Chapter Text
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
James keeps finding himself in the hold on Erebus, pawing through Sir John’s trunk. It is full of trifles: masks with painted mouths, crowns and paper flowers, scarves of florid silk. A centurion’s helmet, meant for a Britannia costume, which he thinks rather dashing, and scores of others besides. Later he will find it—all of it—quite troubling, but today he smiles at these things in passing and sets them to one side. He hasn’t returned to the trunk for them.
The dress is brownish velvet, the color of sargassum. It might have been red once, or violet; indeed there are patches of rich color still, in the deepest folds of its skirt, in the pressed seams. But on the whole it is brown, and he finds as he holds it against him that the color flatters him, that the dress seems to brighten and improve his features. James has not felt quite himself lately. His head aches. His eyes are dry and glassy. But here against the velvet they seem to twinkle, and aided by the dress’s faded luxury his cheeks are not windburned but merely flushed from pinching, or rouged like a whore’s.
He dreams up Carnivale before this trunk, stroking the dress on his lap like a pet. Around him, wedged in the ice, the ship heaves and sighs as though she’s dreaming too: of leads, of clear sailing. In the silence between these wooden groans he can hear his own hand move against the velvet. Softest, softest, like the tread of a boot sole on new snow. He holds the dress up again, bodice to breast.
James is vain, but he is also a realist. The greater part of his beauty lies in how well he keeps himself. His face is broad. His conformation might be described as raw-boned, and he looks like an outsized schoolboy if he cuts his hair above the ears. He has seen paintings of his father, commissioned in the man’s last days of solvency. He has watched them for long hours, but he cannot fully place himself there. If he could see his mother, if he had but one memory, however foxed by time—but he doesn’t. His past is a country he has worked to forget. His future, writ in ice, is yet undiscovered. James knows himself only in the present, in the reflection of the men around him in the wardroom. Alone in the low light, a bundle of velvet in his hands, he casts about and is unsurprised to find that at the moment he does not know himself at all.
He won’t wear the dress to Carnivale, of course. Not that it is so preposterous an idea; James has been to a pantomime, and he knows the sorts of entertainments men devise on a long passage. He has played the woman several times before, and he has heard a rumor that Francis Crozier himself, in more ebullient days, once escorted a begowned James Ross to a polar masquerade.
So James does not lack for precedent. Were he still Sir John’s second, were Francis sound, then he might get away with it. It might be seen to rouse the men, speak to their commander’s good cheer, his frivolity. He would wear one of the maquillaged masks, duck his head and play coyly at anonymity. How the men might hoot and whistle, how they might grab for him—it steals his breath to imagine it, and James huffs it out again in his corner of the hold like a fall of diamonds.
But Sir John is dead, and James hasn’t spoken to Francis in a fortnight. He’s barely seen him, only catching a glimpse when Jopson forgets himself, when he fails to mop Francis’s brow and empty his piss pot and also bar the door all at once. When James does spy Francis, he is discomfited. He has always thought of Francis as ruddy, but now his face is waxy pale as a sweating cheese. His sickroom, too, has a certain tang, which James notes with some embarrassment on his first’s behalf. It is none of it his fault, James thinks. It is a brave thing Francis does, and he ought to be lauded for it. James does laud him, with effusiveness. Nevermind his many years of being stymied by the man.
“Nevermind Francis Crozier, full stop,” James says to the empty hold.
No, he will be Brittania at Carnivale. With her helm and breastplate he will shine in the candlelight and put the men in mind of the rising sun they gather to greet. He drags out the toga with its hammered brass accoutrements, runs his palm over the stiff horsehair crest of the helmet. It is not so mossy as the velvet, which disheartens him, and so just once more he sets his chosen costume aside and takes up the dress.
James looks around him. He has bid the officers not to leave their choice too long, and he fears he may be beset by others who would come down to the hold to look. But the ship is as quiet as she ever is, which is to say not so quiet, but the tromp of steps abovedecks has grown no heavier in the last five minutes. Surely James can be assured of privacy for five more.
He shucks his waistcoat and gansey with alacrity, reminded of warmer days, shinning sea-cliffs to plunge back down into the salt and the blue, the way boys could dart like slick fish underwater, hands sliding over backs and bellies, parting legs, and then away. He gasps to feel the cold hit him, his skin all points, gooseflesh and nipples. In the cold he can’t bear to bring his trousers down all the way, and he ought to be ready if someone comes. So he slips the dress on overhead, smoothing the velvet against his arms and chest. He has avoided the looking glass lately, but he knows the hang of his uniform, a new sharpness about the hips. His need is beginning to outstrip biscuits and tins of Goldner’s finest. He has peculiar and specific cravings. Fried calves’ liver, jellied marrow. A handful of earth. A bathtub of lime juice. The ice itself, which he would jaw in great handfuls if he would not seem mad to do so.
James bites at the inside of his cheek and considers himself. He cannot be said to be at his prime, but nonetheless, he makes a passable woman. He sets his palms to either side of his ribcage and sweeps them down. The line below his skirts is interrupted by the trousers and is not so pleasing, but above it the dress clings to him from shoulders to hips in a smooth hourglass. The velvet is the softest thing James can remember touching, and the feel of it against his hands wrests a moan from him. James feels himself begin to stiffen. He laughs a little for the shock of it, the most interest he’s had in months. He will sometimes wake up half-hard of a morning, but he has lacked the time or inclination to seek any sort of conclusion.
He will be quick. He keeps his eyes open and trained on the door. His mind cannot settle on any particular line of fantasy, thus he shuffles through a series of fragments he returns to with increasing urgency. Firm hands at his waist, holding fast. The initial burn and shock of being breached. No faces in particular; he has not had a face to bring to mind for years, not since he made lieutenant, though there are a fair few from before he might recall were he to rack his brain. He would be bent double and fucked in this dress, worn properly with underskirts and stays, petticoats voluminous enough to become lost in.
James hazards a small, pained cry and drags his free hand across his chest, fists his skirt to crush the sweaty pile. He does find the looking glass then, and sees high color in his cheeks, bitten lips. There was a girl in Malta his contemporaries liked to visit. James demurred of course, but he oft admired her painted mouth and cheeks, the dark fall of her hair, the same shade as his own. And now he pictures a rough, admiring hand against his own cheek, thumbing at his own vermillion lip. James has made himself so pretty. And now the hands hard at his waist again, the blunt instrument driving home. He loves it. It is shameful. He loves it—
James finishes and flops against the trunk with a groan. He has applied himself so thoroughly that the back of his neck is damp with sweat. He ventures beneath the velvet and finds he has quite ruined its underside, having lacked the foresight to bring out his handkerchief. He wipes his hands. His heart flaps about in his chest like a bat and when he stands his vision swims so he has to grasp at the wall to keep from stumbling.
When he leaves the hold, he bundles the dress inside Brittania’s toga. He passes Le Vesconte on the stairs and claps him on the shoulder. “Pickings grow slim down there, old man,” he says. “I can hardly wait to see what you come up with.”
James and Francis have adjacent tents, but they have been sharing two cots pushed together since the first night of the march. Like the men, they are cold and have want of company. When they aren’t bone tired they sit and talk over the minutiae of the day, lists and the like, dull and comforting. They still have tea and Jopson to fetch it. Francis lets him go after he pours. Leave it for the morning, Thomas, he says. James has long given Bridgens leave to berth wherever in the camp he likes, as the man has elsewhere to go. Jopson, on the other hand, seems to draw solace from serving Francis, and would be wounded were he told to set his duties aside.
James sits on his cot and winces, coaxing a swollen foot out of his boot. He cannot remember any distinction between days beyond what rituals they still move through to open and close them. They do not undress to sleep, falling beside one another in their crusty slops and mufflers, dragging blankets over top. They do not take their boots off lest some peril befall them in the night and require their quick arousal. But ceaseless scrambling over rocks has caused James’s boot to rub a place on one sole raw. He eases the boot off, strips free a vile-smelling woollen sock and presents his foot for Francis’s inspection. Friction has raised a pearly blister, tense with fluid.
“Give it here,” Francis says. He holds James’s foot in his lap, unperturbed by its grim condition, and prods the blister with a fingertip.
“Best to lance and drain it,” James says. “I have a roll of plaster in my pack.”
Walking overland he learned how best to care for such things, though then there was no risk of wounds failing to close. As it is, though, he is hobbled, and so he leans to grab his pack, which holds his allotted tin of medical supplies. Francis finds a sewing needle. When he sets it to James’s foot the relief is immediate, and James gives a grunt that makes Francis smile and run his thumb along James’s arch, which is white and clammy as the belly of a fish.
James wriggles his toes. The nail of the biggest one is blackening. “Not so long ago I gave three days duty owing for cleaner than these,” he says by way of apology.
“I am as filthy as you. And I won’t have you lame, James. For want of a nail the shoe is lost, et cetera.”
James hums. Francis wraps his foot with the deftness of a surgeon. For the first time all day James is not precisely warm, but tolerably cold and sitting in something approaching comfort. It is in this intoxicating lull, Francis fussing with his bandage, that James speaks again. He has no excuse for what emerges other than the familiarity that has grown between them lately, between the awful Carnivale and the abandoned ships and now.
“How would you have me?” James asks quietly.
A pause. Francis sets James’s foot down. “Well rested,” he says. He nods at James’s boot. “Put that back on and to bed with you.”
James follows orders, crawling onto the cot and arranging his blankets. He has misstepped. His salvation, if he has it, will come only by the grace of Francis’s willful misinterpretation. He lies still as Francis moves about the tent, sorting, scribbling in a little book with a stub of pencil. When Francis climbs in beside him at last James evens his breathing so Francis will think him asleep already, and they lie in the dark like this for some time. James can hear the wind moan around the tents. He has never known wind to have such character, nor snow, nor ice. He dreams of them sometimes as figures in a play. Wind, snow, ice. A chorus, here to deliver him a message.
“James?”
He starts. He had hoped Francis would have dropped off to sleep directly, but perhaps he too is listening to the chatter and whine of what seems to James to be the halting language of the cold itself.
“Earlier,” Francis says. His voice is soft and probing, sets James on his guard again. “That sounded like some manner of flirtation.”
Oh, damn. James is glad of the darkness; it makes the moments stretch and gives him time to collect himself.
“A kind of—of daydream,” James says finally, dissembling. “I was too much at ease. Exhaustion took me and I forgot myself for a moment.” He conjures one of his old laughs. A mistake, for it bounces around the tent, clings to its center pole conspicuously as ball lightning on a mast.
But when Francis speaks again there is laughter in his voice, too, a burbling, running kind James has not yet heard. “At ease,” he says, as though counting on his fingers. “Overtired. Dreaming. And so tell me, James. Did you dream me into someone else?”
James swallows. He is perturbed for having to discuss it but relieved too, for if Francis guessed the truth he would not press so, would not sound so amused, would not be alluding to some long-lost sweetheart, obviously of the fairer sex. James has not had one of these in his entire life. “Perhaps I did.”
Francis croaks triumphantly, as though this disclosure has been hard won. Lying beside him James is reminded, somehow, of Sir John, though he can hardly imagine sharing a cot with Sir John Franklin. But Franklin might have acted thus, acted pleased to draw him out. Ironic, for there would have been no need; not so long ago James would have offered up almost anything Franklin asked. And James would in turn have been pleased to locate some kernel of genuine personality in Francis, though Francis-as-he-was would have punished them both soundly for it.
Well, James will take his stab at it, with this new, perplexing Francis, for whom he has come to feel such warmth.
“And you?” James asks. “Do you dream yourself beside Miss Cracroft?”
Francis’s breath stutters so that James feels a stab of real concern. He raises himself up on an elbow. In the darkness he can just make out Francis, who has not expired but is simply holding very still. James worries that he has misstepped again. Perhaps, as insubordination goes, this question is even graver than the last. But Francis sighs, and seems to sink deeper onto the cot. He turns his head towards James, just slightly, as though checking to see if James is watching him. When he sees that he is, he winces.
“At times,” says Francis, “I find I have difficulty remembering who that is.”
James nods. He has never had a sweetheart, but he understands a little of what Francis means. For when he thinks of home and hearth he finds them harder and harder to conjure, to remember that bright rolling country around Rose Hill, to remember once familiar faces. He is aware more keenly than ever that all he has known dwells inside him, a house with a thousand rooms that shift and change from visit to visit. There are rooms kept shut up, and these will fade beyond hope the longer he stays away. Some of them, many of them, he will not regret losing. But he can see that Francis is bereft, that the memory of Sophia Cracroft is a room he has passed long hours in. To find it changed, to find it barred to him—
James reaches for Francis. He rests a heavy hand on Francis’s chest between his sternum and his collarbone. Francis has slimmed, though he is not yet a thin man, and he is wearing copious layers. James fancies he can feel the heartbeat beneath his ribs anyway. His chest is warm, his woolen jumper worn and soft, and James cannot stop his idle thumb from stroking it. Francis’s breathing stills again. And then, slowly, he raises his own hand, sets it down atop James’s. There is an air of gravity between them in the tent. And yet within it James has remained hidden, like a deer that stills before the hunt and is lost to the undergrowth. Unfair, perhaps, when Francis has bared himself, but James cannot help but feel glad of the concealment.