When she pried open the wax and saw the marmalade, Lady Silence’s gaze snapped up to Irving’s face again. She seemed to be studying him.
He made a rough pantomime of her spreading the marmalade on the biscuits and eating them.
She did not move. Her gaze did not shift.
Finally she leaned out and extended her right arm as if reaching for him across the blubber fire, and Irving flinched a bit before realizing that she was reaching to a niche – just a small recess in the ice block – at the head of his robe-covered platform. He feigned not noticing that her own robe had slipped lower and that both her bosoms were bobbing free as she reached.
She offered him something white and red and reeking like a dead and decaying fish. He realized that it was another slab of seal or other-animal blubber that had been stored in the snowy niche to be kept cold.
He accepted it, nodded, and held it in his hands above his knees. He had no clue what to do with it. Was he supposed to bring it home to serve as part of his own seal-oil blubber lamp?
Silence’s lips twitched then, and for an instant, Irving almost thought she had smiled. She took out her short, sharp knife and gestured, drawing the blade quickly and repeatedly right up to and against her lower lip as if she were going to cut that full, pink lip off.
Irving stared and continued holding the soft mass of blubber and skin.
Sighing, Silence reached over, took the blubber from him, held it to her own mouth, and cut several slices off with her knife, pulling the short blade actually into her mouth between her white teeth with each morsel. She paused to chew a moment and then handed the blubber and rubbery sealskin – he was almost certain it was seal now – back to him.
Irving had to fumble down through six layers of slops, greatcoat, jacket, sweaters, and waistcoat to get to his boat knife that was sheathed on his belt. He held the blade up to show her, feeling like a child seeking approbation during a lesson.
She nodded ever so slightly.
Irving set the reeking, stinking, dripping blubber next to his open mouth and pulled the sharp edge of his knife back quickly the way she had.
He almost cut his nose off. He would have sliced his lower lip off if the knife had not caught in the sealskin – if sealskin it was – and soft meat and white blubber and jerked upward slightly. As it was, a single drop of blood dripped from his sliced septum.
Silence ignored the blood, shook her head ever so slightly, and handed him her knife.
He tried it again, feeling the strange weight of her knife in his palm, slicing confidently toward his lip even as a drop of blood dripped from his nose onto the blubber.
The blade went through effortlessly. Her little stone knife was – somehow, incredibly – many times sharper than his own.
The strip of blubber filled his mouth. He chewed, trying to idiot-mime and nod his appreciation toward the woman from behind his upraised strip of blubber and poised knife.
It tasted like a ten-week-dead carp dredged from the floor of the Thames beneath the Woolwich sewer outlets.
Irving felt a great urge to vomit, started to spit the wad of half-chewed blubber on the floor of the snow-house instead, decided that this would not further the goals of his delicate diplomatic mission, and swallowed.
Grinning his appreciation for the delicacy while trying to force down his continued nausea – all the while surreptitiously mopping at his barely sliced but vigorously bleeding nose with a bunched-up frozen mitten serving as handkerchief – Irving was horrified to see the Esquimaux woman clearly gesture for him to cut and eat more of the blubber.
Still smiling, he sliced and swallowed another piece. It was, he thought, precisely what it must feel like to be filling one’s mouth with a giant glob of some other creature’s nasal mucus.
Amazingly, his empty stomach rumbled, cramped, and demanded more. Something in the reeking blubber seemed to be satisfying some deep craving he had not even known he felt. His body, if not his mind, wanted more of it.
The next few minutes were quite the domestic scene, thought Lieutenant Irving, with him sitting on his white bear robe on his little snow shelf, quickly if not enthusiastically cutting and swallowing strips of seal blubber, while Lady Silence crumbled strips of ship’s biscuit, dunked them in his mother’s crock as quickly as a sailor mopping up gravy with his bread, and devoured the marmalade with satisfied grunts that seemed to come from deep in her throat.
And all this time her bosoms remained bare and visible for Third Lieutenant John Irving’s constant and appreciative, if not relaxed, perusal over his diminishing strip of seal blubber.
What would Mother think if she could see her boy and her crock now? wondered Irving.
When the two were finished, after Silence had eaten all the biscuits and emptied the marmalade crock and Irving had made a serious dent in the blubber, he tried to mop his chin and lips with his mitten, but the Esquimaux woman reached to the niche once again and presented him with a handful of loose snow. Since the high temperature in the little snow-house felt as if it were actually above freezing, Irving self-consciously mopped the blubber grease off his face, dried his face with his sleeve, and started to hand the remaining strip of sealskin and fat back to the girl. She gestured to the storage niche and he stuffed the piece of blubber as far back into the niche as he could reach.
Now comes the hard part, thought the lieutenant.
How does one communicate just by the use of hands and dumb show that there are more than a hundred hungry men threatened by scurvy who need someone else’s hunting and fishing secrets?
Irving made a game try at it. With Lady Silence’s deep, dark eyes watching unblinkingly, he acted out men walking, rubbing his stomach to show that they were hungry, the three masts of each ship, men getting sick – he stuck his tongue out, crossed his eyes in a way that used to upset his mother, and mimed falling over onto the bearskin robe – and then pointed to Silence and energetically acted out her casting a spear, holding a fishing pole, pulling in a catch. Irving pointed to the blubber he’d just stuffed away, in more ways than one, and pointed vaguely beyond the snow-house, again rubbing his stomach, crossing his eyes and falling, then rubbing his stomach again. He pointed to Lady Silence, floundered a moment on the sign language for “show us how to do it ourselves,” and then repeated the spear-throwing and fish-catching mimes while pausing to point to her, shoot splay-fingered rays out his eyes, and rub his stomach to specify the recipients of her teaching.
When he was finished, sweat dripped from his brow.
Lady Silence looked at him. If she had blinked again, he’d missed it during his antics.
“Oh, well, bloody hell,” said Third Lieutenant Irving.
In the end, he just buttoned up his layers and slops again, stuffed the ship’s napkin and his mother’s crock back in his leather valise, and called it a day. Perhaps he had got his message across after all. He might never know. Perhaps if he returned often enough to the snow-house…
Irving’s speculation veered into the highly personal at that point, and he reined himself in as if he were a coachman with a matched set of willful Arabians.
Perhaps if he returned often… he would be able to go with her during one of her nocturnal seal-hunting expeditions.
But what if the thing on the ice is still giving her these things? he wondered. After seeing what he had seen so many weeks ago, he had half-convinced himself that he had not seen what he had seen. But the more honest half of Irving’s memory and mind knew that he had seen it. The creature on the ice had brought her chunks of seal or arctic foxes or other game. Lady Silence had left that place among the ice boulders and seracs that night with fresh meat.