Third Lieutenant John Irving needed to know how Silence got on and off the ship without being seen. Tonight, one month to the day since he’d first found the Esquimaux woman in her lair, he would solve the puzzle if it cost him his toes and fingers.

The day after he first found her, Irving reported to his captain that the Esquimaux woman had moved her den to the forward cable locker on the hold deck. He did not report that she appeared to be eating fresh meat in there, mostly because he doubted what he had seen in that terrifying second of staring into the small flame-lit space. Nor had he reported the apparent sodomy he’d interrupted in the hold between Caulker’s Mate Hickey and Seaman Manson. Irving knew that he was abrogating his professional duty as an officer in the Royal Navy’s Discovery Service by not informing his captain of this shocking and important fact, but…

But what? All John Irving could think of as a reason for his serious breach of duty was that HMS Terror had enough rats aboard it already.

But Lady Silence’s apparently magical appearances and disappearances – although accepted by the superstitious crew as final evidence of her witchcraft and ignored by Captain Crozier and the other officers as a myth – seemed far more important to young Irving than whether a caulker’s mate and shipboard idiot were pleasuring each other in the stinking darkness of the hold.

And it was a stinking darkness, thought Irving, in the third hour of his watch crouched on a crate above the slush and behind a pillar near the forward cable locker. The stench in the freezing, dark hold was getting worse by the day.

At least there were no more half-eaten plates of food, tots of rum, or pagan fetishes on the low platform outside the cable locker. One of the other officers had brought this practice to Crozier’s attention shortly after Mr. Blanky’s amazing escape from the thing on the ice, and the captain had flown into a fury, threatening to cut off the rum ration – forever – of the next man stupid enough, superstitious enough, addle-brained enough, and generally un-Christian enough to offer up scraps of food or mugs of perfectly good watered-down Indian rum to a native woman. A heathen child. (Although those sailors who had gained a peek of Lady Silence naked, or heard the surgeons discussing her, knew that she was no child and muttered as much to one another.)

Captain Crozier had also made it completely clear that he would tolerate no show of white-bear fetishes. He announced at the previous day’s Divine Service – actually a reading of Ship’s Articles, although many of the men were eager for more words from the Book of Leviathan – that he would add one extra late-night watch or two seats-of-ease thunder-jar disposal duties to each man for every single bear tooth, bear claw, bear tail, new tattoo, or other fetish item he saw on that hapless sailor. Suddenly the enthusiasm for pagan fetishes became invisible on HMS Terror – although Lieutenant Irving heard from his friends on Erebus that it was still thriving there.

Several times Irving had tried to follow the Esquimaux in her furtive movements around the ship at night, but – not wanting her to know that he was following her – he had lost her. Tonight he knew that Lady Silence was in her locker. He had followed her down the main ladder more than three hours ago, after the men’s supper and then after she had quietly and almost invisibly received her portion of “Poor John” cod and a biscuit and glass of water from Mr. Diggle and gone below with it. Irving posted a man at the forward hatch just forward of the huge stove and another curious sailor to watch the main ladderway. He arranged for these watches to trade off every four hours. If the Esquimaux woman climbed either ladder tonight – it was already past 10:00 p.m. – Irving would know where she went and when.

But for three hours now the cable locker doors had been tightly shut. The only illumination in this forward part of the hold had been the slightest leakage of light around the edges of those low, wide locker doors. The woman still had some source of illumination in there – either a candle or other open flame. This fact alone would cause Captain Crozier to have her plucked out of the cable locker in a minute and returned to her little den in the storage area forward of the lower-deck sick bay… or thrown out onto the ice. The captain feared fire in the ship as much as any other veteran sailor and he seemed to harbour no sentimental feelings toward their Esquimaux guest.

Suddenly the dim rectangle of light around the ill-fitted locker doors disappeared.

She’s gone to sleep, thought Irving. He could imagine her – naked, just as he’d seen her, pulling her cocoon of furs around her in there. Irving also could imagine one of the other officers hunting for him in the morning and finding his lifeless body curled here on a crate above the slush-flooded hull, obviously an ungentlemanly cad who had frozen to death while trying to sneak a peek at the only woman on board. It would not be an heroic death report for Lieutenant John Irving’s poor parents to read.

At that moment a veritable breeze of icy air moved through the already frigid hold. It was as if a malevolent spirit had brushed past him in the darkness. For a second, Irving felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise up, but then a simple thought struck him – it’s just a draft. As if someone has opened a door or window.

He knew then how Lady Silence magically came and went from the Terror.

Irving lit his own lantern, jumped off the crate, splashed through the sludge-slush, and tugged at the doors of the cable locker. They were secured from the inside. Irving knew that there was no lock inside the forward cable locker – there wasn’t even a lock on the outside since no one had any reason to attempt to steal cable hawsers – so therefore the native woman herself had found a way to secure it.

Irving had prepared for this contingency. He carried a thirty-inch pry bar in his right hand. Knowing that he would have to explain any damage to Lieutenant Little and possibly to Captain Crozier, he jammed the narrow end of the bar in the crack between the three-foot-high doors and leveraged hard. There came a creaking and groaning but the doors opened only an inch or two. Still holding the pry bar in place with one hand, Irving reached under his slops, greatcoat, undercoat, and waistcoat and pulled his boat knife from his belt.

Lady Silence had somehow driven nails into the backsides of the cable locker doors and run some sort of elastic rawhide material – gut? sinew? – back and forth until the doors were secured as if by a white spiderweb. There was no way that Irving could enter now without leaving a clear trace that he’d been there – the pry bar had already seen to that – so he used the knife to slash through the cat’s cradle of sinew. It was not easy. The strands of sinew were more resistant to the sharp blade than rawhide or ship’s rope.

When the strands finally fell away, Irving extended the hissing lantern into the low space.

The little cave-den he’d seen four weeks earlier was, except for the absence of any flame now other than his lantern’s, just as he remembered – the coiled hawsers pushed back and pulled almost overhead to create a sort of cave within the raised locker area – and there were the same signs that she’d been eating meals there: one of Terror’s pewter plates with only a few crumbs of Poor John remaining on it, a pewter grog mug, and some sort of storage bag that looked as if Silence had stitched it together from scraps of discarded sail canvas. Also on the locker deck was one of the ship’s small oil lanterns – the kind with just enough oil in it for the men to use when going above to one of the seats of ease at night. Its flue was still very warm to the touch when Irving removed his mitten and glove.