Blood and Ice

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

December 23, 10:30 p.m.

“I'M THIRSTY,” Sinclair said loudly, and Franklin got up off the crate he was sitting on, picked up the paper cup with the straw, and held it out to him.

Sinclair, whose hands were cuffed, sucked through the straw, greedily. His throat was parched, but no amount of water, he knew, would ever quench it. He was sitting up on the edge of the cot. Ranged around him in the storeroom were mechanical devices the size of blacking boxes, capable of sporadically emitting waves of heat, even though they were supplied with no coal or gas source that he could detect.

It was truly an age of wonders.

There was a nagging pain in the back of his head, where the bullet fragment had grazed his skull, but he was otherwise intact. Around his left ankle he wore an improvised shackle, a chain looped through a pipe on the wall and clamped with a padlock. The room was stacked with boxes, and on the floor off to one side he noted a broad russet stain, which could only have been caused by blood. Was this where prisoners were normally taken for interrogation, or worse?

He had tried to engage his guard in conversation, but beyond learning his name-Franklin-it had proved hopeless; he wore something in his ears, connected by a string, and buried his face in a gazette with a half-naked girl on its cover. Sinclair had the impression that Franklin was afraid of his prisoner-justifiably so, if it came to that-and that he had been ordered not to exchange any information. But if the opportunity ever presented itself, Sinclair would very much like to repay him for that wound on the back of his head.

The time crawled. His own clothes had been removed-he could see them neatly piled on a crate belonging to a “Dr Pepper,” whoever that was-and replaced with an embarrassing pair of flannel pajamas and a pile of woolen blankets. He longed to get up off the cot, reclaim his clothes, and go in search of Eleanor. She was somewhere at this encampment, and he meant to find her.

And then… what? It was like running smack into the proverbial brick wall. What were their prospects, marooned as they were at the end of the earth? Where could they run? And for how long?

There had been boats, he remembered, at the whaling station- a big one, the Albatros, that he would never be able to launch on his own. And smaller, wooden whaling boats that might, with some repair, prove seaworthy, but Sinclair was no sailor. And they were surrounded by the most perilous of oceans. His only chance would be to embark in decent weather, and hope to be rescued by the first passing ship they encountered. Apparently, there was some commerce, and if he and Eleanor could acquire modern clothing, and come up with some plausible explanation, they might be able to board another ship and be transported back to civilization again. To lose themselves among people who did not know, nor would ever learn, their terrible secret. Once that much was done, Sinclair could rely on his native wits to carry them along. He had become, of necessity, a great improviser.

The outer door opened with the scraping of metal on ice and a burst of frigid air, refreshing after the stifling heat generated by the little heaters. Once all the coats and gloves and goggles had come off, Sinclair recognized him as the man-Michael Wilde-whom he had first encountered in the blacksmith's shop. There, he had seemed a fairly reasonable chap, though Sinclair remained determined to trust no one.

He was carrying a book bound in black leather, with a gilded binding, in his hand.

“I thought you might want this back,” Michael said, extending the book, but Franklin was up like a shot to intervene.

“The chief said not to give him anything. You don't know what he could use, or how he could use it.”

“It's just a book,” Michael said, letting it be inspected. “Of poetry.”

That made Franklin frown. “Looks pretty old,” he said, riffling through the pages.

“Probably a first edition,” Michael observed, with a glance at Sinclair, to whom he handed it.

“It's by a man named Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” Sinclair said, accepting it awkwardly between his cuffed hands. “And so far as I know, it's never hurt a soul.”

Michael recognized the need for all the precautions but was embarrassed by it, nonetheless.

“So I saw,” Michael said, before reciting the few lines he remembered from school: “ ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn, a stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the Sacred River, Ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea.’ I'm afraid that's about all the poetry that ever stuck,” he said, but Sinclair looked nonplussed all the same.

“You know his work? Even now?”

“Oh yes,” Michael was pleased to inform him. “The Romantic poets are taught in high school and college. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats. But I still don't know what the title of this book- Sibylline Leaves -means.”

Sinclair was smoothing the cover of the book as if he were stroking the top of a dog's sleek head. “The Greek sibyls-seers?- wrote their prophecies on palm leaves.”

Michael nodded. He'd been impressed that this should be the book Sinclair held closest to his heart; it had been packed in his gear by the door of the church. “And I saw that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in it,” he said. “That's still a very famous poem. It shows up on a lot of required reading lists.”

Sinclair gazed down at the book, and without opening it, intoned, “ ‘Like one that on a lonesome road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned around walks on, And turns no more his head.’ “

Franklin was looking utterly stumped.

“ ‘Because he knows, a frightful fiend,’ “ Sinclair concluded the passage, “ ‘Doth close behind him tread.’ “

The words seemed to silence the chamber… and chilled Michael to the bone. Was that, he wondered, how Sinclair perceived his own flight? A lonesome journey, dogged by demons every step of the way? The haunted look on his face, the hollows around his eyes, the cracked lips, the blond hair matted to his head as if he'd been drowned-they all testified that it did.

Franklin, apparently afraid that the poetry recital might go on, said to Michael, “You mind if I take a break?”

“Go ahead,” Michael replied, and Franklin, tossing his magazine onto the crate, left.

When he was gone, Sinclair put the book aside and leaned back against the wall, while Michael removed the well-thumbed copy of Maxim from Franklin's perch and sat down.

“You haven't got anything to smoke, do you?” Sinclair asked, for all the world like one gentleman, lounging in a club, idly asking another.

“Afraid not.”

Sinclair sighed, and said, “The guard didn't either. Am I to be deprived of tobacco for a reason, or do men no longer smoke?”

Michael had to smile. “Murphy probably left orders not to give you anything like a cigarette or a cigar. He might have thought you'd try to burn this place down.”

“With myself inside it?”

“Granted,” Michael said, “it wouldn't be smart. But men do smoke-just not as much anymore. It turns out it causes cancer.”

Sinclair looked at him as if he'd just seriously suggested that the moon was made of green cheese. “Well, then,” he said, “do they drink?”

“Definitely. Especially here.”

Sinclair waited, expectantly, while Michael debated what to do. He knew it would be a gross breach of Murphy's express orders to provide Sinclair with a drink, and Charlotte would probably tell him it was a bad idea, too. Hell, for that matter he knew it was inadvisable. But the man seemed so calm and so rational, and would there be any better way to gain his confidence and get him talking about the long and eventful journey he'd made? Michael still could not imagine how Sinclair and Eleanor had wound up wrapped in chains at the bottom of the sea.

“At the club, we always kept a decanter of very fine port on hand for our guests.”

“I can tell you now, we don't have that. Beer is more likely.”

Sinclair shrugged amiably. “Beer would not be unwelcome.”

Michael looked around the locker. Most of the boxes contained canned goods, or crockery, but somewhere there had to be some Sam Adams crates.

“Don't go anywhere,” Michael said, getting up and going into the next aisle, where Ackerley's blood had left a stain on the concrete floor. Stepping around it-and trying not to think about it- he found a Sam Adams box and broke it open. He took out two bottles, and used his Swiss Army knife to pop the caps. Then he went back and handed one to Sinclair. He clinked his own against it, then moved back to his seat.

Sinclair took a long drink, his head back, before studying the dark bottle with its bewigged man on the label. “There was once a great scandal, you know, over a bottle rather like this.”

“A scandal?”

“It was a Moselle, served in a black bottle about this size, and set at Lord Cardigan's banquet table.”

“Why was that such a problem?”

“Lord Cardigan,” Sinclair said, giving the nobleman's name an especially orotund delivery, “was very punctilious about such matters, and he had expressly ordered that only champagne be served.”

“When was this?”

“Eighteen forty, if memory serves. At a regimental dinner.”

Michael found the conversation increasingly surreal. While Sinclair recounted the rest of the tale-”this is all, you understand, from the popular account, as I was still at Eton at the time”- Michael kept reminding himself that Sinclair and Eleanor had lived in an era, and a world, that was long gone. What was history to Michael was simply the news of the day to Sinclair.

Sinclair took another drink, with his eyes closed, and then, slowly-very slowly-he opened them again.

Had he just adjusted his vision?

“Thin beer,” he said.

“Is it?” Michael replied. “I guess the draft beer you were used to was heavier.”

Sinclair didn't answer. He was looking fixedly at Michael. Pondering. He drained the bottle, and put it on the floor beside his shackled ankle.

“Thank you,” he said, “all the same.”

“No problem.” Michael was considering how to steer the conversation in the direction he wanted, when Sinclair took the wheel instead.

“So,” he said, “what have you done with Eleanor?”

This was definitely not where Michael would have wanted it to go. But he answered that she was well, and resting, which all seemed innocuous enough.

“That's not what I asked.”

The lieutenant's tone had abruptly changed.

“Where is she?” he said. “I want to see her.”

And Michael's eyes flicked, involuntarily, to the chain holding him to the pipe on the wall.

“Why won't you let us see each other?”

“That's just the way the Chief of Operations wants it for now.”

Sinclair snorted. “You sound like some conscript, reduced to following orders.” He took a deep breath, then loudly exhaled. “And I've witnessed what comes of that.”

“I'll see what I can do,” Michael replied.

“We're just a humble man and wife,” Sinclair said, trying another tack, and in a more conciliatory tone, “who have come a very long way together. What possible harm could there be in our seeing each other?”

Man and wife? Michael hadn't known that, and he was sure he would have remembered it if Eleanor had said they were a married couple. Sinclair blinked again, slowly, and Michael noted that he seemed short of breath.

“Does that surprise you,” Sinclair said, “that we are husband and wife? Or hadn't she mentioned it?”

“I don't think it came up.”

“Didn't come up?” He coughed, shaking his head in disbelief. “Or you didn't want to know?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm no fool, so please don't take me for one.”

“I'm not taking-”

“I'm an officer in Her Majesty's service, Seventeenth Lancers,” he said, a steely resolve in his voice. Lifting his cuffed hands and rattling the chain secured to the wall, he added, “And if I were not at such a disadvantage, you'd soon regret trifling with me.”

Michael stood up, surprised again at Sinclair's sudden change of tone. Was it the beer? Did alcohol have some unforeseen effect on him, because of his condition? Or were these mercurial moods a part of his everyday nature? Despite the chain, Michael backed a few more feet away.

“Do you want to call back the guard?” Sinclair taunted him.

“I think it's the doctor you should see,” Michael said.

“What?” he said. “The blackamoor again?”

“Dr. Barnes.”

“That bitch has already tapped me like a barkeep taps a keg”

What had happened here? What had gone wrong? Sinclair had gone from calm to crazy in a matter of minutes. And there was an unwholesome gleam in his bloodshot eyes.

Franklin ambled back in, his bushy moustache covered with frost. “You two still reading poems to each other?” he said.

Then he saw Michael standing back, and the look on his face, and knew that something was off. “Everything all right?” he asked Michael, and when he didn't get an immediate reply, he said, “What do you want me to do?”

“I think you should get Charlotte. Maybe Murphy and Lawson, too.”

Franklin gave Sinclair a wary glance, then went right back out.

Michael had never taken his eyes off Sinclair, who sat on the edge of the cot, staring back with red-rimmed eyes.

And then, returning to the same measured voice he had used to recite the earlier lines, Sinclair intoned, “ An orphan's curse would drag to hell, A spirit from on high; but oh, more horrible than that, Is the curse in a dead man's eye!’ “ The look in his own eye was nothing short of murderous. “Do you know the lines?” he asked.

“No. I don't.”

Sinclair rapped his knuckles on the cover of the old book. “You do now,” he said, chuckling grimly. “Don't say you weren't warned.”