Andrea Barrett: Voyage of the Narwhal

“You know this means waiting even longer,” he said. “Has he mentioned a date?” His fault, he thought again. Why hadn’t he asked Zeke himself?

“Not exactly. But when he gets home, I know he’ll want to settle down.”

Of course he wanted her to marry Zeke, not just to ease his own responsibilities but because he wanted her happy. Didn’t he? She’d cared first for their father and then him. “You’re sure…” he said. “You feel sure of his feelings for you?”

“He loves me,” she said passionately. “In his own way_I know he does.”

A blinding headache had seized him then, blurring the rest of the party. And through a process he still didn’t understand, he’d been led to this table and Alexandra’s pointed questions; to the fact that, in two days, he’d be sailing north in the company of a young man he’d known for ages yet couldn’t imagine accepting orders from.

One of the maids came in with the tea tray: Agnes? Ellen? The servants were Lavinia’s province; as long as meals appeared on time Erasmus didn’t notice who did the work. He thought they didn’t know this, although Lavinia sometimes reproached him. And although once he’d overheard the staff in the kitchen referring to “the seedy-man” and then laughing furiously. Now he avoided the eyes of the girl with the tray and drew a breath, waiting to hear what Zeke would say about the open polar sea.

“You read a lot,” Zeke said to Alexandra. If he was startled that she’d remembered his comment at the party, it didn’t show. “I’ve noticed that. So you must have learned about the stretches of open water persisting all winter and recurring in the same places every year. What the Russians call polynyas. Inglefield found open water in Smith Sound. Birds have been seen migrating northward from Canada. A warm current flows northward beneath the surface, several people have observed it — suppose it leads to a temperate ocean, free from ice, surrounding the North Pole beyond a frozen barrier?”

“Suppose,” Alexandra said. Her right hand sketched an arc in the air, as if she were still holding her paintbrush.

“When Dr. Kane left,” Zeke continued, “he said he was going to look for signs of this phenomenon if he could. So there’s nothing so strange in my wanting to look as well.”

Many times in the months since the party Erasmus had sat in the offices of wealthy men, while Zeke proposed their search for Franklin. A portrait of Franklin in full-dress uniform hung in the Narwhal’s cabin — Franklin, Franklin, Zeke had said, as he asked the men for money. It made sense that he concentrated on this aspect of the voyage — how proud the merchants were, contributing to such a good cause! In Zeke, Erasmus thought, they saw a young man who could succeed at anything. The man they’d dreamed of being, the man they hoped their sons might be. Other expeditions might have failed, but Zeke’s would not.

“It’s a theory,” Zeke told Alexandra now. “An interesting theory. In the arctic one can never predict where the ice will allow one to go, nor one’s speed, nor even always one’s direction. My plan is to follow this route and search for Franklin. But were conditions to be unexpectedly good — were one of the northern channels to be open, say — it’s possible we’d do some exploring.”

“Possible,” Alexandra said. “Hence you provision for eighteen months?”

“For safety’s sake,” Zeke said. He stroked his eyebrows, taming the springy golden tufts; perhaps aware that Lavinia followed the gesture intently. And perhaps, Erasmus thought, a bit annoyed that Alexandra didn’t. A sensible woman, she seemed immune to Zeke’s charms.

Lavinia, tearing her eyes from Zeke’s hand, said, “I don’t see here on the maps where you’d head north at all.”

“Only if he were driven to it,” Alexandra said. “Were he to raise this money to search for Franklin, and then purposefully head in another direction, that would be quite wrong.”

Zeke gazed steadily at her, and she gazed as steadily back. “The maps never tell us what we need,” he said, turning toward Lavinia. “That’s part of the reason we go.”

Later Erasmus would realize that for all his alertness to Zeke’s gestures and the women’s responses he hadn’t been paying sufficient attention. The lamps were lit, the sun was setting, they were munching delicious chocolate cake; the maps beckoned and he was dreaming of glory. His own glory, his own desires. They might find survivors of Franklin’s expedition; or if not, surely better evidence of what had happened than Rae’s dispiriting tale. With any luck they’d find other things as well. All sorts of specimens, not just plants but seaweeds, fishes, birds — he would write a book. He’d sketch his specimens and write their descriptions; his talent was for drawing from nature, capturing the salient features as only a trained observer could. Copernicus, so skilled with color and light, would turn the sketches into paintings; Linnaeus and Humboldt would prepare the plates. Together they’d make something beautiful. For years, in the light of his disappointments, he’d pretended to himself that he wasn’t ambitious — but he was, he was. And lucky beyond belief to be part of this voyage. A blaze of excitement blinded him.

“And you, Erasmus,” Alexandra said. “What do you think of all this?”

“In the polar regions,” he said, “it’s true that one must be flexible, and take what opportunities are offered.”

He looked down at the volume she’d relinquished. He would bring it, after all. Surely there was room for one small book. “Zeke and I will respond to what we find, and decide accordingly.”

THAT NIGHT, IN her diary, Alexandra wrote:

It’s not Lavinia’s fault her brothers underestimate her. I know she’ll be different once the men leave and we’re on our own; her mind dissolves in Zeke’s presence. I’ll be glad when we can be ourselves. This house is so beautiful, so spacious — what would my parents think, I wonder, if they were alive to see me in these two gorgeous rooms I now call my own? The window over my bed looks down on a planting of dwarf trees. My bed-linen is changed weekly, by someone other than me. And this painting is such a pleasure, so much more satisfying than needlework- So much better paid. Beneath the lining of my sewing box I’ve already tucked a surprising sum. Soon I’ll be able to purchase some books of my own, an extravagance when I have the Repository shelves to browse through, once the men leave… I’m impatient for them to go, I am. And Does he know that he rocks the toe of his boot in the air whenever Zeke speaks? I wonder what Erasmus was like as a boy. Before he grew so frozen, before he sat with his chin tucked into his collar like that, and his right hand wringing his left so strongly one wonders he doesn’t break the bones. Lavinia says that when she was a girl he was fond of beetles and moths, and teased the succession of governesses who raised her. I can’t imagine him teasing anyone.

THE NARWHAL SET sail on May 28, in such a wild flurry that everything important seemed still undone and nothing Erasmus meant to say got said. He and Zeke stood on the deck in their new gray uniforms, waving their handkerchiefs. Above them the Toxophilites’ pennant streamed in the wind, snapping straight out then beginning to droop, snapping straight out again. Terns hung motionless in the high currents, and Erasmus felt as though he himself were hanging between two worlds.

The acquaintances of the Narwhal’s crew gathered in little knots close to shore, followed by the cheering Toxics in their green outfits. Dotting the wharf in separate clusters were Zeke’s and Erasmus’s relatives and friends, their clothing splayed into wide colored planes by the wind whipping across the river. Alexandra had brought her entire family — her sisters, Emily and Jane; her brother, Browning; and Browning’s wife and infant son — all of them huddled so tightly that it was as if even here, in the open air, they couldn’t expand beyond the confines of the tiny house they’d shared since their parents’ deaths. They were small, neat, and yet somehow fierce-looking; abolitionists, serious young people. They dressed in the colors of sparrows and doves but more closely resembled, Erasmus thought, a family of saw-whet owls. Browning had a Bible in his hands.