Ah, Your Anchor-Chain's A Fetter

The two of them have retired to their respective armchairs on their respective sides of the fireplace when Fitzjames glances up from the Illustrated London News and asks, “Do you remember that night, on King William Land?”

It’s been six years since abandoning Terror and Erebus to the ice, six years since King William Land— five spent on English shores, mending their wounds and recalling their horrors. Six-odd years since that night. They hadn’t spoken of what passed between them, not in the morning and not after, not for the whole dismal experience — after the long stretch of waiting, Fitzjames’ fever had broken and that had been that. There hadn’t been an occasion for it, in between doling out sliced seal liver and attempting to convey to local men and women in broken Inuktitut where their men were going and why.

Storytelling had perhaps saved their lives — a cluster of eight Netsilik seal hunters had become apprised of their desperate circumstances and had set up a place in their encampment for their English visitors. Crozier and Fitzjames served as spokesmen for the rest. Despite his weakness and debility, it was Fitzjames who had become the belle of the ball for his openness and good nature — the Netsilik were determined storytellers, and on the fourth day Fitzjames had accrued enough goodwill as the subject of the group’s frank curiosity to recount his own tale of triumph and torment and revenge. Crozier had served as translator. For all their limping speech, it had been a triumph — Fitzjames utterly transfigured from the man who had been so convinced of the Netsilik’s covetousness and cruelty, eight strangers enlivened by brotherly feeling (sisterly feeling, in the case of the three women among them) and lit up with the double warmth of hospitality and success. These men and women had owed their stranger guests nothing, and by giving them warmth and meat and shelter and happiness they had given them everything.

That too was a fairly good night: huddled in a snow-house, curled up on sleeping skins alongside Mr. Goodsir and Fitzjames and feeling the ache of scurvy beginning to leech away from their bones after the first taste of fresh meat. They’ve spoken of their night in the storytelling circle many times since — before a court-martial, before Lady Jane Franklin, before Ross and the rest. Through telling and retelling it had become a testimony to English grit and good nature, rather than Netsilik generosity and cooperation, and each recounting of it seemed to sand off another potentially-troubling edge from the whole thing — how had the men of the Royal Navy been so stricken that they had to resort to Esquimaux charity? What had brought them to such a pass? What had become of the rest of their men, to reduce them to some forty stragglers? Questions too dark for the drawing-room, too unpleasant for a cozy memoir.

But that is not the night Fitzjames means. He means the night of the wolfskin sleeping robe. They’ve never spoken of that night spent together, and God willing Crozier had thought they never would. There have been other nights — happier nights, in warmer climes, but never like that, the unparalleled desperation and pity and closeness to oblivion.

That memory is in its own class. Crozier clears his throat cautiously. “I may, James.”

“Then you recall what took place between us.”

“I do.”

“Then perhaps you can enlighten me on certain points of interest. Did I really tell you about the advantages of being buggered on all fours?”

Crozier coughs again, flushing under his collar. Fitzjames had said just that, and it had made a pretty image indeed. No word on who had done the buggering, or where.

“I don’t remember that.” Crozier does.

“Because I seem to recall having said something of the sort and I have no idea why I thought that was suitable conversation under the circumstances.”

“God damn you, James, is this a recent recovery in your memories of that place, or had you known about this all the while and simply failed to mention it?”

Crozier finds himself glancing around in alarm for the housekeeper. The blessed woman is nowhere to be found — looking after a pair of frostbitten bachelors had proven to be light work most days, in an arrangement that all parties found agreeable. She overlooked Crozier’s deficiencies in the domestic arts and met Fitzjames’ staunch standards for good order; her discretion and good character were only pleasant bonuses. Discretion might serve them better now than ever.

That night.

For so long it had felt like a scene from a dream, like Crozier had fabricated their coming together in some sticky corner of his imagination to fill the void of one more dismal Arctic night. Commander Fitzjames shivering and wriggling against him like a dockside wanton, the dull soft warmth of his body, and the tremendous strength still living in it — was that the tenaciousness of a dying man, or the iron resilience of one determined to survive the same bullet twice?

Fitzjames looks at him as if he’s said something very droll indeed. Cozier frowns around a mouthful of tea.

“Do you have any idea how much it’s pained me to maintain the strictest silence around a perfectly good humorous anecdote?”

Crozier could have spat. “It was hardly humorous at the time, unless my recollection fails me significantly—”

“There were wolfskins, as I recall, the whole affair was damned near primeval. I would never breathe a word of it to another living soul, of course. Two men on the brink of making our own rescue, acting on pure passion in defiance of all reason. In hindsight it savors of melodrama.”

Crozier studies the loose tiles in front of the fireplace, and tries to swallow back an incoherent swell of feeling. Melodrama, hardly — they won’t be depicting similar scenes in Drury Lane any time soon. All the small absurdities — the men’s half-thawed boots, Crozier’s awkwardness, Fitzjames’ shameless abandon. Lady Franklin would expire on the spot if she heard of it.

“It gave me great comfort, to be near you then.” If he shuts his eyes he can see it still — he can smell it, the smell of coal dust and infection. It was a kindness to be near him at the end, at the very end of the world — and now here they were, installed in a pokey little house like a couple of old bachelors, eating spinach soup and boiled salad and Spanish lemons and strawberry jam on toast. They’d starved and frozen together, brawled and grieved. Victoria will forgive them their eccentricities, even if Lady Franklin never will.

“Likewise, Francis.” Fitzjames smiles crookedly at him — he can’t help how his face is, but it gives his slightest looks of approval a roguish and irreverent skew. It’s difficult not to cuff him on the shoulder for his insolence.

“I thought you’d forgotten it, between the fever and what came afterward.”

“And I thought you were being your usual stiff self in never alluding to it. There are a very many things about that time that I cannot recall, but your exquisite kindness is not one of them.”

Sharply-felt embarrassment would have been more than enough to rub out any memory of such an encounter — and then after their return to England the unspeakable night had joined a dozen other incidents of questionable judgment in the index of things Francis Crozier would rather shoot himself than address before a court martial. It would have damned them, to be known for what they were.

“You held onto my hand. I remember that.” He’d felt the pulse of blood in the palm of his hand, the shifting bones in that pitiful extremity. He’d felt the marvelous strength in that hand.

Six years, four stone gained back and a dozen false teeth between them — Mr. Goodsir had been the luckiest in their number and had gotten off with only another gold tooth. Fitzjames had found the sensation of porcelain false teeth against enamel so disagreeable that he’d gone and had three more teeth pulled to allow for a suitable substitution. Six years, and they’ve spoken of the unspeakable at last — only lucky it hadn’t been ten years, or twenty, or a crypto-Latinate footnote in a memoir published after Crozier is dead and buried and all of Fitzjames’ youthful dash has turned to dust. The two of them have not been lovers in the interim, they have been — something else. Something beyond and beside.

“I should have known you’d never forget an incident as colorful as that.”

“Having it off in the dismal Arctic with a very dear friend?”

“If sodomy wasn’t a hanging offense you could tell it at my expense in every clubhouse and wardroom. You could make a comedy of it.”

“I wouldn’t do that, Francis. I haven’t spoken of it because I’m a jealous man, I suppose. I’ve wanted to keep the memory of it for myself.”

Fitzjames rises from his chair and crosses over — the first thing his sister-in-law Mrs. Coningham had done upon hearing of their new abode had been to send them two Turkey carpets and the strongest assurance of her own love and faith. The smaller of the two carpets makes a soft scuffling beneath Fitzjames’ slippered feet.

Crozier leans back against a well-loved cushion and shuts his eyes.

“There are stories and there are stories, James. It’s one thing to stand in a room that stinks of brandy and cigars, and talk of rations and supplies and friendly Esquimaux, and another to tell the truth. I know you hardly joy in speaking of hardship. There’s no triumph to be had there.”

Cruelty, weakness, desperation, filth, disease — blistering cold, and never-ending dark. Men like Ross are eager to forget these things. Floggings, hangings, funerals.

“You must be joking! It’s all that I can do not to cry it aloud in the streets, damn your eyes, don’t you know where I’ve been? Don’t you care to know the truth? They’ll never know what it was like, they’ll go to their shows and they’ll scour the newspapers but they’ll never have the faintest idea.”

Crozier laughs. “They can thank God for that.”

Ordinary Englishmen and their wives can never know the sublime annoyances and sudden terrors of polar exploration, no matter how many times they gaze on papier-mache icebergs at Vauxhall. All of it is frightfully banal in the end, the endless cold and the endless walking. Crozier can’t see the romance in it any more after parting on such terms.

“It’s the same in a crowded drawing-room full of Lady Jane’s subscribers. The next time I see that damned scribbling Dickens fellow I won’t be held responsible for my actions. To hear him tell it you’d think Sir John conquered the Arctic single-handed, and the rest of us were only dead weight.”

“Single-handed and on one leg,” Crozier says.

The Admiralty may forgive them for what they’ve done, but Sir John’s many admirers will not. Fitzjames settles his weight against the back of Crozier’s armchair, leading with his good arm; Crozier sets aside his cup of tea and folds his newspaper in his lap with a snap that sounds out like a shot in their muffled little parlor room. He can reach back and set his hand gingerly on Fitzjames’ sleeve — it’s a new frontier of strangeness to see Fitzjames in an informal state of dress. Neither of them will ever see command again; it’s all soft woolens and sack coats for them now.

“I loved Sir John. I respected him as a man. But Franklin is dead and gone, and we’re alive, you and I. You were there for all of it. You understand it better than any man could.”

“Not all,” Crozier said. “Not all of it, James.”

He’d left men to their own devices. He’d left them to be preyed upon by their own fears, the first and worst fears since childhood — darkness, hunger, abandonment. He’d only whetted their cruelty, and then left them alone with each other.

“The worst of it, then. The worst of it and the best.”

Fitzjames reaches out to take his hand. Crozier permits it, with a dim spark of pleasure glowing in his heart.