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Something was wrong with Commander Fitzjames. It was as if a force had come in the dark of the arctic night, stolen away the Commander and replaced him with the ungodly creature that looked like him, spoke like him, but could not manage an act that could fool Francis.
The day had been strained enough. Gore’s sledging party had returned missing members. Gore was dead. The stranger the men had brought back, the Inuit Shaman they had shot, had died too. He had died poorly and messily, and his bereaved daughter was now ensconced below Francis’ deck, her safety assured for this night at least.
After the stress of the day, Francis had sought comfort in the bottle again. He had been close to sleeping at his desk, his thoughts made dull and short-lived, when Fitzjames seemed to suddenly appear in his cabin.
He had not heard the creak of the door nor the tread of Fitzjames’ boots. In fact, it was the rustle of Fitzjames stripping off his slops that had raised him from his stupor.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Francis had snarled, sleep gumming up his eyes and groggy from the drink.
But it was a valid question for Francis to ask. Just why had the hero of Ching-Kiang-Foo deigned to slip into his cabin at such a late hour?
Fitzjames didn’t answer immediately, folding his slops as neatly as he could, taking that moment to study Francis warmly, with a wholly unearned affection. His cheeks were flushed with the chill of the trek between ships, his hair messy from the Welsh wig. He smiled, a type of easing smile, the type of smile that slipped between your ribs like a knife, a smile that didn’t touch his eyes. It didn’t come close.
“Oh, just a social call, Francis.” Fitzjames had said in his deep rumbling voice, as he stepped closer.
As he advanced, Fitzjames reached into his jacket and brought out a fine-looking bottle of whiskey. He tilted it from side to side, the liquid rolling. There was something of a seduction in the silky movements of his arm, a calculated attempt to please. Francis watched, nearly unable to tear his eyes away, only just managing to wrestle his gaze up to Fitzjames’ handsome face. The grin was still there, rictus and grim, but his eyes were the giveaway. Like the eyes of a spider tending to its web, almost dead, even. Black.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. All men at sea developed the sense with enough time, be it the pitch of the deck, the errant flap of a sail, the creak of a rotting beam. There was something in the wild gleam in Fitzjames’ eyes, something in the eagerness of Fitzjames’ advance. When had Fitzjames ever had the occasion to greet Francis with eagerness?`
He glanced at the bottle again, The glass glinted in the little light with a merry shine, wrapped neatly with a blue label, a kingly looking gift. Francis shook off his instinct with a shake of his head. The man was only Fitzjames, no threat to anyone unless they had the misfortune of belonging to the Chinese peasantry.
Francis, hazy and weak of flesh, just couldn’t help himself. “And what have you brought me?”
“Your favourite Francis,” he murmured. “Royal Brackla. King’s own, aged in sherry casks.” He shook the bottle again, the gentle lapping of the whiskey inside beckoning Francis closer. That strange empty smile was directed at Francis once again.
Francis’ mouth watered, but something held him back. He knew Fitzjames was ultimately a political creature. If he accepted this gift, what did Fitzjames want in return?
An odd thought came to him, the memory of his Nanny, old Memo Moira, sitting in her chair in the corner of the kitchen in the house in Banbridge. She’d cackle whilst hunched over her knitting and lecture him. She’d crow at him to beware of the Greeks bearing gifts, surely. Or would she eye the whiskey and lecture him instead to not to look a gift horse in the mouth. And God, if Fitzjames were a gift horse, he’d be a purebred stallion. He surely was the consequence of fine breeding, a stock finer than Francis' ilk.
And what favour could Fitzjames possibly want from him? That was easy. All of this, all it was was curiosity, the brief alleviation of the weight of boredom building up. Fitzjames was entertaining himself and gathering information to share with his Brother-Officers. Francis would have to be a fool to reject his gift.
Francis waved his hand. “Take a seat.”
Fitzjames ignored the command and came to stand beside Francis, uncomfortably close. Out of the corner of his eye, Francis watched him. With a quick motion, Fitzjames uncorked the bottle and topped up Francis’ glass. The action was overfamiliar, as if Fitzjames was playing at being a steward.
But the fragrance of the whiskey rose in the frigid air, thick and smoky and gorgeous.
“Are you trying to poison me?” grumbled Francis.
Fitzjames moved to the armoire with two elegant steps and removed a crystal glass. He took his seat, setting the glass down with a crisp clink against the woodgrain.
“Poisoning?” he sounded more amused at the accusation than shocked. “Well, Francis. Nothing you haven’t already done to yourself.” His voice, deep and rumbly, was smoother than the whiskey he now poured into his own glass.
He raised the glass to his mouth, licked the inseam of his lips with a flash of pink tongue, then took a long sip. He hummed, smiled his queer little smile. “I don’t think it’s poisoned, Francis. Or I may have built up a bit of resistance to it,” his eyes flickered to Francis’, both a taunt and a challenge. “Though I dare say, Francis, you’ve also built up quite a resistance to the stuff, haven’t you?”
Francis broke, and the whiskey was down his gullet in a few short gulps. James hadn’t lied. It was the good stuff, the really good stuff, better than the plonk he had in his personal stores.
“That sounds like insubordination.” Francis scowled. There was a flicker of a stray emotion on Fitzjames' face, there for a moment and gone the next. For a moment, Fitzjames seemed wounded. But whatever slip of composure it was, Fitzjames proceeded to pick up the bottle and top up Francis' glass before he leant back, the devil in his eyes.
“Would you relish my flogging?” his smile was grotesque, half repulsion, half playful, as if this were all some small, disgusting game to him. The hairs on the back of Francis’ neck rose again.
He topped his own glass up. “Shall we indulge in another after this, Francis?”
Francis was too weak to resist, and with an eerie watchfulness, Fitzjames continued to ply him in near silence, diligent as a steward.
The whiskey kept coming, the taste flattening, the bloom down his throat lessening with each easy administration. The weight of the unease Francis could not cast off grew lighter. Francis was nearly drifting off in his seat when Fitzjames finally spoke.
“Francis?” God, that accent stirred something inside Francis. Two clipped syllables, made lovely by Fitzjames’ smooth voice.
“Hmmm?” Francis looked up, his eyesight so bleary that even Fitzjames’ distinct features blurred into one another
“Francis, could I talk to the girl? Tonight?”
Francis blinked stupidly, only for realisation to dawn, far more slowly than it should have. Jesus Christ. That was it, that was the ploy. Fitzjames was cuntstarved. He’d come out to Terror, braving the ice, all whilst being led by his prick. The whiskey and the company all to lull Francis into a false sense of security. It made sense now. Francis finally had a proper measure of him.
And what a bastard he was. The girl’s father had died hours ago, and here was Fitzjames, already attempting to get into her drawers. A hot flush of indignation rose in Francis. Where was Fitzjames’ sense of humanity? What did they do to these soldiers when they went out to war to make them so hateful, so calculating? Just who was Fitzjames to attempt something as cruel and distasteful as this?
And coming to Francis first, as if Francis was the girl’s pimp. Jesus. Francis hadn’t even entertained the fantasy of having her. The bottle had made him as sexless as a priest.
“I think the girl deserves some rest,” Francis ground out. God, it was hard to speak. “Today has been a poor one for her.”
“It is a poor one for all of us.”
Francis grunted at the enigmatic statement. “Worse for her, I think.”
Fitzjames looked down his long nose. “Just you wait.”
Francis blinked at him, feeling as if his brain was buried deep in his abdomen. “And what does that mean?”
Fitzjames raised his hands in surrender. “Oh nothing worth worrying about yet,” he sighed, drawing a large hand over his face. “I must speak to the girl, please. Please, Francis?”
“Speak? You don’t have any Inuktut,” scoffed Francis.
“I've been tutored,” Fitzjames claimed, and Francis knew he had caught him in a lie.
“Oh yes? Who by?” he slurred.
“Does it really matter?”
“Don’t sell me a dog. Talk to her! Only talk, I can’t believe that.”
Fitzjames looked startled for a moment. He blinked, his pretty eyelashes kissed the skin under his eyes, before his gaze was back upon Francis. Such dark and beautiful eyes. “Goodness, Francis. You’ve never accused me of that before,” he exclaimed.
“Would I have occasion to?” Francis snapped.
James tilted his head, almost coquettishly. “Act as my chaperone then. Watch me attempt to converse.” Fitzjames shook his head. “Protect the damned girl’s virtue.”
And with that, Francis suddenly thought it all rather funny. Maybe some jollity could be salvaged from this day if Fitzjames attempted to talk to the girl and failed. Francis shrugged and stood up. The room span, ample evidence of his gluttony tonight. He took a moment and squared up his shoulders. It wouldn’t do to look weak in front of James.
Francis marched out of his cabin and down, down to where the girl was being kept, focusing on keeping one foot in front of the other as he walked through the common areas of the ship. Every step, Fitzjames was following him.
The ship was dark, and most men were asleep. The hammocks hung in rows, the occupants mostly silent, some snoring. Those men awake and attending to their duties watched them pass, thumbing their forelocks and dipping their pale faces. There would be rumours. Idle men were the worst type of gossipers. On the morrow, every single man on the ship would know that the Inuit girl had been visited by the Captain and the visiting Commander of Erebus, and that they had both stunk of whiskey.
Upon arrival at her cramped quarters, he acknowledged the sentry, though he didn’t send him away, and pushed the door to the girl’s quarters open without fanfare. Fitzjames brushed past him without comment.
Francis inhaled and noticed on the second inhale that Fitzjames smelt different. A lack of cologne, a lack of pomade. That was his habit, to wear scent and he wasn’t subtle about it. He hadn’t bothered tonight, for Francis, and a small portion felt piqued at the lack of effort.
The girl looked up. The evidence of her bereavement was plain to see, her eyes red-rimmed, her sleeves tearstained. Again, Francis felt the wave of disgust at Fitzjames’ insistence on seeing her. It could have waited, surely.
Fitzjames squeezed himself into the cramped space, nearly bending over the girl. The girl stared at him, as hard-faced as any seasoned dockside moll.
Francis braced himself. Composure befitting of a captain. He would not laugh now, but he would when Fitzjames left. And tomorrow, when he would tell Jopson, and then after he would call Blanky into the Cabin under the pretense of an ice report, and they would roar with laughter.
“Good Evening,” Fitzjames spoke. It took a slow moment to realise that Fitzjames had spoken in perfect Inuktut.
And then Fitzjames was galloping away at an impossible pace. His deep voice pitched up and down, every subtle intonation verbalised, no hint of any novice hesitancy, so quick that Francis couldn’t keep up, save for a few choice words. Fitzjames had started with pleasantries, he thought. There had been a snippet- he had praised her father. He had consoled her for her loss, and had praised her father and then – “I am the Shaman of these People,” Fitzjames said.
Francis felt as if the room was closing in on him. He closed his eyes. Dizziness struck him, and he blindly felt for the wood of the doorway. This was impossible. Fitzjames couldn’t speak Inuktut. Francis knew that. He knew that. He hadn’t been able to speak Inuktut this afternoon, when the girl’s father had died. Fitzjames had been close to useless in the sick-bay.
Now he was speaking the language like he were the leading British authority, as if it were his mother tongue. Nothing made sense, not Fitzjames' sudden ability to speak nor what he was saying. Why would he lie to the girl? How was it even possible for Fitzjames to lie to her?
“I am cursed,” James said.
Francis prised open his eyes to survey the scene. The girl sat, her expression giving nothing away. Fitzjames trembled with a kind of nervous energy he had not betrayed earlier. He lurched into another quickfire of sentences, too quick again for Francis. He raised one of his large gunner’s hands, curled all fingers to his palm save for his index finger, extended with a particular elegance. He drew the circumference of a circle in the air. “Round and round,” he said in a language he had no right to have mastery over. “Round and around and around, over and over and over.”
The girl’s eyes glittered in the dark. She remained silent.
Fitzjames continued rapidly. Finally, Fitzjames raised his hand once more, only to place his thumb and finger together. Francis did not know the Inuktut, but he knew exactly what James was saying. He’d heard it too many times. “Bullet the size of a Cherry,” reverberated around Francis’ head, over and over again.
Francis eyes nearly boggled out of his head.
Fitzjames’ hand then pointed to his arm, drifted his finger across to his breast, stopped, and tapped meaningfully. “I carry my death in my chest,” he said.
Francis felt as if he was going to be sick.
Fitzjames continued on and on, unrelenting in his monologue, his focus solely on the girl. The girl did not answer, though her glower grew deeper and deeper.
And then he spoke the word “Tuunbaq.”
Francis did not know the word. But the girl did. She flinched as if she had been slapped. Finally, she spoke. “You cannot know about him.”
“I know as I speak truth,” Fitzjames replied smoothly.
He continued, but now the girl began to respond in waspish remarks, anger flashing across her face. Whatever Fitzjames had said, the girl was angry.
Hardly the attempt at seduction Crozier had anticipated.
Fitzjames shook his head and rose to his feet. “It appears we have come to an impasse. Do you have anything you would like said to her, Francis?”
“What was that?” Francis asked angrily, “What on God’s good earth was that?”
“I have a talent for languages,” said Fitzjames airily, waving his hand as if his sudden mastery of the Inkutut language was no great feat. Sighing, he moved to leave, and as he left, Fitzjames paused in the doorframe, turned once more to the girl. “Oon-oo-koot,” he said to the girl. Goodnight, Francis' mind supplied. “Oon-oo-koot, Silna.”
The girl’s face slackened, her mouth dropping open in surprise. Fitzjames closed the door behind him and smiled that strange little smile again before proceeding to amble, at a slow, easy pace, up to Francis’ cabin.
“I didn’t know the Commander spoke that Eskie language, Sir,” voiced the man stationed as sentry.
Francis nearly jumped out of his skin, having forgotten the man was there. “Oh yes,” mumbled Francis, still in shock. “A true intellect.”
He stalked after Fitzjames, catching up and staring at the back of Fitzjames’ head; the roar of his heart thundering in his ears. He felt sick, he felt clammy, he felt, he felt– he felt as if he were in the presence of something unnatural. Something not human, something barely attempting to pretend.
Changeling hissed Old Memo Moira from the depths of Francis’ childhood.
Old Memo Moira had believed in many things. She was an unwavering papist, and she had believed in the aos sídhe, the fae. That old woman had twisted the old superstitions of Ireland into her faith until the two tenets were so tightly intertwined they could never be picked apart.
But in her stories, it was the young and the beautiful that the fae desired the most. Newborn babes for faerie cribs, and beautiful young women snatched away to become brides. Now that was a thought, Commander Fitzjames made into a bride and replaced by this impossible imposter.
God, this night had made him ridiculous. He hadn’t contemplated his Nanny’s fairie stories since he had become a man. And his Nanny’s stories never featured snatched thirty-something Commanders of the Royal Navy.
Fitzjames led Francis back through his own ship, looking back before he ascended the stairs. Francis couldn’t help but be stuck by the beauty evident in the silhouette of his face. If anyone were to be snatched from the ship, Fitzjames was the handsomest candidate. In the entire Navy, even. But Fitzjames was smiling that false little smile again, the smile he had worn like a mask for the entirety of the night. It sat stiffly on his handsome visage, as ugly as sin.
“Would you care for some more? I quite fancy another snifter.” he spoke with such a horrid levelness of emotion, apparently unbothered by the events of the door.
A spark of panic ignited, horror sparking through Francis’ chest, every nerve pitched to the highest tension. Changeling hissed old Memo Moira from somewhere deep in his mind. Every Irish child knew that you should never accept food from the fae, lest you owe a debt to the creature. And he had accepted that drink, that lovely, jolly bottle. And he had drunk, gladly and deeply. If the fae had snatched Commander Fitzjames away, he was in debt to the creature they had left behind.
Francis pressed his lips together so firmly they felt numb, fearing that should he open his lips, the madness inside his head would tumble out.
Fitzjames cocked his head, and Francis nodded stiffly.
They came to the Captain’s Cabin once more, Fitzjames ushering Francis inside. Francis did as he was bid to do, watching Fitzjames with wary eyes.
Fitzjames was surely aware of Francis attention, walking to the desk, turning to face Francis, and seating himself upon Francis’ desk. Such temerity! He poured himself a drink and knocked it back in one.
“Did you really think I was going to force myself on her? Do you really have such a low opinion of me?” he was grinning as he said it, forced and unnatural.
Yes, thought Francis. “No,” he said. He had the sense to lie at least.
Fitzjames raised his eyes to the heavens. “Jesus, Francis. Get to know me a bit better, and you’ll come to find that I am hopelessly inverted,” Fitzjames laughed, but there was no humour to be found in the bitter note. And no fear of consequence.
It was as if Francis had been punched in the gut. Fitzjames was speaking as if he had no regard for the fact that he could be hanged for his sin. He spoke as if he knew - knew of Francis’ own hidden irregularities. After a long minute, he found the composure to ask. “Why are you telling me this?”
James shrugged elegantly, leant back to look Francis up and down, a look so blatantly desirous Francis felt as if- as if… There was a glint of danger in those imposing dark eyes, bewitching, seductive, burning straight to the marrow.
“Given some encouragement, you so often find out for yourself.”
Panic exploded inside him. “Get off my ship,” ground out Francis. “Get out. I don’t want you here.”
Fitzjames’ smile widened, sinister and eerie. He ignored Francis’ command, choosing to pour himself another glass. “You know, I prefer it when you hit me, Francis. Makes it all seem so much more real.”
All of it was too strange to be countenanced. Nothing in nature could explain this night. Something had possessed Fitzjames, come in the arctic night, stolen away the Commander and replaced him with the ungodly creature standing before him.
Fitzjames must have seen the terror in Francis' face. The smile faltered into something more painful, the mask falling like a serac. “Francis? Have I scared you? I’ve frightened you, haven’t I? Too much at once, too early. I’ve never frightened you before.”
Francis attempted to speak and found himself struck dumb. What could he say?
Fitzjames raised his hands in surrender. “Peace, Francis. Peace. I’ll leave you be.” James pulled on his Welsh wig and gathered his slops into his arms, turning to leave.
A question bubbled in Francis’ mind. It was mad to voice it, but this entire day had been madness upon madness after so many days of inactivity.
“Just what are you?” Francis asked, afraid of the tremor in his voice, afraid of the answer.
Fitzjames looked wretchedly tired. He pondered the moment for a moment. “Doomed,” he said with a softness, his voice a caress. “But I suppose that in the end, we all are.” Fitzjames paused, made a clicking sound with his tongue, and for the first time looked up at Francis, haunted and noble and as if he were to cry. A different creature entirely.
“I do wish that you would just get on and put a stop to the drink, Francis,” he said plaintively. “You always make me wait for so long. We don’t really have much time together at all.”
He left without explaining himself, without explaining anything, his footsteps pacing further and further away until he could no longer be heard.
Francis staggered to his seat. Fitzjames’ glass stood upon his desk, the bronzen liquid gleaming in the low light. Francis lifted the glass, contemplated it. Fitzjames’ long lips had touched this glass, leaving only a faint impression. Changeling hissed Old Memo Moira from Banbridge in County Down, from the depths of Francis’ childhood. How long had it been since she had died? What would she make of all this?
His hand was trembling, the liquid quivering under his nose. What would Old Memo Moira say about the glass in his hand? Would she say to drink or to spill it? What was the correct etiquette for interactions with the Fae? How else could he explain the mysteries of this night?
He extended his tongue, ran it along the rim, the place where Fitzjames’ lips had met the crystal. All the warmth of Fitzjames' mouth had fled, and the glass tasted of nothing but whiskey. With violence, Francis knocked back the glass with a gulp, set it upon his desk, and wondered what debt he owed to Fitzjames now.