On the Proper Use of Stars

by Dominique Fortier

  When what was left of the plum pudding, a tepid, slimy, brownish heap, had been taken to the kitchen, when the crystal decanters for the service of Cognac and Glenlivet had been set out, at the moment when the ladies were about to withdraw to let their husbands smoke their cigars in peace, Lady Jane moved in to attack:

  “I want to reiterate to all of you that your presence here today is priceless. I thank you for coming to brighten with your company the very sad Christmas of a worried wife …” she began, her voice quavering, which brought a stunned look from Eleanor, who was not accustomed to hearing her stepmother speak so tearfully.

  “ … for as you are well aware, my dear John has been gone for nearly three years now and we have not yet received a single word from his expedition. I feel a pang of emotion when I think that he may be in a difficult situation, waiting impatiently perhaps for help to come that we do not even think of sending him …”

  Parry broke in with the steady voice one uses to persuade a disturbed individual to come down from the roof where he is perched, or to convince him that he is not the object of some plot hatched by foreign powers:

  “Dear Jane, do not forget that you are speaking about an expedition that has unprecedented resources. While there have been cases of ships imprisoned in the Arctic ice, they were not as well armed for confronting harsh conditions as the Erebus and the Terror. And remember, Sir John has valuable experience of a Polar land and he will be best able to decide on the correct procedure for completing his mission with no danger to himself or to his men. Sir John Barrow,” he added, raising his glass to the old man, who, cupping his hand to his ear, was trying to grasp what was being said about him, “has seen to it that they are prepared for any eventuality.”

  “Quite so, quite so,” Ross went him one better. “Never has an expedition been so generously equipped, so effectively fitted out. While your fears are entirely normal on the part of a loving wife, you may rest assured that they are groundless.”

  Sir John Barrow had raised his glass, apparently thinking that he was expected to propose a toast; seeing that no one was following him, he set it down again, and soon his head was nodding gently. Lady Jane, who expected more on the part of the man who had made all the decisions of the Admiralty for nearly forty years, took advantage of the opportunity to regain control of the situation.

  “Nonetheless, it seems to me most well advised to launch straight away one or more rescue expeditions, which in all probability will never be necessary, but should the need arise, would be ready to leave in the spring.” She looked down, her voice became a murmur, and when she spoke again she gazed fixedly at the place left empty at the head of the table. “Knowing that the man one loves is so far away, sensing that he is calling out to us, calling for our help when we are unable to do anything, is terrible. Only a sailor’s wife can understand the feeling that haunts the heart, the mysterious communication one maintains, in spite of distance, with the man who has gone to sea …”

  As she had hoped, at those words young Mrs. Ross burst out sobbing. She who had made her fiancé swear that never again would he agree to command so perilous an expedition – when it was suggested that he lead the very one which had eventually been given to Franklin – she saw herself alone, worried, tormented, unhappy, and she could not hold back her imagined sorrow.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, and for the first time Sophia could hear the tone of her voice, which, she had to acknowledge, was not unpleasant. “James, you must do something!”

  Lady Jane settled comfortably into her chair.

  1 January 1848

  SAD, SAD NEW YEAR’S celebration on board the Terror to mark the coming of the year 1848. Everyone around the table did his best to look happy, but the faces were grim. Repeated toasts were proposed – to the year that was ending, the one that was coming, to the discovery that we shall not fail to make, to the England we have left in order to extend her dominion beyond the seas, and of which it seems to me that we now dream as others before us have dreamed of Eldorado or the land of milk and honey. I know as I look at the forced smiles on Fitzjames, Little, and Gore that they share my discomfort, that even the stewards who go about their tasks like nervous and awkward automatons can sense it. Perhaps they have forgotten how to serve a festive meal.

  With great ceremony the last jars of rillettes and goose pâté were opened, but those tidbits tasted like ashes in my mouth and I had to force myself to swallow them, as if they were some bitter medicine. Those delicacies were too reminiscent of the last meal of a condemned man for anyone in the officers’ mess to savour them with pleasure.

  I could not resolve to launch into a long-winded speech of the sort that Sir John would gladly make on grand occasions, feeling neither the courage nor the cowardice necessary for lying to these men whose existence I have been sharing for close to three years. At midnight, I contented myself with raising my glass and drinking to their health.

  Whatever happens, our last year in the Arctic came to an end last night. Every man knows without it being said that we no longer have rations enough to allow us to survive for one more year amid the ice that does not loosen its embrace.

  ALONE IN THE LIBRARY of the Terror, where he liked to take refuge when he needed to think, Crozier was pacing, his strides long and nervous, and arrived at nothing save to turn over in his mind the only two choices, each with an equally uncertain outcome: to give up the relative safety of the ships and set out on foot, in the cold and snow, on an expedition of some thousands of miles (and if that were the decision, he would have to determine the best direction to go, which posed a new dilemma) or to risk remaining a prisoner of the two ships that might not be able to escape from the ice in summer (and even if they did, the provisions would be cruelly rationed and there was no guarantee that they could stretch them out so that they would last for the entire trip back to England). As the room was tiny, it took but three steps to cross it, and Crozier stalked angrily back and forth.

  He stopped and stood for a moment with his arms dangling, then he emptied a whole carton of books without knowing what he might hope to find in it. When he was a child his grandmother had been in the habit of every morning opening the Bible at random, putting her finger blindly on a page, and reading aloud the verse to which she had pointed, swearing that this teaching would be valuable to her for the day to come. Filled with wonder at this unexpected opportunity to draw from the divine source some nearly supernatural wisdom, the young Francis had sometimes tried to imitate her, but he had obtained only cryptic, even incomprehensible results – unless they were dull and trivial.

  “After he brought me through the entry, which was at the side of the gate, into the holy chambers of the priests, which looked towards the north.”

  “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop fatness.”

  “And it shall come to pass after these events.”

  He had soon turned his attention to the few science books that his uncle, who was very keen on geography and mushrooms, possessed, books with pictures.

  In the half-light in the belly of the Terror, where floated an aroma of coal, dampness, and mouldy paper, Crozier picked up the volumes one by one, arranged them absent-mindedly around him in a fan. The Vicar of Wakefield, which had always seemed to him to be intended for the weaker sex. Shakespeare. The Sonnets, Othello, King Lear. Newton. A collection of French poems. A work of botany. A heavy etymological dictionary bound in brown leather which fell, open, as Crozier was placing it on an unsteady pile. Picking it up again, his eyes fell on the entry for tea.

  First tay (1652), then tea (1657) according to modern Latin; derived from Malayan teh, te, or from the word t’e in southern Chinese dialects by way of the Dutch language. The plant is originally from Asia and both botany and Chinese medicine trace it back to the third millennium B.C., during the reign of Shennong, a mythical emperor. Identified by various Chinese names, it was reputed to relieve fatigue, strengthen the will, and sharpen the eyesight. In the 5th or
4th century B.C., it spread into the valley of the Yangtze and into southern China, and it then began to be identified by the current ideogram which is transcribed as cha, no doubt derived from the classical character tu. In the west the word turns up several times (in 851 in Arabic, by the merchant Soliman) before the plant was imported into Europe in 1606 by the Dutch East India Company, which had been founded four years earlier. Several languages have borrowed from classical Chinese cha, the name by which they identify tea, among them Portuguese (cha), Russian (tchai), Turkish, and Persian. The multiplicity of commercial routes explains why we cannot decide between the Chinese and the Malayan etymon.

  He reread the last sentences, incredulous, then burst out laughing. He felt tears coming to his eyes, running down his cheeks, wetting his whole face with their bitter water. This business of the T drawn on the crates was nonsense, as he had been well aware … And now it was too late.

  In a kind of frenzy, he grabbed the books he had arranged around him and began to skim them methodically, with suppressed rage, turning the pages of entire chapters at a time, shaking the volumes as if to make them give up he didn’t know what, even striking the spine on the ground when the volume had not released any secret following his violent examination.

  Then they sat there, books and commander, shaggy-haired, bruised, desperately mute.

  THE HEAVY CRIMSON velvet curtains had been drawn and the small sitting room was filled with a half-light similar to the kind that bathes the naves of churches. Lighted candles in every corner cast misshapen shadows on walls covered with flowered paper. The ladies, who numbered eight, of whom Lady Jane and Sophia knew only the lady of the house and her sister, were speaking in hushed voices and letting out small laughs which they quickly stifled, like excited schoolgirls before the prizes are handed out. A round table in the middle of the room, covered for the occasion with a dark cloth that fell to the floor in thick folds, was surrounded by eleven straight-backed chairs.

  Without introducing them to her other guests, Mrs. Parry gestured to Lady Jane and Sophia to take a seat. They sat side by side, soon copied by the other women, whose age ranged from around twenty (a long, pale, blond girl) to late fifties (a white-haired matron with a heavy bosom). The table fell silent when Mrs. Parry fetched in Miss Ellen Dawson, a medium by trade. Short and plump, she moved with grace and had a pleasantly round face on which one could not however make out the features, hidden as they were by a small black veil that formed a mask to the chin, an accessory that helped her, so she said, to disregard what was around her, the better to concentrate on the message that would come from the beyond. She had an accent impossible to identify, which combined the musicality of some mysterious Slavic language with some nasal vowels of purest Cockney.

  “Take the hands of your neighbours,” she said, with a slight rolling of the r, “and close your eyes.”

  Nine pairs of eyelids were lowered straightaway. Miss Dawson studied attentively each of the ladies seated around the table, when her turn came looking deeply into the eyes of Lady Jane, who was observing her, too.

  “Very well, I believe this lady has a question for me,” she said, indicating Lady Jane, who remained silent.

  If this Miss Dawson was able to hear the voices of those who had passed on and to interpret the speech of the dead for the benefit of the living, then it stood to reason that she must be able to hear the question that was haunting Lady Jane, seated across from her, without her having to state it aloud.

  “I have a question,” interrupted – most impolitely, thought Lady Jane and Sophia, who both pursed their lips – a small lady with red hair. “I should like to know if Josephine is happy where she is now. Please, Miss Dawson …”

  Miss Dawson released the hand of the woman on either side of her and raised her arms, at the same time throwing her head back. Her body stiffened, then she dropped her arms and announced in a changed voice: “Yes, she is at peace … She has a message for you: she forgives you. She has long since forgiven you.” At these words, the red-haired lady could not repress a sob. She directed an expressive look at her neighbour, who apparently knew who Josephine was and why there was need of forgiveness, for she murmured: “That is extraordinary …”

  Miss Dawson studied the neighbour for a moment, then returned her gaze to Lady Jane: “It’s not a dead man whom you wish to know about. The one to whom you want to speak is alive, in a land of cold and darkness.”

  “Is he safe and well?” Lady Franklin could not prevent herself from crying out.

  “I cannot say. The images that come to me are blurred. I see water, stones. I see a powerful man and a flag. Everything is white, hazy …”

  Her voice faded and she turned towards Sophia, sitting on the edge of her chair with bated breath: “You have already had the answer to your question but you refused to hear it.”

  Miss Dawson relaxed all at once and rested her head on her arms. Mrs. Parry almost had to carry her out of the room. The ladies rose, shaken and for the most part disappointed for they had not had time to question their own dead. The curtains were thrown open and a tentative daylight came in, shedding light on pale faces. What had started as an innocent entertainment, a curiosity, had been transformed into a disturbing and rather trying exercise. Lady Jane rushed out, leaving her shawl on the back of her chair. When Sophia came back to fetch it, Miss Dawson signalled to her, beckoning her into the small room where she was sitting before a platter covered with cheeses and pâtés. She chewed for several seconds, swallowed, then stated almost absent-mindedly: “Place a mirror under your pillow every night and on the fourteenth day you will see in it the man who will be your husband,” after which she took a long gulp of wine and settled into her chair.

  In the small parlour, the red-haired lady was still sniffling: “It is such a relief to know that Josephine is happy. When the coach ran over her last month I thought that I would never forgive myself. But she adored putting herself in the horses’ way and trying to bite their legs …” Her voice broke and her friend put her arm around the woman’s shoulders to comfort her.

  —

  The mirror under her pillow formed a hard lump that kept her awake. She had first tried to wrap it in a cashmere scarf but the lump, while not so hard, was bulkier and Sophia was still unable to sleep. Unwrapping the object, she had slid it imperceptibly to the side until its presence no longer disturbed her. She had wakened the next morning to discover that the looking-glass was no longer under her pillow but under the one beside hers – which doubtless resulted in the invalidation of the two previous nights of torture. She had to start again from square one.

  Over the nights that followed, she did her best simply to ignore the thing, finally falling asleep, exhausted, at the first light of dawn. Then she moved the mirror so that it took up as little space as possible under the sensitive nape of her neck, but discovered that doing so uncovered the mirror, in which she caught sight when she wakened in the middle of the night of a vague form that she believed to be a ghost before she realized that it was her own silhouette, and turned furiously to the wall. She then tried to find a smaller, less cumbersome looking-glass in her dressing table, turning the contents of its drawers into a tangled mess – a waste of time, save for her discovery of a hatpin adorned with a silver dragonfly, long since presumed lost.

  Finally, trying to outsmart it, she placed the mirror under her pillow but slept with her head on the pillow beside it, a stratagem she regretted the next morning, fearing that it obliged her to start again and count the days from zero.

  After a few weeks of this intermittent regime, an exasperated Sophia resolved to rid herself of the object once and for all and to chase from her mind Miss Dawson and her visions. Her bedroom was sunk in a bluish half-light, the household was asleep, silent. She grabbed the silver handle of the mirror jutting out from under her pillow and stood up, holding it at arm’s length as if it were some dangerous animal. In her attempt to place it on her dressing table, she knocked over a candelabrum whi
ch took along in its fall a hairbrush and an ebony box holding seashells and pebbles picked up during her travels. It all came crashing to the floor with the sound of breaking glass. Sophia bent over the damage and saw among the conches and agates shining feebly in the moonlight a hundred silver splinters, each reflecting a fragment of everything around it so that she could recognize the individual flowers on the paper that hung on her bedroom walls, the curved leg of the dressing table, the branches of the candelabrum, the moon cut into four by the squares of the casement, and a patch of sky dotted with stars. Carefully, she picked up that last shard. It cut her finger, but she paid no attention, and fell asleep at last holding the splinter of mirror tight in her fist while a drop of blood stained her pillowcase.

  THE QUESTION WAS at the centre of every conversation, between the youngest sailor and his neighbour in the next hammock as well as at the Captain’s table, where bottles of wine were now opened at dinner only on Saturday: when and how would they get out of the ice? No one dared to broach the underlying question, the real object of everyone’s concern, which Crozier himself formulated aloud for the first time on 9 February 1848: would they ever escape from the ice? After a year and a half, a hopeless spring and winter during which the white trap that had closed around the Terror and the Erebus had not loosened its grip, they must, he said calmly to Fitzjames, who was calculating their position for the thousandth time – for the ships were moving eastward, imperceptibly, carried along by ice that was subject to mysterious currents – they must consider the possibility that the icefield in the sea off King William’s Land might never give way. Fitzjames looked up and responded almost mechanically, as if he had had the opportunity to repeat on numerous occasions the remark he made: “Crozier, if we have arrived here by sailing, common sense says that we can leave by the same means.”