Silence will follow him if he chooses this path — he knows she will — even though it means the death of everything she is and everything she lives for here.
But he wouldn’t ask her to. If he were to go south after his crew, he would go alone because he suspects that, despite all his new knowledge and skills, he would die on such a search. If he doesn’t die on the ice, there will be an injury on the river he would have to follow south. If the river or injury or illness along the way don’t kill him, he might encounter hostile Esquimaux groups or the even more savage Indians farther south. Englishmen — especially the old arctic hands — love to believe that Esquimaux are primitive but peaceful people, slow to anger, always resistant to war and strife. But Crozier has seen the truth in his dreams: they are human beings, as unpredictable as any other race of man, and often descend into warfare and murder and, in hard times, even cannibalism.
A much shorter and surer route to rescue than going south, he knows, would be to head due east from here across the ice before the ice pack opens for the summer — if it opens at all — hunting and trapping as he goes, then crossing the Boothia Peninsula to its eastern coast, traveling north to Fury Beach or the old expedition sites there. Once at Fury Beach he could just wait for a whaler or rescue ship. The chances for his survival and rescue in that direction are excellent.
But what if he makes it to civilization… back to England? Alone. He will always be the captain who let all his men die. The courtmartial will be inevitable, its outcome predetermined. Whatever the court’s punishment might be, the shame will be a lifelong sentence.
But this is not what dissuades him from heading east or south.
The woman next to him is carrying his child.
Of all his failures, it is Francis Crozier’s failures as a man which hurt and haunt him the most.
He is almost fifty-three years old and he has loved only once before this — proposing marriage to a spoiled child, a mean-spirited girl-woman who had teased him and then used him for her pleasure the way his sailors used dockside chippies. No, he thought, the way I used dockside chippies.
Every morning now and often in the night he awakens next to Silence after sharing her dreams, knowing that she has shared his, feeling her warmth against him, feeling himself responding to that warmth. Every day they go out into the cold and fight for life together — using her craft and knowledge to prey on other souls, to eat other souls, so that their two lifespirit souls can live awhile longer.
She is carrying our child. My child.
But that is irrelevant to the decision he must make in the next few days.
He is almost fifty-three years old and he is now being asked to believe in something so preposterous that the very thought of it should make him laugh. He is asked — if he understands the strings and the dreams, and he believes he does at long last — to do something so terrible and so painful that if the experience does not kill him, it may drive him mad.
He has to believe that such counter-intuitive insanity is the right thing to do. He has to believe that his dreams — mere dreams — and that his love for this woman should make him surrender a lifetime of rationality to become…
Become what?
Someone and something else.
Pulling the sledge next to Silence under a sky filled with violent color, he reminds himself that Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier believes in nothing.
Or rather, if he believes in anything, it is in Hobbes’s Leviathan.
Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
This cannot be denied by any rational man. Francis Crozier, in spite of his dreams and headaches and strange new will to believe, remains a rational man.
If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the arctic night under a sky gone mad, toward a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilized hearth?
And toward a fate too frightening to imagine.
On their fifth day pulling along the coast, they come to the end of the island and Silence leads them northeast out onto the ice. The going is slower here — there are the inevitable pressure ridges and shifting floes — and they have to work much harder. They also travel more slowly so as not to break the sledge. They use their blubber stove to melt snow for drinking water but do not pause to catch fresh meat, despite the many breathing-hole domes Silence points out in the ice.
The sun now rises for thirty minutes or so each day. Crozier cannot be sure of the time. His watch disappeared with his clothing after Hickey shot him and after Silence rescued him… however she did that. She has never told him.
That was the first time I died, he thinks.
Now he is being asked to die again — to die as what he was in order to become something else.
But how many men get such a second chance? How many captains who have watched one hundred twenty-five men in their expedition die or disappear would want it?
I could disappear.
Crozier has seen the mass of scars on his arm, chest, belly, and leg each night when he strips to crawl beneath the sleeping robes, and he can feel and imagine how terrible the bullet and shotgun-pellet scars are on his back. They could be an explanation and excuse for a lifetime of silence about his past.
He can hike east across Boothia, hunt and fish in the rich, warming waters off the east coast there, hide from Royal Navy and other English rescue ships, and wait for an American whaling ship. If it takes two or three years there before one comes, he can survive that long. He is sure of it now.
And then, instead of going home to England — has England ever been home for him? — he can tell his American rescuers that he has no memory of what has happened to him or what ship he belonged to — he can show his terrible wounds as evidence — and go to America with them at the end of the whaling season. There he can start a new life.
How many men get a chance to start such a new life at his age? Many men would want to.
Would Silence go with him? Would Silence bear the stares and laughter of sailors and the harsher stares and whispers of “civilized” Americans in some New England city or New York? Would she trade her furs in for calico dresses and whalebone corsets, knowing that she would always be the ultimate stranger in the ultimate strange land?
She would.
Crozier knows this as surely as he knows anything.
She would follow him there. And she would die there — and die soon. Of misery and of the strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison from the Goldner tins poured into Fitzjames — unseen, vile, deadly.
He knows this as well.
But Crozier could raise his son in America and have a new life in that almost-civilized country, perhaps captain a private sailing ship there. He has been a total failure as a Royal Navy and Discovery Service captain and as an officer and as a gentleman — well, he was never a gentleman — but no one in America would ever need to know that.
No, no, a serious sailing ship would take him to places and ports where he might be known. If he is recognized by any English Naval officer, he would be hanged as a deserter. But a small fishing ship… fishing out of some small New England harbour village, perhaps, with an American wife waiting in port to raise his child with him after Silence dies.