The Terror

16 CROZIER

It was five bells, 2:30 a.m., and Captain Crozier was back from Erebus, had inspected the corpses – or half-corpses – of William Strong and Thomas Evans where the thing on the ice had left them propped up near the stern rail on the quarterdeck, had seen to their stowage in the Dead Room below, and now he sat in his cabin contemplating the two objects on his desk – a new bottle of whiskey and a pistol.

Almost half Crozier’s small cabin was taken up by the built-in bunk set against the starboard hull. The bunk looked like a child’s cradle with carved, raised sides, built-in cupboards below, and a lumpy horsehair mattress set almost chest-high. Crozier had never slept well on real beds and often wished for the swinging hammocks he’d spent so many years in as a midshipman, young officer, and when he served before the mast as a boy. Set against the outer hull as this bunk was, it was one of the coldest sleeping places aboard the ship – chillier than the bunks of the warrant officers with their cubbies in the centre of the lower deck aft, and much colder than the sleeping hammocks of the lucky seamen forward, strung as they were on the mess deck near the still-glowing Frazer’s Patent Stove that Mr. Diggle cooked on twenty hours out of the day.

Books set into built-in shelves along the rising, inward-sloping hull helped insulate Crozier’s sleeping area a little but not much. More books ran under the ceiling for the five-foot width of the cabin, filling a shelf that hung under curving ship’s timbers three feet above the foldout desk connecting Crozier’s bunk to the hall partition. Directly overhead was the black circle of the Preston Patent Illuminator, its convex opaque glass piercing a deck now dark beneath three feet of snow and protective canvas. Cold air constantly flowed down from the Illuminator like the freezing exhalations of something long dead but still labouring to breathe.

Opposite Crozier’s desk was a narrow shelf holding his bathing basin. No water was kept in the basin since it would freeze; Crozier’s steward, Jopson, brought his captain hot water from the stove each morning. The space between desk and basin left just enough room in the tiny cabin for Crozier to stand, or – as now – sit at his desk on a backless stool that slid under the basin shelf when not in use.

He continued staring at the pistol and bottle of whiskey.

The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future – other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail – but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.

The late Sir John Franklin had filled his storeroom with expensive china – all bearing Sir John’s initials and family crest, of course – as well as cut crystal, forty-eight beef tongues, fancy silver also engraved with his crest, barrels of smoked Westphalia hams, towers of double Gloucestershire cheeses, bag upon bag of specially imported tea from a relative’s plantation in Darjeeling, and crocks of his favorite raspberry jam.

And while Crozier had packed some special foods for the occasional officers’ dinners he had to host, most of his money and allocated hold space had been dedicated to three hundred and twenty-four bottles of whiskey. It was not fine Scotch whiskey, but it would suffice. Crozier knew that he had long since reached that point of being the kind of drunkard where quantity always trumped quality. Sometimes here, as in the summer when he was especially busy, a bottle might last him two weeks or more. Other times – as during this past week – he might go through a bottle a night. The truth was, he had quit counting the empty bottles when he passed two hundred the previous winter, but he knew that he must be nearing the end of his supply. On the night he drinks the last of the last and his steward tells him there are no more – Crozier knew it would be at night – he firmly planned to cock the pistol, set the muzzle to his temple, and pull the trigger.

A more practical captain, he knew, might remind himself that there were the not-insignificant liquid remnants of four thousand five hundred gallons – gallons – of concentrated West Indian rum in the Spirit Room below, and that each jug was rated between 130 and 140 proof. The rum was doled out each day to the men in units of gills, one fourth of a pint cut with three-quarters pint of water, and there were enough gills and gallons left to swim in. A less finicky and more predatory drunkard-captain might consider the men’s rum his reserve. But Francis Crozier did not like rum. He never had. Whiskey was his drink, and when it was gone, so would be he.

Seeing young Tommy Evans’s body severed at the waist, the trousered legs sticking out in an almost comical Y, the boots still firmly laced over the dead feet, had reminded Crozier of the day he’d been summoned to the shattered bear blind a quarter of a mile from Erebus. In less than twenty-four hours, he realized, it would be the fifth-month anniversary of that eleventh of June debacle. At first Crozier and the other officers who had come running could make little sense of the havoc at the blind. The structure itself had been torn to shreds, the very iron bars of its frame bent and battered. The plank seat had been smashed to splinters and amid those splinters lay the headless body of Marine Sergeant Bryant, the ranking Marine on the expedition. His head – not yet recovered when Crozier arrived – had been batted almost thirty yards across the ice until it stopped next to a skinned bear cub’s carcass.

Lieutenant Le Vesconte had suffered a broken arm – not from the bear-monster, it turned out, but from falling out onto the ice – and Private William Pilkington had been shot through the upper left shoulder by the Marine next to him, Private Robert Hopcraft. The private had received eight broken ribs, a pulverized collarbone, and a dislocated left arm from what he later described as a glancing blow from a monster’s huge paw. Privates Healey and Reed had survived without serious injury but with the ignominy of having fled the melee in panic, tumbling and screaming and scrambling on all fours across the ice. Reed had broken three fingers in his flight.

But it had been the two trousered and boot-buckled legs and feet of Sir John Franklin – intact below the knees but separated, one lying in the blind, another having been dropped somewhere near the hole through the ice in the burial crater – which had commanded Francis Crozier’s attention.

What kind of malevolent intelligence, he wondered while drinking whiskey from his glass, severs a man at the knees and then carries the still-living prey to a hole in the ice and drops him in, to follow a second later? Crozier had tried not to imagine what may have happened next under the ice, although some nights after a few drinks and while trying to fall asleep, he could see the horror there. He also thought for a certainty that Lieutenant Graham Gore’s burial service one week earlier to the hour had been nothing more than an elaborate banquet unwittingly offered up to a creature already waiting and watching from beneath the ice.

Crozier had not been overly devastated by Lieutenant Graham Gore’s death. Gore was precisely that kind of well-bred, well-educated, C of E, public school, war-hero Royal Navy officer, come natural to command, at ease with superiors and inferiors, modest in all things but destined for great things, well-mannered British kind-even-to-Irishmen, upper-class fucking toff twit whom Francis Crozier had watched being promoted over him for more than forty years.

He took another drink.

What kind of malevolent intelligence kills but does not eat all its prey in such a winter of no game as this but rather returns the upper half of the corpse of Able-Bodied Seaman William Strong and the lower part of the corpse of young Tom Evans? Evans had been one of the “ship’s boys” who had beat muffled drums in Gore’s funeral procession five months earlier. What kind of creature plucks that young man from Crozier’s side in the dark but leaves the captain standing three yards away… then returns half the corpse?

The men knew. Crozier knew what they knew. They knew it was the Devil out there on the ice, not some overgrown arctic bear.

Captain Francis Crozier did not disagree with the men’s assessment – for all his pish-posh talk earlier that night over brandy with Captain Fitzjames – but he knew something that the men did not; namely that the Devil trying to kill them up here in the Devil’s Kingdom was not just the white-furred thing killing and eating them one by one, but everything here – the unrelenting cold, the squeezing ice, the electrical storms, the uncanny lack of seals and whales and birds and walruses and land animals, the endless encroachment of the pack ice, the bergs that plowed their way through the solid white sea not even leaving a single ship’s length lee of open water behind them, the sudden white-earthquake up-eruption of pressure ridges, the dancing stars, the shoddily tinned cans of food now turned to poison, the summers that did not come, the leads that did not open – everything. The monster on the ice was just another manifestation of a Devil that wanted them dead. And that wanted them to suffer.

Crozier took another drink.

He understood the arctic’s motivation better than his own. The ancient Greeks had been right, thought Crozier, when they stated that there were five bands of climate on this disk of an earth, four of them equal, opposite, and symmetrical like so many things Greek, wrapped around the world like bands on a snake. Two were temperate and made for human beings. The central band, the equatorial region, was not meant for intelligent life – although the Greeks had been wrong in assuming that no humans could live there. Just no civilized humans, thought Crozier, who’d had his glimpse of Africa and the other equatorial areas and was sure nothing of value would ever come from any of them. The two polar regions, the Greeks had reasoned long before the arctic and antarctic wastes were reached by explorers, were inhuman in every sense – unfit even to travel through, much less to reside in for any length of time.

So why, wondered Crozier, did a nation like England, blessed to be placed by God in one of the most gentle and verdant of the two temperate bands where mankind was meant to live, keep throwing its ships and its men into the ice of the northern and southern polar extremes where even fur-wearing savages refuse to go?

And more pertinent to the central question, why did one Francis Crozier keep returning to these terrible places time after time, serving a nation and its officers that have never recognized his abilities and worth as a man, even while he knew in his heart that someday he would die in the arctic cold and dark?

The captain remembered that even when he was a small boy – before he went to sea at age thirteen – he had carried his deep mood of melancholy within him like a cold secret. This melancholic nature had manifested itself in his pleasure at standing outside the village on a winter night watching the lamplights fade, by finding small places in which to hide – claustrophobia had never been a problem for Francis Crozier – and by being so afraid of the dark, seeing it as the avatar of the death that had claimed his mother and grandmother in such a stealthy way, that he had perversely sought it out, hiding in the root cellar while other boys played in the sunlight. Crozier remembered that cellar – the grave chill of it, the smell of cold and mold, the darkness and inward-pressing which left one alone with dark thoughts.

He filled his small glass and took another drink. Suddenly the ice groaned louder, and the ship groaned back in response – trying to shift its place in the frozen sea but having no place to go. In recompense it squeezed itself tighter and moaned. Metal brackets in the hold deck contracted, the sudden cracks sounding like pistol shots. The seamen forward and the officers aft snored on, used to the night noises of the ice trying to crush them. On deck above, the officer on watch in the seventy-below night stomped his feet to renew circulation, the four sharp stamps sounding to the captain like a weary parent telling the ship to hush its protestations.

It was hard for Crozier to believe that Sophia Cracroft had visited this ship, stood in this very cabin, exclaimed how neat it was, how tidy, how cozy, how very learned with its row of books, and how pleasant the austral light pouring down from the Illuminator.

It had been seven years ago almost to the week, the Southern-Hemispheric spring month of November of 1840, when Crozier had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land south of Australia in these very ships – Erebus and Terror – on the way to Antarctica. The expedition had been under the command of Crozier’s friend, although always his social superior, Captain James Ross. They had stopped at Hobart Town to finish their provisioning before heading into antarctic waters, and the governor of that penal island, Sir John Franklin, insisted that the two younger officers – Captain Ross and Commander Crozier – stay at Government House during their visit.

It had been an enchanting time and – to Crozier – a romantically fatal one.

The inspection of the expedition’s ships had occurred on the second day of the visit – the ships were clean, refitted, almost fully provisioned, their young crews not yet bearded or made haggard by the two winters in the antarctic ice to come – and while Captain Ross personally hosted Governor Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, Crozier had found himself escorting the governor’s niece, the dark-haired and bright-eyed young Sophia Cracroft. He had fallen in love on that day and had carried that blossoming love into the darkness of the next two southern winters, where it had bloomed into an obsession.

The long dinners under the servant-turned fans of the governor’s house were filled with lively conversation. Governor Franklin was a worn-out man in his midfifties, dispirited by the lack of recognition of his accomplishments and dispirited further by the opposition of the local press, wealthy landowners, and bureaucrats during his third year in Van Diemen’s Land, but both he and his wife, Lady Jane, had come alive during this visit by their Discovery Service countrymen and, as Sir John liked to address them, his “fellow explorers.”

Sophia Cracroft, on the other hand, showed no signs of unhappiness. She was witty, alive, vivacious, sometimes shocking in her comments and boldness – even more so than her controversial aunt, the Lady Jane – and young and beautiful and seemingly interested in every aspect of the forty-four-year-old bachelor Commander Francis Crozier’s opinions, life, and sundry thoughts. She laughed at all of Crozier’s initially hesitant jokes – he was not used to this level of society and strived to be on his best behaviour, drinking less than he had in years and that only wine – and she always answered his tentative bon mots with increasingly higher levels of wit. To Crozier, it was like learning tennis from a far better player. By the eighth and final day of their extended visit, Crozier felt the equal of any proper Englishman – a gentleman born in Ireland, yes, but one who had made his own way and had also lived an interesting and exciting life, the equal of any man – and the superior of most men in Miss Cracroft’s amazing blue eyes.

When HMSs Erebus and Terror left the Hobart Town harbour, Crozier was still calling Sophia “Miss Cracroft,” but there was no denying the secret connections they had made: the secret glances, the companionable silences, the shared jokes and private moments alone. Crozier knew that he was in love for the first time in a life whose “romance” had consisted of dockyard doxies’ cribs, back-alley knee-wobblers, some native girls doing the deed for trinkets, and a few overpriced nights out in gentlemen’s whorehouses in London. All that was behind him now.

Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor’s house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit.

Then followed almost two years of pack ice, glimpsing Antarctica, the stink of penguin rookeries, naming two distant, smoking volcanoes after their tired ships, darkness, spring, the threat of being frozen in, finding and fighting their way out by sail only through a sea now named after James Ross, and finally the rough Southern Sea passage and the return to Hobart Town on the island of eighteen thousand prisoners and one very unhappy governor. This time there was no inspection of Erebus and Terror; they stank too much of grease and cooking and sweat and fatigue. The boys who had sailed south were now mostly hollow-eyed and bearded men who would not sign up for future Discovery Service expeditions. Everyone except HMS Terror’s commander was eager to return to England.

Francis Crozier was eager only to see Sophia Cracroft again.

He took another drink of whiskey. Above him, barely audible through the deck and snow, the ship’s bell rang six bells. Three a.m.

The men were sorry when Sir John had been killed five months ago – most of them because they knew that the promise of ten sovereigns per man and a second advance-pay bonus had died with the paunchy, bald old man – but little actually changed after Franklin’s death. Commander Fitzjames was now acknowledged as the captain of Erebus that he’d always been in reality. Lieutenant Le Vesconte, gold tooth flashing when he smiled, his arm in a sling, took Graham Gore’s place in the hierarchy of command with no visible ripple of disruption. Captain Francis Crozier now assumed the rank of expedition commander, but with the expedition frozen in the ice, there was little he could do differently now from what Franklin would have done.

One thing Crozier did almost immediately was ship more than five tons of supplies across the ice to a point not far from the Ross cairn on King William Land. They were now fairly certain it was an island because Crozier had sent out sledge parties – monster bear be damned – to scout the area. Crozier himself went along on half a dozen of these early sledge parties, helping to smash easier, or at least less impossible, paths through the pressure ridges and iceberg barrier along the shore. They brought extra winter slops, tents, lumber for future cabins, casks of dried foods and hundreds of cans of the tinned foods, as well as lightning rods – even brass bed rods from Sir John’s appropriated cabin to be fashioned into lightning rods – and the essentials of what both crews would need if the ships had to be abandoned suddenly in the midst of the next winter.

Four men had been lost to the creature on the ice before winter returned, two from one tent during one of Crozier’s trips, but what stopped the transfer sledge trips in mid-August was a return of the severe lightning and thick fog. For more than three weeks both ships sat in the midst of the fog, suffered the lightning to strike them, and only the briefest ice outings – hunting parties mostly, a few fire-hole teams – were allowed. By the time the freakish fog and lightning had passed, it was early September, and the cold and snow had begun again.

Crozier then resumed sending cache-supply sledge parties to King William Land despite the terrible weather, but when Second Master Giles MacBean and a seaman were killed just a few yards ahead of the three sledges – the deaths unseen because of the blowing snow but their last screams all too audible to the other men and to their officer, Second Lieutenant Hodgson – Crozier “temporarily” suspended the supply trips. The suspension had now lasted two months, and by the first of November no sane crewman wanted to volunteer for an eight- to ten-day sledge trip in the dark.

The captain knew that he should have cached at least ten tons of supplies on the shore rather than the five tons he’d hauled there. The problem was – as he and a sledge party had learned the night the creature had ripped through a tent near the captain’s and would have carried off seaman George Kinnaird and John Bates if they had not run for their lives – any campsite on that low, windswept gravel-and-ice spit of land was not defensible. Aboard the ships, as long as they lasted, the hulls and raised deck acted as a wall of sorts, turning each ship into a kind of fort. Out on the gravel and in tents, no matter how tightly clustered, it would take at least twenty armed men watching day and night to guard the perimeter, and even then the thing could be among them before guards could react. Everyone who had sledged to King William Land and camped out there on the ice knew this. And as the nights grew longer, the fear of those unprotected hours in the tents – like the arctic cold itself – seeped deeper into the men.

Crozier drank some more whiskey.

It had been April of 1843 – early autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, although the days were still long and warm – when Erebus and Terror returned to Van Diemen’s Land.

Ross and Crozier were once again guests at the governor’s house – officially called Government House by the old-time inhabitants of Hobart Town – but this time it was obvious that a shadow lay over both Franklins. Crozier was willing to be oblivious to this, his joy at being near Sophia Cracroft was so great, but even the irrepressible Sophia had been subdued by the mood, events, conspiracies, betrayals, revelations, and crises that had been brooding in Hobart during the two years Erebus and Terror had been in the southern ice, so in the course of his first two days in Government House, he’d heard enough to piece together the reasons for the Franklins’ depression.

It seemed that local and venial landed interests, personified in one undercutting, backstabbing Judas of a colonial secretary named Captain John Montagu, had decided early on in Sir John’s six years as governor that he simply would not do, nor would his wife, the outspoken and unorthodox Lady Jane. All Crozier heard from Sir John himself – overheard, actually, as the despondent Sir John spoke to Captain Ross while the three men took brandy and cigars in the booklined study in the mansion – was that the locals had “a certain lack of neighbourly feelings and a deplorable deficiency in public spirit.”

From Sophia, Crozier learned that Sir John had gone, in the public eye at least, from being “the man who ate his shoes” to his self-styled description of “a man who wouldn’t hurt a fly” then quickly to a description widespread on the Tasmanian Peninsula of “a man in petticoats.” This last calumny, Sophia assured him, came from the colony’s dislike of Lady Jane as much as it had from Sir John’s and his wife’s attempts to improve things for the natives and prisoners who laboured there in inhuman conditions.

“You understand that the previous governors simply loaned out prisoners for the local plantation owners’ and city business tycoons’ insane projects, took their cut of the profits, and kept their mouths shut,” explained Sophia Cracroft as they walked in the shadows of the Government House gardens. “Uncle John has not played that game.”

“Insane projects?” said Crozier. He was very aware of Sophia’s hand on his arm as they walked and spoke in hushed whispers, alone, in the warm near-dark.

“If a plantation manager wants a new road on his land,” said Sophia, “the governor is expected to loan him six hundred starving prisoners – or a thousand – who work from dawn until after dark, chains on their legs and manacles on their wrists, through this tropical heat, without water or food, being flogged if they fall or falter.”

“Good Lord,” said Crozier.

Sophia nodded. Her eyes remained fixed on the white stones of the garden path. “The colonial secretary, Montagu, decided that the prisoners should excavate a pit mine – although no gold has been found on the island – and the prisoners were set to digging it. It was more than four hundred feet deep before the project was abandoned – it flooded constantly, the water table here is very shallow, of course – and it was said that two to three prisoners died for every foot excavated of that abhorred mine.”

Crozier restrained himself before he could say Good Lord again, but in truth that was all that came to his mind.

“A year after you left,” continued Sophia, “Montagu – that weasel, that viper – persuaded Uncle John to dismiss a local surgeon, a man very popular with the decent people here, on trumped-up charges of dereliction of duty. It divided the colony. Uncle John and Aunt Jane became the lightning rod for all criticism, even though Aunt Jane had disapproved of the surgeon’s dismissal. Uncle John – you know, Francis, how very much he hates controversy, much less to administer pain of any sort, why he’s often said he would not hurt a fly…”

“Yes,” said Crozier, “I have seen him carefully remove a fly from a dining room and release it.”

“Uncle John, listening to Aunt Jane, eventually reinstated the surgeon, but that made a lifelong enemy out of this Montagu. The private bickerings and accusations became public, and Montagu – in essence – called Uncle John a liar and a weakling.”

“Good Lord,” said Crozier. What he was thinking was, If I had been in John Franklin’s place, I would have called this Montagu fucker out to the field of honor and there put a bullet in each of his testicles before I placed a final one in his brain. “I hope that Sir John sacked the man.”

“Oh, he did,” said Sophia with a sad little laugh, “but that only made things worse. Montagu returned to England last year on the same ship carrying Uncle John’s letter announcing his dismissal, and it turns out, sadly, that Captain Montagu is a close friend of Lord Stanley, secretary of state for the Colonies.”

Well, the Governor is well and truly buggered, Crozier thought as they reached the stone bench at the far end of the garden. He said, “How unfortunate.”

“More than Uncle John or Aunt Jane could have imagined,” said Sophia. “The Cornwall Chronicle ran a long article entitled ‘The Imbecile Reign of the Polar Hero.’ The Colonial Times blames Aunt Jane.”

“Why attack Lady Jane?”

Sophia smiled without humour. “Aunt Jane is, rather like myself… unorthodox. You have seen her room here at Government House, I believe? When Uncle John gave you and Captain Ross a tour of the estate the last time you were here?”

“Oh, yes,” said Crozier. “Her collection was wonderful.” Lady Jane’s boudoir, the parts they were allowed to see, had been crammed carpet to ceiling with animal skeletons, meteorites, stone fossils, Aborigine war clubs, native drums, carved wooden war masks, ten-foot paddles that looked capable of propelling HMS Terror along at fifteen knots, a plethora of stuffed birds, and at least one expertly taxidermied monkey. Crozier had never seen anything like it in a musuem or zoo, much less in a lady’s bedroom. Of course, Francis Crozier had seen very few ladies’ bedrooms.

“One visitor wrote to a Hobart newspaper that, and I quote verbatim, Francis, ‘our governor’s wife’s private rooms at Government House look more like a museum or a menagerie than the boudoir of a lady.’”

Crozier made a clucking noise and felt guilty about his similar thoughts. He said, “So is this Montagu still making trouble?”

“More than ever. Lord Stanley – that viper’s viper – backed Montagu, reinstated that worm in a position similar to the one Uncle John dismissed him from, and sent Uncle John a reprimand so terrible that Aunt Jane told me in private that it was the equivalent of a horsewhipping.”

I’d shoot that bugger Montagu in the balls and then cut Lord Stanley’s off and serve them to him only slightly warmed, thought Crozier. “That is terrible,” he said.

“There is worse,” said Sophia.

Crozier looked for tears in the dim light but saw none. Sophia was not a woman given to weeping.

“ Stanley made public the rebuke?” guessed Crozier.

“The… bastard… gave a copy of the official rebuke to Montagu, before he sent it to Uncle John, and that weasel’s weasel rushed it here by the fastest post ship. Copies were made and passed around here in Hobart Town to all of Uncle John’s enemies months before Uncle John received the letter through official channels. The entire colony was sniggering every time Uncle John or Aunt Jane attended a concert or performed the governor’s role in some official function. I apologize for my unlady-like language, Francis.”

I’d feed Lord Stanley his balls cold in a fried dough of his own shit, thought Crozier. He said nothing but nodded that he forgave Sophia her choice of language.

“Just when Uncle John and Aunt Jane thought it could get no worse,” continued Sophia, her voice trembling slightly, but with anger, Crozier was sure, not with weakness, “Montagu sent to his plantation friends here a three-hundred-page packet containing all the private letters, Government House documents, and official dispatches which he had used to make his case against the governor to Lord Stanley. That packet is in the Central Colonial Bank here in the capital, and Uncle John knows that two thirds of the old families and business leaders in town have made their pilgrimage to the bank to read and hear what it contains. Captain Montagu calls the governor a ‘perfect imbecile’ in those papers… and from what we hear, that is the most polite thing in the detestable document.”

“Sir John’s position here seems untenable,” said Crozier.

“At times I fear for his sanity, if not his life,” agreed Sophia. “Governor Sir John Franklin is a sensitive man.”

He wouldn’t hurt a fly, thought Crozier. “Will he resign?”

“He will be recalled,” said Sophia. “The entire colony knows it. This is why Aunt Jane is almost beside herself… I have never seen her in such a state. Uncle John expects official word of his recall before the end of August, if not sooner.”

Crozier sighed and pushed his walking stick along a furrow in the garden path gravel. He had looked forward to this reunion with Sophia Cracroft for two years in the southern ice, but now that he was here he could see that their visit would be lost in the shadow of mere politics and personality. He stopped himself before he sighed again. He was forty-six years old and acting like a fool.

“Would you like to see the Platypus Pond tomorrow?” asked Sophia.

Crozier poured another glass of whiskey for himself. There came a scream of banshees from above, but it was only the arctic wind in what was left of the rigging. The captain pitied the men on watch.

The whiskey bottle was almost empty.

Crozier decided then and there that they would have to resume cache-hauling sledge trips to King William Land this winter, through the dark and storms and with the threat of the thing on the ice ever present. He had no choice. If they had to abandon the ships in the coming months – and Erebus was already showing signs of imminent collapse in the ice – it would not do merely to set up a sea camp here on the ice near where the ships would be destroyed. Normally that might make sense – more than one hapless polar expedition had set up camp on the ice and let the Baffin Bay current carry them hundreds of miles south to open sea – but this ice was going nowhere and a camp here on the ice would be even less defensible from the creature than would a camp on the frozen gravel on the shore – peninsula or island – twenty-five miles away in the dark. And he’d already cached more than five tons of gear there. The rest would have to follow before the sun returned.

Crozier sipped his whiskey and decided that he would lead the next sledge trip. Hot food was the greatest single morale builder cold men could have, short of sight of rescue or extra gills of rum, so his next sledge trips would consist of stripping the four whaler boats – serious craft rigged for serious sailing should the real ships be abandoned at sea – of their cookstoves. The Frazer’s Patent Stove on Terror and its twin on Erebus were too massive to move to shore – and Mr. Diggle would be using his to bake biscuits right up to the minute Crozier gave the order to abandon ship – so it was best to use the boat stoves. The four stoves were iron and would be heavy as Satan’s hooves, especially if the sledges were hauling more gear, food, and clothing to cache, but they’d be safe on shore and could be fired up quickly, although the coal itself would also have to be hauled across the cold hell of a pressure-ridged twenty-five miles of sea ice. There was no wood on King William Land nor any for hundreds of miles south of there. The stoves would go next, Crozier decided, and he would go with them. They would sledge through the absolute darkness and unbelievable cold and let the Devil take the hindmost.

Crozier and Sophia Cracroft had ridden out that next April morning in 1843 to see the Platypus Pond.

Crozier had expected they’d be taking a buggy as they did for sojourns into Hobart Town, but Sophia had two horses saddled for them and a pack mule loaded with picnic things. She rode like a man. Crozier realized that the dark “skirt” she’d appeared to be wearing was actually a pair of gaucho trousers. The white canvas blouse she wore with it was somehow both feminine and rugged. She wore a broad-brimmed hat to keep the sun off her skin. Her boots were high, polished, soft, and must have cost roughly a year of Francis Crozier’s captain’s salary.

They rode north, away from Government House and the capital, and followed a narrow road through plantation fields, past penal colony pens, and then through a patch of rain forest and out into open higher country again.

“I thought that platypuses were found only in Australia,” said Crozier. He was having trouble finding a comfortable position in the saddle. He’d never had much opportunity or reason to ride. It was embarrassing when his voice vibrated as he jounced and bounced. Sophia seemed completely at home in the saddle; she and the horse moved as one.

“Oh, no, my dear,” said Sophia. “The strange little things are found only in certain coastal areas on the continent to our north, but all across Van Diemen’s Land. They’re shy though. We see none around Hobart Town any longer.”

Crozier’s cheeks grew warm at the sound of the “my dear.”

“Are they dangerous?” he asked.

Sophia laughed easily. “Actually the males are dangerous in mating season. They have a secret poisonous spur on their hind legs, and during the breeding season the spurs become quite venomous.”

“Enough to kill a man?” asked Crozier. He’d been joking about the comical little creatures he’d seen only in illustrations being dangerous.

“A small man,” said Sophia. “But survivors of the platypus’s spur say that the pain is so terrible that they would have preferred death.”

Crozier looked to his right at the young woman. Sometimes it was very difficult to tell when Sophia was joking and when she was serious. In this instance, he would assume that she was telling the truth.

“Is it breeding season?” he asked.

She smiled again. “No, my dear Francis. That is between August and October. We should be quite safe. Unless we encounter a devil.”

“The Devil?”

“No, my dear. A devil. What you may have heard described as a Tasmanian devil.”

“I have heard of those,” said Crozier. “They’re supposed to be terrible creatures with jaws that open as wide as the hatch on a ship’s hold. And they’re reputed to be ferocious – insatiable hunters – able to swallow and devour a horse or Tasmanian tiger whole.”

Sophia nodded, her face serious. “All true. The devil is all fur and chest and appetite and fury. And if you had ever heard one’s noise – one cannot really call it a bark or growl or roar, but rather the garbled gibbers and snarls one might expect out of a burning asylum – well, then I guarantee that not even so courageous an explorer as thee, Francis Crozier, would go into the forest or fields here alone at night.”

“You’ve heard them?” asked Crozier, searching her serious face again to see if she was pulling his leg.

“Oh, yes. An indescribable noise – absolutely terrifying. It causes their prey to freeze just long enough for the devil to open those impossibly wide jaws and to swallow its victim whole. The only noise as frightening may be the screams of its prey. I’ve heard an entire flock of sheep bleating and crying as a single devil devoured them all, one at a time, leaving not so much as a hoof behind.”

“You’re joking,” said Crozier, still staring at her intently to see if she was.

“I never joke about the devil, Francis,” she said. They were riding into another patch of dark forest.

“Do your devils eat platypuses?” asked Crozier. The question was serious, but he was very glad that neither James Ross nor any of his crewmen had been around to hear him ask it. It sounded absurd.

“A Tasmanian devil will and does eat anything,” said Sophia. “But once again, you are in luck, Francis. The devil hunts at night, and unless we get terribly lost, we should have seen the Platypus Pond – and the platypus – and had our lunch and returned to Government House before nightfall. God help us if we are out here in the forest come darkness.”

“Because of the devil?” asked Crozier. He’d meant the question to be light and teasing, but he could hear the undercurrent of tension in his own tone.

Sophia reined her mare to a halt and smiled at him – truly, dazzlingly, completely smiled at him. Crozier managed, not gracefully, to get his own gelding stopped.

“No, my dear,” said the young woman in a breathy whisper. “Not because of the devil. Because of my reputation.”

Before Crozier could think of anything to say, Sophia laughed, spurred her horse, and galloped ahead down the road.

There was not enough whiskey left in the bottle for two last glassfuls. Crozier poured most of it, held the glass up between him and the flickering oil lamp set on the inner partition wall, and watched the light dance through the amber liquid. He drank slowly.

They never saw the platypus. Sophia assured him the platypus was almost always to be seen in this pond – a tiny circle of water not fifty yards across, a quarter mile off the road in a thick forest – and that the entrances to its burrow were behind some gnarled tree roots that ran down the bank, but he never saw the platypus.

He did, however, see Sophia Cracroft naked.

They’d had a pleasant picnic at the more shaded end of the Platypus Pond, an expensive cotton tablecloth spread on the grass to hold the picnic basket, glasses, food containers, and themselves. Sophia had ordered the servants to pack some waterproof cloth-wrapped parcels of roast beef in what was the most expensive of all commodities here but the cheapest from whence Crozier had come – ice – to keep it from going bad during the morning’s ride. There were broiled potatoes and small bowls of a tasty salad. She’d also packed a very good bottle of Burgundy in with actual crystal glasses from Sir John’s crest-etched collection, and she drank more of it than did the captain.

After the meal they’d reclined just a few feet apart and talked of this and that for an hour, all the while looking out at the dark surface of the pond.

“Are we waiting for the platypus, Miss Cracroft?” asked Crozier during a short gap in their discussion of the dangers and beauties of arctic travel.

“No, I think it would have shown itself by now if it wanted us to see it,” said Sophia. “I’ve been waiting for an interval before we go bathing.”

Crozier could only look at her quizzically. He certainly had not brought beach bathing attire. He did not own beach bathing attire. He knew it was another one of her jests, but she always spoke in such evident earnestness that he was never 100 percent sure. It made her puckish sense of humour all the more exciting to him.

Extending her rather titillating joke, she stood, brushed some dead leaves from her dark gaucho pants, and looked around. “I believe I shall undress behind those shrubs there and enter the water from that grassy shelf. You are invited to join me in the swim, of course, Francis, or not, according to your personal sense of decorum.”

He smiled to show her he was a sophisticated gentleman, but his smile was unsteady.

She walked to the thick bushes without another glance back. Crozier remained on the tablecloth, lying half reclined and with an amused look on his carefully shaven face, but when he saw her white blouse suddenly lifted up by pale arms to be draped across the top of the tall shrub, his expression froze. But his prick did not. Beneath his corduroy trousers and too-short waistcoat, Crozier’s private part went from parade rest to top of the mizzen in two seconds.

Sophia’s dark gaucho pants and other white, frilly unnamed things joined the blouse atop the thick shrub a few seconds later.

Crozier could only stare. His easy smile became a dead man’s rictus. He was sure that his eyes were bulging out of his head, but he could not turn away, nor avert his gaze.

Sophia Cracroft stepped out into the sunlight.

She was absolutely naked. Her arms hung easily at her sides; her hands were slightly curled. Her breasts were not large but were very high and very white and tipped with large nipples that were pink, not brown as had been the case with all the other women – crib doxies, gap-toothed prostitutes, native girls – whom Crozier had seen naked before this moment.

Had he ever seen another woman truly naked before? A white woman? At this instant he thought not. And if he had, he knew, it mattered not in the least.

The sunlight reflected off young Sophia’s blindingly white skin. She did not cover herself. Still frozen in languid posture and vapid expression, only his penis reacting by becoming even more turgid and aching, Crozier realized that he was astonished that this goddess in his mind, this perfection of English womanhood, the woman he already mentally and emotionally had chosen to be his wife and the mother of his children, had thick, luxurious pubic hair that seemed intent, here and there, on leaping out of its proper black V of an inverted triangle. Unruly was the only word that came to his otherwise empty mind. She had unpinned her long hair and let it fall to her shoulders.

“Are you coming in, Francis?” she called softly from where she stood on the grassy shelf. Her tone was as neutral as if she were asking him if he would like a bit more tea. “Or are you just going to stare?”

Without another word she dived into the water in a perfect arc, her pale hands and white arms cleaving the mirrorlike surface an instant before the rest of her.

By this time Crozier had opened his mouth to speak, but articulate speech was obviously an impossibility. After a moment he closed his mouth.

Sophia swam easily back and forth. He could see her white buttocks rising behind her strong, white back, along which her wet hair lay separated like three brushstrokes of the blackest of India inks.

She raised her head, treading water easily while stopping at the far end of the pond near the large tree she’d pointed out upon her arrival. “The platypus’s burrow is behind these roots,” she called. “I don’t think it wants to come out and play today. It’s shy. Don’t you be, Francis. Please.”

As if in a dream Crozier felt himself rising, walking to the thickest patch of shrubbery he could find close to the water on the opposite side of the pond from where Sophia was. His fingers shook violently as he worked to undo his buttons. He found himself folding his clothing in tight, proper little squares, setting the squares within a larger square on the grass at his feet. He was sure he was taking hours. His throbbing erection would not go away. Will it gone as he would, imagine it away as he might, it persisted in rising rigid to his navel and pitching back and forth there, the glans as red as a signal lantern and extended several taut inches free of its foreskin.

Crozier stood irresolute behind the bush, hearing the splashes as Sophia continued to swim. If he dithered another moment, he knew, she would be climbing out of the pond, be back behind her own curtain of a shrub drying herself off, and he would curse himself for a coward and a fool for the rest of his days.

Peeking through the branches of his shrub, Crozier waited until the lady’s back was turned as she swam toward the far shore, and then, with much speed and clumsiness, he threw himself forward into the water, stumbling more than diving, abandoning all grace in his single-minded effort to get his treacherous prick beneath the water and out of sight before Miss Cracroft turned her face his way.

When he surfaced, spluttering and blowing, she was treading water twenty feet away and smiling at him.

“I’m delighted you decided to join me, Francis. Now if the male platypus emerges with his venomous spur, you can protect me. Shall we inspect the burrow entrance?” She pivoted gracefully and swam toward the huge tree where it overhung the water.

Vowing to keep at least ten – no, fifteen – feet of open water between them, like a foundering ship surrendering to a lee shore, Crozier dog-paddled after her.

The pond was surprisingly deep. As he stopped twelve feet from her and treaded water clumsily to keep his head above the surface, Crozier realized that even here at the edge, where roots from the large tree came down five feet of steep bank into the water and tall grasses hung over casting afternoon shadows, Crozier’s flailing feet and seeking toes could not at first find purchase on the bottom.

Suddenly Sophia was coming toward him.

She must have seen the panic in his eyes; he did not know whether to back-paddle furiously or just somehow warn her away from his condition of prick-rampant, because she paused mid-breaststroke – and he could see her white breasts bobbling beneath the surface – nodded to her left, and swam easily toward the tree roots.

Crozier followed.

They hung on to the roots, only about four feet from each other, but the water was blessedly dark below chest level, and Sophia pointed to what might have been a burrow opening, or just a muddy indentation, in the bank between the tangle of tree roots.

“This is a camping or bachelor burrow, not a nesting burrow,” said Sophia. She had beautiful shoulders and collarbones.

“What?” said Crozier. He was happy – and mildly amazed – that his power of speech had returned, but less than satisfied by the odd, strangled sound of the syllable and by the fact that his teeth were chattering. The water was not cold.

Sophia smiled. A strand of dark hair was plastered along one of her sharp cheeks. “Platypuses make two kinds of burrows,” she said softly, “this kind – what some naturalists call a camping burrow – which both the male and female use except during breeding season. The bachelors live here. The nesting burrow is dug out by the female for the actual breeding, and after that deed is performed, she excavates another small chamber to act as a nursery.”

“Oh,” said Crozier, clinging to the root as tightly as he had ever clung to any ship’s line while two hundred feet up in the rigging during a hurricane.

“Platypuses lay eggs, you know,” continued Sophia, “like reptiles. But the mothers secrete milk, like mammals.”

Through the water he could see the dark circles in the centres of the white globes of her breasts.

“Really?” he said.

“Aunt Jane, who is something of a naturalist herself, believes that the venomous spurs on the hind legs of the male are used not only to fight other male platypuses and intruders, but to hang on to the female while they are swimming and mating at the same time. Presumably he does not secrete the venom when clinging to his breeding partner.”

“Yes?” said Crozier and wondered if he should have said No? He had no idea what they were talking about.

Using the tangle of roots, Sophia pulled herself closer, until her breasts were almost touching him. She laid her cool hand – a surprisingly large hand – flat against his chest.

“Miss Cracroft…,” he began.

“Shhhh,” said Sophia. “Hush.”

She shifted her left hand from the root to his shoulder, hanging from him as she had hung from the tree root. Her right hand slid lower, pressing across his belly, touching his right hip, then coming back to his centre and going lower again.

“Oh, my,” she whispered by his ear. Her cheek was against his now, her wet hair in his eyes. “Is this a venomous spur I’ve found?”

“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.

“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.