Dan Simmons - The Terror

“If I were to marry,” continued Sophia, opening her parasol again and spinning it above her, “it would be to our dashing Captain Ross. Although I am not destined to be a mere captain’s wife either, Francis. He would have to be knighted… but I am sure he will be soon.”

Crozier stared into her eyes, searching for some sign of jest. “Captain Ross is engaged,” he said finally. His voice sounded like the croak of a man who has been stranded without water for many days on end. “They plan to marry immediately after James’s return to England.”

“Oh, pshaw,” said Sophia, standing now and twirling the parasol more quickly. “I will be returning to England by swift packet boat myself this summer, even before Uncle John is recalled. Captain James Clark Ross has not seen the last of me.”

She looked down at him where he remained, absurdly, still on one knee in the white gravel. “Besides,” she said brightly, “even if Captain Ross marries that young pretendress waiting for him – he and I have spoken of her often, and I can assure you that she is a fool – marriage is the end of nothing. It is not death. It is not Hamlet’s ‘Unknown Country’ from which no man returns. Men have been known to return from marriage and find the woman who has been right for them all along. Mark my words on this, Francis.”

He stood then, finally. He stood and brushed the white gravel from the knee of his best dress uniform trousers.

“I must go now,” said Sophia. “Aunt Jane, Captain Ross, and I are going into Hobart Town this morning to see some new stallions the Van Diemen Company have just imported for breeding services. Do feel free to come with us if you so choose, Francis, but for heaven’s sake change your clothing and your expression before you do.”

She touched his forearm lightly and walked back into Government House, twirling her parasol as she went.

Crozier heard the muffled bell on deck ring eight bells. It was 4:00 a.m. Usually, on a ship at sea, the men would be rousted from their hammocks in half an hour to begin holystoning the decks and cleaning everything in sight. But here in the darkness and the ice – and in the wind, Crozier could hear it still howling in the riggings, meaning another blizzard was probable, and this only the tenth of November of their third winter – the men were allowed to sleep late, lazing away until four bells in the morning watch. Six a.m. Then the cold ship would come alive with the mates’ shouts and the men’s finneskoed feet hitting the deck before the mates carried out their threats of cutting their hammocks down with the seamen still in them.

This was a lazy paradise compared to sea duty. The men not only slept late but were allowed to have their breakfast here on the lower deck at eight bells before having to get on with their morning duties.

Crozier looked at the whiskey bottle and glass. Both were empty. He raised the heavy pistol – extra heavy with its full charge of powder and ball. His hand could tell.

Then he set the pistol into the pocket of his captain’s coat, removed the coat, and hung it on a hook. Crozier wiped out the whiskey glass with the clean cloth that Jopson left every evening for that purpose and set it away in his drawer. Then he carefully set the empty whiskey bottle in the covered wicker basket that Jopson left near the sliding door for just that purpose. A full bottle would be in the basket by the time Crozier returned from his dark day’s duties.

For a moment he had considered getting more fully dressed and going up on deck – exchanging his finneskoes for real boots, pulling on his comforter, cap, and full slops, and going out into the night and storm to await the rousing of the men, coming down for breakfast with his officers and going the full day with no sleep.

He had done it many other mornings.

But not this morning. He was too weary. And it was too cold to stand here for even a minute with only four layers of wool and cotton on. Four a.m., Crozier knew, was the coldest belly of the night and the hour at which the most ill and wounded men gave up the ghost and were carried away into that true Unknown Country.

Crozier crawled under the blankets and sank his face into the freezing horsehair mattress. It would be fifteen minutes or more before his body heat would begin to warm the cradled space. With luck, he’d be asleep before that. With luck he’d get almost two hours of a drunkard’s sleep before the next day of darkness and cold began. With luck, he thought as he drifted off, he wouldn’t wake at all.

Silence was missing, and it was Third Lieutenant John Irving’s job to find her.

The captain hadn’t ordered him to do so… not exactly. But Captain Crozier had told Irving to watch over the Esquimaux woman when the captains decided to keep her aboard HMS Terror six months earlier in June and Captain Crozier never rescinded that order, so Irving felt responsible for her. Besides, the young man was in love with her. He knew it was foolish – insane even – to have fallen in love with a savage, a woman who was not even a Christian, and an uneducated native who couldn’t speak a word of English, or any language for that matter with her tongue torn out as it was, but Irving was still in love with her. Something about her made the tall, strong John Irving weak in his knees.

And now she was gone.

They first noticed she wasn’t in her assigned berth – that little den set back amid the crates in the cluttered part of the lower deck just forward of the sick bay – on Thursday, two days earlier, but the men were used to Lady Silence’s odd comings and goings. She was off the ship as much as she was on it, even at night. Irving reported to Captain Crozier on Thursday afternoon, the eleventh of November, that Silence had gone missing, but the captain, Irving, and the others had seen her out on the ice two nights before. Then, after the remains of Strong and Evans had been found, she’d gone missing again. The captain said not to worry, that she’d show up.

But she hadn’t.

The storm had blown in that Thursday morning, bringing heavy snow and high winds. Work teams labouring by lantern light to repair the trail cairns between Terror and Erebus – four-foot-high tapered columns of ice bricks every thirty paces – had been forced to return to the ships that afternoon and hadn’t been able to work out on the ice since. The last messenger from Erebus , who had arrived late Thursday and been forced to stay on Terror because of the storm, confirmed that Silence was not aboard Commander Fitzjames’s ship. By this Saturday morning, watch was being changed on deck every hour and the men still came below crusted with ice and shaking with cold. Work parties had to be sent topside into the gale with axes every three hours to hack the ice off the remaining spars and lines so that the ship would not tip over from the weight. Also, the falling ice was a hazard to those on watch and did damage to the deck itself. More men struggled to shovel snow off the icy deck of the forward-listing Terror before it built up to a depth where they couldn’t get the hatches open.

When Lieutenant Irving reported again to Captain Crozier on this Saturday night after supper that Silence was still missing, the captain said, “If she’s out in this, she may not be coming back, John. But you have permission to search the entire ship tonight after most of the men are in their hammocks, if only to make sure she’s gone.”

Even though Irving’s officer-on-deck watch had ended hours earlier this evening, the lieutenant now got back into his cold-weather slops, lit an oil lantern, and climbed the ladderway to the deck again.