The Ice Child (11 page)

He looked away, closing his eyes against the snow streaming along the ground. He tried to see a photographic pattern. He focused on the shape of the human body against the bear, the tableaux they made with the emptiness of backdrop. He snapped off a reel of pictures, moving in to take the detail of her head, ears, and feet. Claws against ice. Collar against fur. Hand on her coat. Gun, bear, ice. The tattoo.

He could no longer feel his feet or hands. There was a warning numbness in his face, around his mouth. He got back in the helicopter, pressing his face into his coat sleeve, heaving warm breath into the angle of his curved elbow. He suddenly wanted to be gone, out of the sound, back to Winnipeg.

He couldn’t explain the congestion, the pressure, in his chest until they were airborne again, and he looked back at the female, now stirring on the snow.

He felt he had invaded her, been party to a swift assault.

And more than that.

He felt she was better than they were. Moving in a world he would never really know, possessor of some more permanent truth.

He shook the irrationality of the thought away, mentally preparing the text of the update he would put on the Web site, and the response that he would write to a boy called John Marshall, as they crossed Barrow Strait and made for Resolute.

Eight

The sea was clear, but Jo couldn’t look at it.

It was later that same week, and she sat directly behind the pilot in the Dauphin helicopter, wedged between John Marshall and the leading medical assistant. She spent most of her time with her fingers crossed, looking steadfastly at the portion of control panel that she could glimpse between the pilot and his observer.

It was a bright day over the North Atlantic, the visibility limitless. In all directions white-tipped waves rolled; the wind was low, the sky empty of cloud. A charitable weather system was sitting square on the southern tip of Greenland, giving them effortless flying.

“You’re lucky to see it like this,” the pilot had told her as they first swung out over the sea.

She had shrunk back. “I don’t want to see it at all,” she had told him, her words mercifully sucked away in the roar of sound as the Dauphin dipped to one side and reeled out in the direction of the
Fox
.

She glanced across at John Marshall. If anything, he looked sicker than she, his head tucked down. She nudged his arm.

“Like flying?” she asked.

He shrugged. She considered him obliquely. He looked very much like his father: tall, rangy, sandy haired. She wondered if Douglas had this same expression in his face, this guarded look. Doug’s public persona seemed to be full of charm and humor. Perhaps, she thought, that was all it would turn out to be. A public face.

When she had first met John that morning, he had been accompanied by one of the most beautiful girls that Jo had ever seen. Introduced to her by John, Jo had found herself self-consciously tugging down on the bulky parka she was wearing, and standing very upright. Then, almost in the same moment, she had grinned inwardly at herself. No amount of standing up straight was even going to bring her up to Catherine Takkiruq’s shoulder. To make matters worse, she couldn’t even find it in her heart to hate the girl for her astonishing good looks. Catherine seemed to be sweetness itself.

She nudged John’s arm again now, raising her voice above the helicopter noise.

“Is your girlfriend Russian?” she asked.

“What?” he said.

“Siberian?”

He smiled, and shook his head. “Canadian. Inuit,” he said.

Of course
, she told herself.
What other kind of girl would a Marshall man be interested in?

“She’s amazing,” she told him.

He nodded, his eyes saying it all.

The Dauphin roared on, lost, it seemed to Jo as she caught glimpses of the sea, in an endless blue space. After a while she dug into her pocket. She brought out the crumpled photograph of Doug and, holding it down against her leg to stop it flying away, showed it to John.

“This photograph …” she said. She pointed to it. “Is this the canister he found?”

John seemed to look for a very long time at the image. “Yes,” he said finally. And he closed his eyes and turned his head away from her.

She looked from him to the photograph, puzzled at his continuing silence. She folded the paper and put it back in her pocket, frustrated.

In the last few days she had found out about Doug Marshall’s discovery, a find so momentous that it had made his professional name. She had found an article he had written for the trade press: how he had stumbled across it, almost literally, while on a previous Greenland trip. How only two canisters from Franklin’s ships had ever been found: one in Egedesminde, on the west coast of Greenland, in July 1849; one by Doug Marshall, at Sarfannguag, in August 1990. The canisters, thrown overboard, supposedly, at regular intervals during the journey—a kind of metal-wrapped paper trail—noted the ship’s positions and the dates. The fact that the paper trail had gone completely dead had puzzled historians for years, until Douglas Marshall had picked up the second canister, one of so many others that had been lost, and found the note from Crozier, Franklin’s second officer, inside.

More than anything, Jo wanted to talk to Marshall about that note. Crozier’s cryptic, lone message, thrown from the second ship, the
Terror
, in July 1845. The ships were in Lancaster Sound, past the northern tip of Bylot Island, heading west at speed. Heading straight for oblivion. Heading for hell.

Jo shivered now, involuntarily.

The sound of the engines was overpowering. Even with ear protectors the thump of the rotors seemed to have invaded her whole body, shuddering and thudding, rattling her spine. The flight had lasted fifty minutes now, with Jo continually checking her watch. The LMA gave her a crooked grin. He had an insulated pack of blood in a cool box on the floor between his feet. Now and then he rested his foot on it.

She wished it were over. Beside her John Marshall seemed to have gone to sleep.

The only other time that Jo could remember being afraid of flying was one summer when she was eighteen, coming back from Corfu on a package flight. Then, they had been caught by a thunderstorm over the Adriatic. The plane had lurched and rolled, dropping thousands of feet between air pockets, lightning dancing along the wing right next to her window.

But as far as she was concerned, the Dauphin had the plane knocked into a cocked hat.

She glanced up to see the pilot looking back at her, with a thumb raised. Then he pointed down at the sea.

Jo looked down in the direction of his finger and suddenly saw, far below them, the slim gray line of the
Fox
, a Type 23 frigate of the UK Royal Navy, heading south-southeast through the flat sea. Her heart lurched.
Thank God, at last
. The Dauphin swung low, promptly dropping Jo’s stomach a few hundred feet. She clenched her fists in her lap and gritted her teeth.

Minutes later they were shepherded out onto the deck under the still-turning blades. Buffeted by the wind, and steadying herself against the slight pitching of the frigate’s deck, Jo took the outstretched hand of the officer stepping forward to meet them.

“Good flight?”

She mimed enjoyment, a kind of slack grin. “Great,” she lied.

Inside the hangar she pulled off the wool hat she had been wearing.

The principal medical officer smiled at her. “Anthony Hargreaves.”

“Jo Harper,” she replied. She looked behind her for John. “And this is Doug Marshall’s son, John.”

The two shook hands. John said nothing.

“We’ve tidied him up for you,” Lieutenant Hargreaves told them.

“Is he okay?” Jo asked.

“We reset the leg last night.” Hargreaves hesitated a moment, glancing at John. “Nasty break,” he said.

“Can we see him?”

“Anytime.”

Jo looked at John. “You first.”

“I don’t mind,” John told her.

There was a moment of awkwardness. Jo felt strongly that Doug’s son should be ahead of her, and she was embarrassed for his apparent—she hoped feigned—lack of concern. She wasn’t quite sure, even now, if it were she that he disliked, or the whole idea of getting to the frigate. She had moved heaven and earth to get them both here, and from the first his attitude had surprised her.

She had reached him in Cambridge the day after Doug had been found.

His voice on the other end of the phone had been wary.

“You don’t know me …” she had begun, after saying her name.

“My mother told me,” John had replied.

From this difficult start he didn’t make it any easier for her.

“I’m trying to get a flight to the ship,” she’d said. “I know someone in the department, and … well, if anyone should go it would be you and your mother.…”

The line had remained silent.

“I’d like to go,” she said. “I’d like to interview your father.”

“They won’t fly us there,” John said flatly.

“It’s true that it’s very unusual, but—”

“They won’t take us,” he said.

“I’m still going to try,” Jo said. “I just wanted to know if you’d come with me.”

Another silence. “I might,” he said.

“And Alicia.”

“No,” he said.

She’d put the phone down with the conviction that John Marshall loathed her.

Still, less than twenty-four hours later, she rang him again.

“Someone on board needs blood,” she’d said. “AB Rhesus Negative. We can hitch a ride.”

“Fine,” John had replied.

She had put the phone down thinking,
If your father isn’t more talkative than you, I’m sunk
.

They went down the ladder now to the deck below, walked aft, and turned left into the sick bay. It was a small cabin with barely enough room for its desk, cabinets, and the screened-off double bunk in a nine-by-five recess.

Jo’s eyes strayed to a notice board on the wall. There was a photograph of a young girl there, not more than eight or nine years old. Seeing her glance, Hargreaves tapped the image with his index finger.

“Daughter of one of the crew,” he told her. “The whole ship was tested by the Norberry Trust when we were in port. Blood test.”

“For what?” she asked.

“Bone-marrow donation. She has leukemia.”

“Oh,” Jo murmured. “I’m sorry.”

Hargreaves walked over to the bunk and drew back the curtain.

Doug Marshall had evidently been asleep, one hand propped behind his head. As they moved up to the bed, however, he opened his eyes.

Jo’s first thought was that he looked different from the photograph in her trouser pocket.

“You look younger than your publicity shot,” she told him, smiling and holding out her hand. “Jo Harper.”

John stepped forward and briefly touched his father’s shoulder, before moving back to the end of the bunk. “All right?” he asked Doug.

“Been better,” Doug replied.

Jo looked from one to the other embarrassedly.

Doug turned back to her.

“How’s the leg?” she asked him.

“Fine. Dunno how I did it. It was flat where I fell,” he said. “Flat as a pancake.”

“Oh?”

“I slipped on the easiest terrain in the world, and fell a hundred and fifty feet.”

Jo smiled at him. She had half expected a show of bravado—
I was negotiating a really hard climb, and …

“Into snow?” she asked.

“Snow over rock.”

“Ouch,” she said.

“Actually, the landing was soft,” he told her. “But the fall wasn’t.”

Jo nodded. “And this was a week ago?”

“Eight days,” he said.

She knew all this already, of course. But as she made the small talk, she listened for her angle. “You’ve lain for eight days in snow?”

“I walked a bit. We found a place to shelter.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw John take off his coat. She heard him sigh heavily. She turned to look at him. He had slumped into a chair and was looking away from her.

She turned back to Doug. “You
walked
on the broken leg?” she repeated.

“I got off the shore out of the water,” he said. “That was all.”

She frowned. “Now you’re losing me,” she said. “When did you get in water?”

“When I tried to get off the rocks,” he said.

She stared agape for a second, then started to laugh.

“It wasn’t so bloody funny at the time,” Doug retorted.

“You fell from a flat straight track a hundred and fifty feet onto rocks by water, and then fell in the water,” she said.

Doug started to laugh himself. At last she recognized the TV face, creased in a fan of fine lines. Laugh lines. “Just dress it up a bit for the paper, will you?” he said. “I don’t want everyone knowing.”

“I’ll do my best,” she promised.

Hargreaves had gone to the door to answer a knock. He came back carrying a tray. “See if you can take this now, Doug,” he said to Marshall, holding out a cup of tea. “And don’t throw up on me again.”

Sitting back from Doug temporarily, Jo saw his eyes flicker to John again. She caught John looking at her and saw a rebuffed expression. She had come between them, she suddenly realized. This was an opportunity for John to talk to his father, and she had stepped in the way. “John,” she said, “come and take this chair next to your dad.”

He didn’t move. He drank his tea. “I’m all right,” he mumbled.

Meanwhile Doug drank slowly, with Hargreaves holding his head like a child’s. Jo saw how much of an effort it was for him, and registered that same glance, again, to John when he was finished.

To cover the silence she found herself saying the first thing that came into her head.

“What do you think it meant,” she said, “—the note in the cylinder? The copper canister.”

Doug Marshall had balanced the cup unsteadily on his chest, and looked at her. “Cylinder?” he repeated.

“I’ve been reading your article. ‘Finding Franklin.’”

“Well,” he said. “Thanks.”

“What did it mean, the note inside?” she asked. “Crozier’s note.”

Doug nodded at Hargreaves to take the cup.

“Don’t talk to me if you feel unwell,” she said. “I can easily come back in a while.”