Collector of Lost Things

by Jeremy Page

  Clara and I took turns nursing the auk. She would show great patience, offering the bird morsels of food, or would stroke the back of its head where the feathers were flat and sleek and so small they could hardly be ruffled. ‘Tell me abut your life,’ she would ask it. ‘Tell me about the storms you have faced, standing on your rock—or swimming on the ocean—tell me about swimming, dear one, with those strong feet of yours. Those storms were so large but you were undaunted, remember? This is not a place for you to die in, is it? Not here.’ She even sang to it, soft nursery rhymes, as if the bird was a child in her charge.

  When I was able, I took measurements. I sketched the patterning of its plumage, the scales on its legs, the join where the beak entered the head and the soft concavity around its eye. I was preparing for its death, when its sound and smell and the way it moved would be lost for ever. These notes would be valuable. Either it slept, with a second milky eyelid half-descended across its eye, or it sat in the shadows, observing me with a pupil that was as small and black as a polished bead. Surrounding the eye was a pure white marking as wide as a goose’s egg, and often it seemed this marking was a larger more curious eye, regarding me, clown-like and sad. I could hardly bear it. For this bird, the ship was a coffin.

  It had no fight left, no struggle, and I felt ashamed that the last great auk should die a captive bird. Its kind had existed throughout millennia, long before man had ever set eyes on them, a lifeline filled with ocean currents and the secrets of migration and breeding. All those thousands of years, only to be eradicated in a couple of decades of senseless greed, and finally coming to an end in this room, next to a chain and witnessed by a man who had failed.

  ‘What is happening outside?’ Clara asked me one morning. ‘I can hear the men shouting.’

  ‘We are travelling through an ice field,’ I told her. ‘The Jakobshavn icefjord. The men are giving warnings of bergs and packed ice.’

  ‘How do they see them, in this fog?’

  ‘That, I’m afraid, is a mystery. Clara, you must take some time away from this cell.’

  ‘I think it will die today,’ she said.

  I nodded. Surely the bird could not last much longer. Clara was sitting on the floor, with it resting across her lap, as long as a dog. It breathed haltingly, with a rasping sound. Occasionally it gave a cough. ‘I am concerned, Clara, about what this might mean for your health. I do not want to see you becoming ill. If the auk dies, it is not because we haven’t tried.’

  ‘You have a caring soul, don’t you, Eliot?’

  ‘Yes. I care very deeply. But not just for the bird.’

  She knitted her brows, as if in pain. ‘I had a vision last night, Eliot. It was Huntsman.’

  ‘Huntsman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In the sealskins—a bearded man—the stained sealskins?’ I asked.

  ‘He sat in my cabin, watching me.’

  ‘This is horrible!’

  ‘Eliot, it was just as you said. A vision, that is all.’

  ‘But how is it possible? This ship is haunted!’

  ‘I don’t know how it is possible.’ She seemed suddenly tired. ‘All I can say is that I saw him.’

  ‘But what did he do? Did he speak to you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t—’

  ‘You can’t what?’

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘You must! What happened?’

  ‘He said nothing.’ She held her head in her hands as if dealing with a great pressure. ‘He sharpened a knife.’

  I took a step away from her, holding the roof beam for support. This was terrible, I thought, terrible! I felt quarried by a sense of dangers all around me. Dangers in the shadows of the room, dangers below and upon deck, in the hearts and minds of men, and dangers in aspects of this voyage that were beyond my comprehension.

  Clara placed the bird on a nest of sacking she’d prepared, laying its neck out like a short length of rope. Her dress had a deflated appearance, as if she had crumpled, without struggle, next to her patient. I looked at them both tenderly, realising she understood the plight of the bird better than I could ever do. She had, after all, dealt with her own incarceration when she was younger. It had made her ill. And illness seeks its own reflection.

  I spoke quietly. ‘You used to dream about a poacher.’

  She looked up at me, startled. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘A poacher. A wild man—or spirit—who lived in the woods near your home. You used to dream about him.’

  She stared at me, alarmed and unblinking, as if I had broken her trust.

  ‘I have deceived you, Clara, please find it in your heart to understand me. As soon as I saw you on board this ship, I knew who you were.’ I held out my hand to prevent her from speaking, I was so afraid I wouldn’t continue.

  ‘Ten years ago, when I was twenty-two and you were just sixteen, I was hired by your father to curate and restore his egg collection.’ Below me she sat perfectly still, breathing shallowly, but I knew I had to say it all, now. I had no choice. I had never had any choice. Even as I spoke, even while she bit her bottom lip, confused and preoccupied, relief was spreading through me. Dismantling a barrier is a job that becomes easier.

  ‘I worked for several weeks of the autumn at your parents’ estate in Norfolk, sitting in that draughty conservatory overlooking the lawn. Clara, I can tell you remember. It was I who came to visit you in the corridor outside your room. It was I who used to talk to you through your bedroom door. You used to tell me of your visions and dreams back then. You told me you dreamt of a poacher, living in the woods. Only, you were not called Clara then. You must have had reason to change your name. You were called Celeste.’

  ‘Celeste?’ Her whisper was barely audible.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘When I saw you on deck that night I recognised you—I should have told you. But I have been so confused, and you appeared so frail, I was afraid to alarm you. I feel wretched now. The last thing I wanted was to deceive you—you are the only worthwhile thing on this ship.’

  She stood and, without once looking me in the eye, put her arms around me.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘say nothing else.’ Her breath was in my ear. She angled her cheek upon my shoulder. Her body felt limp and suppliant, but her hands clenched themselves tightly behind my back. She began to sob, her face tucked into the lapel of my jacket, urging me forward into a tighter embrace.

  ‘I know you remember me. I know it,’ I said.

  I wandered the deck, reeling and elated after my confession. My feet barely seemed to touch the boards. Yet I have often wondered about this moment, wishing that I had paid more attention to Clara’s reaction. Did I miss something? Did she reveal something in that shadowy locker room that would have explained all that subsequently happened? I don’t know. Sometimes, when I recollect being with her among those shadows, I feel she was deliberately concealing herself.

  The ship had been brought to a halt by the thickness of fog and the proximity of icebergs. All was silent, except for the solitary barking of a seal, somewhere across the water. But even though I had been just a short time beneath decks, I could see the sun was now trying to clear a path through the mist, as if wanting to shine on me alone, and the happiness I felt. It burnt with a cold haze, pouring its pale light across the deck, as through a high window in a cathedral. The air had begun to sparkle with the dust of minute crystals, a phenomenon I had first witnessed on the ice floe. A simple wave of the hand would part and swirl the glitter, as if the air contained a thousand pinpricks of sunshine.

  I noticed an unusual and bewildering vision: a burning disc of sunlight emerging in the fog. It grew in intensity, thirty or forty feet out to sea, surrounded by rings of rainbow coloration running in a haze. As I watched it I began to discern in the centre of the circle, burning, as it were, the hovering spectral appearance of a man. A man, where a man could not possibly be, suspended above the water. I stared, dry-mouthed, as this spirit
-figure floated and shimmered. Around his outline, a coruscating wheel of Arctic light and glitter seemed to radiate, pinning him to the centre and lifting him in ghostly levitation.

  It was only when I took a step back that I realised the man was, in fact, myself. My outline, captured by the sun, projected within a tumbling vortex of light radiating from the air crystals. When I raised an arm in greeting, the figure responded, exactly, but it was unlike any other shadow I have ever seen. It was like meeting another living part of myself.

  By evening, the mist had cleared. Across the bay several hundred icebergs floated, their shapes doubled by the perfect mirroring of the calm water. As the light changed, the ice began to glow, a pale steel blue and then an ivory white that lingered, until the entire bay had a magical, transparent quality. I listened to the seal, once more barking, but I could not see it. Distances became deceptive. Some icebergs seemed to hover above the horizon, overlapping others like pieces of coloured glass in a magic lantern. Greys and blues shifted in bands across the sky. I had never seen such beauty as this, such elemental grandeur, such peace. Mesmerised, I watched as icebergs appeared to melt into clouds, their solidness temporary and untrustworthy. Yet others hardened, turning into cliffs of pale rock, revealing new facets and dimensions: eroded hearts, the fragments that they would become one day, the stone kernels that must lie in the centre of each one.

  Eventually, it was difficult to see any of the icebergs at all. The ship’s deck became grey, then lighter, then finally dark and featureless. The sea turned glassy. Instinctively I knew something magical was about to occur. I remained on deck, even though the night was bitterly cold and I could feel the ache of the low temperature spreading into my fingers and toes. For a long time there was nothing at all, then swiftly it was everywhere, a strange and luminous green glow that stretched in a braided pleat of ribbons across the sky. A revolving phantom, spreading wings, pulsing with life. The aurora hung above the ship and flowed towards the horizon. It glowed dull green on the wet wood of the mast and the pale rolls of the furled sails; even on the dark wooden stem of my tobacco pipe. The sea had flattened, as if the lights pressed a quietness beneath them. Even the seal had stopped barking. I felt that the lights were spilling upon us all in simple grace. That we were all touched by this dance of mysterious energy that flowed across the sky and through us too.

  I was moved to tears, thinking of all the sights I had seen: the slaughtering of the seals, the whale and calf, the gull with its wing shot clean off, the flensed whales at the Danish whaling station, the flukes and body parts that drifted in the murky water beneath our rowing boats, the colony of walruses, steaming with breath and fear, and the kill there which had been long and terrible. Through it all, a vividness of blood which almost hurts the eyes. The piercing red of a yew berry. All that slaughter and aggression. Mankind’s failure to be anything other than a beast of greed and profit. All that, and then to see the majestic aurora above us—gentle proof that the Arctic was beyond any one of us. It draped across us like a blessing. And that is what I felt. I felt blessed.

  Clara came to my side. I saw the play of green lights on her cheeks. Her eyes were wide and as dark as oil. I knew she was in a mood I couldn’t grasp. Something had happened.

  ‘My dear Clara,’ I whispered, ‘tell me.’

  She shook her head, unable to speak. Instead she took my hand and led me across the deck, under the lanterns that had been hung in the rigging, their pale wicks in odd competition with the spectral greenness beyond, past the hatches of the deck that once more appeared like open jaws. She led me down the companionway to the lower deck, where we passed under the greasy light of the storm lantern, feeling the dusty air of the stacked cargoes, the smells of all the skins we had collected, their musk adding a soft reminiscence of death to the air, past the hooks and chains where once—many years earlier—rows of African slaves had been manacled, on their way to the West Indies, their bodies tormented with grief and illness. All of this pressed in on me with immediacy, as if past and present had truly overlapped, until we reached the anchor locker where I knew the auk had finally died, even as Clara was opening the small padlock on the door.

  She led me into the room where the air felt thick with shadows, and here the bird sat cornered. The difference in its posture filled me with confusion. Then awe. Pushed up beneath its breast, the unique pattern and brittle symmetry were unmistakable. The bird had laid an egg.

  20

  I CANNOT REMEMBER HOW long we stayed down there, with Clara crouched by the bird, whispering and stroking its back. The egg was easily the size of a man’s fist, tapered at one end and decorated with a lattice of brown and grey lines against a cream white background.

  Pointed like a razorbill’s, but more elongated, closer to a guillemot’s, the markings had the yellowish brown hue of many terns’ eggs, but a lighter background. The veining was as distinctive as serpentine. Of all species it resembled most closely the egg of a Brünnich’s guillemot—a specimen of which I had only ever seen once.

  ‘This is the rarest egg in the world, Clara.’ A tingling sensation ran the length of my spine. The last of its kind, I thought. Irreplaceable. Beyond value. I felt like a man who unexpectedly discovers a large rare jewel, or nugget of gold. He is struck by its beauty and its rarity, its natural quiet splendour. And its ability to change his world—the stroke of luck every one of us needs at least once in a life. This egg would grace any display case. Private collectors would fight for it. The gentlemen who had paid for my passage, idly betting that this species might still exist, would now pay treble or more to own this object. They would happily contact the museums, eagerly anticipating a bidding war. Men admire eggs. Perhaps it is their fragility, or their rarity, or simply the fact that within an open palm it is possible to hold the entire encapsulated life of a bird. Perhaps it is all these things, but men covet rare eggs, they collect them, and they will spend a great deal to make sure they have what others may not.

  The bird sat upon its prize with a splayed belly. Occasionally it would lower its head and nudge the egg sideways with its beak, as if in disbelief. When Clara offered some food, the auk ate quickly.

  ‘Now you are hungry!’ she said, laughing. ‘Well, you must eat as much as you wish, because you have been truly splendid, and we have been so worried about you. Eat, and rest, and we shall continue to look after you.’

  It eventually became so cold in the anchor locker that Clara and I were forced to return to the saloon. We stood by the stove, trying to warm ourselves. Bletchley was in his customary armchair, next to the fire, fast asleep. I noticed the scratched shape of the star, on his right boot, to remind him which side port and starboard were. It had been inscribed by a different man than the one I recognised, now.

  ‘He is peaceful tonight,’ Clara said, regarding him with the same caring attitude as she had in the anchor locker. ‘He was quite excited earlier, when he saw the northern streamers. They were a little too much for him to take.’

  I nodded, afraid we might wake him. Briefly, a tremor flickered across his face and I wondered—not for the first time—whether he was merely pretending to sleep. Soundlessly, I took Clara’s hand, and led her to my cabin. Inside, we sat together on the bunk, sharing whatever warmth we had, and it seemed the most natural thing to do. There was an air of celebration.

  ‘Do you mind being in here?’ I asked. She shook her head shyly. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s quiet tonight.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I like the silence.’

  ‘Me too.’ She seemed thoughtful. ‘I was used to it as a girl. But they say silence is the bedfellow of madness. It can make you hear things.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘Things you didn’t want to hear.’

  I nodded, blowing into her cupped hands to warm them. Her skin smelt of the bird’s feathers.

  We sat listening to the sighing of the ship at night, as it moved against the anchor. There were occasional footsteps on deck abo
ve us, the gentle knock as ice touched the hull, the ticking of the ship’s clock from the back of the saloon. Every so often, a distant bird, screeching, a lone skua searching the bay. We could hear Sykes, asleep in his cabin, coughing every ten minutes or so and, directly through the wall, an ominous silence from French’s cabin. Often, I had heard him long into the night, writing, the scratch of a harsh nib on the paper. But at that moment, all was quiet. He might have been fast asleep, or he might be staring at the flame of the candle that he liked to have burning upon his desk. This image of him, intently awake, unnerved me. I remembered how he had glared at me as I led Clara away from the whales being targeted. Equally it was possible to imagine he was angled, tall and insect-like, against the wall, trying to listen through the wood.

  ‘We must be quiet,’ I whispered.

  She took off her shawl and folded it carefully, stroking the fabric until it was smooth. She placed it on my desk and, in an unexpected and swift movement, climbed beneath my blankets. I sat perfectly still, perched at the end of the bunk, unsure what to do. She lay very quietly. I thought she might be falling asleep, and that it would be thrilling to watch her do so. Then, quite suddenly, with her eyes firmly shut, she broke into the most wonderful smile. She pulled the bedclothes to one side, inviting me in.

  I remember that night more vividly than any other night of my life. Quickly, I lay down beside her. My familiar bed was filled with strangeness, the feel of Clara’s satin dress, her sleeves trimmed with lace and ribbon bows, her feet in woollen stockings, her toes wriggling happily to keep warm. Her fingers, too, seeking to interlock with mine, as if in extremity she was a different person, active and playful. I lay rigid and bewildered alongside her, trying not to touch her, but the bed was so narrow it was unavoidable. She turned upon her side to face me. We were inches apart.