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
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
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
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.
17 IRVING
