Captain Crozier knew that there was one other item sewn into the sail-shroud with Irving, one that no one else knew about. It lay under his head like a pillow.
It was a gold, green, red, and blue silk Oriental handkerchief, and Crozier had surprised the giver by coming into the postmortem tent after Goodsir, Lloyd, Hodgson, and the others had departed, just before Old Murray the sail-maker was to enter and sew up the shroud he had prepared and upon which Irving already lay in state.
Lady Silence had been there, bending over the corpse, setting something beneath Irving’s head.
Crozier’s first impulse had been to reach for his pistol in his greatcoat pocket, but he’d frozen in place as he saw the Esquimaux girl’s eyes and face. If there were no tears in those dark, hardly human eyes, there was something else luminous there with some emotion he could not identify. Grief? The captain did not think so. It was more some kind of complicit recognition at seeing Crozier. The captain felt the same strange stirring in his head that he had so often felt around his Memo Moira.
But the girl obviously had set the Oriental handkerchief carefully in place under the dead boy’s head as some sort of gesture. Crozier knew the handkerchief had been Irving’s — he’d seen it on special occasions as far back as the day they’d sailed in May of 1845.
Had the Esquimaux wench stolen it? Plundered it from his dead body just yesterday?
Silence had followed Irving’s sledge party from Terror to Terror Camp more than a week ago and then had just disappeared, never joining the men in the camp. Almost everyone, excluding Crozier, who still held hopes she might lead them to food, had considered this good riddance. But all during this terrible morning, part of Crozier had wondered if somehow Silence had been responsible for his officer’s murder out there on the windswept gravel ridge.
Had she led her Esquimaux hunter friends back here to raid the camp and run into Irving on the way, first giving a fete to the starving man with meat and then murdering him in cold blood to keep him from telling the others here of his encounter? Had Silence been the “possibly a young woman” that Farr and Hodgson and the others had caught a glimpse of, fleeing with an Esquimaux man with a headband? She could have changed her parka if she had returned to her village in the past week, and who could tell young Esquimaux wenches apart at a glance?
Crozier considered all of these things, but now in a time-stopped moment — both he and the young woman were startled into immobility for long seconds — the captain looked into her face and knew, whether in his heart or in what Memo Moira insisted was his second sight, that she wept inside for John Irving and was returning a gift of the silk handkerchief to the dead man.
Crozier guessed that the handkerchief had been presented to her during the February visit to the Esquimaux’s snow-house that Irving had dutifully reported to the captain… but had reported with few details. Now Crozier wondered if the two had been lovers.
And then Lady Silence was gone. She’d slipped under the tent flap and was gone without a sound. When Crozier later queried the men in the camp and those on guard if they had seen anything, none had.
At that moment in the tent, the captain had gone over to Irving’s body, looked down at the pale, dead face made even whiter with the small pillow of the brightly covered handkerchief behind it, and then he had pulled the canvas over the lieutenant’s face and body, shouting for Old Murray to come in and do the sewing.
“‘Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour,’” Fitzjames was saying, “‘deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.’
“‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’”
Fitzjames’s voice fell silent. He stepped back from the grave.
Crozier, lost in reverie, stood for a long moment until a shuffling of feet made him realize that his part of the service had arrived.
He walked to the head of the grave. “
‘We therefore commit the body of our friend and officer John Irving to the deep,’” he rasped, also reciting from memory that remained all too clear from many repetitions despite the pall of fatigue in his mind, “‘to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the Sea and the Earth shall give up their dead.’” The body was lowered the three feet, and Crozier tossed a handful of frozen soil onto it. The gravel made a strangely moving rasping sound as it landed on the canvas above Irving’s face and slid to the sides. “‘And the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’”
The service was over. The ropes had been retrieved.
Men stamped cold feet, tugged on their Welsh wigs and caps, rewrapped their comforters, and filed back through the fog to Terror Camp for their hot dinner.
Hodgson, Little, Thomas, Des Voeux, Le Vesconte, Blanky, Peglar, and a few of the other officers stayed behind, dismissing the seamen’s detail that had been waiting to bury the body. The officers shoveled soil and began setting in the first layer of stones together. They wanted Irving buried as best he could be under the circumstances.
When they finished, Crozier and Fitzjames walked away from the others. They would eat their dinners much later — for now they planned to walk the two miles up to Victory Point where Graham Gore had left his brass canister and optimistic message in James Ross’s old cairn almost a year ago.
Crozier planned to leave word there today on what the fate of their expedition had been in the past ten and a half months since Gore’s note had been written and on what they planned to do next.
Plodding tiredly through the fog, hearing one of the ship’s bells ringing for dinner somewhere in the roiling fog behind them — they had, of course, brought both Terror’s and Erebus’s bells along in the whaleboats dragged across the frozen sea to camp when the ships were abandoned — Francis Crozier hoped to Christ that he would decide on their course of action by the time that he and Fitzjames reached the cairn. If he could not, he thought, he was afraid he might start weeping.
42
PEGLAR
There hadn’t been enough fish and seal on the sled to serve it as a main dish to ninety-five or a hundred men — a few were too ill to eat anything solid — and even Mr. Diggle’s and Mr. Wall’s record at routinely performing loaves-and-fishes miracles with the limited ships’ stores did not allow them to fully succeed at this one (especially since some of the food on the Esquimaux sledge had been particularly putrid), but every man managed to get a taste of the savory blubber or fish along with the prepared Goldner soups or stews or vegetables.
Harry Peglar enjoyed the meal even though he was shaking with cold as he ate it and knew that it would only provoke the diarrhea that was already ripping him apart every day.
After the meal and before beginning their scheduled duties, Peglar and Steward John Bridgens walked together with their tin mugs of tepid tea. The fog muffled their own voices even as it seemed to amplify sounds from far away. They could hear men arguing over a card game in one of the tents on the far side of Terror Camp. From the northwest — the direction the two captains had walked before dinner — came the artillery rumble of thunder out over the pack ice. That sound had been going on all day, but no storm had arrived.