by Dan Simmons
From Sophia, Crozier learned that Sir John had gone, in the public eye at least, from being “the man who ate his shoes” to his self-styled description of “a man who wouldn’t hurt a fly” then quickly to a description widespread on the Tasmanian Peninsula of “a man in petticoats.” This last calumny, Sophia assured him, came from the colony’s dislike of Lady Jane as much as it had from Sir John’s and his wife’s attempts to improve things for the natives and prisoners who laboured there in inhuman conditions.
“You understand that the previous governors simply loaned out prisoners for the local plantation owners’ and city business tycoons’ insane projects, took their cut of the profits, and kept their mouths shut,” explained Sophia Cracroft as they walked in the shadows of the Government House gardens. “Uncle John has not played that game.”
“Insane projects?” said Crozier. He was very aware of Sophia’s hand on his arm as they walked and spoke in hushed whispers, alone, in the warm near-dark.
“If a plantation manager wants a new road on his land,” said Sophia, “the governor is expected to loan him six hundred starving prisoners — or a thousand — who work from dawn until after dark, chains on their legs and manacles on their wrists, through this tropical heat, without water or food, being flogged if they fall or falter.”
“Good Lord,” said Crozier.
Sophia nodded. Her eyes remained fixed on the white stones of the garden path. “The colonial secretary, Montagu, decided that the prisoners should excavate a pit mine — although no gold has been found on the island — and the prisoners were set to digging it. It was more than four hundred feet deep before the project was abandoned — it flooded constantly, the water table here is very shallow, of course — and it was said that two to three prisoners died for every foot excavated of that abhorred mine.”
Crozier restrained himself before he could say Good Lord again, but in truth that was all that came to his mind.
“A year after you left,” continued Sophia, “Montagu — that weasel, that viper — persuaded Uncle John to dismiss a local surgeon, a man very popular with the decent people here, on trumped-up charges of dereliction of duty. It divided the colony. Uncle John and Aunt Jane became the lightning rod for all criticism, even though Aunt Jane had disapproved of the surgeon’s dismissal. Uncle John — you know, Francis, how very much he hates controversy, much less to administer pain of any sort, why he’s often said he would not hurt a fly… .”
“Yes,” said Crozier, “I have seen him carefully remove a fly from a dining room and release it.”
“Uncle John, listening to Aunt Jane, eventually reinstated the surgeon, but that made a lifelong enemy out of this Montagu. The private bickerings and accusations became public, and Montagu — in essence — called Uncle John a liar and a weakling.”
“Good Lord,” said Crozier. What he was thinking was, If I had been in John Franklin’s place, I would have called this Montagu fucker out to the field of honor and there put a bullet in each of his testicles before I placed a final one in his brain. “I hope that Sir John sacked the man.”
“Oh, he did,” said Sophia with a sad little laugh, “but that only made things worse. Montagu returned to England last year on the same ship carrying Uncle John’s letter announcing his dismissal, and it turns out, sadly, that Captain Montagu is a close friend of Lord Stanley, secretary of state for the Colonies.”
Well, the Governor is well and truly buggered, Crozier thought as they reached the stone bench at the far end of the garden. He said, “How unfortunate.”
“More than Uncle John or Aunt Jane could have imagined,” said Sophia. “The Cornwall Chronicle ran a long article entitled ‘The Imbecile Reign of the Polar Hero.’ The Colonial Times blames Aunt Jane.”
“Why attack Lady Jane?”
Sophia smiled without humour. “Aunt Jane is, rather like myself … unorthodox. You have seen her room here at Government House, I believe? When Uncle John gave you and Captain Ross a tour of the estate the last time you were here?”
“Oh, yes,” said Crozier. “Her collection was wonderful.” Lady Jane’s boudoir, the parts they were allowed to see, had been crammed carpet to ceiling with animal skeletons, meteorites, stone fossils, Aborigine war clubs, native drums, carved wooden war masks, ten-foot paddles that looked capable of propelling HMS Terror along at fifteen knots, a plethora of stuffed birds, and at least one expertly taxidermied monkey. Crozier had never seen anything like it in a musuem or zoo, much less in a lady’s bedroom. Of course, Francis Crozier had seen very few ladies’ bedrooms.
“One visitor wrote to a Hobart newspaper that, and I quote verbatim, Francis, ‘our governor’s wife’s private rooms at Government House look more like a museum or a menagerie than the boudoir of a lady.’”
Crozier made a clucking noise and felt guilty about his similar thoughts. He said, “So is this Montagu still making trouble?”
“More than ever. Lord Stanley — that viper’s viper — backed Montagu, reinstated that worm in a position similar to the one Uncle John dismissed him from, and sent Uncle John a reprimand so terrible that Aunt Jane told me in private that it was the equivalent of a horsewhipping.”
I’d shoot that bugger Montagu in the balls and then cut Lord Stanley’s off and serve them to him only slightly warmed, thought Crozier. “That is terrible,” he said.
“There is worse,” said Sophia.
Crozier looked for tears in the dim light but saw none. Sophia was not a woman given to weeping.
“Stanley made public the rebuke?” guessed Crozier.
“The … bastard … gave a copy of the official rebuke to Montagu, before he sent it to Uncle John, and that weasel’s weasel rushed it here by the fastest post ship. Copies were made and passed around here in Hobart Town to all of Uncle John’s enemies months before Uncle John received the letter through official channels. The entire colony was sniggering every time Uncle John or Aunt Jane attended a concert or performed the governor’s role in some official function. I apologize for my unlady-like language, Francis.”
I’d feed Lord Stanley his balls cold in a fried dough of his own shit, thought Crozier. He said nothing but nodded that he forgave Sophia her choice of language.
“Just when Uncle John and Aunt Jane thought it could get no worse,” continued Sophia, her voice trembling slightly, but with anger, Crozier was sure, not with weakness, “Montagu sent to his plantation friends here a three-hundred-page packet containing all the private letters, Government House documents, and official dispatches which he had used to make his case against the governor to Lord Stanley. That packet is in the Central Colonial Bank here in the capital, and Uncle John knows that two thirds of the old families and business leaders in town have made their pilgrimage to the bank to read and hear what it contains. Captain Montagu calls the governor a ‘perfect imbecile’ in those papers … and from what we hear, that is the most polite thing in the detestable document.”
“Sir John’s position here seems untenable,” said Crozier.
“At times I fear for his sanity, if not his life,” agreed Sophia. “Governor Sir John Franklin is a sensitive man.”
He wouldn’t hurt a fly, thought Crozier. “Will he resign?”
“He will be recalled,” said Sophia. “The entire colony knows it. This is why Aunt Jane is almost beside herself … I have never seen her in such a state. Uncle John expects official word of his recall before the end of August, if not sooner.”
Crozier sighed and pushed his walking stick along a furrow in the garden path gravel. He had looked forward to this reunion with Sophia Cracroft for two years in the southern ice, but now that he was here he could see that their visit would be lost in the shadow of mere politics and personality. He stopped himself before he sighed again. He was forty-six years old and acting like a fool.
“Would you like to see the Platypus Pond tomorrow?” asked Sophia.
Crozier poured another glass of whiskey for himself. There came a scream of banshees fr
om above, but it was only the arctic wind in what was left of the rigging. The captain pitied the men on watch.
The whiskey bottle was almost empty.
Crozier decided then and there that they would have to resume cache-hauling sledge trips to King William Land this winter, through the dark and storms and with the threat of the thing on the ice ever present. He had no choice. If they had to abandon the ships in the coming months — and Erebus was already showing signs of imminent collapse in the ice — it would not do merely to set up a sea camp here on the ice near where the ships would be destroyed. Normally that might make sense — more than one hapless polar expedition had set up camp on the ice and let the Baffin Bay current carry them hundreds of miles south to open sea — but this ice was going nowhere and a camp here on the ice would be even less defensible from the creature than would a camp on the frozen gravel on the shore — peninsula or island — twenty-five miles away in the dark. And he’d already cached more than five tons of gear there. The rest would have to follow before the sun returned.
Crozier sipped his whiskey and decided that he would lead the next sledge trip. Hot food was the greatest single morale builder cold men could have, short of sight of rescue or extra gills of rum, so his next sledge trips would consist of stripping the four whaler boats — serious craft rigged for serious sailing should the real ships be abandoned at sea — of their cookstoves. The Frazer’s Patent Stove on Terror and its twin on Erebus were too massive to move to shore — and Mr. Diggle would be using his to bake biscuits right up to the minute Crozier gave the order to abandon ship — so it was best to use the boat stoves. The four stoves were iron and would be heavy as Satan’s hooves, especially if the sledges were hauling more gear, food, and clothing to cache, but they’d be safe on shore and could be fired up quickly, although the coal itself would also have to be hauled across the cold hell of a pressure-ridged twenty-five miles of sea ice. There was no wood on King William Land nor any for hundreds of miles south of there. The stoves would go next, Crozier decided, and he would go with them. They would sledge through the absolute darkness and unbelievable cold and let the Devil take the hindmost.
Crozier and Sophia Cracroft had ridden out that next April morning in 1843 to see the Platypus Pond.
Crozier had expected they’d be taking a buggy as they did for sojourns into Hobart Town, but Sophia had two horses saddled for them and a pack mule loaded with picnic things. She rode like a man. Crozier realized that the dark “skirt” she’d appeared to be wearing was actually a pair of gaucho trousers. The white canvas blouse she wore with it was somehow both feminine and rugged. She wore a broad-brimmed hat to keep the sun off her skin. Her boots were high, polished, soft, and must have cost roughly a year of Francis Crozier’s captain’s salary.
They rode north, away from Government House and the capital, and followed a narrow road through plantation fields, past penal colony pens, and then through a patch of rain forest and out into open higher country again.
“I thought that platypuses were found only in Australia,” said Crozier. He was having trouble finding a comfortable position in the saddle. He’d never had much opportunity or reason to ride. It was embarrassing when his voice vibrated as he jounced and bounced. Sophia seemed completely at home in the saddle; she and the horse moved as one.
“Oh, no, my dear,” said Sophia. “The strange little things are found only in certain coastal areas on the continent to our north, but all across Van Diemen’s Land. They’re shy though. We see none around Hobart Town any longer.”
Crozier’s cheeks grew warm at the sound of the “my dear.”
“Are they dangerous?” he asked.
Sophia laughed easily. “Actually the males are dangerous in mating season. They have a secret poisonous spur on their hind legs, and during the breeding season the spurs become quite venomous.”
“Enough to kill a man?” asked Crozier. He’d been joking about the comical little creatures he’d seen only in illustrations being dangerous.
“A small man,” said Sophia. “But survivors of the platypus’s spur say that the pain is so terrible that they would have preferred death.”
Crozier looked to his right at the young woman. Sometimes it was very difficult to tell when Sophia was joking and when she was serious. In this instance, he would assume that she was telling the truth.
“Is it breeding season?” he asked.
She smiled again. “No, my dear Francis. That is between August and October. We should be quite safe. Unless we encounter a devil.”
“The Devil?”
“No, my dear. A devil. What you may have heard described as a Tasmanian devil.”
“I have heard of those,” said Crozier. “They’re supposed to be terrible creatures with jaws that open as wide as the hatch on a ship’s hold. And they’re reputed to be ferocious — insatiable hunters — able to swallow and devour a horse or Tasmanian tiger whole.”
Sophia nodded, her face serious. “All true. The devil is all fur and chest and appetite and fury. And if you had ever heard one’s noise — one cannot really call it a bark or growl or roar, but rather the garbled gibbers and snarls one might expect out of a burning asylum — well, then I guarantee that not even so courageous an explorer as thee, Francis Crozier, would go into the forest or fields here alone at night.”
“You’ve heard them?” asked Crozier, searching her serious face again to see if she was pulling his leg.
“Oh, yes. An indescribable noise — absolutely terrifying. It causes their prey to freeze just long enough for the devil to open those impossibly wide jaws and to swallow its victim whole. The only noise as frightening may be the screams of its prey. I’ve heard an entire flock of sheep bleating and crying as a single devil devoured them all, one at a time, leaving not so much as a hoof behind.”
“You’re joking,” said Crozier, still staring at her intently to see if she was.
“I never joke about the devil, Francis,” she said. They were riding into another patch of dark forest.
“Do your devils eat platypuses?” asked Crozier. The question was serious, but he was very glad that neither James Ross nor any of his crewmen had been around to hear him ask it. It sounded absurd.
“A Tasmanian devil will and does eat anything,” said Sophia. “But once again, you are in luck, Francis. The devil hunts at night, and unless we get terribly lost, we should have seen the Platypus Pond — and the platypus — and had our lunch and returned to Government House before nightfall. God help us if we are out here in the forest come darkness.”
“Because of the devil?” asked Crozier. He’d meant the question to be light and teasing, but he could hear the undercurrent of tension in his own tone.
Sophia reined her mare to a halt and smiled at him — truly, dazzlingly, completely smiled at him. Crozier managed, not gracefully, to get his own gelding stopped.
“No, my dear,” said the young woman in a breathy whisper. “Not because of the devil. Because of my reputation.”
Before Crozier could think of anything to say, Sophia laughed, spurred her horse, and galloped ahead down the road.
There was not enough whiskey left in the bottle for two last glassfuls. Crozier poured most of it, held the glass up between him and the flickering oil lamp set on the inner partition wall, and watched the light dance through the amber liquid. He drank slowly.
They never saw the platypus. Sophia assured him the platypus was almost always to be seen in this pond — a tiny circle of water not fifty yards across, a quarter mile off the road in a thick forest — and that the entrances to its burrow were behind some gnarled tree roots that ran down the bank, but he never saw the platypus.
He did, however, see Sophia Cracroft naked.
They’d had a pleasant picnic at the more shaded end of the Platypus Pond, an expensive cotton tablecloth spread on the grass to hold the picnic basket, glasses, food containers, and themselves. Sophia had ordered the servants to pack some waterproof cloth-wrapped parce
ls of roast beef in what was the most expensive of all commodities here but the cheapest from whence Crozier had come — ice — to keep it from going bad during the morning’s ride. There were broiled potatoes and small bowls of a tasty salad. She’d also packed a very good bottle of Burgundy in with actual crystal glasses from Sir John’s crest-etched collection, and she drank more of it than did the captain.
After the meal they’d reclined just a few feet apart and talked of this and that for an hour, all the while looking out at the dark surface of the pond.
“Are we waiting for the platypus, Miss Cracroft?” asked Crozier during a short gap in their discussion of the dangers and beauties of arctic travel.
“No, I think it would have shown itself by now if it wanted us to see it,” said Sophia. “I’ve been waiting for an interval before we go bathing.”
Crozier could only look at her quizzically. He certainly had not brought beach bathing attire. He did not own beach bathing attire. He knew it was another one of her jests, but she always spoke in such evident earnestness that he was never 100 percent sure. It made her puckish sense of humour all the more exciting to him.
Extending her rather titillating joke, she stood, brushed some dead leaves from her dark gaucho pants, and looked around. “I believe I shall undress behind those shrubs there and enter the water from that grassy shelf. You are invited to join me in the swim, of course, Francis, or not, according to your personal sense of decorum.”
He smiled to show her he was a sophisticated gentleman, but his smile was unsteady.
She walked to the thick bushes without another glance back. Crozier remained on the tablecloth, lying half reclined and with an amused look on his carefully shaven face, but when he saw her white blouse suddenly lifted up by pale arms to be draped across the top of the tall shrub, his expression froze. But his prick did not. Beneath his corduroy trousers and too-short waistcoat, Crozier’s private part went from parade rest to top of the mizzen in two seconds.