The Ice Maiden

by Sara Sheridan

  Hooker jotted down the details of the menu. Fish stews. Corn breads. An occasional pudding steamed in syrup. On board all sweetness was as treasure and Joseph had a tooth for it. He had been transfixed by her chocolate cream and dedicated half a page to it. Then he noticed me, only then.

  She sighed, wondering what might have happened had her luck been different? It had all been so brief. If only the storm hadn’t floored her, might Joseph have asked her to cook in his house in Glasgow? From cabin boy she might have been promoted to head chef. She read on, looking for the memories that were important to her, and for the most part not finding them. He did not mention the day he helped her with the dropped slop of food – that moment of connection. He must have been terrified of what he felt. And from then it seemed he could not bring himself to scribble a single word about her or even her food until she was uncovered.

  Then – Karina sets me alight, he put down. Karina’s heart rushed to read it. She stopped and read it again. See, it was not only me. She felt a flood of hope. Carefully, she calculated the entry to two days before he first touched her, curling his hand around her waist as she read on the bed. She is a mesmerizing flame, he said. She wondered why he held back, then. And why, if he was so mesmerized, would he still marry his Frances; for though he never said it, it was clear he would turn his back on passion for the sake of propriety or money or society. Whatever it was. All his needs. Now, she thought, I can see every shabby intention. We had a fire that was to be fed as long as it suited him and then abandoned to burn out or locked away to burn in secret. Which was worse?

  She dropped the pages and in temper she took off and soared. She flew up and down the glacier greedy for revenge until she had run herself out. Then she sat on a bank of snow and wished for redemption. It amused her that she had never believed in ghosts. And neither had he, for that matter. It seemed foolish now. All at once, she wanted to repent, but there were no sins to speak of. Foolishness, certainly. Poor decisions too. She had not been a good wife to Thebo, perhaps. But sin – that was another matter. They said there was redemption in death. She had heard that. But nothing changed, here on the other side. She missed not home exactly. She missed the living. She missed being alive. The privilege of knowing so little. Of taking some kind of revenge on Joseph or at least being able to tell him that she knew he’d betrayed her. It is a kind of torture to see inside your lover’s heart.

  Inland, the Emperor penguins huddled, nesting. They sang to each other. When the light came it surprised her. The sky opened and suddenly the world was bright blue. Karina perched on her vantage point, as the birds fussed around their eggs. Then she spotted one little fellow – fully grown, on his own. At first, she thought he was lost, heading inland, away from the rookery and any hope of food. Karina stood up. Her body stretched and she felt a cloud brush through her hair. She could swear that she creaked like a tree. Inland, the penguin continued walking away from the shore.

  Determined to direct him to safety, she swooped, waving her arms. But he showed no sign of knowing she was there. She landed in his path but he walked straight through her. I am no longer part of the world, she thought. In the ghost stories of her childhood, spectres touched the living, but not her, not now.

  In the end, she followed. The little bird waddled ten miles, advancing to his doom. She rose to look back at the colony, but the others made not even a call in his direction. After days, the poor creature could only crawl, determined, still pulling himself on his belly away from redemption and then, a tiny pinprick on the dazzling white, he gave a shallow pant. Fascinated, she watched as his life slipped away. When he was gone, she shed an unexpected tear, cursing her foolishness as she lingered, waiting to see if he appeared in death, but there was nothing – only the ice shelf – a sheer void in the world.

  On the light nights, the eternal days, she visited the penguin colony often. The seals and whales swam close to scoop what they could out of the water. From time to time, she realized, a penguin simply slipped across the surf towards them voluntarily. Perhaps they were stranger creatures than the crew had realized. Perhaps some of them simply wished to die. She wondered if Joseph had presented his penguin skeleton to the Society, as he had planned. She wondered what the gentlemen of London might have made of it. She wondered if he thought of her. Poor Karina, he might say. The way he’d talk of a dead lapdog. A happy but inconsequential memory. It was clear that those nights in his cabin had an entirely different meaning for the doctor. She gritted her teeth when she thought of it and nursed her fury.

  ELEVEN

  It would not be true to say that she did not see the men, though she did not see them clearly. Like interlopers in a dream, they were indistinct both to the eye and the ear. Once she heard Swedish, she could have sworn it. A snippet of conversation about a recipe, that caught her attention, but she could not make it out. The men camped on the ice and brought dogs. Karina watched, thinking of Hooker, who had never quizzed her about dog sleds in the end. She squinted at vague shapes as they fumbled through the snowstorms, but she could not tell one fellow from another. They were too swaddled – not only in wool and gabardine but almost as if the edges of them had melted into the air. She wondered, momentarily, if they could see her. And then they were gone.

  Time meant nothing any more. She drifted in and out. A day. A week. A year. A decade might pass overnight. Then a snatch of Italian, perhaps, from a fuzzy shadow. Or was it Latin? She tried to bring the man into focus, but she couldn’t concentrate. The stars were too beautiful. The snow twinkled like a kaleidoscope in the moonlight. Then she closed her eyes and a few more months simply disappeared. Sometimes she heard the empty days as they whizzed by, just missing her. She was a bright star. She was a frozen outcrop. Eternal in spirit, spread thinly over the plains.

  She was lying on the glacier one day (or was it night?) when a buzzing started behind her eyes and even if she closed the lids she couldn’t stop it. She waved a hand in front of her as if she was batting off a fly. Then, she scented Braunschweiger on the air. Karina had not smelled anything for a long time, long before she had passed over. The sensation stopped her dead and all at once she felt the satin edge of the quilted cover her sister and she had slept beneath as children. This is the final consequence, she thought, the last sad vestige of my earthly feelings. My love for Marijke. It takes a long time to leave it all behind. In death, it is life that haunts you. Its limits dictate the edges of everything. Now, too late, Karina knew the importance of her passions, for she was carrying them into eternity. It was her love for Hooker that had trapped her here. It was her lack of interest in the indistinct shapes of other men as they passed that meant she had become so long, so thin, so alone. Where are the ships? she wondered, and then, hauled back by the sensation, she felt the sun on her face, as if she was lying on the pantiled roof once more, watching sightseers come off the ferry.

  Karina leaned forward. Marijke drew into focus, a vision on the snow. She was the first person Karina had seen clearly in a long time. Thousands of miles away, her figure was absolutely distinct. She was an old woman now. Her face was lined and her hair was a wisp of white, though Karina would know her anywhere for she could see the freckled eight-year-old blonde girl inside the fragile, elderly frame. How many years have I been here? When she sees me, am I still twenty-four years old? Karina wondered and reached down the edge of a sheer ice cliff.

  Marijke’s eyes were cloudy. They had buried her with black cloth swaddled tightly around her tiny body. There was an amethyst brooch at her neck and she still wore her wedding ring. She was not smiling. This old lady, Karina’s sister, perched alone upon the crest of the pantiled roof like some strange raven. Exactly where she had sat all those years ago. Called by the same buzzing noise as her sister, she looked around and waved, examining Karina’s ghost. The two women smiled at each other. Ah, you died. That’s why you did not come home. I wondered for years. I waited. The old woman’s blue eyes were sad. Yes, I died young and beautiful and it is no c
onsolation, Karina said. Marijke shrugged as if to say, And you are not here? You never came home?

  It crossed Karina’s mind that, as a child, her sister had been wrong in her appetite for the world. She should have stayed in Ven. She felt desperately sorry that Marijke was never happier than her childhood days. What kind of life was that? Karina wished she could see her now in death, perched in her wedding bed or in a ballroom or some fine hostelry. Or in the grand dining room where she must have eaten every day with friends and family, mistress of her husband’s house. Marijke’s life had seemed so much more settled. Now it was clear that she had not been happiest with her wealthy husband in her luxurious home. I always thought you loved him. Karina said. Love? The old woman laughed. Never love.

  She had sent the money. Karina could see that now, her story unfolding. And Van Kleek had sent it back, deducting her debts and a carefully calculated interest payment before doing so. He had proved a studious accountant. The letter had not arrived on Deception till the spring after Karina’s departure. Trafficking news across the world’s oceans was an inexact science and Marijke’s kindness languished a long time in Chile before a vessel was heading in the right direction. Would I have survived till spring? Karina wondered. She might. She might not. She had been so thin. So frail in the face of Deception’s hardship. Perhaps it would have been better for her to remain there and take her chances, for it was clear now that there was a different life to be had with a different death at its crossroads. You don’t think that way when you have breath in your lungs. She waved again at her sister and turned her eyes to the little village beyond the roof tiles.

  Ven looked the same. The same wooden houses. The same main street. The little village was so ordinary and so very far away. To one side, beyond the roof, there was a shocking slash of yellow beach and rising behind it hills of misty green. They look so soft. After years of jagged outcrops, the green was mystifying. She strained, trying to see her mother, but even as children it had been clear their mother hated life in the backwater where she was born and where she would die. Together the women wondered momentarily where their mother had gone but they did not know her well enough. They did not know what she wanted. Perhaps there is another place, Marijke ventured. And you?

  I loved a man here, Karina replied. A faithless man who was promised to another. And now I must stay here at the end of the world.

  I’m sorry, Marijke said. What fools we have been.

  Below her, a scatter of children ran up and down the beaten earth of the walkway. Two boys threw a leather ball back and forth where the boats weighed anchor. Are they Sverre’s sons or his grandsons? There was no way to know. A sullen carthorse tethered outside the village shop watched them. Karina drank in this little vignette. She ached for it. She thought of the ghost stories they used to tell over the winter. Her mother baked rosy red apples in the embers and her uncle tried to scare them with tales of the dead returning or worse, the dead who never left. The creak of a floorboard left the other children squealing. These boys no doubt did the same.

  Now we are the dead.

  And did you never have children? Karina examined her sister’s face for an explanation.

  No. Not that. Children, indeed. And you had three men?

  Three? Karina shook her head. Two. Thebo and the other one. The faithless English doctor.

  Marijke shrugged. No, I’m sure it was three, she repeated, before moving off. Death did not allow you to feign interest.

  She disappeared across the village roofscape, trailing a length of black cloth in her wake and carefully picking her way towards a ship docking at the jetty. Doubtless, she would name the people who disembarked. She would know every one of them, every story now. Karina cried out, knowing the vision was fading. She wished she were there. She wished so hard, she believed that it would move her, but her heart had made the choice long ago and there was no leaving. She blew a single kiss and the light faded. Then she cried out and fell dejected, onto her knees. Was Marijke the last living soul who held her dear? Could the wrong choice really leave her stranded forever? Could ghosts not cling to each other? Could they not be held? She wished she could cry but there was not even enough warmth for that any more. Instead she hardened, impenetrable as the ice.

  Slowly, she stepped off the edge of the hillside and onto the air. She flew past the penguin colony and out to sea. From above, the coastline looked like Ross’s map – white ice against blue ocean. ‘Marijke!’ she called, as if her sister was walking ahead and might wait for her. Karina kept going. She felt the breeze in her hair. To one side the sky turned vermillion as the sun sank. And then, it was like hitting a wall. The world disappeared into total blackness and all she could think was, Is this a second kind of death?

  When she woke again she was laid out on the ice, back where she had started. There would be, she realized, no going home. She kicked the snow but it did not shatter. She blew in the face of the wind, but it made no difference to the Antarctic storm. She screamed at the seals, bathing in the cool sunlight but they were as nonchalant as deaf old men.

  Utterly alone, she sat on the edge of the ice shelf, dangling her feet in the glacial water, as if she was lazing in the tropics. How long she sat there it was impossible to say but it got light. A man might run mad, waiting for the first polar dawn after the interminable darkness, she thought. She continued to splash her toes in the water but could not displace a drop. Christ, she thought, wondering where that word had come from, who on earth can possibly save me?

  PART TWO

  Fingers Like Ice

  ‘Playing the game means treating your dogs like gentlemen and your gentlemen like dogs.’

  Ted Tally

  TWELVE

  8 February 1902

  There was no telling how much later it was but Marijke had long faded. The sky lightened and darkened so many times Karina lost count. When she first spotted it, it was only a pinprick on the horizon. It was difficult to focus on something so small and yet, like an itch in an awkward spot, she could not leave it alone. It was moving slowly – not fluid like a whale but too large to be anything else. She waited and then as her vision cleared, she gasped.

  ‘A ship.’

  The hull was black, the rigging hoisted like an old maid’s tangled knitting and she could read the name on the side – Discovery. Compared to the clean majesty of the ice shelf, the ship looked grubby as it sailed into the bay – a mass of wooden planks and thick rope sprouting what looked like old man’s whiskers. Fluttering behind she saw the colours – that unmistakeable interlacing of red, white and blue. That pirate’s flag. Yes, she thought, it’s real. There was a ship. And aboard it, scuttling like mice, she realized there must be men.

  With her mind racing, she stood on tiptoe. She had grown in death – thinned and elongated. When she was alive, her hands were pale, and aboard the Terror, her nails were carefully trimmed for work in the galley. Now she was no longer contained by flesh and blood, she had talons like a wise Chinee. When did they grow, she wondered. When did she become a creature that could swoop like a gull?

  She looked down half expecting both feathers and scales but mostly she was made of light. Then she stretched one white alien finger and was mesmerized as it reached the mountain a mile away. That will never do, she thought. I want to look inside. So she squirmed as if she was drawing on a bodice. For a vivid moment, she was reminded of vanity – of what it was to be alive. Then she contracted and pounced inside.

  After all this time and so many indistinct figures, it was difficult to focus on the living. And then, slowly, the figures stepped from the shadows. They moved in a scatter and with fascination she named them. She took no less delight in that old game. And all at once, in a rush that almost knocked her over, she saw everything – their home towns, their dingy kitchens, their small discomforts. The delight of leaving port. A snatched kiss with a loved one. A hearty meal. It all crowded in. Every man aboard carried a sitting room in his memory, populated by a woman wearing
peculiar clothes.

  Karina’s nails dug into the floorboards as she tried to steady herself. She squinted at these mothers and wives as they went about their business – darning or reading. Making their toilette with a spray of lavender or rose or violet. Dressing their hair. Choosing what would be served for dinner. Balancing the household accounts. A thousand tiny dramas played out on a hundred small stages. With her head to one side, bemused, Karina watched them pin their hats in place and set off for a walk in the park or a trip to the haberdashery. They bathed. They read a while.

  As the ship edged steadily closer she was overwhelmed by the freshness of the memories. She struggled to see the world again with all its scents and colours. And slowly she realized that she could control the visions, walking around them as she pleased. A stroll in Islington. A swim in Strangford Lough.

  In one, the ship itself was being built in Scotland on the Tay – only half completed. There in her mind’s eye was the commander inspecting it. He strained to understand the engineer, whose accent was as thick as Keiller’s marmalade. The smell of freshly cut timber swept the Antarctic air and then, before she knew it, she was on an Australian road in some kind of machine that threw up clouds of dust. She attended a formal dinner raising funds for this expedition. There was music, which was a riot of sound – not like anything she had heard before and course upon course of fancy food with ices and jellies and glossy butter sauce. And then, in a blink, she found herself standing in the shadows of a bedroom as a man made love to his wife tenderly and afterwards kissed her goodbye. Later, she loitered in the background when he paid for the attention of a different dark-haired woman, somewhere the sun was blazing.