For my parents
1
Perhaps he’ll die this time.
He 1nds this doesn’t worry him. Maybe because he’s so cold he has a drunkard’s grip on his mind. When thoughts come, they’re translucent, free- swimming medusae. As the Arctic wind bites at his hands and feet, his thoughts slop against his skull. They’ll be the last thing to freeze over.
He knows he is walking, though he can no longer feel it. The ice in front of him bounces and retreats, so he must be moving forward. He has a gun across his back, a bag across his front. Their weight is both meaningless and Sisyphean.
He is in a good mood. If his lips were not beyond sensation, he would whistle.
In the distance, he hears the boom of cannon 1re. Three in a row, like a sneeze. The ship is signaling.
Chapter no 1
The interviewer said my name, which made my thoughts clip. I don’t say my name, not even in my head. She’d said it correctly, which people generally don’t.
“I’m Adela,” she said. She had an eye patch and blond hair the same color and texture as hay. “I’m the Vice Secretary.”
“Of…?” “Have a seat.”
This was my sixth round of interviews. The job I was interviewing for was an internal posting. It had been marked SECURITY CLEARANCE REQUIRED because it was gauche to use the TOP SECRET stamps on paperwork with salary bands. I’d never been cleared to this security level, hence why no one would tell me what the job was. As it paid almost triple my current salary, I was happy to taste ignorance. I’d had to produce squeaky-clean grades in 1rst aid, Safeguarding Vulnerable People, and the Home Office’s Life in the UK test to get this far. I knew that I would be working closely with refugees of high-interest status and particular needs, but I didn’t know from whence they were Aeeing. I’d assumed politically important defectors from Russia or China.
Adela, Vice Secretary of God knows what, tucked a blond strand behind her ear with an audible crunch.
“Your mother was a refugee, wasn’t she?” she said, which is a demented way to begin a job interview.
“Yes, ma’am.” “Cambodia,” she said. “Yes, ma’am.”
I’d been asked this question a couple of times over the course of the interview process. Usually people asked it with an upward lilt, expecting me to correct them, because no one’s from Cambodia. You don’t look Cambodian, one early clown had said to me, then glowed like a pilot light because the interview was being recorded for staP monitoring and training purposes. He’d get a warning for that one. People say this to me a lot, and what they mean is: you look like one of the late-entering forms of white—Spanish maybe—and also like you’re not dragging a genocide around, which is good because that sort of thing makes people uncomfortable.
There was no genocide-adjacent follow-up: Any family still there [understanding moue]? Do you ever visit [sympathetic smile]? Beautiful country [darkening with tears]; when I visited [visible on lower lid] they were so friendly.… Adela just nodded. I wondered if she’d go for the rare fourth option and
pronounce the country dirty.
“She would never refer to herself as a refugee, or even a former refugee,” I added. “It’s been quite weird to hear people say that.”
“The people you will be working with are also unlikely to use the term. We prefer ‘expat.’ In answer to your question, I’m the Vice Secretary of Expatriation.”
“And they are expats from…?” “History.”
“Sorry?”
Adela shrugged. “We have time-travel,” she said, like someone describing the coPee machine. “Welcome to the Ministry.”
Anyone who has ever watched a 1lm with time-travel, or read a book with time- travel, or dissociated on a delayed public transport vehicle by considering the concept of time-travel, will know that the moment you start to think about the physics of it, you are in a crock of shit. How does it work? How can it work? I exist at the beginning and end of this account simultaneously, which is a kind of time-travel, and I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it. All you need to know
is that in your near future, the British government developed the means to travel through time but had not yet experimented with doing it.
In order to avoid the chaos inherent in changing the course of history—if “history” could be considered a cohesive and singular chronological narrative, another crock of shit—it was agreed that it would be necessary to extract people from historical war zones, natural disasters, and epidemics. These expatriates to the twenty-1rst century would have died in their own timelines anyway. Removing them from the past ought not to impact the future.
No one had any idea what traveling through time might do to the human body. So the second reason that it was important to pick people who would have died in their own timelines is that they might well die in ours, like deep-sea 1sh brought up to the beach. Perhaps there were only so many epochs the human nervous system could stand. If they got the temporal equivalent of the bends and sluiced into gray-and-pink jelly in a Ministry laboratory, at least it wouldn’t be, statistically speaking, murder.
Assuming that the “expats” survived, that meant they would be people, which is a complicating factor. When dealing with refugees, especially en masse, it’s better not to think of them as people. It messes with the paperwork. Nevertheless, when the expats were considered from a human rights perspective, they 1t the Home Office criteria for asylum seekers. It would be ethically sparse to assess nothing but the physiological ePects of time-travel. To know whether they had truly adjusted to the future, the expats needed to live in it, monitored by a full-time companion, which was, it transpired, the job I’d successfully interviewed for. They called us bridges, I think because “assistant” was below our pay grades.
Language has gone on a long walk from the nineteenth century. “Sensible” used to mean “sensitive.” “Gay” used to mean “jolly.” “Lunatic asylum” and “asylum seeker” both use the same basic meaning of “asylum”: an inviolable place of refuge and safety.
We were told we were bringing the expats to safety. We refused to see the blood and hair on the Aoor of the madhouse.
I was thrilled to get the job. I’d plateaued where I was, in the Languages department of the Ministry of Defence. I worked as a translator-consultant specializing in Southeast Asia, speci1cally Cambodia. I’d learned the languages I translated from at university. Despite my mother speaking Khmer to us at home, I hadn’t retained it through my formative years. I came to my heritage as a foreigner.
I liked my Languages job well enough, but I’d wanted to become a 1eld agent, and after failing the 1eld exams twice I was at a bit of a loss for career trajectory. It wasn’t what my parents had had in mind for me. When I was a very small child, my mother made her ambitions known. She wanted me to be prime minister. As prime minister, I would “do something” about British foreign policy and I would also take my parents to fancy governmental dinners. I would have a chauPeur. (My mother never learned to drive; the chauPeur was important.) Regrettably she also drilled the karmic repercussions of gossip and lying into me—the fourth Buddhist precept is unambiguous on this—and thus at the age of eight my political career was over before it began.
My younger sister was a far more skilled dissembler. I was dutiful with language, and she was evasive, pugnacious with it. This is why I became a translator and she became a writer—or at least she tried to become a writer and became a copy editor. I was paid considerably more than her, and my parents understood what my job was, so I would say that karma worked in my favor. My sister would say something along the lines of: Go fuck yourself. But I know she means it in a friendly way, probably.
Even on the very day we were to meet the expats, we were still arguing about the word “expat.”
“If they’re refugees,” said Simellia, one of the other bridges, “then we should call them refugees. They’re not moving to a summer cottage in Provence.”
“They will not necessarily think of themselves as refugees,” said Vice Secretary Adela.
“Has anyone asked them what they think?”
“They see themselves as kidnap victims, mostly. Nineteen-sixteen thinks he’s behind enemy lines. Sixteen-sixty-1ve thinks she’s dead.”
“And they’re being released to us today?”
“The Wellness team think their adjustment will be negatively impacted if they’re held on the wards any longer,” said Adela, dry as a 1ling system.
We—or rather, Simellia and Adela—were having this argument in one of the Ministry’s interminable rooms: pebble-colored with lights embedded in the ceiling, modular in a way that suggested opening a door would lead to another identical space, and then another, and then another. Rooms like this are designed to encourage bureaucracy.
This was supposed to be the 1nal direct brie1ng of the 1ve bridges: Simellia, Ralph, Ivan, Ed, and me. We’d all gone through a six-round interview process that put the metaphorical drill to our back teeth and bored. Have you now, or ever, been convicted of or otherwise implicated in any activity that might undermine your security status? Then nine months of preparation. The endless working groups and background checks. The construction of shell jobs in our old departments (Defence, Diplomatic, Home Office). Now we were here, in a room where the electricity was audible in the light bulbs, about to make history.
“Don’t you think,” said Simellia, “that throwing them into the world when they think they’re in the afterlife or on the western front might impede their adjustment? I ask both as a psychologist and a person with a normal level of empathy.”
Adela shrugged.
“It might. But this country has never accepted expatriates from history before. They might die of genetic mutations within the year.”
“Should we expect that?” I asked, alarmed.
“We don’t know what to expect. That’s why you have this job.”
The chamber the Ministry had prepared for the handover had an air of antique ceremony: wood panels, oil paintings, high ceiling. It had rather more éclat than the modular rooms. I think someone on the administration team with a sense of
drama had arranged the move. In its style and in the particular way the windows Aattened the sunlight, the room had probably remained unchanged since the nineteenth century. My handler, Quentin, was already there. He looked bilious, which is how excitement shows on some people.
Two agents led my expat through the door at the other end of the room before I’d adjusted to knowing he was coming.
He was pale, drawn. They’d clipped his hair so short that his curls were Aattened. He turned his head to look around the room, and I saw an imposing nose in pro1le, like a hothouse Aower growing out of his face. It was strikingly attractive and strikingly large. He had a kind of resplendent excess of feature that made him look hyperreal.
He stood very straight and eyed my handler. Something about me had made him look and then look away.
I stepped forward, and his eyeline shifted. “Commander Gore?”
“Yes.”
“I’m your bridge.”
Graham Gore (Commander, Royal Navy; c.1809–c.1847) had been in the twenty-1rst century for 1ve weeks, though, like the other expats, he’d been lucid for only a handful of those days. The extraction process had merited a fortnight of hospitalization. Two of the original seven expats had died because of it, and only 1ve remained. He’d been treated for pneumonia, for severe frostbite, for the early stages of scurvy, and two broken toes on which he had been blithely walking. Lacerations too, from a Taser—he’d shot at two of the team members who’d come to expatriate him, and a third was forced to 1re.
He’d attempted to Aee the Ministry wards three times and had to be sedated. After he’d stopped 1ghting back, he’d gone through a ground zero orientation with the psychologists and the Victorianists. For ease of adjustment, the expats were only given immediate, applicable knowledge. He came to me knowing the basics about the electric grid, the internal combustion engine, and the plumbing
system. He didn’t know about the First and Second World Wars or the Cold War, the s*xual liberation of the 1960s, or the war on terror. They had started by telling him about the dismantling of the British Empire, and it hadn’t gone down well.
The Ministry had arranged a car to take us to the house. He knew, theoretically, about cars, but it was his 1rst time in one. He stared through the window, pallid with what I assumed was wonder.
“If you have any questions,” I said, “please feel free to ask. I appreciate that this is a lot to take in.”
“I am delighted to discover that, even in the future, the English have not lost the art of ironic understatement,” he said without looking at me.
He had a mole on his throat, close to his earlobe. The only existing daguerreotype of him showed him in 1840s fashion, with a high cravat. I stared at the mole.
“This is London?” he asked 1nally. “Yes.”
“How many people live here now?” “Nearly nine million.”
He sat back and shut his eyes.
“That’s far too large a number to be real,” he murmured. “I am going to forget that you told me.”
The house that the Ministry had provided was a late-Victorian redbrick, originally designed for local workers. Gore would have seen them built, if he’d lived into his eighties. As it was, he was thirty-seven years old and had not experienced crinolines, A Tale of Two Cities, or the enfranchisement of the working classes.
He got out of the car and looked up and down the street with the weariness of a man who has traveled across the continent and is yet to 1nd his hotel. I hopped out after him. I tried to see what he could see. He would ask questions about the cars parked on the street, perhaps, or the streetlamps.
“Do you have keys?” he asked. “Or do doors operate by magic passwords now?”
“No, I have—”
“Open sesame,” he said darkly to the letter box.
Inside, I told him I would make tea. He said he would like, with my permission, to look at the house. I gave it. He made a swift tour. He trod 1rmly, as if he expected resistance. When he came back to the kitchen-diner and leaned against the doorjamb, I seized up painfully. Stage fright, but also the shock of his impossible presence catching up with me. The more he was there—and he kept on being there—the more I felt like I was elbowing my way out of my body. A narrative-altering thing was happening to me, that I was experiencing all over, and I was trying to view myself from the outside to make sense of it. I chased a tea bag to the rim of a mug.
“We are to—cohabit?” he said.
“Yes. Every expat has a bridge for a year. We’re here to help you adjust to your new life.”
He folded his arms and regarded me. His eyes were hazel, scrawled faintly with green, and thickly lashed. They were both striking and uncommunicative.
“You are an unmarried woman?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s not an improper arrangement, in this century. Once you’re deemed able to enter the community, outside of the Ministry or to anyone not involved in the project, you should refer to me as your housemate.”
“‘Housemate,’” he repeated disdainfully. “What does this word imply?” “That we are two unpartnered people, sharing the cost of the rent on a house,
and are not romantically involved.” He looked relieved.
“Well, regardless of the custom, I’m not certain it’s a decent arrangement,” he said. “But if you’ve allowed nine million people to live here, perhaps it’s a necessity.”
“Mm. Beside your elbow is a white box with a handle. It’s a refrigerator—a fridge, we call it. Could you open the door and take out the milk, please?”
He opened the fridge and stared inside. “An icebox,” he said, interested.
“Pretty much. Powered by electricity. I think electricity has been explained to you—”
“Yes. I am also aware that the earth revolves around the sun. To save you a little time.”
He opened a crisper.
“Carrots still exist, then. Cabbage too. How will I recognize milk? I’m hoping you will tell me that you still use milk from cows.”
“We do. Small bottle, top shelf, blue lid.”
He hooked his 1nger into the handle and brought it to me. “Maid’s got the day oP?”
“No maid. No cook either. We do most things for ourselves.” “Ah,” he said, and paled.
He was introduced to the washing machine, the gas cooker, the radio, the vacuum cleaner.
“Here are your maids,” he said. “You’re not wrong.”
“Where are the thousand-league boots?” “We don’t have those yet.”
“Invisibility cloak? Sun-resistant wings of Icarus?” “Likewise.”
He smiled. “You have enslaved the power of lightning,” he said, “and you’ve used it to avoid the tedium of hiring help.”
“Well,” I said, and I launched into a preplanned speech about class mobility and domestic labor, touching on the minimum wage, the size of an average household, and women in the workforce. It took a full 1ve minutes of talking, and by the end I’d moved into the same tremulous liquid register I used to use for pleading with my parents for a curfew extension.
When I was 1nished, all he said was, “A dramatic fall in employment following the ‘First’ World War?”
“Ah.”
“Maybe you can explain that to me tomorrow.”
This is everything I remember about my earliest hours with him. We separated and spent the fading day bobbing shyly around each other like clots in a lava lamp. I was expecting him to have a time-travel-induced psychotic break and perhaps chew or fold me with murderous intent. Mostly he touched things, with a compulsive brushing motion I was later to learn was because of permanent nerve damage from frostbite. He Aushed the toilet 1fteen times in a row, silent as a kestrel while the cistern re1lled, which could have been wonder or embarrassment. At hour two, we tried to sit in the same room. I looked up when he breathed in sharply through his nose to see him pulling his 1ngers away from a light bulb in the lamp. He retreated to his bedroom for a while, and I went to sit on the back porch. It was a mild spring evening. Idiot-eyed wood pigeons lumbered across the lawn, belly-deep in clover.
Upstairs, I heard a cautious woodwind polonaise strike up, waver, and cease. A few moments later, his tread in the kitchen. The pigeons took oP, their wings making a noise like swallowed laughter.
“Did the Ministry provide the Aute?” he asked the back of my head. “Yes. I told them it might be grounding for you.”
“Oh. Thank you. You—knew I played the Aute?”
“A couple of extant letters from you and referring to you mention it.”
“Did you read the letters that mentioned my mania for arson and my lurid history of backstreet goose-wrestling?”
I turned around and stared at him. “A joke,” he supplied.
“Ah. Are there going to be a lot of those?”
“It depends on how often you spring on me such statements as ‘I have read your personal letters.’ May I join you?”
“Please.”
He sat down beside me, keeping a space of about a foot between our bodies. The neighborhood made its noises, which all sounded like something else. The wind in the trees sounded like rushing water. The squirrels chattered like children. Distant conversation recalled the clatter of pebbles underfoot. I felt I should have been translating them for him, as if he didn’t know about trees.
He was drumming his 1ngers on the porch. “I suppose,” he said carefully, “that your era has evolved past such tasteless vices as tobacco?”
“You arrived about 1fteen years too late. It’s going out of fashion. I’ve got some good news for you though.”
I got up—he turned his head, so as not to have my bare calves in his eyeline— fetched a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from a drawer in the kitchen, and came back.
“Here. Something else I got the Ministry to lay on. Cigarettes more or less replaced cigars in the twentieth century.”
“Thank you. I’m sure I will adapt.”
He busied himself with working out how to remove the plastic 1lm—which he put carefully away in his pocket—Aicking the Zippo, and frowning at the warning label. I stared at the lawn and felt like I was manually operating my lungs.
A few seconds later, he exhaled with obvious relief. “Better?”
“It embarrasses me to convey just how much better. Hm. In my time, well- bred young ladies did not indulge in tobacco. But I note that a great deal has changed. Hemlines, for example. Do you smoke?”
“No…”
He smiled directly into my face for the 1rst time. His dimples notched his cheeks like a pair of speech marks.
“What an interesting tone. Did you used to smoke?” “Yes.”
“Did you stop because all cigarette packets carry this garish warning?”
“More or less. As I said, smoking is very out of fashion now, because we’ve discovered how unhealthy it is. Damn it. Could I have one, please?”
His dimples, and his smile, had vanished on “damn.” I suppose as far as he was concerned, I might as well have said “fuck.” I wondered what was going to happen when I did eventually say “fuck,” which I did at least 1ve times a day. Nevertheless, he proPered the packet and then lit my cigarette with anachronistic gallantry.
We smoked in silence for a while. At some point, he raised a 1nger to the sky.
“What is that?”
“That’s a plane. An aeroplane, to give it its full name. It’s a—well. A ship of the sky.”
“There are people in there?” “Probably around a hundred.” “In that little arrow?”
He watched it, squinting along the cigarette. “How high up is it?”
“Six miles or so.”
“I thought so. Well, well. You have done something interesting with your enslaved lightning. It must be Aying very fast.”
“Yes. A Aight from London to New York takes eight hours.”
He coughed suddenly, bringing up a mouthful of smoke. “Uh—I want you to stop telling me things for a moment, please,” he said. “That’s… quite enough for today.”
He ground the cigarette out on the porch. “Eight hours,” he murmured. “No tides in the sky, I suppose.”
That night, I slept with unpleasant lightness, my brain balanced on unconsciousness like an insect’s foot on the meniscus of a pond. I didn’t so much wake up as give up on sleep.
Outside on the landing there was a huge tongue-shaped shadow, stretching from the closed bathroom door to my bedroom. I put my foot in it and it went squelch.
“Commander Gore?”
“Ah,” came a muAed voice from behind the door. “Good morning.” The bathroom door swung open, guiltily.
Gore was already fully dressed and sitting on the edge of the bath, smoking. The bottom of the bath had a low-tide mark of cigarette ash and soap scum. Two cigarettes were crushed out in the soap dish.
As I would discover, this would become his habit: rising early, bathing, ashing in the tub. He could not be persuaded to sleep in, use the shower—which he disliked and intimated was “unhygienic”—or ash in the ashtrays I would pointedly leave on the edge of the bath. He would be embarrassed by the sight of my razor, shave with a cutthroat blade, and insist on separate soaps.
All this was to come. On that 1rst morning, there was Gore chain-smoking and a bleeding water-supply line. The toilet’s cistern lay on the Aoor, gleaming like a slain whale. A vile smell was seeping up from the Aoor.
“I was trying to see how it worked,” he said diffidently. “I see.”
“I fear I may have got carried away.”
Gore was an officer from the dusk of the Age of Sail, not an engineer. I’m sure he knew plenty about ship’s rigging, but he’d probably never handled an instrument more technologically complex than a s*xtant. Men in their right minds are not usually overcome with a mania for pulling the plumbing apart. I suggested he might like to wash his hands at the sink downstairs, and I could, perhaps, call a plumber, and we could, potentially, take a constitutional walk on the nearby heath.
He gave this due consideration over the stub end of the cigarette. “Yes, I would like that,” he said 1nally.
“We’ll go downstairs and wash our hands 1rst.”
“It was clear water,” he said, grinding out the cigarette. His face was averted from mine, but I could see the mole on his throat lay on pinkening skin.
“Well. Germs.”
“‘Germs’?”
“Hm. Bacteria. Very, very tiny creatures which live in—everything, really. Only visible through a microscope. The bad ones spread disease. Cholera, typhoid, dysentery.”
I might as well have named the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for the look of alarmed amazement that came over Gore’s face. He looked down at his hands and then slowly extended his arms, holding them away from his body like a pair of rabid rats.
He took some comfort from the phrase “fresh air,” at least, once we’d stepped out onto the heath. He was far more impressed by germ theory than he had been by electricity. By the time we’d crossed the 1rst of the early-morning dog walkers, I was enthusiastically describing the cause of tooth cavities, with hand motions. “I don’t think it’s very polite of you to say there are germs in my mouth.”
“There are germs in everyone’s mouths.” “Speak for yourself.”
“There’ll be germs on your shoes and under your nails. It’s just how the world works. An aseptic environment is. Well. It’s a dead one.”
“I won’t be participating.” “You don’t have a choice!”
“I will write a strongly worded letter of complaint.”
We walked a little farther. The color was starting to return to his cheeks, though around his eyes I could see score marks of strain and insomnia. When he saw me scrutinizing him, he raised his eyebrows, and I tried a cautious smile.
“Careful,” he said. “Your germs are showing.” “Well!”
We got croissants and tea from a food truck set up by the children’s park. These concepts were either familiar to him, or explicable from context, and we managed our walking breakfast with no further revelation.
“I’ve been told there are other, uh, expats,” he said eventually. “Yes. There are 1ve of you.”
“Who are they, please?”
“There’s a woman from 1665, who was extracted from the Great Plague of London. Uh. A man—a lieutenant, I believe—from 1645, Battle of Naseby. He fought back harder even than you. There’s an army captain—1916. Battle of the Somme. Someone from Robespierre’s Paris, 1793; she’s got quite the psych pro1le.”
“You didn’t ‘extract’ anyone else from the expedition?” “No.”
“May I ask why not?”
“Well, this is an experimental project. We wanted to pull individuals from across as wide a range of time periods as possible.”
“And you chose me, rather than, say, Captain Fitzjames?”
I blinked up at him, surprised. “Yes. We had documentary evidence that you
—you’d left the expedition—” “That I’d died.”
“Uh. Yes.” “How did I die?”
“They didn’t say. You were referred to as ‘the late Commander Gore.’” “Who are ‘they’?”
“Captain Fitzjames, Captain Crozier. Coleading the expedition after the death of Sir John Franklin.”
We’d fallen into a languid, patrolling step, and he’d gone cool.
“Captain Fitzjames spoke very highly of you,” I ventured. “‘A man of great stability of character, a very good officer, and the sweetest of tempers.’”
That, at last, brought his dimples out.
“He wrote his memoirs on his return, then?” Gore said, amused. “Ah. Commander Gore.”
“Hm?”
“I think I should—Could we sit down? On that bench over there.”
He pulled up the swing of his step so abruptly that I kicked myself in the ankle trying to stop.
“You are about to tell me something happened to Captain Fitzjames,” he said.
“Let’s sit down. Here.”
“What happened?” he asked. The dimples had gone. Apparently I did not get them for very long.
“Something happened to—everyone.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, a touch impatiently. “The expedition was lost.”
“Lost?”
“In the Arctic. No one returned.”
“There were one hundred and twenty-six men in two of the most powerful ships in the service,” he said. “You are telling me not one returned to England? Captain Crozier? He’d been to Antarctica—”
“No one survived. I’m sorry. I thought you’d been told at the Ministry.”
He stared at me. The green rings in his eyes turned the color of shined chestnuts when he canted his head.
“Tell me,” he said slowly, “what happened. Once I—left.”
“So. Yes. Right. Uh. We picked you up in 1847, from Cape Felix. We knew a summer camp had existed there, but we weren’t sure what it was—”
“It was a magnetic observatory. It doubled as a base for the hunting parties too.”
“Right, okay. So, we knew that the camp had been abandoned in a hurry. When the site was found in 1859, there was all this abandoned equipment. Tents. Scienti1c instruments. Bearskins. Historians were never sure why, but we thought—”
“Surely it was because of you,” he said, comprehension breaking on his face. “The—Aash of lightning, I thought it was. Then that—doorway of blue light.”
“Yes.”
“I saw 1gures in the doorway. There was an… enormous net… which hurt.” “I’m sorry. We couldn’t send people through the portal—we didn’t know
what would happen to them. I think the net was steel-linked? To stop you from, uh, cutting yourself free.”
More staring. I hurriedly added, “We weren’t sure that we were the cause of your men abandoning the camp until we did it. It’s one of the ‘great mysteries,’ ha, so we thought we might as well take our chances that it was us and—”
“Did your people kill everyone?” he asked. His voice was strangely mild, but there was a crimson rash prickling across his cheeks. “I know my officers. Knew them. They would have come out after me. Sent a party after me.”
“I’m sure they did come after you, but the portal would have closed by then.” “How did they die, then?”
“Well. The sea never thawed. The two ships stayed trapped in the pack ice. By winter 1847 the expedition had lost nine officers and 1fteen men. I don’t know how many of them died while you were still—”
“Freddy—Mr. Des Voeux—and I had left a note for the Admiralty on King William Land. In a cairn at Victory Point. It contained—”
“Yes, the expedition found your note in April 1848. Crozier and Fitzjames updated it to say they’d abandoned the ships and that the whole crew were planning to march south to Back’s Fish River. King William Island is, er, it’s an island, by the way.”
He turned away from me and tugged the cigarette packet from his coat pocket.
“Back’s Fish River was eight hundred miles away,” he said eventually. “Yes. They didn’t make it. They starved to death on the march down.” “All of them?”
“All of them.”
“I can’t imagine Captain Fitzjames dying of something so morbid as starvation. Or Harry Goodsir? He was one of the cleverest men I’d ever—”
“All of them. I’m very sorry.”
He stared out over the heath and exhaled slowly. “It appears I was spared a wretched death,” he said. “I’m sor—You’re welcome?”
“How long did it take?”
“Inuit testimony suggests a small group of men returned to the ships and survived a fourth winter. But everyone was dead by 1850.”
“What is an ‘Inuit’ testimony?”
“Er. You called them ‘Esquimaux.’ It’s correct to call them Inuit.”
To my surprise, he Aushed deeply and Ainched. He looked disproportionately guilty—Victorians didn’t have political correctness—but all he said was, “The Admiralty sent no rescue parties?”
“The Admiralty sent several. Lady Franklin 1nanced a number as well. But they all went in the wrong directions.”
He shut his eyes and blew a feather of smoke at the sky. “The greatest expedition of our age,” he said. There was nothing in his voice—no anger, no sadness, no irony. Nothing.
Later that day, he said, “I apologize for my reaction. It was—something of a shock, but one I should have borne with greater stoicism. After all, we knew what we’d signed up for. I hope you didn’t feel that I was in a temper at you.”
“No. I’m only sorry you received the story so disjointedly.”
He stood back and looked at me. If he were another sort of man, I would have called this look a once-over. But there wasn’t enough heat in it to be a once- over. He was simply looking at me, head to toe, for the 1rst time.
“Why are you my bridge?” he asked. “Why did they not assign an officer of some sort? The secrecy of this, ah, project, as you call it, was impressed on me at length while I was… recovering.”
“I suppose I am an officer, sort of. A professional, anyway. I worked in the Languages department as a translator-consultant. My area of expertise is mainland Southeast Asia.”
“I see,” he said. “Actually, I don’t see. What does all that mean?”
“I’m cleared to top secret and I’ve worked with—displaced people. The Ministry’s original intention was to have the expats cohabiting with therapists, but in the end they felt it made more sense for you to have… a friend.”
He stared at me blankly, and I blushed, because even to me it sounded like I was pleading. I added, “I already knew a lot about you. I’d read about the expedition. They’ve written books and books about it. Roald Amundsen, the guy who discovered the North and South Pole, did it because he was obsessed with John Franklin’s expedition. He—”
“You have the advantage of me,” he said. “I do, yes.”
The dimples came out for that. Not very mirthfully, but they did come out. “And who found the Northwest Passage?” he asked. “That was our original
intention.”
“Robert McClure, in 1850.” “Robbie?!”
“Yes. He found it when he came out after you on one of the search expeditions. He told the Inuit he was looking for a ‘lost brother.’ As you’re the only expedition member he knew personally, I always assumed—”
“Oh,” he said.
I stopped talking. He’d said “oh” as if I’d pushed a needle through his clothes. All these people were history to me but still felt alive to him. The queasiness of his discomposure dropped the Aoor out of the room. I was so embarrassed that I automatically took the cigarette he oPered me, even though I had, as I’ve said, given up smoking years beforehand.
The more I got to know him, the more I discovered Gore was the most entirely realized person I’d ever met. In his own time, he had liked hunting, sketching, Aute playing (he was very good at this), and the company of other people. Hunting was out of the question, and socializing was limited by order of the Ministry. By the end of the 1rst week he was visibly going bonkers with no one but me to talk to.
“When will I meet the other expats?” “Soon—”
“Am I to be idle for this entire year? You do still have a naval service?” “We expected you would need more time to adjust—”
“Is the sea still wet? Can one still Aoat ships upon it?”
The 1rst thing to slow him down was the capaciousness of streaming services. Speci1cally, Spotify. I ran him brieAy through the evolution of the phonograph
—which he might have lived to see had he not perished in the 1840s—the turntable, the cassette player, the CD, MP3s, before landing on music-streaming services.
“Any music? Any performances, any time, whensoever you wish it?” “Well, not any, but it’s a very large library.”
We were sitting beside each other on the sofa, a Ministry-issue laptop on my knees. He liked the laptop, as a concept. He was cautiously interested in Google and Wikipedia, but the difficulty of 1nding letters on the keyboard had hobbled his curiosity. He had already remarked on how unnerving he found my ability to type at speed without looking.
“Will you please instruct the machine to play Bach’s Sonata in E-Aat major?” I hit play on the 1rst version Spotify suggested.
We settled back, if “settle” is the right word for the stiP, wary way we oPset each other’s weight on the cushions. After a while, he covered his eyes with his hands.
“And one can simply… repeat it. In1nitely,” he mumbled. “Yep. Would you like it again?”
“No. I don’t think it’s very respectful.” “Shall I put on something else?”
“Yes,” he said, not moving. “Instruct the machine to play something that you prefer.”
It didn’t seem like it would be kind to play Kate Bush. I put on Franck’s Sonata in A major.
“When was this written?”
“I’m not certain of the exact date. The 1880s, I think? After you—after your
—afterwards.”
“My sister Anne would have loved this. She was a great fan of sentimental violin.”
I looked away. When the music 1nished, he said, in a thick voice, “I’m going to go for a walk.”
He left and didn’t return for several hours. The air turned sharp and cool. Oily clouds were piling up in the sky. A storm was coming. I was fretful and couldn’t stay in one room for longer than a few minutes. It had occurred to me only after he shut the door that I wasn’t allowed to let him out of my sight yet.
When he returned, he blew in like the weather. His jaw was set, which I had started to understand was a sign of enormous agitation.
“This city is so crowded,” he said, standing in the hallway in his coat and boots. “Worse even than when I was last here. There are buildings everywhere. No horizons. Only buildings and people as far as the eye can see, and great metal towers strung with rope. Huge gray roads, covered in metallic traffic. There’s no space here. How can you breathe? Is all of England like this? The entire world?”
“London is a capital city. Of course it’s crowded. There are still empty places.”
Behind my back, my 1st was spasmodically clenching and releasing.
“Where? I would like to go somewhere where I don’t feel as if I’m in a microscope’s slide.”
“Uh. There are currently movement restrictions on all expats. You must have been told. You can’t leave the boundary lines.”
He stared at me, unseeing.
“I’m going to have a bath,” he said 1nally.
While I still worked in Languages, I’d been employed as the primary translator on a project between the trade department and a pan-ASEAN forestry commission. I’d had a gristly time translating “internally displaced person,” which, during this project, referred to people who had been forced to leave their villages because of logging work—hard to explain, because some other people, often from the same villages, had achieved economic stability and long-term employment because of the logging work. “Progress,” that was another tricky thing to translate.
I’d sat with the term “internally displaced person” until I’d broken it down semantically. I was wrestling with a ghost meaning: a person whose interiority was at odds with their exteriority, who was internally (in themselves) displaced. I was thinking about my mother, who persistently carried her lost homeland jostling inside her like a basket of vegetables.
Gore was internally displaced in this way. I could sometimes see him regarding the modern world as if through a telescope. He stood forever on the deck of a ship somewhere in the early 1800s. He must have done it even in his own era, coming down from the ports to note with alarm that women were wearing their sleeves wide again, that some European country had declared war on another again, while he was months or years away at sea. He told me stories as if he were trying to catch himself in amber. Just like my mother, though I didn’t tell him that.
I told him about the forestry commission, and he listened keenly. “You were quite important,” he suggested.
“No need to Aatter me. I was just a translator.”
“One never understands one’s use but through the opinion of others. Take the Aden expedition. That was a triumph, and my captain insisted I be promoted to 1rst luP as if I’d had a major hand in it.”
I smiled at his knuckles. We’d been briefed on teaching moments, where we might 1nd the values of the expats didn’t align with those of modern, multicultural Britain. For Gore, Control had identi1ed the conquest of Aden and the Second Opium War. Avoid confrontational or oppositional language. Avoid being drawn into conversations about personal value systems. In January 1839, the British decided to acquire the port of Aden, which was part of the sultanate of Lahej. It was a useful port on the trade route to the Far East. So far as I understood the British Empire, other people’s countries were useful or negligible but rarely conceived of as autonomous. The empire regarded the world the way my dad regards the elastic bands the post deliverer drops on their round: This is handy, it’s just lying here; now it’s mine.
“Did you have a major hand at Aden, then?” I asked, like a coward. “Modesty is a virtue, and I must warn you that I am a very virtuous man.”
“I should warn you that these days, blowing up an Arabian port because you want to claim it for the empire is generally frowned upon.”
“But intervening in the trade commission of another country, in order to increase the trade advantage of the kingdom, is considered diplomatic.”
“Well,” I said, and I was about to protest that it had been an environmental intervention, even though it would mean having to explain environmental, when I saw that he was regarding me with something approaching admiration, and I stopped.
I should say that my face does a good impression of whiteness, late-entering or not. I didn’t know how to tell Gore that I’d been tricking him, feature by feature. I wasn’t sure I was ready to. He’d made, as people do, an assumption about me that left me room to maneuver. Later, when he found out the truth— as people do—he’d be unbalanced by his own mistake. Another person’s unguardedness in that moment can be very useful, interpersonally, as long as you don’t soften. There is language I could use about this if I were the melodramatic type: behind enemy lines, for example, or double agent. My sister might use these terms, or she might call me a fraud.
Besides, I’d read both of his extant letters. He’d written to his father to say that he was pleased with the outcome at Aden. A hundred and 1fty Arabs died in the battle, and the British didn’t sustain a single casualty. It was a bloodbath.
“Your job sounds very interesting,” he said. “How did you get it?”
Gore wouldn’t watch television. He seemed to 1nd it a tasteless invention.
“You can send dioramas through the ether,” he said, “and you’ve used it to show people at their most wretched.”
“No one’s forcing you to watch EastEnders.”
“Any child or unmarried woman of virtue might engage the machine and be faced with lurid examples of criminal behavior.”
“No one’s making you watch Midsomer Murders either.” “Or deformed monstrosities against the will of God—” “What?”
“Sesame Street,” he said. Then he had to busy himself with looking through his pockets for his cigarettes, his tongue tenting his cheek as he tried not to laugh.
Finally, at a loss for anything else to do, he began to pick over the bookshelves. I hit an early win with Arthur Conan Doyle. I tried giving him the Aubrey–Maturin series, starting with Master and Commander, but he found them upsettingly nostalgic. He liked Great Expectations but made it less than a 1fth of the way through Bleak House. I suggested the Brontës, and I might as well have told him to pick up and read a pigeon. He had no patience for Henry James, but he liked Jack London. Out of curiosity, I tried him on Hemingway, which he pronounced “shocking” and read in the bath.
One day, on a whim, I gave him Rogue Male by GeoPrey Household. It was the literary equivalent of playing with 1re—I’d delayed my explanations of the world wars, much less given context about why an unnamed English crack shot and sportsman would want to try shooting a European dictator in the 1930s. But he’d complained so much about not being able to hunt that I thought the premise might entertain him.
A day or so later, I got the email that officially launched the next segment of the project.
“Commander Gore?” “Hm?”
“I have some good news. The Ministry want us to go in next week.” He did not look up. “Oh. You’ve not got very far with Rogue Male, then.”
“Oh,” he said, “I 1nished it. And then I started it again.”
2
Gore pulls himself onto the ship, greeted by the mittened hands and muffled voices of the watch. The ship, trapped in the grip of sea ice, lists uneasily to one side, where frozen waves have pressed against the hull. Below deck—sealed off from the elements and crowded with bodies so tightly that the air is warm—Gore finds the crew in the unusual, humid thrall of urgency. Captain Fitzjames has called for an emergency command meeting.
He hands off his bag to the officers’ steward and insists on attending the meeting, trying to shake off the creeping ice-dementia. He knows, without needing a mirror, that his lips are the color of a corpse.
In the sick bay, Stanley, the ship’s surgeon, asks for the date. “The twenty-fourth of July, 1847,” Gore responds, after a moment’s hesitation.
“You need firmness in your speech,” the doctor mutters. He doesn’t say “You’re slurring”—not to an officer.
Gore attempts a smile. Cracks spider along his lips. But no one tells him not to attend the emergency meeting.
It takes place in the Great Cabin of Erebus, a room now eerily empty. Sir John Franklin had died here, succumbing to age and the harsh climate more than a month ago. His kindly spirit has not appeared. James Fitzjames, his second-in-command and now captain of Erebus, inhabits the cabin like an orphan locked in a tomb.
Captain Crozier of Terror, the expedition’s new leader, has sent Lieutenant Irving over to Erebus. Irving is a shy man with heavy whiskers and a disconcerting tendency to quote scripture at sailors.
“I’m afraid,” Irving says, “that it isn’t good news.”
“The rations,” Fairholme interrupts. Fairholme, the third lieutenant of Erebus, is a large, lively man who usually towers over the other officers. Now, he cowers, reminding Gore of a Great Dane caught stealing food.
“Yours too,” Irving sighs. “God has seen fit to test us in our resolve. But His ways are not our ways, and the wisdom of the world is as foolishness to—”
Gore presses his hand flat on the mahogany table. Firmly, but with finality. The drone of Irving’s voice betrays the panic of a preacher pleading with a storm.
“James,” he says.
He means Fairholme—he wouldn’t dare address Captain Fitzjames by his first name in a command meeting—but it is Fitzjames who responds.
“It’s the tinned rations,” Fitzjames says. “Some of them have been found to be inedible. More so than usual,” he adds with a faint smile. “Rotten. On both ships, which means they must have been defective when we set sail, rather than due to some noxious influence on the journey.”
Gore lifts his hand, leaving behind a smear the color of tamarind flesh. A sour, steady pain throbs in his palm, momentarily confusing him into thinking it’s a taste.
“How many of the tins?” he asks.
Fitzjames doesn’t answer. Seated in Sir John’s chair, his once-shiny curls now dulled, but still flashing a troubling copper, he instead asks, “Was there much game, Graham?”
Gore thinks about the weight of the sack he carried, which had felt so significant. “Three partridges,” he says, “and a boatswain gull too far off to hit. Nothing else. Not even tracks.”
“In four and a half hours?”
“Was I gone that long?”
Silence falls again. This cabin had once been a lively wardroom, where no story went unmatched by another, like an arch bridge built of banter. But now, even stating the obvious feels like trying to carve wax from granite. The constant groaning and cracking of the ice-bound ship robs them of sleep and quiet; without those restful pauses, conversation becomes feeble.
“We don’t have enough rations to sustain both ships’ crews for a third year,” Fitzjames says. “Is Captain Crozier in agreement?”
“Yes, sir,” Irving replies, his tone miserable.
Fitzjames drums his fingers on the table. Like Fairholme, he is a large man, built like a cathedral, but his face turns boyish when he’s worried. His parentage is a mystery; rumored to be illegitimate, he must have spent much of his childhood worrying, and now his face reverts to that state.
“Two-thirds rations?” he suggests.
“Captain Crozier recommends reducing to two-thirds, yes, sir.”
At this, Stanley leans forward. He is a fussy, short-tempered, handsome man who does not enjoy his job. “I must emphasize that the debility plaguing those in the sick bay will undoubtedly worsen if we reduce the men’s rations.”
“And if we don’t reduce them, the men will starve to death instead,” Fitzjames replies. “I want to get as many of them back to England as possible when the ice breaks up. This is the compromise we must make.”
Gore stares at his left palm. The sour pain continues to seep through the bandages. So does the blood, but it seems melodramatic to mention it.
“And if the ice doesn’t break up?” he asks calmly.
The ice outside shifts—the Arctic gnashing its jaws like a cat spotting a bird. The ship’s cat had died in convulsions during their second winter. Gore had liked that cat. He’d grown attached to it, especially after his dog had died in the first spring.
Creak, crack. The ship groans in agony.
