Wild Island (65 page)

‘Twenty,' said Jane and Sophy together. They knew their lines.

‘We count it twenty,' Sophy explained, ‘because although the expedition left England in May of 1845, they carried enough provisions for five years—seven at a pinch—and therefore we did not begin to consider them
truly
lost until
after
1850 . . .'

‘My husband hoped to make a speedy journey, of course,' (Jane now) ‘to be home within two years. But he warned us a hard season might detain him far longer.'

General Davis replied politely that he would do what he could; that the Arctic is vast, but Sitka is the old capital, called New Archangel by the Russians, and any news or trade-able object found by whalers or fur-trappers might eventually make its way here. The Inuit, or Esquimaux, or ‘Huskimay' people, he said, do not set great store by
paper and were unlikely to save anything of that kind, but they keep practical objects, knives and so on. The Indians, by contrast, take excellent care of paper or books, handing them down to their children.

‘Have there been other finds?' he asked.

‘Many small ones over the years, but all of them more puzzling than explanatory,' said Jane. A great quantity of monogrammed silverware belonging to the ships' officers, for instance. Franklin's men seem to have lugged all their spoons and forks into a whaleboat, which they intended to drag a thousand miles over the ice—and yet they'd left behind a large supply of chocolate, when provisions would be vital? Why was this?

Sophy fetched a small package wrapped in linen and showed General Davis the spoons carrying Sir John's crest. General Davis said quietly that it was an honour to have seen them. Sophy repeated several times later that he made ‘a most
favourable
impression'.

I began a letter to Gus.

Over the next two weeks I added to this letter: a visit from the Army wives, and one from an eccentric Army Captain calling himself ‘Prince Thoreau'; a visit to the Indian village. In the third week I tried to write but could not. As the sun moved towards the solstice, a strange malaise gripped all three of us. To my imagination it seemed to emanate from Jane, who was quiet and feverish with a burning desire to find some trace of the expedition. Nothing had come in. Marie and Lawrence ran away together the same week; perhaps they felt it too.

We were scarcely sleeping; day and night seemed one. There is no midnight sun in Sitka, but in the middle of summer it is never entirely dark. About an hour before midnight the sun dips below the horizon for a short time, leaving the world lit with a golden crepuscular glow, an effulgent twilight which seems to make the mind at once languid and preternaturally active. We closed the curtains at first and tried to sleep, but restlessness often drove us outdoors, where the yellow sky seemed an extension of the earth, another path waiting to be taken.

Sophy, after complaining for a week, took a heavy dose of chloral one night and fell deeply asleep. Jane and I shared a bottle of sweet yellow wine one of the Army wives had brought us. Later I dozed and then woke, lay thinking about Gus and Thea, becoming gradually aware of shuffling noises in Jane's room. It was not quite two in the morning. I heard the click of Jane's door and soft footsteps. A creak of the stair as someone descended. Clicks of the downstairs lock, a thud as the front door closed. Silence. Jane never went out alone, would never do so at night.

It took me two minutes to pull on slippers and a short jacket over my nightdress. When I emerged from the front door I could see Jane plainly, a lone figure in a white nightgown and shawl hobbling away along the empty road towards the Indian village, in the warm magical night. I ran to her, but when I came close I saw she was sleepwalking and hesitated to touch her. Her eyes were open, but glazed, fixed. I called softly, ‘Jane, Jane', but she did not stop. We reached a little bridge crossing a stream where the water came rushing down from the mountains. Snow-melt, icy even now in summer. Then she wavered and veered off the road, and I thought she must stray into the water, and so caught hold of her arm. Nearby were some boulders with broad flat tops where we had rested when we walked to the Indian village, and I led her to these and sat her down, my arm through hers. She began to speak to me—in a delirium I thought at first.

‘Reports of a blue-eyed woman among the Apache—snatched from settlers when she was a child thirty years ago. And Mrs Eliza Fraser
in Australia found with an aboriginal tribe three years after she was thought lost in a shipwreck. And the convict William Buckley!' Jane laughed. ‘What a sight for the Port Phillip survey party! Six feet seven inches tall and clad only in skins—walking out of the bush when he had been believed dead for thirty-two years! And after all,' her voice was firm, ‘there have been rumours over the years of a white man living among the Inuits.'

Then I understood her forlorn hope. That somewhere out there in those thousands of miles of shimmering white there was a survivor from Franklin's expedition, England still glimmering fitfully in the depths of his ice-altered mind. Jane gripped my arm as though she would make me see it, and I thought, Oh Lord, if only it were true!

A man brought in to us in bulky furs, his nose and the lower half of his face covered by a mask of caribou skin chewed to air-penetrable softness by an Inuit woman (there would have to be an Inuit woman to have kept him alive). Suddenly he might say English words, ‘God Save the Queen'. Or his own name, or the name of his leader, ‘Franklin'. If only it could be Fitzjames, who still haunted Jane even more than all the others! Because he was young and brilliant, and if he had perished, lost such a future, probably while obeying orders he did not agree with.

‘We have discovered nothing here,' Jane whispered. ‘It is my fault.'

She felt that if only she tried hard enough, she should be able to will the objects to reveal themselves. They must be there. Two hundred metal canisters for messages, a thousand volumes of reading matter on each ship, costumes for amateur theatricals, boots, shoes, medals . . . Sometimes, she said, she tried to send her mind out like a bird speeding across thousands of miles of ice, scanning for a dark speck: a man, a ship. At other times she tried to make herself an emptiness into which the ice and wind might flow, bringing . . . what? A voice? A vision? She worried that her fears and furies made a silent chaos around her so that nothing could get through.

She had forgiven everyone now, except herself. Of course she had known her husband was too old for the voyage. He had only been
given the expedition because of the humiliations in Tasmania. She had not tried to dissuade him because she agreed with what Parry had said to Lord Haddington: ‘If you don't let Franklin go the man will die of disappointment.' But it had led to the deaths of not only her husband, but a hundred and twenty-eight men besides. All those mothers, wives and families, all that long waiting. Jane groaned. This was a burden weighing heavier on her every day for twenty years. If giving up her own life could have brought them back, she would have done it in an instant.

‘You could not have dissuaded him,' I argued. ‘He would have gone no matter what—and so would every man of his crew.'

‘Not enough kindness, not enough love,' she muttered, shaking her head, not heeding me. She knew she loved her husband more now than when they were together; not the old man as he would be with his elderly smells, his fumbling and deafness; it was the idea of him she loved, noble, heroic.

Eleanor, too, her stepchild, she had not loved enough.

‘You know Ella is dead?' Jane looked at me, her face troubled. ‘We were so shocked. Gell took her with their little boys to Wales on holiday, but there had been scarlet fever in the village. Her children sickened with it; she nursed them through, but died herself.'

At the funeral Gell had held out an olive branch; how could she refuse? Now Ella's little boys came to Jane's London garden to help sweep up the autumn leaves and make a bonfire, and she paid them in ‘wages and rations': bright new-minted pennies and ginger cake.

Mathinna. She had not loved Mathinna; she had been dreadfully sorry for the child. How could she leave that bright little girl to die among the ghastliness of the stricken tribe at Flinders Island? But she, Jane, had not spent enough time with Mathinna. Perhaps if she had ignored the doctors' advice and brought her back to England with them? But the Orphan School with Booth as supervisor had promised well. Why had Mathinna been taken out of the school? Three aboriginal children Jane had tried to help, and only one had lived happily, the boy who became a constable at Muddy Plains. The
other boy had run away, and Mathinna had died tragically, drowned in a puddle while the worse for drink, the newspapers said.

Sophy. Perhaps, in Sophy's case, she had done a little spark of good. She had loved Sophy like a daughter, and yet—never to be spoken, of course, hardly to be thought—perhaps it had been Sophy in the end who caused the failure of the expedition?

‘Crozier proposed to her again two days before the
Erebus
and
Terror
sailed, and she refused him again—with great severity, he told me. He was in a pitiable state.'

‘But . . .' I hesitated. ‘Sophy could not marry him if she did not love him?'

‘No,' said Jane, ‘but she had kept him hoping for five years. Why not let him hope for another two, during the long hard voyage? Instead she told him she felt nothing for him, would never marry him.'

And thus when the expedition left, Crozier was in a state of melancholia, and taking too much rum as consolation. ‘That was plain from a letter Ross showed me, the very last one Crozier sent from the Whale Fish Island just before they entered the ice.'

After her husband died, she added, Crozier must have assumed command, with Fitzjames as his second. But Fitzjames had no practical experience of the Arctic, his field was magnetics, and Crozier was probably in no fit state to lead; devastated by Sophy, missing Ross.

‘Then blame Ross for marrying Anne,' I said, ‘or the Admiralty—or chance, fate, destiny . . .'

But Jane was following her own thoughts. ‘Men believe women have no power, and yet great matters may turn on a woman's emotions.'

I hesitated for a moment, and then told her how I had lied to St John Wallace to prevent Thea going into the Orphan School. Jane's face showed her shock. She shook her head, but then after a minute she hugged me and said she could not find it in her heart to blame me. ‘He died in India, I suppose? St John?'

‘No,' I said unable to resist a laugh. ‘He went to the hill station at Darjeeling, where the Army wives go for the hot weather—and thrives there, according to Jane Rochester.'

We sat in contented silence as the sun began to rise like a vision of glory, angels and archangels and all the company of heaven soaring up to the great vault above us from a burst of golden rays across the horizon. The waters of the sound became a shimmering molten mass, the sight grew in splendour every moment. Wisps of lavender clouds flamed deepest crimson, and the world was remade in an ecstasy of light and colour.

‘This,' said Jane, tears running down her face, ‘this is what they saw. What they were drawn back to see again and again.'

Later, a wagonette came towards us along the road, and I begged a ride for us back to the lodgings.

‘Passing strange,' I said to Gus when we were together again in London—and after I had been saturated with blissful news of railways, tunnels, steam engines, routes and scenery, ‘that it might have been Sophy's character that caused the loss of the expedition.'

Gus was dressing for dinner. He raised his eyebrows at me and repeated the objections I had made. When I told him Jane's answer he said smiling, ‘Only very young men, or very ignorant ones, underestimate the power of women. Was anything found in Sitka, in the end?'

‘No, nothing.'

In 1876 Gus and I went to England for the third time—the last, it must be—for a ceremony at Westminster Abbey installing a memorial to Franklin. We arrived in July, two weeks before the nominated date, only to find Jane had died a few days before. She was eighty-three. Sophy was sixty-two—fat, inconsolable, and again facing a return to live with her mother. No hope of rescue this time.

The day of Jane's funeral was cold and grey although it was the middle of summer. England so green: that old surprise again. She was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery beside her sister Mary. As we drove to our hotel afterwards the heavens opened and rain came down like floods of tears for every one of our scattered dead.