Chapter Text
God wants you to live, Francis.
The words followed him from his dream. In the grey half light of morning, he imagined them floating like breath towards the crack in the curtains, seeking out the light there, the breeze beyond the glass. He wished to set them free; from the tiny room with its dark oak and threadbare carpets, from the few trinkets that decorated the bureau, from the dress uniform which hung on the closet door and the promise he had made to it. He did not wish to be here.
God wants you to live.
But he was, nevertheless. He was alive and he owed it to the memory of that voice to at least…. Try. Crozier rose, and followed the words, the heavy covers slithering from his body. He padded barefoot to the window. A man who had not endured the arctic night would have flinched at the cold tiles which now pressed against his soles, but he barely registered the December chill. Slowly he pulled back the drapes and below him London stirred; gloomy, dirty, the scent of smoke cloying, wending like ivy through the gaps in the seal of the window. His breath misted the glass for a moment and he watched dully as it shrank back, faded, vanished. All trace of him gone, once more.
He had not expected this, of all things, upon his return to London. Court Martial, yes, and the furore that went with that process. Then, later, perhaps, obscurity; there were others better suited to the role of hero than he, others who were younger, more becoming, less Irish, others who were already eagerly preparing for another trip to the Passage. Soon they would don the mantle of Explorer with the Discovery Service and Francis Crozier would all but disappear.
He expected these things and he would allow them to come to pass with something akin to relief. He did not seek recognition or accolade; a hundred men lay dead and lost and their souls weighed heavy upon his shoulders. To be knighted or even to write a memoir seemed wrong, offensive to the deepest of sensibilities. No, he was content enough to slip away from all that had been, as far as he could, take rooms apart from the social hubbub of the admiralty, and begin to try and piece together the vestiges of his life.
God wants you to live.
But he had not expected…. This.
Life had always been the navy. He barely had a memory from before the time he signed up at aged thirteen. Dozens of years at sea, at least ten on Terror herself, some fifteen winters in the ice and goodness only knew how many hours of darkness. The endless months without sunlight. The endless isolation. There had been friends, rare friends, Ross, and Blanky and a handful of others who tolerated his melancholy but mainly there had been Crozier, and his charts and calculations and personal stockpile of whiskey. A few months on land here and there meant he never laid down roots despite a notion that he might like to. In all his fifty- two years there had been One…. One flirtation with the possibility of marriage, and then inevitably, back to sea.
There was e’er nothing for him, on land.
My dear friend, I know not what else I can say to you, in truth, I am sadly lonely.
So it was when he set sail for the passage, scribbling a final missive to James Ross. And so it was now, but he knew it could be otherwise and somehow that was worse than a lifetime of unpunctuated loneliness. God had wanted him to live, but more than that, he had begun to want it. For the briefest of moments in that harshest of lands he had been given a reason why. He had felt hope against all that told him there was none. He had loved and been loved. There was something, or someone to live for. And now it was gone.
I am sadly lonely.
He felt it surround him in his room. He felt it in the bustle of the street. And most painfully he would feel it again when forced to attend the gala at the admiralty tonight. John Barrow was dead, not a week before, and the admiralty in mourning, but the thing proceeded. Death was a glorious thing and a celebration of Franklin, to his memory and to those brave survivors who had straggled home that autumn of 1848 had already been arranged with Barrow’s blessing. It would serve as a tribute to both Sir Johns and to all they had been seen to achieve.
It occurred to Francis, and to him alone it seemed, that it ought to be a more solemn affair; an earnest memorial in hushed tones only. Not for those leaders whose names would live on in history, but for the men and boys he had watched die on the ice. Men who had died well and bravely, but men whose deaths could have been prevented, could have been less cruel. In the frozen, lifeless wilderness of the North, there was no glory in death. Only pain, and fear.
For a moment he remembered the weight of a wasted body in his arms, the scent of rot on its breath and the blood that oozed from wounds long healed, and his own limbs felt too heavy.
God wants you to live.
He shook himself from the recollection. He ought to shave and prepare, he ought to do something. Francis dipped his fingers into the basin before him. The water in the washstand was cold but at least he did not have to break through an inch of ice to reach it. In an hour there would be enough light to see, but for now the reflection in the glass stared back at him like a ghost and held him paralysed. The winter dawn had leeched him of colour but lent a darkness to his hair. Still too thin cheeks pitched hollow and carved angular grooves in the muscles of his jaw. Eyes he knew were blue in the light of day, looked back at him from shadow. He had seen the face before; it was not his.
God wants you to live, Francis, the dream voice repeated.
‘Is this living?’ he asked its face.