Most of the men.
Crozier glanced over at Hickey, standing next to Magnus Manson and the Erebus gunroom steward who had been flogged after Carnivale, Richard Aylmore. There was a cluster of other malcontents around these men — several of the Terror seamen who had been eager to kill Lady Silence even if it took a mutiny to do so back in January — but, like all the others standing around the pathetic hole in the ground, they had their Welsh wigs and caps off and their comforters pulled up to their noses and ears.
Crozier’s middle-of-the-night interrogation of Cornelius Hickey in the captain’s command tent had been tense and terse.
“Good morning to you, Captain. Would you like me to tell you what I told Captain Fitzjames and…”
“Take off your slops, Mr. Hickey.”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“You heard me.”
“Aye, sir, but if you want to hear how it was when I saw the savages murderin’ poor Mr. Irving…”
“It’s Lieutenant Irving, Caulker’s Mate. I heard your story from Captain Fitzjames. Do you have anything to add or retract from it? Anything to amend?”
“Ah… no, sir.”
“Take those outer slops off. Mittens too.”
“Aye, sir. There, sir, how’s ’at? Shall I just set ’em over on the…”
“Drop them on the floor. Jackets off too.”
“My jackets, sir? It’s bloody cold in here… yes, sir.”
“Mr. Hickey, why did you volunteer to go search for Lieutenant Irving when he hadn’t yet been gone much more than an hour? No one else was worried about him.”
“Oh, I don’t think I volunteered it, Captain. My recollection is that Mr. Farr asked me to go look for…”
“Mr. Farr reported that you asked several times if Lieutenant Irving wasn’t overdue and volunteered to go find him on your own while the others rested after their meal. Why did you do that, Mr. Hickey?”
“If Mr. Farr says that… well, we must’ve been worried about him, Captain. The lieutenant, I mean.”
“Why?”
“May I put my jackets and slops back on, Captain? It’s bloody freezing in…”
“No. Take off your waistcoat and sweaters. Why were you worried about Lieutenant Irving?”
“If you’re concerned… that is, thinking I was wounded today, Captain, I wasn’t. The savages never saw me. No wounds on me, sir, I assure you.”
“Take that sweater off as well. Why were you worried about Lieutenant Irving?”
“Well, the lads and me… you know, Captain.”
“No.”
“We was just concerned, you know, that one of our party was missin’, like. Also, sir, I was cold, sir. We’d been sittin’ around to eat what little cold food we had. I thought that walkin’, following the lieutenant’s tracks to make sure he was all right, would warm me up, sir.”
“Show me your hands.”
“Pardon me, Captain?”
“Your hands.”
“Aye, sir. Pardon my shaking, sir. I ain’t been warm all day and with all my layers off but this shirt and…”
“Turn them over. Palms up.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Is that blood under your nails, Mr. Hickey?”
“Could be, Captain. You know how it is.”
“No. Tell me.”
“Well, we ain’t had real water what to bath ourselves in for months, sir. And what with the scurvy and dysentery-like, there’s a certain amount of bleedin’ when we see to the necessaries…”
“Are you saying that a Royal Navy petty officer on my ship wipes his arse with his fingers, Mr. Hickey?”
“No, sir… I mean… may I put my layers back on now, Captain? You can see I ain’t wounded or anything. This cold is enough to shrink a man’s…”
“Take your shirts and undershirts off.”
“Are you serious, sir?”
“Don’t make me ask a second time, Mr. Hickey. We don’t have a brig. Any man I send to the brig will spend time chained to one of the whaleboats.”
“Here, sir. How’s this. Just me flesh, freezing as it is. If my poor missus could see me now…”
“It didn’t say on your muster papers that you were married, Mr. Hickey.”
“Oh, my Louisa’s been dead going on seven years now, Captain. Of the pox. God rest her soul.”
“Why did you tell some of the other men before the mast that when it came time to kill officers, Lieutenant Irving should be the first?”
“I never said no such thing, sir.”
“I have reports of you saying that and other mutinous statements going back to before the Carnivale on the ice, Mr. Hickey. Why did you single out Lieutenant Irving? What had that officer ever done to you?”
“Why, nothing, sir. And I never said no such thing. Bring in the man who said I did and I’ll dispute it to his face and spit in his eye.”
“What had Lieutenant Irving ever done to you, Mr. Hickey? Why did you tell other men from both Erebus and Terror that Irving was a whoremaster and a liar?”
“I swear to you, Captain… pardon my teeth chattering, Captain, but Jesus Christ the night is cold against the bare skin. I swear to you, I didn’t say no such thing. A lot of us looked on poor Lieutenant Irving sorta like a son, Captain. A son. It was only my worry for him out there today that made me go check on him. Good thing I did, too, sir, or we would’ve never caught the murdering bastards who…”
“Put your layers on, Mr. Hickey.”
“Aye, sir.”
“No. Do it outside. Get out of my sight.”
“‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,’” intoned Fitzjames. “‘He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’”
Hodgson and the other pallbearers were using great care in lowering the pallet with Irving’s canvas-wrapped body to the ropes held in place above the shallow hole by some of the healthier seamen. Crozier knew that Hodgson and Irving’s other friends had gone into the postmortem tent one at a time to pay their respects before the lieutenant had been sewn into his sail shroud by Old Murray. The visitors had set several tokens of their affection next to the lieutenant’s body — the recovered brass telescope, its lenses shattered in the shooting, that the boy had so esteemed, a gold medal with his name engraved on it that he had won in competitions on the gunnery ship HMS Excellent, and at least one five-pound note, as if some old wager had been paid at last. For some reason — optimism? youthful naïveté? — Irving had packed his dress uniform in his small bag of personal belongings, and he was being buried in it now. Crozier wondered idly if the gilt buttons on the uniform — each bearing the image of an anchor surrounded by a crown — would be there when nothing else but the boy’s bleached bones and the gold gunnery medal survived the long process of decay.
“‘In the midst of life we are in death,’” Fitzjames recited from memory, his voice sounding tired but properly resonant, “‘of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sin art justly displeased?’”