by Jeremy Page
On board the Amethyst, the routines continued as before. The bilge was pumped at eight bells, the log-line run almost every hour, and the sun sighted at noon. These things punctuated the day. But there was also much talk about Captain Bray’s damaged ship, its failed cargo of whale oil and its frozen passenger on her bed of ice. Bletchley talked endlessly about a wish he’d had, since being a child, of being able to shoot one, how he could outwit it by circumnavigating the wind and using the sun to blind his approach on a flat white surface. He suggested a plan of hiding in a sealskin, laying ambush to a polar bear by shooting it at close range when it approached.
‘Lay yourself out for his luncheon?’ French had replied, with little-disguised derision. He was playing draughts against Bletchley. I noticed it was the captain’s set, and French was playing ‘bullet’.
‘I would have two guns loaded, of course,’ said Bletchley.
‘And perhaps a napkin to tuck around his neck?’
Bletchley had laughed along with us at the joke, unaware that he was being mocked, continuing regardless: ‘In all seriousness, I think it would be possible—’
‘Of course, Mr Bletchley. Well, we must try it at the first opportunity.’
Seeing Talbot enter the saloon with his distinctive shuffle, Bletchley had turned excitedly towards him. ‘We shall see bears, Mr Talbot?’ he’d asked, hopefully.
Talbot glanced impatiently at Bletchley, before disappearing into his cabin with nothing to say on the matter and no wish to be drawn.
It was left to French to answer in his place. ‘We will see seals, Mr Bletchley, and where we see seals, there are always bears.’
I had little time for this hunting talk. The reek of butchery that had clung to the Jester was difficult to overcome. In fragments, it had persisted—I had smelt it on the lapel of my jacket, on another occasion when I had combed my hair, and once even when I had turned the pages of a notebook. Death had been brought back to the Amethyst.
Only Clara seemed untouched. In fact, her health had begun to improve. Instead of the fragility of those first few days, when her sunken eyes and thin blue skin had suggested an entrenched illness, now she had a new vigour. During the day she and Bletchley took great pains to avoid each other, coming out on deck or retiring to their cabins like the figures on a weather-house clock, never out in the open at the same time. If, by chance, they passed each other, they would nod in cordial fashion; nothing more nor less. But the evening ushered in a quite different attitude. They would sit together on one of the settees, whispering or passing notes between them.
Once, while Clara appeared to be asleep at the end of the settee, I noticed Edward Bletchley looking about him, quite craftily, to see if he was being observed. Satisfied that he wasn’t, he proceeded to stroke her upon the wrist and forearm. When she showed no response, he placed his hand upon her lap and let it rest there, motionless. I watched, transfixed. After a minute or two I realised he must have been forcing his hand down, for her dress had become depressed between her legs. I saw his fingers rapidly clench and deliver what must have been a strong pinch upon her thigh. Clara jolted with a start, her eyes springing open as she tried to suppress an astonished cry. But she didn’t even look at her cousin, or acknowledge the errant hand that was still lying upon her lap. A minute or so passed, until I watched with horror as Bletchley’s grip once more pinched her, slower this time, but with equal force and pain. Clara reacted, staring intently and drawing a breath through pursed lips until, with the sound of someone coming down the companionway, the offending hand was quickly removed.
Occasionally, if the cabin latches were not properly shut, the motion of the ship had the tendency to spring them open. This occurred one evening as I was retiring to bed. Both my door and—directly opposite—Clara’s door swung open, as if mischievously pulled by an invisible thread. I leapt to close mine, and had a clear sight into Clara’s cabin. Surprisingly, I saw Bletchley perched at the end of her bed. He was stooped intently over a board placed on the blankets. In front of him, Clara was leaning back against the wall, her eyes firmly shut as if in a deep trance. Seeing her door had opened, it was Bletchley who reacted—jumping from the bed as if he had been stung by a wasp. He nodded formally at me before closing the door with a firm click.
I was quite certain, in those days, that Clara hadn’t recognised me, and had no knowledge of the role I had once played in her life, on that fateful Sunday at the end of October in 1835. Her encounters with me on board were polite: wishing me good morning, or good evening, but never revealing anything else. Yet there were times when, facing her across the dinner table, I caught her glancing up at me in a most peculiar fashion. She would stare at my hands or smile inexplicably, and when I returned the smile it was as if she hadn’t noticed me at all.
On May Day, the crew surprised us by blackening their faces with grease and soot. They came down to the passenger quarters in a procession, fantastically dressed in ribbons and tricorns, with epaulettes upon their shoulders. It was a startling and most unexpected sight. One of the Herlihy brothers, brandishing a wooden sword, approached Bletchley—who had been reading a book—ordering him to fetch ‘them dandy trousers and the daft blue coat’ in order that he could lead the men and women around the deck.
Bletchley had been startled by the wooden sword, but quickly sensed a game was in the offing. ‘What women?’ he asked.
‘Them maidens,’ the Herlihy brother said, pointing his sword. Two of the men stepped forward, with garishly painted faces and halved coconuts hung from their necks as grotesquely adorned breasts. The roughest, most hirsute of the crew had been chosen to be the girls.
‘Oh,’ Bletchley managed, quite taken aback. ‘Of course. And delightfully pretty they are, too.’
Bletchley had been game that day, leading the ship’s company around the deck, making gestures for the others to ape as they followed, while they banged kettles and frying pans and the like. It was an infernal noise. He grimaced and played up for about an hour, until he’d quite worn the crew out. At one point he stopped when he spotted me:
‘That man there is not being enough of a monkey. Have him arrested!’ The men approached en masse, but I swung my arms and chattered like a chimp and they thought fit to let me stay free.
‘Quick thinking,’ French whispered in my ear. ‘It has been known for the leader to leap over the side, in which case we have to follow. Do you think Master B is quite as much a fool as that?’ Bletchley, at that moment, was arranging for a pair of the coconut halves to be hung around his own neck.
‘Perhaps. I have the sense that Edward has yet to reveal himself.’
‘We have a lot of breasts this year, I’ve noticed,’ French said, as a casual aside. ‘It’s because there’s a woman on board. The sailors think we’ll have bad weather—the naked breasts are meant to counteract that. We have no figurehead, you see, the sailors are all talking about it in their fetid quarters.’ French tightened his cloak and pulled his cuffs straight. I couldn’t gauge his mood. I smelt a whiff of eau de cologne on him. ‘At least she’s in her cabin now. May be for the best—the men are dead superstitious about having her up on deck.’
When, at long last, the festival wound to a close, Simao invited the passengers to join the officers in the saloon, where a platter of biscuits and pastries had been laid out. Coloured paper chains had been hung beneath the skylights and cotton doilies in the shape of snowflakes had been placed at our settings. Simao, with his customary precision, invited us to stand in a line alongside the table. We stood, like as many schoolchildren, while Simao went to the captain’s cabin and knocked once upon the door. Sykes answered, entering the saloon wearing a velvet cloak and a crown of sorts, made from a cooper’s hoop.
‘I say, Captain Sykes, what’s all this about?’ Bletchley piped up, grinning so wide his dimples were like upholstery buttons.
Sykes eyed him, regally. ‘I do not know this captain you speak of. As you all may see, my name is Neptune, and I have the gr
eat pleasure to inform you that not only is this the first day of May, but at noon we crossed into the Arctic Circle.’
Bletchley beamed with delight, skittish as a kitten, and promptly made us all shake hands.
‘Wonderful news!’ he said. ‘Wonderful!’
‘I have upon my hand a bishop’s ring of rough amethyst crystal,’ Sykes continued, holding up a hand to show us. ‘Amethyst, as you are aware, is also the name of this fine ship, and I wish you all to bless her with a kiss of the Episcopal ring, after which you may attack the cakes our steward has prepared, with as much excessive gluttony as you wish.’
Sykes moved along the line, inviting myself, Bletchley and Clara to kiss the ring, which we did. He shook our hands. ‘Welcome to the Arctic,’ he said to each of us, in turn.
I remember the feel of French’s hand, which was surprisingly dry, and a handshake that was brief and quickly dispatched. Sykes’ hand felt small and vigorous, like the hind thigh of a whippet, twitching with energy.
Remarkably, for the second time, Talbot refused to offer his hand as I approached. Instead he stared me down with anxious consternation. Clara noticed this exchange—or rather lack of exchange—and came to save me, guiding me away from the taciturn second mate and offering her cheek for me to kiss. Doing so, I heard her whisper I think you will find what you are looking for, by way of a wish, or blessing. I felt her squeeze my elbow, affectionately, but as I pulled away from her I was aware of a hot and unpleasant look that French gave me, as if I had behaved improperly.
That was the occasion when I saw Clara happily eating several of the coconut biscuits. Simao, excessively relieved, kept offering her more, in the manner of a grateful mother whose child has just regained its appetite. She laughed when Bletchley insisted he try on Neptune’s crown. I was struck by the fact that I had never heard her laugh before. For the time being, I was happy too. I gazed at her, full of contentment. A happy woman is a righted world, I thought.
I had thought about Celeste since that autumn when I had worked at the manor house near Somerleyton in Norfolk, sitting in the conservatory, organising the egg collection. Each day I’d watched her being led across the lawn, bronze leaves blowing about her feet, a shawl tied closely around her shoulders. It hadn’t taken me long to work out where she was for the rest of the time. She was shut away in her bedroom, kept behind a locked door, in an unheated part of the manor house, held distant from myself and any other visitors as if we might be a threat or bring contagion.
During those weeks I had been exposed to a mystery. In a largely silent house filled only with the distant ticking of several clocks, a girl was apparently a virtual prisoner of her parents. Every day she was guided in a kind of trance, the processional circuit of an invalid, led by her mother. At each turn of the walk, before her feet touched the brick edging, I would see a glimpse of her face, eyes turned down in meditation, her cheek pale and bloodless in the chill, her hair tied simply and without ornamentation. My work was tedious, assembling the fragments of rare eggshell into complete specimens, strengthening them with careful plaster moulding, and then arranging the collection by zoological group and species. It was easy for my mind to create its fantasies—what the fleeting appearances on the lawn meant, or the nature of her illness. I made small discoveries: her name was Celeste, she was the daughter of the house, an only child, and she had recently been withdrawn from all public interaction. It was not much to go on, and rather than appease my curiosity, it inflamed it.
Before long, in the hour after lunch, I began to explore the house, using the servants’ staircases and passages, pacing the cold-carpeted corridors that were left unheated. It was a damp and chilled place. A large wood-burner roared in the entrance hall, but its heat was channelled elsewhere, into the library and drawing rooms. At the very top of the house I found her bedroom. It was locked from the outside.
It took me a couple of weeks before I began to pass her door on a daily basis, and longer still until I lingered there. I would press my ear to the wooden panels. Occasionally I was able to discern sounds of her moving, or pacing the rug with bare feet, or the clink of glass bottles being arranged on the marble surface of a dressing table. Once or twice, while I was looking at the light that crept below her door, a shadow would pass.
At those times, I felt a very real presence of the girl inside the room, and she must have also sensed me, for it wasn’t long before my visits to the door were noticed. I would stop, lean my ear against the cold paint and listen to the sound of her approaching. With just an inch of wood between us, I could hear the faint sound of her breaths and could imagine the softness of her hair, virtually touching mine. I held the palm of my hand against the wood. A finger lightly drummed against the other side, and I replied, mimicking the rhythm.
I began to rely on visiting the corridor, never letting a day pass without going there, and I felt that Celeste looked forward to these moments too. Strangely, neither of us spoke, even though a whisper would have been heard. It was as if to speak might break the spell. Sometimes, during her walks on the lawn, I had noticed that she looked up to glance in my direction, her face still tilted down but her eyes searching for mine as I sat at my desk.
It was she who spoke first. With my head leaning against the wood one afternoon, her voice was soft.
‘Is it you again?’ she asked.
It was as if I woke from a dream. I started, unsure of how to react.
‘Can you hear me?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. That is very good. Why do you come here, every day?’
I felt like running. What was I doing? I’d been hired for a job, to be in the conservatory, curating the egg collection. What on earth was I thinking, leaning against this bedroom door in a part of the house I had no right to be in?
‘I must go,’ I said.
‘Please …’ she urged. ‘Stay.’
I had taken a step away from the door, but I returned and leant my head against it once more.
‘My name is Celeste,’ she whispered.
‘Mine is Eliot.’
‘Eliot,’ she repeated, trying the name. ‘Are you the man who is helping my father?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is your work nearly done?’
‘A few more days.’
‘I have seen you, working in a very careful manner.’
I waited, knowing that at any minute I might be discovered, knowing also that this would lead to my instant dismissal, but still I was unable to leave.
‘My father has spent a great deal of time and money collecting those eggs,’ she said. ‘I wish you would smash them all.’
7
I WILL SAVE YOU, I had promised. Each day, sitting at that bench alone in the draughty conservatory, mending the eggs, the same thought. Save her from that dreadful captivity, that torment. Each day I would creep up the staircase and listen outside her door. I will save you, I would whisper, so quiet she would not be able to hear me.
But you didn’t, I said to myself, standing on the deck of the Amethyst. You didn’t save her. Out to sea a dense pall of fog rolled towards the ship. It felt like the arrival of a dark and malevolent force. A brooding shadow that was accompanying the voyage, out there, getting closer, gaining on us. Others on deck had noticed it too, stopping their duties to stare at the purplish tinge in the clouds, the colour of Welsh slate. Soon the fog overran us, and a dense storm of snow sped past the ship’s side and through the rigging, fast as smoke, clinging and settling on any exposed part of the deck. Within minutes the entire ship had been transformed under a covering of fine white powder, crisp to the touch on any exposed piece of wood or rope. I expected it to soften and melt, becoming slippery and wet, but instead it had a brittle and grainy texture that remained for an hour or two, setting my teeth on edge as I stepped through it, until some of the men used deck brushes to clear the working areas. Talbot, at the helm, merely turned his collar up against the weather, purposely ignoring it, even though his beard q
uickly developed a dusting. French, on the other hand, wanted no part of it. I saw him duck into the galley as soon as the snow was sighted, and he remained in there until long afterwards.
After watching the blizzard, startled by the sight of the mast tops spearing through the snow, I needed to go to the saloon for warmth. There, I pressed my ear against the base of the mizzenmast, wondering whether I’d be able to hear the vibrations of the storm: distant sounds carried through the wood, of ropes and cables, the whole living sinews of the ship bearing the forces of the weather. The rest of the room was unnaturally hushed, punctuated by the regular creak of oil lamps swinging above the table and the ticking of the sheep’s head clock by the captain’s cabin. It was only then that I realised Clara was sitting in the second part of the saloon, on one of the settees, studying me.
I quickly removed my ear from the mast. ‘It’s snowing outside,’ I explained.
‘It is?’ She put her book on the cushion and came to the mast, placing a palm against the wood.
‘It feels so incredibly strong, don’t you think? This whole ship feels quite … unbreakable. Like the forest of oaks it once was.’ She stood very close, so that I could see the complicated arrangement of her hair—drawn into a plaited knot at the back, with a similar plaited band across the top of her head and loose ringlets that hung either side. It must take concerted preparation, each day, I thought. I noticed a single grey hair, among the brown.
‘Seeing as I have you all to myself,’ she began, ‘I have been wondering whether you might show me the drawings you have made? You seem quite inseparable from your sketchbook.’
‘Yes, I suppose that’s true. Of course, I shall fetch it.’ The sketchbook was in my cabin. On the way back I stopped, took a breath and examined my reflection in the mirror above the washstand.
