The first thing he noticed was that Lady Silence was naked under her open robes. She was lying on a platform carved out of the snow about four feet from Lieutenant Irving and almost three feet higher. Her bosoms were quite visible and quite bare – he could see the small stone talisman of the white bear she had taken from her dead companion dangling on a thong between her breasts – and she made no effort to cover them as she stared unblinkingly at him. She had not been startled. Obviously she had heard him coming long before he squeezed himself into the snow-dome’s entry passage. In her hand was that short but very sharp stone knife he had first seen in the forward cable locker.
“I beg your pardon, miss,” said Irving. He was at a loss of what to do next. Good manners demanded that he wriggle backward out of this lady’s boudoir, as awkward and ungainly as that motion must be, but he reminded himself that he was here on a mission.
It did not escape Irving’s attention that wedged in the opening to the snow-house as he was, Silence could easily lean over and cut his throat with that knife while there would be very little he could do about it.
Irving finished extricating himself from the entry passage, pulled his leather bag in behind him, got to his knees, and then to his feet. Because the floor of the snow-house had been dug out lower than the surface of the snow and ice outside, Irving had enough room to stand in the center of the dome with several inches to spare. He realized that while the snow-house had seemed like nothing more than a glowing snowdrift from the outside, it had actually been constructed of carved blocks or slabs of snow angling and arching inward in a most clever design.
Irving, trained at the Royal Navy’s best gunnery school and always good at mathematics, immediately noticed the upward spiral of the blocks and how each block leaned in just slightly more than the previous one until a final capping key block had been pushed down through the apex of the dome and then tugged into position. He saw the tiny smoke hole, or chimney – no more than two inches across – just to one side of the key block.
The mathematician in Irving knew at once that the dome was not a true hemisphere – a dome built upon the principle of a circle would collapse – but rather was a catenary: that is, the shape of a chain held in both hands. The gentleman in John Irving knew that he was studying the ceiling, the blocks, and the geometric structure of this clever dwelling so as not to stare at Lady Silence’s naked breasts and bare shoulders. He assumed he had given her enough time to draw the fur robes up over herself, and he looked back in her direction.
Her bosoms were still bared. The polar white bear amulet made her brown skin look all the more brown. Her dark eyes, intent and curious but not necessarily hostile, still watched him unblinkingly. The knife was still in her hand.
Irving let out a breath and sat on the robe-covered platform across the small central space from her sleeping platform.
For the first time he realized that it was warm in the snow-house. Not just warmer than the freezing night outside, nor just warmer than the freezing lower deck of HMS Terror, but warm. He had actually started to sweat under his many stiff and filthy layers. He saw perspiration on the soft brown bosom of the woman only a few feet from him.
Tearing his gaze away again, Irving unbuttoned his outer slops and realized that the light and heat were coming from one small paraffin tin that she must have stolen from the ship. As soon as he had this thought of her thieving, he felt sorry for it. It was a Terror paraffin tin all right, but one empty of paraffin, one of hundreds they had thrown overboard in the huge garbage area they had excavated out of the ice only thirty yards from the ship. The flame was not burning from paraffin but from some sort of oil – not whale oil, he could tell from the scent – seal oil? A cord made out of animal gut or sinew hung down from the ceiling, suspending a strip of blubber over the paraffin lamp and dripping oil into it. Irving saw at once how, when the oil level would grow lower, the candlewick, which seemed to be made of twined strands of anchor-cable hemp, would become longer and the flame would burn higher, melting more blubber and dripping more oil into the lamp. It was an ingenious system.
The paraffin container was not the only interesting artifact in the snow-house. Above and to one side of the lamp was an elaborate frame consisting of what appeared to be four ribs from what might have been seals – how had Lady Silence caught and killed those seals? wondered Irving – thrust upright in the snow of the shelf and connected by a complex web of sinew. Hanging from the bone frame was one of the larger rectangular Goldner food cans – also obviously scavenged from Terror’s garbage dump – with holes punched in the four corners. Irving saw at once that it would make a perfect cooking pot or teakettle hanging low over the seal-oil flame.
Lady Silence’s bosoms were still uncovered. The white bear amulet moved up and down with her breathing. Her gaze never left his face.
Lieutenant Irving cleared his throat.
“Good evening, Miss… ah… Silence. I apologize for bursting in on you this way… uninvited as it were.” He stopped.
Didn’t the woman ever blink?
“Captain Crozier sends his compliments. He asked me to look in on you to see… ah… how you were getting along.”
Irving had rarely felt more the fool. He was sure that despite her months on the ship, the girl understood not one word of English. Her nipples, he could not help noticing, had risen in the brief blast of cold air that he had brought into the snow-house with him.
The lieutenant rubbed the sweat off his forehead. Then he removed his mittens and undergloves, bobbing his head as if to ask permission of the lady of the house as he did so. Then he mopped his forehead again. It was incredible how warm this little space under a cantenary dome made out of snow could get just from the heat of a single lamp burning dripping blubber.
“The captain would like…,” he began, and stopped. “Oh, bugger it.” Irving reached into his leather valise and brought out the biscuits wrapped in an old napkin and the crock of marmalade wrapped in his finest Oriental silk handkerchief.
He offered the two bundles across the central space to her with hands that were slightly trembling.
The Esquimaux woman made no attempt to take the bundles.
“Please,” said Irving.
Silence blinked twice, slipped the knife under her robe, and took the small, lumpy packages, setting them next to her where she reclined on the platform. As she lay on her side, the tip of her right bosom was almost touching his Chinese handkerchief.
Irving looked down and realized that he was also sitting on a thick animal fur set onto this narrow platform. Where did she get this second animal skin? he wondered before remembering that more than seven months earlier she had been given the outer parka of the old Esquimaux man. The grey-haired old one who had died on the ship after being shot by one of Graham Gore’s men.
She untied the old galley napkin first, showing no response to the five ship’s biscuits wrapped in it. Irving had spent a serious bit of time finding the least weevil-infested biscuits possible. He felt a little piqued at her lack of recognition of his labours. When she unwrapped his mother’s little porcelain crock, sealed with wax on top, she paused to lift the Chinese silk handkerchief – its elaborate designs were in bright red, green, and blue – and to set it against her cheek for a moment. Then she laid it aside.
Women are the same everywhere was John Irving’s giddy thought. He realized that while he had enjoyed sexual congress with more than one young woman, he had never felt such a strong sense of… intimacy… as he did at this moment sitting chastely in the seal-oil lamplight with this half-naked young native woman.