Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Miss Cra-…,” he began.

She squeezed. She floated gracefully so that suddenly her strong legs were on either side of his left leg, and then she lowered her weight and warmth, rubbing against him. He raised that leg slightly to buoy her up and keep her face above water. Her eyes were closed. Her hips ground, her breasts flattened against him, and her right hand began to stroke the length of him.

Crozier moaned, but it was only an anticipatory moan, not one of release. Sophia made a soft sound against his neck. He could feel the heat and wetness of her nether regions against his raised leg and thigh. How can anything be wetter than water ? he wondered.

Then she moaned in earnest, and Crozier closed his eyes as well – sorry that he could not continue seeing her but having no choice – she pressed herself hard against him once, twice, a third downward-pressing time, and her stroking became hurried, urgent, expert, knowing, and demanding.

He buried his face against her wet hair as he throbbed and pulsed into the water. Crozier thought the pulsing ejaculation might never end, and – if he had been able – he would have apologized to her at once. Instead, he moaned again and almost lost his grip on the tree root. They both bobbled, their chins dripping beneath the waterline.

What confused Francis Crozier most at that moment – and everything in the universe confused him right then, while nothing in the universe bothered him – was the fact of the lady’s downward-pressing, her thighs strong around him, her cheek pressed hard against his own while she closed her eyes so tightly, and her own moan. Certainly women could not feel the kind of intensity that men do? Some of the doxies had moaned, but certainly that had been only because they knew the men liked it – it had been obvious that they felt nothing.

And yet…

Sophia pulled back, looked into his eyes, smiled easily, kissed him full on the lips, raised her legs into an almost jackknife, kicked off from the roots, and swam for the shore where her clothes lay on the mildly quaking bush.

Incredibly, they dressed, picked up their picnic things, packed the mule, mounted, and rode all the way back to Government House in silence.

Incredibly, that evening during dinner, Sophia Cracroft laughed and chatted with her aunt, Sir John, and even with the unusually loquacious Captain James Clark Ross, while Crozier sat mostly silent and staring at the table. He could only admire her… what did the Frogs call it? – her sangfroid , while Crozier’s attention and soul felt precisely as his body had at the moment of his endless orgasm in the Platypus Pond – atoms and essence scattered to every corner of the universe.

Yet Miss Cracroft did not act aloof toward him nor offer any sense of reproof. She smiled at him, made comments to him, and attempted to include him in the conversation just as she did every evening in Government House. And certainly her smile toward him was a little warmer? More affectionate? Even smitten? It had to be so.

After dinner that night, when Crozier suggested a walk in the garden, she begged off, pleading a previous engagement of cards with Captain Ross in the main parlour. Would Commander Crozier care to join them?

No, Commander Crozier begged off in return, understanding from the warm and easy undertones in her warm and easy surface banter that all must be kept normal in Government House that evening and until the two of them could meet to discuss their future. Commander Crozier announced loudly that he had a bit of a headache and would turn in early.

He was awake, dressed in his best uniform, and walking the halls of the mansion before dawn the next day, certain that Sophia would have the same impulse of meeting early.

She did not. Sir John was the first to come to breakfast, and he made endless, insufferable small talk with Crozier, who had never mastered the insipid art of small talk, much less been able to hold up his end of a conversation on what the proper tariff should be on renting prisoners for digging canals.

Lady Jane came down next, and even Ross appeared for breakfast before Sophia finally made an appearance. By this time Crozier was on his sixth cup of coffee, which he had learned to prefer over tea in the morning during his winters with Parry in the northern ice years earlier, but he stayed while the lady had her usual eggs, sausage, beans, toast, and tea.

Sir John disappeared somewhere. Lady Jane deliquesced. Captain Ross wandered off. Sophia finally finished her breakfast.

“Would you like to walk in the garden?” he asked.

“So early?” she said. “It’s already very hot out there. This autumn shows no signs of cooling off.”

“But…,” began Crozier and attempted to communicate the urgency of his invitation with his gaze.

Sophia smiled. “I would be delighted to walk in the garden with you, Francis.”

They strolled slowly, interminably, waiting for a single prisoner-gardener to finish his task of unloading heavy bags of fresh fertilizer.

When the man was gone, Crozier steered her upwind to the stone bench at the far and shaded end of the long formal garden. He helped her take her seat and waited while she folded her parasol. She looked up at him – Crozier was too agitated to sit and loomed over her, shifting from foot to foot as he loomed – and he imagined that he could see the expectation in her eyes.

Finally he had the presence of mind to go to one knee.

“Miss Cracroft, I am aware that I am a mere commander in Her Majesty’s Navy and that you deserve only the attentions of the full Admiral of the Fleet… no, I mean, of royalty, of one who would command a full Admiral… but you must be aware, I know you are aware, of the intensity of my feelings toward you, and if you could see yourself finding reciprocal feelings for…”

“Good God, Francis,” interrupted Sophia, “you are not going to propose marriage, are you?”

Crozier had no answer to that. On one knee, both hands clasped and extended toward her as if in prayer, he waited.

She patted his arm. “Commander Crozier, you are a wonderful man. A gentle man despite all those rough edges which may never be rounded off. And you are a wise man – especially in understanding that I shall never be a commander’s wife. That would not be fitting. That would never be… acceptable .”

Crozier tried to speak. No words came to mind. That part of his brain still working was trying to complete the endless sentence proposing marriage which he had lain awake all night composing. He had got through almost a third of it – after a fashion.

Sophia laughed softly and shook her head. Her eyes darted, making sure that no one – not even a prisoner – was within sight or hearing. “Please do not be concerned about yesterday, Commander Crozier. We had a wonderful day. The… interlude… at the pond was pleasant for both of us. It was a function of… my nature… as much as a result of mutual feelings of closeness we felt for those few moments . But please disabuse yourself, my dear Francis, that there remains upon you any burden or compulsion to act in any way on my behalf because of our brief indiscretion.”

He looked at her.

She smiled, but not with as much warmth as he had become used to. “It is not,” she said so softly that the words came through the hot air as slightly more than a firm whisper, “as if you compromised my honour, Commander.”

“Miss Cracroft…,” Crozier began again and stopped. If his ship had been in the act of being forced against a lee shore with the pumps out of action and four feet of water in the hold and climbing, the rigging snarled and the sails in tatters, he would have known what orders to give. What to say next. At this moment not a single word came to mind. There was only a rising pain and astonishment in him that hurt all the worse for being a recognition of something old and all too well understood.