Aye, sir.

Excuse me, Captain, I said. But why not let her go back to her people?

Crozier smiled at this. Normally I would agree with that course of action, Doctor. But there are no known Esquimaux settlements – not the smallest village – within three hundred miles of here. They are a nomadic people – especially those we call the Northern Highlanders – but what brought this old man and young girl out onto the pack ice so far north in a summer where there are no whales, no walruses, no seals, no caribou, no animals of any sort abroad except our white bears and the murderous things on the ice?

I had no answer to this, but it hardly seemed pertinent to my question.

It may come to the point, continued Crozier, where our lives might depend upon finding and befriending these native Esquimaux. Shall we let her go then before we’ve befriended her?

We shot her husband or father, said Surgeon Stanley, glancing at the mute young woman who still stared at the now empty fire hole. Our Lady Silence here might not have the most charitable of feelings toward us.

Precisely, said Captain Crozier. And we have enough problems right now without this lass leading a war party of angry Esquimaux back to our ships to murder us as we sleep. No, I think Captain Sir John is right… she should stay with us until we decide what to do… not only with her, but with ourselves. Crozier smiled at Stanley. In two years, this was the first time that I could remember seeing Captain Crozier smile. Lady Silence. That is good, Stanley. Very good. Come, John. Come, m’lady.

They walked west through the blowing snow toward the first pressure ridge. I went back up the ramp of snow to Erebus, to my tiny little cabin which seemed like pure heaven to me now, and to the first solid night’s sleep I had had since Lieutenant Gore led us south-southeast onto the ice more than ten days earlier.

By the day that he was to die, Sir John had almost recovered from the shock of seeing the Esquimaux wench naked.

It was the same young woman, the same teenaged harlot Copper squaw whom the Devil had sent to tempt him during his first ill-fated expedition in 1819, the wanton Robert Hood’s fifteen-year-old bedmate named Greenstockings. Sir John was sure of that. This temptress had the same coffee-brown skin that seemed to glow even in the dark, the same high, round girl’s breasts, the same brown areolae, and the same raven-feather slash of dark escutcheon above her sex.

It was the same succubus.

The shock to Captain Sir John Franklin of seeing her naked on surgeon McDonald’s table in the sick bay – on his ship – had been profound, but Sir John was sure that he had been able to hide his reaction from the surgeons and from the other captains during the rest of that endless, disconcerting day.

Lieutenant Gore’s burial service took place late on Friday, the fourth of June. It had taken a large work party more than twenty-four hours to get through the ice to allow for the burial at sea, and before they were done they had to use black powder to blow away the top ten feet of rock-hard ice, then use picks and shovels to excavate a broad crater to open the last five feet or so. When they were finished around midday, Mr. Weekes, the carpenter from Erebus, and Mr. Honey, the carpenter from Terror, had constructed a clever and elegant wooden scaffolding over the ten-foot-long and five-foot-wide opening into the dark sea. Work parties with long pikes were stationed at the crater to keep the ice from congealing beneath the platform.

Lieutenant Gore’s body had begun to decay quickly in the relative heat of the ship, so the carpenters first constructed a most solid coffin of mahogany lined with an inner box of sweet-smelling cedar. Between the two enclosures of wood was set a layer of lead in lieu of the traditional two rounds of shot set in the usual canvas burial bag to ensure that the body would sink. Mr. Smith, the blacksmith, had forged, hammered, and engraved a beautiful memorial plate in copper, which was affixed to the top of the mahogany coffin by screws. Because the burial service was a mixture of shoreside burial and the more common burial at sea, Sir John had specified that the coffin be made heavy enough to sink at once.

At eight bells at the beginning of the first dogwatch – 4:00 p.m. – the two ships’ companies assembled at the burial site a quarter of a mile across the ice from Erebus. Sir John had ordered everyone except the smallest possible ship’s watches to be present for the service and furthermore had ordered them to wear no layer over their dress uniforms, so at the appointed time more than one hundred shivering but formally dressed officers and men had gathered on the ice.

Lieutenant Gore’s coffin was lowered over the side of Erebus and lashed to an oversized sledge reinforced for this day’s sad purpose. Sir John’s own Union Jack was draped over the coffin. Then thirty-two seamen, twenty from Erebus and a dozen from Terror, slowly pulled the coffin-sledge the quarter mile to the burial site, while four of the youngest seamen, still on the roster as ship’s boys – George Chambers and David Young from Erebus, Robert Golding and Thomas Evans from Terror – beat a slow march on drums muffled in black cloth. The solemn procession was escorted by twenty men, including Captain Sir John Franklin, Commander Fitzjames, Captain Crozier, and the majority of all the other officers and mates in full dress, excluding only those left in command in each near-vacant ship.

At the burial site, a firing party of red-coated Royal Marines stood waiting at attention. Led by Erebus’s thirty-three-year-old sergeant, David Bryant, the party consisted of Corporal Pearson, Private Hopcraft, Private Pilkington, Private Healey, and Private Reed from Erebus – only Private Braine was missing from the flagship’s contingent of Marines, since the man had died last winter and been buried on Beechey Island – as well as Sergeant Tozer, Corporal Hedges, Private Wilkes, Private Hammond, Private Heather, and Private Daly from HMS Terror.

Lieutenant Gore’s cocked hat and sword were carried behind the burial sledge by Lieutenant H. T. D. Le Vesconte, who had assumed Gore’s command duties. Alongside Le Vesconte walked Lieutenant James W. Fairholme, carrying a blue velvet cushion on which were displayed the six medals young Gore had earned during his years in the Royal Navy.

As the sledge party approached the burial crater, the line of twelve Royal Marines parted, opening to form a lane. The Marines turned inward and stood at reverse arms as the procession of sledge-pullers, funeral sledge, honor guard, and other mourners passed between their ranks.

As the hundred and ten men shuffled to their places amid the mass of officers’ uniforms around the crater – some seamen standing on pressure ridges to get a better look – Sir John led the captains to their place on a temporary scaffolding at the east end of the crater in the ice. Slowly, carefully, the thirty-two sledge-pullers worked together to unlash the heavy coffin and lower it down precisely angled boards to its temporary resting place on the wooden superstructure just above the rectangle of black water. When the coffin was in place, it rested not only on the final planks but on three sturdy hawsers now manned on either side by the same men who had been chosen to pull the sledge.

When the muffled drums quit beating, all hats came off. The cold wind ruffled the men’s long hair, all washed, parted, and tied back with ribbons for this service. The day was chilly – no more than five degrees at the last measuring at six bells – but the arctic sky, filled with ice crystals, was a solid dome of golden light. As if in honour of Lieutenant Gore, the single circle of the ice-occluded sun had been joined by three more suns – sun dogs floating above and to either side of the south-hanging true sun – all connected by a halo-band of rainbow-prismed light. Many men present bowed their heads at the aptness of the sight.