Peglar was hailed by the watch, invited aboard, and he carried his message from Captain Crozier down to Captain Fitzjames, who was sitting and smoking his pipe in the aft officers’ mess since the Great Cabin was still being used as an ad hoc sick bay.
The captains had begun using the brass canisters meant for cached reports to send their written messages back and forth – the couriers hated this change since the cold metal burned fingers even through heavy gloves – and Fitzjames had to order Peglar to open the canister with his mittens, since the tube was still too cold for the captain to touch. Fitzjames did not dismiss him, so Peglar stood in the doorway to the officers’ mess while the captain read the note from Crozier.
“No return message, Mr. Peglar,” said Fitzjames.
The foretop captain knuckled his forehead and went up onto the deck again. About a dozen Erebuses had come up to watch the sunrise and more had been getting into their slops below to do so. Peglar had noticed that the Great Cabin sick bay had about a dozen men in it on cots – about the same number as Terror. Scurvy was setting in on both ships.
Peglar saw the small, familiar figure of John Bridgens standing at the rail on the stern’s port side. He came up behind him and tapped the man on the shoulder.
“Ah, a little touch of Harry in the night,” said Bridgens even before he turned.
“Not night for long,” said Peglar. “And how did you know it was me, John?”
Bridgens had no comforter over his face, and Peglar could see his smile and watery blue eyes. “Word of visitors travels quickly on a small ship frozen in the ice. Do you have to hurry back to Terror?”
“No. Captain Fitzjames had no response.”
“Would you care to take a stroll?”
“By all means,” said Peglar.
They went down the starboard side ice ramp and walked toward the iceberg and high pressure ridge to the southeast so as to get a better view of the glowing south. For the first time in months, HMS Erebus was backlit by something other than the aurora or lantern or torchlight.
Before they reached the pressure ridge, they passed the scuffed, sooted, and partially melted area where the Carnivale fire had burned. The area had been well cleaned up on Captain Crozier’s orders in the week after the disaster, but post holes where the staves had served as tent poles remained, as did shreds of rope or canvas that had melted into the ice and then been frozen in place. The rectangle of the ebony room still showed even after repeated efforts to remove the black soot and several snowfalls.
“I’ve read the American writer,” said Bridgens.
“American writer?”
“The chap who caused little Dickie Aylmore to receive fifty lashes for his inventive set decorations for our late, unlamented carnivale. A strange little fellow by the name of Poe, if memory serves. Very melancholy and morbid stuff with a touch of the truly unhealthy macabre. Not very good, overall, but very American in some undefinable sense. I did not, however, read the fateful story that brought on the lashes.”
Peglar nodded. His foot struck something in the snow, and he bent to pry it out of the ice.
It was the bear’s skull that had been hanging above Sir John’s ebony clock, which had not survived the flames – the skull’s flesh, hide, and hair gone and bone blackened by the fire, eye sockets empty, but the teeth still ivory-coloured.
“Oh, my, Mr. Poe would love that, I think,” said Bridgens.
Peglar dropped it back into the snow. The thing must have been hidden beneath chunks of fallen ice when the clean-up parties worked here. He and Bridgens walked another fifty yards to the tallest pressure ridge in the area and clambered up it, Peglar repeatedly giving his hand to help the older man up.
On a flat slab of ice atop the ridge, Bridgens was panting heavily. Even Peglar, normally as fit as one of the ancient Olympic athletes he’d read about, found himself breathing harder than usual. Too many months of no real physical duty, he thought.
The southern horizon was glowing a subdued, washed-out yellow, and most of the stars in that half of the sky had paled.
“I almost can’t believe it’s returning,” said Peglar.
Bridgens nodded.
Suddenly there it was, the disk of red-gold rising hesitantly above dark masses that looked like hills but must be low clouds far to the south. Peglar heard the forty or so men on the deck of Erebus give three cheers, and – because the air was very cold and very still – he could hear a duplicate but fainter cheer coming from Terror, just visible almost a mile to the east across the ice.
“Dawn stretches forth her rosy fingertips,” Bridgens said in Greek.
Peglar smiled, mildly amused that he remembered the phrase. It had been several years since he’d read the Iliad or anything else in Greek. He remembered the excitement of his first encounter with this language and with Troy and its heroes as Beagle had been anchored off São Tiago, a volcanic island in the Cape Verde Islands, almost seventeen years earlier.
As if reading his mind, Bridgens said, “Do you remember Mr. Darwin?”
“The young naturalist?” said Peglar. “Captain FitzRoy’s favorite interlocutor? Of course I do. Five years on a small bark with a man leaves an impression, even if he was a gentleman and I wasn’t.”
“And what was your impression, Harry?” Bridgens’ pale blue eyes were watering more heavily, either out of emotion at seeing the sun again or just in reaction to the unaccustomed light, as pale as it was. The red disk had not completely cleared the dark clouds before it started descending again.
“Of Mr. Darwin?” Peglar was also squinting – more to bring back memory of the thin young naturalist than because of the sun’s wonderful illumination. “I found him pleasant, as such gentlemen go. Very enthusiastic. He certainly kept the men busy transporting and crating up all those damned dead animals – at one point I thought the finches alone were going to fill the hold – but he wasn’t above getting his own hands dirty. Remember the time he joined in the rowing to help tow old Beagle upstream in the river? And he saved a boat from the tidal wave that other time. And once, when whales were alongside us – off the coast of Chile, I believe – I was amazed to find that he’d climbed all the way up to the crosstrees on his own to get a better view. I had to help him down, but not before he looked through the glass at the whales for over an hour, the tails of his coat flapping in the breeze.”
Bridgens smiled. “I was almost jealous when he lent you that book. What was it? Lyell?”
“Principles of Geology,” said Peglar. “I didn’t really understand it. Or rather, I did just enough to realize how dangerous it was.”
“Because of Lyell’s contention about the age of things,” said Bridgens. “About the very un-Christian idea that things change slowly over immense aeons of time rather than very quickly due to very violent events.”
“Yes,” said Peglar. “But Mr. Darwin was very keen on it. He sounded like a man who had experienced a religious conversion.”
“I believe he had, in a manner of speaking,” said Bridgens. Only the top third of the sun was visible now. “I mention Mr. Darwin because mutual friends told me before we sailed that he is writing a book.”
“He published several already,” said Peglar. “Do you remember, John, we discussed his Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle in the year I came to study with you… 1839. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but you said you’d read it. And I believe he published several volumes on the plant and animal life he saw.”