Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  ‘They offer me command of this next expedition,’ he told his friends, ‘though I confess I have seen enough ice for one lifetime.’

  ‘As have we all,’ said Sir John.

  ‘Aye, indeed,’ said Crozier.

  But how could one tire of the ice, thought Sophia, enraptured by the names on Ross’s itinerary. The Nimrod Islands. Aurora. Cold beauty that waited, shrouded from knowledge, in secret vaults of ice. If she could only cut off her hair, dress as a boy and run off with the ships, like the famous Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen of old Ireland, who had dared to present herself, a wanted rebel, at the palace at Greenwich, where she had treated with great Elizabeth as if she were her peer.

  Sir John spoke again, though his voice was kept low, so that his words might not carry beyond this private circle.

  ‘I confess,’ he said, ‘that I am aggrieved for myself, that the Admiralty’s orders must send away the dearest friends to have passed through Van Diemen’s Land since I took up my post here. Yet I am even more aggrieved for yourselves, that their lordships have seen fit to order your ships to attempt the pack ice twice more in this same expedition. What more can you do than you have already done in your last season? You have passed clear through the southern pack ice, which has never been done before. You have determined the location of the south magnetic pole. You have discovered new lands and prodigious wonders, like the Great Ice Barrier that guards the southern continent, and the volcano that burns at your furthest south, your marvellous Mount Erebus. And all this without losing a single man to scurvy! To try more than this is to tempt fate.’

  Captain Ross answered his old friend with a smile.

  ‘Your care for us makes you overstate our peril, Sir John. Our little bomb ships may be poor sailers in the open sea, but they are built strongly for their calling and have proven well-suited to enduring the ice. All that can be done has been done, and we are in the hands of God, now as ever.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Sir John, who was a deeply pious man for all his seamanly concern for pagan fate. ‘Yet I cannot help but fret. Hepburn and I know all too well the horrors that can befall an expedition that goes awry. When I think of that brute Terohaute, and the meat which he fed to Hepburn here, saying it was wolf meat, but which we later learned was the flesh of his fellow ­voyageurs, whom he had murdered in the barrens . . .’

  Hepburn shook his head dutifully, though he did not seem much put out at this revelation of his unwitting cannibal past. Sir John continued: ‘Dr Richardson had to put a bullet in Terohaute’s head after he murdered poor Midshipman Hood. That was no job for a physician.’

  Sophia scarcely dared to breathe. Such tales of horror were not told in the books of adventure and travel that she inhaled like fresh air, and which formed such a staple of her conversation with her aunt. Let him only speak on, she thought. Then she noticed that Crozier was watching her. She lowered her eyes then raised them again in mute appeal. Don’t reveal me as a spy, she thought. Crozier cleared his throat and looked away from her, addressing Sir John. ‘Your concern for us does you credit, Sir John, especially in light of your Arctic experiences. But you had to travel by land from the interior of the Canadas, in boats and on foot, whereas we are supplied with two fully victualled ships and a wide sea to sail them on. Should one of our ships be stricken, it is to be hoped that the other would be on hand to take off its crew.’ He made a diffident bow to Hepburn, as if seeking his forgiveness for this exposition. But, Sophia realized, he is explaining this to me.

  ‘Perhaps,’ countered Sir John. ‘But I fear you speak ingenuously, Frank, in order to make light of your danger in this present charming company.’ He turned and smiled at his niece, who thought, Oh, so he has not forgotten me! Sir John continued: ‘When Erebus and Terror leave here they must cross again the Roaring Forties and the great southern ocean, where they were already separated on their voyage here from the Cape. In the event of a shipwreck I do not think that any small boat could weather such waters for long.’

  There was a moment’s silence as all in the circle considered the evident truth of Sir John’s words. Then Captain Ross reached across the table to clap his friend Crozier on the shoulder. ‘There, my dear Frank. The Madeira is sitting before you. Pass it around and let us drink to our good fortune, that she may remain constant to us. And tomorrow, when the wine has worn off, we shall make amends for our superstition and commend ourselves properly to our Maker, who holds us in His hand.’

  The talk continued on happier subjects until the sawing of bows signalled the musicians’ intention to resume their work. One by one, the officers went off to claim their partners for the next dance, but Lieutenant Bird, who was to dance with Sophia, was detained at the rail by Captain Ross on some ship’s business, leaving Sophia alone with her uncle. Sir John sat back in his chair and watched the revellers flee from the ruins of their supper.

  ‘What a great shame it is, Sophia,’ he said, ‘that your aunt could not be here. She has worked so hard for the people of this colony, convict and settler alike, and with so little thanks. The officials plot against her campaign for humane reform and would have me dismissed if they could. Tonight, at least, she might have had some reward for her troubles.’

  Sophia, distracted by confused thoughts of eternal love and of dire extremity, ventured to say what she had heard said by others, and of others, but which she could not yet conceive to be true also of herself: that it was a sad fact of life that people do not always get what they deserve.

  She regretted her remark immediately. It was too off-hand, too casual; it was unworthy of Lady Jane’s tireless philanthropy and improving zeal to consign her to the category of mere ‘people’. Yet her uncle surprised her by solemnly nodding.

  ‘You are quite right,’ he said. ‘People do not always get what they seem to deserve in this life, and must await their true reward or punishment in the next. The ways of God are not laid bare to us and are quite beyond our moral judgement.’

  Sophia, who knew of her uncle’s great piety, readied herself for a sermon on the Divine Will. Yet her uncle surprised her again.

  ‘That being the case,’ he continued, ‘it is all the more pleasant to observe the good fortune of a friend who is about to receive his deserved reward on this side of heaven. Our dear friend Frank Crozier –’ and here he seemed to fix her with his eye – ‘has never been given the credit he deserves for his distinguished service. He is known as one of the finest seamen in the navy, and a keen scientist too. And yet Frank has little private interest at the court or in parliament, so promotions and posts have often eluded him. His father left him nothing – he has not even a house of his own.’

  ‘What a great pity,’ said Sophia. It was a cause of some embarrassment to her that she knew all this already; did Sir John not understand that the ladies of the town had assayed to the last ounce the wealth and prospects of each unmarried officer of the squadron, almost as soon as his feet touched the shore? Sophia, a romantic of the heroic stamp, considered such gossip indelicate. She believed – no, she felt, for her reason was sound enough, and tried to tell her otherwise – that the worth of a man could be read in his eyes.

  ‘All that will change now,’ said Sir John. His gaze was still on her. ‘If it pleases God that the ships should return to England, Frank Crozier will finally get what he deserves. Ross will be knighted and Frank made post captain, and they will offer Frank command of the North West Passage voyage should James refuse it, as I think likely. And when God willing he returns from that expedition, Frank will have earned a salaried post at Greenwich. I have heard him say how much he loves to stand by the observatory, astride the prime meridian like a fanciful schoolboy, and to placidly observe the ships and boats that pass up and down the Thames. To have a little house nearby and to walk each day on the Black Heath is his notion of heaven. He even talks of bringing his unmarried sisters there from Dublin. If he cannot get a wife.’

 
; She was looking beyond her uncle, to where Ross and Lieutenant Bird conversed at the windward rail of Terror. Across on the Erebus the tuning of instruments was now complete. If Bird did not hasten to claim her they would have to join the dance late, at the end of the line. Ross, glancing across, saw her and smiled.

  ‘It sounds a charming prospect,’ Sophia said distractedly. ‘I am sure that Commander Crozier will be most deserving of his future happiness.’ Her memory stirred within her. ‘And is it not fixed that Captain Ross will also live at Greenwich once his voyaging is done?’

  ‘It is. He has had enough of polar sailing. Unless there is a war this may be his last voyage. So he has bought a house on the Black Heath that is big enough for himself and Miss Coulman. And God willing their children as well.’

  She turned away from her uncle, in the vague direction of the bows.

  Sophia knew the Black Heath well, and all of Greenwich and its environs. She had often gone there with her uncle and aunt, paying calls on the tribe of serving and retired navy men who had settled near the naval college, braced between London and the sea. Yet now, on the deck of the Terror in this cold hour of night, her recollection of those genteel districts, their parks and their hills and their houses, was infused with a sudden dread. The houses and the terraces, the squares of the naval college and the old Greenwich palace, seemed newly strange and sorrowful: like offerings, old and new, large and small, arranged beneath the shrine of the observatory, where time was transubstantiated from the sky and consecrated in chronometers, then served to the ships that passed down the reach. It was in Greenwich that days were born and there that they returned to die.

  She shuddered. Was this to have been the scene of her triumph? Men had wives there, and children, and problems with servants. Their houses, she had noticed, were often a little too small, their furniture not quite of the best manufacture, showing the scars of too-frequent removal from one rented home to the next. And here and there, in odd corners of dusty upstairs rooms, she saw the great sturdy sea-chests that called to her softly like a shell held to the ear. How could they stand it, men who had sailed into battle, who had dared the unknown and written their names there, to settle down here on this hill by an estuary, with what comfort and love they could gather around them, and wait for death, whom they knew well already, to find and reclaim them? How could they bear to sit still?

  It was a little after three when the last waltz was called. Many of the older guests had long since departed, the exceptions being those with marriageable daughters or those who were lucky or reckless at cards.

  The floor now belonged to the youngsters. Which is to say, it belonged to the young ladies and to those gentlemen who, in this most unbalanced of colonies, where men outnumbered women several times over, were charming or ruthless or lucky enough to have secured partners for the very last waltz of the Glorious First, an occasion which would be talked of in Hobart Town lifetimes from now: long after Erebus and Terror had vanished in the frozen Arctic labyrinth; after the shameful name of Van Diemen’s Land was replaced with the blameless Tasmania; after Sophia’s own travels had finally ended, fifty-one years later, on a rainy June evening in Phillimore Gardens, Kensington; after both the poles were conquered, and the last blank spaces on the map had been claimed by the aerial photographers.

  And yet even the next day Sophia herself could remember almost nothing of that final entry on her dance card. Crozier must have been silent again. He must have danced well, although she was sure he would have looked very tired. His hand had not been too heavy on her waist, his fingers had not sweated through her glove and he had not stepped on her feet. He had left her, in short, to dance by herself, as she had done since suppertime, alone with the music and the forms of the dance, forms which included the steps and the partner and whatever small-talk she was required to make, which she did quite mechanically, hearing herself speak while the music flowed through her, shaping itself to her need. She was borne upward by her weariness, exalted in her loneliness. She no longer cared whom she danced with or who might be watching her. The white planks of the deck were a snow-field; the dancers were swirls in a blizzard, figments of a winter dream. What a fine thing it was to be tired and heartsore and wise beyond one’s years. If she could only stay that way for ever.

  The music stopped and she heard the hum of voices. Commander Crozier asked her to take a turn with him by the stern rail. She stood, looking out to the mouth of the river where fading stars gave notice of the dawn, and half listened to the honest sailor as he talked of his prospects. Was she caught in a circular dream? She had already heard the same talk from her uncle tonight, although it seemed like long ages before. The six men of the quadrille orchestra, their instruments cased on the deck at their feet, stood by the mainmast exchanging tired conversation. They wore blanket-cloth coats and their breaths smoked in the air. Every few moments one head or the other would turn in her direction, and she thought: They are waiting for me to be finished with Crozier, so Crozier can pay them, and then they can go on their way.

  Then the bandsmen of the 51st Regiment took up their instruments to play the last guests off the ships, and at once Sophia was awake again. It was that tune, the same that had moved her the evening before, when she had descended through magical gardens and marvelled at ships on the river, ships that were burning with light. Hearing it now, she understood the beauty of that moment; it was her own beauty, and she pitied it and mourned it, although for the rest of her life it could be summoned by that tune.

  All this turmoil of regret and understanding, and yet Sophia still had to stifle a yawn. She pulled her shawl tightly about her. Crozier was coming to his point. She ought in kindness to stop him before he reached it. But how could she decently divert him? He stood beside her at the rail, clasping it with both hands as if waiting for a wave to break over him, his face braced for the cold slap, and he was telling her that of course it was by no means certain that the next two seasons of the voyage would be crowned with success, or that he himself would be spared from the hazards of the sea, but that if, upon returning to England . . .

  She put her hand on his sleeve, stilling him. ‘My dear Frank,’ she said, ‘things will be as they shall be, and I will pray for your safety until we see you again. But please tell me now, in case it should slip me to ask you, and then later come back to trouble me, as it has troubled me all night – what is the name, do you know, of that tune they are playing? It is lodged like a thorn in my memory and I cannot pluck it out. Mr Elliot said earlier that it might be “The Brighton Camp”. Do you know if he is right?’

  Crozier seemed taken aback by her interruption. Yet he mastered himself quickly. He does have manners, she thought; I am sure he will forgive me. ‘ “The Brighton Camp”?’ he pondered. ‘Why no, Sophia, it is no such thing as far as I know. It is one of our old Irish songs – surely the lilt of it betrays its origin. We call it “The Girl I Left Behind Me”.’

  ‘ “The Girl I Left Behind Me”,’ she repeated, weighing herself with the words.

  Hers would be a life of departures, but it was not she who would be left behind. And a life of departures must also be a life of quiet renunciations: it was things such as these – old friends half forgotten, cold wind on your face, rain on a London window as the light fades in June – that made you feel alive.

  She linked his arm and led him away from the rail, back to where her uncle awaited them. ‘Thank you, Frank. It is a very lovely air. I shall send for the broadsheet. “The Girl I Left Behind Me”. We shall play it in our drawing room and think of you and your ships.’

  And Francis Crozier, quite mistaking her meaning, squeezed her hand to his side with his elbow then quickly released it once more.

  North West Territories, Canada

  If there had ever been a sign, then Nelson had missed it. Instead of taking the highway south he found himself in the car park of Inuvik’s small airport, built on its own dead-end road on
the south side of town. He was about to turn and drive on, but then he remembered that he needed cigarettes, and that Fort McPherson, the next township to the south, was about two hours’ drive away.

  He parked his car and went into the terminal, and by the time he understood his mistake – that the airport was too small to have its own store – it was already too late.

  She was alone on the plastic seats inside the door. Her bag lay on the floor beside her. Voices murmured from a distant backroom but the hall itself was empty. The paleness of her face, the shadows under her eyes, suggested a long journey. Her hair was short and too dark, too lacking in grey, not to be at least a little bit dyed.

  She got to her feet and smoothed down the knees of her jeans. ‘Taxi?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’ He turned to go.

  ‘Then could I ask you for a lift into town? I’ve been here for ages and no one’s come or gone.’

  He could see a couple of small planes through the glass doors at the back of the hall, their engines wrapped in canvas. Grounded by weather, he guessed: the radio had said there were storms to the south over Whitehorse and Yellowknife and Norman Wells. The snow front was headed this way: if he didn’t get out now he could be blocked in the mountains.

  ‘I’m not going back to Inuvik. I’m headed the other way. Out.’