The Ice Maiden

by Sara Sheridan

  The ship was going nowhere and to the men, the darkness felt like a homecoming. Lighting the lamps became a ritual. The little stoves that ran on seal blubber gave off a smell to which they became accustomed. Already the mess looked as if there was a celebration underway with yellow strings of light crossing the table. Outside when the temperature was taken it proved to be an unexpectedly low: minus thirty and dropping fast. At minus fifty there was no question that winter was upon the camp. They merely needed to survive it.

  PART THREE

  Into the Light

  ‘All men are possible heroes: every age, Heroic in proportions.’

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  TWENTY

  She tossed and turned like a feverish child, but she did not wake. She lengthened. She hardened. But her dreams were human. Had she guessed, she would have thought it might be Hooker who disturbed her, but in the darkness it was the men of the Discovery who appeared in the flashes that cut into the safe silence under the ice.

  Scott and Shackleton were high above her, screaming at each other as they travelled across the plain. The sky was light for the beginning of spring. The winter air still lingered. Shackleton was bent, heaving for breath. His skin was patchy as Wilson looked on, trying to break up the argument, about the use of skis. Skis? she thought. What foolishness. Why are they arguing about that? Wilson sighed. The skipper and Shackle had fought the long journey there and half the way back. They had argued till they were hoarse. They disagreed about the skis. The dogs. The sledges. They bickered about everything except the real problem. That Scott couldn’t bear having his authority questioned and that Shackleton thought he could do better.

  Shackleton’s blood was thin. Karina could feel it coursing through him too quickly. His joints were aching. He was twice as exhausted as the other two men but he wouldn’t give up. She shifted.

  ‘You aren’t fit for this. You will step down,’ Scott spat at the sub-lieutenant.

  ‘We could have made the pole. We could still make it if we get the equipment right,’ Shackleton insisted.

  Scott stamped his foot. They had been hiking over the plain for weeks. The ice was scarred with ski tracks and footprints where they had hauled everything they needed in this first attempt on the magnetic pole. How pointless. Eventually Scott had taken the difficult decision to turn back but they’d made it the farthest south of anyone. Heroes. Record-breakers. Pioneers. Still, the skipper cursed the day he’d chosen Shackleton for the expedition. The sub-lieutenant had been sick from the off. From the first night he had been shaky, his gums were raw and some mornings he could scarcely breathe. That notwithstanding, he’d hauled his share or as close as dammit. Together the three men battled the difficult conditions, navigating too slowly for the supplies to last. That was the problem, Scott cursed. As far as he was concerned it wasn’t the skis. Or the dogs. Or the sledges. The trouble was the speed at which Shackleton had been able to travel.

  Wilson marvelled at Ernest’s fighting spirit. Even breathless and so badly run down that his teeth were loose, he still found the strength to raise his voice. It did no good. They had ended up killing the dogs one after the other and feeding them to the rest of the pack just to keep going. Is it his diet? Wilson wondered. Could the experiment be having this much of an effect? Whatever it was, the invalid was still fighting.

  Shackleton’s eyes were alight, flecked with yellow. Karina could feel his hatred on the air. He’d kill Scott if he thought he could get away with it. In the end, you get away with everything, she thought, and turned over. She knew that murderous feeling. That moment of numbing anger. That need for release.

  When she blinked the men were back aboard the Discovery. The crew had turned out on the ice to welcome them. Later, fed and after the kind of sleep the living imagine the dead would savour, Scott gave Shackleton a dressing-down – it would be the last time he spoke to him directly.

  ‘You will go home. Medical reasons,’ the skipper commanded. ‘I’m invaliding you out.’

  Shame turned in Shackleton’s stomach. He was stronger already. Sleeping in a proper bunk had done wonders. Most men would have died from what he had endured. Karina wondered if Shackleton died, would he linger at the pole? It was all he wanted, after all. But who could say where Shackleton had been happiest. Did death take account of a man’s hopes and dreams?

  Later, in the doctor’s cabin, amid the iodine and rolled bandages, Shackleton tackled Wilson.

  ‘The skipper is too bloody stubborn. He can’t accept his mistakes,’ he insisted. ‘He isn’t being fair.’

  Wilson did not indulge the grievance. Instead he decided that Shackleton ought to reintroduce meat to his diet.

  ‘The skipper is the skipper,’ was all he said. ‘You didn’t help matters, Shackle, old man.’

  When the relief ship, the Morning, sailed into view Shackleton’s health was improving. He could not bring himself to stand on the ice with the others, cheering and waving the ship to its anchor. Nor did he help to unload the supplies for the second winter – the one he’d miss. That night the officers dined together and with the mess cupboards restocked, Clarke put on a fine show.

  ‘The weather doesn’t seem so bad down here,’ said the Morning’s captain, Colbeck – a decent enough sort.

  It was the same kind of Antarctic day as had greeted the Discovery when she sailed in. The ice cliffs were still. The sky was blue. It was cold but it wouldn’t kill you. No one wanted to enlighten the new boy. It would have sounded like they were complaining. Instead Scott proposed a toast to the Morning.

  ‘Well,’ Colbeck said afterwards. ‘Who’s jumping ship and coming back to England?’

  A couple of weeks later, below decks, heading northwards for Blighty, the array of hopeless cases banished from any prospect of glory were tortured by nightmares they did not speak about. No one wanted to be branded the man who couldn’t cope. They joined the Morning’s crew where they fitted in like pieces of a puzzle but their hearts were still aboard the Discovery, where the darkness was descending. If their injuries were physical, they sought to overcome them. By the time they docked in Portsmouth, every man had fully regained his health. Shackleton included.

  ‘Sounds like scurvy,’ one of the medical chaps back in London at the Royal Society diagnosed when he managed to prise the symptoms from Shackleton’s mostly sealed lips. ‘I don’t understand it. You chaps had lime juice in your rations, didn’t you?’

  Shackleton nodded. The navy wanted to subject him to a medical examination but he had refused. ‘And this is the diet that Dr Wilson prescribed?’

  ‘Several of us were on it.’ Shackleton’s tone was dismissive.

  The man’s eyebrow arched but Shackleton wouldn’t say any more and there was so much else to discuss. Who could help be enthused? The men on the expedition were heroes – no matter that the sub-lieutenant had been sent home. The doctor leaned forward. ‘Do you think the pole is possible to achieve?’ he asked, eyes dancing. ‘Perhaps it’s just too much of a stretch, Ernest. There might be some places on earth that man will never conquer.’

  ‘I can do it,’ Shackleton insisted. ‘I know I can.’

  Karina batted away the visions. She craved darkness and solitude but when the light came and the men with it, she found herself unable to turn away. Between the momentary sightlines, one long winter stretched to two, then three. The Discovery was long gone but still the men appeared in front of her eyes. They played around the fringes of her memories alongside the imprint of old sensations. A slap on the wrist in school. The smell of apricots, only a glimmer. Hot jam made by her mother more than a century before. Nibbled hazelnuts sprinkled through the vibrant orange jelly. And then a vision of Vince, drenched, dead, trickling water onto wooden floorboards. The sum of all her days. Who can tell what will stick? You don’t know what will make you turn in your grave. What will rouse you. A puff of anger passed Karina’s lips and the darkness descended again. The soft, dark silence.

  But there
was no getting away. Time and again she came back to them. She could never tell who it might be. Wilson. Scott. Vince. Four years, five, six. This time, it was Shackleton she had the run of. He lit a cigar as he sat back in his chair somewhere smart – in a gentlemen’s club. The men reading newspapers pretended they didn’t notice him but she could feel the unspoken rustle of English interest behind the headlines. Tall, broad and with his dark hair parted in the centre, Shackleton cut a dashing figure. It had been a long time, she realized. They used to ignore him in this lounge because he had been sent home all those years ago. Now they ignored him because of his notoriety. He had led his own expedition. He was famous and they didn’t want to intrude.

  Karina sat up. It didn’t matter if her eyes were open or closed. What did she need eyes for? The world was playing this inside her head. When had he come back, she wondered. Why didn’t she see his second tour on the ice? There was the flash of a tattered flag and the sound of a man crying quietly. He had attempted the pole and he had failed.

  ‘Sir Ernest,’ the bartender brought whisky.

  The toffs drank brandy but Shackleton had never got used to the taste. The fire crackled and shifted in the grate.

  ‘Lady Shackleton will be joining me for dinner,’ he said. ‘Will you let me know when she arrives?’

  Sir Ernest, was it? And his beloved, Emily had succumbed to his proposal when he got home from the Discovery expedition, or as he thought of it now, the Discovery fiasco. What had happened still rankled. Wait till he’s dead, she thought. If he can’t let go of it, Scott will haunt him. All that time on the ice.

  In London, the Shackletons dined together every night, though as Emily occasionally pointed out, the conversation was either about Ernest’s last trip or his next one. She frequently wished that she had at least one other interest in common with her husband. The garden perhaps.

  ‘I shall inform the porter of Lady Shackleton’s imminent arrival,’ the waiter confirmed.

  Here, at the centre of the civilized world, where all decisions were taken, ladies were only permitted if they had come to eat. The horror of an unaccompanied woman roaming the club in search of her husband was unthinkable.

  London, Karina thought. I wouldn’t have liked it.

  Shackleton did, though. At least, to some degree. He liked the lecture circuit and the adulation but the truth was, once you’d lost yourself in whiteness and frozen your dreams not once but twice on the way to an as yet unreachable pole, they did not thaw the same. He was restless despite his marriage and the title. Despite the polar medal they’d given him.

  When he first came home he found the myriad colours distracting and the noise unbearable. It was too cluttered. Too easy. Too soft. People didn’t understand how the Antarctic had changed him. More importantly, he hadn’t planted a flag at what was now the most important destination in the world. No one had. And as a result the endless lectures and dinners and congratulations didn’t sit well on Shackleton’s conscience. He came up ninety-seven miles short every time. If he was haunted, it was by the inaccessibility of the pole’s coordinates, its wide white spaces and empty silence. Its impossibility.

  Ernest, Karina cooed. He shook his head. It had been a long time since he’d heard that voice. He associated it with the madness of the Discovery, the pain in his joints. A shade of concern twisted. But then luckily, another voice distracted him.

  ‘What ho, Shackle,’ it chimed from behind the chair.

  Shackleton turned. ‘Wilson!’

  He put down his drink and puffed his cigar as he got to his feet to shake the surgeon’s hand. Over the years they’d run into each other now and then. Wilson sank into a chair and was brought a gin and tonic by a passing waiter. No one who was anyone had to order at the club. That was the point of it being a club.

  ‘I’m having dinner with Emily. Feel free to join us,’ Shackleton offered.

  ‘I’m already eating with a couple of other chaps. I arrived from Cheltenham this afternoon.’

  Shackleton nodded. ‘Visiting your family?’

  ‘We went boating – the weather’s been marvellous. My mother claims it’s too cold, but well, you know,’ Wilson rolled his eyes.

  All of them the same. All of them smitten. She leaned in, reading the doctor. Wilson knew how it had been more than most – he was the doctor after all. The first months after the crew arrived home none of them could bear the mild English weather. The voyage across the equator felt like a baptism of fire. When the Morning had anchored in South Africa, Shackleton couldn’t sleep for the heat. It felt as if the sunshine had kindled a fire at the centre of his being and his skin was burning from the inside. He roamed the grounds of his hotel like a zombie, fanning himself, unable to bear it. When he got back to Blighty, England’s weather seemed somehow indecisive. Here there was no blade of ice hanging over your head, a frozen Damocles’ sword to focus the mind. Whoever would have thought the bloody awful sub-zero temperatures would prove an addiction?

  Shackleton was not alone among Antarctic veterans in finding himself uncomfortable anywhere above freezing. Many of them dreamed of snowstorms, of the icy breath of the southern wind on their skin and of the clear clean days of Antarctic summer. Unlike Shackleton, though, none of them ever dreamed of the blonde spectre about which he had never uttered a word.

  ‘And you’re well?’ Wilson enquired.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Bad luck. Not making it. I hoped for you, Shackle. I really did.’

  He did come back, she thought searching her memory.

  Wilson’s concern was genuine and Shackleton knew it. Still, the words rankled. It had almost been almost a year since he returned to London and he was painfully aware it would be a few more before he got to head to the far south once more.

  Such uncomfortable feelings were an ongoing maelstrom. Perhaps that’s what draws me. Shackleton knew Scott’s second attempt was funded now. That’s why Wilson had been visiting his family – he had been saying goodbye. If this expedition reached the pole, the aristocracy’s latest lord would never forgive himself. The bad blood between him and Scott rendered the business a grudge match.

  ‘Are you …?’ his voice lingered.

  ‘I’m Chief of Scientific Staff this time,’ Wilson admitted. ‘Truth is I’ve missed the old place. The skipper has been on the circuit for months – organizing it all.’

  ‘I wish you’d come with me,’ Shackleton allowed himself to say. ‘We could have done with you.’

  Wilson’s eyes were drawn to the floor. ‘I couldn’t, old man. It would have been terribly disloyal,’ he almost whispered. ‘I’ll have a crack at the pole with the skipper. Sooner or later one of us has to make it.’

  Shackleton never knew what to say when anyone mentioned Scott. Drawing up his courage, he smiled at his friend. Still, Shackleton couldn’t help be reminded of the sinking instant when he realized the bastard was sending him home and that there was nothing for him to do but take it. Scott had pulled rank when he banished him – like a coward.

  ‘Have you seen any of the others?’ Wilson changed the subject as he sipped his gin.

  ‘I took Frank Wild with me,’ Shackleton replied.

  Wilson smiled. ‘Wild’s a good man. I read that you saved him. You gave him your last ration.’

  Shackleton shifted in his chair. ‘The press made a lot of that.’

  ‘Scott amended our supply depot plan on account of it.’

  Shackleton’s stomach turned again.

  ‘It was brave decision, Shackle. The last thing we’d want is a tent of frozen, half-starved corpses but it’s difficult to put someone else ahead of yourself. You can’t run an engine without fuel, old man, can you? We learned that first time out.’

  Wilson blushed. After all, it was the experiment with diet that had caused the poor fellow’s scurvy. He often thought if Shackleton had been in the other group of men, perhaps things might have been different. But he had never said so.

  ‘Tell me, how is
the old place?’ he ventured.

  ‘We visited George Vince’s cross. We laid pebbles. I expect Wild found that particularly hard.’

  ‘Terrible business,’ Wilson shook his head.

  From the other side of the room a short, stocky fellow with ginger hair caught Wilson’s eye. Wilson smiled and Karina felt the focus shift. This was a new face but the man was somehow familiar. She circled as he approached. He was naval – that much was clear from his bearing – she’d seen too many Englishmen at sea not to recognize the signs. He loved swimming. His leg was in pain. He had spent much of the day with his mother, shopping. So trivial.

  ‘This is Henry Bowers,’ Wilson said. ‘He’s Royal India Marine. Bowers – Ernest Shackleton.’

  Shackleton proffered a handshake as he took in the young fellow’s appearance. He was an odd-looking stick. It was almost like looking at Wilson in a distorted fairground mirror. Wilson was tall and this fellow was short. Wilson was slim and Bowers had a paunch. Wilson’s features were even and Bowers sported an extraordinarily prominent nose. Shackleton put his head to one side. Now he came to think about it he realized the two men were not alike at all – the comparison only arose because both had red hair. When Bowers spoke he had an accent though she couldn’t say from where.

  ‘I am a long-time admirer,’ he admitted shyly as the waiter approached.

  ‘What can I get you, sir?’ the man enquired.

  ‘Some cordial, if you please.’

  Bowers, then, is not a member.

  ‘We were just catching up,’ Wilson explained cheerily.

  ‘I don’t want to intrude,’ the lieutenant seemed somehow younger in the presence of these two polar giants. The truth was, he was reeling from being given a place on Captain Scott’s expedition. This time there had been eight thousand applicants.

  ‘You’re not intruding, old man. Not at all,’ Wilson insisted. ‘Lieutenant Bowers has been in charge of loading the ship, Shackle. Our Terra Nova. He’s done an immensely good job.’