest of them.

 

Sir John, whether through valiance or stupidity, stepped forwards to get a better look at the carcass. He nudged it gingerly with the end of his walking cane and beckoned the rest of the team closer. Francis begrudgingly complied, as did Dr. McDonald, and Little. Blanky simply levelled Francis with an unimpressed look and a comment that nothing could be worth getting closer to whatever was making a smell like that.

 

"Good Doctor, what a specimen, eh?" Sir John declared, quite obviously breathing through his mouth as much as possible so as not to inhale the creature's vile aroma. "Be a gentleman and set up your camera for me. I wish this to be immortalised for the Society."

 

As McDonald set up his equipment, taking a moment here and there to breathe through his handkerchief, Jopson approached from behind them having left Collins lying on his back in a nearby sand dune and said matter-of-factly, "I think I've seen one of those wash up on the banks at Limehouse. Fairly sure that's a chunk of rotten whale."

 

Little turned to Jopson with a mix of disgust and delight on his face as the phosphorous flash cracked in time with his guffaw. It was the first time Francis had seen him truly laugh, and the gentle crinkle of Jopson's eyes as their gazes met said that it was for him too.

James was laughing so hard that Francis was afraid he might further injure himself.

"Oh away and boil your head, James!" He said with little heat and a small, pleased smile.

"I like it better when you say it that way." Francis asked in what way James simply smiled back. "When you don't look like you'll knock my teeth out straight afterwards."

Francis reached out as if to touch the place he once had done before, but thought better of it, his hand retreating to settle once again in his lap. They were silent for a while, only James' laboured breathing still audible above the sound of the rain.

It was odd for Francis to think back on the last few years, since that fateful meeting in Mayfair. So much of his opinion of the man now lying next to him had been forged from second-hand gossip and his own damn prejudices, but with every consequent meeting, one of the scales had fallen from his eyes. James was so much more than he had seemed, and it shamed Francis for having thought otherwise. Now when he thought of James, his chest filled with a fondness that bordered on something more profound. When he had seen James in danger, in the very jaws of the beast, he found all logic had fled and he ran as though the devil were at his heels, and not vice versa.

"You must know," James said at last, shattering Francis’ reverie. "That such a story is not uncommon, and certainly less embarrassing than many of my own."

"Well then, what tales of woe do you have for me?" When he gestured down to his prone frame, Francis tutted. "That hardly counts, James. It was no fault of yours that two entire hunting teams managed to miss the approach of a twelve foot jungle cat and you happened to be the unlucky sod closest to it."

It had started innocuously enough. They had been told by Mr. Holme that the creature they were hunting would slink away across the water from his ironworks, and was heard screaming in the dark from deep in the forest. So, naturally, they had headed into the forest with all of their best equipment, and set about tracking the thing. 

They hadn't really known what they were looking for, but Sir John had been certain that they would know what they were looking for when they saw it. After a number of hours traipsing through the undergrowth, caked in sweat, mud and moss, it was decided that they would be better setting up a forward camp of sorts. 

 

"A base of operations in unknown territory, James!" Sir John had cried jovially, his face ruddy with the morning's exertion, when James had suggested perhaps they forge on a little further, as it was still early afternoon. "It never hurts to be prepared or well-rested!"

 

So they began clearing away the greenery and fallen branches, brushing aside flowers and shrubs, and cutting down any poor saplings that had happened to sprout in the vicinity of where they were making their campsite. The wood was too green or too wet to burn effectively, but Bridgens had had the foresight to pack writing paper, which he grudgingly sacrificed for kindling, though James was certain this was done so to better shield the books he had brought from a possible fiery end themselves.

It was only once they had got a reasonable fire going, and had begun pitching the large oilskin tents, that they were interrupted by the arrival of Terror's sole female member, crashing through the trees as though the very hounds of hell were on her heels.

She was spitting her words with such violence, one didn't have to speak her language to know that she was chastising them quite harshly. She knelt to the ground and keened at the stubs of where plants had once been. When, at last, some more of her team appeared from between the trees, she turned on them and relayed what James was sure was scathing commentary on the Erebite camp. Francis was third of their group to appear, stripped to his shirtsleeves in the muggy afternoon clime. James felt the colour rise in his cheeks as their eyes met, but Francis was soon engaged in whatever it was that the Lady was saying, replying to her in her own tongue, clumsily but somewhat competently. He nodded, his face creasing with displeasure as she continued, before he turned to face James personally.

 

"You cannot camp here." He began and flinched at Sir John's answering scoff. "I don't say this as some sort of petty inconvenience between rivals, I mean we have been tracking the beast from the shore, up through the gorge, and onto this ledge. Silna says that you have destroyed our chance of tracing it any further, but this is likely very close to where it’s staying."

 

Before James could reply Sir John laughed with false cheer and declared it good fortune for them to have chosen so convenient a spot.

 

Francis all but growled at this interruption, but James raised a conciliatory hand. "I would hear what he has to say, Sir John."

 

Baffled, Sir John reluctantly gestured for Francis to continue. Francis himself shot James a quizzically grateful look before explaining further what they had uncovered at Camlett. Sir John's bafflement grew to poorly concealed ire as the story drew on.

 

"You believe this woman and a handful of drunken workmen over an esteemed patron of the Royal Society? You have taken this too far, Francis, even for you!"

 

"That esteemed patron is the cause of his own problems, Franklin. He has encroached on land that does not belong to him, he has caused grief and suffering to its people, and has exploited the land to beyond what it can recover from. This beast, be it Natural or Unnatural, has every right to reclaim what he has taken, don't you think?"

 

"Of course you would twist any scenario into this tired argument. Stab not the fallen, Francis. Sophocles, is it not, Bridgens? Hmm?"

 

"You dare speak of the fallen ?" Francis began, and James felt his grasp on the conversation slipping as the two began to throw insults and grievances at one another, joined at once by Blanky and Little, the latter held back just barely by Jopson, whose hand resting on his forearm stilled Edward's burgeoning anger to a low simmer.

 

James' eyes drifted from the furor, to where Peglar and Bridgens were stood, side by side, heads close in hurried conversation. Bridgens seemed perturbed by whatever it was that Peglar was saying, and looked up sharply in James' direction. He began to shout something when James felt a hot, sharp pain in his side before his head collided with a crack into a nearby tree, and his body fell like a discarded ragdoll. 

His vision swam as he gasped for breath through the most acute pain he had ever experienced. There was a large, dark shape in front of him, a low rumble emanating from it, and he was vaguely aware of shouting, and the sound of gunshots.

 

"Stop!" He cried, or at least thought he did. His voice fell raspy and quiet from his lips as he tried in vain to drag himself upright. Though none of his comrades could hear him, the creature whipped round and stalked back to where he lay, fangs huge and yellowing as they sunk once again into his arm.

 

 He could feel the undergrowth rushing underneath him as he was dragged bodily away from the camp. With his good arm he reached up and touched the dark fur of the monster whose jaws he was so firmly held in. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." He babbled as he slipped in and out of consciousness. "We didn't know, we didn't know."

 

"You knew, though. You knew it would be there, and you knew it was going to attack. How ever did you manage to get that information?"

Francis sighed. "The issue with Sir John is that he has a blind spot for class. If there ever was a man to espouse the virtues of helping the less fortunate, but still to consider them beneath him, it would be John Franklin. After we'd crossed paths in Kincamock and Sir John had given me a piece of his mind regarding the 'disruption of our benefactor's enterprise' we promptly ignored him and made our way around the North shore to the ironworks."

The approach to the Camlett Ironworks was muddy from the previous night's rainfall and the tramp of a hundred workers' boots as they had clocked in that morning.

 

Little flagged down the first worker he saw, who was reluctant to engage, but eventually angled his head behind him towards a man who appeared to be hollering orders up and down the compound. "You're best speaking to Murdo." He said, his accent thick, vowels clipped and consonants soft.

 

If the first worker had been reluctant, Murdo was downright antagonistic. Little ventured first, asking after him as the previous man had said and received a distinctly unimpressed reply.

 

"Aye, who's asking?"

 

As Little continued to introduce himself and the team, Francis noticed that Silna had detached from their retinue and was walking slowly towards the water's edge.

 

"What do you think?" He asked, his Inuktitut slow but more fluent than Goodsir's.

 

Without shifting her gaze from the loch, she hummed thoughtfully and replied. "The balance is wrong on this side of the water. It is like sukkittunga ." When Francis repeated the word back to her, their eyes met for a moment and he could see the twitch of a smile tugging at her lips. "Your inuttitut is getting worse. Sukkik , a small piece of wood stuck under your skin. It hurts at first, but you do not always know it is there. If you can remove it quickly it is not a problem, but if you are not careful it starts to rot inside."

 

"A splinter." Francis provided in English with a nod of understanding. "This feels like that to you?"

 

She hummed in reply. "It feels like when your people set off explosions in the ice. The land has been disturbed, the animals and the people suffer."

 

There had been no accusation in her voice, but Francis felt shamed all the same. "Do you think it's the iron ... stove?"

 

"Stove?" Silna blinked at the word. "Ah, I suppose that works. I would perhaps say iron uunaqiqarvik , the place where iron is heated, but yes, in part. The land feels sick, the ironworks are filling the sky with smoke and the water with poison, but it is more than that. It feels angry, but it feels empty too. Things that once grew here do not grow here any longer."

 

"There have been ironworks here for hundreds of years, why now? What's changed?"

 

Silna simply shrugged and replied that she could only tell him as much as she could feel, and that was what she could feel.

 

Their musings were interrupted by the sound of raised voices from behind them. Crozier turned to see Little and the foreman, Murdo, all but snarling at one another, and though he couldn't hear the particulars, the disagreement appeared to have spread from Little to even Blanky and Goodsir, who had both stepped closer, flanking Little on either side.

 

He barked at both parties to back down as he strode back over, but it did little to ease their tempers. They bit and snapped at one another a few more times before Francis placed himself directly between them, hands open and placating towards the irate ironworker.

 

"We did not come here to cause grievances, we're just trying to find out a little more about the beast your men reported seeing." He said, and at the familiar burr Murdo appeared to soften very slightly. "We're just trying to help."

 

"Aye, we've had your folk before, coming here to help but you sweer to listen !" Murdo growled. "Just sneeter amongst yourselves like my men aren't afeart for their lives. Sgrios a bhith orbh! "

 

The last words were harsh but filled less with venom than exhaustion, and as unfamiliar as they were to most of their assembly, to Francis they were the spark of a desperate idea.

 

Just as the foreman turned to leave Crozier clenched his fists and shouted after him in a tongue that was leaden and slow from misuse, but the taste of which stirred something warm and half-forgotten in his chest. It was a tongue that his grandmother had spoken, but that had been beaten from his father, then from him and all his sisters. He cringed at the sound of it, another shameful thing he held against his heart, tucked away with the small, silver medallion his mother had gifted him, inscribed: stus christophorus protector noster .

 

As he'd hoped the man stopped and, thus emboldened, Francis ventured again. "Más é do thoil é." Please .

 

The hushed whispers from the Terrors behind him had stopped as well, and even the workers in the near distance seemed to slow, their gazes drifting to their ramshackle group.

 

"Tha Èirinn gu math fad às, nach eil a charaid?" Murdo said at last, through an unimpressed sneer. The words fell from the foreman's lips soft as moss, but his tone was far less friendly. To Francis it was like hearing someone speak while underwater, he knew the shape and meaning of it, but much of the detail was lost. He was far from home, he supposed.

 

"Tá meirg ar mo chuid Gaeilge, agus is oth liom a rá níl Gaeilge na hAlban agam," He replied with a wince. It was an apology, as best as he could manage. The consonants were sharper in his mouth than Murdo's had been, the vowels less round, but there was a familiar cadence, and as he spoke he could see the Scotsman's gaze grow shrewd and thoughtful. "Ach féachfaidh mise leis."

 

At that, Murdo barked a laugh, less bitter than before but equally as tired. He took a moment to regard Francis, then the team behind him before sighing deeply. "Fortanach, tha mi a' tuigsinn do Ghàidhlig na h-Èireann gu leòr."

 

Even for those who spoke nothing but English, the ebbing tension was almost palpable, and Francis let go of an anxious breath, extending a hand to the man. "Arís, ar mhiste leat cabhrú linn, a chara?"

 

Murdo frowned at the hand for a moment before rolling his eyes and shaking the proffered hand firmly. "Ceart gu leòr, a charaid."

 

As the foreman gestured for the rest of the group to follow him further into the ironworks, Blanky turned to Crozier with bewilderment. "What the bleeding hell was that, old man?"

Crozier's answering smile was almost on the bashful side of wry. "Us Teagues have got to stick together."

"I didn't know you spoke Irish."

Francis grunted. "It's not something that has ever brought me much fortune."

The rain and hissing crackle of the fire swelled around them for a moment before James spoke up again. "It's a shame that we must be forced to forget so much of our mother tongues in aid of the Empire."

"What would you know of it?" Francis snarled reflexively, but his ire extinguished at James' pained expression. There was a naked honesty in his face that caught him quite off guard.

James sighed, breath rattling. "What would I know of it, indeed."

Francis swallowed heavily, the question itching on his tongue, but as James wheezed again, he instead shifted closer. "Camlett Ironworks are even more monstrous up close than they had looked from across the water."

The dour, black cairns of iron slag were piled around tall stoves that clung to the furnaces in pairs like pilot fish. All the while the smoke and smog shrouded the chimneys above, blocking out whatever meagre sunlight had breached the thick layer of cloud cover, leaving the factory dark and the air close and claggy. Murdo stalked ahead of them, shouting clipped greetings to the men here and there, who all appeared friendly towards the man, though their gaze turned wary as it fell on the Terrors.

 

They spoke briefly to a number of men who all reluctantly shared that they had seen something difficult to describe, lurking in the shadows before some misfortune fell the ironworks. Most appeared to be level-headed enough to brush it off as a trick of the light, many of the older workers were losing their sight and hearing enough not to trust their own senses on such things. Little, Jopson and Goodsir were making notes and sketches as they continued onwards, but a glance at Blanky showed Francis wasn't the only one with misgivings about this venture. If all they were to get was second-hand anecdotes from tired men with poor eyesight, it was looking to be a wasted day, and one that they simply couldn't afford.

 

Then they stopped in front of a ramshackle stock house at the base of one of the large cylinders closest to the assayer's office. There was a man squatting outside, middle-aged but not yet greying, chewing the end of his pipe and squinting up at them all from under bushy, low-set eyebrows.

 

"Murdo." He said with a nod.

 

"Bain, I've some associates here to ask you some questions about the beast."  The foreman replied, before introducing the man to the Terrors as John Bain, a stoker who'd had a closer encounter with the beast from the loch.

 

"We'd just like to know what you saw, in your own words." Ned said as he finished taking down the man's details.

 

Bain's large eyebrows raised as one. "My ain words? Looked like a cat, but the size of a muckle pony and dark as a blackjock, slinking canny-like ahint the trees there." He gestured towards the water where a small island was just about visible. "MaolNaomh, used to have a kirk so most folk here got buried there. Easier and cheaper than hauling them back til Kincamock. There's a wee kirk there, 'course, but it's just a buskit creeve with some half-knab who calls himself a priest. There was threescore graves on that island when we arrived and there's been half a dozen more added of late. It's as Christian soil as any, but the kirk is no more than rummle now, so some folk think it an unsonsy place. Alls I know is that the beast was hulkin on that shore. It was a darker night than usual as the clouds were thick and the wind had slocked all the lanterns, but the beast's eyes were still burning bright as anything. I'm not freitty, but I know what I saw."

 

"What happened after that?" Goodsir ventured.

 

He shrugged stiffly. "I lost sight of it. Next thing, something's clyped a great gash in the stove neb there and fled." He sighed and took another puff of his pipe. "If you're wanting more than that, you're best talking to Blockie. He's a peedie wee gowk but he saw more than me. He sees more than anyone."

 

Blockie, as it turned out, was a young boy, barely more than twelve, coltish and awkward as only boys of that age could be. "Blockie's a by-name." He explained, voice reedy in a way that suggested it was not far from breaking. Murdo laughed and said that it was for how the boy would stare gormlessly into space, eyes glazed and mouth open like a fish fresh out of the sea. Blockie scowled and added, "My mither named me Peter, I bud ask you to do the same."

 

Peter's story started much as the others had, but just as Bain had said, where they had seemingly lost sight of the creature, the boy had seen more. "At first I thought it was a hunting dog, the great shaggy kind frae the manor-place, but then I saw its eyes doing what cats' eyes do in the moonlight, shining silver as two shillings. It was pacing along the loch's brim over-by on MaolNaomh Inch when it spied me. It got its birss up, hair all standing on end, then slipped ablow the water. I was feart it would come after me, but it let me be and swam til the slag heap instead. It was howkin with its great paws like it were butter and not iron bingstead. Then it began to skirl and screech. I've no heard a sound like it afore, I could feel it in my bones."

 

"Was it digging for something specific?"

 

"How should I ken? I was feart for my life, no tarragit with it!"

"Still not much to go on there, Francis." James said. "You can't have pieced it together just from that."

"Hush and let me finish then." Francis chastened gently. "We got these stories from the workers, and spent some time tossing ideas about here and there. Blanky suggested Cu-Sìth, but there hadn't been a single bark mentioned, only a yowling. I suggested a Gwyllgi, since it was stalking the graveyard, but we're a long way from Wrexham. So we spoke to the foreman again."

Murdo sucked a lungful of smoke and let it go with a sigh. "We've been smelting up here since before Hadrian's dyke, but it wasn't like this. Never like this."

 

"What was it like before?" Blanky said.

 

"Small enterprise, a few dozen men and a single furnace. The bellows were pumped by the water and we made enough pigs to line our pockets better than the cotters."

 

"What about them, then, did they get fair pay for their land?"

 

The man barked a wheezing laugh. "Did they, aye. The laird sold the land and all their livelihood to Meyrick Holme who shabbed them straight off the farms afore the ink was dry. In Argyll each cottar gets two acres of land to farm, but here there's scarce half an acre each. Plenty folk been farming potatoes as there's naught else'll grown on so small a bit of land."

 

Blanky looked to Francis then, whose face was grim and solemn.

 

News of the blighted harvests had come over from Dublin in the October. Those already making little enough to feed themselves had delved into the ground they had tended all year only to find the once white, firm flesh of their crop soft and riddled with rot. The Freeman had called it a cholera, with more than a third of all harvests failing. They had planted extra this year, in the hope it would mitigate the disaster of last. Francis' gaze held all the hope and fear of Orpheus at the gates of Hades.

 

Silna's quick tongue interrupted their thoughts as she frowned towards the loch. As she spoke, Blanky took it upon himself to translate for the benefit of the rest of the group whose Inuktitut was not fluent enough to follow it.

 

"The energy here is wrong." He said as her words flew past them. "People do not simply live on the land, they live with it, in harmony or partnership. Over many years these people have lived on this land. They have been born, bled and died on this land and they have become one with it. When the land is unhappy, the people are unhappy, but when the people are unhappy the land is also. They are one and the same, a living creature to itself. Being forced from the land you are a part of is like losing an arm or a leg. Then you poison the water and burn the trees, and the wound rots with it."

"I had no idea they had been so put out." James said with a frown. "Sir John hadn't even considered talking to anyone but the landowners."

Francis replied that it was unsurprising.

"I don't want to believe he's a  bad man, Sir John. I think he is a good Christian in all the ways an Englishman can be, but he's of a certain age and a certain class, and while he wants to do well by people, I fear you're right, he sees anyone he considers to be beneath him as wayward children."

"Or sheep."

James let out a pained laugh. "Yes, he does rather see himself as a shepherd. It's a shame there is a turn of phrase about the impossibility of herding cats." The two shared a warm, amused glance, and Francis felt his chest tighten with affection.

"When did you change your mind about it being a cat?" He said at last.

"Well, Goodsir came to us the morning after our trip to the ironworks with some theory about King Arthur, which I'd dismissed as nonsense only the night before, but he had some compelling evidence."

"Why had he not mentioned that evidence before, do you think?" James mused.

Francis' eyes narrowed. "You look as though you already know the answer, James. Are you privy to something that I am not?"

If it were possible, James seemed to pale further still, his gaze furtive. "If I were, if I were to tell you, would you promise that those involved would not be harmed or reprimanded for it?"

"Why should they be?"

The inn was not large, but it was loud. It was the only public house in miles, and the ironworkers and farmers alike gathered in the belly of the place to drink and smoke and tell tales of one thing or another. Sir John had invited the entire team to dine with Mr. Holme at his estate, but something about spending the evening with the man had not sat right with James, and he had feigned a headache and excused himself at the last minute. As such he found himself unexpectedly at a loose end, and quite by himself in a room full of Scotsmen who had made it rather apparent they were not too fond of him or his colleagues. 

 

"Henry! I wasn't expecting to see you here."

 

James perked up at the sound of an Englishman he knew. Bridgens had, it appeared, also begged off the dinner with the coal magnate, and had happened upon a friend somehow.

 

"I didn't mean to encroach," Came the reply, from a young man James had seen with Crozier's team earlier that day. He seemed flushed, though in the heat of the pub and the chill of the Highland air, it was difficult to tell if it was the warmth, cold, or his own abashment. "Only, I knew you were here and thought I might-"

 

"No, no, of course. It's a surprise, but a nice one." Peering over James could see John's hand hovered at the base of the boy's spine in a curiously intimate way. "I'm always glad of your company. Come, let's supper together out of this din, so we might catch up."

 

Bridgens' rooms were small but warm, shared with young Hartnell and Des Voeux, who he explained to his young Henry were supposedly out with Fitzjames and unlikely to be back until lightly pickled on the Laird's gin and whisky. 

 

James felt badly for following them even to the door, but he had hoped to perhaps share their company. It felt, however, the longer he spent listening to their conversation, that he would be an unwanted third to their supper. The food itself was meagre really, a bowl of stew each and a hunk of stale bread, but the company seemed to be pleasant enough that neither man felt it lacking. They spoke for a while about a whole manner of things, on family and travels and one another's health. Though their conversation was benign and platitudinous, they had grown closer as their bowls emptied and the talk turned to the case at hand.

 

"A Cat-Sìth wouldn't be unheard of round here, but one the size of a horse, attacking a factory and its workers?" John mused, scrubbing a hand over his beard thoughtfully.

 

"The boy, Peter, said he saw it swim from the island on the lake all the way to the factory underwater ." Henry said with some excitement. "I always thought cats hated water. Then Mr. Goodsir mentioned something about King Arthur, but Mr. Crozier called it 'French nonsense'."

 

John hummed, his thumb moving in small, absentminded circles where it lay on Henry's wrist. "There's a story mentioned in the Welsh Triads, written in the Black Book of Camarthen, of a monstrous black cat born of a cursed white sow. It was cast into the sea as a kitten but rather than drowning, it swam the Menai Strait to Anglesey where it grew to the size of a lion. It was supposed to have killed a hundred and eighty men, though in this telling they were led by Cai, Arthur's seneschal, his right-hand man, who slew the beast by distracting it with his shield. At least, that is what was assumed. The poem itself was never finished, but given that it was a story told in various versions, that ending can be deduced."

 

"Wasn't Sir Kay a braggart and a bully?" Peglar asked, swallowing thickly as John's thumb swept over the sensitive skin of his wrist another time. "He locked Arthur away and tried to claim the throne for himself."

 

"Now there is where Mr. Crozier has the right of it being French nonsense. Chrétien de Troyes wrote him as such in all his poetry, and the Grail romances took much of their foundation from his work, then Malory based much of Le Mort d'Arthur on the Grail prose in turn. However, if you return to the Welsh texts, Kay is hot-tempered and as fierce in battle as a Viking berserker, but quick-witted, loyal and honourable all the same. There are those who even compare him to the Irish hero Cú Chulainn, strong and good. I always thought there was something to be said about how much easier it is to malign an existing folk hero than try to disappear him."

 

"Destroying a hero only martyrs him, I suppose." Henry mused, flushing a little at having made such a silly comment out loud.

 

John's thumb stilled as he brought Henry's hand to his lips, pressing a kiss to his palm reverently. "You are so incredibly bright, Henry."

 

"I wish you'd kiss me properly, John. I shall not break if you do." He replied, hoarse and full of want.

 

"We are not in a place safe from prying ears or wagging tongues." John said, reluctantly releasing him.

 

As swift as he had been let go, Henry cupped that beloved face in his hand and John's eyes fluttered shut at the sensation. "I came here to see you, you know. I had not seen you in so many months, and I still cannot express myself how I wish when I write. I had to see you, so I could tell you in person how much I longed to kiss you again."

 

At that, John slowly lowered the hand from his face, leaving Henry bereft of his touch once more. "We cannot-"

 

"When can we? Are we to live constantly in fear of discovery, John?"

 

"Such is the nature of men like us."

 

"Men like us? Were Achilles and Patroclus not 'men like us' and did Plato not call their love 'divinely approved'? What of Alexander and Hephaestion? Are they not lauded as two of the greatest men in history, and did they not pass through the city of Troy to honour the tomb of Achilles and Patroclus together, in front of their men?"

 

"Henry, we cannot compare ancient pederasty with our current situation." John replied, voice thick and filled with regret. "I for one would not wish to take such a role, or define our feelings as such."

 

"What is the point in reading Greek classics if we are not to take anything from them?" Henry said in return. "Achilles mourned Patroclus as Andromache did Hector, yet her love for him is never questioned or mistaken for platonic companionship. John, if you were to die before me I would wish for my ashes to be mixed with yours as theirs were, so that we might never be parted again, even in death. We two alone-"

 

Before he could finish, John had pressed their lips together with a fervent, palpable desire. Just as Henry began to return his affections, John pulled away, though he kept Henry's face cupped in his large, worn hands. "Do not speak of death, Henry, I beg of you. And do not mistake my hesitance for unwillingness. You are not worth risking, and I would live all my days with no more than your friendship if it kept you safe and whole."

 

Henry held back a frustrated, mournful keen as he rested his forehead against his lover's. "I would cut my life short if that life could be filled with your love and affection, John."

 

"You do not need to cut it short, for you have my affection always, even if it is from afar." He whispered. "I love you so dearly."

 

James felt quite the voyeur but could neither bring himself to interrupt them, nor to leave. The rest of the evening burnt away as a candle wick, and they spoke no more of Troy, but tossed ideas back and forth of shields and shadows and monstrous cats, all the while their hands laid over one another's, comforting and grounding as an anchor.

 

When sleep began to creep up on him and he could put it off no longer, James made a show of loudly coming up the stairs and fumbling with the door, and was relieved to see that when he entered, the two men were suitably distanced from one another, and only very slightly dishevelled.

"A damned dangerous thing they were doing, and so carelessly." Francis growled. "If you had been anyone else."

"But I wasn't. Men have done worse things than love one another, Francis!" James snapped before heaving a sudden pained breath.

Alarmed, Francis' hands trembled as he fretted over the wounds, the one on his side still bleeding sluggishly. It had seemed a good idea not to move him, when they had first stopped to make camp, but with the rain and the dark around them, there was no sign of rescue, and James was growing worse by the hour. All he knew was that he couldn't leave him, wouldn't leave him even if there were no other option.

"I know, James, I know." Francis sighed. "If the last few weeks have taught me nothing else, it's that there are worse things than love and monsters."

"Whatever do you mean?"

Francis shrunk in on himself a little, as though the shame of his next words were swallowing him whole.

"Do you know why Sir John and I parted?" He asked softly, fearfully. James replied that he did not and Francis sighed. "We had worked together for a number of years, never entirely happily, but we had a great deal of respect for one another, and we were always cordial. Then we'd heard rumour that there was a creature stalking the Canadian north, unlike anyone had seen before. It was said to be an extraordinarily large white bear with the face of a man, cunning and vicious, and when you encountered it you could hear the screams of the damned. It took us a year to get to the North-West Territories, and we sat in ice pack for another, but eventually we happened upon a pair of Netsilik, a man and woman. The man was a shaman, an angakkuq in their tongue, and he had been tasked with summoning a spirit to protect them all from invaders. From us."

They had appeared out of the dark, their sealskin parkas covering them head to toe. The woman had called out to the men on the deck of the ship, but none had spoken Inuktitut. It had been a warning, a kindness, despite it all.

"We didn't know it at the time, of course, and even now Sir John refuses to believe it was anything more than another fantastical creature for us to kill and stuff and put on display for the well-to-do to gaze upon and ridicule. It was Blanky who realised that the man was an angakkuq and he might have knowledge of the creature, so Sir John ordered him captured and interrogated, as though he were a criminal. It was considered bad luck to have a woman aboard so she was detained outside. I am ashamed to say that I did not see anything much wrong with it at the time. He did not speak, no matter what we offered he did not speak. The woman screamed and begged for us to let him go. He was her father, she said.

Then the creature arrived, the tuunbaq , and there was panic. We didn't know that it was the angakkuq who controlled it, and that by having him confined we had angered the spirit. We'd gone in as green as boys with no thought given to what our naivety might bring down upon us. The angakkuq walked out so calmly to confront the beast, but we were still shooting the thing, and in the fear and confusion he was shot instead and bled out on the ice. The daughter was distraught, of course. We offered her what apologies we could muster and let her leave with her father's body on a hastily constructed sledge. She returned a few days later, screaming and cursing us."

Francis felt sick to his stomach to remember the dark of those days,  the howling wind biting through every layer of clothing, carrying the keening Inuktitut with it, filling every crevice with her grief and anger.

"When we'd taken the man into custody, interrogated and humiliated him, we had also taken some of his belongings. Ostensibly it was to make sure he had no weapons on him with which to harm us, but in reality it was looting, plain and simple. One of these items taken from him was an idol, an effigy of some kind, a chimerical creature carved of whale bone. Its body was ursine but its face was almost human, though its nostrils and eyes were too wide, and its tongue was long and protruding from between sharp fangs. There was human hair adorning its head and it seemed to be wearing scraps of cloth like clothing, but cradled between its carved paws was a blacked piece of meat."

The meat had been stuck there, no one could move it. It was as though the effigy had been carved specifically to hold it and the bone and flesh had fused together as one, and touching it brought all who did so a profound feeling of unease.

"Sir John thought it grotesque, but if we were not to be bringing back the creature itself, we could at least bring back its likeness. However, the effigy, we were to discover, was the last earthly tie to the tuunbaq. This was the offering that had been required to summon the creature in the first place, this thing of hair and bone and flesh. As it turned out, the flesh in the tuunbaq effigy had been the angakkuq's sacrifice. His tongue, cut from his own mouth in isolation so that he might keep the secret of the tuunbaq's summoning."

Into the silence of that confession James admitted to feeling a little unwell, and Francis couldn't help but agree, though the worst was yet still to come.

"The Netsilik believe that in order to transition to the spiritual world, the angakkuq needs to be consumed, by beast or spirit, it doesn't matter, but they must be consumed in their entirety."

"But there was a piece missing." James whispered, almost to himself, and Francis nodded gravely.

"Without this piece, the tongue held by the tuunbaq, her father could never continue his journey into the afterlife. Sir John called it nonsense and made some quite unsavoury comments about baptism and the soul that he later admitted to being callous, but regardless, we had something important to her and her people, so the Netsilik woman kept returning. After a while Erebus began to fracture, split between those who believed the Netsilik woman had a right to her father's remains, and those who believed that terra nullius somehow applied to any and all things discovered and apprehended.

"I wish I could say that I was one of those first who sided with the woman, but I was not. I did not agree with Sir John entirely, but I did not understand at the time what taking his side truly meant. My Inuktitut was even poorer then than now, and she spoke with such rage and anguish until her throat was hoarse and barely audible above the gales and snowfall. I am shamed, James, that I took that from her, that I supported such sacrilege. I cared only for Sir John's good opinion of me, that it might endear his niece to me. My own petty infatuation was what stood in the way of a man being laid to rest, and it is something I shall never truly atone for.

"When I finally came to my senses, I promised that I would do my utmost to recover the effigy and his remains, but she didn't believe me. She was right not to, because I failed to convince Sir John, and I failed to stop him from taking the effigy back to England. In fact, I didn't return to England with him at all. Blanky, Little, Jopson, Dr. McDonald and I all chose to stay, and once we had all the information that we thought we could gather, the four of us returned to England with our new Netsilik companion. We didn't learn her name was Silna for a long time. When Sir John and Erebus left she did not speak a word, out of anger or grief, I'm not sure. We called her 'Lady Silence' and I believe she only allowed us to live because she didn't have it in her heart to curse the land with any more unnecessary deaths."

"Silna?"

Francis nodded. "The very same. When we returned to London we tried our best to re-acquire the specimen from the Society, but were once again unsuccessful. In fact, it's still there. I don't think that Silna will ever truly give it up, no matter how futile the effort. I owe it to her to be right alongside her. She only started speaking again, really, out of anything other than anger and grief, when she met Goodsir. He has a way about him, soothing but genuine. I think she could sense that he was all but incapable of dishonesty. He was the only one she spoke to for months, and she never spoke in English, only ever Inuktitut."

"I had been meaning to ask, though I suppose now seems inappropriate." James began. "Are the two of them... involved?"

"The Netsilik do not marry as we do, there is no ceremony, it is simply agreed upon that they live together and assume a partnership of equal labour until a child is born. I believe Silna already supposes this to be the case with them, but Harry is too meek and Christian a man to take her to bed without marrying her first. Since he would never demand she convert simply to marry him, he believes he cannot be with her, and since he will not take her to bed, she assumes he is not interested in such a partnership. It is a baffling dance."

James asked then if he knew about her father, and Francis winced at the memory.

"Ah, yes, though not for quite some time. I have never seen a man more distraught or disgusted by harm caused to a third party. He and Alexander, Dr. McDonald that is, joined forces somewhat to devise a plan to appeal to the Royal Society formally, but it never came to fruition. The two were thick as thieves for months, but drifted apart for one reason or another. I do wonder, sometimes, if there was some affection there beyond friendship, and that Harry's dedication to Silna did not drive some wedge between them."

There was a quiet that lingered between them for a moment before James spoke again, his voice hoarse and wavering ever so slightly. "You believe them to be that way inclined? Yet, you do not seem to be perturbed by it."

"Why should I be? What happens in a man's own house is his own business. Who am I to deny anyone love and companionship." He replied with a hurried shrug.

"Do you truly believe that, Francis?"

Francis looked at him then and James knew that the raw, naked hope in his eyes was comprehensible even in the gloam. Francis looked away. Neither spoke for a long time.

"I didn't really believe," James said finally, throat thick with feeling. "When I agreed to come here, that there was anything real about these claims. No matter the specimens at the Royal Society. The people in the cities, those in industry and away from the wild places, most have never seen anything out of the ordinary at all. They have their faerie stories, as do we all, but they are just that. Stories. I had thought perhaps we might find some exotic pet escaped from a mansion someplace, if we were lucky. Though more likely it would simply be a stray dog spotted by a dozen drunkards. Francis, even the men at that party, looking on that specimen, taxidermied and trussed up behind glass for their amusement, believed it to be a fiction. I caught more than one laughing at how poor the stitching was between the different animals that they believed you and Sir John to have pieced together."

Francis sighed. "James. I know all of this. You think I'd have spent so many years in this business without knowing that most all people I meet believe me to be a fraud? Harry spent most of his savings on purchasing that camera, he is so proud of the images he collects, but no matter how good the image, everyone he shows can't help but see a log where he saw a kelpie, or a moth where he saw a brownie."

"Doesn't it bother you?"

"It used to, even as recently as arriving here, and I know that there is truth to their beliefs, I've uncovered more than one hoax in my time, but I've come to realise that there is more importance in what we do than the acknowledgement of our doing it."

"That makes you a better man than I."

"No, James. I might have that one questionable virtue, but I cannot judge you for being prideful when I spent so much of our association acting so abominably rude towards you with no other excuse than my own wounded pride and not a small amount of jealousy."

"Jealousy? Why on earth were you jealous? Was it not you who stepped away from Erebus in the first place?"

"Aye, it was." Francis sighed. "It was not jealousy of your position with Sir John that rankled me, though perhaps there was a mite of that. You're young, James, handsome and educated, you have good connections and better manners, and you have managed to fit so neatly into the place I have spent so many years trying to carve for myself."

They were both silent for a moment.

"You think me handsome, Francis?" His tone was light enough to be taken as teasing, should Francis have wished it.

"It would take poorer eyesight than mine to think otherwise."

James swallowed thickly again. "The truth is, I'm a fake, Francis. A damnable fraud." At Francis' protestations he simply raised his hands in supplication. "No, truly. I wasn't certain that these creatures were even real until I saw that beast with my own eyes."

"Sir John said you'd been highly recommended."

James laughed, sharp and bitter. "Yes, by Sir John Barrow, whose son I happened to save from scandal in Singapore. I was never recommended for my experience or ability, it was entirely political happenstance."

"I could say that of a great many men, James. It doesn't lessen my opinion of what I've seen of you since arriving here."

"I'm not even English!"

Francis scoffed. "You bloody well sound like one to me."

"Yes, well, that's rather the point. A man like me will do amazing things to be seen. My father-" He paused. "My father was a ridiculous man. Ruined himself with debts. He was a Consul General in Brazil, he and his wife would mix with the wealthy Portuguese families in exile there. My mother was probably from one of those families. I was never told more."

"James."

"My father's cousins had to find people to raise me. The Coninghams were benevolent enough to raise me kindly, alongside their son, like one of their own. I was two, maybe three years old when I arrived in London. They baptised me there; James Fitzjames, son of James and Ann Fitzjames. Utter fiction."

"I didn't know any of that." The words spoken softly accompanied the barest touch of Francis' warm, calloused hands against James' own. A jolt ran through them both and James almost flinched, but instead dared to move his thumb ever so gently atop Francis'.

"Yes, well." He took a deep breath. "They brought me over with a nursemaid, a caboclo woman. I would not be parted from her, I was inconsolable when they tried. They made me call her Maria, but I know that wasn't her name. I wish I could remember her better, but I do remember the stories she told. She is the only reason I had any real belief in any of this. Growing up in London and Hertfordshire all of this, these ancient fae creatures, it's all just stories for children. The stories that Maria told, though, she believed them, and she made me believe them too."

"She used to say that if I was still awake when I was supposed to be sleeping that Jasy Jatere would steal me away to feed his brother, a giant, fanged javelina called Ao Ao . Quite the tale for a young, impressionable boy I can tell you."

As James spoke at length of the fantastical creatures from his nursemaid's stories, a gentle feeling settled over the pair, a solemn understanding that stretched into the silence long after they had stopped talking. Their hands remained joined between them, fingers laced one by one as James' tales scattered like ash on the breeze, until they were holding one another into the quiet dark, laboured breaths, quiet rain, and the hammering of Francis' heart as he gathered James closer against the cold.

After a time Francis gripped James' hand once more where it had grown lax between them and gathering courage he hadn't thought he had left in him, stepped out into the void. "You asked me if I wouldn't think any less of two men for keeping company such as that, and I couldn't answer, because it would make a hypocrite of me to do so, but to admit it is too terrifying a prospect. For men like us."

James' breath hitched, just barely, but squeezed his hand in return, and Francis could feel the vertigo lessen. "I hadn't thought, that is, I hadn't dared hope-"

"Hope? James, I have been an utter brute to you from the very start, how could you have possibly hoped for anything for me but a swift kick in the ribs?"

"You were abominably rude to begin with, Francis, I'll not deny it, but it was nothing I didn't bally well deserve. I was such a cocksure ass. Even before I strode up to you in that inn, I have listened to smarmy Society members talk all kinds of nonsense about you behind your back and I laughed along as though they would not be saying such things and far worse about me if they knew the truth. I rode on the coattails of the reputation you built with Sir John - I'm inclined to believe for Sir John - and espoused my own inadequacies as though they were medals of valour. And now I discover that the real reason for your departure was not one of drunkenness or disobedience, but of honour and common human decency. Francis, I judged you so terribly wrongly."

"You are forgiven, James, you must know that." Francis replied softly, bringing James' hand up to his face, and pressing a trembling kiss there.

James' eyes fluttered shut and his throat clicked as he swallowed thickly around such overwhelming feeling. "You spoke of jealousy, Francis, but whatever jealousy you held for me can surely pale in comparison to that which I held for you."

The brow Francis raised begged him continue.

"For you, of you, of others who held your attention the way I could only dream of. You are a miserly old git, Francis, but you are skilled, and principled, you are a good leader and you have made something of yourself that doesn't need to be weighed and valued by the laws of high society, but instead holds its own by pure merit alone."

Francis pressed another kiss to the back of James' hand, surer this time. "Which others held my attention? Who else could possibly have been on my mind every waking hour?"

"Sophia Cracroft, James Ross, even Jopson at times, I did wonder."

"Sophia was a dream, a lovely one, but never attainable. I could never have been happy in such company as she keeps and she could never have been happy in mine. Can you imagine Sophie sat in the dark and the rain and the dirt awaiting rescue that might never come? Ross is dear to me, true enough, and I believe he might have held a candle for me in our youths, but that has long since guttered in favour of his darling Ann, whose company I delight in and do not begrudge one inch."

"And Jopson?"

"James, if you are fishing for some other clandestine affection, you are better staying closer to home."

A wariness crept back into his expression. "Do not tease me, Francis, not about this."

"I do not aim to tease, James. You must know by now that I find you diverting."

"You misunderstand. You speak of diversion, of fleeting affection, but you have dealt me a mortal wound, Francis." His hand slipped from Francis' grip and grasped instead at the centre of his chest, knuckles white around the bunched cloth of his shirt. "You are nestled, here, underneath my ribcage. You somehow knew where all the softest parts of me were, and when you found them you carved them out, but instead of leaving me for dead you placed yourself in there. It infuriated me so. Where I thought sugared words would mask my shame and earn me the respect I so desperately craved, you stalked through that door with a mouth full of vinegar and more well-earned respect in your little finger than in that entire room of stagnant, saccharine vaunters. Everything I thought I hated in myself, I find in you sacrosanct."

Francis frowned, torn between awe, delight and bewilderment. "That is idolatry not affection."

"Ah, but it is both. I admire all of these things in you that made me reconsider myself, true, but there is so much of you that bears no resemblance to me in any way. You are steady and loyal, your honesty is a credit to you despite the trouble it brings, and you are proud, to a fault, Francis. And that is, impossibly, as endearing as it is frustrating. This has been growing in me from the moment I saw you in that damned gallery. Even if I did not know of all your faults and virtues, all the pieces that make you Francis Crozier, you must understand that you are an imposing figure of a man to look at alone. You are sturdy but somehow still soft, especially around the eyes, and you have this gap in your teeth-"

"Damn my teeth!"

James laughed so breathlessly at this that Francis couldn't help but slip his hand along his neck and bring him in for a heated kiss. It was short-lived but so filled with passion and intent that James gasped when they parted, for once in pleasure and not in pain.

"It's one thing to espouse my civil virtues, James," Francis growled. "But quite another to wax poetic about my damn teeth."

James kissed him again, awkwardly for his smile was so broad.

"James, I did not misunderstand you." Francis said at last. "I am no poet, and I can't put into words all the things I have thought of you. Some have been pleasant and others less so, but I just need you to know that you are unbearably beautiful, and I admire you greatly."

"Just admire?"

Francis shook his head. "I daren't name it anything more, but any change you believe I have brought about in you, know that it has been mirrored in me. I am a different man for knowing you, a better man. James, if we make it out of here alive, may I see you again?"

"If you do not, I shall be terribly displeased." James replied, touching their foreheads together.

"Well we can't have that, can we?"

"And how shall we avoid one another when we are both picketed outside the Royal Society together, hmm?"

Francis pulled away. "You cannot, James. Sir John would not have it, you'll be cast out after all the effort you put into getting there."

"That is my choice to make, Francis." He replied softly, and kissed him again.

"If you're quite finished mauling the man, Frank," Came an amused voice from the other side of the clearing. "I've come, at great effort and cost I might add, to rescue you."

James winced as they sprung apart once again to see Blanky, lantern aloft, smirking at them from under a thick oilskin. 

At James' horrified expression Blanky shook his head. "It's nothing I've not seen before, and I shan't be the one to turn this lug in for that. Do, perhaps, keep it to yourselves for the next few hours though, your James Clark Ross heard we'd all got lost on some Highland hill and got his old team back together just to come and rescue us. They found us by the falls and we saw the smoke your sorry excuse for a fire was making and legged it up here. Ross and the rest of Enterprise are a few minutes behind me, and a good thing too."

"Was anyone else hurt?"

Blanky winced. "It got young Hartnell before it ran off with Fitzjames, but he'll live. As will your man, but only if we can get him down this damn mountain. Come on, Frank!"

With the two of them gingerly manoeuvring him, James slipped into unconsciousness again, waking only to murmur "What of the monster?" 

Blanky’s expression was surprisingly fond as he replied. "Harry got a few shots with that fancy camera of his, so perhaps we'll have got something from this mess. If you ask me, that Mr. Holme deserves all the damn demon cats he gets."

With that he slipped finally into the blissful blackness, Francis' alarmed voice slipping away as swiftly as sand through his fingers.

2 months later

Summer in London was a stinking, squalid affair, even in the wealthiest neighbourhoods. The sickly scent of flowering Linden trees mingled with the smog, horse dung, and at this time a collection of individuals sweating through their waistcoats and breeches, even as the sun was barely above the rooftops, to create an unholy fragrance. One of these individuals rested on a placard and waved jovially at a figure in the near distance.

"I say, is that Fitzjames?" He called, and the figure laughed. "I thought you wouldn't be allowed back out until Nurse Crozier deemed you well enough."

James grinned and shucked off his jacket. "I managed to convince him. He should be along in a moment."

"You say that as though I'm some decrepit old man." Came a voice from behind him. "Good to see you Thomas, Edward."

Little saluted half-heartedly from his place in the shade of the large townhouse.

"I had to come today, Francis, I promised I would be here to greet William." He turned to Blanky. "He was kind enough to have a word with Carlyle, who in turn had a word with Mill, who wrote to the SDUK and I do believe we may have a rather larger contingent than we did last week."

Blanky raised a brow. "Friends in high places?"

Before he could reply, James was interrupted by the arrival of Goodsir and Silna, who regarded their presence warily, but did not, as she had done in the weeks prior, shouted them all away. It was not their place, she cried, to speak over her or usurp her grief. It was useful, perhaps, to have someone there the Society could not simply disappear to St. George’s Fields at their convenience.

"Mr. Crozier, Mr. Fitzjames!" Goodsir said. "I brought with me the plates from Scotland. Some of them came out rather well, would you like to see them?"

They shared a glance as Goodsir began to open his black lacquer and produced a small handful of bronzed images. 

"Better friends in less lofty places, I rather think."