CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“What sort of man is Gregory?” Adams asked Honey as they sat in the tent.
“An evil bastard. That’s what sort.”
“We would have taken him back with us. Taken all of you.”
“He’d never go with you. He said if someone saw the bones on the beach, they’d know what we was eatin’ and we’d hang. He wanted to go back to Erebus and sail her out once Captain Fitzjames was dead and nobody could stop him. He said no one would understand what we did.”
Then he was not wrong about everything, Adams thought.
Honey would not look at him. “You found the boat on the beach?”
“Two bodies.”
Honey nodded. “They was goin’ back to Erebus . Gregory told us they were goin’ to tell Fitzjames what we’d been up to. Said we had to kill ’em; said the others would come for us when we ran out of food. Once you start believin’ lies, it’s easy to keep doin’ it. The others ran. Probably went south, chasing Crozier. We left the boat there. Gregory said we might need it if the ice melted before we could walk back to Erebus .”
“The bodies had been disturbed,” said Adams. “Scattered by animals.”
“Animals?” Honey cocked his head, a puzzled look on his face. “Not likely. No animals around here. I reckon that was probably Billy Orren did that. I never did ask him about it, though.”
The words were out of Adams’ mouth before he realised he had spoken. “You feel no shame? At what you did?”
Honey studied him from under heavy lids, his expression bored. “Shame? Dunno what that means anymore. It went along with everything else. Peels away like, I dunno ... dead skin or somethin’.” His voice was nonchalant, empty of regret.
“I cannot fathom it.”
“At first, when you’re starvin’, you try to ignore the pain in your gut. I used to pretend it was because someone had punched me, not ’cos I was hungry. Then I tried biting me thumb, tried to make something else hurt to take me mind off it. Then one of me teeth came away.”
Honey paused. It seemed to Adams that the man might have been discussing the weather.
“Once you do it,” Honey went on in a weary monotone, “it ain’t so strange. You don’t think about it. Some questions a man has no answer for. Do you wait for the thaw or try and walk out over the ice? Do you leave the invalids behind or take them with you?” He looked Adams directly in the face. “Do you starve to death or do you eat a man?”
The question was like an arrow Adams could not evade. He answered too quickly. “I would rather starve to death,” he said. “I have no doubt.”
Honey smiled for the first time, his few teeth yellow in his thick beard. He gave a wheezy chuckle.
“You’re so sure, ain’tcha? I’ve known a few like you.”
The limestone shingle clicked under Robinson’s boots. The temperature rose to thirty-five degrees, but his wasted body trembled with every gust of wind. When the fog thickened, they halted, shivering, and waited for the mist to lift enough to reveal a glimpse of the sea ice to the west. The wind whistled across the ice. Streaks of drift reached out like fingers. Tufts of grass crunched underfoot, hard as wire. Ptarmigan whizzed past them, their wing tips touching the stones, but he and Adams were so weak, the birds were out of range before they could raise their guns.
Robinson mulled over Honey’s tale, imagining scores of dismembered, partially consumed corpses laying in shallow depressions inches beneath the rocky soil of King William Land. He thought back to Investigator ’s arrival at Upernavik the year before. The northernmost outpost on the western coast of Greenland, huddled on a bony slope overlooking a small bay, seemed like the loneliest place a man could die. A group of Esquimaux and a pack of dogs milled on the shore. He made out a small graveyard high on the hill through his telescope. Standing over the bones of unfortunate whalers and stubborn Danish colonists was a row of crosses silhouetted against the ashen sky. But even in that wilderness, the dead were gathered together, properly buried and remembered, their presence noted with headstones. They were torn apart and eaten here on King William Land, the pieces scattered across a desolate land, lost and forgotten.
In the morning, after a night of walking, he and Adams sat the two invalids on the gravel and searched for game while Billings pitched the tent. Honey and Handford leaned against each other, back-to-back like stone carvings, their mouths agape, their hands in their laps. Robinson looked at the two men sitting silently on the ground. If the three of them walked away and left them, would the two stricken men move? Would they even make a sound?
Robinson left the others in the tent and retraced their steps for two miles, his shotgun ready. He stood listening. The pungent, muddy odour of the thawing earth hung in the air.
A noise reached him from far off in the haze, and he knelt, waiting.
Snow fell in thick flakes but vanished as it hit the ground. The stony earth steamed. The distant noise came again, distorted by wind and mist and cold. He knew it was the pack moving, but it resembled something else each time. One moment it was like an axe on a tree stump, the next the crump of a firework. He went back to the tent and woke Adams.
“Get them up.”
The sun tired a little more each evening on the northern horizon at midnight.
Billings leaned forward in the sledge harness, knees bent like pistons, his back parallel to the earth. He stumbled on broken rocks, ripping holes in his trousers.
Adams worried for him. As he sensed impatience and frustration building in Robinson, he saw the opposite in Billings: a gradual capitulation, like an untended flame slowing dying out. At the crest of each rise, Robinson turned back and swept the horizon with the telescope. Adams knew they would need to find game soon. Within a few days, they would have nothing left. He gave Billings a full ration of reindeer meat and fed Honey and Handford more than he kept for himself, but Franklin’s two crewmen grew ever weaker.
Several times a day, the two men fell. He and Robinson lifted them to their feet and walked with their arms around their shoulders. The pair moved, bent over like rusted dolls. Their hair and beards were long and wild, their faces taut and dark with grime. When Adams examined them in the evening, they stared straight ahead, as patient as horses. Their mouths were black, their pelvic bones protruding like china plates under the skin. Kneecaps like stones atop brittle branches.
Adams inspected Handford’s feet. Only two toes remained on each foot, but the amputations he had conducted had not led to any infection.
“You said you will go back to Sunderland, Mister Handford?”
“What?” Handford blinked as if waking from a dream. “What?”
“Sunderland. Who do you go back to there?”
Handford swallowed. “There’s no one now. My mam died of the typhus in ’31.”
“You said you wanted to go back to the shipyards.”
Handford nodded. “I liked the smell there.”
“Which smell is that?”
Handford was silent for a moment, appearing to recall a life he had not thought of for a long time. “I was a rigger on the Wear.” He smiled. “Hot tar. Fresh-cut timber. New rope. Wet paint. Even the fresh water in the new barrels smells fine, before it goes green and slimy.” His face took on a dreamy expression. “It all smelled like ... I dunno, somethin’ being born, y’know? Somethin’ not spoiled yet. Out here, everything just goes to shit. Timber rots, food goes bad, metal rusts, caulking falls out. Men go mad. They stink, and bits fall off. Then they die.” He paused, imagining it. “If I can get a whiff o’ that nice new smell, I reckon I’ll fare well enough.”
The scurvy was advancing. Adams’ feet were like lumps of wood, swollen and numb to the touch. He felt nothing when he ran the tip of his knife over his heel. When he changed into his dry bed socks and lay down to sleep, shooting pains lit up the veins in his legs.
Only when Adams saw Robinson’s mitten red with blood did the lieutenant notice that an old injury to his elbow had opened. Billings’ neck was speckled with bruises, as though he had been throttled. Red and blue spots had appeared on the big man’s legs, and his gums were the colour of rotting plums.
They found a small beluga, recently dead, rolling in the shallows. While Adams and Billings watched for prowling bears, Robinson hacked through the reeking blubber and brought out a few pounds of evil-smelling meat. Honey and Handford thrust handfuls into their mouths. Within minutes they both vomited it back up and lay gasping and moaning on the ground.
They watched the sun sink through the long evening until it skimmed the northern skyline at midnight, then lifted itself into the cold sky again. Shallow lakes glimmered in the east. Their layers of wool and linen were as thin as cotton when the wind howled out of the north. Clouds bunched and elongated, great celestial caterpillars changing colour above their heads.
They traversed the grey land like wounded survivors of a war. They walked with a dull, mechanical tread, clothes stiffened by frost and dried mud, throats sore, cheeks wind-blasted, bellies hollow. As the snow melted, the surface of the earth dissolved into freezing slush. The sledge runners sank into green clay.
Bodies of water frozen for months split open underfoot. Snow upon the surface of lakes was in places only an inch thick, hardening to a thin crust in the cold twilight. A row of thick white clouds along the horizon was like surf upon a beach. Distant cracking sounds, like shotguns discharging, carried to them from the ice pack far to the west as the floes fractured on the tide. Large patches of olive moss and orange lichen were like splashes of paint on the brown stones.
When the mosquitoes arrived, Adams thought it would finish them. The insects fell upon them in black clouds, burrowing into their ears, stabbing at their faces, reducing them to tears. The brush of a glove or the shake of a head did nothing to deter them. Weeping at the absence of vegetation, Adams yearned for a campfire piled with green branches, desperate for the choking smoke just to be free of the insects for a few moments. Nearby, the other four men performed an absurd dance, stamping their feet and waving their gloved hands at the winged monsters. They rolled themselves in their blankets until they could not breathe. The mosquitoes lanced through the strips of linen they wrapped around their faces.
Anguish settled on Adams like mortar hardening. He wanted to bellow his rage at Franklin, scream into the emptiness, anything to raise him from his grave. O Lord, he thought, forgive me. Pray do not turn away from us.
Adams imagined himself aboard Erebus in the winter before Crozier brought them ashore on King William Land. The shooting parties returned in the long twilight with nothing. Before long, the sun was gone, and it was too dark and cold to venture out to hunt. The surviving officers rationed slimy three-year-old salt pork and canned provisions that were putrid when opened. The men consumed it all without comment, their sore jaws crunching on the weevils in the biscuit. They swept the decks and wiped the condensation from the walls of the lower deck. Huddling in their blankets, they wished for the rum and coal that ran out two years earlier. In the crushing melancholy of the long, black, freezing night, a dozen pairs of eyes watched the last tallow candles wink out. Adams finally knew grief then, with the tiny flame mourned more than any dead shipmates they had tipped through the hole in the ice or buried in the hard ground. He treated bruises that blackened and spread across thin bodies and wasted limbs. He watched men falling dead and going mad and starving to death in their hammocks, and when the drift was deep around the gunwales of the ship, he went on deck in his heavy coat and Welsh wig, where a man could scream forever and never be heard.
When he woke, he thought only of food. Rotten salt junk. Weevil-infested biscuit. Any kind of meat.