The Ice Maiden

by Sara Sheridan

  This was a connection that had been denied her in her isolation – a contract that she had not yet experienced. Something the old ghost in Frances’s study knew, but she had been denied. When a ghost wakes to their death, if they are among men – can they feed from them? Perhaps the presence of the Discovery was her way back into the world. For the first time in a long time she could vent her feelings. Slowly, she pointed a long, white finger at the blue-eyed sailor. As it passed through him, she could see he felt it. You will be among the first, she said.

  The man knotted a tatty scarf around his neck. He had the pale skin of northern shores and the certain gait of the English when he moved. He turned his attention to the glacier ahead. The bo’sun was discussing how to unload quickly while the weather held. The men were leaning over the prow. One, his name was Shackleton, Karina pronounced the word in her mind as if Marijke had asked her to – yes, that one stretched so far she wondered if he might tumble. Slowly, like a cat toppling a vase, she swiped at him and the man laughed and pulled himself back on deck. Give me time, she snarled.

  Sixty years were nothing and these men were Hooker’s emissaries. As the ship reached the glacier, she whipped upwards into the clear blue sky. Hallelujah! she shouted as she wheeled and they dropped the anchor. Hallelujah! They are returned.

  THIRTEEN

  The ships were unloaded promptly. The crew could not wait to get onto the ice. Huts would be built. Expeditions into the interior attempted. But first they must unload. Karina peered as they brought off the living cargo. The men and the dogs before anything else.

  The men did not trust their instincts when they sensed her, but the animals did. The dogs had been kept in cages the whole voyage. As the boat docked, they were leashed and led onto the ice amid a veritable opera of barking. Karina taunted them, joining in and howling at the white moon in the blue sky as if she was part of the pack. Weller, the dog handler, justified their excited response. ‘They need a run. There are no polar bears down here. The closest penguin colony is miles away. They will have to come back for food,’ he commented to Shackleton, the officer she had almost tumbled. Ernest.

  Excited and tormented at once, the animals ran in circles and snapped at Karina’s spectre as she swooped among them. The men, unaware of the drama, offloaded the first of the supplies. Even the largest crates seemed tiny next to the majesty of the mountains. The hold had been stowed so that the things the expedition needed immediately were nearest the openings. The crew set to bringing them off with vigour, working in teams scooping out the saws and nails, sledges and skis, lamps and rucksacks as the animals snapped at Karina’s heels.

  ‘Careful,’ Wilson, the surgeon, hovered over the men, and Karina halted to watch him from her place high above the pack. Hooker used to bear over the crew in the same way, nervous that if they got injured, they would not heal because of the cold. Karina inspected the new doctor carefully. It didn’t comfort her to find that he was married and that he had no lover. Or that he was godly and his memories were peppered with church visits. He liked hymns.

  Unaware of the ghost high above making her cursory inspection, the doctor’s attention was taken up by one of the dogs, which had stopped halfway across the ice field. The animal cocked his head to one side and snarled, sending a thick stream of hot breath clouding onto the air. Then he barked like a guard dog seeing off an intruder. The other animals skipped around him, jumping up at nothing at all. Wilson looked bemused. There was nothing to be seen a mile in any direction. What on earth were the animals doing?

  The doctor looked around but everyone was bent to their work. The dogs continued to bark at the icy air. The doctor squinted and decided they must simply be confused after the long voyage. This was a strange place and it would take the men and the dogs alike, a while to settle.

  Close to the ship and under Wilson’s steady eye, the men raised the first tent. As she lost interest, Karina abandoned taunting the dogs. They quietened as one and settled to a steady pace, moving off to explore the ice. One of the younger pups stopped to eat mouthfuls of snow, crunching crystals between sharp teeth. Back at the point on the map Scott had christened Winter Quarters Bay, Wilson marked out a plot by scoring the white surface with a pickaxe. He directed the men to raise a tarpaulin over it. As they started, it felt as if the very ice itself rejected the tent, turning its hard white back on the expeditionary force from the off. One man began to hammer in the first peg but it snapped in two. As it did so, a biting wind picked up from nowhere and the seamen’s eyes narrowed as the hair on the back of their necks rose. It’s too empty here, she heard one think as Wilson spotted what had happened to the peg.

  ‘Bad show,’ he said. ‘Come on, man, let’s try again.’ The doctor’s tone was encouraging. He couldn’t have the men giving up. The seaman picked up his hammer and fetched another peg. He positioned it at a different angle and was about to strike when from somewhere among the pile of kit, a rope broke free and skittered across the ice on a rogue squall. Karina laughed. She shrugged in time with the movement pushing the scatter of rope further away from the party, seeing how far she could go with it. One seaman ran in pursuit for 100 yards before flinging himself onto the end as if it was a tiger’s tail and he was wresting a wild beast to the ground. Laughter ensued and Karina glared at them. This was her joke, not theirs.

  ‘Good man,’ the doctor raised a hand. Then he turned back to the tent team. ‘Chop, chop,’ he directed them.

  Slowly they raised their hammers and the pegs penetrated the surface. They put their backs into the job. This time only one peg snapped. The unfortunate man reached for another without comment or complaint, sneaking a glance sideways at the doctor. As he did so he caught a glimpse of something moving like a long white snake in the distance. He squinted momentarily into the blinding sunlight and then turned away. What good would come of knowing, he thought as he banged the peg into place.

  Over the next few days, with the first tent successfully raised, a small village began to grow on the ice. Karina stalked around it, kicking ropes and placing hammers out of reach. She honed her skills, learning to double her growing strength by tapping into the movement of the breeze. When harsh winds whipped up the snow, she made sure to direct them to topple carelessly placed crates. She slipped catches on doors and burrowed holes into tarpaulin. She eavesdropped.

  The officers were concerned to keep up the men’s spirits. Behind closed doors, on the ship, Ross divided the duties. Shackleton was put in charge of entertainment.

  ‘Keep ’em busy,’ Scott instructed him. ‘Mark their time, eh?’

  Popular, Shackleton found it easy to rally everyone, no matter the day-to-day difficulties of missing tools and unlucky breaks. No matter that there was something unsettling in the silence – an undercurrent that he feared would carry him off. More than once he heard a voice say his name and when he turned there was no one. Shackleton was ashamed of his imagination. He thought of it as his Irish side. He’d always had a facility for stories and had believed in fairies as a child.

  Unaware that his understanding surpassed any of the others, Shackleton ignored the female voice cooing, Ernest, as if she was trying out the word for the first time. Ernest. He responded by biting his lip and ticking himself off for daydreaming.

  Karina watched him carefully. He was a big man with startling blue eyes. This meant that though he wore the same polar kit as the others, he was easy to pick out. He had an easy gait and the men looked to him. She noticed Scott jealously watching the sub-lieutenant from the deck of the Discovery as he went about his business on the ice and she realized that the commander did not trust this tall, bluff Irishman. Scott was keeping his enemies close. As if the expedition did not have enough stacked against it.

  Still, the skipper had chosen well when it came to the charge of the entertainment schedule. Ross’s men had made their own entertainment, dicing with cubes of whalebone and singing below decks all those years ago. These men would shoulder an Antarctic winter but th
ey’d have help to keep up their spirits. Shackleton understood instinctively the importance of occupation. The usual comings and goings – light and dark, high tide and low – did not exist on the Antarctic plane. At the extreme of summer, there was no balance of darkness to match the light and the water barely showed a tidemark. In winter, in the dark, it would be worse.

  Karina now had the crew to mark her time. These days she would not lose her way among the minutes and hours and days and weeks. That was Shackleton’s skill, she realized, giving the men something to grasp.

  First off, a football pitch was laid out on the ice. Two of the able seamen laboriously marked the lines with pickaxes.

  ‘Come on, lads,’ Shackleton encouraged the men. ‘Who’s for a kick-about?’

  Bruised from the voyage, tired and aching after the long days of work, two teams of eleven men formed surprisingly quickly and Karina settled to watch them play.

  In their enthusiasm, the able seamen slapped each other on the shoulders and chattered about their favourite teams. Hotspur and Aston Villa. ‘Come on, Skelton,’ Shackleton called to a fellow Karina had seen wrangling a camera on a tripod during the afternoons. Once she had tripped him up and he had spent half an hour reassembling his kit, humming a music hall song under his breath. A ripple now went around. Skelton, it transpired, had played for the Royal Navy, upholding the Senior Service’s good name against those johnny-come-latelies, the British Army.

  Those not playing stood on the sidelines as Shackleton tossed a sixpence in the air and Petty Officer Taffy Evans (at a shade over six feet, the tallest man on the expedition) called heads. From the newly constructed kennels, the dogs sensed the excitement and a burst of barking echoed on the empty air as Evans chose his end and Shackleton took his place as referee. He cast a glance at Scott and wondered if the skipper ever heard a woman’s voice say his name out of nowhere. Then the match kicked off.

  With the mountains in the distance the men could not help but feel tiny when they stopped to notice. Karina noticed too. The match was a contrast – an affirmation of life – a statement that men could achieve their aims in this empty, wide, white place if only for ninety minutes. Shackleton had chosen well. The act of playing football made it clear that the southern continent was there to be conquered.

  At half-time, the teams changed ends even if in such calm weather there was no advantage in doing so. The second half saw all the action at the goalmouth. Extra time was played. It turned out Skelton was a stickler for the rules and objected when Shackleton allowed a penalty.

  ‘No quibbling,’ Shackleton retorted. He was enjoying himself. ‘I’m the final word.’

  Karina noticed Scott flinching. He is jealous, she thought. He is afraid. On the pitch the men were too busy to pay any mind.

  ‘Sir,’ Skelton insisted, his voice rising, the closest an officer might get to questioning what was, in effect, an order. The objection went no further as Shackleton stared the man down, his blue eyes dancing. He loved a challenge and taken up with this he quite forgot the niggling worry that perhaps he was going mad.

  ‘It’ll not be the end of you, Skelton,’ he promised. ‘Not the way you’re playing.’

  And that was the truth. Skelton scored two more goals for the officers’ team. It was only that when the whistle sounded, the men had scored three. And they felt good, she could see, to have completed the game and to have won.

  As they came off, ready for dinner, the teams shook hands, all flesh still obscured by finnesko mittens or knitted gloves, scarves and furs and felted hats. ‘Frostnip can set in as quickly as a snakebite,’ Doctor Wilson kept saying. ‘Be careful now. Mind yourself.’ Like him. Just like him. And yet Karina liked the doctor for the first time after the match. The camaraderie had changed something. She looked at Scott and did not think of James Ross. She looked at Wilson and knew that he wasn’t Joseph Hooker. Having given their all, the men seemed somehow endearing.

  ‘I’m ravenous,’ one of the young seaman let his natural reserve drop.

  There was a murmur of general agreement among the others. The cold affected them all that way and their stomachs were growling.

  ‘It feels like I’m starving, I tell you, boy,’ the Welsh stoker chimed in.

  ‘Great goal, Frankie!’ one of the officers exclaimed, slapping the fellow on the back and distracting attention from the seaman’s outburst and the subsequent chatter.

  Two–three was a respectable enough score. Frankie, the hero of the hour, beamed. Everyone was satisfied – even Skelton who complained to Evans about hogging the ball.

  ‘Tomorrow you must do better, Taffy. Pass for heaven’s sakes and we’ll have them.’

  As they trooped aboard, it was easy to imagine Scott’s men forming some kind of club. They knew this expedition would distinguish them. They already talked about how they’d meet for dinner in London at some swanky restaurant on a grand boulevard or in a local pub, somewhere near the port, where sailors were most at home. There would be reunions and a friendly remembrance of unpacking these tons of equipment and finding out here at the end of everything, piece by piece what would operate in the biting cold and what would not. They’d share memories of kicking a ball around on the ice. Of gathering on the mess deck and listening as Bunny Bernacchi, the Belgian, gave a long and abstract lecture about meteorology that sent Karina out, into the night sky, to play among the stars with new knowledge.

  Inside Shackleton hung up his coat. The voice whispered so low he had to strain to make it out. Ernest. What will you remember of this when you go home? What will you leave behind? Shackleton shook his head as if he was dislodging a drop of water that had become caught in his ear.

  ‘Good game,’ Scott said on his way into the meal.

  It is the promise of fame that fires him, she thought. The captain. It was not an attractive quality. But then, what else might bring a man here to the end of everything? Hooker had wanted his day at the Royal Society. Ross wanted to be known as the man who mapped Antarctica. Perhaps men always cared what other men thought of them. Karina bristled. Then, distracted by the hot dishes laid on the table, she smiled quietly. For all their tinned supplies, Scott’s cook could not manage a chocolate cream.

  Scott said grace and as he did so, she settled on his shoulder. The men, heads bowed respectfully, found it difficult not to lash into the food. They were young, or at least there was hardly a grey hair among them for polar exploration was a young man’s game. Ferrar, the youngest of the scientists, was barely twenty-three. Such expeditions were the proving of a man and there it was again – these fellows longed to be proven. Scott most of all.

  He had already written the headlines that would announce the Discovery’s homecoming. He had practised giving interviews in which the incredible spirit of his men would feature heavily. He had decided what he would wear to make the announcement. Before Karina knew it she had strayed from these idle intentions and came face to face with Hooker again. There, inside the commander’s head. He was dispensing advice. This time, she turned tail.

  ‘Amen,’ Scott intoned and the men sat down. Shackleton’s eyes darted. Ernest, she cooed and found herself laughing at him. Perhaps, the poor man thought, I am hallucinating because I am so hungry. Maybe that’s what it is.

  FOURTEEN

  Shackleton was not the only person who was hearing things. Karina dismissed the echo. It came from beyond her world and theirs. Unlike the lieutenant, though, she knew she was not going mad. The noise made her turn to look behind. It made her fly over the camp to see where it might be coming from. It sounded as if it was calling her away, but she was not willing.

  Instead of pursuing it, she turned her attention to the men. The crew was truly diverting. Scott’s expedition was different from Ross’s in several ways. Karina was not sure if this was simply the nature of the men involved or if it was due to advances. One way or another, there was catching up to do. The doctor, Wilson, had set himself several tasks. The first was to find out how to nouris
h a man in the deep cold. All knowledge was up for grabs and when the surgeon declared he wanted to find the best diet, Scott had deemed the idea useful. So from the start it had been on the expedition’s rota of scientific endeavour.

  Tonight and every night, Clarke, the ship’s cook, had everything ready. The fellows could not be kept waiting. Each of them qualified for different rations, their diets restricted in either starch or meat.

  ‘What is it tonight?’ Shackleton chimed as he took his seat at the mess table.

  ‘For you, sir? Well, you know you can’t have what you’d like! What with all this business of having to find out about nourishment,’ Clarke replied, lingering over the last word, as if it had nothing to do with the cooking of food.

  The cook left a boy to serve. The sound of the officers’ clanking cutlery drowned out everything. Achettes of bread were passed around and pots of stew appeared from the galley. ‘Come on then, Shackle. We must have our rations, such as they are. You’re on the experiment, aren’t you?’

  Shackleton nodded. Eager to eat, he lifted his fork. Wilson, the surgeon, chimed a piece of cutlery on a plate to attract the officers’ attention.

  ‘Have you all got the hang of it?’ he checked.

  There was a murmur of general agreement and only the merest glance of longing at the food some were allowed and others were not.

  Karina found herself interested in the doctor. Wilson had red hair. He came from Cheltenham and his memories were peppered with recollections of punting on the English river that ran past the bottom of the garden of his parents’ home. As a child he performed experiments on earthworms and frogs. He fished tadpoles out of the water and watched them darting like animated flickers in glass jam jars that he kept beside his bed. He was a lifelong experimenter. In England, he once drove himself to the brink of chronic anaemia by using himself as a control in an experiment. Science was not for the faint-hearted and the officers and the men of the Discovery could not be accused of any such indisposition. It was admirable, she thought. Hooker had reserved his experimentation for the penguins, in the main.