Wanting

he was the best ally she could hope to make.

‘More tea?’ she asked.

He accepted with a smile. She ignored the stubby fingers holding out the saucer and cup—more befitting, she felt, of a navvy than a novelist—just as she ignored the overly bright clothing, the excess of jewellery, the way he seemed to be devouring her just as he had the poppyseed cake, all in a greedy rush, leaving on his lips a jetsam of yellow crumbs and black seeds. He put her in mind of a shrivelling hermit crab staring out of its gaudy shell. It all might almost have been disagreeable, were it not for who he most certainly was. That she did not ignore.

‘Milk, Mr Dickens?’

And so that wintry morning in London she told him her story, burnished bright and honed sharp by countless telling, of the expedition, a task only the English in their greatness would even dare contemplate: to go where none had ever been; to discover at the very edge of the world the route of which men had for centuries only dreamt, the fabled Northwest Passage through the Arctic ice.

Though Dickens knew much of it—who did not?—he listened patiently. Lady Jane spoke of the two splendid ships, the Terror and the Erebus, returned from their epic Antarctic voyage and fitted out with the most modern engineering marvels: steam engines and retractable screw propellers, copper sheathing, steam heating, even a steam-powered organ that could automatically play popular tunes. By virtue of a remarkable new invention, they carried an abundance of food preserved in thousands of tin- plate canisters. And she made all this detail of the expedition—the most expensive, most remarkable ever to be sent out by the Royal Navy—fascinating, even compelling.

But it was on the calibre of the officers and crew that she dwelt—the very finest of Englishmen, including the remarkable veteran of the southern polar exploration, Captain Crozier, and finally its leader, her husband, Sir John Franklin: his indomitable character, his gentle but inexorable will, his remarkable capacity for leadership, his extraordinary and heroic contribution to Arctic exploration, his embodiment of all that was most virtuous in English civilisation. But nothing had been heard of him or his one hundred and twenty-nine men since they sailed for the northern polar regions nine years before.

‘Is it any wonder, then, that this mystery has captured the imagination of the civilised world?’ said Lady Jane, trying not to be distracted by the sound of Dickens sucking his tongue in odd concentration. ‘For how is it possible for so many so remarkable to vanish off the face of the earth for so long without trace?’

Sitting there, he had a vision that would become inescapable, at once a talisman, a mystery, an explanation and a lodestone—the frozen ship, leaning on some unnatural angle, forced upwards and sideways by the ice, immense white walls rearing behind its dipping masts, the glitter of moonlight on endless snow, the desolate sound of men moaning as they died echoing across the infinite expanse of windswept white. In its strange hallucinatory power, Dickens had the odd sensation of recognising himself as ice floes, falling snow, as if he were an infinite frozen world waiting for an impossible redemption.

‘Greatness like Sir John’s comes but once in an age,’ he said, seeking to wrench his fancy free from these terrible visions. ‘A Magellan, a Columbus, a Franklin—they do not vanish, neither from the earth nor from history.’

Lady Jane Franklin had extensive acquaintances, bad breath, and was dreaded in more than one circle. There was no accounting for her triumphs. It was said that she was a woman of beguiling charm, but looking at her that morning, Dickens could see little of it. Rather than the black of a widow’s weeds, she wore a green and purple dress, down the front of which hung a bright pendant showing Sir John in white Wedgwood profile—an odd touch, Dickens felt. It was as if Sir John were already an ice man.

‘What with all that bunting, she was more a semaphore station than a Lady of the Realm,’ he later told his friend Wilkie Collins, ‘signalling the Lords of the Admiralty and the Ladies of Society one thing and one thing only: My husband is not dead! Is it gaudy or godly,’ he added, ‘to pronounce one’s marital loyalty so?’

Still, none seemed immune to her message—how could he deny it? She spoke of her personal communications with the highest, not only in England but around the world. Everyone from the Muscovy Czar to American railroad millionaires had sent out rescue missions, and every mission had returned with nothing.

Yet Lady Jane maintained her determined love, her refusal to accept a mystery as a tragedy. Nothing had elevated a woman higher in the eyes of the English public than her refusal to sink with grief. And though her husband had left nine years before—with three years of food and almost as much fanfare—the English public, ever pleased, as Dickens well knew, with the possibility of outrageous coincidence, agreed that she was right; the English public was certain that there was no reason at all to suggest that Sir John—a great Englishman in the stoutest English company ever assembled for such a venture—would not endure where even savages could survive.

‘And now this,’ Lady Jane said, her voice suddenly Arctic ice itself, taking from a side table a folded newspaper and passing it to Dickens. ‘I’m sure you’ve read it.’

He hadn’t. But of course he had heard of it. It was The Illustrated London News, and one article bore numerous green ink markings. It was an account by a noted Arctic explorer, Dr John Rae, of the remarkable and gruesome discoveries he had made in the farthest polar reaches. The dreadful news had flown around London, amazed Europe and stunned the Empire.

It appeared a terrible possibility, Lady Jane went on, from Dr Rae’s evidence, and from the more incontrovertible assembly of relics he had brought back—broken watches, compasses, telescopes, a surgeon’s knife, an order of merit, several silver forks and spoons with the Franklin crest, and a small silver plate engraved ‘Sir John Franklin, K. C. H.’—that all of the expedition had most tragically perished. She had to admit to the possibility. She did not deny it—but it remained, until irrefutable evidence emerged, only a possibility.

As an old newspaperman, Dickens found newspapers an ever less satisfactory form of fiction. He skimmed the opening columns. They recounted how, after much adventuring, Dr Rae had met with Esquimaux who possessed bric-a-brac clearly from Franklin’s expedition; after numerous careful interviews, Rae had put together a chilling tale. Dickens’ eyes halted at a passage down the side of which ran a long wavering green line. It was the only passage he read properly.

‘But this,’ said Lady Jane finally, ‘is not a possibility. This is unbearable.’

It was astonishing.

‘From the mutilated state of many of the bodies and the contents of the kettles,’ Dickens read a second time, admiring the marvellous detail of the kettles, ‘it is evident that our wretched Countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative—cannibalism—as a means of prolonging existence.’

‘It is a lie,’ said Lady Jane. ‘A nonsense. And its sensational airing is an insult to the memory of these greatest of Englishmen.’

Handing the newspaper back, Dickens studied her face closely.

‘If my husband has perished, he has none but me left to save his honour from such slander. If he is alive, then how is it possible to ask either the great or the many for further help to find him if Dr Rae’s view prevails?’

And now, for the first time, Dickens understood that her sole purpose was to seek his help in damning Dr Rae and his account. Lady Jane wanted him to put an end to these dreadful rumours of Sir John eating his fellows. Well, thought Dickens as he continued to listen solemnly, he would have to eat something to maintain that enormous bulk of his.

‘You see, Mr Dickens, the question that arises?’

‘I do see, Lady Jane.’

And he did. This famous woman wanted his help. He, who had known such shame as the son of a man imprisoned for debt; he, a one-time bootblack labeller, a scribbler and chancer got lucky. He had made of himself something, indeed everything; and here, in Lady Jane’s every word, he had undeniable proof of it: a celebrated Lady of the Realm wanting from him what even the powerful did not seem to possess. He, the debtor’s son, was now to be the creditor.

‘Can such testimony be trusted?’ she asked.

‘Can rat cunning ever be called truthful witness?’

‘Indeed,’ said Lady Jane, momentarily startled. ‘That’s precisely it.’ She halted, lost in some distant, elusive