The Ministry of Time

Chapter II

Gore hauls himself aboard the ship, met by the mittened hands and mufflered faces of the watch. The ship, trapped in sea ice, tilts queasily to one side where the frozen waves have shoved against the hull. Below deck—so sealed from the elements and so thick with bodies that the air is warm—Gore finds the crew in the rare, humid grip of a hurry. Captain Fitzjames has convened an emergency command meeting.

He hands off his bag to the officers’ steward and insists on attending the meeting, trying to shake the ice-dementia. He knows without consulting a glass that his mouth is corpsey blue.

In the sick bay, Stanley, the ship’s surgeon, asks him for the date.

“The twenty-fourth of July, 1847,” he says, after too thick a pause.

“You want a firmness of diction,” mutters the doctor. He does not say You’re slurring, not to an officer.

Gore tries a smile. Fissures teem along his lips. But no one orders him not to attend the emergency meeting.

It is held in the Great Cabin of Erebus, a desperately unhaunted room. Sir John Franklin had died here, succumbing to age and the climate, more than a month before. His avuncular ghost has failed to manifest. James Fitzjames, his commander and now captain of Erebus, lives in the cabin like an orphan locked in a crypt.

Captain Crozier of Terror, the expedition’s new leader, has sent Lieutenant Irving over to Erebus. He is a shy man with heavy whiskers and an unhappy habit of quoting scripture at sailors.

“I’m afraid,” says Irving, “that it isn’t good news.”

“The rations,” Fairholme cuts in. Fairholme is the third lieutenant of Erebus, a big, bouncing man who towers over most of the other officers. Now he cringes, putting Gore in mind of a Great Dane caught stealing food.

“With yours too,” sighs Irving. “God has seen fit to test us in our resolution. But His ways are not our ways, and the wiseness of the world is as foolishness to—”

Gore puts his palm down flat on the mahogany table. Gently, but with finality. The drone of Irving’s voice bespeaks panic: that of a preacher pleading with the weather.

“James,” he says.

He means Fairholme—he wouldn’t presume to address Captain Fitzjames by his Christian name in a command meeting—but it is Fitzjames who answers.

“It’s the tinned rations,” Fitzjames says. “Some of them have been found to be inedible. More so than usual,” he adds, smiling faintly. “Rotted. On both ships, so they must have been defective when we shipped out, rather than attributable to some noxious influence on the journey.”

Gore lifts his hand. He’s left a smear on the table the color of tamarind flesh. There is a sour, steady pain in his palm that he briefly misunderstands as a taste.

“How many of the tins?” he asks.

Fitzjames doesn’t answer. He is seated in Sir John’s place. His curls have lost their gloss but they still flash a troubling copper.

“Was there much game, Graham?” he asks instead.

Gore considers the weight of the sack he’d carried, which had felt so meaningful. “Three partridges,” he says, “and a boatswain gull too far off to hit. Nothing else. Not even tracks.”

“In four and a half hours?”

“Was I gone that long?”

They fall silent again. This had once been a convivial wardroom. A story couldn’t start that wasn’t met with an opposing tale, like an arch bridge made of chatter. But even speaking the obvious is like massaging wax from granite these days. The persistent grieving and shrieking of the wood of the ice-locked ship robs them of sleep and silence between paragraphs; without those fallow periods, all speech is feeble.

“We don’t have rations to see both ships’ companies through a third year,” says Fitzjames. “Is Captain Crozier of an accord?”

“Yes, sir,” says Irving miserably.

Fitzjames drums his fingers on the table. Like Fairholme, he is a big man, set like a cathedral, but his face is boyish when he is worried. His parentage is a mystery; he is rumored illegitimate; presumably he spent much time worried as a child, and now his face returns to it.

“Two-thirds rations?” he says.

“Captain Crozier’s suggestion is that we reduce to two-thirds, yes, sir.”

At this, Stanley leans in. He is a fussy, short-tempered, handsome man who does not enjoy his job. “I must impress upon the meeting that the debility that wracks those in the sick bay will doubtless find ample footholds should we reduce the men’s rations.”

“And if we do not reduce the rations, the men will starve to death instead,” says Fitzjames. “I’d like to get as many of them back to England as possible when the ice breaks up. This is the compromise we must make.”

Gore is looking at his left palm. The sour pain is still there, seeping through the bandages. So is the blood, but it seems melodramatic to observe this.

“And if the ice doesn’t break up?” he asks mildly.

The ice outside shifts—the Arctic stammering its jaws as a cat does when it sees a bird. The ship’s cat died in convulsions during their second winter. Gore had liked that cat. He’d become quite attached to it, especially as his dog had died in the first spring.

Creak, crack. The ship bellows in agony.