by Cormac James
For godsake sit down, Morgan told him. Sit down and eat.
But he too was starting to fret. The timbers were complaining freely now. It was a definite squeeze. The wind had swung round to the southward, was pressing the looser floes in on those ahead of them, that refused to cede. The ship was caught in the middle, and now being pinched very nicely indeed. It was nothing, he had told the men. It was merely the tides. The sun and moon would be in conjunction on the 18th, that was all.
Not quite the little jaunt you expected, he told the woman sitting opposite him.
She considered him closely, seemed to be revising some opinion in her mind.
Do you honestly think I didn’t know what I was getting myself into? she said.
No I don’t, Morgan said. To be perfectly frank.
The ship I came out on went down just north of Baal’s River, she said. The Kronprindsesse.
She told them the story. They’d left Copenhagen very early in the year, and when they came round the southern tip of Greenland the ice was still in place, even that far south.
I had gone up on deck to drink my coffee, she said, because it was the first fine day of the whole passage. Seeing me up on deck, the captain invited me to the bow, to show how he could squeeze through even the tightest gap. He was all swagger, of course. Who knows how long before he’d see a white woman again?
That particular morning the gap shrank a little sooner than the captain expected, and the floes touched her exactly across the beam. She went down with Kitty’s coffee still steaming in the cup, and they walked over the ice all the way to the shore.
A gorgeous day, she said. Hardly a breath of wind. You get a great many of those up here, believe it or not. The entire world seems at such peace with itself. Even the ice. Especially the ice. So quiet, so reliable. You’re so ready to trust. I entirely agree with you, Richard, how hard it is to convince anyone has not seen the thing with their own eyes, that this is death.
Their cabin door was suddenly flung open, with a lovely pop. There was no one there. Brooks went to close it, and could not. The frame was skewed. It was the crush. The entire ship was trembling now.
Up on deck, the snow was fine as flour. The wind was freshening still. Morgan leaned over the taffrail to watch the next slab come. Carefully, the thing lifted itself onto its hind legs, stood there without the slightest stagger. He stood back out of its way, to let it fall.
All evening the men worked desperately to relax the squeeze – shoving the ice back as it rose up and readied to topple, and heaving off whatever they could not keep from falling onto the deck.
By the time she came up, the men were shirtless, and bright with sweat.
A nice spectacle, she said.
Do you mean the men or the ice? said Morgan.
They both have their interest.
I could order them to put on their shirts again, if you prefer.
The last thing I want, she said, is to interfere. You should do exactly as you would were I not aboard.
From their beds they listened all night to the ice grinding itself against the hull. Whatever was out there, it sounded stubborn and wise. In it was a promise he knew would be kept. Every now and then, he risked a glance at MacDonald, who had the top bunk opposite. The man lay there motionless, his hands trapped in prayer. For almost twenty-four hours he had not said a word.
17th August
Every dawn now was another miracle. Every morning, coming up out of the murk and the stench, for the first few minutes he felt he could start afresh. Before him he found a world stretched and flattened, boiled and starched, rid of every flaw and stain. For the first few minutes, it seemed, none of it had happened yet. He had only to shift his course slightly now and it never would.
But by mid-morning there would be a harsh, brittle beauty to it, and from then on the men kept below, out of its sight. It was like a visitor or shipmate they were desperate to avoid. It reminded Morgan of the tropics. The scorched, searing afternoon. Wherever he stood, wherever he lay, even in total darkness, he could always feel the weight of its stare. Outside, it was waiting for him.
By evening the glare would be more gentle, and often the men sat on the bulwarks in their shirtsleeves until midnight, to sew. They worked idly, chatting and mumbling, needles and threads sprouting between pinched lips. There would be a shout of dismay, and to a man they would lift their heads. A circle was already formed around the players, to enjoy the latest treachery. It was DeHaven again.
She’s in there somewhere, he was telling Banes, goading. Just waiting for the right gentleman to come along.
They had chosen their hero. Night after night they stood peering over his shoulder, waiting to see him slap down that last, devastating card. They were never in any rush to return to their work. They had time. The long bright days would never fail.
Morgan sat nearby, pretending not to hear. There was news now in every overheard word, every careless threat, every jibe. Her cabin was directly under their feet. She was down there now, counting the minutes, taking DeHaven’s blue pills, and aching for the end of the month. He had seen the date marked on her calendar, a reckoning. He too was waiting, in much the same way. A week before, he’d brought in a stone picked from the side of a berg, olive-green and almost perfectly round. Now it sat on the shelf in their cabin, wobbling constantly, alive. Every so often he found himself staring at it, or taking it in his hands. It was something solid, real, irrefutable. What the pregnancy might one day dare to become. A bald fact, that nothing could erode. But for the moment he felt nothing so sure. For the moment he felt as though he’d come into a familiar room to find the furniture shifted slightly, or something removed – and this in every room he came into, everywhere he sat or stood, except out on the ice. In everything there was some change now he could not quite put his finger on, knew only by his own unease. He looked up and down the deck, tried to remember how it had been. For all he could see, it had been much as it was now. Only his body told him it was otherwise.
When the ice was too tight they diverted themselves with shinty, cricket, and wagers against time. In everything it was the English against the rest. Today, with a spike and a length of rope, Morgan had them etch out a circle that made quarter of an English mile; they traced the line over with cinders the better to see, and he raced the men round and round against the clock.
Petersen had been watching them from a distance, and now called Morgan to come with his little grinder. The chronometer, he meant. Get your woman too, Petersen told him. She will like the show of it.
A mound of minced seal flesh had been slopped out onto the snow. It was two days’ rations, and the dogs were frantic. Kitty and Morgan and Cabot watched from the deck. Petersen let slip the chain. He was grinning with a crazy pride.
A real cheat! Petersen roared up. But it is the only way how to help the weak.
Morgan glanced down at the sweep of his second hand. The dogs were still savaging the surface, too busy to turn on each other just yet.
She had forced herself to watch, but now hurried to the side and leaned over. They heard her retching noisily. Cabot made to go to her but Morgan grabbed his arm.
She wanted to come out here, Morgan said.
Afterwards, the ragged trail of it ran all the way down the hull. Already the dogs were mopping at the snow, and the few feet above. Morgan told Cabot to leave the rest for the night, the freeze, the easier to scrape off in the morning.
22nd August
On the 22nd DeHaven came to her cabin again. He laid the calendar flat before her. The 12th of July was circled in red. She furrowed her brows, leaned forward for a better look. No, she said, irked at the inaccuracy of a man from whom she expected so much. The correct date, she said, would be the tenth.
It took Morgan a moment to realize what she meant. Already DeHaven was writing the date in his ledger. With considerable pleasure, no doubt. As though he were present at the actual coupling – the event, as he liked to call it – and looking on with a wise smile, already relishing the consequences of so frivolous an act.
DeHaven and Kitty sat together on the bed. The calculations were a promise of certainty, of proof. The voices were lowered, conspiring. Four feet away, Morgan was forgotten. He saw her better now, he thought, the woman he’d lain with. Eventually she noticed he was still there. She clapped the ledger shut. Either the affair was concluded, or there was something in it she did not want him to see.
DeHaven asked her how she felt. She complained of irritable skin. That was perfectly normal, he said. He seemed to know in advance exactly what she would say. They were merely making conversation now. They were running down the clock, Morgan saw. They were waiting for him to leave, for the sake of her privacy. He who had already seen everything, been there ahead of every other man. So he went and sat on the other side of the wall, and listened to the lock turning in the door.
From the off, DeHaven had told Morgan he would not intervene. Let nature do its work, he said. Give it time. He spoke with absolute authority, the catastrophes at his feet.
Twenty minutes later, he called Morgan back in.
There was nothing to be done now but wait, DeHaven said, and let things run their normal course. ‘Now,’ he said, as though it were a milestone they’d reached, and not one they kept passing, incessantly, all along the way. Le col est fermé, he said, with a nod. Anything delicate, in anyone else’s presence, was now said in French. The ‘col’ was closed. ‘Collar’ might best translate it, Morgan thought. He thought of the notices in the newspapers, in Geneva, after the first snows. Le Col Est Fermé. Overnight, the blocked passes, the travelling season’s abrupt end.
Sceptical, disapproving, Sir John Franklin stared down at them, from inside a gutta-percha frame. Theirs was too trivial an affair. A distraction – and a slightly sordid one – from more important things. It ought to have been beneath his attention, but was being played out right under his eyes, making it impossible to ignore. Once DeHaven was gone, Morgan reached over and faced the picture to the wall.
She lay on the bed, letting the news take her in its grip, tightening, to a perfect fit. He could see she wanted to celebrate, but did not dare. It was still too early. It was still not too late for everything to go back to how it had been before, as though the ship had never returned to Disko. Determined to keep that possibility behind her, she kept staring into the far distance, did not dare turn her head. She had not yet heard the gates clank shut behind her back.
What else did he say? Morgan said.
He asked me how is the father.
And what did you tell him?
I told him you were quite well, as far as I knew.
He wanted to take a bow. Not a but the father. It put him up on a stage. It gave him an audience, called for a performance, that would be judged.
DeHaven laid down his cards, and did not dare explain. Morgan stared at them in silence, with a puzzled look. He seemed not to understand. There seemed to have been some mistake. There was no appeal possible, of course. Fin de partie, Cabot said, apparently pleased, because for him there was nothing at stake. But Morgan was physically sickened and dismayed. This was sudden, unexpected proof of his own mortality.
DeHaven reached wide his arm and gathered all the cards to himself, properly tidied and stacked, and began to shuffle the deck. He worked devoutly, and neither Cabot nor Morgan dared interrupt.
She would have made a fine wife for a man, DeHaven said, watching his own hands at work.
I have a wife, Morgan said.
And still DeHaven was shuffling. For a full minute and more he refused to look up, as though he did not quite trust his own hands not to fumble or cheat.
Myer wonders if she’s not a little mad, DeHaven said.
She hoards it well enough, if she is, Morgan said.
The hands began to share out the cards. The thing was done with a lazy, sinister proficiency – the movements quick and fluid, but ridiculously precise. Morgan watched the fingers suspiciously. They did not appear to be under control, but there was no doubt that this was their proper work. The entire performance – the entire scene – had been practised to perfection, seemed inevitable.
Afterwards, in his bed, Morgan wrote up his private journal for the day, and refused to mention her. This morning, he wrote, we found the canal cleared yesterday afternoon covered with a kind of thin paste. I invited Myer to come and look at it, but he declined. Day after day we haul and warp through a thickening stew, and only our captain seems not to notice the change. He has not the courage to concede defeat, and there is no greater guarantee, I believe, that we will never reach Beechey. I now look the thing in the face, with all the serenity I can muster, he wrote. We are condemned to pass the winter here in the heart of The Pack. With her, he wanted to write – with everything her presence and condition entailed. Myer, he wrote, insists there continues fair ground for hope. He says we cannot possibly stay ice-bound until the searching season had passed. Such appears to be the full reach of our commander’s logic, namely, that matters as they stand do not quite suit his convenience, and must therefore change. He continues to hope for some unseasonal thaw, or some great commotion, that will liberate without destroying us. The man has great faults, but I think I am beginning to be jealous of his tenacity.
23rd August
He was up in the Crow’s Nest, scouring again. A little earlier he’d seen something very like mist to the northwest. Mist meant water, in the normal run of things. They called it a water-sky. That would be Cape York, according to the charts. But it was too perfect, and he told no one. It was exactly the thing they were all waiting to see.
Eighty-five feet below, with sober triumph, Kitty was carrying herself up and down the deck. Her evening constitutional, that DeHaven had prescribed. Morgan studied her through the glass. Of the few dresses she’d brought, this was his favourite – well cut, and now quite tight. She seemed to have put on a little weight, and every ounce to her benefit.
She was chatting to Brooks now, and Morgan could hear every word. At first there were polite, reheated inquiries about where Brooks came from, how long he’d been at sea, and so on. Morgan was listening zealously, letting her voice do to him whatever it wanted to do. He let it warm and sway, and didn’t resist.
You were never on the Kronprindsesse, Brooks told her.
Wasn’t I? she said.
No, he said. The Kronprindsesse went down off Upernavik, not off Baal’s River. Nor was it the year you came out.
Indeed, she said. What is your point?
My point is, you were never on a sinking ship. You don’t know the first thing about life in the ice.
My story had its effect, did it not?
It did.
And there was nothing in it that was not true, as to the dangers of the ice?
No.
Well then, what does it matter whether I saw it myself or not? Can you even imagine how many times I had to listen to the whalers bragging about the like?
From the galley door, Cabot watched her go. He watched her bend through the hatch. Every stretch, of every stitch. Through the glass, Morgan read the man’s face, staring mournfully at where she’d been. The ramshackle smile he’d used to greet her had long since fallen away.
24th August
The days were fine, with light winds from the south. These of course packed the ice tighter still. In the evening, from out on the floe, came the polite pop of ball against bat. Tonight again, Morgan was practising his French with Cabot. They watched Petersen coming in. He had rigged himself a harness, was trailing a young seal. He staggered past, leaving a tattered red thread behind him on the ice.
The liver, fried with bacon, Cabot said. He looked astonished. He closed his eyes and puckered his lips.
The next day Morgan asked Petersen if he might come along. But the man seemed to take it as an order, and Morgan was obliged to carry the rope and the grappling hook, to show it was not so. A mile from the ship, not a seal in sight, Petersen suddenly stopped and turned to face him. He brought his fist up against Morgan’s chest. The arm jerked and thumped Morgan at the heart. Here, no good, he said. This was the first lesson, apparently. In the beef, he said, you lose a bullet, you lose a seal. But here, good. He raised the same hand, index finger extended, and touched the tip between Morgan’s eyes. The gesture was a priestly one, an ordination. The pressure grew, but Morgan stiffened his neck, refused to cede even an inch. Then, with a jab of his arm, Petersen sent the ship’s second sprawling backward, flailing.
