“Is that blood under your nails, Mr. Hickey?”
“Could be, Captain. You know how it is.”
“No. Tell me.”
“Well, we ain’t had real water what to bath ourselves in for months, sir. And what with the scurvy and dysentery-like, there’s a certain amount of bleedin’ when we see to the necessaries …”
“Are you saying that a Royal Navy petty officer on my ship wipes his arse with his fingers, Mr. Hickey?”
“No, sir … I mean … may I put my layers back on now, Captain? You can see I ain’t wounded or anything. This cold is enough to shrink a man’s …”
“Take your shirts and undershirts off.”
“Are you serious, sir?”
“Don’t make me ask a second time, Mr. Hickey. We don’t have a brig. Any man I send to the brig will spend time chained to one of the whaleboats.”
“Here, sir. How’s this. Just me flesh, freezing as it is. If my poor missus could see me now …”
“It didn’t say on your muster papers that you were married, Mr. Hickey.”
“Oh, my Louisa’s been dead going on seven years now, Captain. Of the pox. God rest her soul.”
“Why did you tell some of the other men before the mast that when it came time to kill officers, Lieutenant Irving should be the first?”
“I never said no such thing, sir.”
“I have reports of you saying that and other mutinous statements going back to before the Carnivale on the ice, Mr. Hickey. Why did you single out Lieutenant Irving? What had that officer ever done to you?”
“Why, nothing, sir. And I never said no such thing. Bring in the man who said I did and I’ll dispute it to his face and spit in his eye.”
“What had Lieutenant Irving ever done to you, Mr. Hickey? Why did you tell other men from both Erebus and Terror that Irving was a whoremaster and a liar?”
“I swear to you, Captain … pardon my teeth chattering, Captain, but Jesus Christ the night is cold against the bare skin. I swear to you, I didn’t say no such thing. A lot of us looked on poor Lieutenant Irving sorta like a son, Captain. A son. It was only my worry for him out there today that made me go check on him. Good thing I did, too, sir, or we would’ve never caught the murdering bastards who …”
“Put your layers on, Mr. Hickey.”
“Aye, sir.”
“No. Do it outside. Get out of my sight.”
“ ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,’ ” intoned Fitzjames. “ ‘He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’ ”
Hodgson and the other pallbearers were using great care in lowering the pallet with Irving’s canvas-wrapped body to the ropes held in place above the shallow hole by some of the healthier seamen. Crozier knew that Hodgson and Irving’s other friends had gone into the postmortem tent one at a time to pay their respects before the lieutenant had been sewn into his sail shroud by Old Murray. The visitors had set several tokens of their affection next to the lieutenant’s body — the recovered brass telescope, its lenses shattered in the shooting, that the boy had so esteemed, a gold medal with his name engraved on it that he had won in competitions on the gunnery ship HMS Excellent, and at least one five-pound note, as if some old wager had been paid at last. For some reason — optimism? youthful naïveté? — Irving had packed his dress uniform in his small bag of personal belongings, and he was being buried in it now. Crozier wondered idly if the gilt buttons on the uniform — each bearing the image of an anchor surrounded by a crown — would be there when nothing else but the boy’s bleached bones and the gold gunnery medal survived the long process of decay.
“ ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ ” Fitzjames recited from memory, his voice sounding tired but properly resonant, “ ‘of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sin art justly displeased?’ ”
Captain Crozier knew that there was one other item sewn into the sail-shroud with Irving, one that no one else knew about. It lay under his head like a pillow.
It was a gold, green, red, and blue silk Oriental handkerchief, and Crozier had surprised the giver by coming into the postmortem tent after Goodsir, Lloyd, Hodgson, and the others had departed, just before Old Murray the sailmaker was to enter and sew up the shroud he had prepared and upon which Irving already lay in state.
Lady Silence had been there, bending over the corpse, setting something beneath Irving’s head.
Crozier’s first impulse had been to reach for his pistol in his greatcoat pocket, but he’d frozen in place as he saw the Esquimaux girl’s eyes and face. If there were no tears in those dark, hardly human eyes, there was something else luminous there with some emotion he could not identify. Grief? The captain did not think so. It was more some kind of complicit recognition at seeing Crozier. The captain felt the same strange stirring in his head that he had so often felt around his Memo Moira.
But the girl obviously had set the Oriental handkerchief carefully in place under the dead boy’s head as some sort of gesture. Crozier knew the handkerchief had been Irving’s — he’d seen it on special occasions as far back as the day they’d sailed in May of 1845.
Had the Esquimaux wench stolen it? Plundered it from his dead body just yesterday?
Silence had followed Irving’s sledge party from Terror to Terror Camp more than a week ago and then had just disappeared, never joining the men in the camp. Almost everyone, excluding Crozier, who still held hopes she might lead them to food, had considered this good riddance. But all during this terrible morning, part of Crozier had wondered if somehow Silence had been responsible for his officer’s murder out there on the windswept gravel ridge.
Had she led her Esquimaux hunter friends back here to raid the camp and run into Irving on the way, first giving a fete to the starving man with meat and then murdering him in cold blood to keep him from telling the others here of his encounter? Had Silence been the “possibly a young woman” that Farr and Hodgson and the others had caught a glimpse of, fleeing with an Esquimaux man with a headband? She could have changed her parka if she had returned to her village in the past week, and who could tell young Esquimaux wenches apart at a glance?
Crozier considered all of these things, but now in a time-stopped moment — both he and the young woman were startled into immobility for long seconds — the captain looked into her face and knew, whether in his heart or in what Memo Moira insisted was his second sight, that she wept inside for John Irving and was returning a gift of the silk handkerchief to the dead man.
Crozier guessed that the handkerchief had been presented to her during the February visit to the Esquimaux’s snow-house that Irving had dutifully reported to the captain … but had reported with few details. Now Crozier wondered if the two had been lovers.
And then Lady Silence was gone. She’d slipped under the tent flap and was gone without a sound. When Crozier later queried the men in the camp and those on guard if they had seen anything, none had.
At that moment in the tent, the captain had gone over to Irving’s body, looked down at the pale, dead face made even whiter with the small pillow of the brightly covered handkerchief behind it, and then he had pulled the canvas over the lieutenant’s face and body, shouting for Old Murray to come in and do the sewing.
“ ‘Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour,’ ” Fitzjames was saying, “ ‘deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.’
“ ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’”
Fitzjames’s voice fell silent. He stepped back from the grave. Crozier, lost in reverie, stood for a long moment until a shuffling of feet made him realize that his part of the service had arrived.
He walked to the head of the grave.
“ ‘We therefore commit the body of our friend and officer John Irving to the deep,’ ” he rasped, also reciting from memory that remained all too clear from many repetitions despite the pall of fatigue in his mind, “‘to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the Sea and the Earth shall give up their dead.’” The body was lowered the three feet, and Crozier tossed a handful of frozen soil onto it. The gravel made a strangely moving rasping sound as it landed on the canvas above Irving’s face and slid to the sides. “‘And the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’ ”
The service was over. The ropes had been retrieved.
Men stamped cold feet, tugged on their Welsh wigs and caps, rewrapped their comforters, and filed back through the fog to Terror Camp for their hot dinner.
Hodgson, Little, Thomas, Des Voeux, Le Vesconte, Blanky, Peglar, and a few of the other officers stayed behind, dismissing the seamen’s detail that had been waiting to bury the body. The officers shoveled soil and began setting in the first layer of stones together. They wanted Irving buried as best he could be under the circumstances.
When they finished, Crozier and Fitzjames walked away from the others. They would eat their dinners much later — for now they planned to walk the two miles up to Victory Point where Graham Gore had left his brass canister and optimistic message in James Ross’s old cairn almost a year ago.
Crozier planned to leave word there today on what the fate of their expedition had been in the past ten and a half months since Gore’s note had been written and on what they planned to do next.
Plodding tiredly through the fog, hearing one of the ship’s bells ringing for dinner somewhere in the roiling fog behind them — they had, of course, brought both Terror’s and Erebus’s bells along in the whaleboats dragged across the frozen sea to camp when the ships were abandoned — Francis Crozier hoped to Christ that he would decide on their course of action by the time that he and Fitzjames reached the cairn. If he could not, he thought, he was afraid he might start weeping.
42
PEGLAR
Lat. 69° 37′ 42″ N., Long. 98° 41′ W.
25 April, 1848
There hadn’t been enough fish and seal on the sled to serve it as a main dish to ninety-five or a hundred men — a few were too ill to eat anything solid — and even Mr. Diggle’s and Mr. Wall’s record at routinely performing loaves-and-fishes miracles with the limited ships’ stores did not allow them to fully succeed at this one (especially since some of the food on the Esquimaux sledge had been particularly putrid), but every man managed to get a taste of the savory blubber or fish along with the prepared Goldner soups or stews or vegetables.
Harry Peglar enjoyed the meal even though he was shaking with cold as he ate it and knew that it would only provoke the diarrhea that was already ripping him apart every day.
After the meal and before beginning their scheduled duties, Peglar and Steward John Bridgens walked together with their tin mugs of tepid tea. The fog muffled their own voices even as it seemed to amplify sounds from far away. They could hear men arguing over a card game in one of the tents on the far side of Terror Camp. From the northwest — the direction the two captains had walked before dinner — came the artillery rumble of thunder out over the pack ice. That sound had been going on all day, but no storm had arrived.
The two paused at the long line of boats and boat-sledges drawn up above the tumble of ice that would be the inlet’s shoreline if there ever came a thaw to the sea.
“Tell me, Harry,” said Bridgens, “which of these boats will we be taking if or when we must go to the ice again?”
Peglar sipped his tea and pointed. “I’m not certain, but I think Captain Crozier has decided to take ten of the eighteen here. We don’t have men well enough to haul more these days.”
“Then why did we man-haul all eighteen to Terror Camp?”
“Captain Crozier considered the possibility that we’d stay at Terror Camp for another two or three months, perhaps letting the ice around this point melt. We would have been better off with more boats, keeping some in reserve should others be damaged. And we could have hauled much more in the way of food, tents, and supplies in eighteen boats. With more than ten men in each boat now, it’ll be damned crowded, and we’ll have to leave too much of the stores behind.”
“But you think we’ll leave for the south with only ten boats, Harry? And soon?”
“I hope to Christ we do,” said Peglar. He told Bridgens about what he had seen that morning, what Goodsir had said about the Esquimaux’s stomachs being as full of seal meat as Irving’s had been, and how the captain had treated those present, perhaps excepting the Marines, as a potential Board of Inquiry. He added that the captain had sworn them to secrecy.
“I think,” John Bridgens said softly, “that Captain Crozier is not convinced that the Esquimaux killed Lieutenant Irving.”
“What? Who else could …” Peglar stopped. The cold and nausea that were always with him now seemed to surge up and through him. He had to lean against a whaleboat to keep his knees from buckling. He had never considered for an instant that anyone other than the savages could have done what he’d seen done to John Irving. He thought of the frozen pile of grey entrails on the ridgeline.
“Richard Aylmore is saying that the officers have led us into this mess,” said Bridgens in a voice so low it was almost a whisper. “He’s telling everyone who won’t inform on him that we should kill the officers and parcel out the extra food rations amongst the men. Aylmore in our group and that caulker’s mate in yours say we should go back to Terror at once.”
“Back to Terror …” repeated Peglar. He knew that his mind was dull with illness and exhaustion these days, but the idea made no sense at all. The ship was locked in the ice far out there and would be for months more, even if summer did condescend to appear this year. “Why don’t I hear these things, John? I’ve heard none of this seditious whispering.”
Bridgens smiled. “They don’t trust you not to tell, my dear Harry.”
“But they trust you?”
“Of course not. But I hear everything sooner or later. Stewards are invisible, y’know, being neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat. Speaking of which, that was a delightful meal, wasn’t it? Perhaps the last relatively fresh food we shall ever eat.”
Peglar didn’t answer. His mind was racing. “What can we do to warn Fitzjames and Crozier?”
“Oh, they have this information about Aylmore and Hickey and the others,” the old steward said nonchalantly. “Our captains have their own sources before the mast and around the scuttlebutts.”
“The scuttlebutts have been frozen solid for months,” said Peglar.
Bridgens chuckled. “That seems to be a very good metaphor, Harry, and all the more ironic for its literalness. Or at least an amusing euphemism.”
Peglar shook his head. He still felt the nausea from the idea that amidst all this illness and terror, any man among them would turn on another.
“Tell me, Harry,” said Bridgens, patting the inverted hull of the first whaleboat with his worn mitten. “Which of these boats might we be hauling with us and which will be left behind?”
“The four whaleboats will go for sure,” Peglar said absently, still mulling over this talk of mutiny and what he had seen that morning. “The jolly boats are as long as the whaleboats, but damned heavy. If I were the captain, I might leave them behind and take the four cutters instead. They’re only twenty-five feet long, but much lighter than whaleboats. But their draft may be too much for the Great Fish River if we can get there. The ships’ smaller boats and dinghies are too light for the open sea and too flimsy for much hauling and river work.”
“So it’s the four whaleboats, four cutters, and two pinn
aces, you think?” asked Bridgens.
“Yes,” said Peglar, and had to smile. For all his years at sea and all his thousands of volumes read, Subordinate Officers’ Steward John Bridgens still knew very little about some things nautical. “I think those ten, yes, John.”
“At best,” said Bridgens, “if most of the sick recover, that leaves only ten of us to man-haul each boat. Can we do that, Harry?”
Peglar shook his head again. “It won’t be like the sea ice crossing from Terror, John.”
“Well, thank the dear Lord for that small blessing.”
“No, I mean that we’ll almost certainly be man-hauling these boats over land rather than sea ice. It’ll be much harder than the crossing from Terror, where we man-hauled only two boats at a time and could put as many men on a team as we needed to get over the rough parts. And the boats now will be even more heavily laden with stores and our sick than before. I suspect that we’ll have twenty or more in harness for each boat hauled. Even then, we’ll have to haul the ten boats in relays.”
“Relays?” said Bridgens. “Dear heavens, it will take us forever to move even ten boats if we’re constantly going back and forth. And the weaker and sicker we become, the slower we will go.”
“Yes,” said Peglar.
“Is there any chance that we shall get these boats all the way to the Great Fish River and then up the river to Great Slave Lake and the outpost there?”
“I doubt it,” said Peglar. “Perhaps if a few of us survive long enough to get the boats to the mouth of the river and the right boats make it and they’re rigged just perfectly for river running and … but, no, I doubt if there’s any real chance.”
“Then why on earth would Captains Crozier and Fitzjames put us through such labour and misery if there is no chance?” asked Bridgens. The older man’s voice did not sound aggrieved or anxious or desperate, merely curious. Peglar had heard John pose a thousand questions about astronomy, natural history, geology, botany, philosophy, and a score of other subjects in precisely that same soft, mildly curious tone. With most of the other questions, it had been the teacher who knew the answer quizzing his student in a polite way. Here, Peglar was sure that John Bridgens did not know the answer to this question.