“I won’t, Cornelius.”
“That’s a good love.”
The lieutenant came closer in the darkness, moving into the dim circle of light thrown by the lantern on the ice here near the cairn. “Almost finished with this cairn, Mr. Hickey?”
“Aye, sir. Just set these last blocks up here and it’s done, Lieutenant. Solid as a lamppost in Mayfair.”
Irving nodded. He seemed to be uncomfortable to be alone with the two seamen, even though Hickey was using his most affable and charming voice. Well, fuck you, thought the caulker’s mate as he continued to show his gaptoothed smile. You ain’t going to be around much longer to put on such dandified airs, you blond-haired, apple-cheeked bastard. Five minutes and you’ll be just another frozen side of beef to hang down in the hold, boyo. Too bad them rats are so hungry these days that they’ll eat even a fucking lieutenant, but nothing I can do about that.
“Very good,” said Irving. “When you and Manson are finished, please join Mr. Sinclair and Mr. Bates on working on the wall. I’m going to walk back and bring up Corporal Hedges with his musket.”
“Aye, sir,” said Hickey. He caught Magnus’s eye. They had to intercept Irving before he walked back along the dimly visible line of torches and lanterns. It would do no good to have Hedges or another Marine up here.
Irving walked to the east but paused at the edge of the light, obviously waiting for Hickey to set the last two blocks of ice in place at the top of the rebuilt cairn. As the caulker’s mate bent to lift the penultimate square of ice, he nodded to Magnus. His partner had moved into position behind the lieutenant.
Suddenly there was an explosion of shouts from the darkness to the west. A man screamed. More voices joined in the shouting.
Magnus’s huge hands were hovering just behind the lieutenant’s neck — the big man had removed his mittens for a better grip, and his undergloves loomed black just beyond Irving’s pale face in the lantern light.
More shouts. A musket fired.
“Magnus, no! ” shouted Cornelius Hickey. His partner had been about to break Irving’s neck despite the commotion.
Manson stepped back into the darkness. Irving, who had taken three steps toward the shouting in the west, whirled in confusion. Three men came running along the ice path from the direction of Terror. One of them was Hedges. The rolypoly Marine was wheezing as he ran, his musket held in front of his massive bulge of belly.
“Come!” said Irving and led the way toward the shouting. The lieutenant was carrying no weapon, but he’d grabbed up the lantern. The six of them ran across the sea ice, out of the seracs, into the starlit clearing where several men were milling. Hickey could make out the familiar Welsh wigs of Sinclair and Bates and recognized one of the three Erebuses already there as Francis Dunn, his caulker’s-mate counterpart on the other ship. He saw that the musket that had fired belonged to Private Bill Pilkington, who’d been in the hunting blind when Sir John was killed last June and who had been shot in the shoulder by one of his fellow Marines during those moments of chaos. Now Pilkington was reloading and then aiming the long musket into the darkness beyond a fallen section of the snow fence wall.
“What has happened?” Irving demanded of the men.
Bates answered. He, Sinclair, and Dunn, as well as Abraham Seeley and Josephus Greater from Erebus, had been working on the wall under the command of Erebus’s first mate, Robert Orme Sergeant, when suddenly one of the larger blocks of ice just beyond the circle of lantern and torchlights had seemed to come alive.
“It lifted Mr. Sergeant ten feet into the air by his head,” said Bates, his voice shaking.
“It’s the God’s truth,” said Caulker’s Mate Francis Dunn. “One minute ’e was standin’ among us, next minute ’e’s flying up into the air so alls we can see is the bottom of ’is boots. And the noise… the crunching…” Dunn broke off and continued breathing hard until his pale face was all but lost in a halo of ice crystals.
“I was coming up to the torches when I saw Mr. Sergeant just… disappear,” said Private Pilkington, lowering the musket with shaking arms. “I fired once as the thing went back into the seracs. I think I hit it.”
“You could’ve hit Robert Sergeant just as easily,” said Cornelius Hickey. “Maybe he was still alive when you shot.”
Pilkington gave Terror’s caulker’s mate a look of pure venom.
“Mr. Sergeant wasn’t alive,” said Dunn, not even noticing the exchange of glares between the Marine and Hickey. “’E screamed once and the thing crunched ’is skull like a walnut. I seen it. I ’eard it.”
Others came running up then, including Captain Crozier and Captain Fitzjames, looking wan and insubstantial even in his heavy layers of slops and greatcoat, and Dunn, Bates, and the others all rushed to explain what they had seen.
Corporal Hedges and two other Marines who had run to the commotion returned from the darkness to say there was no sign of Mr. Sergeant, only a thick trail of blood and torn clothing that led off into the thicker ice jumble in the direction of the largest iceberg.
“It wants us to follow,” muttered Bates. “It’ll be waiting for us.”
Crozier showed his teeth in something between a mad grin and a snarl. “Then we won’t disappoint it,” he said. “This is as good a time as any to go after the thing again. We have the men out on the ice already, we have enough lanterns, and the Marines can fetch more muskets and shotguns. And the trail is fresh.”
“Too fresh,” muttered Corporal Hedges.
Crozier barked orders. Some men went back to the two ships to bring the weapons. Others formed up in hunting parties around the Marines, who were already armed. Torches and lanterns were brought from the work sites and assigned to the killing parties. Dr. Stanley and Dr. McDonald were sent for in the low probability that Robert Orme Sergeant might still be alive or the higher probability that someone else might be injured.
After Hickey was handed a musket, he considered shooting Lieutenant Irving by “accident” once out in the dark, but the young officer now seemed wary of both Manson and the caulker’s mate. Hickey caught several concerned glances the toff was throwing toward Magnus before Crozier assigned them to different search parties, and he knew that whether Irving had caught a glimpse of Magnus behind with his arms raised in that second before the shots and shouts were first heard or whether the officer simply sensed something wrong, it wouldn’t be as easy to ambush him the next time.
But they would. Hickey was afraid that John Irving’s suspicions would finally cause him to report to the captain what he’d seen in the hold, and the caulker’s mate could not abide that. It wasn’t so much the punishment for sodomy that bothered him — seamen were rarely hanged anymore, nor flogged around the fleet for that matter — but rather the ignominy. Caulker’s Mate Cornelius Hickey was no mere idiot’s bum-bugger.
He would wait until Irving lowered his guard again and then do the deed himself if he had to. Even if the ships’ surgeons discovered that the man had been murdered, it wouldn’t matter. Things had gone too far on this expedition. Irving would be just another corpse to deal with come the thaw.
In the end, Mr. Sergeant’s body was not found — the blood and strewn clothing trail ended halfway to the towering iceberg — but no one else died in the search. A few men lost toes to the cold and everyone was shaking and frostbitten to some extent when they finally called off the hunt an hour after their supper should have been served. Hickey did not see Lieutenant Irving again that afternoon.
It was Magnus Manson who surprised him as they trudged back to Terror again. The wind was beginning to howl at their backs and the Marines slouched along with rifles and muskets at the ready.