Death on the Ice (12 page)

‘Please don’t remind me. I blush.’ There were times during their short and abortive foray on to the ice when. Wilson had been incapable of undressing himself and getting into the wolfskins, used in place of sleeping bags, without Shackleton and Ferrar’s help. ‘We disappointed him, I think.’

‘As he was sorely disappointed in Royds and Barne.’ All the more so, he failed to add, because they were Navy men. ‘And none of us has mastered the dogs, not really. And yet, he has somehow moved us along, away from dwelling on all that and looking to the future. Still, it’s early days yet. Let’s see how we are when the sun comes back. We’ll all get tetchy. I’m not sure any of us is suited to confinement, least of all the skipper. Or me. I’m ashamed to say I lost my temper just two hours ago and threatened to strike a man.’

Wilson tried to keep the shock off his face. It was hard to imagine Shackleton turning belligerent, except inside of a boxing ring. ‘Who did you threaten?’

‘That good-for-nothing Brett.’ The cook was a foul-mouthed drunk who presented food either raw or burned. Scott had already clapped the man in irons, the harshest punishment the skipper had yet dished out. Mostly Scott used his tongue, as he had to numbing effect on Royds, for his failure of nerve at Cape Crozier.

‘Understandable. Brett would try the patience of St Francis. And a lost temper happens to us all.’

On a stationary, trapped ship or in a cramped hut, it didn’t take much to stoke a grievance. The way a man chewed his seal steak might start you off, a piece of tuneless whistling, a badly stowed piece of gear or a pair of damp, icy socks in the morning. ‘Well, I have certainly mislaid mine from time to time, but not you, doctor.’

‘Oh, yes. Even me.’ He put a hand on the prayer book once more, as if in penance. The men knew him to be a good Christian, rather than the Sunday-only type they suspected the skipper was, and many of them came to Wilson for spiritual advice. Shackleton knew he didn’t find this easy. He was a naturalist, not a natural father-confessor. ‘But then, I am not too taken with Navy life, Mr Shackleton.’

‘The skipper knows no other way. The Royal Navy made him what he is. Can an Ethiopian change his skin? I think the skipper is doing as good a job as anyone has the right to expect under the circumstances.’ He didn’t add that the circumstances were that their shocking ignorance of the rigours of ice travel had been cruelly exposed. ‘But he makes it hard on himself sometimes.’

‘Commander Scott isn’t always an easy man,’ said Wilson softly. ‘But he’s a good man.’

Shackleton nodded. He had no reason to dispute this. ‘And remember, Bill, the Society almost appointed Royds as expedition leader. Look where we might be then.’

‘Indeed.’ Wilson felt disloyal agreeing, because the fastidious and usually cheerful Royds was a positive asset on the ship and he liked him. But they both knew what Shackleton was referring to. Since his failure to reach the letter drop at Crozier, and the experience of savage temperatures, crevasses, snowfields that could swallow a man up his waist, weather that could turn from benign to belligerent within a hundred yards and the terrible, crippling cramps of strained sledge-hauling muscles, Royds seemed cowed by Antarctica. A fear had seeped into him and Skelton was still murmuring about his ‘girlish’ behaviour on the ice. The stern tongue-lashing from Scott had also dented his confidence.

The fiasco had made Scott certain that improvisation was the enemy of polar travel. One man had died in the most hideous circumstances and, as Scott had told the company, only providence had kept the toll so low. Wilson had saved Barne’s hands by soaking them in warm water for hours. It caused agony, as his screaming testified, but it was better than losing fingers.

Never again could Scott allow his men to go stumbling about without clear, defined orders. An improvisation—Barne being told by Royds to choose whichever route back he thought best—was what had almost killed them.

‘Jesus.’ A shooting star dashed across the sky, slashing a bright slit through the heavens, like a knife through a black safety curtain. ‘Sorry. Did you see that? Now if you told me that was an angel’s chariot, I might just believe you.’

Wilson felt his limbs stiffening and the familiar prickling feeling as the blood fled from the exposed skin around his eyes and the end of his nose. A promise of frost-nip. He rubbed his face and shuffled about to generate some warmth.

The doctor looked north again, along the peninsula, where a soft glow of red sometimes marked the summit of restless Erebus, stoking its volcanic fires through the long winter night. The only evidence of its plume was a wedge of darkness where the crystalline brilliance of the sky should have been.

A series of gusts scooped up the loose snow and ice around his feet, creating a low fog. A dog yowled mournfully and he heard a whisper of conversation, disembodied words passing by him into the night, blown from goodness knew where. Men were on the ship and in the huts, taking measurements, writing, reading, mending, gossiping, smoking, playing cards, arguing, cooking and dreaming. To be this far south, not only safe, but also comfortable, was remarkable. Despite the loss of poor Vince—a service and a memorial cross to the perished seaman had helped the crew reach some kind of accommodation with the first death on the continent—for the most part they remained optimistic about the season to come. It was quite an achievement, the true wonder of Antarctica, for that year at least.

‘He’s a decent man,’ Wilson repeated to himself, as he trudged back over the ice, head down against the strengthening breeze, bound for the soft glow bleeding from its skylights that marked
Discovery
’s position. ‘We are in good hands.’

‘And God’s hands,’ offered Shackleton from behind.

Wilson, not sure whether he was being mocked, stopped for a second and looked back at the dark shape. ‘Yes. Him too.’

Despite the stiffening wind, Shackleton stayed out a little longer, till staring at the ever-deepening heavens and the growing number of visible constellations gave him vertigo. Then he, too, returned to the ship. As he stepped over the compacted surface in Wilson’s footsteps, careful not to turn an ankle in the deep scoring from the ice-quarry’s sledge loads, he wondered if being a decent man in Antarctica was enough.

T
HE MAN SELLING THE
horses was called James Alexander. He was a squat Yorkshireman, dressed in a loud three-piece tweed suit. He struck Oates as a rather brash fellow, but his stables and stud at Harrogate were hard to fault. He had welcomed the Oates brothers to the Queen Anne house that fronted the property with a glass of Madeira and seed cake, saying they would have lunch once the proceedings had been concluded. Oates, walking with a stick, said quietly, ‘If they are concluded.’

Alexander smiled. ‘Lunch comes regardless. And if you see nothing you like here, my brother has a well-regarded stud near York.’

‘Let’s see what you have to offer first.’

There were twenty-five stalls in the main stable, each one with a brass plaque announcing the horse’s name in a curlicue hand, as well as a subscript with details of sire and dam. At the far end was a large equine water-bath and exercise pool, of a size Laurie Oates had never seen before. Alexander was only too keen to explain the benefit to horses with joint problems.

Once Oates had managed to convince the garrulous man that he had heard enough, Alexander had one of the lads bring out Arion, a fourteen-and-a-half-hands colt, into the yard and they followed.

Bryan whispered, ‘That’s a handsome beast.’

Although he had to admit the three-year-old chestnut was attractive, Oates knew enough not to be smitten early. ‘Looks aren’t everything.’

Alexander explained the horse’s immaculate pedigree, while Laurie Oates walked around, not touching the animal, letting his eye run from head, past withers to haunches and tail. The coat was certainly richly coloured, the haunches strong, but there were a few mis-proportions. The architecture, it seemed to him, was not without problems. The back, to Oates’s gaze, was a might too long, the neck beneath the carefully arranged mane somewhat skinny. Although there was no evidence for it, Oates always felt a thin neck on an animal gave it problems with delivering wind to the lungs. Culshaw used to point out that Derby winner Sir Visto was famously slender of neck, but Oates had always stood his ground.

He moved to the animal and fetched an apple from his pocket. It was gratefully crunched down in a few seconds.

‘How much?’

‘A hundred and fifty guineas.’

It was almost a hundred guineas more than he had paid for a better colt in Ireland. ‘Rather steep.’

‘You’ve heard the pedigree.’

‘I’m buying the horse, not the parents.’ It was easy to be dazzled by pedigree but, as he had found with cavalry officers from good families, the child isn’t always the equal of illustrious forebears. Oates gazed into the mouth, then, with easy, consistent movements, stroked the flanks and ran a hand down the rear legs. He lingered over a couple of the joints. He’d wager Arion was spavined; only a little, but there it was, a marker of trouble to come.

‘Take him out on the gallops,’ suggested Alexander.

Oates considered, making one final circuit of the animal and looking into the large, unblinking and, it seemed to him, vacant eyes. ‘I think I’ll pass on him, if you don’t mind.’

‘As you wish.’ If Alexander was irritated he didn’t show it, nor did he attempt to bring the price down. Someone would pay one-fifty for Arion. Just not Lawrence Oates.

He rejected the next animal after looking into his eyes. As he later explained to Bryan, some horses have personality in there; others just exude dumb friendship or unknowable soul. The Trickster’s gaze suggested a mean streak, confirmed when he tried to nip Oates as he examined the teeth and kick him when he touched the fetlock.

In the end, he chose the Angel Gabriel, who had been orphaned when his dam became colicky after his birth. He had been hand-reared by the stable lads with buckets of milk. Although suffering from the equine equivalent of a pugilist’s face, he was sleek and strong in the body. The ears were attentive and mobile, and Oates could sense a keen intelligence. Still wary of his thigh, he let Bryan ride him. His brother was a steady, but unexceptionable horseman, but that made it all the more interesting to see how the animal behaved.

After criticising a few minor flaws, chiefly a turned-out left knee, they shook on a hundred and ten guineas. He spent another forty on a mare called Sorry Kate—so named on account of a troublesome thoroughpin—at the same terms. So when Mr Alexander turned up with the two animals at Gestingthorpe, he’d have thirty days to hand over a hundred and fifty guineas.

It was at times like this he felt his mother’s purse strings draw tight about his neck, as choking as any lariat.

To Lieutenant Oates, Gestingthorpe’s drawing room was Caroline Oates’s version of General Headquarters, her button-backed chair the CO’s desk. It was here that staff were praised or scolded, family plans approved, the girls’ suitors entertained, or more frequently dismissed, and finances and prospects—chiefly Bryan’s—discussed. There were times when Lawrence Oates hated it, preferring the morning room, with its less precious furniture, the stable block or the kitchen, or even his bedroom. When, after the two horses had been paid for on delivery without a word of protest, his mother summoned him there, he knew there was another price to pay for the pair.

The room smelled of freshly polished rosewood and ormolu overlaid with woodsmoke. A fire smouldered in the great hearth, as it always did, winter or summer. Caroline Oates believed chimneys only needed sweeping if fires were allowed to go out; a continual blaze, on the other hand, purged the passages of soot. That was why she employed Gilbert, whose job it was to keep the three largest fireplaces in the house burning continuously.

She was sitting by the window, novel in hand, the room’s heavy crimson drapes pulled back to admit the maximum grey afternoon light. Oates had become aware that her eyes were failing, at least for reading small print, but she would not, as yet, admit to it. Caroline Oates had also reverted to her former mode of dress; almost everything she had on was black or charcoal. The only splash of colour was a ruby brooch, a present from her husband. ‘You wanted to see me, Mother?’

She set aside her book and indicated he should sit. ‘Yes. “Mother” is it now?’

‘Carrie.’

‘Better. Are you happy with the animals?’

‘You had no need to pay for them. I arranged to have a pair of pistols sold at auction—’

‘They are not yours to sell.’

‘They were a present.’

‘From your father.’

‘To do with as I wish.’

‘I would rather you kept them as a memento of him. I have cancelled the sale.’

He spluttered but no words came. Brough & Son, the auctioneers, would have carried out her instructions without question.

‘Now, how are the horses?’

Oates closed his eyes for a moment till the red mist passed. ‘I had Brooks look them over.’ This was the local vet. ‘He agrees. Angel Gabriel is a fine horse and Sorry Kate just needs more care than she’s been getting. Brooks has prescribed a hock bandage and feeding up. They’ll do me well. Thank you.’

Caroline Oates smiled in a way that showed she wasn’t at all interested in the horses. ‘Very good. If it helps your recovery, I am only too happy to oblige.’ She frowned. ‘But Laurie, I have heard something that concerns me from the War Office.’

Oates shifted in his seat at her little-girl-lost tones. Caroline Oates had never been lost, as girl or adult. He could guess what she was referring to. He had written to ask for a reconsideration of his convalescence period. ‘You have heard from the War Office?’

‘Informally. It suggests you are thinking of returning to your regiment.’

He felt himself redden slightly. ‘Informally’ meant some family friend had tipped her the wink about his request. She would not be pleased he had gone behind her back. ‘As soon as I am well.’