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A mild winter and dizzying wheel of caricature and speculation had passed in London before Terror was found. By 1850, she was not entirely submerged, but near enough to it that all there was left to find was the foremast cutting a tall, abrasive line against the horizon.
This news reached Francis Crozier on a bright day, approaching the eighth month since he had seen hide nor hair of the men who had kept him company on the vessel.
This was no fault of the company itself. After months of living in the attic rooms of his friend James Clark Ross’ home at Eliot house, Francis had come around to calling himself what he was: a hermit. What little daylight he had seen in the past months was forced upon him like a woodlouse squirming beneath a lifted log. Ross worried; Ann was more frequently annoyed by the termite which had infested their home. Francis was kind, and a reasonable contributor in lieu of what little drain he had on household finances– but Ann wished somewhat desperately (by the fourth month of this arrangement) that he would spend some time elsewhere.
Ann felt a little as though her husband had sprung a housecat upon her with no consultation of her own feelings on the matter. She loved Francis dearly –but he stalked the house. There was no other word for it. Francis had no club, he paid no calls. One could believe that he had no friends in London at all if it was not public knowledge that he had men to whom he was saviour scattered variously across the city. In between marches around the rooms, he sat with them and smiled generously; enquired keenly after her days at suppertime and breakfasts. At night he was as still as a mouse. Whenever she was at home, he ventured out doors once-a-week for a walk which lasted precisely seven minutes at two-thirty every Thursday afternoon. This had been her own suggestion. He was, otherwise, found in nooks, crannies and abed.
Near a year since Francis had begun to creak the overhead floorboards now, Ann was nearing her limit for this feline behaviour. She was only somewhat relieved when her husband revealed to her the same annoyances, for nothing changed with them. Where else Francis was to go –save back to Ireland with his sisters– was now the question which kept her from outright launching his heavy trunk out of the window herself.
The idea of arranging a dinner which reunited Francis with those he had retreated from emerged somewhere to Ann like an engine shuddering into life. She had been quick to write invitations –and unflinching in her reminding Francis that he owed this night’s company to them for the sake of his lodgings.
In the hours before this, she sat opposite Francis, entirely absorbed in one of what Ross fondly called her ‘shocking new novels.’ In truth, the young rising star Wilkie Collins was producing some of the more tame sensational horrors Ann had encountered in the last few years. Francis, picking his way through a recommendation of her own, turned a page and stretched his legs. He had been distinctly more reticent today than before.
Like the releasing of a held breath, the silence was broken as James Ross stepped into the parlour, windswept and brash. “Thought you ought to know before it hit the papers,” he announced, breaking the silence and jolting Francis half out of his skin while he handed over what seemed to be a letter. He greeted her with a squeeze to the arm as he flopped onto the sofa. His eyes remained resolutely fixed on Francis, who was looking at the paper before him, steely and resolute. “You know how quickly these things get to print.”
Francis nodded, and raised his eyebrows. “Yes,” he said, thinking of his fine black pen and ink lying on the seabed, only a little way beneath the feet of the retrieval mission. He had only borrowed things to write with now –hours seemed borrowed, as did what little space and sleep he had been able to grasp over the last few months.
Ross eyed him in that delicate way of his. “I would not trouble myself that many of the crowd tonight will expect you to speak on it,” he said slowly.
Francis looked at him, then to Ann. “I do not trouble myself,” he said, sounding a little defeated. “I will not be discussing it.”
It was the second note that Francis had been handed that morning –the first had come just after breakfast. Having been dreading the day for the past week since its announcement, it had done nothing for his nerves.
Dear Francis, it had begun in an elegant scrawl which gave every impression of being hurried.
I write to ask if we might speak privately this evening. Having not seen you in quite a number of months, I expect we will have much to discuss.
JJ.
There was a time, just after they had returned, when they had tilted on a precipice. James had not yet re-entered society. Francis had not yet locked himself away in James Ross’ preternaturally comfortable but moth-bitten and lonely attic rooms. They had found somewhere together on an unsuspecting but well-connected street in Marylebone, unwilling to part and anxious in the weeks before the court-martial.
In the daylight, they clung to each other. Wanting Francis became something incessant and reliable; examination of the nature of the want at night revealed things that James scarcely had the words for.
The nights were chiefly strange for the fact that he was alone. There were not the heavy, laden breaths of sickbeds which had surrounded him for months on the long walk, and nothing of the harsh, stinging wind that whistled outside. Nothing of the days at the worst of it, with Francis at his bedside like a sleeping dragon in resolute refusal to let him slip away. Instead, he instituted himself in a room beside, nevertheless watchful but significant in new distance.
The nights, once he felt a little more well –when he was out of the haze that had carried him from vessel to vessel as they journeyed back– that was the worst of it. In the silence and darkness his memory ran rampant as a pack of wolves –it hounded him, nipped at his heels and teased him half-way to a heart attack.
The days carried anxieties too. When they had first stepped foot from the boats and she had been waiting, James had imagined himself doomed by a renewed countdown: to the day on which Francis would stumble in red-cheeked with news of Sophia. This is what held him back, James supposed. This, or fear. Fear tormented him –he knew he could not go to Francis if Francis would not come to him first.
It was on one such night that James came to this realisation –at the very least, he realised that one would have to re-cross the threshold that England had put in place between them– and that if Francis would not then, it was likely to be never.
He had been barely conscious. His line of sight, caught somewhere between the blueish dark of his room and a shock of jagged white which attempted to slice at him from memory, roved. He thought that he could see spat blood on the ice –he tasted iron, as though his body was trying to remind him by the sensation that he was alive and still pulsing. As if this would save him. As if a will to live had made any difference at all.
He had caught himself crying between creased sheets, shaking as he had in the worst of the cold. His throat was sore, he was sure he had shouted.
This was confirmed to James by the sound of a familiar, steady step outside his door. The hardwood creaked, and whatever weak moonlight shone from beneath the doorframe dimmed. That step, James’ only consistent drum to march by in dream or daylight –he would always know. Wanting so badly for Francis to cross the threshold, James held his breath. The steps moved away, steady and sure.
James had known at that moment that it was not to come from Francis ever, then– that there was no hope unless he was to toe the line. And he could not.
Since, whatever fragile, unnameable thing that had arisen beneath tent-tops and in the midst of the festering heat they had been rescued in –had, it seemed, turned to sand. Its memory was immaterial, fine, and equally difficult to scrub from his skin.
James had withdrawn: it seemed they would have to be entirely seperate now re-instituted in London, anyhow. Francis rose with the sun and kept his hands and mind busy with manuals and whatever else took his fancy until it came time to sleep. James was rarely alone –did not attempt much sleep, unless his body resolutely cried out for it. In light of this, his strength seemed to have plateaued somewhere between being well and as strong as he once was. He remained too thin, and could not walk the miles he once managed. On the worst days, he stunk of spirits and laughed away the ringing in his ears. He slept through most mornings. Francis moved his things one of these mornings to Greenwich; James found himself venturing on an ambitious plan to put on a production of The Rover with Dundy at the club.
He had once once been introduced at a party to a woman who claimed to be the fourth-time grand niece of Aphra Behn. He was amused by this –finding her at once not a sight near funny enough for this to be believable, and entirely empathetic to the compelling charm of a good story when one’s true ancestry was a topic best avoided.
The Rover had last come to mind the fateful day he spent planning carnivale on the ice –determined for this not to be the latest association, and in desperate need of stimulation that made his still-tired bones creak and mind buzz, he proposed it as an Easter celebration. Used to the strange and permissibly rowdy humour of sailors, a significant blind eye had been turned.
“I would be Willmore then, Jaz,” Dundy had said. “Of course.”
“And I Hellena.” James grinned. He felt a great lightness when Dundy laughed, having always had a tolerance for James’ affinity for bright and gentle things. This was more than he could ask of most.
The play had gone on without a hitch. They had recruited a good many friends to join the hap-hazard production company, and staged it to much laughter, and some speculative rumour in the more sensational corners of broadsheets. James had wondered if word had reached Francis, in the dark little corner of London that he had created for himself; he had thought of Francis watching him flirt a “well done, captain” with Dundy and grow jealous. He had been forced to stop such a thought where he stood.
There were, then, public and private joys to be had. The laughter was fine. The fleeting moments of recognition when he said “and dost thou think that ever I’ll be a nun?” and the audience whistled or laughed or smiled sweetly at him. Even for a moment- these were sparks of great gravity- but they were not the matter of his dreams. He missed Francis.
Francis had tried to leave sleeping all that James’ note had arisen in him. A thing of the past, he had thought, to be solidified and duly buried to look back on when he finally left London. Perhaps because Francis would always be a reminder of the shale; perhaps they had both lived too much and too long to change their habits.
He descended the stairs, having mingled for a good half-hour previous with all the weight of expectant months but without James. He resigned himself to the idea that whatever James wished to discuss, it would be -at the very least- a reason to speak with him.
On the first step into the busy dining room, thoughts of what that would be like dissipated into reality. Golden with candlelight and the quiet spitting of the Ross’ fire, James stood across the room, poised and controlled as he ever had been. There were still marks of illness on his face, but he no longer wavered where he stood. And he was laughing –a great, low tinkling sound which was not the breathless chuckles Francis had once eked out of him on the ice, but something more carefully pronounced. It was nevertheless distinctly James’. For the first time since his would-be deathbed, Francis thought he looked ill-fitting in his uniform.
The last time that Francis had heard James’ voice, in a dark corridor, he had turned away for fear of many things.
Francis had watched him rise up to that full height again as they journeyed back to England. He had seen James stagger and fall. Had carried him. Had been there as he took his first steps again, stumbling like a newborn.
“I feel Ephesians calling to me with every renewed step,” James had said, ironic and sweating on the deck of Enterprise one bright morning on the Atlantic. The sun that day had been something like benediction; something Francis almost felt he should shrivel up beneath.
“Ah,” Francis had laughed. “Your life before you left for the Arctic was something corrupted, then?” he asked, looking squarely at James.
James turned as they reached someplace to sit and did so, heavily. He smiled up at Francis, wincing only a little. “Must you demand all my secrets?”
Francis looked down at him. “Demand? I hope I’ve never demanded anything from you but your job, James.”
James had laughed again, and agreed. They said no more about it.
Francis watched the man, now no more sallow-skinned, hair combed finely – turn with a bow of his head to his companions, look at Francis with a gaze steady and open, and step carefully past him, beckoning him already from the room.
Eliot Place was a half-hour’s walk from the Thames which had set them out all those years ago. It would not be many months from now that it would freeze, a thick slab of solid ice cutting through the heart of London.
Francis had no thought about his abandonment of the party as he followed James out-of-doors. It was not hard to follow as his epaulettes gleamed from gaslight to gaslight. What pushed him to leave without at least greeting any of the others was something like desperation, perhaps. He had overheard, once, that he –being an explorer– was made of hope. He had disagreed, privately, at the time. It was less hope that drove him to continue, always, but a desperation that compelled him to try for a taste of satisfaction –again, again, again.
The sky was now dark. Spring had eased the longer days on them, a slow trickle of small comfort. It raised all interesting sensations that were summoned from the heath –the smell of honeysuckle, the sight of little blinking crocuses. These earthly things, these things of rich soil which had once seemed so alien to Francis’ seafaring nose, thrilled rather than scared him now. They grew without having been asked to or encouraged.
The stars yawned a still, staggering splay above the neat grass of the heath. They passed it, James walking in long strides still reassuring to Francis in spite of the months of recovery he had been told of by Ann, her eyes low under her lashes as though he would not notice her watching his reaction.
The silence between them had something of the texture of a thin air-balloon, fit to burst. Francis did not ask when James, (as he ever was wont to do,) at last wielded the needle.
“Are you well, Francis?” Francis looked across at him. He wet his lips. “I have –barely seen you tonight.”
Francis held the words inside him for a moment –their novelty and earnest inquiry. He hesitated asking why James had simply not approached him, but reasoned it was a fault which lay equally on their shoulders. Instead, he began:
“I arrived late–”
“Ah, yes. Your reluctance to re-enter society. You know, that this has been the continued case for the most part this last year has been surprising. I know you.” James was looking at the floor before him, now, eyes downturned.
Francis pressed his lips together. The mocking irony which he had once found so infuriating now seemed manifestly nervous. It seemed almost a compulsion in James to put things in their proper place; the sound of it sent a great longed for familiarity rising within him. He laughed.
“Quite,” Francis said. “I have hardly been out in society since we returned. Parties like that–” He shook his head. “They make me feel like an old gooseberry.”
James let out a breath of laughter and nodded, eyes still downcast. Francis, now leading them through the gates of the park, realised he knew the area far better than James did and likely that his first venture outside was aimless in its direction.
They reached after a moment the steep drop-off by the Observatory. A place familiar to Francis, but beautiful and unearthly now in the dark. Crouching amidst the trees, like an unspun globe.
“In that,” James said slowly, “we are perhaps the same. The Northwest Passage was supposed to be the pinnacle of our careers. We returned, survivors. We are caught somewhere between heroes and pity-fodder, and I want –I want none of it. I feel like a fattened pig at a fair being inspected for marks of scurvy even now, whenever I walk into a room.”
Francis knew what he meant and felt suddenly embarrassed at his attention that night. He wondered if he was counted in the numbers James felt made livestock out of him.
The park was quite empty. The paved path down the hill sloped quietly down into the thicket. They passed it and came to rest by the rail. All of London churned out beneath them like a heaving sea, knitted together by light.
Francis considered remarking on this.
“Did you hear that they found her?” He found himself asking instead, the question bubbling up in spite of earlier resolutions. He had known it would come. By the set of James’ jaw, so had he.
“... Yes,” he said.
“Of course.” Francis shook his head. “You have great friends with eyes in every corner, alleyway and dockyard of London, I expect.”
James did not laugh.
“I was frightened, when I heard,” he said carefully. Against the gloom, the characteristic lines of his cheeks looked unsettlingly like the hollows which had been there not long ago. Francis turned from his anxious imagination to the city, again. It was strange, talking like this. As though the months had never passed, –but still, they hung there like an unwanted old coat. He nodded.
“I thought that… It was so very strange. I thought of all the things we left behind. The prospect that they would perhaps again be found.” he turned, fully, then, to face James. Reliably, he turned this time to match Francis and face him also, one hand still resting on the rail.
“What frightened you?”
James looked at Francis’ face –truly looked at him. A face Francis had been variously afraid he would see little of in his future at certain times. A face which had become –not more beautiful, but moreso James himself over the time they had spent on the ice. The expression of his brow was inextricable from the pain or pleasure he expressed in a phrase or reaction. Francis felt it keenly. He felt the ghost of James’ teeth on his own mouth as they worried over his bottom lip.
“I feared,” James began, quiet, “that all they would find left aboard were our everyday things –places we slept, tonics we used when ill. I worried I would be ridiculed in the streets for needing medicine to be well again. I was afraid–” He looked to the dark sky, jaw closing with a strain under his skin. “The fragility of the thing, you know. I even– I even thought about the books I’d left behind. The novels I brought on the expedition, tactically placed at my bedside, because I didn’t want– I didn’t.” He paused again, then swallowed. His eyes, somehow darker than the sky itself, than the river, than anything. “I wanted them to pull her up, when I heard they found her. I did. I became almost –obsessed– with the idea last night. I feared it. I wanted it desperately.”
Francis reached for his arm, stiff in starched cotton. James had turned from him to speak this out to the landscape of the city. He had wondered many things in their estrangement, but had never imagined that James’ desire to be known would rise up once more in so fierce a manner. Francis wondered that he had not served his purpose, then considered that perhaps true intimacy was not a purpose to be served. He kept his hand on James’ arm, expecting him to say more.
Francis opened his mouth to attempt –to wonder– exactly how they might, indeed, cross this space, when a crackling shot-like sound rang out. Then a great rain of green and gold shimmered in the sky and fell. There was a great shout from below where the Naval hospital stood proud and white by the riverside. Some kind of celebration for the patients, Francis supposed. He looked to James, who had jolted.
When he was flushed, out on the ice, he had seemed so young. But he had also seemed ill –and looked weary enough to add years beneath his skin. Now he flushed pink, and not in the sickly way he had before; he was golden, alight with green and red which spluttered against the purple bruise of the night-time.
James turned to find him watching, and looked as though he might cry for a moment. Francis felt a great desperation rise in his chest. “You told me once that I was free,” he said. “Well, I do not feel free.”
Fireworks rose behind him like obscene punctuation –like a mockery of the green sky-lights which had become so everyday to them some time ago.
“We are no longer at the end,” Francis said gently. James looked down, away, and nodded.
Francis let his arm go with something of a resigned sense of meeting his purpose. They stood in silence, the roar and crackle of the fireworks eventually ending in a great cheer. The river, stretching along past the park, churned.
“Are you well, James? Is this what you wished to tell me?” Francis broke the silence eventually.
James turned to him and shook his head. “Yes,” he said. “Broadly. I am well. I sent the note because I felt that if I did not speak with you especially tonight -if we avoided each other- I would miss a now rare opportunity to talk with the one person to whom I have had no issue confessing the things that concern me most.” Francis watched him closely. “–I have seen less of you than I would have liked. Although I suppose that we have moved in quite different directions.”
Not one for lingering where it was unnecessary, Francis shook his head. “My own fault,” he said. “I have not moved in any direction at all. I grow tired of solitude.”
James found his hand and touched it where Francis grasped him. “I am soaked in Perrier-Jouet most nights. That is not your fault.”
When they had first returned, they said so very little to each other by means of parting. Everything –the way they had lived, the language they had used, had as much a place in England as either of their mother-tongues. They both knew it. It had borne no discussion. It had become something to hold to the heart rather than kill with attempts to keep it stoked.
Now it flamed in Francis more fearsome and gentle than ever before. There was, it seemed, a gaping space that he had left in James’ life, and he had never been so compelled to give what was being asked of him since those years spent camped on the ice.
“Come back to my room?” He asked, suddenly. James looked at him in a veneer of delicacy.
“Through the party?” Francis had not considered this. James shook his head. “We can fetch a cab to mine. All will be empty,” he looked away. “I’m still at the old place, in Marylebone.”
“Yes,” Francis said. “Yes, let’s go and speak somewhere warmer.”
Walking beside Francis had become to him something instinctual and sincere. As one who shunned sincerity wherever it sought him, knowing it was never truly wanted, James thrived as well as he could in laughing corners of the deniable. Under Francis, he unfurled –it was at once haunting and tempting as they walked from streetlight to streetlight. He felt strangely airy on his feet –not only feeling the meagre health that had been regained from the last time they walked together. They were side-by-side once more. A shrug and Francis could take his arm.
He busied himself with trying to make Francis laugh as the inevitability of privacy dawned on him.
“Do you remember,” he said, “when you would sooner walk those eight-hundred alone than sit and listen to my stories?"
He thought he may have seen Francis roll his eyes. He continued: "I do not think that you ever believed a word of them."
“You have always eaten vinegar with a fork, James. I cannot be blamed for thinking that some of your stories were embellishment.” He looked sideways at him and smiled thinly. “Or an excuse to talk.”
James clasped a hand to his chest. “You have hurt me,” he said, “beyond recovery. This usurps the sniper and scurvy both by all means.”
Francis shook his head. “You are remarkable.”
The rented place had not changed much, as Francis remembered. What had been their shared drawing room was still small, and much to his embarrassment the mantle maintained trinkets that he had left in his haste to get away and somewhere that sheltered him from James’ expressions. It felt ridiculous to think of the length of time they had spent apart now, as though they had come back to each other months since, and not that very evening. He marched over to the fireplace and fumbled with the tinder-box without ceremony. He knew the places everything ought to be.
James attempted to do it for him, and when Francis would not budge flopped onto the sofa with a look that seemed a little frightened.
“Don’t look at me as though you’re concerned,” he said as the fire began to spit and clamour to life.
Francis turned on his knee. “You have told me tonight, in so many words, that I have left you desperately alone and wishing for honest companionship.” James looked away. “Allow me a little concern if not guilt.”
James stood suddenly and Francis wondered if he would not march out. Instead he paced around the sofa and leaned onto it with his hands. “I did not say so to elicit your pity,” he said, seeming somewhat agitated. “I merely wished to be honest.”
Francis stood and brushed his hands down slowly. “Yes,” he said. “And do not mistake my word ‘concern’ for ‘pity,’ James.”
James looked down at the sound of his name, and stood up again. “It is not that I–” he began. “It is not so simple as missing ‘honest companionship,’” he said quietly.
“Then what is it, James?” Francis’ heart was half in his throat.
“When you looked at me, out on the ice –when you looked at me, with more openness than anyone ever had. I remembered, in that moment, thinking that nobody would again. Either because I would not survive to see home once more, or because nobody I would encounter again could measure up to how kindly you shone upon me. Me, bare and half on my knees before you –you, a great light that revealed to me a great truth –what you wanted from the beginning. It was honesty. It was openness. You were always open, Francis. It is what got us off the ice, in the end. It was what made you right all along. You openly adored, and you openly despised, and you asked only openness back. That is why I hated you. I realised that, when you shone on me. I had not been asked to trust in such an uninhibited way before. When I had to trust you –that was when I saw it, though I didn’t realise– to trust you is to blow away a damn on the most ferocious stream. You ask for trust. You give all the love a man –a person –a-” he broke off for a moment, cleared his throat. Francis looked on in amazement. “-well,” said James, low and careful. “All the love a person might so want, in their lifetime.”
A raw surprise leapt up into Francis’ heart at the plainness with which he had said it. He looked at James, who had sliced open his proverbial gut to spill and now stood, fidgeting by the fireplace, cap in hand. Francis hardly knew what to say. He shook his head.
He had not hoped –not for a moment had he hoped. All that Francis had looked to take was what had seemed within his grasp. On the ice, he had sought brotherhood. In London, a maintenance of this brotherhood which stumbled and fell somewhere in this very room. That James was unhappy –but not because Francis had attempted to loom too large in his life back in England, but rather that he wished for something else, for something Francis had scarce allowed himself to hope for–
“I–” he began, then swallowed. “I feared for a long while when we returned that I had only the capability to love as an addict loves,” he said slowly. “Ferocious, but covetous. I would not have that done to you. Do you understand?”
James looked up with an openness that Francis basked in. As he had on the ice, as he had his first sunlight out-of-doors once back in England. “Yes,” he said, thickly. “I understand.”
Francis nodded, and opened his mouth to speak.
“–but,” James broke him off. “Do, please tell me that you no longer fear that. I find that I cannot. I cannot imagine that your love can be made of anything but the finest stuff.” He spoke quickly, a little breathless.
Francis shook his head, and took a step towards him. Still feeling somewhat glass-like at the words sitting between them, he took James’ hand where it was white-knuckled on the back of his chair.
“I find I love you in ways that reach beyond textures. That you find such comfort in what I give to you –I would not stop that for anything. Know this to be true.” Francis shook his head. “I can scarcely reach for the words. But –James. I know that what I want with you simply cannot not exist in Belgravia drawing rooms.”
James watched his face, and nodded. “I understand.”
“Would you follow me, again?”
There was a heavy moment. James swallowed. Francis thought that he may ask where –where, or how. Instead, James looked to the window.
“Would they think me a man if I did?”
Francis furrowed his brow. He had watched, always, when James corrected, questioned and flinched in private conversation.
“Would you want them to?”
James turned back to him, eyes gleaming. He was smiling. “Good god!” She laughed, and pressed her face into Francis’ neck. “I do not think I have grasped yet how to respond to such questions.”
Francis could do nothing but press her close and sigh with a feeling of relief that overtook him.
“I mean it, James,” he said, close to her ear and with a great hope rising in his chest that he had not felt since he was nearabout twenty-five and still seeking to rise –an impossible Irish phoenix in his childish mind. Delicacy had never been something Francis excelled at. Then again, James had been drawn to his directness and loved him for it. And it was all spilling out of him now –feeling so fundamental and enormous it threatened to swallow up any sense. “Would you live with me, as husband and wife? Would you like that?”
James made a sound that was something of a muffled sob against the fabric of his coat. “I’m afraid to speak,” she said. “As to not rupture this feeling that your proposition has given me.”
“Proposition!” Francis exclaimed, laughing the word as he moved a hand up James’ back. “Call it a proposal –as if that is not what it is.”
James shook her head against him and did not move. They stood for a moment in each other's arms before she pulled her face from Francis’s shoulder and looked at him. “I came to a realisation a long time ago,” she said, “that following you was perhaps the only commitment on God’s green earth that is worth anything at all. I loved you then, fearfully. Then I loved you furiously. I love you now, with all that fury, but enduringly also. Does that answer your question?”
Francis was sure he was beaming, but he could not help it. He wondered if his teeth or eyes were shining with James’ great light, for he felt a great sun expanding in his chest to look upon her. “Yes,” he said, and kissed her. “It does, and I ask that you never stop answering me with stories.”