‘You must miss him.’
She did not want to meet Hooker’s eyes.
The doctor waited a moment. ‘He was young?’ he pressed.
‘He was thirty when he died.’
‘I’m sorry. You are too young to be a widow.’
‘Many are widowed as young as I was, doctor.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we see if we can get you on your feet?’
The pain felt as if it might rip her skin. Her ribs were still healing. She sat on the edge of the bed like a child dangling her feet in a freezing pool. Hooker held out his hand. She took it, afraid only momentarily of what such contact might release. He smiled. ‘Now then, I know you are brave,’ he said.
The boards were cold. She shuffled like an old woman, each movement a fresh cut, but he helped her as she made it to the porthole. Through the glass, the sun hit the ice so that it was almost blinding. The water was choppy, a dark reflection of the sky.
‘I expect that’s enough for today,’ the doctor said.
Karina struggled back and hauled herself into the bed. She sat up and he handed her the book she had been reading.
‘You are healing well. It takes longer in the cold. I have noticed it with the men. I shall check on you later.’
He proved as good as his word. The ship kept the doctor busy and Karina was not his only patient but he visited a couple of times a day. They talked. At first it was awkward. Not like before, when she was a boy.
‘Do you miss home?’ she asked.
Hooker almost shrugged. ‘The house in Glasgow – my family’s place – is built of russet stone. There is a balustrade and the gardens are lush. I miss the smell of growing things. The tick of the clock as I sit by the open window. In the summer, you know.’ He looked abashed at saying so much. The men didn’t talk like this – about what they wanted. She knew that he’d not have admitted these things to Karl. It made her smile. Perhaps things were settling. She did not want to overburden him by saying she was so homesick, she missed places she hadn’t visited. She considered Rome a moment. Yes, she was homesick even for there and she had only once seen a picture of it. ‘I didn’t mean to come here,’ she said.
Hooker got up from the stool. ‘Oh, it’s not so bad,’ he said.
The truth was, as she watched the ice through the porthole, she lost herself a little. It was like being a child and watching trees in the wind. She followed the line of the cliffs against the sky and strained to see the dark water that reflected them. And there was peace in that, she supposed. Just a little.
After a fortnight, he arrived with a brown paper parcel. He laid it on the desk and cut the string.
‘Ross sent this,’ he announced, pulling out a shabby grey gown with a stiff bodice that laced at the front. ‘Goodness,’ he held it up. ‘I wonder where he got it.’
Karina reached out and took the dress. ‘A governess. That’s what it looks like.’
She had never been one for fancy clothes. In Portugal, she had arrayed herself in a feather headdress one night and Thebo had laughed at her. They both preferred when she was simply herself. Better a governess than the other kind of woman.
‘It’ll do,’ she said. ‘Though I shall still need my woollens, I imagine.’
He waited while she changed behind the sheet.
‘I’m sorry,’ she kept saying, for it took a while. Still, the bodice fitted and not only that, it felt good to be contained. Her newly knitted ribs settled comfortably into the proscribed shape. She pulled back the sheet and he smiled.
‘When your hair grows, you’ll look fine,’ he said.
Karina ran her fingers through her shorn locks, Si Bevan’s efforts now in vain.
‘There is no hat, I’m afraid.’ Hooker lifted the empty brown paper and turned it over as if by magic more feminine attire might appear.
‘I can use my knitted cap.’
‘It will look strange.’
‘It’ll have to do.’ She leaned against the bed. Her ribs were painful still, but not as cutting as they had been. Besides, the pain was not her only worry.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘It’s them.’ She motioned upwards.
‘You will have to face the crew. We cannot confine you forever.’
Karina brushed her hand along the surface of the thick cotton skirt. The dress was slightly too long. It obscured Thebo’s old boots, at least. ‘Well,’ she said, hauling herself off the bed, ‘perhaps I should just get on with it.’
Hooker accompanied her along the corridor, up through the hatch and into the light. The men stopped work and stared with no regard for her modesty as she stepped on deck. There was silence and then, in a clatter she heard them coming up from below as news spread that the woman was on show. Far off, on the Erebus, she sensed there were some fellows sharing an eyeglass.
Hooker whispered, his tone that of a man she’d heard once, soothing an unbroken pony as he slipped on the reins. ‘They will get used to you. You look like an English lady now.’ She shifted, pulling her shoulders back and he offered her his arm. After weeks in the gloom of the sick bay with only a porthole-sized circle of light, the full vista of the glacier was so dazzling it almost blinded her. There was a lack of colour in the south and an abundance of whiteness – a shock to the unaccustomed. The air was so fresh it would sober a drunk man in seconds. It felt good on her skin. Below deck there was a perpetual fug from the men’s pipes and a heavy, musty air that lingered, ingrained into the wood.
At the mizzen, pink-faced and proud, Pearce stood in defiance as the doctor and his patient approached. Behind him two seamen lined up shoulder to shoulder.
‘Dear God,’ the midshipmen said, ‘what have we here? Our little cookie?’
‘Mrs Lande is almost well enough to return to her duties and I know, you for one, will be glad of that, Pearce.’ Hooker did not drop Karina’s arm. It was as if he was promenading with a woman of worth in his beloved London.
‘I’ll make you a tart, sir,’ Karina said.
The midshipman snorted. ‘Not dressed like that.’
She blushed.
‘For heaven’s sake man.’ Hooker sounded exasperated. ‘Have some manners.’
They continued to the bowsprit and she sat for a moment. On deck the men shifted, one or two getting back to work. Karina closed her eyes and breathed deeply. ‘You look bright,’ the doctor said. ‘Like some strange spirit.’
She wondered what he meant. Her hair was pale and now arrayed in grey, she must match the landscape along the coast. She remembered a fairy tale Marijke had once read out loud. A woman with skin as white as snow. ‘Like you,’ she had said because her own skin was peppered with freckles. Karina was the pretty one. The one easily led. Or, she had been. Now, her clothes were an odd jumble and she looked no lady. She might be able to read, but this was something different entirely. After all, a woman’s first duty was to look well on a man’s arm. That was why Thebo had fallen at her feet that day in Copenhagen when they first met. What had it been about him that she had let him?
‘Don’t worry,’ Hooker kept his voice low. ‘Give it time.’
‘You are too kind, doctor.’
‘Somebody must be kind,’ he said and held out his hand to escort her below.
SEVEN
Hooker was right. The men gradually settled. Daily, Karina promenaded on deck, more than when she was a kitchen boy. The light seemed to nourish her and the sky was stunning. There was something majestic in the roll of the icy hills and all the shades of blue that faded in and out on the changing weather. Now and then there was even a touch of orange – the ripe apricot rim of the sinking sun and the flash of a penguin’s beak. There were lights in the sky some nights that glowed golden, purple and pink. There was such clarity and vividness but, she realized with a pang, no green. She missed it. There was not so much as a patch of weedy ground or some velvety moss on the freezing stones. In time even the muddy outcrop of Deception Island developed a kind of glamour with its rough scr
ub. She ached for it with a visceral kind of longing. Green – the colour of life.
Hooker, it transpired upon coaxing, missed his garden for the same reason. He eulogized the hills beyond Glasgow. ‘The fertile, dark earth of Argyll,’ he said, as if the words were poetry. ‘Plants that live and die and live again.’ When he visited her in the evenings, he took to bringing a botanical dictionary and intoning the names of the species in Latin, pronouncing them as if they were the names of delicious morsels. He pointed at the illustrations, describing them in detail – feathery ferns that were almost yellow and the thick, dark tongues of the greenhouse exotics. He talked fondly of the orchid houses at Kew.
Karina longed differently. Her desires were less exotic – for the verdant pastures of her homeland with the bright sparks of wildflowers for which she know no Latin. The Scandic grasslands of the fallow fields of Ven where the fjällfibbla and polarull grew in summer. ‘My sister and I used to take a picnic,’ she said. Where they sat, the grass it released a clean scent onto the warm air. It seemed a hundred years ago when the world was ephemeral. In the far south, everything had an eternal quality – the glacier moved so slowly. The white and blue hardly changed and the mountains creaked without moving. ‘This place is forever. That’s why it has no smell,’ she said. Who knew that green was necessary for the soul?
It was no shock when it happened. She was almost completely better and no longer in pain. He had held off sending her back to work and she knew it. Once or twice she had thought to ask if she might go to the galley but something kept her waiting. That was a woman’s place or at least, as she understood it, that was how English women behaved.
They had eaten together that evening and were at their leisure. She was bending to read a book when Joseph laid his hand on her waist. He stroked gently and she realized she could scarcely breath. Time stopped. It was the same feeling as that evening all those weeks ago. But now it was allowed. She hesitated, trembling, and turned to meet his eyes. Here at the end of the world there was no hurry.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said.
‘I am older than you are,’ she pointed out.
‘But I am wiser,’ he smiled. Then he took just a moment too long.
‘What is it?’
‘Do you think of him?’ he asked. ‘I mean, your husband.’
With Thebo, in the beginning, it had been different to this – frantic almost. With Thebo there had been the world to excite them. All the places they had been and those left to visit. They had met in Copenhagen when Karina had returned to run the kitchen. When she arrived, it transpired that the job was to run the household. Marijke wrote daily and Karina replied by return. She negotiated an extra payment and every second Sunday off.
One Sunday, as she strolled along the Strogert, Thebo struck up a conversation as she stared in a shop window. He was wheeling a bicycle – an odd contraption. It had made her laugh out loud. ‘You should try it,’ he insisted. He was studying navigation. His father was a mapmaker, but Thebo longed to leave his family’s dusty library and see the world for himself. He asked if he could walk her home, but she refused. In the five years since she had left Ven, Karina had advanced but she was still in service. Her Sunday best, hand sewn by Marijke, made her look like a lady.
It had been pleasant to return to Copenhagen. The job was easy enough. She liked organizing the accounts and checking the linen and some evenings she would make little pastries stuffed with cinnamon and almond paste because it pleased her to cook. She took to plaiting her long, blonde hair and putting it up in a complicated bun. And it was that caught Thebo’s eye, he said. Hair like spun gold. By the time he found out she was a housekeeper, it was too late.
The affair was forbidden. They met in secret and that fired their passion. Stolen moments at the market – a chart mapping their desires. They talked of the Brazils and the countries along the Mediterranean coast. They talked of escaping the grey skies of winter and of being free. The irony that they ended up on Deception Island was not lost on her. They had passed all the colours and kept going. Did she miss him?
‘There was nothing more to come between us,’ she said. ‘You are a different passion. A different man.’
He blushed at that or perhaps it was the way she was staring now, quite openly in desire.
‘English women do not speak that way,’ he declared.
‘It is the truth. You probably saved my life, doctor. Do you want me to play games? To make you wait?’
And then he kissed her and the world stopped again.
Like the ice, she realized, love removed her from the human concerns of time and place. Amsterdam could be a few months away or a few years. It didn’t matter. She waited for him to want her naked. She waited for him to ask for more. To fumble. To unlace her. But he didn’t. They kissed for a while. That was all.
That night, she moved back to the galley. She walked along the corridor without as much as a twinge. She half expected Hooker to come after her and drag her back to his cabin. But he didn’t. She lingered at the galley door. Si Bevan jumped, aghast, when he caught sight of her. ‘I’ll never get used to it,’ he declared. ‘A kitchen boy in a dress. What are you doing?’
‘I am returning to duty.’
She slipped the dirty dishes from her supper into the old seawater tub on the floor. Hepworth appeared and disappeared again, hovering at the galley door only momentarily before he sped off down the corridor with a look of delight on his face.
‘You’d think a dumb man could hold his counsel,’ the old cook declared. ‘Well, what am I to call you now? Milady?’ He chortled. ‘I can’t say I am not glad you are back. I held off using the last of the jarred fruit so you could bake it. You can treat them to a pie tomorrow.’
As Hepworth’s silent news spread below decks, Archie appeared in the galley to gawp.
‘For God’s sake, man,’ Si snapped. ‘Is this what we’re to have? A royal progress, is it?’
Archie grinned. He had even fewer teeth than Si. Karina laid her hands on her hips. ‘If you’re coming in, you best be useful.’
Archie removed his cap and loitered away from the stove. He reached into his pocket. ‘Here,’ he said, bundling a parcel into her hands.
‘Is it for me?’
‘Go on, girl.’
Karina split the brown paper. Inside, a scarf of fine wool nestled in the centre. A merino, she would guess. She lifted it between her fingers. It took her breath away. A sigh escaped her lips. It was the colour of wet summer grass. She lifted the material to her cheek, to bathe in its greenness. ‘It’s so soft,’ she said.
‘We missed you, girl.’
Momentarily she thought she might cry.
‘Missed her? Missed her skill with the stove, more like,’ Si snapped. ‘What’s wrong with my damn cornbread anyway?’
Archie looked bashful.
‘Where did you get this?’ Karina asked as she ran the river of green between her fingers.
The old man shrugged. ‘I bought it for my missus when we docked the other side of the equator. I’ll get her another. It goes with your dress, doesn’t it?’
Karina looked doubtful. Nothing would ever match the old, worn, governess’s frock. ‘Thank you.’
That night she settled down to sleep, holding the scarf in a patch of moonlight so she could sleep in sight of it. The colour of his eyes. She was used to a bed now – albeit a hard one – and her old station on the floor made her ribs ache again. There was a creak in the corridor and she wondered if he might come for her, but it was only the ship shifting as the Terror cut through the swell. When she woke up it was morning and Si arrived into the galley, waking her late.
‘None of that,’ he said. ‘You’ll work as hard as before or you’ll not work at all, milady.’
Later, when the bread came out of the oven, he tasted it. ‘Ah,’ he let out a long sigh. ‘The boys’ll be happy.’
And from there the day stretched. Bread and pie and brose. The grog was doled out. The stew bub
bled in the pot. Perhaps she simply wasn’t used to it any more, she thought. Her arms ached but it felt good to have something to do – a strange kind of homecoming that left her still missing something. Not green any longer. Him. Oblivious, Si was in his element, clattering pans and feigning disinterest.
By the time the captain’s dishes were sent out that evening, Karina found she was singing, low, under her breath. Still, she kept a weather eye out. Not a day had passed since she was first injured that the doctor hadn’t tended to her. It was strange to have to wait and wonder if he would come. Si took out the tray and laid it. He spooned a dollop of stew and a slice of tart.
‘You better take this to Hooker, girl.’
Carrying the tray along the corridor her heart beat at a pace. She knocked on the door and waited for his call. ‘Ah, Karina,’ he said, as if he had expected her. The cabin was familiar but he had folded away the bed. She laid the tray on the side and waited awkwardly.
‘Will you share the food with me?’
She shook her head. ‘I have eaten,’ she admitted. ‘Bevan and I ate first.’
‘Galley privilege.’ Hooker motioned towards a stool and she pulled it forward. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Good.’
‘Back to work?’
She wasn’t sure what he was asking. The way English women behaved clearly made life more complicated.
‘Don’t you want me?’ she asked.
He shifted in his chair. ‘What kind of question is that?’
‘An honest one.’
‘I cannot …’ His voice trailed off. His teeth looked white and sharp and she felt as if he had torn her flesh. She wondered what it was that he seemed so ashamed of. Not that, surely. It didn’t feel that way to her. She got to her feet.
‘I don’t wish to trouble you,’ she said. ‘It must be irksome to have a woman aboard, and last night … It doesn’t matter.’
She turned to go but he caught her fingers and pulled her back. His eyes lit on the green scarf, then his gaze travelled down.
‘I want to show you London,’ he said.
‘You are a romantic, then?’
The Ice Maiden Page 7