The Ice Maiden

by Sara Sheridan

  Karina silently dallied in the recesses, inspecting these secrets and feeling the prickle of a hundred shabby lies. Are all men the same? One fellow was in love with a seaman from another vessel – a desperate, grasping ache snatched behind a public house. A kiss full of longing. Another stationed himself outside the house of a pale, blonde woman, watching her from a distance, every hour he could spare. He has never spoken to her, she realized. And between all this, the intimacy of life on board, the knowing of each other, as far as it is possible. And like flashes of lightening, images of the women at home. The Franceses of the world, hopeful and proud, telling tales to young children of the exploits of their menfolk. Confiding their pride to their friends. As if these sailors were heroes.

  Has he regretted his decision? Has Hooker returned? She could not help think on it. She searched the scatter of men on deck. She dived into the wooden cabins, the galley and the heads. She made a full survey, but he was not on board. Disappointed, she was surprised by the strength of her feeling. She had not thought of him for years now. Decades maybe.

  The ship weighed anchor in the bay as if it was a painting. On deck, the crew was full of energy, but to Karina they played out as a mime, silent as the snowy wastes. Then suddenly her ears popped and the ruckus of voices chimed a familiar echo. It brought back the Terror tenfold – the twang of English – the difference between an upper-class accent and the rounded vowels of the men. At first she could not distinguish a single word. Only the tone. How long has it been? How long? She wanted to shout. I am here. I am here. She felt as if she could run again, up the mountain and down the lee of the slope. As if she could touch the world and make a difference. As if she might fit into a small, frail, pink body after all.

  The men collected on deck. The sight of the lapidary, diamond-white mountains was a glory. Karina joined them. Usually she only looked outwards, but now, her perspective reversed. It was strange to see the vast plains of her prison from beyond the shore. The crew had been waiting in anticipation of this arrival for months, no matter the storms or the hardships of the journey (for this ship, she saw, had already battled its share of icy waters). These men were driven. They wanted to prove their mettle – that was why they had come. They wanted to be the heroes their womenfolk dreamed of. Unlike Ross’s weary Antarctic band, they were eager. In their eyes the vista was fresh. It was larger and brighter than their imaginings. Out of the babble, the words began to chime clearly.

  ‘Commander Scott, sir,’ one man said, ‘Isn’t it magnificent? We must unload our provisions at once, sir? We must set up camp.’

  My God, Karina thought, they think they can attempt the interior. They have come for the pole. She laughed. It was unbelievable. These would-be heroes with their pink skin and their fragile heartbeats reckoned they could travel inland. Have they no idea how small they are? This place will eat them. It will squeeze their lives raw onto the ice shelf.

  She circled the ship and wove between them, intrigued. Their clothes were different from Ross’s crew. The style had changed. Each man wore almost the same as the other, like soldiers, though no soldier she knew would be so devoid of feathers and brocade. In the main, they had been trained in the senior service or by the merchant navy. Each had spent most of his life at sea but this trip, they reckoned, was the highlight. They think will make their names. They think they have a shot at history.

  Weighed heavy in expectation and swaddled in two knitted sweaters and a blue hat, Robert Falcon Scott, for so she had named the fellow in charge, stood at the prow, delighted by the sight of the bay. His eyes burned with determination and Karina could see that though every one of the crew wanted to prove themselves, their commander had the greatest need. It was with difficulty that he turned into his cabin, away from the view.

  News flooded towards her. Poor Queen Victoria was dead, she realized. It happened only a year ago and yet it seemed no time at all since her marriage. Captain Ross had disparaged a woman’s ability to rule, and he had proved wrong. Like a magic lantern, she witnessed the old queen’s funeral. A million black armbands over England. And now the country had a king once more. She thought how relieved Ross would be.

  Curious, she settled high above the vessel and soaked it in. She had had no news, for decades. None at all. And now each image arrived like a fiesta – a titbit. Bit by bit it came to her – the indistinct shadows that had passed her by. The men who had come to the ice shelf. Their names were known here. They had written journals. They had reported. Never mind Victoria’s sainted death and the coronation they were planning for her son. Never mind the news of the day or the crew’s tawdry personal lives. This was interesting.

  She leaned in, like a woman hard of hearing and scooped up the memories with more than a modicum of greed. There had been a Swede and an Italian. There had been men who had survived the winter. There had been progress. Others have come, she intoned. Others have come. And once there was a party that had landed to the south, beyond her boundary. Still, she wondered how could she have missed something so momentous? Surely she would have heard a heartbeat? The animals must have known men were there. The sea lions must have skirted the ship. The penguins, curious, must have eyed the sailors and looked away with disdain. Did the whales sing to them? She couldn’t believe all that had passed her by.

  As a result, the men of the Discovery had charts with them. One of their number was an officer on an earlier mission. He had been here, on the continent, only two years before – a Belgian. Karina spoke a little Belgian. She thought fondly of a chocolate exporter she had met in Venezuela who had greasy hair and yellow eyes. That must be ten years ago. Twenty. Fifty. On board the Discovery, the Belgian sailor was dapper. They called him Bunny – a nickname only the British upper classes could pull off. The man’s mind worked in numbers and in patterns. He hardly noticed the panoramic view. It made him hard for her to read, though he was glad to be back, heading for the ice sheet where he intended to calculate the secrets of the continent until he was sick of them. Until he understood.

  She curled around the hatch leading downwards. Below decks, this ship was not so very different to the Terror – dark wood and rope. Iron stoves peppered the geography. Karina wondered about the galley and was rewarded with sight of a smaller space than that which she and Si Bevan had occupied. She shrugged and moved on to the storerooms. Bisto powder, Colman’s Mustard; she read the names, rolling them around her tongue as if she was tasting the contents of the tins and jute sacks.

  Beyond the mess, inside his cabin, Robert Falcon Scott unravelled his charts. She peered over his shoulder, and saw clearly both Swedish and Norwegian written on Ross’s map. My own people. Scott’s interest turned to the fact these northern men had dogs. Nothing changes. Why could I not see them? To hear words in her own language would have been like bathing in warm water, she thought. And yet not a single memory had floated towards her. Not a single emotion. Why could she see the Belgian now when only a few hundred days before, he had been indistinguishable? Why, clear as day, could she see into the hearts of some and not others?

  Above, as if to illustrate the point, the Belgian hung over the side.

  ‘Glad to be back, Bunny, old chap?’ a fellow officer slapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ the man replied, and remembered boiling ice to make some kind of porridge.

  Karina settled in the commander’s cabin. She wound round the legs of his desk. It seemed to her that there had been nothing but weather for decades. Wide open spaces. Grand high mountains. The scale had been huge and the cadence slow. And now this mass of humankind cut into it. If she had a heart, it would be beating faster. They will bring the place to life, she thought, and then wondered at those words only an instant before being pulled back to Scott as if she was on a leash.

  The commander’s clear blue eyes were alight. He rolled up the charts, tidying them into place as Karina slipped through his veins, smooth as blood. She moved with him as he made for the door, climbed upwards onto the de
ck and shouted instructions to disembark at the point. The order had the air of a dramatic performance – where else might the ship dock? What else had they come all this way to do? She could hear the dogs yapping from their quarters below – the animals could sense landfall. Distracted, she abandoned Scott to slide below deck and explore the contents of the hold.

  The place was like a museum storeroom – an exploration of the time she had missed. It was not only the fashions that had changed – the bustles and the necklines of the women. In the gloom of the stores, she peered at the fruits of decades of invention, trailing her fingers over the boxes and crates, looming upwards to peer inside. There was a strange machine under waxed tarpaulins. She heard one of the crew call it a motor. Beside it, barrels of fuel were freezing at the edges. Her eyes descended further, tunnelling inside the ship towards the spirit lamps and boxes of untried equipment, shining and untouched in their factory wrapping.

  They intend to stay for some time. Karina felt glad. Time was the only thing she possessed in surfeit and now she could see them, she was interested. Rising upwards, she burst through the boards on deck. In the light, every man was in his place, crowded together, and all faces turned to their leader. Like all Englishmen, the crew oozed a familiar certainty – confidence in their plans that reminded her of Pearse and Hooker. The sense of entitlement that the world was theirs for the taking.

  It was strange that so little had changed. Why these men? Why now? Then the answer to her question came in a flash as she fathomed Scott’s mind. As blinding as the glacier in full sunshine, Karina reeled. The commander had met Joseph Hooker not a year ago. Joseph is still alive, the words dropped from her lips. For a moment she felt nothing and then she almost screamed. Her thoughts raced as she lit on the captain’s memory, drawn in as if the ice has given away beneath her once more and she was falling into him.

  It was a cold day for Europe. Scott’s coat was taken by a maid and he was shown through a glossy door into Hooker’s study. The smell of sealing wax and velum pervaded the dusty air. In the corner, a large green plant grew in a brass bucket. Joseph sat in a velvet chair with ornately carved wooden feet. The doctor was an old man, his fingers thin and his colours faded. The soft pink lips Karina had kissed so passionately had faded to thin grey lines. She stared, her eyes wide. In her memory, he was handsome – eternally young. Now the skin hung in folds from his neck. Still, it was Joseph. Eager to plunge deeper she walked towards him, almost melting into his body. She could see that Hooker’s heart still played hide and seek with itself. He believes his own deception, she breathed.

  Scott shook Joseph’s hand – the old man’s veins were visible, bulging blue below white skin flecked piebald with great age. Joseph motioned the commander to sit down and the men started with small talk about the journey the commander had made by steam train to get there. The view from the window. This must be Glasgow, she thought and looked around the room. Sure enough, there were signs – a book bound in tartan and a mounted stag’s head.

  ‘A good journey then?’ Joseph checked. His tone had not changed. He might have been enquiring after a healed injury on the deck of the Terror all those years ago. Scott nodded and then with a slim smile, Joseph admitted he wished he could have come to London but he was too old to travel. This is his house and he will not leave it again. Karina toured the premises as if it was only an architect’s plan. She passed through the walls, plastered and painted. The old place he had described to her in such detail was grander than she had imagined. The ceilings were bordered in plaster, like thick swathes of lace. Below them, the skirting boards were a foot high. Behind Joseph’s desk there was a penguin, stuffed and mounted – the very fellow he had taken from the shore. On the walls, exquisitely painted plants and flowers were framed in burnished wood hung between tall shelves stacked with books. On the mantle a clock ticked.

  Joseph has not thought of me. In his memory, she could see the old man had rewritten the circumstances around their love affair. Karina was a dalliance to be put in its place. How strange, it comes into her mind. You can damn someone and hardly think of them again. Even as he sat sociably and discussed ice fields and glaciers with Robert Scott there was no image of her in the old man’s mind. He did not remember her body, naked under the fur covers, skin as pale as ice and eyes as blue as the azure sky. He could not scent her skin dewed with the musk of their lovemaking. She was nothing. She was gone.

  Karina set her jaw. A glimmer of fury cut through her frame. She could not believe that this man had been her whole world and yet, here he was, nonchalant. Hooker was respected – famous even. There were stacks of letters on his desk and articles sent for his comments before publication. Even in his dotage, his view was sought.

  In his chair, Scott nodded reverently as Joseph spoke of the dangers of his mission – all those years ago. The commander counted himself lucky to have the old man’s advice. He was the last survivor – the only living link. The other Englishmen on Ross’s expedition were all dead. Karina wondered where their spirits resided and a reply came to her, from the recesses of Hooker’s mind. Ross was buried forty years ago next to his wife in a graveyard in St Albans. Gone now. Gone. Continuing, oblivious, Hooker talked about the fierceness of the cold and Scott told him how he intended to provision the expedition. Joseph listened sagely as the younger man described the motor and nodded at the details of supplies that the crews of the Erebus and the Terror could only have dreamed of. What is a tin of ham? she thought.

  Her eyes flitted around the room, landing back on Joseph’s wrinkled face. Around his chair there were photographs and childish drawings. She realized that Hooker had children and grandchildren. He was in correspondence with one of the youngest. He watched daily for the child’s letters to arrive. This fired her with fresh fury. He has lived. Just as he went home to do. And I am alone.

  Behind his chair, outside the window a long expanse of green lawn stretched down to a flash of a greenhouse containing exotic plants and a grapevine that showered fruit in season. This man had everything. To see him like this was a final straw. I could have had children. A boy, blond, with freckles like Marijke. A girl I could teach to cook. A girl with my own blue eyes to see the world with.

  Unable to bear it, Karina burst out of the vision. She flew upwards, rising high over the coast, wheeling above the ship. Looking down on the crew, she hissed.

  How dare you?

  From this height, the Discovery looked tiny and the ice fields beyond the ship stretched eternal. The shelf shifted so slowly that only those beyond life’s bounds could see the movement. These men were Joseph’s emissaries, engaged upon his continuing mission. Karina eyed the chart in Scott’s cabin – the one Ross had completed. She knew the jagged cliffs and shifting snowfields. They were her brothers and her sisters now. All Scott had was mere lines on paper – in life and death the landscape rose differently. You had to traverse the hills to understand them. You had to experience the ice flows. A few marks on paper did not signify.

  Beside the chart lay Scott’s diary. 1901, she saw. 1902. It had been almost sixty years, she understood at last. Joseph must be eighty years old. I might have been eighty, she shrieked into the wind. I might have had children and a home. She saw herself in a burgundy dress – the same as Frances had worn all those years ago. She pictured herself flouncing in the lacy Glaswegian mansion, ordering servants about their business and playing in the nursery with her children.

  She wanted to tear up the stupid chart with its carefully pencilled calculations. The last time she had seen these curves the map was still being drawn. Now it was printed and the names were horribly familiar, for Ross had called the landmarks after his ships and crew. Mounts Terror and Erebus. The Ross Ice Shelf. Even Victoria merited a mention. In memoriam. And then she read it. Cape Hooker. In a snap, it was as if she could feel the cold again. She stared at the chart, listless. There was, needless to say, no mention of her. No Cape Karina. No Lande’s Land. No one knows. No one ever will, for now t
hey are all dead but him.

  She wondered what happened to Archie and Bevan and the crew. She wondered about the cruel-mouthed midshipman, Pearse, and Hepworth, the silent negro with the ring in his ear. They had not figured in Hooker’s memory. Maybe he had lost touch, which meant the men were faceless nobodies who had never made a mark on the world. Not his world, anyway.

  She swooped low across the bow of the Discovery and her mood was black. She wanted to hurt the men on the ship. She wanted to wound Joseph Hooker and his precious reputation. In fury, she pointed at Scott’s heart with a single long finger but it passed straight through him. Frustrated, she let out a gasp. Then she turned and whirled over the point and as she did so it dawned on her that the snow flurried with her more than she flurried with it. She had never felt that before. With her newly vengeful heart, she swooped again, and once more the snow shifted slightly, as if she was a whirlwind. She focused her anger and a translucent sliver of ice crumbled and slipped into the sea.

  From the ship, Scott noticed it with his eyeglass and she glared back at him in triumph. Then she tried again, for ice fell into the sea all the time and it was not unusual for the snow to flurry. But when she blew, the wind picked up and she was at one with it. She smiled.

  These men had arrived on her doorstep – all the life a spirit could crave. Enough to make death bearable and give it purpose. This is my land. And you are encroachers. She could scent how much this expedition meant to them. Swooping low she could pick individuals from the sea of faces. A squat man whose dark hair peeked from beneath his cap scratched his head and squinted into the cloudless blue. Turning, she soared back over the ship and as she did so another man stared upwards, as if he could sense her too. Sailors believed their superstitions. She wondered whether it was still unlucky to have a woman aboard. The fellow shuddered. Slowly it came to her that the dead not only needed the living but that perhaps, somehow, the living also needed the dead.