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The night before her wedding, Anne Coulman finds herself quite unable to sleep. She’d gone to bed at quite a respectable hour—though not quite early enough to avoid her mother pulling her aside for one last earnest lecture—and yet here she is, hours later, still wide awake.
The moon through the window is barely a sliver, and yet it might as well be the noonday sun beating down on her face. In the other bed, across the room, Eleanor and Mary are sound asleep, breathing deeply and not quite in time. All three in one room, like when they’d stayed here as young girls: Wadworth Hall is packed to bursting with Anne’s family, not to mention the sailors that seem to follow James everywhere.
She’s getting married tomorrow. It still hardly feels real. She’s been waiting so long for this day to come, and now it’s mere hours away. When James was away in the south, trying to reach the magnetic pole, she sometimes felt as though she’d turned into a statue of herself, the world moving on around her while she waited and waited. If the worst had happened, if James had never returned, she’d be waiting still, frozen in the grounds of Whitgift. A pillar of salt.
But it’s over at last. Tomorrow they’ll finally, forever, belong to no one but each other. Nothing will ever separate them again.
One of her sisters turns over in her sleep, breathing deepening into a gentle snore. A noise that’s as familiar a background to Anne’s nights as rain on the rooftops, and yet it rasps against her ear. Anne untangles herself from the bedclothes and gets to her feet, reaching for a discarded dressing gown. Once she’s out of bed she knows it’s the right idea: a quick walk to clear her head, rather than continue to toss and turn for hours. She tiptoes across the room and out the door, closing it silently behind her.
The house is perfectly still. She treads lightly down the hallway, pausing just for an instant outside the door of the green room, her ears pricked for any sound from James within. For an insane moment she’s tempted to try the door. The last time he’d slept under Wadworth’s roof, that July weekend before he’d sailed south, she’d waited until her aunt was out in the garden and her uncle had nodded off over the paper and then snuck up to James’s room while he was working on his magnetic calculations—but he’d been too much of a gentleman to do more than kiss, no matter how she’d hinted.
Anne passes the door by and pauses at the top of the staircase, looking down over the front hall. Darkness drapes thickly over everything, barely broken by the wan moonlight from the upper windows. Even in the dark, she knows the house as well as she knows Whitgift. And it’s been more of a home to her, these past years, in some ways: she’s been more at ease beneath her aunt and uncle’s roof than her father’s. A refuge, where she needn’t worry that someone will see what’s in her heart.
Earlier, as they’d dressed for dinner, she’d overhead Eleanor wonder aloud to Mary whether their father would survive sitting down to dinner with the man he refers to only as “that sailor” without dropping dead of apoplexy. “I’m surprised he didn’t burst into flame as soon as Captain Ross crossed the threshold,” she’d added, and they’d both dissolved into giggles. But Mary had glanced up and seen Anne watching them, and hurriedly shushed Eleanor.
But the dinner hadn’t been as terrible as she’d feared. Sitting beside her father, she’d tensed every time he cleared his throat, and for a long horrible moment during the first course it had seemed as though he wouldn’t speak at all, and the whole meal would pass in the stony silence she knew well. She’d glanced at James across the table, and seen the effort underlying his jovial conversation; his hands trembled as he reached for his glass. But whether her father was starting to soften in his old age, or simply was unwilling to be deliberately rude at Uncle Robert and Aunt Judith’s table, he’d eventually relented enough to participate in the conversation, even if he assiduously addressed his remarks to anyone but James.
All will be well, Anne thinks, and wishes it didn’t sound so much like a desperate plea. Her mother likes James well enough; her sisters treat him like a brother already; her aunt and uncle adore him. But still, there’s a splinter in her heart that she fears will never heal. When she’d spoken to her uncle, a few days ago, to ask him to be the one to give her away, she’d seen the sadness in his face, just for an instant, before he’d wrapped her in a hug.
Anne sighs and scrubs her hand across her eyes. She ought to go back to bed; there’s no use to wandering the corridors like some melancholy spirit. But as she turns to retrace her steps, a gleam of light at the bottom of the stairs catches her eye.
She treads cautiously down the staircase, careful to miss the squeaky step. The light is a narrow line under the door of the library. Anne frowns at it: surely no one else can be awake at this hour. Wondering if someone has left a candle burning, she opens the door and slips inside.
At first she thinks she was right: there’s no one there. The fire has burned down to dull embers; a candle gutters on the side table, casting a wan, flickering light over the rows of well-worn spines. But as she moves closer she sees a form slumped in her uncle’s favorite armchair, snoring faintly, feet stretched towards the fire and a book open in his lap.
Anne studies him, perplexed. This tableau is hardly how she’d expected to find Captain Crozier. But then, she hardly knows him at all save from what James has mentioned in his letters. James’s friends, the two captains, are an odd pair: a set of illuminators, not exactly matched but both catching James’s light. Bird short and jovial, making up for his receding hairline with tremendous side-whiskers; Crozier quieter, somehow threadbare despite his stiff new clothes. She’s not sure she’s heard him say more than two sentences together since he entered the house in James’s wake.
And here he is, asleep in the library in the early hours of the morning, a mostly-empty glass of whiskey on the side table within easy reach of his hand, accompanied by an open decanter. Uncle Robert isn’t in the habit of keeping his whiskey in the library; Anne frowns and replaces the stopper.
Perhaps the quiet chime of the glass disturbs him; he stirs, passing a hand across his face and blinking up at her owlishly. “What…Oh.” He stops halfway through a stretch, as though he’s been turned to ice. “Miss Coulman.”
“Captain Crozier,” Anne says. “I’m sorry for disturbing you.”
“Not at all,” he replies. “I lost track of time.”
His stock is undone; his greying fair hair is flattened where his head had rested against the armchair. Anne, suddenly aware that she’s in her dressing gown with her hair down, pulls the gown tighter around her shoulders. Crozier frowns at her, his face furrowed and unreadable in the light of the dying candle. There’s something in the air between them, Anne can almost feel it. Not a chill, exactly. It’s not as though he’s been impolite, on the few occasions they’ve spoken. Quite the opposite, in fact: a stiff, careful politeness. Brittle, like a pane of glass.
Crozier makes as though to lever himself out of the chair—and the book, forgotten in his lap, topples to the floor, landing in a rustle of pages. He sighs and leans down, reaching for the book with a shaking hand. Anne, remembering the new tremor in James’s fingers, feels a pang.
“Are you well, Captain?” she asks.
“Yes,” Crozier rasps. “Just tired.” He retrieves the book and places it on the table next to his glass; Anne’s eyes flick to the title stamped on the spine. It’s a familiar one: a book she’d pored over before it and its companion volumes mysteriously vanished from the library at Whitgift. One of Captain Parry’s journals.
“Reminiscing?” she asks.
Is it the dim light, or does Crozier’s face redden? “Yes.”
“Were you on that voyage?” she asks. She knows he’s an old Arctic hand, as Bird is.
“Yes,” he says, and Anne has to bite her tongue to stop herself from asking whether he knows any other words.
The silence stretches, and then Crozier says, like the words are being pried out of him, “That was my first Arctic voyage, 1821. Mine and Jack’s and Ned’s—Captain Bird, that is, who you’ve met. James had been in the Arctic already, of course.” Another pause, and then, “We all idolized him, even though he was the youngest of us. He seemed to know everything there was to know: magnetism, natural philosophy, how to trap foxes and keep them as pets. Always in motion. He could do more in a day than I could in a week. And he was so han—” He stops, abruptly, and reaches out to fidget with the book, squaring it with the corner of the table. It occurs to Anne that he’s avoiding her eyes. “Anyway, that’s all in the past, now. You don’t need to hear an old man’s rambling.”
“No!” Anne protests. “I was fascinated. I wish I could have known him then.”
The look Crozier gives her tells her plainly what he’s thinking: she’d have been a babe in arms when that voyage set sail, and he’s known James for almost as long as she’s been alive. But she meets his gaze, unintimidated. So what if he thinks her a silly child? The Coulmans and the Spences have whispered about her behind her back for years; she’s learned to bear people thinking ill of her. Crozier blinks first, and looks away.
“He hasn’t changed,” he says. “Age has not dulled him. Nor even slowed him down, really. He worked like a drudge for the whole voyage, you’d have thought no one else on the ship could read a dip circle. Ned despaired of him ever getting a full night’s sleep. But then, it always was impossible to get him to rest…” He makes a soft noise that could almost be a laugh.
Anne watches him, rapt. Something in Crozier’s face changes, when he’s speaking of James: a fondness that overflows his dour face. His creased brow softens, his eyes lighten.
“You’ve sailed with him often,” she says, a gentle prompt.
“Half my life, it feels like,” he says, giving her a lopsided almost-smile. “With Parry in the ‘20s, and when he went out after those frozen-in whalers in ’36. And this last voyage, of course.”
Anne glances again at the Parry volume on the table, and begins to understand. “And what will you do,” she asks, “after this?”
The light in Crozier’s face vanished like a snuffed candle. He shrugs. “Back to London for a time, perhaps. Or to Ireland. And after that, who knows.”
“Would you consider St. Leonards?”
Crozier stares at her, clearly taken aback. Anne herself hardly knows why she’d said it: she and James had briefly discussed whether they might see any of his friends while they’re on their honeymoon, but never settled on an answer. And this glum, gruff man would hardly be a congenial companion on their holiday. And yet she how warmly he speaks of James raises an instinctive sympathy in her. “That is,” she says lightly, “if you haven’t tired of the sea.”
“I have not.” The startled look hasn’t faded from his face. Anne feels a gleam of mischievous satisfaction. “But surely—”
“Think it over,” she says. Now that she’s thinking about it, the idea appeals to her: an opportunity to make a further study of this strange man. And James will be delighted to have another friend nearby. “If nothing else, I’d like to hear more stories about your voyages together. Especially the escapades James got up to when he was younger.”
Crozier laughs at that. “Oh, there were plenty of those, to be sure.”
The clock on the mantel strikes two, and Anne and Crozier both startle. “Good Lord,” Crozier says, “is that the time? I mustn’t keep you up any later.”
“Perhaps not,” Anne agrees. “Still, thank you for the conversation. I’m glad to know you better, Captain.”
A flicker passes across his face at that, something she can’t interpret. Interesting.
“Good night,” Crozier says. “Miss Coulman.”
“Good night,” she replies, and leaves the library as quietly as she’d entered it. Her eyes have adjusted to the candlelight; stepping back out into the darkness of the front hall is a shock. She moves slowly, blindly, up the staircase. If Crozier leaves the library, it’s after she’s already crept back into her room and closed the door.
As she settles back into bed and burrows under the quilt, she worries that she’ll toss and turn for what remains of the night—but she falls asleep almost as soon as she lays her head on the pillow. Her dreams are a disturbed jumble of images: sometimes the regular nightmares of her parents disowning her, sometimes walking on a beach with James, sometimes in the library again, facing Crozier across the dying fire. Crozier is trying to tell her something, but she can’t hear over the sound of the sea outside—
And then she wakes, the room brimming with clear morning light and the church bells ringing down in the village for her wedding day.