“What the fuck?” he says. “What?”
Sumner doesn’t respond. He looks at the man he has just hit and realizes with a jolt that it is not Corbyn at all. They are roughly similar in age and height certainly, but apart from that, there is little true resemblance — the hair, the whiskers, the shape and features of the face, even the uniform is wrong. Sumner’s rage dissolves, he returns to himself, to his own body, to the deep humiliations of the real.
“I thought you were someone else,” he tells the man. “Corbyn.”
“Who the fuck is Corbyn?”
“A regimental surgeon.”
“Which regiment?”
“The Lancers.”
The man shakes his head.
“I should find a constable and have you jailed,” he says. “I swear to God I should.”
Sumner tries to help him, but the man pushes him away. He touches his cheek again, winces, then looks carefully at Sumner. The cheek is reddening, but there is no blood.
“Who are you?” he says. “I recognize that face.”
“I’m no one,” Sumner tells him.
“Who are you?” he says again. “Don’t fucking lie to me.”
“I’m no one,” he says. “No one at all.”
The man nods.
“Come here then,” he says.
Sumner steps closer. The man places his hand on Sumner’s shoulder. Sumner smells the port wine on his breath, the bandoline in his hair.
“If you’re really no one,” he says, “I don’t suppose you’ll object too much to this.”
He leans in six inches and drives his knee high up into Sumner’s balls. The pain ricochets through Sumner’s stomach and out into his chest and face. He drops to his knees on the wet pavement, groaning and wordless.
The man, who he thought was Corbyn but isn’t, leans down and whispers gently into his ear.
“The Hastings is gone,” he says. “Sunk. Smashed to little pieces by a berg, and every fucker in her bar none is drowned, for sure.”
* * *
The next afternoon, they find a capsized whaleboat and then, a little while later, an intermittent half-mile-long slew of empty blubber casks and shattered timbers. They row about in slow circles, picking up pieces of the debris, examining them, conferring, then dropping them helplessly back into the water. Cavendish for once is pale and silent, his normal piss and windiness crushed by the weight of unlooked-for catastrophe. He scans the nearby ice floes with the telescope but sees nothing and no one. He spits, curses, turns aside. Sumner, through the green and melancholic haze of his sickness, realizes that their best hope of rescue is now gone. Some of the men begin to weep and others start clumsily praying. Otto checks the charts and takes a reading with the sextant.
“We’re past Cape Hay,” he calls across to Cavendish. “We can reach Pond’s Bay before night. When we get there we’ll find another ship, God willing.”
“If we don’t, we’ll have to winter o’er,” Cavendish says. “That’s been done afore.”
Drax, who is chained to the rearmost rowing bench and is thus the closest man to Cavendish, who is at the steering oar, snorts at this.
“It hant been done afore,” he says, “and it hant been done afore because it can’t be done. Not without a ship to shelter in and ten times the provisions we have left.”
“We’ll find a ship,” Cavendish says again. “And if we don’t find one, we’ll winter o’er. Whichever way it goes, we’ll all live long enough to see you hanged in England, you can be sure of that.”
“I’d be happier hanged than fucking starved to death or frozen.”
“We should drown you now, you cavilling bastard. That’d be one less fucking mouth to feed.”
“You wouldn’t like my dying words too well if you tried that trick,” Drax answers. “Although there’s others here might find ’em interesting enough.”
Cavendish looks at him for a time, then leans forwards, takes a firm handful of his waistcoat, and replies in a fierce whisper.
“You hant got nothing on me, Henry,” he says. “So don’t ever think you do.”
“I int squeezing, Michael,” Drax says calmly. “I’m just reminding. The time may never come, but if it comes, it’d suit you to be ready, that’s all.”
Drax picks up his oar, Cavendish calls out the order, and they begin to row again. To the west, a long line of coal-dark mountains, ashen-tipped, rise up out of the hammered grayness of the sea. The two whaleboats move gradually onward. After several hours, they reach the craggy tip of Bylot Island and enter the mouth of Pond’s Bay. Rain clouds gather and disperse; the light is slowly failing. Cavendish peers eagerly through his telescope, sees first nothing, then, wobbling on the horizon, the black outline of another vessel. He waves and points. He shouts to Otto.
“A ship,” he calls. “A fucking ship. Over yonder. See there.”
They all see it, but it is far away and seems to be steaming south already. The smoke from its stack makes a faint angled smudge against the sky, like a thumbed-out pencil line. They give urgent chase, but the effort is futile. In another half hour, the ship has disappeared into the haze, and they are alone again on the dark, brimful sea, with only the brown snow-clad hills about them and the scuffed and mournful evening sky above.
“What kind of fucking watch are they keeping that they don’t see a whaleboat in distress?” Cavendish says bitterly.
“’Appen the ship is full,” someone answers him. “’Appen they’re heading home with all the rest.”
“No fucker’s full this year,” Cavendish says. “If they had anything about them, any fucking thing at all, they’d still be out here fishing.”
No one answers him. They look out into the pallid misty drabness seeking for a sign but see nothing.
As darkness falls, they pull over to a nearby headland and raise the tent on a thin strip of gravel beach backed by low brown cliffs. After eating, Cavendish orders the men to break up one of the whaleboats with hand axes and build a beacon fire with its salvaged timbers. If there is another ship out there in the bay, he argues, they will see the blaze and come to rescue them. Although the men appear to doubt this reasoning, they do as they are told. They turn the boat over and begin to smash apart its hull, keel, and stern piece. Sumner, wrapped in a blanket, shivering and queasy still, stands beside the tent and watches them at their work. Otto approaches and stands next to him.
“This is how I dreamed it,” he says. “The fire. The broken whaleboat. Everything the same.”