‘And you are very direct.’
‘Are you scared of what they’ll say? The men?’
Hooker let out a bark, half laugh, half yelp. ‘No.’
She waited, one more time. He ran his finger across her palm and it came to her – the thing she wanted to tell him. She felt afraid but the thought of not saying what she felt and returning to the galley did not lie easily.
‘I have been a married woman. I almost starved to death. Then I might have been keelhauled. I might have been thrown overboard. I was injured and you nursed me back to health, but I could have died of what happened to me. Sailors have died of less. I am lucky, Doctor Hooker. I am here at the end of the world and it is a miracle I have survived. Any day one of these storms might do for all of us. Do you think I want to wait like an English lady? To talk of drawing rooms and dressing rooms and of shopping in Piccadilly for a new bodice and a green dress. A fox cape to keep me warm. How many times do you think I must dodge death before I learn to grasp life when it shows itself?’
She could feel her cheeks burning. Hooker’s eyes were stern. ‘No one has ever spoken to me like that,’ he said, low, below his breath.
She reached out, a pulse of fury running through her. She slapped him hard.
‘Wake up,’ she snapped. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
Hooker grabbed her wrist. ‘My God.’ She flinched as he reached in her direction but he only laid a long finger on her lips. Then slowly he began to stroke her face.
When it happened, making love felt as natural as the gentle seasons of Europe – an escape from the harshness of the polar extreme. One stroke leading to another, once they had started. It was an exploration.
‘Joseph,’ she whispered, trying his name for the first time. She had only ever heard the captain use it. He fetched furs from his trunk and stretched a thick bearskin over the bed. Then he laid her on it.
‘You are my ice queen,’ he breathed, as he helped her remove the grey dress and regarded her snowy skin as it emerged.
‘We are like Esquimaux,’ she teased him.
Joseph did not like that. He had not been to the north, but he had read Ross’s journals.
‘You are not a native woman. You are not a country wife.’
She had no idea what he meant, but he had used the word wife and that felt promising. She nuzzled his neck. She wondered if here, in the most unexpected of places, they might have a life. She lay on the fur, luxuriating in it and watched him watch her as he removed his clothes and bent to stroke her hair. Then he clambered on top and set her alight so she forgot everything except her desire.
Afterwards he said he had drowned in her.
‘Do not say that,’ she whispered. ‘No sailor should ever think of drowning.’
Hooker laughed. ‘When I was inside you, I swear you smiled.’
‘Of course.’
What strange kind of women had he had before, she wondered. They kissed until he fell asleep and for a while she watched his breath rise and fall, his lips rosy as a girl’s and his hair parted to one side, flopping onto the pillow. His body was taut, like a working man and yet he was still boyish. Her newly reinstated curves were by way of contrast. With Thebo, she had run away. It had been a carnival from the day they were married at the sailor’s church in Lisbon. But this was a long, slow dance and she realized there had been times when she hadn’t been able to tell her own body from his.
‘Karina,’ he breathed in sleep, and reached out to hold her.
She stretched under the cover. He moved, caressing the curve of her hip and the line of her stomach. Then he nestled into her neck breathing in the scent of her pale hair. There had been a shift, she realized.
Outside the porthole she followed the line of blue sky till it met the ice and she felt no need to be anywhere else the whole world wide than with Joseph Hooker. Drifting to sleep she dreamed of skating across the ice.
When she woke, his dinner lay uneaten on the desk. She slipped out of his arms and pulled on the shabby grey dress. Then she lifted the tray and took it back to the galley, careful to be in place before Si Bevan arrived to set the kettle boiling and start the round of cornbread and pease porridge.
‘What are you smiling at?’ he asked.
She hadn’t been aware she was smiling.
‘It’s a beautiful day,’ she said, nodding towards the porthole.
‘Beautiful day,’ Si muttered under his breath, dismissing such madness. ‘I’ll give you a beautiful day. We just have to get on with it, don’t we?’
EIGHT
That night, Karina moved into the doctor’s cabin. She did so without announcement. Nobody commented upon the new arrangement. The British, it seemed, preferred not to say anything and having few possessions meant that the matter could be managed discreetly. She waited for some kind of outcry or backlash or judgement, but the cold made thinking a slow process and gradually outrage had become all but impossible. The crew were more interested in warm bread, fish stew and scalded rum than in the rights and wrongs of wedlock. The affair was a private matter. Life on board, she thought, now she had settled to it, passed as easily as when she was a boy and was far more diverting.
At night, the doctor and his mistress took to swathing the furs from his trunk on top of their greatcoats. They tripped up on deck to glory in the canopy of the bright sky and make out what they could of the stars. There, at the end of the world, it felt as if they were alone, the crew sleeping in hammocks below, the outline of the sun and the moon hanging in the sky at once.
The days were full of activity but the nights felt empty of everything except the landscape and the bearskin flung across his berth when they went back below. As the season turned and darkness began to bleed further across the sky each night, the ships turned back and the officers of the Erebus came aboard for a celebration dinner to mark the start of the trip northwards. The way the men eyed her, she could tell they knew everything. She wondered if a junior officer had sent the news to the other ship, and which flag might have declared her a woman and the doctor’s lover.
Hanging back, she avoided their glances, content to be the girl in the shadows, as she passed them in the dark corridor or scurried to fetch a bottle from the store. An officer as blond as she was sniffed the air in her wake. ‘Violets,’ he pronounced. ‘Can you almost smell violets?’
‘It’s your imagination, Harry,’ his fellow cajoled him. ‘None of us have smelled a thing since God knows what bearing.’
‘They say she can cook almost anything,’ the first man said wistfully. ‘Makes you wish she’d stowed away on our side.’
But nobody said a word to Karina’s face and after the cheese had been finished and the port drunk, the officers returned to their ship and the course was set northwards.
From then on, Pearce and the other midshipmen were taken up making a fair copy of the map and the rest sailed hard for they must get out of these waters before the winter hit. The crew talked of warmer climes, of drinking beer at port and of crossing the equator.
‘We’ll resupply,’ Bevan sounded excited as he stood filleting fish. He could not write but verbally he repeatedly ran over the list of provisions he’d buy. Fresh fruit, vegetables and meat. The lemons were gone and needed to be replaced. And the coffee and the tea. In warmer weather, food spoiled more easily but they would put in periodically to resupply as they sailed up the coast. ‘Brazil for the cacao,’ he announced. ‘Then Tobago.’ The words lolled around his mouth.
And galley to sick bay, Karina continued. She cooked and helped the doctor tend to the men. When one of the seamen died, she sewed the canvas around him and the crew gathered to sing a hymn and slip his body into the icy sea. As they turned back to their duties, the men deferred to her, she noticed. They let her walk ahead.
The weeks passed. The map was almost finished by the time the ships arrived back where they had started, at the penguin colony. The anchor was weighed and the bells were rung. Then whistles sounded. Some kind of cer
emony was underway. ‘We’ll stay a day, I expect,’ Si Bevan said sagely, as he handed Karina a tray to deliver to the captain’s cabin. It was a dish of sweetened rice pudding. Ross ate at his desk during the day. He called it ‘nursery food’. The captain waved her in.
‘Thank you.’ He motioned her to leave the dish and she hovered waiting to be dismissed. But the captain hesitated as if he had something to say.
‘Sir?’
Ross cleared his throat. ‘A lady shouldn’t work,’ he said.
He had realized, it seemed, that Karina was not the shabby illiterate he had first assumed. The compliment sent a prickle down her spine but she did not want to be confined. Working in the galley was better than having nothing to do.
‘Oh no, sir. How else might I be occupied? I am happy.’ She realized as she said it that it was true. She was happier than she had ever been – even those first heady months of running away with her husband. Even then.
‘It has been difficult for the men,’ the captain continued. ‘And you have done admirably. Do you remember, Mrs Lande, what I said to you in the sick bay?’
Karina nodded. Her fingers quivered. She put them behind her back. ‘You said you would put me off, sir. First place we came to.’
‘The first place will likely be Deception Island.’
Fear must have flickered across her face but he sought to comfort her. ‘Do not concern yourself. I could not be so cruel, after the service you have given. We will hide you aboard if you wish, when we pick up our first supplies. But I cannot allow you passage, Mrs Lande. It is not fitting. Hooker tells me you have a sister.’
‘In Amsterdam, sir.’
‘You wish to return to her?’
Karina hesitated. It was what she had always wanted but now Hooker had stroked her hair and promised her London. She had a sudden vision of it – his world, the two of them strolling down Pall Mall. ‘Your skin is like silk,’ he had said the night before as he slipped inside her. And then, for the first time, ‘I love you.’ The words had made her gasp as they tumbled from his lips and she wrapped herself around him tighter.
Ross glared, waiting for a reply. What visions flickered in front of his eyes, she wondered. What did the captain long for? ‘Amsterdam, Mrs Lande?’ he offered again.
‘It is what I hoped for when I came aboard,’ she replied.
‘There will be Dutch ships at Maranhão. We can put you ashore there. The doctor will pay your passage.’ He said it as if the matter was settled.
Karina eyes flicked towards the door, the corridor and Hooker’s cabin. ‘That is what he wishes?’ she asked.
‘I am the captain, Mrs Lande. It is what I wish.’
She bit her lip. It was on the tip of her tongue to promise him custards and nut cracknel and choux pastry but he wasn’t a junior officer or a negro servant. ‘Please, sir—’ she started but Ross cut her off.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘do not try my patience.’ Then he waved her away.
She burst like a bullet into the corridor and headed straight for Hooker’s cabin. The doctor was not there. Inside, she paced up and down wondering if he knew this was what the captain had intended. Had they discussed it? And if so, why had Hooker said nothing? Outside the porthole the ice continued eternal but it could not calm her. At least he did not intend to put her ashore on Deception.
On Hooker’s desk lay a pile of papers, a book about Linnean classification and the doctor’s journal. Karina hesitated as she moved towards his leather-bound notebook and then pulled back. She itched to open the pages and see – did he know? And if so, how long had he plotted with the captain to send her away? She restrained herself. That wasn’t love. Instead, she slumped into his chair and wiped a tear from her cheek as the door opened.
‘My love,’ the doctor said lightly, as his greatcoat brushed against the door frame. He laid an eyeglass on his desk and removed his hat. His glasses had steamed. It was not warm below, but it was warmer than on deck. He wiped them and then laid the palm of his hand on her shoulder. She wrapped her fingers around it.
‘Did you know, Joseph?’
‘Know what?’
‘Captain Ross will put me ashore.’
Hooker did not reply straight away. He simply sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at length. ‘There is nothing I can do. But I will pay your passage, Karina.’
‘And London? You said you wanted to show me London. You talked of home?’
She realized she had entertained a vision of her cooking for him. A halfway position between housekeeper and lover. Something, now she thought of it, that was unspoken on his part. He had talked of shopping. Of going to the theatre. Of plants. Of exhibits. Never of them living together. ‘You do not want me?’
‘In England,’ he started, ‘there is no place …’
‘We shall go to Glasgow, then.’ She knew she sounded simple. For a man like Thebo to marry a servant was almost acceptable. But for a doctor. A botanist. A gentleman.
‘I have thought about it,’ he said slowly. ‘I could set up a household. A place in the country. Kensington, perhaps. I could visit you there.’
Karina felt her heart shift. If the ice shifted the same, it would surely crack. She got to her feet and got to the door without making a sound. In the corridor, she whimpered as she leaned against the wooden planking. She had been a fool.
Hooker stood in the open doorway and peered after her. ‘Come back,’ he asked. ‘Please. I haven’t finished.’
Karina turned. ‘Finished?’
‘Damn it, woman.’
Sheepishly, she turned. Hope will make you go back, she thought. Hope was what had kept her on Deception too long. She might have stowed away on another ship. She might be home by now. Her heart sank further. Hooker closed the door behind her.
‘I know you can’t take me to a ball. To an opening. To your la-di-da. I know that.’
‘La-di-da?’
Bevan had used the word the other day and she had liked it.
‘You want me to be your mistress?’
‘Look, do you have to always be so … direct?’
‘I thought you liked that about me.’
‘I do. Sometimes.’
‘You like it well enough in bed.’
He grinned. ‘I can pay for you to go to your sister’s. From Brazil it should be easy enough to find a packet to take you there. And then, if I was lucky, I hoped you might come to me.’
‘And I would be a secret?’
‘Many men have such secrets, Karina.’
‘You are ashamed of me.’
‘I worship you.’
‘And what would I do?’
‘Do?’
‘All day? What would I do with my time? Between these visits?’
He was about to say something when a sharp rap came on the door and Pearse popped his head around. ‘Sir,’ the midshipman said, ‘come quickly. There’s been an injury. Fulsom has fallen out of the rigging.’
Hooker shrugged in her direction only a fraction. His eyes betrayed a sliver of relief. Then he grabbed his bag and disappeared in the boy’s wake. She wondered if he might say, ‘Dismissed,’ as Ross did with his officers when he breezed off, but the doctor was more abrupt even than that. She glanced at his journal once more as the door banged behind him. Riffling among his papers lacked grace. Instead she returned to the galley.
Her jaw set in determination, she found a task to do. At least it would keep her occupied. Above, men were running this way and that, as she decanted wine for the captain’s table. She followed their motion, guessing what was happening above. She felt part of the ship and the truth was that here, she had been useful and Hooker had made her feel loved. Was it all an illusion? Holding up the bottle to check she was leaving only the dregs, she drank a mouthful in defiance, putting down the decanter just in time as Bevan bustled in.
The old cook hulked a leg of smoked ham onto the block before raising his knife. ‘I’d forgotten about this,’ he said. ‘If only we had eggs. Or l
eastways, if I hadn’t killed the chickens. One of the young ones fell, you know. It’s a broken leg, they say. The doctor is setting it now. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing will come of nothing, boy,’ he chortled. ‘Love’s young dream, is it?’
She flinched. ‘They will put me off at Brazil.’
Bevan looked taken aback. ‘Put you off? The best thing that ever happened aboard this ship? And what am I supposed to do? It was bad enough when you were poorly.’
All afternoon she kept thinking of the difference between them. What Hooker had to go back to. London. Family. The honour of lecturing about the pole and the penguins. It felt by contrast as if she had very little. Maybe she’d get to Amsterdam and Marijke would be gone. She’d need to find herself a position. A new life. It was dark in the galley and walls began to close in. The logic of the captain’s decision made her stumble as she mixed the dough for a baked pudding and sprinkled raisins into it, folding the paste till the little black dots disappeared. The ship could be a coffin, she thought. It was only a box of wood and they might as well bury you. A deep sting of betrayal cut through her. Betrayal by Hooker most of all. It was the people and the place that were important and she felt that she had neither.
When the doctor asked for her that evening, she refused, buying off Hepworth with a savoury strip of toasted cheese spiced with mustard powder so he would deliver the message that she was busy. Then, before Hooker could reply, she wrapped up and took herself on deck. The white nights had long receded and the cliffs ashore glowed blue in the darkness. The air was so sharp it felt it might cut the skin. Winter was coming and it would be fierce. A long stream of smoke trailed from the galley into the night sky and below decks there was the sound of dice being thrown and then cheering.
She wondered what she had expected of him. Did she think she might become a gentleman’s wife? It struck her that she had always wished for what Marijke had, but Jakson, Marijke’s husband, was no gentleman. He was a stolid burgher and wealthy but that was quite different. He valued Marijke’s business sense. Her way with people. Thebo had been a captain, and she had been only a pretty adventurer, for that is what he wanted on his arm. Neither of these men were like Hooker. It seemed he had no place for passion in his public life. The English were confusing. Their ways seemed harsh. Had she made a mistake in choosing him? If that were true, it seemed late to be learning of it and besides, she knew he wasn’t truly cold. She knew it.
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