Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  A note from the publisher asked him if perhaps he would be so kind, for Captain Kennedy’s sake, as to bring the book with him to the Royal Geographical Society and mention it in his talk. The resulting publicity in the newspapers would be most welcome, especially since Mr Kennedy was already en route to the Bering Strait in Lady Franklin’s new ship, Isabel, and could do nothing to promote his book for himself. Compliments and thanks from Dalton Publishers, Cockspur Street, Trafalgar Square.

  Trafalgar. That was a good one. And the book in his hands was not even from the de luxe edition, the leather-bound volumes with engravings and maps got up for rich subscribers. Instead, he had been given one of the cheap, mass-market hardbacks that would soon be in the shops. Its pages had already been cut for him, although he did not want or need to open it: he had already read the damned thing in proof.

  He tossed the book on the bed and went back to the window. The fog had thickened so much that he could no longer see the street lamp, only its diseased glow.

  The agony of snow-blindness. The screaming haze of exhaustion and scurvy. White-out fogs which dazzled and disoriented you until you felt so sick that you had to lie down in the snow and close your eyes so you wouldn’t puke up the last of your pemmican. He remembered all this, but memory was merciful, so he could not say honestly that he remembered it well.

  He stuck out his chin and addressed the window. ‘Your Royal Highness. My Lords and Ladies. Fellows and learned members of the Royal Geographical Society. Honoured guests and gentlemen . . .’

  Was that the right form? He would have to check with the secretary before he was introduced. He would have to write it down and memorize it. You knew where you were when you wrote it all down. Or so he’d used to think.

  Kennedy’s book lay on the bed behind him. He could see its candlelit reflection in the windowpane, a spectral projection on the swirling fog.

  He was seized by a desperate hope. Perhaps he’d imagined the offending passages. Or perhaps Kennedy, a good man, a good friend, who surely was no liar, had realized his mistake and excised them before the proof went to press. Perhaps he’d seen sense at the last minute. Perhaps the crisis had melted away.

  Bellot seized the book from the bed and desperately skimmed through it.

  But it was still there, on page 131.

  7 April 1852: From a high hill near our encampment at this spot, we observed a broad channel running N.N.E. and S.S.W., true (variation 140), which was at first taken for a continuation of Brentford Bay, until its great extent convinced us that we had fallen upon a western sea or channel, and that the passage we had just gone through was in reality a strait, leading out of Prince Regent Inlet. It appears on the map of our discoveries as Bellot Strait – a just tribute to the important services rendered to our Expedition by Lieutenant Bellot.

  Their greatest and indeed only discovery: a new North West Passage, the northernmost shore of the American mainland.

  Bellot’s Strait.

  But Bellot had walked with William Kennedy every step of that terrible journey, eleven hundred miles on foot behind a team of foundering dogs, blundering through flat uncharted wastelands, lost, snow-blinded, starving, dazed by sleeplessness, thirst and scurvy. And if there was one thing of which Bellot was sure, one thing on which his journal and his memory perfectly agreed, it was that he had seen no ‘Bellot Strait’ between Somerset Land and Boothia, no new North West Passage at all, only a low isthmus and a large frozen lake.

  But why would Kennedy insist on seeing something that was not there?

  Bellot had searched through his journal to look for the answer. He had found there only more questions.

  Why, a week into their sledging trip, had Kennedy borrowed Bellot’s private compass, then kept it for himself, even though he already had another?

  Why had Kennedy insisted on minding their sledging chronometer himself – even though he was not qualified to use it – and then forgotten to wind it, causing it to stop?

  Why, when Bellot was preparing to observe the lunar distances that would allow him to reset the chronometer – their only reliable means of fixing their longitude west of Greenwich – had Kennedy accidentally knocked over and broken their artificial horizon? Why, on Kennedy’s orders, had their mercury horizon and their magnetic dip circle been left on board the ship?

  Bellot, the mapmaker and scientist, had been stripped of his tools one after the other until Kennedy was the uncontested guide of their sledging expedition. And Kennedy never even bothered writing a journal. He said he could keep it all in his head.

  Working at night with frozen fingers, thawing the ink inside his clothes, Bellot had doggedly kept up his own journal, the book which he meant to publish one day to earn dowries for his beautiful, penniless sisters. But a journal meant nothing without angles and numbers to pin it to the map.

  Now Kennedy had given Bellot’s name to his greatest – his only – discovery and Bellot could not refute it. Instead, Bellot’s reputation was tied to its existence. Why didn’t he call it Kennedy Strait? Then perhaps I could denounce him.

  And what, Bellot asked himself again, staring into that creeping London fog, do I really remember about those months on the ice?

  He remembered Kennedy staring hopelessly at his compass, its needle swimming listlessly around the dial, after it had once again steered them in circles through fog and waist-deep snow. A compass was useless so close to the magnetic pole.

  He remembered hills that were low islands and islands that might have been hills.

  He remembered being too weak and thirsty to drill through ice for water, and trying to shoot holes in it with a musket instead. If the water was fresh they were crossing a lake. If not they were crossing the ocean.

  He remembered bears and reindeer looming in the fog, not thirty yards away, and shooting and missing. Short rations and gnawing hunger. The black gums and stinking breath of scurvy. Healthy teeth that came out in your pemmican if you tried to eat it cold.

  The exquisite agony of sleeplessness, the urge to lie down in the snow.

  He remembered the terrible scene when they finally turned back. They were on the edge of a vast white plain stretching north and west to an obscure horizon. Tears were freezing in his lashes, and he was bawling at Kennedy that he was wrong, that this was not Prince of Wales Land but some undiscovered sea beyond it, that they must have wandered all the way across Peel Sound without even noticing it, and that they were now facing west and not south. Kennedy and his useless compass had led them far off their course. They would not reach King William Land. Not this year or the next.

  I told you so, Bellot had shouted at Kennedy, while the starving dogs whined in their traces and the other exhausted men looked on. If we’d had the right instruments, if you hadn’t broken them all, we’d have reached King William Land long before

  now. If Franklin was there we’d have found him, or signs of his ships. We’d have discharged our mission. Instead, we’ve achieved nothing at all.

  The ships may yet be there, mumbled Kennedy, shamefaced, not meeting his eye, but I am sure that by now they are long since abandoned. And we haven’t achieved nothing. We’ve confirmed the new strait’s existence. It was exactly where I looked for it. It was where it was set on the child’s map.

  Bellot had turned away so the others could not see him weeping. ‘What strait? What child? What whore of a map?’

  And so Kennedy had told him.

  Derry City, Ireland, two years before

  The front parlour of number 34 Strand Road in Londonderry was, like the ‘good rooms’ of most Irish houses, a shrine to the family that lived hidden behind it. There, in a silence broken only by the ticking of the clock, reposed jugs and portraits and china and ornaments, parchments and heirlooms, brooding on their mantels or hanging from their nails. They abided there in solemn state, patiently awaiting the opening of the door, the timid approach o
f the maid who dusted and polished, or the firm tread of the high priest of this cult, master shipwright William Coppin, who came in once a week to wind and correct the family clock. And there it was, not two years before, that little Louise Coppin had been laid on her trestle, her hands clasped on her chest, dressed in her sister Ann’s hand-me-down church clothes, having never – and she was now frozen for all eternity, her clock stopped for ever at the tender age of four – been given a new dress of her own.

  That sad event, as we say, had come to pass almost two years before this spring evening of 1851, and the scent of tuberoses had long since faded from the room. To Mr William Kennedy, waiting alone on a couch by the window, the air smelled only of wax and metal polish. Yet the family clock, an ancient wooden upright with a yellowed ivory face, seemed to knock inside its case like a soul trapped in a coffin, a hollow, despairing, mechanical sound, until Kennedy, who was sensitive to such things, rose abruptly from the couch and took a walk around the room.

  Here on a table by the wall was a model of Coppin’s most famous design, the steamship Great Northern, the biggest screw ship in the world on the day, nine years before, that she glided down his slipway and into the Foyle. Here were framed certificates from the London Board of Trade and the registrars of shipping. Here was a framed drawing of the first screw propellor, which Captain Coppin had championed, and whose patent he had disastrously failed to exploit. And here too, detaining Kennedy’s interest the longest, was a portrait of the Coppin family, a calotype image dated two years before. This portrait, or photograph, showed Captain Coppin and his wife Dora with their five children, the four older children standing in front, the parents behind, with Mrs Coppin holding her newborn in her arms. The older children stood with their hands limp by their sides, gazing hither and thither, some looking at the apparatus, some to one side, with the stupid, self-absorbed faces of those who did not yet understand that new form of magic called ‘drawing in light’: who did not comprehend that in facing the lens they were facing eternity. Only one of them, the second youngest, a sturdy little girl in a dress that was too big for her, a child of perhaps four years, seemed to notice the camera’s existence; she gazed into the lens with a frank curiousity and on her lips was the trace of a smile.

  Mr Kennedy remembered his strange mission, the letter in his pocket. Louise, he thought. Little Weesy. It must be her. And he, being also unused to photography, gazed with wonder and grief at the face of a child returned from the grave. His eyes welled with tears.

  There were loud steps in the hallway, and Kennedy had just time to steady himself before the door opened. Captain Coppin, an old friend from the Canada coasting trade, was the first to come in, his frown hidden in his beard, his beard buried in his frock coat. He was speaking impatiently to someone behind him.

  ‘Come, child,’ he said, ‘we have kept Mr Kennedy waiting long enough.’ Then, as if pushed from behind, little Ann Coppin, the girl he had travelled from London to interview, came hurrying after her father. Last to enter was the girl’s aunt, Miss Smith, who – her sister Mrs Coppin being again indisposed – was supplying the place of a mother. She was a handsome woman, with a strong broad face and hair that was still brown, but her staring eyes had, for Kennedy, an unsettling intensity. He noticed it again now as she glanced around the room, as if searching in its corners for something he could not see.

  ‘Come, Mr Kennedy,’ said Coppin, who made an effort to smile at his friend. ‘Let us both sit and you may question the girl.’

  Ann Coppin was a thin child of about nine years of age with stiff red hair pulled back from her forehead and pale white skin through which veins showed like marble. Her eyes were green yet red-rimmed from crying, or want of sleep, or excess of nerves; they had a distracted, feverish look as they darted around the room. It is more than eighteen months since Louise died, thought Kennedy. Can her grief be still so fresh?

  The child was introduced to Kennedy and made her curtsy, though she did not meet his eye. Then she stood there and waited, swaying from side to side with an almost imperceptible motion, as if intent on some distant, private music, her eyes turned to the carpet. Looking more closely, Captain Kennedy observed a faint smile on her lips – the same knowing smile he had seen on the face of her dead little sister in the portrait on the wall. Louise was the first, he understood: this one will be second. She is already halfway there. He turned his head for a moment, to steady his feelings, and saw the rags of grey cloud that tore past the window, the smoke from Coppin’s shipyard across the Strand, the rain on the glass pane. They all move before the wind; they ought not to beat back against it. An immense sense of ­sorrow momentarily seized him, as if his soul were bared to the universe, as if he must feel compassion for every dead soul, every lost child, every grain of dust in all creation: as if he were God, all-knowing yet powerless.

  Is this what the child knows? Is that the wind that sways her? He had a list of questions he had wanted to put to her about the letter that Captain Coppin had sent to Lady Franklin. He could dispense with most of them now.

  ‘Do you still see her, Ann?’ he asked softly. ‘Is your little sister Louise here in this room with us now?’

  The girl looked up at him, sharply, as if she had suddenly awoken to his presence. After a moment’s pause she shook her head.

  ‘No, sir. She is not here.’

  He nodded and smiled to encourage her. ‘If she were here now, in this room with us, would you be able to see her?’

  She answered quite frankly, without affectation, as if she were merely settling some detail of her previous day’s activity. ‘Sometimes I see her, sometimes I don’t. But when she is here, even if I do not see her I would always feel she was present. So would the other children, sir. But only I would see her.’

  Her aunt, who stood behind her, spoke up. ‘We set a place at table for Weesy every night, Captain. She sits between myself and little Ann.’

  Reluctantly, Kennedy gave Miss Smith his attention. He did not trust this woman’s quiet exultation. ‘Have you seen her too, Miss Smith?’

  ‘Oh no. I am not sensitive enough, alas. But I feel her presence. So do the other children, and Captain Coppin himself.’ Her brother-in-law moved in his chair and looked embarrassed, but kept his silence. ‘Little Willie is more sensitive than the rest of us, though less sensitive than Ann. Sometimes he glimpses Weesy as a ball of blue light and rushes over to embrace his little sister, who was his great darling. That is why he hits his head against the wall.’

  ‘I see.’ She was smiling tightly, though not at him or anyone else in the room. Her eyes looked past his shoulder at the grey sky and the rain. ‘So, you say that it is his grief for his sister that makes the child William harm himself?’

  ‘Not grief, Mr Kennedy, but love. Little Weesy is still with us. There is nothing for Willy to grieve.’

  Ann made a loud sigh and her aunt, interpreting the sound as an indication of agreement, patted the child’s thin shoulder. Standing behind her niece, Miss Smith could not see the expression which flitted across the child’s face, an eye-rolling grimace of scorn and impatience. But Kennedy saw it, and sank heavily back in his chair, stunned at the child’s silent insolence, and more, at this glimpse of a secret knowingness, even a bitterness, far beyond the girl’s years. He turned and looked at his friend, seeking confirmation that he had not imagined it, but Coppin was evidently in the grip of deep emotion and sat leaning forward with his face in his hands, his eyes covered and his shoulders stiff, as if his whole frame had been frozen in the act of a sob. When Kennedy turned back to the girl her face had resumed its previous serene expression. He watched her sway in her invisible wind.

  ‘Do you know your letters, Ann? Can you read and write?’

  She screwed up her face again, but this time it was with the innocent frown of a child. ‘I know the letters. But I am not good with them. Often when I write them they come out backward or wrong. I am behi
nd my class at school and the teacher often beats me.’

  ‘You do not like your school, Ann?’

  ‘No, sir. But of course I must go.’

  Her aunt spoke again. ‘She is a good child, Mr Kennedy. She does her best at all her lessons and is very good at her sums. I always tell her that when her teachers oppress her or her classmates bully her that she must remind herself that God has given her another book to read, one that is beyond her tormentors’ sight.’

  Kennedy waited until she was finished and then he spoke to the child. ‘And Louise,’ he said. ‘Could she read and write?’

  Miss Smith interrupted again. ‘Weesy was only four years old when she passed over, on the Whitsun before last. She had not started her letters. But she was a quick child and would have done well at lessons.’

  Glancing sideways, Kennedy saw that his friend remained stiff and silent, but that he had pulled his hands halfway down his face, so that his eyes, dull and dry, stared at the far wall. How I wish, thought Kennedy, that poor Coppin were not here. But he addressed the child again.

  ‘Little Weesy could not write, and you yourself have trouble reading. Yet the message you received was in the form of writing, appearing on the floor?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And the map has several names on it. Were they in writing, too?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I see . . . Had you, or your little sister, seen any such maps, or read any accounts of the search for Erebus and Terror? I mean, before Louise passed on?’

  ‘They had not,’ interrupted Miss Smith. ‘These were not matters to interest little girls.’

  ‘But there might have been newspapers lying about the drawing room, perhaps? Or perhaps they might have heard Captain Coppin discuss the missing expedition with his visitors? Seafaring men have spoken of little else these past three years.’

  Coppin stirred, and at last he spoke. His voice was hoarse, and taut with feeling.