turn not thy back to the compass

He will lay him down in some quiet place and bury a scalpel between his ribs, or gash his throat, or gouge out his eyes and cut out his tongue – Hickey had done worse to Lieutenant Irving, that pious naif whose only crime had been too much earnestness and too little discretion. Hickey had put Lady Silence in fear of her life, not once and not twice – he deserves grave punishments for grave sins. Goodsir will set it right or die. He will kill the man, quickly, and steal away quickly too – make his way back to Crozier and Fitzjames and the rest. How glad he will be, to see their faces. Or he will die, and that will be its own relief.

Chop the head off the snake and steal away before the alarm is raised – these men all fear Hickey far more than they respect him, he’s garnered their complicity but not their love, and not one of them will set foot in his tent without his command. Goodsir is escorted to his audience in the great tent by an armed man, but Hickey dismisses him with a gesture and Goodsir is left alone – he feels as though he ought to bow, or kneel, here in audience before this obscene prince, seated cross-legged on the canvas bed. The rest of them must sleep on the ground, and here is a caulker’s mate, equipped like a conqueror.

Hickey appears to be in the middle of fashioning an axe from an iron plate. That’d do the trick nicely – dash out his brains with a tool of his own making. He sets the pieces aside, and beckons Goodsir forward – the motion of his arm casts queer shadows on the far wall in lamplight.

“Goodsir – just the man I wanted to see. Mr. Tozer had something to say about the lady. Your Esqui friend. Where is she now, do you think?”

“It’s too late now to ask for Netsilik assistance.” Crozier had wanted that – before the hanging.

“What would be the point? They live here, and we don’t. We die here. How many do you think there are, across the whole place? Four dozen? Four dozen families,

One less, now, with Mr. Hickey’s crime uncovered. “Perhaps four dozen, yes.”

“Then there’s no use crying over what can’t be changed.” Hickey spreads his arms wide, like a showman. “Well? Have you come here to give me your warmest regards? Your condolences?”

Goodsir cannot take this man’s life, but nevertheless, he wants it. He wants vengeance. He could do it now, right now, snatch up the half-formed axe and strike all thoughts from that satanic pudding of a mind – but his pretense for coming is smaller than that, even, small enough to fit in a pocket.

“I brought you something.” Goodsir fumbles in his coat; the frost and damp have made his gloves stick to his cuffs.

“Out with it, then. Come closer, I won’t stand on ceremony.”

“I thought you might like to have it, for sentimental purposes.”

All sentiments belong rightfully to someone else – to a hungry young girl somewhere who will never know how her brother died. He presses the ring into Hickey’s gloved hand and swallows down nausea.

Hickey’s gaze runs cool.

“I’m not a sentimental man, Mr. Goodsir.” He’s challenging him to object to it, to protest where the bauble came from, to cause some offense and be punished for it. Goodsir won’t give him that. “We had a year, together. Some odd months. You never knew Billy, did you?”

Goodsir held the man as he expired. He cut through the skin of Billy Gibson’s calf and trimmed out the muscle for supper. He’d known him more intimately than any man can hope to know another, and it makes Mr. Hickey’s professions of friendship a perfect farce.

Goodsir tosses his head; the motion makes him feel more debilitated than ever. “We weren’t acquainted, no.”

Hickey will kill him first, for his lack of promptness. He’ll call back Mr. Hodgson and they’ll have a little show, right there. Perhaps that’s what the axe-blade is for. Hickey will punish him for his reticence in ways Goodsir could never have imagined, ways that will make what happened to Irving look like a Sunday-school scolding – coming here at all, even with head bowed and a token of submission in hand, was a mistake. Goodsir is feeling that mistake keenly.

Hickey continues. “He showed me the ropes, all right. Taught me the difference between port and starboard, just about. I wasn’t much of a sailor when I came aboard, and without Billy, I’d have been worse. I would have gotten myself killed three months out of port – of course, you’re thinking that’d be a blessing now, aren’t you. He’d been all sorts of places, Africa and such. That man could tell a tale.”

Hickey is smiling thinly.

“I’m sorry, then,” Goodsir says stiffly. It isn’t a lie, but it’s uncomfortable nonetheless. “He was very sick. Perhaps it was a mercy.”

“Dr. Stanley’s brand of mercy.” Hickey is looking away, studying an ill-patched tear in the canvas – his own handiwork, perhaps. He’d made a poor caulker and a worse craftsman. “Billy wanted me to do it. You would have seen it if you’d looked in his eyes.”

Goodsir had seen nothing in those eyes that he hadn’t seen in the eyes of a hundred other dying men – nothing but broken, baffled resignation.

Hickey does not wait for further remark; he cuts quick and sure. “Have you come here to share my bed, Mr. Goodsir?”

Goodsir is flustered by the bluntness of the question, very nearly set back on his heels. “That is, if you’ll have me.”

“What do you mean to achieve by that, Mr. Goodsir?”

“There’s nothing to achieve. I’m frightened,” Harry says, “of the men. I need your protection. I won’t resist.”

Hickey swings his legs over the edge of the camp bed. He has new boots, and they don’t quite fit.

“You’ll be here to keep me company, then. Like a great dog.”

Goodsir shakes his head, and a rueful laugh escapes him despite himself. “I’ve seen how you treat dogs, Mr. Hickey.”

His treacherous laughter only makes Hickey smile wider, but such smiles are dangerous. “Only dogs of superior rank. I’m a right post-captain, now, here with my fleet. What shall I do with you, now that I have you? I could carve bits off you, for every time you insist on defying me. But that would leave you less useful than you started, and I can’t have that.”

“The men will talk.”

“And we can’t have that, can we? If any one of these men speaks a word to me out of turn, he’ll be the next one gracing our table. Almost makes you wish they would.”

“I want to stay in your better graces, Mr. Hickey. I’ll do whatever you require of me.”

“Whatever I require. What a world of possibilities.” Hickey pauses for a moment, straightening the collar on his ill-gotten coat like some great bird of prey. The tails spread out around him. “Tell me a story, then. That’s a start.”

“What kind of story?”

“If your accent hasn’t led me astray, I suppose you’ve had a charmed life, then. Ices and puddings every day, sugar for your tea and your mam to tuck you in at night. All the books and newspapers you could ever ask for. You must be made of stories.”

Mr. Hickey is fairly glowing – the same luminous, vicious smile he’d worn on his face when Goodsir had told him to butcher his own meats. There are many men of low birth who came on this voyage decently – it’s only a shame that Mr. Hickey is not one of them.

“I was more fortunate than some, yes.” Goodsir is numbed, inert. There’s some trick in this, and he can’t see the aim of it. His face aches, his teeth, his lips. “I’m sure I took all manner of things for granted.”

“Then sit down and make yourself at home. Tell me what you miss the most, and I’ll tell you what sort of man you are. That should pass the time nicely.”

His body is so very tired, and to be seated somewhere other than the cold ground, with unbound hands, is bliss. Even the hunger in the pit of his stomach seems muffled by comparison when his very bones are no longer protesting. If the cost of such a supreme pleasure is a story, then he’ll tell all.

Goodsir tells him about Surgeons’ Hall, the collections there it would take one man a lifetime to catalogue, the muffled peace of the dissection room, the shortage of bodies available for cutting and the summer sickness that recurred at the university like a fever. Hickey unties his neckcloth with hands like a steward’s. Goodsir tells him about his brothers – he is only talking, now, not with any intent, and Hickey is listening as a man listens to the Sunday service, in order to show his attention rather than out of excessive interest. He eases the waistcoat off Goodsir’s shoulders and the cold slips in like a knife under his ribs, alongside the caress of a hand.

Goodsir speaks of pleasure gardens and cycloramas, shabby bookstores, friends’ houses. Hickey’s eyes are on him, like the beam of a lamp. This is how men crumble before a man like Mr. Hickey – not simply at the foreign sensation of being touched without rough intent, but at the sensation of being under his gaze, having his total scrutiny. It weakens him, piece by piece and bone by bone. He is desolate under those cold eyes.

By lamplight, they lie together, head to hip on the canvas bed. Hickey opens his flies and takes his prick in his mouth – that much is enough to be astonishing, the gentleness of his touch and the absolute obscenity of the act. Goodsir cannot achieve an erection – the same vascular debility has raddled him like every other man – but Hickey coaxes him into curious pleasures. If he calls him by another name as he strokes the crease of his hip or if there is little of the gleeful seducer about him as he leads Harry down to ruin, then there are no witnesses.

He finishes him off with exquisite care, spitting on the ground

“That should help you sleep, Mr. Goodsir.”

Hickey draws up the sleeping-robes around him like a nursemaid; Harry sits up uneasily to re-order himself more to his own liking. He is faintly stunned, and not only by the act itself.

He could do it now – both hands around Hickey’s thin white throat. He could kill him now, soundlessly. But Goodsir is weak, and Hickey is only a man like any other. Only an organism, and not a monster. This is the gravest defeat.