The Terror

41 CROZIER

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’”

Lieutenant Irving had been Crozier’s officer, but Captain Fitzjames had a better voice – the lisp had all but disappeared – and a better way with Scripture, so Crozier was grateful that he was doing a majority of the burial-service reading.

All of the men in Terror Camp had turned out except those on watch, those in sick bay, or those performing essential services such as Lloyd in sick bay and Mr. Diggle and Mr. Wall and their mates labouring over the four whaleboat stoves cooking up some of the Esquimaux’s fish and seal meat for dinner. At least eighty men were at this graveside about a hundred yards from camp, standing like dark wraiths in the still-swirling fog.

“ ‘The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.’”

The other surviving officers and two mates were to carry Irving to the grave. There was not enough wood at Terror Camp to make a coffin, but Mr. Honey, the carpenter, had found enough wood to knock together a door-sized pallet on which Irving’s body, now securely sewn into canvas, could be transported on and upon which the body could be lowered into the grave. Although the ropes were set across the grave in proper Naval fashion, as they would be for any land burial, there would not be much lowering to do. Hickey and his men had been unable to dig deeper than three feet – the ground below that level was as hard-frozen as solid stone – so the men had gathered scores of large stones to lay over the body before piling on the frozen topsoil and gravel, then more stones to lay over that. No one had real hopes that it would keep the white bears or the other summer predators out, but the labour was a sign of most of the men’s affection for John Irving.

Most of the men.

Crozier glanced over at Hickey, standing next to Magnus Manson and the Erebus gunroom steward who had been flogged after Carnivale, Richard Aylmore. There was a cluster of other malcontents around these men – several of the Terror seamen who had been eager to kill Lady Silence even if it took a mutiny to do so back in January – but, like all the others standing around the pathetic hole in the ground, they had their Welsh wigs and caps off and their comforters pulled up to their noses and ears.

Crozier’s middle-of-the-night interrogation of Cornelius Hickey in the captain’s command tent had been tense and terse.

“Good morning to you, Captain. Would you like me to tell you what I told Captain Fitzjames and…”

“Take off your slops, Mr. Hickey.”

“Pardon me, sir?”

“You heard me.”

“Aye, sir, but if you want to hear how it was when I saw the savages murderin’ poor Mr. Irving…”

“It’s Lieutenant Irving, Caulker’s Mate. I heard your story from Captain Fitzjames. Do you have anything to add or retract from it? Anything to amend?”

“Ah… no, sir.”

“Take those outer slops off. Mittens too.”

“Aye, sir. There, sir, how’s ’at? Shall I just set ’em over on the…”

“Drop them on the floor. Jackets off too.”

“My jackets, sir? It’s bloody cold in here… yes, sir.”

“Mr. Hickey, why did you volunteer to go search for Lieutenant Irving when he hadn’t yet been gone much more than an hour? No one else was worried about him.”

“Oh, I don’t think I volunteered it, Captain. My recollection is that Mr. Farr asked me to go look for…”

“Mr. Farr reported that you asked several times if Lieutenant Irving wasn’t overdue and volunteered to go find him on your own while the others rested after their meal. Why did you do that, Mr. Hickey?”

“If Mr. Farr says that… well, we must’ve been worried about him, Captain. The lieutenant, I mean.”

“Why?”

“May I put my jackets and slops back on, Captain? It’s bloody freezing in…”

“No. Take off your waistcoat and sweaters. Why were you worried about Lieutenant Irving?”

“If you’re concerned… that is, thinking I was wounded today, Captain, I wasn’t. The savages never saw me. No wounds on me, sir, I assure you.”

“Take that sweater off as well. Why were you worried about Lieutenant Irving?”

“Well, the lads and me… you know, Captain.”

“No.”

“We was just concerned, you know, that one of our party was missin’, like. Also, sir, I was cold, sir. We’d been sittin’ around to eat what little cold food we had. I thought that walkin’, following the lieutenant’s tracks to make sure he was all right, would warm me up, sir.”

“Show me your hands.”

“Pardon me, Captain?”

“Your hands.”

“Aye, sir. Pardon my shaking, sir. I ain’t been warm all day and with all my layers off but this shirt and…”

“Turn them over. Palms up.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Is that blood under your nails, Mr. Hickey?”

“Could be, Captain. You know how it is.”

“No. Tell me.”

“Well, we ain’t had real water what to bath ourselves in for months, sir. And what with the scurvy and dysentery-like, there’s a certain amount of bleedin’ when we see to the necessaries…”

“Are you saying that a Royal Navy petty officer on my ship wipes his arse with his fingers, Mr. Hickey?”

“No, sir… I mean… may I put my layers back on now, Captain? You can see I ain’t wounded or anything. This cold is enough to shrink a man’s…”

“Take your shirts and undershirts off.”

“Are you serious, sir?”

“Don’t make me ask a second time, Mr. Hickey. We don’t have a brig. Any man I send to the brig will spend time chained to one of the whaleboats.”

“Here, sir. How’s this. Just me flesh, freezing as it is. If my poor missus could see me now…”

“It didn’t say on your muster papers that you were married, Mr. Hickey.”

“Oh, my Louisa’s been dead going on seven years now, Captain. Of the pox. God rest her soul.”

“Why did you tell some of the other men before the mast that when it came time to kill officers, Lieutenant Irving should be the first?”

“I never said no such thing, sir.”

“I have reports of you saying that and other mutinous statements going back to before the Carnivale on the ice, Mr. Hickey. Why did you single out Lieutenant Irving? What had that officer ever done to you?”

“Why, nothing, sir. And I never said no such thing. Bring in the man who said I did and I’ll dispute it to his face and spit in his eye.”

“What had Lieutenant Irving ever done to you, Mr. Hickey? Why did you tell other men from both Erebus and Terror that Irving was a whoremaster and a liar?”

“I swear to you, Captain… pardon my teeth chattering, Captain, but Jesus Christ the night is cold against the bare skin. I swear to you, I didn’t say no such thing. A lot of us looked on poor Lieutenant Irving sorta like a son, Captain. A son. It was only my worry for him out there today that made me go check on him. Good thing I did, too, sir, or we would’ve never caught the murdering bastards who…”

“Put your layers on, Mr. Hickey.”

“Aye, sir.”

“No. Do it outside. Get out of my sight.”

“ ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery,’ ” intoned Fitzjames. “ ‘He cometh up and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.’ ”

Hodgson and the other pallbearers were using great care in lowering the pallet with Irving’s canvas-wrapped body to the ropes held in place above the shallow hole by some of the healthier seamen. Crozier knew that Hodgson and Irving’s other friends had gone into the postmortem tent one at a time to pay their respects before the lieutenant had been sewn into his sail shroud by Old Murray. The visitors had set several tokens of their affection next to the lieutenant’s body – the recovered brass telescope, its lenses shattered in the shooting, that the boy had so esteemed, a gold medal with his name engraved on it that he had won in competitions on the gunnery ship HMS Excellent, and at least one five-pound note, as if some old wager had been paid at last. For some reason – optimism? youthful naïveté? – Irving had packed his dress uniform in his small bag of personal belongings, and he was being buried in it now. Crozier wondered idly if the gilt buttons on the uniform – each bearing the image of an anchor surrounded by a crown – would be there when nothing else but the boy’s bleached bones and the gold gunnery medal survived the long process of decay.

“ ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ ” Fitzjames recited from memory, his voice sounding tired but properly resonant, “ ‘of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sin art justly displeased?’ ”

Captain Crozier knew that there was one other item sewn into the sail-shroud with Irving, one that no one else knew about. It lay under his head like a pillow.

It was a gold, green, red, and blue silk Oriental handkerchief, and Crozier had surprised the giver by coming into the postmortem tent after Goodsir, Lloyd, Hodgson, and the others had departed, just before Old Murray the sailmaker was to enter and sew up the shroud he had prepared and upon which Irving already lay in state.

Lady Silence had been there, bending over the corpse, setting something beneath Irving’s head.

Crozier’s first impulse had been to reach for his pistol in his greatcoat pocket, but he’d frozen in place as he saw the Esquimaux girl’s eyes and face. If there were no tears in those dark, hardly human eyes, there was something else luminous there with some emotion he could not identify. Grief? The captain did not think so. It was more some kind of complicit recognition at seeing Crozier. The captain felt the same strange stirring in his head that he had so often felt around his Memo Moira.

But the girl obviously had set the Oriental handkerchief carefully in place under the dead boy’s head as some sort of gesture. Crozier knew the handkerchief had been Irving’s – he’d seen it on special occasions as far back as the day they’d sailed in May of 1845.

Had the Esquimaux wench stolen it? Plundered it from his dead body just yesterday?

Silence had followed Irving’s sledge party from Terror to Terror Camp more than a week ago and then had just disappeared, never joining the men in the camp. Almost everyone, excluding Crozier, who still held hopes she might lead them to food, had considered this good riddance. But all during this terrible morning, part of Crozier had wondered if somehow Silence had been responsible for his officer’s murder out there on the windswept gravel ridge.

Had she led her Esquimaux hunter friends back here to raid the camp and run into Irving on the way, first giving a fete to the starving man with meat and then murdering him in cold blood to keep him from telling the others here of his encounter? Had Silence been the “possibly a young woman” that Farr and Hodgson and the others had caught a glimpse of, fleeing with an Esquimaux man with a headband? She could have changed her parka if she had returned to her village in the past week, and who could tell young Esquimaux wenches apart at a glance?

Crozier considered all of these things, but now in a time-stopped moment – both he and the young woman were startled into immobility for long seconds – the captain looked into her face and knew, whether in his heart or in what Memo Moira insisted was his second sight, that she wept inside for John Irving and was returning a gift of the silk handkerchief to the dead man.

Crozier guessed that the handkerchief had been presented to her during the February visit to the Esquimaux’s snow-house that Irving had dutifully reported to the captain… but had reported with few details. Now Crozier wondered if the two had been lovers.

And then Lady Silence was gone. She’d slipped under the tent flap and was gone without a sound. When Crozier later queried the men in the camp and those on guard if they had seen anything, none had.

At that moment in the tent, the captain had gone over to Irving’s body, looked down at the pale, dead face made even whiter with the small pillow of the brightly covered handkerchief behind it, and then he had pulled the canvas over the lieutenant’s face and body, shouting for Old Murray to come in and do the sewing.

“ ‘Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour,’ ” Fitzjames was saying, “ ‘deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.’

“ ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’”

Fitzjames’s voice fell silent. He stepped back from the grave. Crozier, lost in reverie, stood for a long moment until a shuffling of feet made him realize that his part of the service had arrived.

He walked to the head of the grave.

“ ‘We therefore commit the body of our friend and officer John Irving to the deep,’ ” he rasped, also reciting from memory that remained all too clear from many repetitions despite the pall of fatigue in his mind, “‘to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the Sea and the Earth shall give up their dead.’” The body was lowered the three feet, and Crozier tossed a handful of frozen soil onto it. The gravel made a strangely moving rasping sound as it landed on the canvas above Irving’s face and slid to the sides. “‘And the life of the world to come, through our Lord Jesus Christ, who at his coming shall change our vile body, that it may be like his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.’ ”

The service was over. The ropes had been retrieved.

Men stamped cold feet, tugged on their Welsh wigs and caps, rewrapped their comforters, and filed back through the fog to Terror Camp for their hot dinner.

Hodgson, Little, Thomas, Des Voeux, Le Vesconte, Blanky, Peglar, and a few of the other officers stayed behind, dismissing the seamen’s detail that had been waiting to bury the body. The officers shoveled soil and began setting in the first layer of stones together. They wanted Irving buried as best he could be under the circumstances.

When they finished, Crozier and Fitzjames walked away from the others. They would eat their dinners much later – for now they planned to walk the two miles up to Victory Point where Graham Gore had left his brass canister and optimistic message in James Ross’s old cairn almost a year ago.

Crozier planned to leave word there today on what the fate of their expedition had been in the past ten and a half months since Gore’s note had been written and on what they planned to do next.

Plodding tiredly through the fog, hearing one of the ship’s bells ringing for dinner somewhere in the roiling fog behind them – they had, of course, brought both Terror’s and Erebus’s bells along in the whaleboats dragged across the frozen sea to camp when the ships were abandoned – Francis Crozier hoped to Christ that he would decide on their course of action by the time that he and Fitzjames reached the cairn. If he could not, he thought, he was afraid he might start weeping.