Ensign Gallo, who was standing at a silver wheel mounted on a freestanding console, said, “Barometric's falling again, sir.”
“What to?” Purcell barked, swiveling back in his chair and adjusting the headset that had slipped askew while he was chewing out Michael.
“Nine eighty-five, sir.”
“Jesus, we're in for it tonight.” His eyes scanned the glowing screens and dials, the sonar, the radar, the GPS, the fathometer, all of which showed a constantly changing and multicolored stream of data.
A spattering of hail clattered against the square windows on the westward side, and the ship heaved like a great hand had just slapped it. Michael snatched at one of the leather straps that dangled from the ceiling and hung on tight; he'd already heard tales of seamen who had been flung from one end of the bridge to the other and broken arms and legs in the process. He wondered if his public flogging was over, or if he was supposed to wait around for more.
Despite the roar of the sea outside, the slashing of the rain and the howling of the winds that seemed to be coming from all directions at once, the atmosphere in the bridge quickly returned to the tranquillity of an operating room. The flat white light panels in the ceiling cast a cold even glow around the blue walls of the room, and the officers all spoke to each other in low, deliberate tones, their eyes fixed on the instrument arrays before them.
“Port engine, full forward,” the captain said, and Lieutenant Commander Ramsey, whom Michael had met a couple of times, reached for a short red-handed throttle. He repeated the captain's words as he executed the order.
Then, Ramsey nodded discreetly toward Michael-who was still standing around like a kid who'd been haled into the principal's office-and said offhandedly to Purcell, “If Mr. Wilde is no longer needed here, sir, perhaps he should join the Ops in the aloft con? It's impossible to fall overboard from there, and he might like to see how the ship is steered.”
Purcell blew out a breath of disgust, and without turning around, said, “If he does fall out, tell him he can float all the way back to Chile before I turn this ship around.”
Michael didn't doubt it, and he took it as his cue to step toward the spiral stair that Ramsey gestured at, and swiftly start climbing.
“How'd you like some company, Kathleen?” he heard Ramsey say into his headset, but he didn't slow up to find out if he wasn't welcome. He went straight up until he was well out of the bridge, and found himself standing on a platform in a virtually black funnel, with only a steel ladder leading higher. The ship juddered, and his shoulders crashed against the rounded wall; he felt like he was in the chimney of the house in The Wizard of Oz, the one that got picked up by the tornado and spun all around. Up above, at least twenty or thirty feet, he could see a blue glow, a lot like you'd get off a TV screen, and he could hear the beeping and hum of machinery.
He put his boot on the bottom rung of the ladder and slowly started to climb. When the prow of the ship came up, he was slung backwards off the ladder, and when the ship righted itself, he was flung forward again; once, he narrowly missed knocking out his front teeth, and he had a sudden terrible flash of having his dental clearance revoked. The rungs were cold and clammy, and he had to grip each one firmly before reaching for the next. As he went up the last few, he saw first a pair of black, rubber-soled shoes, then a pair of blue trousers. He hauled himself up the rest of the way, and when the ship seemed level for a second or two, clambered to his feet.
The Ops was holding steady to a smaller version of the wheel down below, her stern expression illuminated by a GPS screen and a couple of other scopes that Michael couldn't identify. Her eyes were set straight ahead and her jaw was locked; a headset clung to her short brown hair. The aloft con itself-the modern-day equivalent of the crow's nest-was barely big enough for the two of them, and Michael tried not to breathe down Kathleen's neck.
“Going out on deck was a very bad idea,” she said, reminding Michael that she was the one who'd busted him. “We're clocking winds of over a hundred miles per hour.”
“Got it,” he said. “The captain happened to mention it, too.” Then, hoping to change the subject, he said, “So you're up here, all alone in the driver's seat?” On all sides, there were reinforced windows, equipped with Kent screens-whirling discs powered by centrifugal force to throw off water like windshield wipers-that provided an unobstructed, 360-degree view of the boiling ocean all around. Behind him, on the aft deck, one side of the helicopter tarp had ripped loose and was flapping like an enormous, dark green bat's wing.
If only he'd been able to get some decent shots of all this…
“When visibility is as limited as it is now-with such high seas,” she said, “control of the vessel is often passed to the aloft con.”
Michael could see why. Everywhere he looked, the vista was in violent motion, the gray sea heaving and churning for miles, with great blocks of jagged ice bobbing and sinking and slamming into each other. Waves higher than any he had ever imagined rushed at the prow of the ship, crashing down on the bow deck and sending a freezing spume into the air. The spray flew as high as the windows of their aerie.
And all of it-the mad, seething sea and the roiling sky above it, the black specks of birds driven like leaves before the screaming wind-were bathed in the unnatural light of the austral sun, a dull copper orb stubbornly fixed on the northern horizon. It was as if the whole tumultuous picture were lighted from below by a giant lantern that was burning its last few drops of oil.
“Welcome to the Screaming Fifties,” the Ops added, in a slightly more congenial tone. “Once you get below fifty degrees latitude south, that's when you hit the real weather.”
The cutter's prow went up, as easily as if it had been lifted from below, until it was pointing nearly straight up at the shredded storm clouds racing across the southern sky. Kathleen clung to the wheel, her feet braced far apart, and Michael tried to steady himself on the handrail. He knew what was coming… because what went up must come down.
Moments later, the crest passed under them-he could feel the swell of it tingling in his feet-and once gone, the ship teetered, then dropped like a stone skittering down the side of a steep hill. Through the front of the conning tower, Michael could look straight down into a massive trough, a dark cleft as wide as a ravine, but with nothing in it but a watery bottom that seemed to recede even as the ship raced headlong into it.
Kathleen said, “Aye, aye, sir,” into the headset and notched the wheel to the right. Michael could taste the pasta he'd had for dinner. “Depth, one thousand five hundred meters,” she confirmed to the captain below.
The ship plunged down, down, then stopped, then spun-with water rising up in sheer walls all around it-before turning to starboard. Even there, easily ninety feet above the deck and twice as far from the diesel turbines, Michael could hear the engines revving and roaring, the propellers turning-sometimes in nothing but air-as the ship tried to forge its own course through the ice-strewn minefield that engulfed it.
“If you're a praying man,” the Ops said, sparing her first glance directly at Michael, “do it now.” She twisted the wheel again to the right. “You're passing over the wrecks of no less than eight hundred ships and ten thousand sailors.”
The ship charged toward an iceberg that suddenly loomed up before it like a triton.
“Shit, I should have seen that,” Kathleen muttered, and a moment later, said, “Yes, sir,” into her headset. “I do see it, sir. I will,” she added, twisting the wheel.
“Hope I didn't distract you,” Michael said over the pelting sleet and wind. “If it's any comfort, I didn't see that coming, either.”
“It's not your job,” she said. “It is mine.”
Michael fell silent, to let her concentrate, thinking instead of the graveyard that lay below him, the wreckage of hundreds of ships-schooners and sloops, brigs and frigates, trawlers and whalers-mauled by the ice, broken by the waves, ripped to pieces by the searing wind. And he thought of the thousands
of men who had fallen into the raging, empty, endless maw, men whose last sight might have been the masts of their ships snapping like twigs, or a slab of glistening ice tumbling over their heads and plunging them down-what had she said, one thousand five hundred meters? — toward the bottom of a sea so deep no light had ever penetrated it.
What exactly lay right below them, many fathoms under their hull, frozen to the floor of the ocean for all eternity?
The ship careened suddenly from one side to the other. The Ops spun the wheel back to the right and said, “Hard starboard, sir!” to the captain down below. Michael saw the wave, too, gathering force and coming at them like a wall, spreading its wings to either side, lifting chunks of ice the size of houses, and blotting out even the deadening light of the constant sun.
“Hold on tight!” Kathleen barked, and Michael braced himself against the walls, his legs straight, his feet spread. He had never seen anything so large move with such velocity and force, carrying everything-the whole world, it seemed-before it.
The Ops tried to turn the boat so that it would miss the brunt of the wave, but it was too late and the wave, no less than a hundred feet high, was too huge. As it rushed toward the cutter-a streaming wall of angry gray water, rising and widening every second- something else-something white, no, black-something out of control, caught in the storm's unbreakable grip-rocketed toward them even faster. A second later, the window shattered with the sound of a shotgun blast, and shards of ice sprayed the compartment like flying needles. Kathleen screamed and fell away from the wheel, knocking into Michael, who tried to grab her as she slid to the floor. Freezing water pelted his face, and he shook it off, to see- alive and cawing-the bloodied head of a snow-white albatross lying atop the wheel. Its body was wedged against the broken window, its twisted wings splayed uselessly to either side. The wave was still surging over the boat, and the bird clacked its ruined bill, flattened like a boxer's nose. Michael was staring straight into its black unblinking eyes as Kathleen huddled on the floor, and the blue light of the flooded console screens sputtered and went out.
The wave passed, the ship groaned, rolled one way, then back in the other, and finally righted itself.
The albatross opened its mangled beak one more time, emitting nothing more than a hollow rattle, and then, as Michael tried to catch a breath, and Kathleen moaned at his feet in pain, the light in the bird's eyes went out like a snuffed candle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
June 20, 1854, 11 p.m.
The Salon d'Aphrodite, known to its regular clientele simply as Mme. Eugenie's, was located on a busy stretch of the Strand, but back from the street. A brace of lanterns always hung from the gates of the porte-cochere, and so long as they were lighted, the salon was open for business.
Sinclair had never known them to be out.
He was the first to step down from the hansom cab, followed by Le Maitre and then Rutherford, who had to pay the cabbie. Thank God he was of a rich, generous-and just now drunken-nature, as he would also have to pay for their privileges of the house. Mme. Eugenie could occasionally be persuaded to extend credit, but it was at a usurious rate of interest, and no one wished to be hauled into court for an outstanding debt to the Salon d'Aphrodite.
As the three of them mounted the stairs, John-O, a towering Jamaican with a pair of gold teeth in the front of his mouth, opened the door and stepped to one side. He knew who they were, but he was paid in part never to say so.
“Good evening,” Rutherford said, rather thickly, “is Madame at home?” As if he were paying a call on a society acquaintance.
John-O nodded toward the parlor, partially concealed by a red velvet drape; Sinclair could hear the sound of the pianoforte, and a young woman singing “The Beautiful Banks of the Tweed.” With the others in tow, he moved toward the light and gaiety. Frenchie lifted the drape to one side, and Mme. Eugenie looked up from a divan, where she was seated between two of her girls.
“Bienvenue, mes amis!” she said, quickly rising. She was like an old bird, with bright new feathers; her skin the texture of leather, her dress an elaborate green brocade studded with rhinestones. She came forward with her hands extended, a gaudy ring on every finger. “I am so glad you have come to call.”
As Le Maitre guffawed, Sinclair sank gratefully onto a well-cushioned ottoman; he wasn't feeling much steadier on his feet than his companions. The room was spacious-it was once the exhibition hall of a bibliographical society, but as there had been too few bibliophiles to keep the house solvent, Mme. Eugenie had swooped in and snapped it up for a song. The bookshelves held knick-knacks-busts of Cupid and silk flowers in chinoiserie vases. A large oil painting, badly rendered, of Leda Seduced by Zeus hung above the hearth.
The studies and workrooms upstairs had been converted to more private and intimate use.
At present, Sinclair counted perhaps half a dozen of th e femmes galantes circulating around the parlor, in clinging or revealing costume, and an equal number of customers, lounging about on the sofas and chairs. A servant asked him if he would care to have a drink, and Sinclair said, “Gin, yes. And one for each of my friends.”
Rutherford said, “Make mine a whiskey,” and threw him a cautionary look that said: If I'm to pay for all this, I'll bloody well have what I want.
Sinclair knew he was only going deeper into trouble, and debt, but sometimes, he reflected, the only way out was down. And there was still a ways to go.
Frenchie, he noted, was already entangled with a raven-haired harlot in jeweled slippers.
“That you, Sinclair?” someone asked, and Sinclair could guess whose voice it was. Dalton-James Fitzroy a fool of the first water, whose family's lands adjoined his own. “My lord, Sinclair, what are you doing here?”
Sinclair turned on the ottoman, and saw Dalton-James Fitzroy his bulky rump parked on the piano bench, beside the singing girl. Now that the girl turned, Sinclair saw that, despite her gangly frame, she couldn't be more than twelve or thirteen years old, with a simple country face.
“I thought you'd been hounded out of town by your creditors,” Fitzroy said. His pudgy cheeks were gleaming with sweat, and Sinclair steeled himself not to rise to the bait.
“Evening,” he simply replied.
But Fitzroy was determined. “How will you pay the apothecary if you catch a dose here tonight?”
This time, he was saved the trouble of answering at all by Mme. Eugenie's intervention, who rushed to the defense of her establishment. She fluttered between them, saying “Messieurs, my companion ladies are clean as whistles! Dr. Evans, he inspects them regulierement. Every month! And our visitors,” she declared, sweeping one hand around the room, “are la creme de la societe. Only the finest gentlemen, as you may see for yourself.” Wagging one bejeweled finger at Fitzroy, playfully but with meaning, she said, “Shame on you, sir, in front of these agreeable ladies, to be so rude.”
Fitzroy took his chastisement in the spirit of irony, bowed low over the piano keyboard, and begged forgiveness. “Perhaps it is best that I sheathe my sword and depart the field,” he said, which was rich, Sinclair thought, coming from a coward like Fitzroy-always full of bluster until the army came calling for recruits.
He stood up, his silk waistcoat straining at its seams, and clutching the girl's hand walked unsteadily toward the main stairs.
“John-O,” Mme. Eugenie called out, “please show our guest to the Suite des Dieux.”
The girl cast a frightened eye back toward Sinclair, of all people. But he could see-under her rouge and makeup-just how young and inexperienced she was. And he could not resist one sally.
“Why not have a woman?” he taunted Fitzroy.
Two of the other gentlemen in the room laughed.
Fitzroy stopped, teetering, but did not turn. “Chacun a son gout, Sinclair. You, above all people, should know that.”
As Fitzroy left the room with his reluctant prize, Mme. Eugenie came to Sinclair, clucking her tongue. “Why are you so quarrelsome tonight?
It is not like you, my lord.” Sinclair was not a lord, not yet, but he knew that Mme. Eugenie liked to flatter her customers that way. “That is bad form, and Mr. Fitzroy has paid well for this privilege.”
“What privilege?”
Mme. Eugenie reared back as if astonished at his stupidity. “This young girl is a flower that has never been plucked.”
A virgin? Even in his inebriated state, Sinclair knew that that was the oldest con in the trade. Virgins commanded a premium price not only because they were, by definition, safe as houses, but because they were also reputed to be able to cure-through vigorous use-several of the amatory infections. It was all balderdash, of course, and Sinclair would normally have put the whole business out of mind already-what concern was it of his, after all? — were it not for that stricken look in the young girl's eye. She was either such an accomplished actress that she belonged on center stage at Covent Garden… or else it was genuine. There was no law against prostitution, and the age of consent was twelve; girls of her tender years were, quite legally, corrupted every day. Fitzroy had no doubt spent twenty-five or thirty pounds for the privilege.
“Come now,” Rutherford cajoled him. “That fat bastard's going to be your neighbor for years to come. Don't begin a fracas now.”
Mme. Eugenie winked at one of the other women, with bright red hair spread across a pair of creamy, well-exposed shoulders, who artfully drew Sinclair off the ottoman and onto a loveseat beneath a picture of a nymph fleeing a satyr. The servant appeared with the gin.
Frenchie had taken the country girl's place at the pianoforte, and was playing, as well as his own compromised condition would allow, a lugubrious version of something by Herr Mozart.
The redhead introduced herself as Marybeth, and tried to engage Sinclair in conversation, asking first about his regiment, then where they might be posted, before expressing deep concern- somewhat premature, in his view-for his continued safety. But all the while, Sinclair could only think of that girl, with the coltish frame and the frightened eyes, being dragged up the stairs behind John-O and his golden teeth.
Blood and Ice Page 7