The Voyage of the Narwhal. Andrea Barrett

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СКАЧАТЬ had his own reasons, Erasmus thought. For going, or staying. “Did he keep this secret from you?”

      “He had to, he said he needed…”

      “Doesn’t that worry you?”

      “As if you ever tell me anything,” she said. “And who are you to criticize him? Especially since Father died: all you do is mope around, sorting your seeds—do you think I haven’t seen you at eleven in the morning still in bed? So Linnaeus and Humboldt can run the business without you. So you haven’t found anyone to fall in love with since Sarah Louise.”

      Sarah Louise, he thought. Still the simple sound of her name made him feel like he’d swallowed a stone. A dull ache, which never quite left him. As Lavinia knew.

      “Copernicus isn’t married either,” she continued, “but you don’t see Copernicus moping around, you don’t see Copernicus wasting his life…I need you.”

      A snarl of guilt and tenderness caught at him. As children, he and his brothers used to bolt for the woods and return hours later, to find Lavinia waiting by a window with an unread book in her lap. He’d been the one she looked up to, the one who tied her shoes and taught her to read. Sometimes, when the other boys weren’t around and he’d remembered not just that her birth had cost him his mother, but that she’d never had a mother, they’d drawn very close. Then his brothers would tumble in and he’d abandon her again. Back and forth, oldest and youngest. He had failed her often enough.

      She drew him inside, to a corner behind a case of stuffed finches. “This is who I love,” she said fiercely. “Do you understand? Do you remember what that feels like? What if something happens to him? You have to take care of him for me.”

      “Lavinia,” he said. Her hands, squeezing his left arm, were very hot. Once, after Zeke had been describing the shipwreck that made him a local hero, Erasmus had found her weeping in the garden. Not with delayed fear over what might have happened to Zeke, not with hysteria—but with longing, she’d managed to make him understand. A boundless desire for Zeke. When he’d tried to remind her that Zeke had flaws as well as virtues, she’d said, “I know, I know. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the way I feel when he touches my hand, or when we dance and I smell the skin on his neck.” The strength of her feelings had embarrassed him.

      “You know this means waiting even longer,” he said. “Has he mentioned a date?” His fault, he thought again. Why hadn’t he asked Zeke himself?

      “Not exactly. But when he gets home, I know he’ll want to settle down.”

      Of course he wanted her to marry Zeke, not just to ease his own responsibilities but because he wanted her happy. Didn’t he? She’d cared first for their father and then him. “You’re sure…” he said. “You feel sure of his feelings for you?”

      “He loves me,” she said passionately. “In his own way—I know he does.”

      A blinding headache had seized him then, blurring the rest of the party. And through a process he still didn’t understand, he’d been led to this table and Alexandra’s pointed questions; to the fact that, in two days, he’d be sailing north in the company of a young man he’d known for ages yet couldn’t imagine accepting orders from.

      One of the maids came in with the tea tray: Agnes? Ellen? The servants were Lavinia’s province; as long as meals appeared on time Erasmus didn’t notice who did the work. He thought they didn’t know this, although Lavinia sometimes reproached him. And although once he’d overheard the staff in the kitchen referring to “the seedy-man” and then laughing furiously. Now he avoided the eyes of the girl with the tray and drew a breath, waiting to hear what Zeke would say about the open polar sea.

      “You read a lot,” Zeke said to Alexandra. If he was startled that she’d remembered his comment at the party, it didn’t show. “I’ve noticed that. So you must have learned about the stretches of open water persisting all winter and recurring in the same places every year. What the Russians call polynyas. Inglefield found open water in Smith Sound. Birds have been seen migrating northward from Canada. A warm current flows northward beneath the surface, several people have observed it—suppose it leads to a temperate ocean, free from ice, surrounding the North Pole beyond a frozen barrier?”

      “Suppose,” Alexandra said. Her right hand sketched an arc in the air, as if she were still holding her paintbrush.

      “When Dr. Kane left,” Zeke continued, “he said he was going to look for signs of this phenomenon if he could. So there’s nothing so strange in my wanting to look as well.”

      Many times in the months since the party Erasmus had sat in the offices of wealthy men, while Zeke proposed their search for Franklin. A portrait of Franklin in full-dress uniform hung in the Narwhal’s cabin—Franklin, Franklin, Zeke had said, as he asked the men for money. It made sense that he concentrated on this aspect of the voyage—how proud the merchants were, contributing to such a good cause! In Zeke, Erasmus thought, they saw a young man who could succeed at anything. The man they’d dreamed of being, the man they hoped their sons might be. Other expeditions might have failed, but Zeke’s would not.

      “It’s a theory,” Zeke told Alexandra now. “An interesting theory. In the arctic one can never predict where the ice will allow one to go, nor one’s speed, nor even always one’s direction. My plan is to follow this route and search for Franklin. But were conditions to be unexpectedly good—were one of the northern channels to be open, say—it’s possible we’d do some exploring.”

      “Possible,” Alexandra said. “Hence you provision for eighteen months?”

      “For safety’s sake,” Zeke said. He stroked his eyebrows, taming the springy golden tufts; perhaps aware that Lavinia followed the gesture intently. And perhaps, Erasmus thought, a bit annoyed that Alexandra didn’t. A sensible woman, she seemed immune to Zeke’s charms.

      Lavinia, tearing her eyes from Zeke’s hand, said, “I don’t see here on the maps where you’d head north at all.”

      “Only if he were driven to it,” Alexandra said. “Were he to raise this money to search for Franklin, and then purposefully head in another direction, that would be quite wrong.”

      Zeke gazed steadily at her, and she gazed as steadily back. “The maps never tell us what we need,” he said, turning toward Lavinia. “That’s part of the reason we go.”

      Later Erasmus would realize that for all his alertness to Zeke’s gestures and the women’s responses he hadn’t been paying sufficient attention. The lamps were lit, the sun was setting, they were munching delicious chocolate cake; the maps beckoned and he was dreaming of glory. His own glory, his own desires. They might find survivors of Franklin’s expedition; or if not, surely better evidence of what had happened than Rae’s dispiriting tale. With any luck they’d find other things as well. All sorts of specimens, not just plants but seaweeds, fishes, birds—he would write a book. He’d sketch his specimens and write their descriptions; his talent was for drawing from nature, capturing the salient features as only a trained observer could. Copernicus, so skilled with color and light, would turn the sketches into paintings; Linnaeus and Humboldt would prepare the plates. Together they’d make something beautiful. For years, in the light of his disappointments, he’d pretended to himself that he wasn’t ambitious—but he was, he was. And lucky beyond belief to be part of this voyage. A blaze of excitement blinded him.

      “And СКАЧАТЬ