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He wears his hair shorter now. Still feels, sometimes, that it is a stranger looking back at him through the mirror. Catches a glimpse reflected in glass and jolts at the sight of his father, his true blood father, or those half-brothers with whom he shares certain angles, an aspect in light.
One of his clearest memories of those days – weeks – after rescue, their bareheadedness as wasted hair was clipped away. Harry, running a hand over a clean jaw, over a scalp with little more than stubble looking, of a sudden, fifteen years younger, wide-eyed and stunned. Dundy’s silver locks a cairn between his feet, his breathless laugh as the last curl fell,
“I would almost give another toe to save it.”
James reached over from where he was propped in his own chair with pillows, grasped his hand, pretended not to see the damp in those eyes.
George grew back less hair than he started with, said – months later – he was surprised it returned at all.
When dear old Bridgens – more unnatural without his beard than with the ruin it had become – asked in that low voice, “are you ready now, sir?”, James simply nodded and whispered around the lump in his throat, “weave it into a poem, will you?”
Francis had already sat through Jopson’s ministrations. Jopson, who offered to attend to his captain though a steward no more, though Ross had offered his own steward for the occasion, and Francis had acquiesced in the name of finishing their expedition in some shadow of how they had begun, and afterwards stayed as James submitted to the scissors, sipping tea as if—
as if they were ladies being prepared for some grand ball.
No Arctic ball. No room on the Enterprise with them all, though Ross complimented every one of them for looking so well, every bit the perfect host, and that evening organised one of the men in possession of a fiddle to play for them as they hid bald heads beneath Welsh wigs, pretended not to feel the cold.
Like something from a novel or a play that can hardly have been real and yet—
His bones ache when the sky looks like rain. There are three gaps in his mouth where teeth used to be. Francis’ hair grew back white.
And he was there to see it, to smooth his fingers through the soft new curls—who had known that hair would curl? To sketch it, learn it, kiss it.
And kept his own hair short, the sensation of it brushing his ears reminding him that he had expected to be buried under shale, and on the first day he had it trimmed after it grew back Francis did not ask, the slightest quirk of his lip as he said,
“It becomes you very well.”
Threads of grey now that there did not used to be before. More forehead than he once had. The lines in his face a trace of all that was and might have been, and as he stands before the mirror, ties a scarlet cravat, he does not lament the loss of that youthful countenance.
Sees now not a stranger, nor his father, but simply himself.