“Mr. Splitfoot says that the Sir John Franklin whom the papers say everyone is seeking is well and with his men, who are also all well but very frightened, on their ships and in the ice near an island five days’ sail south of the cold place where they stopped their first year out,” intones Maggie.
“It is very dark where they are,” adds Katy.
There come more rappings.
“Sir John tells his wife, Jane, not to worry,” interprets Maggie. “He says that he shall see her soon – in the next world, if not in this one.”
“Oh my!” Mrs. Fox says again. “We have to call for Mary Redfield and Mr. Redfield, and Leah, of course, and Mr. and Mrs. Duesler, and Mrs. Hyde, and Mr. and Mrs. Jewell…”
“Ssshhhh!” hisses Katy.
RAP, RAP, RAP, rapraprapraprap, RAP.
“The Guide does not want you to speak when He is leading us,” whispers Katy.
Crozier moans and bites his leather strap. The cramps that had begun in his gut now rack his entire body. He shakes from the chill one moment and throws off the blankets the next.
There is a man dressed like an Esquimaux – animal-fur parka, high furry boots, a fur hood like Lady Silence’s. But this man is standing on a wooden stage in front of footlights. It is very hot. Behind the man, a painted backdrop shows ice, icebergs, a wintry sky. Fake white snow litters the stage. There are four overheated dogs of the type used by the Greenland Esquimaux lying on the stage, their tongues lolling.
The bearded man in the heavy parka is talking from the white-speckled podium. “I speak to you today for humanity, not for money,” says the little man. His American accent grates on Crozier’s aching ear as fiercely as had the teenaged girls’. “And I have traveled to England to speak to Lady Franklin herself. She wishes me Godspeed on our next expedition – contingent, of course, on whether we raise the money here in Philadelphia and in New York and in Boston to mount the expedition – and says that she would be honoured if the sons of the United States were to bring home her husband. So today I ask for your generosity, but only for the sake of humanity. I ask for this in Lady Franklin’s name, in her lost husband’s name, and in the secure hopes of bringing glory to the United States of America…”
Crozier sees the man again. The bearded fellow is out of his parka and naked and in bed in the Union Hotel in New York with a very young naked woman. It is a hot night and the bedclothes have been thrown back. There is no sign of the sledge dogs.
“Whatever may be my faults,” the man is saying, speaking softly because the window and transom are open to the New York night, “I have at least loved you. Were you an empress, darling Maggie, instead of a little nameless girl following an obscure and ambiguous profession, it would be the same.”
Crozier realizes that the young naked woman is Maggie Fox – only a few years older. She is still attractive in that simpering American way, even without her clothes on.
Maggie says in a tone much more throaty than the teenager’s imperious command Crozier heard earlier, “Dr. Kane, you know I love you.”
The man shakes his head. He has lifted a pipe from the bedside table and now frees his left arm from behind the girl to tamp in the tobacco and light it. “Maggie, my dear, I hear those words from your little deceitful mouth, feel your hair tumbling onto my chest, and would love to believe them. But you cannot rise above your station, my dear. You have many traits which lift you above your calling, Maggie… you are refined and lovable and, with a different education, would have been innocent and artless. But you are not worthy of a permanent regard from me, Miss Fox.”
“Not worthy,” repeats Maggie. Her eyes, perhaps her prettiest feature now that her plump breasts are covered from Crozier’s view, appear to be brimming with tears.
“I am sold to different destinies, my child,” says Dr. Kane. “Remember that I have my own sad vanities to pursue, even as you and your venial sisters and mother pursue your own. I am as devoted to my calling as you, poor child, can be to yours, if such theatrical spiritualist poppycock can be called a calling. Remember then, as a sort of a dream, that Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas loved Maggie Fox of the Spirit Rappings.”
Crozier comes awake in the dark. He does not know where or when he is. His cubicle is dark. The ship seems dark. The timbers moan – or is that an echo of his own moans of the last hours and days? It is very cold. The warm blanket he seems to remember Jopson and Goodsir setting on him is now as damp and frozen as the other bedsheets. The ice moans against the ship. The ship continues its answering groans from pressured oak and cold-strained iron.
Crozier wants to get up but finds that he is too weak and hollow to stir. He can barely move his arms. The pain and visions roll over him like a breaking wave.
Faces of men he has known or met or seen in the Service.
There is Robert McClure, one of the most guileful and ambitious men Francis Crozier has ever known – another Irishman intent on making good in an English world. McClure is on the deck of a ship in the ice. Cliffs of ice and rock rise all around, some six or seven hundred feet high. Crozier has never seen anything like it.
There is old John Ross on the stern deck of a little ship – a sort of yacht – heading eastward. Heading home.
There is James Clark Ross, older and fatter and less happy than Crozier has ever seen him. The rising sun shines through ice-rimmed jib lines as his ship leaves the ice for the open sea. He is heading home.
There is Francis Leopold M’Clintock – someone Crozier somehow knows has searched for Franklin under James Ross and then come back on his own again in later years. What later years? How long from now? How far in our future?
Crozier can see images flit by as if from a magic lantern, but he does not hear answers to his questions.
There is M’Clintock sledging, man-hauling, moving more quickly and efficiently than Lieutenant Gore or any of Sir John’s or Crozier’s men ever have.
There is M’Clintock standing at a cairn and reading a note just pulled from a brass cylinder. Is it the note that Gore left on King William Land seven months ago? Crozier wonders. The frozen gravel and grey skies behind M’Clintock look the same.
Suddenly there is M’Clintock, alone on the ice and gravel, his sledging party visible coming up several hundred yards behind him in the blowing snow. He is standing in front of a horror – a large boat tied and lashed atop of a huge cobbled-together sledge made of iron and oak.
The sledge looks like something Crozier’s carpenter, Mr. Honey, would build. It has been assembled as if it was meant to last for a century. Every join shows care. The thing is massive – it must weigh at least 650 pounds. Atop it is a boat that weighs another 800 pounds.
Crozier recognizes the boat. It is one of Terror’s 28-footers – one of the pinnaces. He sees that it has been extensively rigged for river travel. The sails are furled and tied and shrouded and iced over.
Climbing onto a rock and looking into the open boat as if over M’Clintock’s shoulder, Crozier sees two skeletons. The teeth in the two skulls seem to gleam at M’Clintock and Crozier. One skeleton is little more than a heap of visibly chewed and heavily gnawed and partially devoured bones tumbled into a rough pile in the bow. Snow has drifted over the bones.
The other skeleton is intact, undisturbed, and still clothed in the tatters of what looks to be an officer’s greatcoat and layers of other warm clothing. The skull still has remnants of a cap on it. This corpse is sprawled on the after-thwarts, its skeletal hands extended along the gunwales toward two double-barreled shotguns propped there. At the body’s booted feet lie stacks of wool blankets and canvas clothing and a partially snow-covered burlap bag filled with powder-shot cartridges. Set on the bottom of the pinnace midway between the dead man’s boots, like a pirate’s booty about to be counted and gloated over, are five gold watches and what looks to be thirty or forty pounds of individually wrapped chunks of chocolate. Also nearby are 26 pieces of silverware – Crozier can see, and knows that M’Clintock can see, the personal crests of Sir John Franklin’s, Captain Fitzjames’s, six other officers’, and his – Crozier’s – on the various knives, spoons, and forks. He sees similarly engraved dishes and two silver serving plates sticking up out of the ice and snow.