At night Wilson and Bowers whispered a plan. Would it be best to go ahead to retrieve supplies from the next depot and then come back for the skipper? They were out of oil and biscuit and pemmican. They were out of all of it. Yes, she breathed. She could guide them. It was all there, only a few miles north – Cherry had resupplied everything. There was cocoa, Bovril, thick blocks of dripping and oil to fire the stove.
Scott kept imagining his wife fussing. ‘Kathleen,’ he smiled, and told himself she’d have cook make him some toasted cheese and bring it up to him in bed with a cup of tea. It was a kind of escape though the truth was he knew where he was. He knew what was happening. Far off, at Hut Point the men at home base sent out a search party but she could feel Scott’s door above the tent, waiting to open. It was too late. Wilson and Birdie were stronger, if only slightly. But she knew that they’d made not only a physical decision but a mental one too. They were a team of three. They would stay together, come what may. Still, she tried to encourage them to set off but their hearts beat together in a strange three-way tattoo and she could not break its rhythm.
The grey lip of dark winter kissed the horizon and Scott laid down his pencil.
Bowers kept going back to his memory of Shackleton in the members’ lounge and Wilson making him take back what he said about Scott and his decisions. He tried not to think of it – the skis and the five men instead of four. He had no strength left and what was the point anyway? As he glanced at the skipper he’d swear he could see a bubble floating above him like an escaped balloon. It looked like the inside of the Royal Society, its lamps alight to welcome members for an evening lecture.
Scott’s face was pale. An old man stood behind the podium. Was it Joseph Hooker, Birdie wondered. He had seen photographs of the old duffer. Surely, though, Hooker must be dead by now. He had been reported ill before the Terra Nova even left. Or maybe the old man would outlast them all. Before he could ask, or comment or ponder it, the room faded away and slowly, Birdie realized, the skipper was gone.
‘Wilson,’ he managed. ‘Teddy.’
Wilson only smiled. He had seen hundreds of corpses. He was a medical man and held out no hope that he and Birdie would fare better. He had carried everyone’s worry with him. He had seen their pain clearly as well as suffering his own – each man a patient as well as a friend. Now, he decided, it was better the cold would take them than they starve to death. That at least was some kind of comfort.
‘We tried, Birdie.’
‘Better,’ Birdie insisted, ‘we did it. We made the pole, old man.’
Wilson nodded.
No, she shouted but neither of them heard her. No, she raged but all they felt was the wind buffeting the canvas of the tent, as it had on and off for days. Karina flew high above, but the rescue party was a long way off. Too far.
Wilson started to mouth a prayer and Birdie joined him. Would she have been so brave if she had known the moment of her death? Outside the blizzard did not abate as the men clasped their hands like monks and waited for God to claim them.
TWENTY-FIVE
Their heroes defined a person, she realized. Birdie had chosen Shackleton, after all. For some, it would be Amundsen, for he was the man who succeeded in planting his country’s flag. But for many, long afterwards, it was the loyalty of Oates, walking into a blizzard in the hope he’d save his fellows or of Scott, whose last thoughts, it seemed, were of his wife and the wives and families of his men.
Karina knew there was no measure in being alone. Surely no ghost was meant to be so. Scott had Hooker now – ghosts worthy of each other. Marijke, she hoped, had their mother. Time didn’t matter. Only passion. The world was a loom and its threads stretched beyond what men could see. In the end, each man got what he wanted. To Amundsen the prize and to Scott posterity. We were each part of the landscape and part of each other, across time, like it or not.
She wondered if anyone would find the little tent with their bodies or if the snow would pile over it so high that Scott, Bowers and Wilson become part of the barrier, as her body was part of it. Would their skin darken and their flesh shrink tightly onto their long-dead bones?
Above the tent, she watched Wilson disappear into a warm study. His friend, Ellis, was sitting at his desk. Birdie was the strongest. He would be the last to go. He closed his eyes because he didn’t want to see the bodies of the others. If anyone came looking, he decided, they would find them together. He tried not to shed a tear thinking of his poor mother, Emily, standing on East India Dock. How soon would she know that her son was never coming home? Well, he’ll be back there soon, she thought as she loitered at the tent flap.
Birdie moaned. Poor Bowers. The best of men. She could hardly believe he had come to this after all the perils. Having faced death so many times and somehow always come through. Further along the route the rescue party was days away. They were far too late. She stiffened as a flower of light bloomed at the apex of the canvas and watched, thinking to wave Bowers goodbye. He was the last of them. But when she looked up he was standing beside her, staring down at his body.
‘Hello,’ he said, making a strange little bow.
She waited for the light to take him.
‘Can you see me?’ he asked.
A smile broke across her face, hopeful as a sunrise. He did not move. There was no scene waiting to take him. She wondered was Oates right about luck? Was he right about heaven? She was not sure how to answer.
‘Were you happiest here? Here?’ she said incredulously.
Birdie cocked his head to one side, that silly green hat on his head.
‘It has been my greatest adventure. Have you come to take me …?’ his voice trailed as he looked behind her for some kind of ladder. ‘Where are the others?’ he asked.
She was not sure how to explain. These things were simpler than men imagined. Birdie was expecting God and angels and heaven but all there was in death is what was best in life. The decades had been difficult, there was no denying it but now her long disappointments fell away as his gaze lingered on her hair, ever blonde and her eyes ever blue and she knew that she would not be alone now. Not ever again. Here was the third man her sister had told her about.
‘I am Karina,’ she told him. ‘And I will be your friend.’
EPILOGUE
‘If everyone was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.’
Mark Twain
1915
They did not want to see Scott’s low hut abandoned, the tins of digestive biscuits and cornflour, half-drunk bottles of whisky, chipped enamel plates and old books simply left behind by the bravest of men. But the Terra Nova sailed away. The wild winds battered the coastline and whipped between the planks of wood. The air froze the iron stove and ice formed on the inside as if it would never warm up again.
The two figures were made of light. They stood at the summit of Mount Terror but even from that great height they had to squint to make out that there were two ships coming. The Endurance and the Aurora. Bowers fell to his knees – he hadn’t seen this before. An arrival. He hadn’t been woken from eternity by the living. Gently Karina laid a long white hand on his shoulder.
‘It’s Shackleton,’ he said with his head to one side as he read the scene. ‘He has returned.’
‘What is the point?’ she whispered. The pole, after all, had been conquered.
Bowers did not reply. He was transfixed.
More distinguished with every passing year, Sir Ernest was steely. Bowers smiled to see the man who once was his hero, as he took his place at the helm. There were no long speeches, no formal celebrations as the ship came into the bay. The men simply hung over the side watching the ice. They were a wayward crew, entirely different from the kind of men Scott would have chosen. Shackleton believed a man’s nature was more important than his skills and a quick pass among the men on deck uncovered singers and puzzle solvers, jugglers and classics scholars – each one hardy and determined to play his part. They would not stop coming, s
he realized. Not ever.
Karina sighed. It was too familiar. They won’t give up until they are all dead, she breathed. Bowers didn’t answer. He sat watching the ice flow that would try to kill them and wondered if the frozen wastes were Shackleton’s happiest place as well. Perhaps the two of them would have company. He leaned against Karina affectionately.
‘They are going to cross it. From the Weddell Sea to Ross Island, don’t you see? It’s the next challenge. To go through the pole and out the other side. That ship is going to get caught in the pack ice,’ he nodded towards the Endurance. ‘You see if it doesn’t,’ Birdie’s face curled into a scowl.
And the days passed. The darkness came and went and the light did the same. She rose with the sun. It felt like dancing. She flew on the storms. It felt like swimming. She swirled with the stars and alone, as her form stretched, she had never felt so free.
Karina stretched. She smiled at him.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you how to lay yourself down. We’ll help them if we can.’
AUTHOR’S HISTORICAL NOTE
History is not a matter of fact but this book is definitely fiction. The first woman did not set foot on the Antarctic until 1935 – the wife of a Norwegian whaling captain, she was called Caroline Mikkelsen, although there is some evidence of Oceanic female explorers on the continent around 650CE and Louise Séguin visited in 1773 but did not step onto the ice. There were a few female applications to Shackleton’s expedition in 1914, but none were accepted and it wasn’t until the 1940s that Jackie Ronne and Jennie Darlington accompanied their husbands’ mission and spent a year on the ice (despite a petition signed by the men to try to stop them).
When I write historical fiction I always wonder where on earth the women were and what they were thinking. We, as a gender, are underrepresented in traditional, written history, in archive material and in artefacts. For a long time, female journals and letters simply weren’t valued either by women’s families or by historians, librarians and archivists so they weren’t always kept.
When I started writing The Ice Maiden I was fascinated by anger – I wanted to write a woman out for revenge – a kind of Shakespearian Valkyrie who had been scorned. The ice seemed a fitting place for that story, which I wanted to wind around the real history of the Victorian and Edwardian explorers who pioneered our understanding of the continent – every one of them a hero and yet every one of them flawed. Unlike some voyages of discovery, Antarctic missions tend to be extremely well documented. I have taken a view on these men’s characters but I hope I have not denigrated their valour or their integrity by creating a fiction to tangle with the facts.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS
Where is your happiest place?
Is Karina’s revenge justified?
Is ambition always ultimately destructive?
How do you justify polar expeditions where there is inevitably loss of life?
What would you miss most?
Is it ever possible to conquer nature?
What makes the best memorial?
Is it important to reach the pole? Or climb Mount Everest? Why?
If you believe in a life after death do you live differently?
What makes someone a hero/heroine?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to many people when you choose to write long, historical novels that don’t belong in only one genre. Firstly, to Jenny Brown, my wonderful agent who ever loves a challenge and never gives up. Thank you for your patience and tenacity, Jenny (and your tremendous good taste). Secondly, to those who helped along the way by reading the manuscript and offering advice: Laura Waddell, Sophie Pinkoski and Georgina Brown. Your eyes, your beautiful, clean, discerning eyes were invaluable, you wonderful people. Thank you. Thirdly, a huge shout-out goes to Creative Scotland, which funded me to research this book, including a trip to the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge and the Royal Geographical Society in London. In both these places, the archivists were hugely helpful – guardians not only of information or even history but of the stuff of our culture – the sinews of us. I appreciate the time you gave me. Thank you. Any mistakes are definitely mine not yours. Thanks and apologies go to the many friends who were patient with me. The Ice Maiden took a long time to write and I told you all about it again and again and you didn’t tell me to shut up. I have the best people around me. And on that note, thanks also go to the Goodwins for their unerring support, my darling Molly Sheridan for being unforgiving in all the detail and encouraging me to be that way too and last, but never least, Alan Ferrier, a Greenock lad like Birdie. I think you’re tops.
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