CHAPTER TWENTY
Adams lay awake in his blanket bag. His feet and legs throbbed. Sharp pains lanced through his stomach. The air in the tent was heavy upon him. He concentrated on forcing his sternum up, felt the cold air seep into a body that, in spite of everything, remained impossibly warm. Honey was now too weak to lift a hand. Adams examined him. He brought his hand to his mouth as his gut tightened. God, he thought, when I thought I had seen all the ways a man can suffer, You show me more.
The man was dying in colours. Yellow teeth, purple flaking lips, crimson oozing from sores on his elbows and legs, the blood dripping from his wrists. His legs were swollen like great ghastly sausages. At forty degrees, it was warm, but he shivered uncontrollably in his blanket bag. There were bare patches on his head where clumps of hair had detached, the skull all jutting ledges of bone and sunken crevices. Adams cut a strip of reindeer skin into tiny pieces. He hoped to make a broth and searched for driftwood to make a fire but found none. Gasping between each word, Honey asked Robinson and Adams not to exert themselves further on his behalf.
“Bury me in the ice, will you?” His voice was a scratchy whisper, like fingernails on a ship’s timbers. “I do not fancy being chewed on by a bear.”
Adams and Robinson swallowed some lichen the assistant surgeon had scraped from the stones. When he offered it to Honey, the man turned his head away.
“Enough,” he whispered. “I’ve had enough.”
Adams stood on the shore, southeast of Cape Felix, and looked out at the ice pack toward Cape Adelaide. The sun settled into a bank of grey clouds stretched along the horizon. Robinson unpacked the Halkett boat and placed its bellows and paddles on the ground. Adams watched the rectangular canvas bundle expand into an oval-shaped object nine feet long and four feet across.
Honey could not stand. Adams and Robinson dragged him into the boat. He lay with eyes closed and head lolling. They placed their tent and bedding beside him and hitched the sledge on the side. They departed at nine in the evening. The ice was firm underfoot but dotted with meltwater pools. Adams and Robinson pulled on the canvas shoulder straps, and where the ice was flat, the airboat glided easily over the ponds. Honey rested, unmoving, his head on the side of the boat. Adams attempted to engage him in conversation, but the stricken man could no longer speak. At midnight the wind abated, and the clouds disappeared. A thin crust of ice formed late at night when the sun dipped below the horizon. By morning it was gone.
Far out on the ice, a bear stood staring at them atop a small, twisted hummock. They held the animal in their sights and waited, hoping it might approach them to investigate. The bear tossed its head and went behind the hummock, and they did not see it again.
A storm grumbled on the horizon to the south. Veins of lightning crackled against darkly stained clouds, dead white trees holding up the sky. Channels of water blocked their path, and they walked hundreds of yards around to find a floe strong enough to bear their weight. After ten miles they reached an islet, a windswept mound of rubble-strewn limestone rising through the ice. Leaving Honey and the airboat on the shingle, they climbed to the top of the crag, gasping and coughing with the effort. Two larger islets lay to the north. The coast of Boothia was visible through the haze, a thin grey silhouette twenty-five miles to the east.
Adams’ throat was raw and painful when he swallowed. His fingers were red and cramped with cold. The sky darkened, and when the rain arrived, it blew sideways, needles on his cheeks. He joined Robinson to erect the tent on the tiny shingle beach, and they sat looking out at the rain.
Honey lay unconscious in his blankets. His breath rattled in his throat, its sickly, fruity odour filling the tent. A groan of thunder made Adams turn his gaze skyward. A moment later, the rumble came again. It seemed to emanate from beneath their feet.
“The ice pack,” said Robinson. “It is breaking up.”
Adams lay down in his blanket, a bitter taste in his mouth and a dull pain in his stomach. The long dark cylinder of Robinson’s shotgun barrel protruded from his blanket. He seemed to keep his weapon closer than before. Bears remained a constant threat, and both men needed to keep watch for game, but Adams had not seen the gun leave Robinson’s hand since the confrontation with Walker and Dunn.
I seen men go down like that, Honey had said. You oughta watch out for ’im.
Adams tried to sleep. His mind simmered with suspicion. Robinson had not spoken of Billings’ death. Honey had said Orren was a good shot. He may have mistakenly shot Billings down while targeting Robinson, but if he did not, the fatal ball could only have originated from the weapon of one other. It may have been an accident. Robinson was a poor shot. Perhaps his shot at Orren had gone wide. But Robinson seemed to harbour an enmity for Billings that bordered on loathing.
You shall tell them nothing, he had said. God knows what you’ll say.
He wished he knew how to speak to the man. There was a wall around him; he was a city of one, and the gates never swung open. If he were to sleep soundly, he would need to hide the lieutenant’s shot bag on the sledge tonight.
Robinson heard Honey die at four o’clock in the afternoon.
Lying next to Robinson in the gloom of the tent, Honey inhaled deeply, then let out a long, slow wheeze. Robinson waited for the sound of his next breath, but none followed. He sat up, leaned over him, and took Honey’s curled, palsied hand in his own. The man’s face was the colour of old putty. His cheeks were sunken pits in his skull. Robinson turned his face from the scorbutic stink of the man. He pulled the blanket from Honey’s body, then rolled the corpse onto its side so it faced away from him. He looked across at Adams. Lying in his blanket, the assistant surgeon observed him in silence. Robinson rolled himself in the dead man’s blanket and was instantly asleep.
Adams wrapped Samuel Honey’s body in a piece of canvas cut from the tent. He stood looking dully at it. He wondered if they had somehow erred in their confusion, parcelling up a block of timber or a collection of tentpoles by mistake. Shrouded in canvas, the corpse looked too small to be that of even a hundred-pound man. Shrunken and anonymous, merely an object to be hauled and buried.
They set out from the islet toward Boothia. The hard ice bruised the soles of their feet through their stockings and cork-soled boots. The water pooled in depressions on the surface was only an inch deep, so they deflated the airboat and looped the track ropes over their shoulders, hauling the sledge carrying Honey’s body. Adams felt the strength seeping from his body at each step. He could not remember what it was to be free of pain, to possess the vigour to climb a ladder or mount a horse. He and Robinson had eaten only lichen and reindeer skin since the soup of dovekies and Iceland moss. With no means of making a fire on the floes, they could not singe the hair from the hide. Adams used his knife to scrape as much hair from the skin as he could, leaving the pair to suck on it until it was soft enough to chew. He worried that the aches in his belly were less frequent now. The pangs abated every few hours, leaving him with no feeling of hunger. Even the thought of prayer left him empty of emotion and bereft of solace. After a day walking over the ice pack, Robinson stopped and dropped his head. Panting, he raised both hands to Adams in surrender.
“We must leave him.”
Adams stared at the corpse on the sledge, thinking it might rise and render its own verdict. Benumbed by fatigue, he opened his mouth to speak, but no words emerged.
“I thought we would find a hole in the ice, at least a seal’s breathing hole,” said Robinson, “but look at it.” He limped to the sledge and removed the shovel. He leaned on it for a moment, gathering himself, then jabbed at the ice with the blade. It clanged with the sound of a sword swung on a boulder. “This is old ice,” he said. “Not this season’s. It was carried here from the north by the current. Harder than stone. There is no getting through it.”
Adams fought to catch his breath. “If we leave him here on the ice, a bear might get him.”
Robinson fixed him with a bleary gaze. There was no guile in his expression. “I am spent.”
“But he did not want this.” Adams crumpled to his knees. Freezing water soaked through the fabric of his trousers. Hot tears were in his beard.
Robinson squinted into the glare at the coastline of Cape Adelaide. It was close, no more than five miles away. “You remember where we left the reindeer meat, yes? The oddly shaped boulder. Near that small peninsula.” His voice sounded hollow now, a deep echo in his chest.
Adams stood. “I remember.” He had thought of little else for days. He coughed and spat, gasping in long, ragged gusts. Relief and guilt warred within him. As wicked as he found the thought of abandoning the body of Sir John Franklin’s last man, the prospect of hauling it another mile made him tremble with dread. This was a man who had joined his shipmates in eating the flesh of his fellows. A man whose dreams were back to front and who wept at the torment of a maimed fox. “We should be ashamed, leaving him unburied.”
“We should,” said Robinson.
“Promises to dying men should be fulfilled.” Adams bowed his head to conceal the insincerity he feared was all too obvious on his face.
Robinson nodded. “There was a time I would not have broken such an oath.”
“He liked pigeon pie.”
Robinson knelt and untied the shrouded corpse. It slid off the sledge, rigid as a log, and came to rest against the foot of a snowy hummock. He straightened and regarded Adams in silence.
It is a challenge, Adams decided. He waits for me to protest. If I acquiesce, it will be easier for us both—if I concede this thing on the ice is not Samuel Honey anymore. Just something stiff and old to be discarded, a heavy weight to be thrown off. Something to flee and forget.
He gazed at rows of grey clouds dragged out across the heavens, so low that if they kept walking, the land and sky must surely be stitched together along a seam somewhere, and they would be unable to go farther. Patches of old ice clung to the shore, crusty and permanent. Up in the hills above Cape Adelaide, more ice hugged depressions and holes in the ground like dough pressed by huge wet fingers. He blinked away the frost in his eyelashes.
“God’s work exacts a toll, does it not?” Robinson asked. “More, perhaps, than you thought it might require you to pay. But do not doubt Franklin and his men will be remembered.” The lieutenant’s tone was contemplative. “Time changes a man. I do not mean how it whitens the hair and wrinkles the skin. Time goes on changing a man after he is dead. A man dies and becomes a hero, or a villain. Likely he becomes less than he was when alive. Sometimes, but rarely, he becomes more.”
Adams thought he might only now be comprehending a great truth about the Passage. “I think,” he said, “that man is the hound chasing the carriage, barking and howling, wanting this strange and exotic thing. We lust after it. Die for it. But we have not the slightest notion of what we shall do with it when we catch it.” He went to the sledge and put a hand on the rolled-up tent. “Let us decide what to do with him once we have rested. Perhaps then we will be strong enough to bury him.”
Robinson fixed him with a doubtful gaze. “There is nothing to eat here. It would not be wise to tarry.”
“Just a few hours.”
Robinson shrugged. He appeared too exhausted to argue. Together they pitched the tent and slept. The dead man lay on the ice outside.
Adams woke. His mouth was parched, and his limbs felt like they were made of iron. Hunger was once again a dull ache in his belly, as if he had swallowed a large stone. He glanced at Robinson. The lieutenant lay in his blanket, his breathing slow and regular. Adams grimaced as he flexed the fingers of one hand and massaged them with his other. Frozen and thawed countless times, his fingertips had almost wholly lost feeling, and he felt that same insensitivity extending to his mind. It was becoming numb. He could see something horrific but feel nothing. He was either in agony or experienced no sensation at all.
He drank from his canteen. He took a square of reindeer skin from his bag and put it between his teeth. These past days, he had taken to deceiving himself that he was eating. The scrap of hide had no flavour, but as he bit down, his mouth ran with saliva, and for a few moments he could imagine it was meat. He pulled on his stockings and boots and left the tent. Ten yards away, Honey’s swathed corpse lay at the foot of the hummock where they had left it. He stood transfixed, staring at the wrapped bundle.
He thought he must still be in his blanket, dreaming. Something within him bent and fractured and fell away, and he was different. A pair of hands moved before him, and boots walked on the ground below but were not his. He could not picture his father’s face or hear Frances’ voice. He could not recall the shape of the tower at the parish church in Great Barton or the colour of the River Lark’s waters near the ruins of the abbey in Bury St Edmunds. Time stretched out, each intake of his breath loud in the silence. He was a creature shedding its carapace, emerging as something new and unrecognisable. The pain in his belly was a throb. He folded his hands over his stomach and remembered what Honey had said.
It ain’t so strange.
Nor was it. He understood that now. He knelt next to the corpse, peeled back the canvas, and sat gazing at the dead man within. Honey’s face was composed, his skin pale and lined. The glimmer of life that had flickered beneath was gone, as when a candle is withdrawn from beneath a sheet of vellum. He lifted Honey’s shroud and pulled up his linen undershirt. The flesh of his chest had withered and sunk, and the bruises had expanded across the yellow skin. Each of the ribs protruded so much, he imagined tearing them out with his fingertips and gnawing on the bone. The knife was light in his hand. He ran his thumb down the blade, then laid it flat across Honey’s chest. He remembered the ragged holes in the leg of the corpse they had found buried on King William Land.
No need to be so graceless. He would have more respect, make a neater incision. Then it would be acceptable. Honey would not begrudge him. Honey had known how it would be. He had seen into Adams’ soul and had told him so.
I’ve known a few like you.
Adams imagined his face as in a looking glass, the vacant expression in his eyes and the slackness in his jaw, and thought, This is what I am now. This was not his doing; it could only be what the Lord commanded. Everything is as God wills it, he thought. He wills that I eat. God wanted Franklin dead from apoplexy, Fitzjames starving to death in his bunk, Billings with a bullet in his throat. God would have him do this because it could not be only Lieutenant Robinson who returned to report to Captain Ross at Port Leopold. It was nothing less than his duty. Robinson would becloud the tale, conceal the truth. He would deny renown to brave men. Without Adams, Fitzjames’ message honouring his men would never be delivered. It had to be this way. Nothing had ever made more sense.
Adams leaned over the dead man and placed a hand on his leg. He took a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut. His body shook. He reversed his grip so he could stab downward with the knife and touched the tip of the blade to the corpse.
Some questions are too hard to answer.
His knuckles were white on the handle of the knife. He pressed down gently, his eyes welling.
You don’t think about it.
He worked quickly to combat the trembling in his hands. He was mechanical, spiritless. The act was in motion, and he could not stop now. He brought the knife down again and again. He closed his eyes and bowed his head. Tears dripped from his chin.