Chapter VI
The group’s leaders—one old man and two younger hunters—request permission to board Erebus. At least, this is true as far as anyone can gather. Franklin’s expedition failed to travel with an interpreter, and it is down to Captain Crozier of Terror to translate. He doesn’t speak the same dialect as these Esquimaux and hazards on fragments of shared vocabulary.
A party of ten natives come aboard. They don’t act as the natives usually do—curious, self-possessed, roaming the ship, teasing the men, miming trade. They cluster on the quarterdeck and listen with blank faces while Crozier fumbles lugubriously through apologies. Gillies and Des Voeux have laid gifts of needles, tobacco, mirrors, and buttons at their feet. No knives.
Eventually Crozier stumps back to the command of Erebus, who hover in a complementary cluster.
“Gore,” he says quietly.
“Sir.”
“The man’s wife wants to look at you.”
“The man’s—?”
“Wife. He was married.” He flicks his soft gray eyes up. Steel in the iris. “No children, you may be relieved to hear.”
Gore obediently steps forward.
The wife—the widow—is at the front of the group. She is small, a bantam woman. Black hair. Brown skin, bright and clean. Cheeks vivid with last night’s tears. Her eyes are dry, and her lashes grow downward, giving her stare a strangely veiled effect. Her mouth is very beautiful, a color that Gore will remember and try to name for a long time afterward. She looks at him. It’s a look that puts him against the horizon: not insignificant, but like something that can be pressed up by thumb.
“I’m sorry,” he says, in English, because he forgot to ask Crozier how to say it in her language. She looks at him.
He should get to his knees. Offer his throat to the edge of her palm. Or maybe he should offer her his hand, to replace the hands of her husband. Brief wildness beats in his skull. Perhaps, after a manhood with no final home, fixing makeshift families in multiple wardrooms, killing and pinning land to maps, God has cast him on the shore by this woman. Years of his finger on the trigger to make sense of her expression.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats.
She looks at him. After the group leave, taking their gifts, the stare will linger on his body. When he washes up in his cabin that night, he feels it slip under his shirt, growing into his skin.