On Beechey Island, nothing.
On Devon Island, which they had passed and explored, nothing.
On Griffith Island, where they had searched for harbours, nothing.
On Cornwallis Island, which they had circumnavigated, nothing.
Down the entire length of Somerset Island and Prince of Wales Island and Victoria Island along which they had sailed south for the entire summer of 1846, nothing.
And now, in his dream, the rescuers in the six ships – now all on the verge of being frozen in themselves – were looking north to what open sea remained up the Wellington Channel toward the North Pole. Beechey Island revealed no clues whatsoever. And Crozier could see from his magical arctic tern’s high viewpoint that Peel Sound to the south – down which Erebus and Terror had found their way a year and a half ago during that brief summer thaw – was now, in this future summer, a solid sheet of white as far as the men on Beechey Island and sailing Barrow Strait could see.
They never even consider that Franklin could have gone that way… that he could have obeyed orders. Their attention – for the coming years, since Crozier sees that they are frozen in solid now in Lancaster Sound – is to search to the north. Sir John’s secondary orders had been that if he could not continue his way south to force the Passage, he should turn north to sail through the theoretical rim of ice into the even more theoretical Open Polar Sea.
Crozier knows in his sinking heart that the captains and men of these eight rescue ships have all come to the conclusion that Franklin had gone north – precisely the opposite direction he had in fact sailed.
He wakes in the night. His own moaning has awakened him. There is light, but his eyes cannot stand the light so he tries to understand what is happening just through the burning of touch and the crash of sound. Two men – his steward, Jopson, and the surgeon, Goodsir – are stripping him of his filthy and sweat-soaked nightshirt, bathing him with miraculously warm water, and carefully dressing him in a clean nightshirt and socks. One of them tries to feed him soup with a spoon. Crozier vomits up the thin gruel, but the contents of his full-to-the-brim vomit pail are frozen solid and he is vaguely aware of the two men cleaning the deck. They make him drink some water and he falls back into his cold sheets. One of them spreads a warm blanket over him – a warm, dry, unfrozen blanket – and he wants to weep with gratitude. He also wants to speak but is slipping back into the maelstrom of his visions and cannot find or frame the words before all words are lost to him again.
He sees a boy with black hair and greenish skin curled in a fetal position against a brick-tile wall the colour of urine. Crozier knows that the boy is an epileptic in an asylum, in some bedlam somewhere. The boy shows no movement except for his dark eyes, which constantly flicker back and forth like a reptile’s. That shape am I.
As soon as he thinks this, Crozier knows that this is not his fear. It is some other man’s nightmare. He was briefly in some other mind.
Sophia Cracroft enters him. Crozier moans around the biting strap.
He sees her naked and straining against him at the Platypus Pond. He sees her distant and dismissive on the stone bench at Government House. He sees her standing and waving – not at him – in her blue silk dress on the dock at Greenhithe on the May day that Erebus and Terror sailed. Now he sees her as he has never seen her before – a future-present Sophia Cracroft, proud, grieving, secretly happy to be grieving, renewed and reborn as her aunt Lady Jane Franklin’s full-time assistant and companion and amanuensis. She travels everywhere with Lady Jane – two indomitable women, the press will call them – Sophia, almost as much as her aunt, always visibly earnest and hopeful and strident and feminine and eccentric and bent to the task of cajoling the world to rescue Sir John Franklin. She will never mention Francis Crozier, not even in private. It is, he sees at once, a perfect role for Sophia: brave, imperious, entitled, able to play the coquette for decades with the perfect excuse for avoiding commitment or real love. She will never marry. She will travel the world with Lady Jane, Crozier sees, never publicly giving up hope that the missing Sir John will be found, but – long after real hope is surrendered – still enjoying the entitlement, sympathy, power, and position that this once-removed widowhood affords her.
Crozier tries to vomit, but his stomach has been empty now for hours or days. He can only curl up and suffer the cramps.
He is in a darkened parlour in a cramped, fussily furnished American farm home in Hydesdale, New York, some twenty miles west of Rochester. Crozier has never heard of either Hydesdale or Rochester, New York. He knows that it is spring of this year, 1848, perhaps only a few weeks in his future. Just visible through a crack in the drawn, thick drapes, a lightning storm surges and flashes. Thunder shakes the house.
“Come, Mother!” cries one of two girls at the table. “We promise you will find this edifying.”
“I will find it terrifying,” says the mother, a drab middle-aged woman with a perpetual frown line bisecting her forehead from her tightly pulled, greying bun to her heavy, frowning eyebrows. “I don’t know why I allow you to talk me into this.”
Crozier can only marvel at the flat ugliness of the American rural dialect. Most of the Americans he has known have been defecting sailors, U.S. Navy captains, or whalers.
“Hurry, Mother!” The girl commanding her mother in such a bossy tone is 15-year-old Margaret Fox. She is modestly dressed and attractive in a simpering and not especially intelligent way that Crozier has noticed is often the case with the few American women he has met socially. The other girl at the table is Margaret’s 11-year-old sister Catherine. The younger girl, her pale face only just visible in the flickering candlelight, more resembles her mother, down to the dark eyebrows, too-tight bun, and incipient frown line.
The lightning flashes in the gap between dusty drapes.
The mother and two girls join hands around the circular oak table. Crozier notices that the lace doily on the table has yellowed with age. All three females have their eyes closed. Thunder shakes the single candle’s flame.
“Is someone there?” asks 15-year-old Margaret.
A crashingly loud rap. Not thunder, but a crack, as if someone has struck wood with a small mallet. Everyone’s hands are in sight.
“Oh my!” cries the mother, obviously ready to throw her hands up over her mouth in fear. Her two daughters hold tight and keep her from breaking the circle. The table rocks from their tugging.
“Are you our Guide tonight?” asks Margaret.
A loud RAP.
“Have you come to hurt us in any way?” asks Katy.
Two even louder RAPs.
“See, Mother?” whispers Maggie. Closing her eyes again, she says in a theatrical whisper, “Guide, are you the gentle Mr. Splitfoot who communicated with us last night?”
RAP.
“Thank you for convincing us last evening that you were real, Mr. Splitfoot,” continues Maggie, speaking almost as if she were in a trance. “Thank you for telling Mother the details about her children, telling all our ages, and for reminding her of the sixth child who died. Will you answer our questions tonight?”
RAP.
“Where is the Franklin Expedition?” asks little Katy.
RAP RAP RAP rap rap rap rap RAP RAP rap RAP RAP… the percusssions go on for half a minute.
“Is this the Spiritual Telegraph you spoke of?” whispers their mother.
Maggie shushes her. The rapping breaks off. Crozier sees, as if he can float through wood and see through wool and cotton, that both girls are double-jointed and are taking turns snapping and popping their big toes against their second toes. It was an amazingly loud rapping sound from such small toes.