Minds of Winter

by Ed O’Loughlin

  72º00’N 94º30’W

  North West Territories, Canada

  Fay forgot to ask Nelson to stop by a food store on the way home from Tuktoyaktuk. Her kitchenette in the chalet had only tea and coffee and little catering tubs of long-life cream and butter, but she found a box of old crackers at the back of a cupboard so she dined alone on that. As she ate she looked through the contents of Nelson’s strange folder, reading the letter three times. The third time, she took out her smartphone and tried to cross-check its details online. Her wifi came from the reception room on the other side of the clearing, so the connection was slow and weak, but from what she could see the letter contained many plausible details.

  She looked at the Guardian article again and thought of her grandfather.

  When Fay was very young she had seen a picture of Christmas presents scattered in the wreckage of a plane. The plane hadn’t caught fire so the presents were still in their coloured wrappers, scattered across a snow-field among shreds of aluminium. It so happened that she had seen the photograph on the same day that she learned from her mother that her mother’s father, until then a hypothetical figure, was a Canadian airman who’d been killed – or rather, he had disappeared – somewhere near the North Pole. After that, Fay sometimes thought of him at Christmas.

  Sometimes, when she was sad or short of money, Alice would hug her daughter and tell her how different things would have been if she’d never left Canada. There was so much room over there, forests and mountains and lakes. Alice had run barefoot all summer with the other kids on the air force base. All winter long she had played in deep snow. Transported to County Down by her widowed mother, the twelve-year-old Alice didn’t take to the dripping hedgerows and grey winter mud, the chapels and the churches. She had fled to London as soon as she could and made the most of its freedoms. One of them had turned into Fay.

  Fay met Alice’s mother Elizabeth only a few times, and only in London. She later guessed that these meetings had been kept secret from Elizabeth’s brothers, who were unmarried, stern and religious, and whom Fay met only once, on her first and only visit to their home town of Banbridge.

  There was a history of strokes in Alice’s family. Elizabeth lay in a coffin in the front room of the house where she’d lived with her brothers. Her anxious face, which was so like Fay’s own, was loosened in death. Fay, who was then very small, had kept watch at the door while Alice, who assumed she would be shut out of the will by her uncles, stole a last memento of her mother.

  Alice chose a framed black-and-white photo that had been taken in that same Ulster parlour. It showed Elizabeth and her Canadian groom on the day they were married during the war. They stood at this very fireplace, the one over which the photograph was displayed: she in a sensible jacket and skirt, he in his number-one uniform. Her grandmother must have been pretty, Fay thought, but the rigid clothes and padded shoulders, the stiff, unnatural hair and the posing of the photograph made her face seem long and horse-like and much sterner than in life. The 1940s weren’t kind to women’s faces. Her new husband would have been older than she, already in his thirties, but he looked older still, as people did back then. He was stocky and clean-shaven, which always seemed odd to Fay. She thought of World War Two pilots as languid men with pointy moustaches. Her grandfather didn’t have the face of a warrior; his eyes had a shy, distracted look, as if he half wanted to be somewhere else. So, thought Fay, looking at the picture that her mother was stealing, that’s the Christmas Man. It was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on Dead Santa.

  The newly-weds held hands stiffly, as if under orders from the photographer. Behind them on the mantelpiece sat a little brass carriage clock, a beautiful instrument with spiky black numerals on a plain white face.

  Flight Lieutenant Morgan had put it there early in the war in case he did not return from his submarine-hunting patrols. If I’d left it at Castle Archdale, he told the young Alice once, some bugger might have swiped it when they came to clean out my kit. When the war ended he took his pregnant wife back to Canada and the little clock went with them. Twelve years later, after Group Captain Morgan vanished, the clock returned to Banbridge with his widow and his child.

  Fay had fallen in love with the clock at her first and only sight of it. She had picked it up to feel its clever weight, breathed on its brass to watch clouds form and sublimate. And Alice, seeing her daughter’s disappointment when she chose to pinch the photo instead, had pointed to the clock’s black-and-white image in the back of the photograph and said, look, this way we get to keep the clock too! She stuffed the photo in her handbag just as an angry tea tray rattled in the hall.

  But here was the clock again, pictured over the news piece in the Guardian. Fay’s uncles must have sold it as soon as Elizabeth was gone. Fay was quite sure it was the same clock: the photograph of her grandparents had hung on the wall over her mother’s favourite armchair, where Alice sat up most days since her own stroke had crippled her. Fay, who nursed her mother herself, had seen it every day for twenty years.

  The coincidence alone was shocking, and then there were all the questions that it raised. Had her grandfather known what his clock really was? And by what freak of chance had this mystery fallen into her lap on the ice-road from Tuktoyaktuk? Was it really just coincidence, or was someone playing a trick? But no one could know who she was or why she had come here. Least of all someone like Nelson. But he did know, she supposed, where this supposed letter had come from. Which was something she wanted to know for herself.

  More snow had fallen in the passes in the night, undoing the work of the graders, but to Nelson this no longer mattered. He had sat up late reading the papers on Bert’s desk, and he thought he could see a solution at hand. The Englishwoman, Fay, seemed to be taking an interest. She had borrowed the Crozier file to read in her chalet. Now he was on his way to pick her up to drive her to the airport. But he knew from the radio that the storms in the south were still grounding all flights. She seemed to have had some college; as long as her exit was blocked he might enlist her to his search for meaning.

  The weather was overcast, not as cold as it had been. His headlights revealed a rain of fine crystals, too small to call flakes or to see in the dark. They fell slant in a breeze that came off the mountains, sticking to the windscreen where the wipers did not reach. The crystals grew larger. As he drove though the last pool of streetlight they were falling more slowly; by the time he reached Fay’s lodgings it was snowing as it should. The flakes whirled in the breeze like a murmuration of starlings, billions of fleeting pixels which formed then dissolved dark trees by the road. Opening the car door, he heard the hiss of new snow brushing over old crust.

  Ringnes had given Fay a chalet of her own, a log cabin on stilts on the edge of the clearing. Wooden steps led up to its porch. Her door had opened before he was halfway up the steps. She was fully dressed, with Bert’s folder under her arm.

  ‘I can take you to the airport,’ he said. ‘But I think that it’s still closed.’

  She came down the steps, watching her feet in case she might slip. Reaching the ground, she looked up at him doubtfully. ‘It is,’ she said. ‘Mr Ringnes just told me. Perhaps we can get some coffee, then have a look around the town.’

  They had breakfast in a cafe on the main street, sitting in the window where they could watch the cars. She ordered the biggest breakfast on the menu, with bacon and eggs and sausage and pancakes. And then he remembered that he had dropped her straight back to her chalet the night before, and that she had probably gone without dinner.

  She ate her food absently, looking out the window. It was still snowing. Trucks and cars hissed past infrequently, announced by gold light that flared on the road. He saw her blink a couple of times, as if in disbelief. There were deep shadows under her eyes.

  ‘You look like you’ve been awake all night.’ He nodded at the folder set beside her on the bench seat. ‘Did that file k
eep you up?’ He had been waiting for her to mention it herself.

  ‘Not really.’ She became interested in a piece of bacon. ‘It’s jet lag, I suppose. I haven’t been able to sleep since I left London.’

  ‘I’ve never had jet lag. I never went further than the States, and I drove all the way . . . They say that after a day or two your body resets its clock by the sun.’

  ‘There is no sun here.’

  ‘There will be next week. But by then we’ll both be gone.’

  The new snow had forgiven the town for most of its flaws. It settled on roofs, on service lots, on dumpsters and highway signs. It clung to the roof of the igloo-shaped church, waiting for the first breath of wind to send it sliding to the ground, and it powdered the pavement, crunching underfoot as they walked to the car. Nelson drove slowly around the small grid of streets, showing her what there was to see: the legion post, the police station, the stores and garages, the view out across the river where the ice-road drove into the north.

  ‘Let’s go a bit further,’ said Fay.

  A gravel road ran a little way into the trees. Out there, thought Fay, just beyond those low hills, was the treeline, where North America turned into something else. But the treeline wasn’t really a line; she had learned that on the ice-road the day before. The trees had merely dwindled in size, wandered away from the riverbank, until somewhere between here and Tuktoyaktuk they had found themselves in the Barren Lands. She hadn’t even noticed until it was too late. On the way back it had been too dark to see.

  ‘I’m not quite sure,’ she said, ‘that the Crozier letter is fake.’

  ‘Yeah?’ He drove slowly, absorbed in the landscape. The ground was lower here, perhaps prone to flooding, the spruces replaced by willows and birches bent under the snow. The road was a grey strip between them, torn from the vacant grey sky. ‘You said last night that nobody ever found any word of those ships.’

  ‘That’s what I thought . . .’ Did she need to tell him about her grandfather, or his chronometer? No, she did not. ‘I looked it up on my phone in the chalet. No written record was ever found from that expedition, apart from one short note which didn’t say much.’

  ‘So then the Crozier letter can’t be real.’

  ‘You would think so. But I read it several times and I checked the details as well as I could. If that letter is a fiction it’s a pretty good one. This Crozier had been deputy commander of the first voyage of exploration by those two ships. It was a scientific voyage to Antarctica. When they got back to England the government decided to send the ships out again to try and find the North West Passage. Crozier was meant to lead this second expedition. But then Sir John Franklin, who was senior to him in the navy, took the job instead. He’d been sacked as governor of Tasmania and wanted to restore his reputation. So Crozier had to sail as his number two. To make things worse, Crozier had also had a proposal refused by Franklin’s niece. She’s also mentioned in that letter.’

  ‘It ties in then.’

  ‘It does. But I can’t work out why there’s no mention of a

  letter like this anywhere on the internet. It would have caused a sensation.’

  ‘Where do you think Bert got it?

  ‘I was going to ask you that. What did your brother do for a living?’

  If he thought about it honestly, Nelson had never been sure. But he had to give her something. ‘Bert came up here a while back to teach in the local high school. But he hadn’t started yet. He’s due to begin next semester.’

  ‘A teacher? That’s all?’

  ‘He wasn’t always a teacher. At least, not a high-school teacher. He used to be a college professor and do research and stuff. He did work for the government. He had a PhD from McGill.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘He was a geographer.’ He seemed to expect her to find this funny. ‘Apparently that’s still a thing. You’d think they’d be done with that by now, right?’

  ‘Did he have access to any special archives?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. If the letter is real, why is it written in his own handwriting? Why didn’t he just make a photocopy or whatever of the original?’

  ‘I was thinking about that last night, when I couldn’t sleep, and after a while I had an idea.’

  On the right, a lane through the trees led to a mesh of poles and wires standing in a glade. ‘That’s for the northern lights,’ said Nelson. ‘Some kind of detector. So what was your idea?’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t know much about the Canadian government archives.’ Apart, that is, from all that she had learned about archives while studying for her library degree, and in her recent search for her grandfather’s lost service record. But this, like the chronometer, was none of Nelson’s business. ‘But I trained and worked as a librarian, and I can say for sure that this reference code on the folder isn’t from the Ottawa archives. In fact, it doesn’t make sense in terms of any of the existing international archival standards: no information about the material’s date, author, description or size.’

  The road narrowed as the willows closed in, finger-like twigs reaching clear of the snow. Fay was reminded of a trip she had once made to Lincolnshire in winter. The fens had been flooded and only the tips of the hedgerows, stark above the water, had guided their car through a fog.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning, he could have come across this letter in a public archive, but he’s trying to disguise where he found it. Or else he has access to some other archive with its own system of filing that I don’t know about. Either way, I can guess why he might have wanted to write it all out by hand rather than photocopy it. I suspect that he couldn’t afford to have it copied.’

  ‘He had plenty of money. He’d always been well paid.’

  ‘No, what I mean is that he couldn’t afford to get someone else to make the copy for him – it wouldn’t have been private. In most archives, if you want something copied or scanned you have to fill out a form and get the librarians to do it for you, assuming permission is granted. But by doing that you leave a record of what you were looking at. Which is not a good idea if you’ve stumbled across something that you want to keep to yourself. Something very sensitive or secret.’

  ‘He could have used a spy camera. Saved himself a lot of writing.’

  ‘Was your brother a spy?’ She was joking when she said it.

  ‘Of course not . . . He wasn’t a very practical man.’

  Not like you, she thought. But this nice car belongs to him, not you.

  ‘I wonder,’ Fay said carefully, ‘if your brother had any more stuff like this letter. Stuff that could be a help in working out if the letter is genuine. Or if he was just making things up.’ She saw Nelson’s face, and hurried on. ‘I mean, he could have been working on a novel or something.’

  They had come to the end of the road. It widened into a small clearing with a clump of willows in the middle. Ahead was a miniature forest of birches and willow twigs, some still wearing the dead leaves of summer. A track too narrow for their car, a firebreak or trapline, continued on north. Nelson drove slowly around the clump of willows until the car was facing back towards town. Then he stopped. The lights of Inuvik were hidden by a low rise in the land.

  ‘I doubt very much that Bert was a writer.’ He looked at her. ‘What about you? What’s your interest in this?’

  She studied the willows, frowning. ‘Nothing really. I just thought I might help you. There’s not much else to do until I can leave.’

  She waited for him to speak again. After a pause he did. ‘There’s plenty more stuff like that letter. I can’t read all of it.’

  No. That’s not your thing, is it? Aloud she said, ‘It sounds like there’s a lot of it.’

  ‘There sure is. And some of it’s in French.’

  ‘I can read French. If I have to. With the help of on online translator. Why don�
��t you let me take a look?’

  Orkney, 3 June 1851

  The little town of Stromness turns its back on the harbour from which it was born. Grey stone houses face a single long street, showing blind gables to the sea. Between the houses, narrow alleys sneak down to the private piers and slips that are hidden behind them, as if the sea were a family secret which everyone knows but no one acknowledges.

  This arrangement confused Ensign Bellot the first time he saw it. It had been a lovely summer evening. The low green slopes of Orkney, the rugged hills of Hoy, were mirrored in the still waters of Stromness harbour as Prince Albert, Lady Franklin’s private search vessel, picked up her moorings off Mr Clouston’s pier. Why, the young French volunteer wondered, would these houses shun such a beautiful view?

  His answer had come the next day, and was repeated on every day since; for a week the Orkney Islands had been battered by southerly storms. Ensign Bellot had never been this far north before. He knew the Biscay gales of Rochefort-sur-Mer, his native home, and he had weathered a hurricane at sea during the Anglo-French raid on Madagascar. Such winds were intense but soon blew themselves out: he had not experienced the prolonged, cold, unwavering spite of a north Atlantic storm, the frigid, driving rain, the wind that jabbed and weaved from south to west for days at a time like a boxer seeking a weakness. It drove sheets of stinging spray off the sheltered harbour, stirred a short but angry slop that pounded the ship as she loaded her stores from the Hudson’s Bay depot. Shivering on deck in a suit of borrowed oilskins, Bellot now knew why the town turned its back to the wind.

  If it is like this here, he thought, in the middle of summer, how will it be in winter in the channels of the north? How will I cope with the Arctic dark and cold? He had won the Legion of Honour five years before, at the age of nineteen, shot in the thigh in the raid on Madagascar, but he was a sensitive young man, and a tendency to doubt his own worth had not been helped by his recent meetings in London.