CHAPTER TWELVE
“Slowly,” Adams told Robinson. “Give it to him slowly.”
The man sat propped on the couch in the gun room, his back supported by cushions. Robinson knelt beside him with a bowl of weak broth Adams had made from some of their reindeer meat. The man’s head lolled back, his eyes closed behind a curtain of greasy hair. His hands trembled in his lap. Adams had wiped the shit from the man’s box cloth trousers, but the faint smell of it mingled in the still air with the odour of urine and mould.
Stripped of its furnishings, the gun room was a gloomy cell. The table at which the ship’s officers had once dined was missing. Splinters of wood stood out from the wall where cupboards and sideboards had been wrenched away. Dark stains marked the floor timbers.
Robinson tipped a spoonful of soup into the man’s mouth. The patient gagged and toppled sideways, heaving most of the liquid onto the floor. Adams recognised the syrupy-sweet odour on his breath as the smell of a man starving to death. The man sat back, eyes clenched shut, coughing until there was blood on his lips and he could barely draw breath. Adams touched Robinson’s back and took the spoon from him.
“Let me.”
Adams crouched beside the invalid and swept the hair from his face. He dribbled a few drops of soup onto his tongue. The man tasted the broth and licked his lips. He opened his eyes and blinked at Adams.
“Who are you?” asked Adams.
The man fixed him with a tired gaze. He cleared his throat as though unsure his voice would come.
“Fitzjames.” His voice was a sepulchral whisper. “Captain. HMS Erebus .”
“We are from Fury Beach,” said Robinson. “Captain Ross is looking for you too.”
“What ...?” Fitzjames tried to raise his head. “What is the date, please?”
“It is the third of July.”
“July.” Fitzjames’ shoulders shook. “My God.” He began to sob, each breath a struggle. His long hair fell back over his face.
“Sir James Ross is on North Somerset,” said Robinson. “His men are searching Barrow Strait and Prince Regent Inlet.”
Tears etched tracks down Fitzjames’ grimy cheeks.
“Captain Fitzjames,” Adams asked gently, “can you tell us what happened? Where is Sir John Franklin?”
Fitzjames looked at him, screwing up his eyes like a man staring into a bright light. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple a mountainous peak in his wasted throat. Adams tried again. He lay a hand gently on Fitzjames’ shoulder.
“Captain, we found your note at Victory Point. Is it true Sir John has passed?”
Fitzjames sighed. He looked at them and wrinkled his brow as he tried to form the words. His lips trembled.
“Victory Point?”
“Yes.” Adams carefully spooned more broth into Fitzjames’ mouth. The captain coughed and swallowed.
“You were frozen in,” Adams said. “Do you remember?”
Fitzjames did not answer. He looked around for the spoon in Adams’ hand.
Adams continued. “You were frozen in, so you went across the ice to Victory Point. Is Sir John buried there?”
Fitzjames’ head bowed in thought, then snapped erect. He stared hard at Robinson, panic on his face. He blinked rapidly and looked around the room before turning back to the two men.
“Who are you?” He shrank back against the sofa, his hands raised as if to ward off blows. “Please,” he said, “do not hurt me. I have no food to give you.”
Adams took Fitzjames’ hand. He was shocked at its wasted condition, like a bundle of sticks wrapped in parchment. He had seen many a dead man in a better state.
“Calm yourself, Captain,” he murmured. “You are safe here.”
Adams lifted the spoon and tipped more broth into Fitzjames’ mouth. The man erupted in another coughing fit, rocking forward on the couch, hugging his ribs. Adams sat him upright, patted his back until the spasm passed, and gently lowered him back to the cushions. He sat, shaking, spittle and soup trickling from the corners of his mouth.
“More,” Fitzjames said between gasps. “Please.”
“Slowly. Just a little,” said Adams. “Your stomach cannot take much.” He had treated patients with cholera, scurvy, and bullet wounds, but how was he to feed a man whose body could take no nourishment?
Tears coursed down Fitzjames’ nose and dripped onto his hands. Adams lifted his canteen to the man’s lips.
Fitzjames looked up. “What is the date, please? Can you tell me?”
“It is the third of July.”
“Third of July.” Fitzjames’ head nodded and drooped. “Third of July.”
“Captain, what happened to Sir John?” Adams asked again. “What happened at Victory Point?”
Fitzjames’ head swayed. “I am so sorry.” Fresh tears rolled down his nose. “We had to eat—”
“What?” Adams felt a sense of disquiet. Fitzjames wore the haunted expression of a man recalling something horrific. Adams pressed him. “What did you eat?”
Fitzjames’ voice was faint. “Jacko.”
“You ate Jacko?”
Fitzjames nodded, closing his eyes. “Yes. Sir John was very fond of him.”
Adams exhaled. So that was it. “I see.” He stood, took Robinson by the arm, and guided him to the far corner of the room.
“What is he saying?” Robinson whispered.
“The monkey. Jacko was the ship’s monkey.”
Robinson frowned. “My God.”
Adams went back to the sofa and knelt beside Fitzjames.
“Do not blame yourself,” he said. “You had no choice.”
“No choice,” Fitzjames whispered.
Robinson’s tone was impatient. “You remember Sir John, Captain? What became of him? And where is Captain Crozier?”
Fitzjames seemed to grow stronger at this, as if given an elixir. He sat up straight, his eyes clearer.
“Sir John said for our theatrical we shall do The Rivals this year,” he said. “I will play Sir Lucius. Or Bob Acres.” His tone was assured. He was a man giving orders now. “But not Mrs Malaprop or Lydia.”
Adams had seen this before, in the naval hospital at Haslar. Dying men would rally, their strength ebbing and resurging, delirious one moment and coherent the next. Robinson glanced across at him with a raised eyebrow. Adams met his gaze and gave a barely perceptible shrug.
Fitzjames’ brow furrowed. “The younger officers do not mind the female roles,” he said. “They say it makes the men laugh. But I do not care for it. It is undignified for an officer, even in jest. The carpenter will knock together some sets. A few of the men are handy with a needle and thread. They shall make the costumes.”
Adams nodded. “Sir Lucius it is, then,” he said.
Mollified, Fitzjames relaxed and nodded. “Well, then.”
Robinson again drew Adams aside and spoke in a whisper. “He is delusional. We will learn nothing from him.”
“Starvation brings on delirium. Paranoia too. The broth may restore him a little if he can keep it down,” said Adams. “I will feed him a little more; then we should let him sleep. He may have more to say later.”
Behind them, Fitzjames muttered to himself. “We did High Life Below Stairs last winter.” Then he stared at Adams for a long moment, smiling. He seemed to recall an old memory. “Good old Sir John. He was ... in a story I once read.”
Adams frowned. “I beg your pardon?” He leaned forward and put his hand on Fitzjames’ shoulder.
“Once upon a time,” Fitzjames whispered. He stared at the back of his hands, then turned them over and examined the palms as if seeing them for the first time. “Once upon a time, there was a brave naval captain. He had to eat his boots.” He gazed at Adams with rheumy eyes of faded blue. He swallowed, and again the great lump in his throat rose and fell. “Do you have anything to eat?” His eyes closed, and his head lolled against the sofa. Then he sat erect again. “The date. What is the date, please?”
Robinson left Billings on the deck to keep watch. With Fitzjames asleep on the gun room couch, he and Adams entered the great cabin. The odour of coal dust and old charcoal. The captain’s table stood in the centre of the room. The chairs were gone. The two men opened the storage lockers. Empty bottles that once held wine, gin, and brandy stood in rows.
Adams stared at the bare shelves. “Where are the books? Franklin had a thousand volumes.”
Robinson peered out through the smoke-stained windows. He ran his fingers over the shelves. They came away thick with dust.
“They burned them,” he said. He stood looking around the cabin. “They burned whatever they could to keep warm. The last of the coal would have been gone years ago.”
Robinson went to the corner of the cabin and opened the narrow door to the captain’s private quarters. The small chamber reeked of unwashed blankets and rotting rope. Filthy linen lay crumpled on the stained mattress. The desk was bare. Once heated in the stove to warm the cabin, a cannonball dangled in chains from a hook in the ceiling like a tool of torture in a dungeon. Bone fragments lay scattered on the floor. He picked one up and sniffed it warily. It was a pork bone, gnawed upon and licked so much, it was smooth and shiny. He threw it back on the floor, then retrieved two crumpled pieces of paper and peered at them in the gloom.
Adams looked in through the door of the cabin. “What do you have there?”
Robinson examined the papers. Both pieces were ripped along the side, torn from whatever volume once held them. He shook his head. “Pages from the chronometer journal. A list of variations in the ship’s timepieces.” He pointed at one. “This one is dated April ’46.”
“I found a few pages from the mess book in the captain’s cabin,” said Adams. “They were dated July ’45.”
“They were still in Baffin Bay then.”
Adams sighed. “No ship’s log. No personal journals.”
Robinson looked around. Had they burned every page? The pieces of a chess set stood on the floor in the corner, the two opposing armies arranged in the starting position. He searched the drawers and shelves but found no chessboard.
Robinson left the cabin and walked the passageway running down the ship’s portside. Adams explored the corridor on the starboard side. The timbers under their boots creaked in the silence. The air was heavy with the smell of creosote and wet oak.
Robinson slid open the door of each cabin and looked inside. Seven feet in length and less in width, each cubicle contained a bunk with a horsehair mattress stripped of blankets. The odour of lamp oil and stale wool was thick in the back of his throat. A washstand stood in the corner, an inch of water frozen in the basin. The shelves above the bunks were bare. The drawers beneath had been wrenched out, leaving gaping holes in the woodwork. Dirty, tattered clothing lay in untidy heaps on the floor. In one cabin, an overcoat hung from a hook on the wall. In another, the small folding table screwed to the wall had been lifted to the upright position, a collection of rodent bones neatly arranged upon it. Bleary fingers of grey light reached through the six-inch glass illuminators in the ceiling. A solid puddle of tallow, once a candle, sat in a saucer. Robinson searched beneath mattresses for journals or letters. He found nothing.
At the end of the passage, he slid the last door open and recoiled as if struck. The contents of his stomach twisted and rose at the cold, greasy smell of decay that slunk from the cabin and wiped its wet palm on his cheek. He coughed and spat, but the odour was in his hair, his mouth. He unwound his scarf and wrapped it around his face until only his eyes were uncovered. The stench seemed to seep in through his eyeballs.
A dead man lay on the bunk, his hands crossed over a well-thumbed pocket Bible. Robinson could not guess his age. The man was thin, with half-open eyes and deep wrinkles in his face where the grey flesh beneath had sagged. A red beard curled on his chest. He was dressed in a heavy coat and sweater. Were it not for the smell, Robinson would have thought the man had just stepped off the ice, but as he ventured closer, he saw the bare feet, the mottled skin.
Robinson tried to imagine the last man to have stood here, someone content to take a dead man’s boots and stockings but too ill or weak or callous to haul him up the ladder to the upper deck and bury him in the ice. Someone who thought Erebus would soon sink and become the man’s tomb, or a man simply in a hurry to get away from the ship? Holding his breath, he searched the man’s coat pockets but found no evidence of rank or identity. Robinson gently touched the man’s cold folded hands. The skin shifted under his fingertips, the flesh almost ready to slough from the bones. He closed his eyes in a brief prayer, then backed into the corridor and quietly slid the door closed. The scarf still over his face, he walked three paces before he knew it was hopeless. He bent over and retched on the floor of the passageway.
Robinson moved forward toward the seamen’s mess. Far from the shaft of light at the main hatch, the lower deck was an assembly of shadows and indistinct shapes.
He reached the seamen’s mess and looked up, expecting to see the mess tables lashed overhead. All were missing. A seaman’s chest was open on the floor. He found toy boats whittled from wood and a pair of inexpertly darned socks. On another chest lay a fiddle, its strings broken and curled. A huge pile of empty food canisters, dull red in the low light, had been stacked against the great black galley stove. The smell of ancient pork fat and mildew hung in the air.
Robinson peered into the gloom. A dozen large cigar-like shapes hung suspended in the darkness, like bundles trapped in a spider’s web. He moved closer. They were hammocks strung up across the mess. A peculiar shape protruded from one hammock. He reached out to touch it, then quickly withdrew his hand. The object was a human hand, the fingers curled and motionless. He held his breath, his pulse throbbing in his ear. The man in the hammock appeared to be asleep. He extended his hand again but pulled it back abruptly as a soft rustling sound in the blackness made him start.
“Who’s there?” Robinson called out. “Show yourself! We are Royal Navy officers.”
Adams emerged from the passageway behind him and stood at Robinson’s shoulder. Together they squinted into the murk. Something moved in the darkness. A small, ghostly figure appeared from behind the galley stove and tottered slowly toward them. A gaunt man, young and clean-shaven, stood hunched and trembling. His face was the colour of old bone long buried. He wore a dirty sweater with holes in the sleeves and carried a cup of water and a small canvas bag over his shoulder.
“Who are you?” Robinson asked.
The man hurriedly knuckled his forehead. He spoke in a whisper.
“Richard Aylmore, sir. Gun room steward.” He looked around and gestured at the hammocks. “I—I must see to them, sir.”
“See to them?”
“Feed them, sir. Fetch them water. Wash them. I hear confessions too.” He suddenly took on the worried look of a man caught in a transgression. “I know I am not ordained, of course, sir. But it makes them feel better.”
Robinson felt a rush of hope. If these men were ambulatory, he and Adams might yet lead them back to Fury Beach. His gamble may yet pay off. He may yet be the great saviour.
“What happened to Sir John Franklin?” Robinson asked. “Can you tell us?”
Aylmore looked at the floor and shuffled his feet. “Sir John is gone, sir. A long time ago now.”
Robinson grasped the young man’s thin wrists and pulled him close with more vigour than he had intended. “Yes, but how? How did he pass? What happened?”
Aylmore cried out and squirmed. He tried to pull away but could not break Robinson’s grip. With both arms pinned, he turned his face into his shoulder. “I do not know, sir.” He began to cry. “I am but a steward. Please, sir.”
“What did the surgeon say about it?” Robinson demanded.
“Dr Stanley, sir? He is dead, sir.”
Robinson gritted his teeth. “But was he not alive when Sir John passed?”
“Sir, I do not remember, sir.” Aylmore’s eyes brimmed with tears.
Robinson’s nails cut into the flesh of the man’s arms. How could this boy notice nothing when his shipmates were dying around him? “Where is Sir John buried? Is he on King William Land? Did he leave any papers?”
Aylmore moaned and shuddered and twisted in Robinson’s grip. “I don’t know, sir. I don’t know.”
Robinson dragged Aylmore closer until their noses almost touched. He could see the grime in the man’s pores and the black holes in his mouth where several teeth had gone. The steward’s fetid breath was a cudgel in his face.
“Think, man! Where does Captain Fitzjames keep his papers? Take a guess, for God’s sake.”
Aylmore’s body went limp, and his head fell back, the white of his throat flashing in the gloom.
“Enough!” Adams stepped forward and touched Robinson’s arm. “Let him go. You have frightened him.”
Robinson sighed. He released the young man and stepped back. Shaking, the steward stood, rubbing his wrists. He stared at the floor, teardrops bursting darkly on his boots.
Robinson felt a twinge of remorse. He had allowed his excitement to get the better of him. The young steward had suffered more than he could know. Eliciting the information he needed would require a patient hand. “I am sorry,” he said. “You must return with us.” He waved a hand at the hammocks. “All of you. How many can walk?”
Aylmore raised his eyes quickly, panicked. “Return with you?” His wet, shiny eyes were huge in the dark. “Where to, sir?”
“First back to King William Land,” said Robinson. “Then to Fury Beach and Port Leopold.”
Aylmore took a step backward. “No.” He shook his head and waved both hands. “No, I will not go there.”
Robinson frowned. Did the lad not understand? “Boy, if you stay here, you will die.”
The steward took another step backward. “You’ll find them!” Aylmore’s face was suddenly goblin-like, snarling and malevolent. He bared his teeth and screamed—a long, high-pitched keening that filled the darkness of the lower deck, echoing off the bulkheads. Adams and Robinson were pushed back on their heels, wincing. As Robinson opened his eyes, the top of Aylmore’s head connected with his belly and shoved him backward. He collided with Adams and knocked him off his feet. The pair collapsed on the dusty timbers. Robinson heard Aylmore’s boots scrabbling on the floor and turned to see him melting into the darkness like a subterranean creature retreating into its burrow.
“Wait, man!” Adams shouted.
He stood and stepped forward in the direction the steward had disappeared, then paused and peered into the darkness. Winded, Robinson lay gasping, his hand on his solar plexus. Adams went to him, sat him up, and patted him on the back.
“Are you injured?”
Robinson shook his head and got to his feet, sucking in the damp, heavy air until finally he could breathe. The two men stood in the dark, listening. A soft thump came from beneath their boots. Robinson held a finger to his lips.
“He’s down on the orlop deck,” he breathed. “Or in the hold.”
“We must fetch him.”
“Not now,” said Robinson. “Without a candle, it will be black down there. He knows every nook. We do not. And he may have a weapon, perhaps even a blade. If he is dangerous, he is best left until we can retrieve him safely.” He pointed at the men in the hammocks. “Examine these fellows first. Find out how many we can take with us. We’ll get one of them to talk to the boy.”
Robinson sat on a seamen’s chest and took out his pipe. He needed to plan their retreat. Their encounter with Aylmore and his shipmates on the lower deck required some recalculation. He would need the young steward’s help to take inventory of Erebus ’ remaining provisions. They might need to build more sledges.
He watched Adams walk between the hammocks, stopping at each one to whisper to the occupant. Every man was emaciated and heavily bearded, clad in dirty, tattered clothes. Adams patted their hands and felt for their pulses, examining bruises and sores on their wrists and throats. Robinson reminded himself to have Adams inspect the ship’s medicine chest before their departure.
He stood and went to join Adams, who lingered beside a hammock occupied by a man with a thick red beard and eyes of the lightest, clearest blue. His eyelashes were so fair, they appeared white even in the gloom of the lower deck.
Adams rubbed his face, despair etched in his features. “We will learn nothing here,” he said. “I think Mister Aylmore is utterly out of his head.”
Robinson frowned. “What do you mean? The lad seems lucid. Frightened and sick, perhaps.”
Adams shook his head. “You do not understand. There is no one else we can ask.”
Robinson gestured at the hammocks suspended in the gloom. “Do none of them have a word to say about Franklin?”
“They are dead.” Adams wiped his hands on his coat. “Every single one of them is dead. Our Mister Aylmore has been tending to corpses.”