Blood and Ice

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

December 16, 5 p.m.

MICHAEL KNEW that if Charlotte's door was closed at that hour, the poor woman was probably trying to grab a much-needed nap, but he really didn't have a choice.

He knocked, and when there was no immediate answer, he knocked again, louder.

“Hang on, hang on,” he heard, as her slippers shuffled toward the door. She opened it, wearing her reindeer sweater and a baggy pair of purple Northwestern University sweatpants. When she saw it was Michael, she said, “I've got to warn you-I just took a Xanax.”

From her drowsy look, he believed it. “We need you to look at someone.”

“Who?”

How could he say this, without her thinking he was playing some stupid prank? “You know that woman? The one who was frozen in the ice?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, stifling a yawn. “You find her again?”

“We did,” Michael said. “And well, the thing is, we've brought her back.”

“To the base?”

“To life.”

Charlotte just stood there, idly scratching the side of her face with the back of her fingernails. “What'd you just say?”

“She's alive. Sleeping Beauty is awake, and she's alive.”

From the look on her face, Michael guessed that she did think it was a joke, and a bad one, to boot.

“You woke me up for this?” she said. “Because I've just had a very rough day and-”

“-I'm telling you the truth. It's for real.” He stared her straight in the eye, so that she could see not only that he was sincere, but that he also wasn't suffering from the Big Eye. That this was the real deal.

“I don't know what you're up to,” Charlotte said, dropping her resistance, “but you've got me up now. Where is this phenomenon?”

“Next door-in the infirmary.”

Michael got out of her way as she went next door, rolling from side to side, still a bit groggy. Lawson, standing around in the waiting area like an expectant father in a maternity ward, said nothing as Charlotte entered the examining room with Michael close behind.

Eleanor was laid out on the table, like a body on a bier, her hands folded across her bosom. The orange down coat was thrown on a chair. She was wearing a long, old-fashioned gown, dark blue, with a white brooch fastened on her breast. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn't asleep. She was breathing weakly through her open mouth.

And Michael could see that Charlotte was-quite suddenly- waking up.

Get a grip, was the first thing Charlotte told herself.

This young woman-whoever she was-sure as hell did look like that woman Charlotte had been allowed to glimpse in the ice.

“She collapsed an hour ago,” Michael was saying, “when we tried to get her to leave the old church at the whaling station.”

The whaling station? The old, abandoned whaling station? This girl-what was she, maybe nineteen or twenty years old?- lying here in the antique clothes? None of it was making any sense at all. Charlotte swore to think twice before ever taking Xanax again. She took the woman's wrist and felt for a pulse. It was steady but feeble, though her fingers felt like frozen fish sticks.

“Her name, by the way, is Eleanor Ames.”

Charlotte looked down at her face-a beautiful face that reminded her of nineteenth-century portraits she'd seen hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago. The features were delicate and refined, the eyebrows thin and arched, but the overall effect was oddly ethereal and unreal, as if she was in fact looking at a portrait, or a lovingly created waxwork. Something that wasn't quite real.

Focus, Charlotte thought. Just focus on doing your job. Don't get distracted by all the other stuff you can't make sense of yet. It was a lesson she'd learned, over and over again, in the ER.

“Eleanor,” she said, leaning close, “can you hear me?”

The eyelids fluttered.

“I'm Dr. Barnes. Charlotte Barnes.” She glanced over at Michael. “She speaks English?”

Michael nodded vigorously. “She is English.”

Charlotte took a second to absorb this, too. “Can you open your eyes for me?”

Eleanor's head turned slightly on the headrest, and her eyes opened. She looked up at Charlotte with a confused expression, her gaze fluttering to the reindeer prancing across the sweater, then back to her broad face.

“That's good,” Charlotte said, encouragingly. “That's very good.” She patted Eleanor on the back of her hand. But if she isn't the woman from the ice, if she isn't Sleeping Beauty, who else could she be? And how else could she have gotten here-to the South Pole? Charlotte chased the thoughts away. Focus. “We're going to get your body temperature up, and you'll be feeling a whole lot better in no time.”

Charlotte used her stethoscope to listen to her heart and lungs. The woman's dress, done in a Victorian style, gave off a briny, icy odor. Almost as if she's been underwater. Charlotte asked Michael to go to the commons and get “something nice and hot, maybe hot chocolate,” while she completed the cursory examination. She proceeded with caution, so as not to do anything that might shock a patient with an antique sensibility. Whoever she really was, and wherever she'd come from, she obviously lived, even if it was only in her own head, in another century. Charlotte had once seen a patient who thought he was the Pope, and she had always been careful to address him as Your Holiness. As might have been expected, Eleanor appeared mystified by the blood-pressure cuff, and the pen-light, used to peer into her eyes, also occasioned astonishment. The whole time, she was watching Charlotte with a gradually increasing awareness, shaded with perplexity. What, Charlotte wondered, would she be making of her-a big, black woman in a boldly patterned sweater, purple pants, and braided, streaked hair piled up in a messy knot on top of her head?

“You are… a nurse?” she finally whispered.

Oh well, it could have been worse, Charlotte thought. “No, I'm a doctor.” She did have an English accent.

“I too am a nurse,” she said, one pale hand lifting toward her bosom.

“Is that right?” Charlotte said, glad to hear her talking, as she readied a syringe for a blood sample.

“With Miss Nightingale.”

“How about that?” Charlotte said, before the words had really sunk in. Eleanor had said them as if she hoped they might make an impression. And of course they did. Holding the needle up to the light, Charlotte paused and said, “Wait-as in what? Are you talking about Florence Nightingale?”

“Yes,” Eleanor replied, apparently happy to hear that this name was still familiar. “In the Harley Street Hospital… and then the Crimea.”

Florence Nightingale? The lady with the lamp? From… when? History had never been Charlotte's favorite subject. It had to have been, what, a couple of hundred years ago? More or less?

Concentrate, Charlotte reminded herself yet again. Concentrate. And don't do anything to alarm the patient, or-in a case like hers-upset a belief system that might be crucial to her mental stability.

“Well, then, Miss Ames, you've come one very long way to get to a place like this.” Charlotte rolled up a sleeve of the dress-the fabric was coarse and stiff, and felt like a stage costume. “Even today, it's not easy getting here.” She swabbed a spot with alcohol. “Now you just hold real still-you're going to feel a little prick-and it'll be over in a few seconds.”

Eleanor's eyes went down to the needle and watched the blood being drawn, as if she had never seen the procedure before. Had she, Charlotte wondered? Could she have? Out of curiosity alone, Charlotte planned to look up Florence Nightingale as soon as the exam was over. Purely, she told herself, for academic reasons.

Just as she was removing the needle, Michael came in, carrying a tray on which he'd placed not only a cup of cocoa, but a blueberry muffin and some scrambled eggs under tight plastic wrap. While he looked for a place to put it down, Charlotte opened the minifridge, where the perishable meds and the red plasma bags were kept, and deposited the blood sample inside for safekeeping. Eleanor, she noticed, was still following her every move. For someone who claimed to be well into her hundreds, she was certainly looking more alive by the minute.

But frozen, in an iceberg, for centuries? Hard as that was for Charlotte to believe, there was only one thing even harder-and that was coming up with some other explanation-any explanation-for who she was or how she came to Point Adelie, one of the most remote and inaccessible spots on the face of the earth.

“Are you hungry?” Michael said, finally finding a place for the food on a standing instrument tray. He rolled it over toward the examining table, and asked, “Can you sit up?”

With Charlotte's help, he was able to put his arm around Eleanor's frail shoulders and lift her into a sitting position, her back cushioned by the pillows. She regarded the food with a kind of polite disinterest, as if it were something she had seen once before but couldn't quite place.

“Try the cocoa,” he said. “It's hot.”

As she lifted the mug to her pale lips, Michael said to Charlotte, “Murphy's outside-he wants to talk to you.”

“Good, ‘cause I'd like to talk to him, too.”

Charlotte took her clipboard, on which she'd been recording the results of the exam, and left the mysterious Eleanor Ames to Michael. Truth be told, she was glad to leave. She'd been feeling a chill ever since entering the infirmary and she didn't think it was just a reaction to the patient's cold, clammy skin or her frosty clothes. It was as if, for all her years of training, she'd finally been presented with something utterly beyond her experience and beyond her scope.

Apart from the wind whistling outside the window, it was silent in the infirmary. Eleanor took the mug away-a bit of white foam still on her lips-and with her eyes still downcast, said to Michael, “I'm sorry if I hurt you in the church.”

He smiled. “I've taken worse hits.”

When he and that other man-Lawson?-had tried to escort her out of the little back room, she had refused to go, and even remembered pummeling Michael on his chest and arms with a flurry of blows that wouldn't have injured a sparrow. A second later, after having expended her last ounce of strength in the attack, she had crumpled to the floor, weeping. Michael and Lawson had carried her, protesting but unable to offer further resistance, outside, and placed her on the seat of Michael's machine. Then they had set off back toward the camp with the storm coming on fast.

“I know that you were only trying to help.”

“That's all I'm still trying to do.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly and lifted her eyes to meet his. How could he ever know, or even imagine, what she had been through? She broke off a piece of the muffin, then glanced around the room.

“Where am I?”

“The infirmary. At the American research station I told you about.”

“Yes, yes…” she murmured, finally eating the tiny piece of the muffin. “But then, is this a part of America?”

“Not really. This-Point Adelie-is a part of the South Pole.”

The South Pole. She might have guessed as much. Apparently, the Coventry had been blown so far off course that they had indeed reached the Pole itself. The most unexplored place on earth. She wondered if the ship had survived the voyage, and if any of the men aboard had ever lived to tell the tale. And if they had, would they have been bold enough to tell all of it? Would they, for instance, have regaled their friends at the tavern with their story of binding the heroic soldier and the invalid nurse in a length of iron chain and hurling them into the ocean?

“The eggs have some melted cheese in them,” Michael said. “That's how Uncle Barney-that's our cook-likes to make them.”

He was trying to be kind. And he had been. But there was so much that he could never know, and she could never say, to anyone. How could they even believe what little she had told them so far? Had she not lived it herself, she would have thought it too fantastical to be true. She picked up the fork, and tried the eggs. They were good, salty and still warm. This Michael Wilde was watching with approval as she ate. He was tall, with an unshaven face and black hair that looked as wild and unruly as her younger brother's used to be when he'd return from flying his kite in the downs.

Her younger brother who had been in his own grave for well over a hundred years already.

Gone. They were all gone. It was as if a death knell were clanging in her head. It didn't bear thinking of. She took another bite of the eggs.

Even though he was still brimming with questions, Michael did not want to interrupt her meal. Who knew how long it had been since she'd last eaten hot food? Years? Decades? More? Everything about her, from her clothing to her manner, suggested someone from another era altogether.

How would he ever be able to wrap his mind around such a concept?

In fact, it was Eleanor who broke the silence by asking, “And what do the people do here, at this encampment?”

“Study the flora, the fauna, the climate changes.” Global warming? He'd let that wait. Something told him she'd already had enough bad news in her life. “Personally, I'm a photographer.” Would even that make sense? “I do daguerreotypes, sort of. And I write, for a magazine. In Tacoma-that's a city in the northwest United States. Near Seattle. People in Seattle like to make jokes about it.”

He felt like he was babbling. But as long as he was talking, she was eating, and that made him happy. She wasn't exactly digging in, more just going through the motions… as if dining were a skill she was trying to remember.

“And the negress? She is a doctor?” she said, with a note of incredulity.

Okay, Michael thought, wherever and whenever Eleanor was from, there was bound to be a learning curve. “Yes. Dr. Barnes- Charlotte Barnes-is a very respected physician.”

“Miss Nightingale does not believe that women should be doctors.”

“Which Miss Nightingale is that?”

“Miss Florence Nightingale, of course.” She'd said it as if she were pulling out her calling card, the reference that would legitimize her somehow.

Michael wanted to laugh. It all just kept getting stranger by the minute. He wondered if she'd run this professional reference by Charlotte.

“She is quite ardent in our defense as nurses, but she also believes, as do I, that there are distinct roles in which the two sexes should serve.”

A long learning curve.

Michael let her nibble at her food, and they talked, though with many hesitations, about other things-the weather, the mounting storm, the work done at the station-and he had to mentally shake himself from time to time, just to remember that he was talking to a woman who claimed-with little evidence so far to contradict her- to have been born sometime in the nineteenth century. Someone who had clearly drowned-how else did you wind up frozen in an underwater glacier? He'd have liked to ask her directly about all that, but they'd just met, as it were, and the words weren't easy to come by, even for a journalist trained to ask tough questions.

And he feared the reaction she might have. Could it trigger some sort of breakdown?

Eleanor sipped her cocoa.

“We were thinking that you could stay here, in the infirmary for now,” Michael did say. “You'll have complete privacy, and Dr. Barnes, if you need her, is right next door.”

“That's very thoughtful,” she replied, dabbing her lips with the paper napkin, then glancing with curiosity at the floral motif that ran along its border.

“We can even try to rustle up some extra clothes,” he said, “though I can't say they're gonna fit all that well.” Eleanor was slim and slight, and anything he borrowed from Betty or Tina or Charlotte was going to look like a tent on her.

“What I have on will do,” she said, “though I would like the opportunity to launder them… and,” she said, blushing, “perhaps to bathe?”

It was precisely such considerations that had persuaded Michael and Murphy and Lawson to house Eleanor in the infirmary under close wraps-not only for her own health and safety, but because she was bound to be an object of the most intense scrutiny if the other grunts and beakers got wind of her. She'd be the Miley Cyrus of Antarctica. And her life going forward, Michael knew, was going to be like no one else's had ever been. Once a supply plane carried her back out again, back to the world-to Dateline NBC and People magazine and her interviews with Larry King and Barbara Walters-she was not going to know what had hit her. And all Michael could do now was try to protect her as long as he could.

Even when he'd carried Kristin down off the mountain, it had made the local news. That was enough. He wouldn't wish the media glare on anyone.

Eleanor finished the cocoa and neatly folded up the paper napkin again, clearly intending to preserve it. Charlotte returned, carrying a fresh pair of hospital pajamas and a terry-cloth robe; she glanced at Michael, as if to convey that Murphy had filled her in on the game plan and she could take it from here.

“Okay then, I'll see you both tomorrow,” Michael said, lifting the tray away. Eleanor looked just a little alarmed at his departure-not surprising, he thought, given that he had become her first friend in this world-but Michael smiled and said, “Fresh muffins again tomorrow. I promise.”

From the bereft expression on her face, it appeared to be small consolation.