CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Look, Mister Adams!” Billings stood fifty feet away, his arms raised in triumph. He held a squirming lemming in each hand. Adams tried to smile at him but could not. His jaw was clamped, the muscles of his cheek twitching.
Robinson took the skull from him. “You are the surgeon, not I. Look here,” he said, his fingertip resting on the edge of the hole in the bone.
Adams looked away. “So? Perhaps the poor fellow hit his head on a rock. Or an animal may have gnawed on it. A fox or a wolf. Perhaps a wandering bear disturbed the body and its tooth punctured the bone.”
“And left no other marks? A bear or wolf would have crushed the skull completely.”
“No Christian would do such a thing,” said Adams. “‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed—’”
“Spare me the scripture!” Robinson’s face was dark, the veins stark in his neck. “You expect too much of starving men. You may not forgive them their frailties, but you may at least attempt to comprehend them.”
“Men eating men?” This was it, the sense of unease that had dogged him for days, a shadowy assailant tracking him across the dead land. He had suspected it but would not turn and confront it. He closed his eyes, toes curling. “To even imply it is a gross insult to every man who serves.”
Robinson sighed. “I imply nothing,” he said. “Surely you see it. That”—he touched the hole in the skull—“represents a fatal wound. Probably a lead ball, possibly a boarding pike.” He shrugged, his voice trailing off to a murmur. “But perhaps they were merely trying to get at the brain of a man already dead.”
“The Esquimaux. They could have done it, could they not? If they attacked en masse, they could have overpowered a small group of Franklin’s men.”
Robinson gaped at him. “For what reason?”
“A gesture misconstrued, a greeting mispronounced? Have we not seen it ourselves? You know how quickly such things can lead to violence.” The taunt was intended to wound.
A look of sadness crossed Robinson’s face. He spoke in a whisper. “I suppose it is possible.” He bent down to retrieve the femur, pulled off his left mitten with his teeth, and rested a dirty fingernail on a mark close to one end. Adams leaned in, peering.
“Do you see that?” Robinson asked.
“That scratch?”
“Not a scratch. A cut mark. Done by a blade.”
Adams took the bone from Robinson and lifted it for closer inspection.
“A surgeon might amputate a frost-bitten digit or even a hand or foot,” Robinson said patiently. “But you can see as well as I, this bone was removed at the hip.”
Adams fell silent and hung his head in the cold, still air. He felt bruised, dizzy. His long-held convictions were collapsing, falling away like old masonry. The afternoon sunlight cast a greasy sheen on the ice pack offshore.
“Sir John was dead before they did this,” said Robinson. “Your man is unsullied. Content yourself with that.”
Adams walked away. He sat down on the stones and hugged his knees, rocking to keep warm. This changes a man, he thought. I am changed. Stripped bare. Hollowed out. I look no different, but I am tougher, stringier. My teeth are loose, my gums sore, my frozen limbs in a permanent state of pain. He looked at the sky. Bars of sunlight pierced the clouds like knives and made him think of blades on flesh, of bright blood. He thought of yellow teeth, bloodshot eyes, and filthy, wasted, bearded faces. He imagined the smell of meat in the cookpot, of men crowding around, holding out their bowls.
Billings lay on his stomach in his blanket bag, whittling a piece of driftwood with a small knife.
“Mister Adams, do you think they still remember us back home?”
“Yes, Jimmy, of course. We have only been away a year.”
Billings’ face was in shadow. “I’m afraid my ma will forget me.”
“She will not,” Adams said. “Mothers do not forget their children.”
A lone gull cried out somewhere far above the tent.
“I’ve forgotten our pa,” Billings said quietly. “He died.”
“Was it a long time ago?”
Billings nodded. “When I was a lad. I was a scavenger in the cotton mill. Used to clean up under the spinning mules. I came home and ma said they found him in the cesspit. Drowned, she said. On account o’ the drink, she said.”
Adams drew on his pipe, exhaled blue smoke. “It takes a long time to forget someone, Jimmy.”
“How long?”
“Much longer than a year. But we shall do something great. Then they shall all remember us.”
Billings propped himself on one elbow and looked eagerly at Adams. “What will we do, Mister Adams?”
Relieved to see the young man had recovered his cheer, Adams smiled. “We shall discover what happened to poor Sir John. People still think of Sir John, do they not?”
Billings digested this. “Why do people think of Sir John, Mister Adams?”
Adams was suddenly unsure what to tell him. Because Franklin served at Trafalgar? Because he sailed around the Australian continent? Because he had been governor of Van Diemen’s Land? Billings would neither understand nor care about such things. Why are some men remembered and not others?
Robinson spoke. “It is because he is the one who didn’t return. They will want to know why.”
Adams ignored him. “It is because he does God’s work,” he told Billings.
Billings’ expression cleared, and he smiled. “I remember now. You told us. Sir John ate his boots.”
“Yes, he ate his boots on the way back from Point Turnagain. Twenty-seven years ago, before you were even born. People still remember that, don’t they?”
“Yes.” Billings nodded emphatically. Then he suddenly looked alarmed. “Will we eat our boots too?”
“No, we shall wear them home, Jimmy.”
Billings smiled again. “Then we’ll tell them all what happened.”
At this, Robinson sat upright. His teeth were clenched on the stem of his pipe. He jabbed a finger at Billings. “Listen to me. You shall tell them nothing.” His eyes were narrow slits. “God knows what you’ll say, but you’re sure to get it wrong. You shall leave the telling to me, is that clear?”
Adams told Billings to wait with the sledge as he and Robinson hunted along the shore. The sun turned the surface of the meltwater pools to mercury. To the east, King William Land was flat and stony. Shallow rocky pools dotted swampy plains of yellow grass. Sunlight spattered on the gravel. The summer colours were leaking from the landscape, each day more a pencil sketch than a watercolour.
Thin slices of limestone cracked beneath their heels. They stepped carefully over pools of water and tufts of pale grass. Thick mud rimmed their boots. Strips of grey cloud were like the furrows in a man’s brow. They walked with their guns at the ready but saw nothing living. The landscape undulated gently, low gravel hillocks punctuated by shallow depressions still filled with snow. The sun was a watery disc behind a bank of clouds.
Adams heard the flap of wings. A ptarmigan alighted on a small outcrop twenty feet in front of him. The bird had begun to shed its winter plumage for the speckled brown feathers of the summer. Its brown head was like a helmet atop its rotund white body. The bird regarded him curiously for a moment, then lowered its head to peck at a small shrub jutting from the stony soil. Adams raised his shotgun and aimed. The ptarmigan’s head jerked up. The bird stared boldly at him. When he pulled the trigger, the wind took the sound of the blast, and the volley of shot blew the bird backward onto the gravel.
Adams signalled to Robinson, who was hunting one hundred yards away. He knelt to collect the bird. As he looked down, his eye went to the stone where the ptarmigan had perched. He reached down and flicked dirt away from it with his glove. Two semicircular shapes jutted an inch above the soil, an inch apart. Adams frowned. Each object was yellow, like a seashell, with a smooth edge. He pulled off his glove and ran his fingertip over one, then pulled his hand away.
He was looking at a pair of toenails.
Robinson approached and stood behind Adams as he knelt. The grave was barely eighteen inches deep and covered with several large, flat stones. He watched as Adams slowly removed each of them from atop the corpse, then gently chiselled away the frozen soil with the tip of his knife. The wind was light and the day warm. Robinson sweated into his flannel undershirt.
Robinson wondered why this corpse had been buried. The others they had found were abandoned in hammocks or boats, or scattered as unburied bones. He knew from experience the effort required to get down more than a foot in this frozen ground. Was this an officer?
A knuckle protruded from the ground. Scraps of dark-blue cloth. Adams scratched at the soil with his knife, revealing more of the fabric. Robinson looked around and found a flat stone. He knelt beside Adams, and together they scraped more earth from the top of the grave. When they had removed two inches of soil, most of the shroud was exposed. Robinson raised his pocketknife and slit the cloth upward from the corpse’s feet to the throat. He sat back, panting.
He peeled the cloth back. There was no odour of decay. The shroud was stiff with frost and unmarked. He saw a pair of thin, bare feet. The two big toes were bound together with twine. He raised the shroud. The knees were also bound. The blue-white flesh was like porcelain, the skin stretched tightly over ropelike tendons. The corpse wore only a pair of linen trousers and a thin shirt.
When Robinson exposed the face, he stopped. The dead man’s eyes were intact and slightly open. Tousled blond hair was plastered to his scalp. The lips were drawn back, exposing yellow teeth within a scraggly brown beard. Robinson half expected the eyes to swivel in their sockets and look at him.
“Too young to be an officer,” Robinson said. “Can’t be more than twenty.”
The left forearm was entirely stripped of flesh between the wrist and elbow, exposing the radius and ulna. A slit ran down the front of one trouser leg. Robinson gently separated the two edges of the fabric. Chunks of flesh had been clumsily hacked from the thigh and calf, leaving jagged dark-red holes an inch across. The bones of the leg were exposed in three places. The face of the corpse was at peace.
“Perhaps,” Robinson said, “this was one of the first. They were still practicing with him. When the idea was still new.”
“He was scorbutic,” said Adams. “They buried him, then returned to him later.”
Robinson’s innards curled. “Like visiting some ghastly larder.”
They had buried him to keep him fresh. Or to hide him from bears. He pictured a visitor kneeling over the grave in silence, his face wrapped in a filthy scarf. Unaccustomed to such surgery, the butcher would have worked quickly, with a blunt knife grasped in a trembling hand.
Robinson wiped his hand across his face. “The body has not been here long.”
Adams stood and scanned the empty expanse. The stony plain stretched out in every direction, unbroken and endless. “This poor fellow deserves a prayer. I doubt he received one.”
Robinson thought of the men who had left their shipmate here. “They did not finish with him. They may be back.”
Adams hesitated, then said softly, “God is a source of strength. He helps me with my burden.”
“I would not know what to ask Him.”
“God hears the prayer of the righteous. So it says in the Bible.”
“Am I more righteous than he?” Robinson jerked his chin at the grave. “Are you?” On the grey sky, a thin black line was scribbled vertically to the northeast. He unstrapped the telescope from across his back and put it to his eye. It was a column of smoke rising in the distance. He followed it upward to where the breeze picked at the smoke, shredding it like strands of black yarn pulled apart.
Billings came running across the gravel. “Mister Adams!”
“I see it, Jimmy.”
The three men stood staring up at the smoke.
Robinson nodded at the body in the earth. “Say your prayer, but do not delay. We would be wise to avoid them.”
“They are starving. They may need our assistance.”
Robinson scoffed. “What assistance would you offer them? What will you do for them when there is nothing left to eat?”
“You cannot know they mean us harm,” said Adams.
“Indeed I cannot, any more than you can be certain they do not.”
“You always assume the worst in men.”
Robinson’s ire rose again. “And you insist upon assuming the best. This is at the heart of what separates us.” He gestured at the body in the earth. “Ask him. Do you imagine men who did this will sit and listen to you read the Bible?” Robinson pointed at the smoke column. “Fury Beach is that way, beyond the smoke. We cannot go back. We must try and go around them.” He unshouldered his shotgun. “Check your weapon. Wipe it down. Have it ready.”