‘Damn it, Killigrew! I’m an apothecary with surgical training, not a miracle worker.’
‘You realise what you’re saying, don’t you?’
Strachan nodded. ‘You can put him on a sledge and drag him, but the chances are he’ll be dead before we’ve covered fifty miles. And in the meantime he’ll be taking up space which could be used for precious food.’ The assistant surgeon looked more haggard than ever when he met the lieutenant’s gaze. ‘You know why people like me become medical men, Killigrew?’
‘To help people?’
Strachan shook his head. ‘That’s what I told myself when I began my studies. But I was wrong. We want to play God, Killigrew. That book you loaned me, Frankenstein? He wanted to create life. All I ever wanted to do is preserve it, to say: “This man will live.” But a man who can say who lives also has to say who dies.’
‘It’s my decision. I’m in command here, it’s my responsibility.’
Strachan grinned sourly. ‘If it makes you feel noble to take that responsibility on yourself, don’t let me stop you. But don’t think it will make me feel any better.’
‘You’re gannin’ to leave him, aren’t you?’ Varrow stood in front of the door to the observatory with his arms folded. ‘If you leave him, he’ll die.’
‘If we take him with us, he’ll probably die anyhow,’ said Killigrew.
‘You canna know that for sure.’
‘We can be pretty sure,’ said Strachan. ‘At least if we leave him, we’ll have more room for supplies, a better chance for the rest of us to make it back.’
Varrow suddenly produced a revolver. Killigrew thought he was going to threaten them with it, but instead he reversed his grip on it and held it grip-first towards Strachan. ‘Then you do it, if you find it so easy to make a decision like that. ’Cause it’ll be a bloody sight quicker and cleaner than leaving him to starve or freeze to death. So you gan in there and put that pistol to Bob Gargrave’s forehead and look into his eyes when you pull the trigger.’
Strachan stared at him, and then reached for the gun, but Killigrew got there first. ‘That’s enough of that, Mr Varrow. If you think that either myself or Mr Strachan has reached this decision without a great deal of soul-searching, or that it won’t weigh on our consciences and haunt our nightmares for the rest of our lives, you’ve got another think coming.’
Varrow flushed. ‘Sir, at least someone should stay behind to make his last hours more comfortable.’
‘Leave a second man behind to die with him? Out of the question. Stand aside, Mr Varrow.’
‘I’m volunteering, sir. He’s one of my lads. I’m not leaving him.’
Killigrew hesitated. For Gargrave, it would be the humane thing to do. But for Varrow…? ‘No.’
‘I’m not leaving him, sir. You can if you want, but I’m staying right here.’
‘You’ll go back and help the others to load the sledges, Mr Varrow. That’s an order.’
‘I know the rules, Mr Killigrew. Once the ship is destroyed, we’re not part of the crew nay more. The ship nay longer exists. We divven’t get paid, and I divven’t have to take orders from you.’
‘If I might make a suggestion, gentlemen?’ said Yelverton, crunching across the snow towards them with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his greatcoat, shoulders hunched against the wind.
Killigrew could see what was coming next. ‘No.’
‘Mr Varrow is no spring chicken, I’ll admit, but he’s still got plenty of years left in him. I, on the other hand, find my days are numbered.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ said Strachan.
‘You said so yourself: I might fall down dead at any moment.’
‘You might also live to a ripe old age.’
Yelverton appealed to Killigrew. ‘You know this is what I want…’
‘What you want is no concern of mine, Mr Yelverton. You think I don’t know how you both feel? That you’d rather die than abandon one man to his fate? You think I don’t feel the same way?’ He shook his head. ‘Gargrave’s already dead. As officers of Her Majesty’s navy, our foremost duty is to the living. One more man is enough, more than enough. I’ve already seen too many men sacrificed on the altar of Arctic exploration, though I dare say I’ll see a few more before we make it back to civilisation. Besides, you’ve got a family waiting for you back in Yarmouth.’
‘My screaming triplets, you mean? My horrible in-laws?’
‘Like them you may not, Mr Yelverton, but you still have a responsibility to them. Just the same as I have a responsibility for all of you, regardless of whether or not the Venturer is still in commission. Now be about your duties, the pair of you, otherwise I’ll have you both court-martialled for mutiny when we get back to England; you see if I don’t!’
‘You’re bloody nuts, you are!’ grumbled Varrow. ‘You canna give me orders no more.’
‘You know something? You’re absolutely right. I must be mad. If I was rational, I’d abandon the whole damned lot of you to your fates, leave you behind while I struck out for Fort Hope on my own. One man could make his way to Fort Hope by living off the land, with a little sand and determination. But I’m staying because it’s my duty. Now be about yours.’ Killigrew held out his hand. ‘Give me the gun, Varrow.’
The engineer turned the gun on him.
‘I won’t ask you again.’
Varrow looked as though he might actually pull the trigger. Then he slammed the revolver into Killigrew’s hand, and turned and marched back to where the others were loading the three sledges, christened Faith, Hope and Charity by the men. If ever there was a time they had needed God on their side, this was it.
Strachan looked at the gun in Killigrew’s hand. ‘You want me to…?’
‘No. My responsibility.’ He jerked his head after the others. ‘Go and lend them a hand, Strachan.’
The assistant surgeon nodded and walked away without looking back. Killigrew watched him, then stepped into the observatory. Gargrave looked up at him.
Killigrew did not know what to say. What did one say to a man you were about to kill? It was easy when you hated them, felt nothing but contempt for them and knew you would be making the world a better place by dispatching them from it; but this man had served him well and faithfully. He should be thanking him, not snuffing out his life. What could he say? Apologise? Beg his forgiveness? Pray with him? The last of these filled him with revulsion. There was no scriptural justification for what he was about to do, only cold, callous logic, a kind of inverted humanity at best. He could not, would not hide behind his religion.
As a child Killigrew had been encouraged to study the works of Francis Hutcheson, amongst others, and that worthy had once written: ‘That action is best, which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.’ But Hutcheson had never stood on the ice-cap with a gun in one hand and a wounded man waiting for him to kill him.
‘Close your eyes, Gargrave.’
The stoker understood, and shook his head. ‘Please, sir, no…’
‘I’m sorry, Gargrave…’
‘I can make it, sir, I know I can…’ Gargrave tried to get up, but his strength failed him.
Could Strachan be sure that Gargrave could not make it? Supposing the assistant surgeon had made a mistake?’
‘Please, sir!’ Gargrave was sobbing now. ‘I divven’t want to die! I divven’t want to die!’
Killigrew hated him then, hated him for making a difficult job more difficult. Why couldn’t he accept what had to be with strength and fortitude? But if Killigrew were in Gargrave’s place, would he have been any different? He seized his rage like a drowning man clutching at a straw and put the muzzle to the stoker’s forehead.
‘God forgive me,’ he whispered, and fired. Again and again, until there was only one bullet left inside the cylinder. The air inside the observatory was acrid with the reek of gun smoke and Gargrave’s face was unrecognisable.
Killigrew put the muzzle inside his own mouth. The
tangy metal felt hot against his lips and tasted of gunpowder. It would be so easy just to pull the trigger, end it all. Then he would not have to live with the guilt of the killing, the recriminations of the other men, or face the arduous, impossible journey that lay ahead of them.
He took the muzzle from his mouth. Someone had to lead the men to safety, or at least die trying. It was his responsibility. If he failed in that, then he would be as guilty of killing them as he was of killing Gargrave. He dropped the revolver and sank to his knees with a sob, staring at Gargrave’s body. He had done this, he knew. He could not shift the blame, he could not lessen its weight by sharing it, but share it he would. All those people back in England who thrilled to read of Arctic adventures, who pressured the Admiralty into sending more and more men to their deaths in quest of the chimerical North-West Passage – they had all played a part in this tragedy. He would go back and face them all, tell them what had happened here, tell them not of the nobility of one man’s sacrifice but of the pitiful pleadings of another. Public opinion would condemn him, but the same public opinion had condemned these men to die in this Godforsaken place.
He pushed himself to his feet, brushed the fast-freezing tears from his cheeks and dusted himself down, emerging from the observatory with a semblance of dignity while his own self-respect lay in tatters within. No one met his gaze, the men pretending to be hard at work loading the sledges and the boats.
Then it finally sank into Butterwick’s thick skull what had happened. He broke away from the others and snatched up an ice-axe, charging at Killigrew. ‘No! Murderer!’
Ågård tripped the stoker up before he even got halfway to the lieutenant, who was too dazed to defend himself. Butterwick slid on the ice and the axe flew from his hand. He tried to get up again, but Ågård put a foot on the back of his neck. ‘It had to be done, Jemmy. It was the kindest thing to do. Bob were a dead man; at least this way he didn’t suffer.’ He helped the stoker to his feet and dusted him down.
Butterwick cuffed tears from his cheeks with a mittened hand. ‘He was my mate, was Bob. He looked out for me.’
‘I’m sorry for it, Jemmy. We’re all sorry for it. Mr Killigrew not least. But it couldn’t be helped.’ He led Butterwick back to the sledges and put him to work to keep his mind off his grief.
Only Terregannoeuck had any words of consolation for the lieutenant. ‘You do right thing.’
Killigrew regarded him coldly. ‘Oh?’
‘That man not die of cold or hunger.’ The Inuk nodded to the horizon where a low, pale shape was visible in the starlight: Bruin, seated on his haunches, watching them intently.
Killigrew froze. ‘I thought you said that if a polar bear didn’t want us to see it, we wouldn’t.’
‘That’s right. But nanuq not care if we see him. He know he get us sooner or later. So you see what happen to Stoker Bob if you leave him behind alive?’ Terregannoeuck toyed with the bear-tooth that hung against his chest as he spoke. ‘He come for Stoker Bob anyhow, but at least now Stoker Bob not live to see it, to feel nanuq’s claws tear his flesh, his teeth snap his bones.’
Killigrew felt a shudder run down his spine. He hurried across to where Ågård and some of the others were fashioning harnesses to drag the sledges with. There were only nineteen of them left now, nineteen out of the thirty-seven who had sailed through Lancaster Sound: Commander Pettifer, his hands still bound behind his back; Killigrew, Strachan and Latimer; the consumptive Yelverton, leaning on a walking stick for support; Terregannoeuck with his charms and potions; Mr Varrow and Stoker Butterwick; peg-leg Armitage, with his left hand still bandaged where his thumb had been, and Steward Orsini; Riggs the carpenter’s mate; Ice Quartermasters Ågård and Qualtrough; and Molineaux and Able Seamen Endicott and Hughes. And the last survivors of the Carl Gustaf: Ursula, Kracht and Fischbein. How many of them would make it to Fort Hope?
Molineaux had seen the bear too. ‘Want me to fetch a musket, sir?’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Terregannoeuck. ‘You not hit him, this distance. You go nearer, he see you come with gun and turn and run. By the time you reach crest of ridge, nanuq be even further away.’
‘It’s just a bear,’ Killigrew insisted dully. ‘It doesn’t know what a gun is.’
‘He knows,’ said Terregannoeuck. ‘He watch us long time now. He know everything about us.’
Again Killigrew felt a shudder run down his spine, as if someone or something had walked over his grave. He cast a final glance at the charred remains of the Venturer. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get going. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.’
‘Marche!’ The five remaining huskies took up the strain as Terregannoeuck blazed the trail on the dog sledge. The rest of them slipped the harnesses on, each of three teams of six men towing one of the larger sledges. Killigrew led one team, Yelverton another and Strachan the third.
A single step, Killigrew told himself. The harness bit into his shoulders as he took up the strain. His foot slithered on the ice, and then the sledge shifted forwards a few inches.
Again. Just one step, then another, and another. That’s all it takes.
The sledge began to move forwards, jerkily at first, and then more smoothly as the men found their own rhythm.
There, that’s not so difficult, is it? Now all you have to do is keep it up.
For the next eight hundred miles.
* * *
The first thirty miles were easy – across smooth bay ice, perfect for pully-hauly – and on the first day they managed to cover not eight but seventeen miles. It was only towards the end of the second day, when they rounded the cape that formed the western arm of Horsehead Bay, that they ran into their first pressure ridge. Sixty feet high, it ran across their path as far as the eye could see in either direction, a towering mass of slabs and chunks of ice, thrust together by the pack around them and cemented with the snow that had been driven into its crevices.
‘What do you think?’ asked Strachan. ‘If we head in one direction, we’re bound to find a way around sooner or later.’
‘Aye,’ agreed Yelverton. ‘My concern is it will be later rather than sooner. I say we climb it.’
Killigrew glanced across to where Molineaux stood, gazing up the side of the ridge with a speculative expression on his face. ‘It’ll take a couple of hours to get all four sledges over, and the dogs,’ said the lieutenant.
‘It could take days to find another way round,’ pointed out Yelverton. ‘For all we know this ridge could stretch for dozens of miles in either direction. And we haven’t got days to spare, if we’re going to reach Fort Hope before our victuals run out.’
The master was right, of course. ‘All right,’ said Killigrew. ‘But we’ll climb it in the morning, while we’re still fresh. We’ll make camp tonight, and look for an easy place to climb it tomorrow.’
But by the time Killigrew emerged from his tent the following morning a storm had blown in from the north. There was no rain or snow, but the gusting wind swept ice spicules against his face like a million airborne needles. Combined with the darkness, the storm reduced visibility to a few feet and there was no way of scouting an easy path up the side of the pressure ridge.
‘No chance of climbing it now,’ he told Yelverton. ‘We’ll have to wait until this storm dies down.’
‘How long is that likely to be?’ asked the master, reminding him that time was not on their side.
‘Nothing else for it,’ said Killigrew. ‘I wouldn’t try climbing up there in this visibility, and I’m not going to send a man up there to do what I wouldn’t.’
Sitting in one of the tents with Ågård, Qualtrough, Endicott and Hughes eating a breakfast of boiled bacon and ship’s biscuits, Molineaux overheard them. He thrust his head out of the tent, blinking at the driving ice spicules. ‘Sir?’
Killigrew and Yelverton turned. ‘What is it, Molineaux?’ asked the lieutenant.
‘Begging your pardon, sir, but if you ask me this is a
job for Cowcumber Henson.’
‘Who the devil is Cowcumber Henson?’ demanded Yelverton.
‘He is,’ said Killigrew. ‘Or was, at any rate. It’s a long story. Thank you for the offer, Molineaux, but climbing up the side of a sixty-foot pressure ridge in the middle of an Arctic storm is a different kettle of fish from burgling a house.’
‘Not as different as all that.’ Molineaux crawled out of the tent, pulling his wire-mesh goggles down over his eyes. ‘I’ve climbed houses in London Particulars. As long as you’ve planned your way up beforehand, don’t matter if you do it in pitch-darkness.’
‘And did you get a chance to plan a way up last night?’
‘Force of habit, sir.’ Molineaux shrugged. ‘I guess I knew I’d end up being the one to climb it.’
‘I was planning to try myself, as it happens.’
‘That’s very noble of you, sir, but you know as well as me there’s no one here better suited for this job than me. And at least it ain’t straight up, like the side of a house.’ He grinned. ‘Pity there ain’t no drainpipe, but I wouldn’t get to look like a hero if it was too easy, would I?’
‘All right. But for goodness’ sake, be careful!’
Molineaux took a coil of rope from one of the sledges, an ice-axe, and attached some ice-anchors to his belt. ‘Mind if I swap my mittens for your gloves, sir? I’m going to need all my fingers for this one.’
‘Of course.’ Killigrew stripped off his gauntlets and swapped them with the petty officer’s mittens. ‘When you get to the top, drive one of those anchors into the ice as a belaying point and lower a rope down to us.’
Molineaux nodded and approached the ridge, trying to find the foot of the route up he had surveyed the night before. He found a familiar formation in one of the lower ice blocks and began to climb. Somewhere above him, he knew, a large slab of ice had been broken in two at right angles, snapped by the pressure of the pack, creating a rough-hewn chimney with plenty of handholds that led almost to the top. If he could get that far, it would be as easy as caz.
Killigrew and the North-West Passage Page 44