Captain Ainsworth. I ought to have been firmer with him. Oh, the vexation! How like people to misunderstand! She had confided to Eleanor that Ainsworth had proposed to her and that she had refused him. Surely Eleanor had not been so dull as to keep this secret to herself? And there was Ainsworth now, several places down the line, dancing with some overdressed colonial girl, a barrister’s daughter whom Sophia did not know. But whenever the revolutions of the dance brought Ainsworth’s eyes around to the head of the line they lingered on Sophia. And Ross, she saw, was well aware of Captain’s Ainsworth’s interest. Indeed, he was trying not to laugh.
She had already reached, perhaps passed, the outermost bounds of delicacy. And yet she made herself smile. ‘I find, Captain Ross, that this colony is often mistaken in its understanding of such matters.’
They armed left, crossed hands again. ‘Indeed, Miss Cracroft, I find that myself.’
It was time for them to go down the middle and change places with Sir John and his girl, the first evolution in a dance that would take Captain Ross and herself, turn by turn, dancing with every other couple, all the way down to the end of the line, which they would reach in about twenty minutes provided the musicians were brisk. They had passed the mizzenmast, were almost at the stern, with Sophia congratulating herself on the perfect indifference that she had shown to poor Ainsworth as the turn had come to dance with him, when the import of Captain Ross’s remark came home to her; by accepting so freely, and indeed with such evident personal conviction, that the colony might misapprehend her own situation, and by avoiding any direct response to her own remark about his reputed engagement, might he not be implying that his own situation too was misunderstood? Perhaps he did not, after all, have an understanding with a young lady?
The first dance was almost over; they had reached the final set, and it was a good thing too, for the gradual loosening of the formation, extending the lines beyond the marked dance floor, had forced the last couples onto the quarterdeck, as far astern as the ship’s wheel (because Erebus was a flush-deck ship, like many that were built as bombs). Sophia and Ross, in performing the last figures, had to dance around the binnacle which, though idle in port, had its oil lamp lit to add to the festivity. The orange flame of the compass lit them both from beneath, throwing their eyes into shadow, a most singular effect which applied to them alone, as if they of all the company, and of all the dancers, had been chosen by the compass for its partners, and Sophia, catching her breath, looked into the pools of darkness that were Captain Ross’s eyes, and saw there only what she wanted to see.
The music had grown indistinct – it may have been the distance from the band, and the blood which coursed in her ears, though the dance, if long, was not very energetic. She saw the moon in the rigging, the lamps in the mirrors, the gleam of buttons and jewels in the darkness by the rail, and she felt the tramp of scores of feet moving in time on the deck. She wished she could do as the sailors did, and kick off her slippers, and dance barefoot on the holystoned planks. Turning away from her partner, she stepped sideways, came back into the middle, her arms gracefully extended, preparing to make hands before they moved into the final few steps. Instead, she found herself colliding with the standing form of Ross who, swayed by the shock, grasped her in his arms to steady them both, in the same instant that her own arms involuntarily wrapped themselves around him. Her face was in his neck, and his breath was in her ear. They stood there thus, embracing, for barely a moment, before Sophia pushed herself away from him. There was laughter, she could hear it now, and Captain Ross pulled a droll face and offered her his hand, which after a moment she accepted, though flushed with what, she told herself, must be mortification.
‘Alas, Sophia, the music has already stopped.’ He spoke gently, so that no one else might hear him. ‘You were so lost in your dancing. Let me take you back to your uncle for the second dance.’
Together, they walked back along the deck, applauded by all. The regimental band began to play again, a short, jaunty air to while away the interval, and Sophia, bright with pleasure, rejoined her uncle, accepted his compliments and smiled kindly at Eleanor who – being, it seemed, incapable of jealousy – was too wide-eyed even to smile at her cousin. Crozier beamed. ‘You have done it!’ he exclaimed. ‘You have carried it off brilliantly! Was ever a ball in London opened so prettily? And to think that you were minded to refuse the honour!’
But Sophia, accepting for a moment the use of her uncle’s chair so that she might recover herself, was deaf to the voices that clamoured around her. She wished only to hear again, rehearsed in the privacy of her own mind, the voice of Captain Ross, addressing her by her first name.
To retain the young people’s interest the second dance would be a lively quadrille. Sir John was now his niece’s partner, the head couple in their square, while Ross and Eleanor danced the sides. The dance was a sore test for Sir John, who was no longer the man who had tramped through the Arctic twenty years before. The stout lieutenant-governor, being now fifty-five years of age, had no breath to spare for conversation so there was little talk among their set. It was with visible relief that Sir John, hearing the last bars of the Finale, retreated to a chair beside the foremast where he charmed the ladies present by borrowing Eleanor’s fan.
There was a brief interval, a sip of refreshment, and then the third dance was almost upon them, another country dance, and Sophia recalled she must dance it with Commander Crozier. There he was, already waiting for her as the musicians tuned their instruments, and she saw that Crozier had observed her watching him, and that she must therefore go and stand up with him, exposed to the gaze of the ladies and the semaphore of their fans. She comforted herself that her next dance, another quadrille, was engaged to Joseph Hooker, the ship’s naturalist and surgeon who, though practically a civilian, was of her own age and both learned and quick. She had just engaged the following dance – the first waltz of the evening – to Lieutenant McMurdo, the first of the Terror, who looked very fine in his uniform and could easily be forgiven his soft Scottish brogue. Well, she would endure her present duty in anticipation of pleasures to come; she only hoped that Commander Crozier would not step on her dress or trample her toes.
She went and stood by him and gave him her hand. He stood there, looking down at her, and seemed as if about to speak, and then he thought better of it, or could not find his tongue, and bowed to her again. Of course! He is nervous. After thirty years at sea, and numerous polar expeditions, this professional seaman, esteemed by his peers for his coolness in danger, who had neatly threaded the Terror between two clashing icebergs in a southern ocean squall, was dumbstruck by fear, here, on this motionless deck in this safe moonlit harbour! It must be the dance, she concluded: he fears parading his clumsiness before so many eyes. Her pity moved, she resolved to assist her poor partner through his ordeal. She would whisper instructions, simplify the steps. So moved was she by her own kindness that it did not occur to her – not until later, after she had learned that Commander Crozier was in fact a perfectly sound dancer – that it was not the steps that frightened him but rather that he was to perform them with her.
Two violin bows sawed in unison, there was a final flourish of the bassoon, and the town’s musicians, convicts to a man, reached for the beer glasses concealed behind their sheet music. It was over, the second of the country dances, and the ranks on the floor would thin out now as the older people, having discharged their duty, abandoned the deck to the youngsters. Sophia, anticipating the more fashionable dances to come, decided she must refresh herself, and as Joseph Hooker had yet to claim her she asked Commander Crozier to escort her to the dressing room. It pleased her to be able to favour him so: he had danced so bravely in the event, with so little help from herself; and if some of the other couples might have been discomfited by his lack of conversation, even when standing off, she herself had no objection to it: silence in such a man as Crozier might be taken as a virtue. How unli
ke the charming Ross he was, though they were known to be close as brothers: indeed, closer than most. It delighted her that she alone had fathomed the cause of his reticence, that the poor dear man was clearly engrossed in recalling and dancing his steps.
So Crozier, still mute, gave Sophia his arm and escorted her to the companionway which led to Ross’s cabin, set aside for the night as a dressing room. And there near the companionway, in the crowd of chattering ladies and gentlemen, was her next partner, young Joseph Dalton Hooker, still in animated conversation with his fellow scientist and surgeon, Mr McCormick. They must, Sophia surmised, have made up their recent quarrel, the talk of the two ships, over a certain friend of Hooker who had usurped McCormick’s role as naturalist on a recent voyage of the Beagle.
Observing young Hooker, Crozier at last found his tongue.
‘Miss Cracroft, I see my relief is at hand. But may I ask if you are already engaged for the final waltz of the night? I should be honoured if you would dance it with me.’
The last waltz of the night. It was still in her gift, and indeed she still had one other waltz free, the third, having just promised her second to her cousin Lieutenant Kay. Two waltzes, a reel and a couple of quadrilles: these were the blanks that remained on her dance card, and none of them yet solicited by Captain James Clark Ross. There he was now by the rail, complacently talking to some men of the town, abandoning her to the trap she was in! She looked away from Crozier, searching for means of escape.
‘The last waltz?’ she said vaguely. ‘I believe that I have an engagement for that.’ She made no move to check her card; it was the shallowest of lies, and she despised herself for it. ‘But I have three other dances still free – you are welcome to any of them, Commander. It shall be a pleasure to stand up again with a gentleman who dances so well.’ And she gave him the smile – the beautiful smile, she knew – which she hoped might compensate him for the disappointment on his broad, freckled face. And though she reproved her own dishonesty (and took some comfort from the fact that she had the evident good character to reprove herself for it), a part of her also whispered: this is not my fault; how does he presume to ask to dance with me twice?
‘Alas,’ said Crozier, ‘the final waltz is the only dance for which I myself am not already engaged.’ He surprised her by smiling. ‘As captains of the expedition, Ross and I are much in demand tonight; all the ladies of the town wish to dance with us, and we have had quite a comical time of it, rebuffing all the outraged gentlemen who wish to know why we don’t ask their wives to dance. Ross has appointed poor McCormick to act as our match-maker, so as not to cause an incident each time we are obliged to refuse. Now I have only the last dance left to me, and James has no dance left at all.’
Sophia looked away from him again, down the tunnel of light which enclosed the main deck. How strange they all looked, and small, in their best coats and ball dresses, their medals and their fans. There was cousin Eleanor, that sad motherless little creature with whom she lived, deep in talk with the Reverend Gell, who was pompously in love with her. Here was Hooker, the naturalist, who had spied her through the crowd, and was about to accost her, to take possession. If I were to fall ill now, if I had to go home . . . But they would send me down to the cabin, where the ladies would surround me with their sympathy, and fan me with their questions, until they had unpicked the cause of my heartache, and then they would turn away from me and smile.
A gust of wind blew off the river. She thought she felt the deck move beneath her feet, stirred by the last faint swell of
the ocean, that great southern ocean, which waited for Erebus off the mouth of the Derwent.
She shivered and settled her shawl about her shoulders. She was being silly. No: she had been silly and would be silly no more. This was a ball after all. How many true balls were held in Van Diemen’s Land? Would such a ball as this ever be held here again? ‘The Glorious First of June’, the newspapers were calling it. She was unmarried, already twenty-four: society decreed that balls must be her business. And it would be such poor manners to refuse poor Crozier. She turned to him again, still smiling vaguely. ‘The last waltz, you say. That is the third, is it not?’ She turned over her dance card, but still did not examine it.
He shook his head. ‘No, Miss Cracroft. The fourth. There are to be four waltzes tonight. The ball will conclude with the last of them.’
She glanced at her dance card and brightened her smile. ‘Why, you are quite right, Commander! Here it is, a fourth! I had quite overlooked it!’ She had, in fact, arranged the order of dancing herself. ‘And it is free. I had thought the third waltz was the last one.’ She turned over her card again, so that he might not see that the space for the third waltz was also left blank. ‘I am already engaged for the third with an officer of the garrison.’ She had little doubt that such a request would yet be forthcoming. ‘Of course I shall dance the fourth waltz with you. You are very kind, Commander.’
And with that she left him and escaped to the dressing room, to avoid her own eyes in the mirror, while young Joseph Dalton Hooker, bewildered to see her thus flee from him, awaited her return at the top of the stair.
Her last dance before supper was with her cousin, Lieutenant Kay, who must therefore by custom accompany her to supper with her party – which happened to be his own party as well.
The music, in stopping, had stranded them both near the mainmast, so that they were the first couple to cross the makeshift companionway, a kind of carpeted stile adorned with silver wattles, which joined the Erebus to Terror where their hulls kissed amidships. And there on the other side, welcoming the stream of guests to his own vessel, stood the smiling Frank Crozier. He bowed to Sophia as her shoes met his deck.
‘Here you see, Miss Cracroft, the result of all your labours. Without your assistance, we poor sailors would never have supplied such a feast as this.’ And with a sweep of his arm he showed her the supper which awaited the guests, set out on trestles which ranged the full length of the deck. There were platters and bowls of cold chicken and ham, of poached fish, salads, biscuits and cheese; of lobster, prawns, pies, pastries both sweet and savoury, and raspberries and peaches from cold stores packed with Yankee ice. Servants bustled up through the main-hatch – sailors and marines in their blue or red jackets – bringing with them the scent of roast beef and lamb and the almond smell of white soup. Surveying them all from his place by the mainmast, where he guarded a trestle crowded with bottles, was Mr Hallett, the purser of Erebus, plying his corkscrew the while.
Kay escorted her to her uncle’s table, where they were joined by Sir John and Captain Ross, and by Lieutenant Bird of the Erebus, another close friend from their polar voyages with Parry. Next came McMurdo and Hooker, who was escorting Eleanor to supper. The Reverend Gell joined them uninvited, presuming on his status as unofficial chaplain to the lieutenant-governor’s household; he sat on the other side of Eleanor, from where he looked darkly at Hooker, and sought to cow the young scientist with barbs of Latin and Greek, to which Hooker easily responded, until Gell topped him with a few caustic-sounding remarks in a language which Sophia, who was greatly amused, took to be Hebrew, or perhaps Aramaic.
It was time now for the toasts and speeches. Sophia had not thought there was so much crystal in all of the colony. The glasses, held high in readiness, splintered the light from the lanterns and mirrors, each facet and cut giving birth to a jewel. The champagne, chilled by imported ice from the lakes of New England, sparkled within her. All eyes were now fixed on the quarterdeck, on Commander Crozier, who stood – for the naval officers, so as not to cause confusion with the guests, were waiving their privilege and would drink the loyal toast standing – with his own glass extended. How was it possible, Sophia wondered, for such a weathered old sailor to blush so deeply?
The loyal toast was given, and then the toast of the day which, it being a Tuesday, was by custom ‘to our men’, and then Crozier made a halting speec
h by way of introduction, a few words of Erse from the hills near his native Banbridge, kade mealy faulty (which many present, being untutored, mistook for Greek), and then it was the turn of Captain Ross to address the diners, and next the guest of honour, his excellency the lieutenant-governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin. And when all the thanks and congratulations and patriotic sentiment were quite run through, everyone could at last sit down and recharge their glasses and fill up their plates, and there was quiet for a while, because of the excellence of the supper, and the appetite born of dancing and talking in the cool air off the Derwent.
The meal having been consumed – or at least, the rate of its consumption having slowed enough to permit some polite interjection – the drone of voices could again be heard over the clink of glasses and forks.
As the interval progressed, a licence was assumed to move from table to table. Joining the top table now was Mr John Hepburn, the superintendent of Government House, a man whose humble origin – he had begun life as a Scotch cowherd before going to sea on a collier – was trumped by his heroic service to Sir John twenty years before. Hepburn had been his master’s right-hand man when Sir John made his famous Arctic journey from the Great Slave Lake down the Coppermine River to the polar sea at Point Turnagain. He arrived at the table just as Captain Ross was discussing with his brother explorers his sailing orders from the Admiralty. These would soon send Terror and Erebus south of New Zealand, from where they were to follow the sixtieth parallel of latitude to the further side of the Antarctic continent, attempting as they went to fix the true position of the Nimrod and Aurora islands. Having reached the vicinity of 55 degrees west, they were then to turn south and attempt to pass through the pack ice for a second time, to see what lay beyond it at that longitude.
Returning from this exploration of the far south – God willing – the ships were then to touch at the Falkland Islands to perform a hydrological survey and then visit Tierra del Fuego for magnetic observations. After that, if the ships were still sound, they were directed to brave the southern ice for a third summer season, to search for Bouvet Island and Thompson Island before finally returning to Greenwich. Nor were they likely to rest there for long, Captain Ross confided: there was talk in his mail from the Admiralty of sending the two ships out again as soon as they could be refitted, this time to the other end of the earth, where they would attempt to traverse the fabled North West Passage.
Minds of Winter Page 3