no milk to our tea

“Tell me about Singapore.” Crozier makes a better captain than a nurse, but he props him upright enough to breathe a little easier, and to take the weight off the wound in his back. “You mentioned an adventure there.”

“Some adventure. If only you’d found it in yourself to tolerate my long, tedious stories three years ago, when I still had the breath to tell them.”

Crozier glances downward. “I was a different man, then. A worse one.”

“Less inclined to suffer fools?”

Fitzjames tries to smile — his split lips no longer smart, but his teeth are aching in his head. The wind whistles in the canvas. Crozier settles in next to him on the blankets, doing his best to block the influx of cold air with his sorry body.

“I’d like to think about someplace warmer than this, if you don’t mind. Tell me about Singapore.”

Never mind that anywhere would be warmer than this. A wet winter in Aberdeen would be warmer than this accursed place. “Shall I tell you about the architecture? The people? The landscape? The coastline? Or the scandal?”

“Tell me about the scandal, John.”

Fitzjames takes a breath, feeling his throat crackle. “Well, then. The scandal.” The scandal that never took place. Whatever Crozier must expect — bribery, preferential treatment, God forgive him, an unwanted child — it’s not as if he can go on and spill the truth. “One of Sir John Barrow’s sons — it doesn’t matter now, why am I being coy? His eldest son, George. I was twenty-eight, he was thirty-two. Chief clerk of the Colonial Office then. He’d been discovered in a certain house. I knew the name. I knew the man, and I knew his reputation. There was a certain house, where a number of our men had rooms. It had been the site of — a quarrel. It would be difficult to mistake what kind of place it was. A young man had been wounded over a matter of honor.”

His skills in oratory aren’t what they were. Fitzjames has to break off, wheezing for breath.

“An Englishman. I came as quickly as I could — young Barrow was there at his desk in a powder-burned silk robe and not a stitch besides. Even a child could understand it. I took the liberty of removing certain papers. I persuaded the destruction of others that had already been sent. Barrow paid the surgeon for his discretion. I loaned him the money. That’s all it was. A grubby little affair, snuffed out before its consequences could become common knowledge.”

When it’s all said, he’s out of breath. Crozier doesn’t interject phrases to show his interest, he simply listens. Fitzjames watches his face for recognition, and for the disgust that will follow it. This sickness has left him worn raw, nothing but a single exposed nerve — every sound reverberates like a gunshot, every spot of color glows like a rare flower. Crozier’s face is hazed in pink, picked out in pale light. Beautiful, beautiful.

Crozier looks at him with faint concern, but no contempt. He is not the kind of listener whose attentive looks engender confidence, but the time for secrets between them has passed — that was before the carnivale, if even then.

“That’s a hell of a thing to do for a man you’ve had nothing to do with,” Crozier says.

It’s so staunch an answer that Fitzjames can’t keep from laughing. The sound tears at his throat; he can taste blood. “Why do you think I knew the place, Francis?”

“Why, by reputation—” Crozier is coloring slightly, huddling in his coat. He has understood.

“You’re too charitable. I’m not married, nor have I ever entertained the prospect of marriage. I can’t stomach the thought of a mistress or a sweetheart. I love women, but I am—” Indiscriminate. Debauched. “I have—” I have yearnings beyond my control. “I am a versatile man, Francis.”

His haunts in those days were disorderly houses and taverns — always with discretion, never with promises or flattery or force when a like-minded individual could be found, man or woman. Those days are behind him now, but the inclinations remain. Fitzjames is rather beyond the pangs of mortification at this point — there is nothing any man can do to him now, either with praise or condemnation.

Crozier’s response is diplomatic. “Ah.”

“There is fraternal feeling among men of our type. Or at least there ought to be. I won’t pretend it was entirely without self-interest — knowing he was Barrow’s son, and that he’d be in a tight spot. He needed money and I had it. He needed a friend to vouch for him.” Fitzjames tries to raise his head, acutely embarrassed. Crozier soothes him back into place. “It seemed — like a stroke of luck, finding him there and helping the matter to disappear. I had no polar experience — Barrow would have sent me anywhere, he could have sent me anywhere. The Clio was meant as my reward. This was meant to be my reward.”

“You’ve made a fine captain, however you came by it. No man could have done better.” Crozier has wonderfully knowing eyes. Perhaps he’s always known.

“It began in blood, Francis. George tried to impress on me his personal gratitude, later on, but I evaded him.”

“The bloody cheek of it all. You must have saved his hide, James, and that’s how he repays you? Barrow should’ve made you a commander for that alone.”

Crozier is trying to humor him, and it’s working.

“It’s too long ago. I can’t remember how I felt.” Fitzjames licks his lips with a thick and rusty tongue. “You know, they shot my friend Robert, at Malaga. They hauled him out in chains and shot him. His brother John gave me some of his papers, he warned me about reading them but I couldn’t resist the temptation. They were terribly sad, but more than that they were — ordinary. He was resigned to it. He knew the stakes he was playing for, and he kept at it. I thought that was bravery, once. Now I don’t know.”

Robert is dead — and all thoughts of how fine it would have been to have died with him in Spain are hard to recall now. Dead for liberty. They’re a young man’s thoughts. Robert has passed on ahead into some indistinct kind of afterlife, remembered only by his friends. Fitzjames follows after him too late. In his mind’s eye Robert will always be older and wiser than himself, lit up with intelligence and ferocity — the memory is of the sunlight spilling across his shoulders and dappling his yellow hair, not a sorry figure in a beshitten shirt toppled over on a Spanish mud patch. As he lived, never as he died.

Crozier strokes the back of his hand. “He must have been a fine man. Perhaps it wasn’t a state of resignation, but one of peace.”

That’s a hopeful thought — marching into certain death with a kind of jaunty ease. That fits him. Fair-haired fiery Robert meeting death with his eyes open.

“He was Irish, you know. His last night on earth, he wrote some lines — but it’s been ten years,” Fitzjames says, “and I can’t remember the words. I used to write verses, did you know that? This is my last night, Francis.”

Fitzjames rests his head against Crozier’s arm, and Crozier lets him. There’s nothing more to be done. The night will only grow colder, the wind will wear away all signs of their passage — everything but what was discarded, unopened tins and spoons engraved with family emblems and whole crates of prayer books. There will be bones in these places.

They made it this far, at least. James pokes his tongue thoughtfully through the place where one of his molars used to be.

“What is it?”

“I must have swallowed a tooth,” Fitzjames says. “Lucky thing, that.”

Choking on a tooth would be a terrible way to die. Crozier cracks a smile. “Ah, but you can swallow, then.”

“Sometimes.”

Crozier lifts a canteen to his lips and helps him to drink — his chapped hands help lift Fitzjames’ chin. Fitzjames watches him, past his crusted eyelashes. What a man Crozier is, with all the sullenness and drink cleared away — a great-hearted man.

Fitzjames’ tongue is swollen and thick in his mouth. He presses it wetly against his front teeth, testing them.

“Kiss me, Francis.”

“What, like Nelson?”

“I’ll give you my blessing.”

“No blessing is necessary.” Crozier squeezes his hand. The bones ache fiercely, all the small bones of his fingers. James tries to smile again, and grimaces.

“In another life we would have fought side by side.”

Crozier gives a weak laugh. “In another life you would have found me an insufferable bore. I’d have been the butt of one of your jokes.”

“Never, never.” His own breathing comes only shallowly, in wheezes. The freshly opened wounds in his side keep him bracketed with pain, the blood is running again and he can tell without even looking. And think, he’d been so proud of himself for rallying well with four bullet holes in his body, he’d been so impressed with the lack of infection. The next time he’s shot, he’ll have to do it differently.

Crozier kisses his forehead, he kisses the top of his head where the scalp is tender and scabbed. Fitzjames lets out a rattling breath. If a blessing escapes him, it is in that breath.

The two of them lie there together — face to face and hand to hand. The soft exhalation of Crozier’s breathing ruffles a lock of lank hair against Fitzjames’ cheek. In other circumstances it would be — comically stiff, two tall men trying to avoid overt impropriety even at the brink. Here it is the only thing that soothes him, and the only thing that washes away the aches of his wounds. He could die like this, as long as he wasn’t alone, he could die among the men who could have saved this expedition. Crozier won’t leave him here.

Sleep catches him up easier than it has in years. It settles over him like the fur lining of a coat.

*

He does not die. When he wakes in the polar dark, roused from unconsciousness by the pain, the regret he feels is unbearable — he can’t even die like this, he must wait to deteriorate even worse than he has. Death will be harder than this. The heat and weight of Crozier’s sleeping body are the only consolations — Fitzjames can lie very still, as every broken-glass ache returns to his bones, and pretend.