The Terror

11 CROZIER

Lat. 70°-05? N., Long. 98°-23? W.

9 November, 1847

You’re frozen through, Francis,” says Commander Fitzjames. “Come aft to the Common Room for brandy.”

Crozier would prefer whiskey, but brandy will have to serve. He precedes Erebus’s captain down the long, narrow companionway toward what had been Captain Sir John Franklin’s personal cabin and which is now the equivalent of Terror’s Great Room – a library and off-duty gathering place for officers and a meeting room when necessary. Crozier thinks that it says good things about Fitzjames that the commander kept his own tiny cubicle after Sir John’s death, refitting the spacious aft chamber into a common area and sometimes sick bay for surgery.

The companionway is totally dark except for the glow from the Common Room and the deck is canted more steeply in the opposite direction from Terror, listing to port rather than starboard, down by the stern rather than bow. And although the ships are almost identical in design, Crozier always notices other differences as well. HMS Erebus smells different somehow – beyond the identical stench of lamp oil, dirty men, filthy clothes, months of cooking, coal dust, pails of urine, and the men’s breath hanging in the cold, dank air, there is something else. For some reason, Erebus stinks more of fear and hopelessness.

There are two officers smoking their pipes in the Common Room, Lieutenant Le Vesconte and Lieutenant Fairholme, but both stand, nod toward the two captains, and withdraw, pulling the sliding door shut behind them.

Fitzjames unlocks a heavy cabinet and pulls out a bottle of brandy, pouring a large measure into one of Sir John’s crystal water glasses for Crozier, a smaller amount for himself. For all of the fine china and crystal their late expedition leader loaded aboard for his and his officers’ own use, there are no brandy snifters. Franklin was a devout teetotaler.

Crozier does no snifting. He drinks the brandy down in three gulps and allows Fitzjames to replenish it.

“Thank you for responding so quickly,” says Fitzjames. “I expected a message in response, not for you to come in person.”

Crozier frowns. “Message? I haven’t received a message from you in over a week, James.”

Fitzjames stares a moment. “You didn’t receive a message this evening? I sent Private Reed to your ship with one about five hours ago. I presumed he was spending the night there.”

Crozier shakes his head slowly.

“Oh… damn,” says Fitzjames.

Crozier pulls the woolen stocking from his pocket and sets it on the table. In the brighter light from the bulkhead lamp here there are still no signs of violence. “I found it during my walk over. Closer to your ship than mine.”

Fitzjames takes the stocking and studies it sadly. “I’ll ask the men if they recognize it,” he says.

“It could belong to one of mine,” Crozier says softly. He succinctly tells Fitzjames about the attack, the mortal wounding of Private Heather, and the disappearance of William Strong and young Tom Evans.

“Four in one day,” says Fitzjames. He pours more brandy for both of them.

“Yes. What is it you were sending me a message about?”

Fitzjames explains there had been sightings of something large moving through the ice jumbles, just beyond the lanterns’ glow, all that day. The men had fired repeatedly but parties going onto the ice had found no blood nor other sign. “So I apologize, Francis, for that idiot Bobby Johns firing at you a few minutes ago. The men’s nerves are stretched very tightly.”

“Not so tightly that they think that thing on the ice has learned how to shout at them in English, I hope,” Crozier says sardonically. He takes another sip of the brandy.

“No, no. Of course not. It was pure idiocy. Johns will be off his rum ration for two weeks. I apologize again.”

Crozier sighs. “Don’t do that. Rip him a new arsehole if you like, but don’t take his rum away. This ship feels surly enough already. Lady Silence was with me and wearing her God-damned hairy parka. Johns may have got a glimpse of that. It would have served me right if he’d blown my head off.”

“Silence was with you?” Fitzjames allowed his eyebrows to ask the questions.

“I don’t know what in hell she was doing out on the ice,” rasps Crozier. His throat is very sore from the day’s cold and his shouting. “I almost shot her myself a quarter mile from your ship when she crept up on me. Young Irving is probably turning Terror upside down as we speak. I made a huge mistake when I put that boy in charge of looking out for that Esquimaux bitch.”

“The men think she is a Jonah.” Fitzjames’s voice is very, very soft. Sounds travel easily through the partitions in such a crowded lower deck.

“Well why the hell shouldn’t they?” Crozier feels the alcohol now. He hasn’t had a drink since last night. It feels good in his belly and tired brain. “The woman shows up on the day this horror begins with that witch doctor father or husband of hers. Something has chewed her tongue out at the roots. Why the hell shouldn’t the men think she’s the cause of all this trouble?”

“But you’ve kept her aboard Terror for more than five months,” says Fitzjames. There is no reproach in the younger captain’s voice, only curiosity.

Crozier shrugs. “I don’t believe in witches, James. Nor Jonahs much, for that matter. But I do believe that if we put her out on the ice, the thing will be eating her guts the way it’s devouring Evans’s and Strong’s right now. And maybe your Private Reed’s as well. Wasn’t that Billy Reed, the redheaded Marine who always wanted to talk about that writer – Dickens?”

“William Reed, yes,” says Fitzjames. “He was very fast when the men did footraces back on Disko Island two years ago. I thought that perhaps one man, with speed…” He stops and chews his lip. “I should have waited for morning.”

“Why?” says Crozier. “It’s no lighter then. Or not much lighter at noon, for that matter. Day or night doesn’t mean anything anymore, and it won’t for another four months. And it’s not as if that damned thing out there only hunts at night… or even just in the dark, as far as that goes. Maybe your Reed will show up. Our messengers have gotten lost before out there in the ice and come in after five or six hours, shaking and cursing.”

“Perhaps.” Fitzjames’s tone echoes his doubt. “I’ll send out search parties in the morning.”

“That’s just what that thing wants us to do.” Crozier’s voice is very weary.

“Perhaps,” Fitzjames says again, “but you just told me that you’ve had men out on the ice last night and all day today looking for Strong and Evans.”

“If I hadn’t brought Evans with me when I was looking for Strong, the boy would still be alive.”

“Thomas Evans,” says Fitzjames. “I remember him. Big chap. He was not really a boy, was he, Francis? He must be… have been… what? Twenty-two or twenty-three years old?”

“Tommy turned twenty this May,” says Crozier. “His first birthday aboard was on the day after our departure. The men were in good spirits and celebrated his eighteenth birthday by shaving his head. He didn’t seem to mind. Those who knew him say he was always big for his age. He served on HMS Lynx and before that on an East Indian merchantman. He went to sea when he was thirteen.”

“As you did, I believe.”

Crozier laughs a little ruefully. “As I did. For all the good it did me.”

Fitzjames locks the brandy away in the cabinet and returns to the long table. “Tell me, Francis, did you actually dress up as a black footman to old Hoppner’s lady of rank when you were frozen in up here in… what was it, ’24?”

Crozier laughs again but more easily this time. “I did. I was a midshipman on the Hecla with Parry when he sailed north with Hoppner’s Fury in ’24, trying to find this same God-damned Passage. Parry’s plan was to sail the two ships through Lancaster Sound and down the Prince Regent Inlet – we didn’t know then, not until John and James Ross in ’33, that the Boothia was a peninsula. Parry thought he could sail south around Boothia and go hell- bent for leather until he reached the coastline that Franklin had explored from land six, seven years earlier. But Parry left too late – why do these God-damned expedition commanders always start off too late? – and we were lucky to get to Lancaster Sound on ten September, a month late. But the ice was on us by thirteen September, and there was no chance of getting through the Sound, so Parry in our Hecla and Lieutenant Hoppner in Fury ran south, our tails between our legs.

“A gale blew us back into Baffin Bay and we were lucky sods to find an anchorage in a tiny, pretty little bay off Prince Regent Inlet. We were there ten months. Froze our tits off.”

“But,” says Fitzjames, smiling slightly, “you as a little black boy?”

Crozier nods and sips his drink. “Both Parry and Hoppner were fanatics for fancy dress-up galas during winters in the ice. It was Hoppner who planned this masque he called the Grand Venetian Carnivale, set for the first day in November, right when morale dips as the sun disappears for months. Parry came down Hecla’s side in this huge cloak that he didn’t throw off even when all the men were assembled – most in costume, we had this huge trunk of costumes on each ship – and when he did throw down the cloak, we saw Parry as that old Marine – you remember the one with the peg leg what played the fiddle for ha’pennies near Chatham? No, you wouldn’t, you’re too young.

“But Parry – I think the old bastard always wanted to be an actor more than a ship’s captain – he does the whole thing up right, scratching away at his fiddle, hopping on that fake peg leg, and shouting out, ‘Give a copper to the poor Joe, your honour, who’s lost his timbers in defence of his King and country!’

“Well, the men laughed their arses off. But Hoppner, who loved that make-believe rubbish even more than Parry, I think, he comes into the ball dressed as a noble lady, wearing the latest Parisian fashions from that year – low bustline, big crinoline dress bunched up over his ass, everything – and since I was full of piss and vinegar in those days, not to mention too stupid to know better, in other words still in my twenties, I was dressed as Hoppner’s black footman – wearing this real footman’s livery that old Henry Parkyns Hoppner had bought in some dandy’s London livery store and brought along just for me.”

“Did the men laugh?” asks Fitzjames.

“Oh, the men laughed their arses off again – Parry and his peg weren’t in it after old Henry appeared in drag with me lifting his silk train behind him. Why wouldn’t they laugh? All those chimney sweeps and ribbon girls, ragmen and hook-nosed Jews, bricklayers and Highland warriors, Turkish dancers and London match girls? Look!