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Sophia Cracroft was bored. She was leaning against the railing of Her Majesty’s HMS Erebus, fitted out for a grand ball; around her swirled assorted creatures of crinoline and lace and gold braid, but she was thinking idly of riding to the little lake outside of town where the platypuses had begun to build their dens, and also of the girl with lovely dark hair who was currently taking a spin with the man of the hour, Captain James Clark Ross.
The girl laughed at something he said and threw her head back, and Sophia’s eyes followed the line of her pale neck down to where the neckline of her dress—worn so low as to appear ready to slip off her shoulders at any moment—revealed just a hint of the curve of her breasts. She wondered idly if she might convince the girl, who she thought was the daughter of a wealthy landowner to the west, to join her, and whether she might convince her to unlace her traveling dress for a dip in that pond.
“Miss Cracroft,” a soft Irish brogue said, startling her from her reverie.
It was James Ross’ Second, the other captain, she was fairly certain. He was not particularly handsome, she thought somewhat uncharitably, and even the soft golden light of the colored lanterns could not burnish his lank strawberry blonde hair the fetching warm auburn of Captain Ross’s, though in style they were almost the same—both worn long and loose in defiance of the current fashion, though Ross’ was arranged into curls.
“I do believe that I have been asked to dance by every woman here... apart from you.” He quirked a half-smile at her.
“Then your dance card should be quite full, Commander Crozier,” she said, knowing full well that she would be scolded for her lack of politeness later. Aunt Jane, who was hovering just far enough away to eavesdrop without crowding her, fixed her with a jaundiced eye. Even if there was no man there fit for her to marry (which was quite to Sophia’s taste) it wouldn’t do to offend unduly, not when their social circle was as small as it was.
“Nonetheless,” he remarked, “Indulge me?”
She glanced again at Aunt Jane, and let him tug her away from her post near the ship’s rail. To force the issue would attract more attention than it was worth.
As he turned her around on the crowded deck, however, she found his hands to be unusually light, and leading only; given his insistence, she had thought he might take advantage of the opportunity to press his hands in places that might not otherwise be proper, especially as the opening quadrille had long since given way to a much more risqué waltz. He seemed content, however, to gently tug her into the steps. He was neither a particularly fine dancer nor an especially poor one.
She wondered at his forwardness and the lack of it; she had not taken much notice of him, beyond that most cursory of his introduction by her Uncle, as one of the two Captains of the ball. One of the great benefits of having followed her Uncle to Van Diemen’s Land, she thought sourly, was that what balls there were were fewer and further between than those in London.
An answer, of a sort, came when he pulled her in close at a turn in the waltz, though not the answer she was expecting. She tensed for a clumsy overture.
“You have been staring at the girl in the purple dress all evening,” he whispered in her ear, instead, quiet enough that even the couple turning next to them should not hear. “Tell me, is it the dress or the girl that fascinates you?”
Things began, then, to form into some sort of order in her mind. There was more than one sort of man who sought out the company of a woman who appeared uninterested; she had pegged him for the other sort, the sort who liked a struggle. But now she thought that perhaps he was simply using her to avoid drawing attention, having noticed a certain sympathy in their dispositions. She had assumed his deference to the Erebus’ captain mere politeness, but now she wondered at the way his gaze had hardly wavered from the man when Uncle John had been showing the two around.
"She is not nearly so fine-looking as your friend Captain Ross is tonight. And I have heard he looks quite fine in a dress as well," she replied, and watched his face in the flickering light.
It was a gamble, but no worse than what he had implied about her already.
He hummed enigmatically, and his hand stroked lightly up her bodice, the whispering touch sending a shiver down her spine, and all the more for being unexpected.
"I think you look finer," he said.
She was not sure what to make of this. She thought she had had his measure; why call attention to her wandering eye if he meant his overtures truly? Why draw her attention to the woman and not Ross, if he were not trying to gauge her for fellow-feeling?
They had taken a full turn about the deck now, and had nearly returned to where they had started; over Commander Crozier’s shoulder she scanned the crowd for Captain Ross and his erstwhile paramour, and found neither. Given that it was Captain Ross’ ship they were dancing on, and unlikely that he would retire permanently until the end of the night, she suspected that could only mean one thing. Aunt Jane had drifted away somewhere as well, though Sophia doubted it was for the same purpose.
“In any case, I think I have lost out to your friend,” she remarked.
“Shame,” he said, “Better luck next time.” He did not look concerned, though; not about the girl and not about Ross.
She turned that over in her head. They were coming to a turn in the dance, and she took the opportunity to lean up and press her lips to his ear, whispering, “Does imagining me with another woman excite you?” before twisting away.
He followed her motion without hesitation, holding his hand up while her wide skirt billowed around her. When she twisted back, she pulled herself, panting and flush, against his body, and he offered her a crooked smile that exposed a rakish gap between his teeth.
Her next step brought her thigh between his legs, where she would surely feel—
Nothing. An inseam and soft flesh only. Just when she thought she had the measure of his desire, he eluded her.
He whimpered in her ear all the same, hand clutching spasmodically at the watered silk of her dress.
“I am not sure if I should be disappointed to have found so chivalrous a suitor,” she huffed, easing her leg out from between his. Despite the lack of physical reaction, his face showed a hint of loss.
“Will you still think me chivalrous if I offer to show you the botanical drawings in my cabin, Miss Cracroft? Only I have heard your uncle say you have quite an interest in the local fauna,” He said in an undertone. His tone was light and the offer joking, though there was an undercurrent of desire beneath his words.
She looked around at the party. It had been dull and largely without interest and, to be honest, she would rather see those botanical drawings, although she wasn’t entirely sure they were real and not a pretense. And if not, well—it wasn’t as if she didn’t find him intriguing. The lack of a handsome face was not so hard a trial to bear when it was buried one’s skirts. And besides, if a waltz was a simulacrum of other activities, as many of its detractors claimed, he had at least shown himself to be a pliable and attentive partner.
“Lead the way, Captain,” she told him sweetly, looking up from beneath her lashes.
He had obviously not expected to find her so forward, or his joking offer accepted; his jaw went slack and his eyes wide, and it was incumbent upon her to pull him, laughing, from the press of dancers still swaying on the deck, making sure to lead them through a crowd of revelers to block Aunt Jane’s view.
He followed her willingly to the start of the gangplank leading from the faux-dance floor of Erebus to his own Terror, where she had to release his hand to hoist up her heavy skirts.
Only when she turned her head to look over her shoulder from the other side and say, “Well?” did he seem to return to himself, practically tripping over his own boots in his haste to follow her.
They were not the only ones on Terror, which like Erebus had been arrayed in a veritable carnival funhouse of looking glasses; tables of refreshments had been laid out, food and drink flowing freely, and some distillers from Port Arthur had brought with them several barrels of Van Diemen’s Land’s best, despite her esteemed uncle’s objections. Someone had arranged a number of sabers into a sort of parody of a chandelier.
She pulled him around to the side of the gangplank where they weren’t visible from the dance floor.
“Take me to your cabin,” she reached up and whispered into his ear.
He looked around guiltily as if he might be caught out—as if his First hadn’t already disappeared somewhere with an impressionable young woman of his own, as if this sort of party wasn’t entirely designed for these sorts of short-lived liaisons between strangers—or people who would pretend at being strangers by tomorrow.
He showed her the way into the belly of the ship, to a room full of maps and drawings which was most certainly not his cabin.
“To be entirely honest, Mister Hooker keeps most of the more interesting samples on Erebus, though I have been the lucky recipient of some of the overflow,” he said, a self-deprecating smile showing his gap-teeth. His hair was receding but the way he grinned and the blush creeping up his pale neck made him look especially boyish, and Sophia could not help taking his face into her hands and kissing him, crowding him up against the table as she did so.
He kissed back sweetly, eyes fluttering closed and giving himself over to her entire, like a maid with her first boy, and Sophia felt compelled to bite and tease at his lower lip a bit. His hands came up to frame her waist, broad and blunt and warm, and his legs shifted apart so she was bracketed by his thighs.
She followed the curve of his chin with her hand, all the way down his chest, to press over his inseam again, but all she could feel was the canvas of his pants and the folds of his shirt tucked up underneath. She was beginning to form a theory about that, and began undoing the buttons on one side.
“Are you shy?” She asked teasingly, and saw him looking down at her with hooded eyes, pupils dark with lust.
"I thought it might not be the first time that you had undressed a woman.” He said, quietly. “I thought you might... know how to give me what I want. Am I mistaken?”
"You’re not mistaken," she said, hand finally pushing into the placket of his trousers. The angle wasn’t good, but she managed to worm her way in between the layers of his shirt and feel—
Oh, but he was wet for her. Even in the confines of the tight trousers her fingers were slipping in the slickness, around the bulge of his clit, and he let out a half-pained hiss and a broken gasp of, “Yes.”
“You want me to make you feel,” Sophia asked slowly, “As a woman does?”
His eyes then were so vulnerable that something inside her could not help but pity him, even as she relished the feeling of power it gave her. “Yes,” he breathed.
And she did.
——
Sophia should have known that it wouldn’t end that easy.
It was decided that Terror and Erebus would winter out in Hobart Town while undergoing repairs and waiting for the pack ice to melt, and as esteemed guests—well, as James Clark Ross was an esteemed guest, anyway—her Uncle John could not help but fall over himself to invite the two Captains to his dinner table as often as feasibly possible, and they became a fixture at Government House.
Aunt Jane must have noticed something between her and Crozier at the Erebus and Terror Ball, for she sat Sophia as close to Captain Ross and as far away from Commander Crozier as it was possible to be while still allowing them to sup at the same table. As a result, Sophia endured rather scorching looks from across the dinner table from Crozier—and equally scorching ones of censure from Lady Jane to him.
More out of amusement than anything else, Sophia decided that she would like to have that trip to the platypus pond she had been considering after all, and she knew just who would most ardently like to take it with her.
——
She met him at sunrise at the gate to Government House, with two horses from the stables and her hair pinned up under her wide-brimmed sun hat. She had put on the white canvas shirt with the wide sleeves and tight bodice that was both feminine and rugged, and the dark-colored gaucho trousers that looked quite like a skirt—if one was not looking too closely. It implied the roughness of a farmhand without forfeiting the grace of a Lady.
It was the sort of image that worked very well on impressionable young women recently arrived from abroad, she had found, to whom it was quite exotic. And, apparently, on 43-year-old Naval Captains wintering in from the Poles, too.
He watched her, mesmerized, as she swung off the first horse with ease and offered him the reigns. He collected himself, though, and went to kiss her hand.
“Miss Cracroft,” he said, a bit breathless. “You look… well.”
“Commander Crozier,” she said, coquettishly.
She led them North from Government House, through the plantations and the colonial houses with their big fences, through a bit of dense forest and out onto a plateau. As they picked up speed across the flat country, Sophia felt the excitement of her thighs clenching rhythmically, rising and falling with the pace of the horse. As the road entered a patch of woods and slowed down again, Sophia turned to look back at her companion.
Commander Crozier sat upon his horse, the poor thing, jostling like a sack of potatoes.
“What do you know about platypuses?” She asked, pulling back to ride alongside him, more in an effort to distract him than anything.
It was evident that he did not know much about platypuses, and he stammered shyly about the illustrations he had seen in some books.
“They’re very dangerous, you know,” Sophia said. “Aunt Jane wanted to keep them in the pond at Government House, but no one would let her.”
The Commander looked at her doubtfully, as if he was unsure whether or not she was mocking him. “Really?”
“Oh yes,” she said, “Particularly the males during mating season. They have little spurs on their legs, and their venom can be quite deadly.”
“Would it kill a man?” Crozier asked, quite seriously.
“Only a small man,” she said, soothingly. “You, my dear, would be quite safe.”
Even for all his years at sea his complexion remained pale as milk, and so she could see the fetching blush that colored his cheeks at such a small endearment.
“Besides, it is just past mating season, and so all we have to fear out here is seeing a Devil.”
“The devil?” He asked, suspiciously. For a person his age he was surprisingly innocent and susceptible to teasing, and it made her want to be just a bit wicked with him.
“A Tasmanian Devil,” She said. “They are great big creatures like bears, with wicked sharp teeth and claws. They are quite endemic to these woods.”
His brow furrowed. “Oh,” he said. “I have heard of them. A fearsome beast with jaws that can crunch through the hull of a ship, or so they say.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “In twilight you can’t tell what size they are, and they make a horrible gibbering sound when they come at you, like a madman. It puts you in mind of some kind of great slobbering beast.”
“What happens when a Devil meets a platypus, do you think?” He asked.
She considered for a minute, but was saved from having to invent a suitably improbable reply by their arrival at the pond.
“Perhaps, if we are very quiet, we shall see,” she said, as she dismounted. She tied up her horse before going back to Crozier to give him a hand down—normally she would be aiming to impress a young lady with the gallantness of the gesture, but for Crozier she rather thought he simply needed the help.
He still colored charmingly when she grasped his arm, though, and let her help him down.
With his assistance, she spread out the cotton sheet she had packed in their saddle bags by the edge of the pond, and laid upon it the spread she had had the servants prepare—cold beef and cheeses, boiled potatoes, and a bit of rocket salad that grew up in the garden of the house. The pièce de résistance was a bottle of Claret she had liberated from Uncle John’s cellars, and two of his finely-cut monogrammed crystal glasses wrapped firmly in napkins, one of which Crozier accepted with a flicker of surprise and a knowing grin that probably indicated that he was aware she wasn’t meant to have taken them.
They ate a leisurely lunch in the shade of the trees, and spoke of this and that; Crozier, she had found, was especially poor at small talk, though he could be relied upon to speak extensively on a topic if it interested him, only to trail off in embarrassment when he realized how long he had been going on. In company this habit was irritating, but alone she found his blushing and stammering quite affecting, and couldn’t help but try to draw it out.
In deference to the warm weather, he had at some point stripped off his cravat and his jacket and even unbuttoned his waistcoat halfway; in the gap between the parted sides, where his shirt collar hung open, Sophia could see that he had left his chest unbound, and the gentle curve of his breast peaking through as he reclined on the blanket was driving her quite to distraction, though he did not seem to notice at all.
“Can I ask you something?” She said, in a lull in the conversation. He shrugged a shoulder in assent.
“Did you always want to be a man?” She asked.
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” he sighed. “I knew I wanted to be a sailor. I have been a man so long, I suppose, that I have forgotten how to be anything else. I didn’t know it was possible to be anything else, besides a man, or… a man’s wife.”
His face was so open and vulnerable that it made her feel a bit of embarrassment for him. He had no guile to him at all. She could ruin him, she realized, if she wanted to; it was no wonder that he had not made it to the full rank of Captain by such an advanced age, as she couldn’t imagine him playing at politics at all.
She broke away from his gaze and moved the conversation on to other topics, such as antarctic fauna, which he was only too happy to expound upon at length.
After they had eaten much of the food—and Sophia had drunk far more of the Claret than she intended, trying to stave off her desire to push Crozier down and get a hand up his shirt—Sophia shifted restlessly on the picnic blanket.
“Are we waiting for the platypuses?” He asked.
“Platypii, dear,” she said, and he ducked his head and smiled a little shyly. “When we’ve finished, I thought we might go bathing.” She stretched her arms above her head, and watched him watch her, the way her shirt hiked up to show a sliver of corset, the piece of potato half-way to his mouth entirely forgotten.
“In fact, I think I shall change presently, in those bushes just there,” she added, with a gesture of her head, “You ought to do the same, I think.”
She made for the stand of bushes behind where they sat (which would protect her modesty in only the most cursory of ways), slowly enough to be an invitation.
“But we haven’t brought bathing—” He called after her, brow furrowed, and she giggled as she stripped the shirt off her back, watching his face through the branches as he saw the shirt appear over the edge of the bush.
“Hurry up or I’ll leave you behind!” She called, turning her back on him to loosen the front-lacing strings of the riding corset she was wearing, then the strings holding up her pants, and finally the lacy white underthings she wore beneath them, hanging them one by one upon the tree so that Crozier could see them as they came off her.
When she was finally bared to the warm air, she ducked around the tree to see if he had listened to her at all or been too shy, and found that he had taken off his trousers but left his shirt on, and his boots. As she approached she could see that in addition to these he also wore a fetching blush all the way from his strawberry-red hair down to his pale pink freckled thighs, which only seemed to grow darker and blotchier as he watched her come nearer, his eyes wide and helpless as he took in her bare frame, seemingly unable to decide whether to look at or away from her.
He was tall and lanky, nearly hairless aside from the shock of red on top and a soft light fur covering his cunt, with just a bit of middle-aged softness beginning to form around the middle. His body was neither feminine nor particularly masculine, but somehow boyish in a way that had nothing to do with age.
“I thought we were meant to be swimming,” He said helplessly, as she straddled him and pushed him back down into the dirt.
His tits, when she finally got at them, were small and flat, and just a bit red, as if they had been bound but not recently. She rucked up his shirt and suckled on one of them, and he wrapped his leg around her back and let her press her face into them greedily, inhale the sweat-tinged scent of skin and cloth. Her teeth found a peaked red nipple and scraped gently, teasingly, while her thumb brushed at the other beneath the rough linen. He sighed her name, blunt fingernails digging into her back.
“Sweet thing,” she said, and he laughed—pulled her up and kissed her on the mouth, rolled them over on the blanket so his long hair fell over her face, brushing her cheeks. The soft light from the trees colored it like fire. With his smattering of freckles and bobbed hair he really did look sweet, in the way of a farm girl.
"What do you want me to say?" Sophia asked, as she gazed up into his face, a hand framing his round chin, thumb resting on the dimple. "Do you want me to call you beautiful? Or handsome?"
"I don’t want you to lie to me," Crozier said. “It is my curse, I’m afraid. I have never been beautiful, and I’ll never be handsome.”
“Oh, my dear,” she said, and kissed him again.
He was shy in his touches, unpresumtive as he had been as a dance partner, cupping a hand gently around her breast and kissing at her neck until she sighed and caught his hand, showed him how to grip and knead at her tits the way she liked.
For her part, she grasped greedily at his thighs, digging her fingernails into the soft flesh of his backside. She got a naked thigh between his and pushed up until she could feel the slick of his cunt on her, the drag of his rough hair. He bucked gently against her, as if against his will, and she bit his shoulder and urged him on, insinuating a hand between their bodies.
He sighed and shuddered as she found him, pressing two fingers in between his folds the way she knew he liked, as she had done when she had him the first time. She stroked him from back to front, dipping her fingers in and dragging the wetness from his cunt up into the folds on each side, circling his clit with her slick fingers, not too rough but not lightly either, and he gasped into her neck, arching his back.
“Have me,” he said, voice rough. “Fuck me.”
She kept her thumb pressed in next to his clit and thrust two fingers into him, suddenly, and he moaned and let his elbows go out as he pushed his hips back onto her, forcing her fingers further in. He was heavy and hot as a furnace and through the rough fabric of his rucked-up shirt she could feel his small flat breasts pressing down on her larger ones, his nipples peaked and angry.
He couldn’t seem to decide what he wanted more—to press back on her fingers or down to her thumb on his clit, and so he rutted on her, madly, until she grasped him by the shoulder and tilted him up so she could get three fingers in his cunt and drive them home, gravity fucking him down onto her hand.
He had his eyes closed and his head thrown back, wanton, lacking all artifice—he was not a beautiful man, as he had said, nor an especially handsome one. In his moment of climax he was artless and greedy, wailing like a wretch and fucking himself on her wildly.
But his greed spurred her on and she couldn’t help how her hips moved in time with his, frustrated with the lack of anything to thrust against, and she thought wildly, oh, but if I had a cock how I should fuck him with it, how I should make him scream.
(Immaterial, of course, because she was perfectly capable of making him scream as it was.)
He clenched around her fingers and she could feel him spill, his walls contracting and shuddering as he grew impossibly slicker around her, until, whimpering like a child, he fell back on her chest, the last weak tremors working their way down his thick, muscular thighs.
She gently eased her aching wrist out from under his body, and he seemed to come back to himself, eyes blinking open slowly. There were tear tracks running down his face, and he looked—ruined. Overcome.
He slid his weight off of her and grasped her hand, sucked her fingers into his mouth desperately, the wet of his saliva mixing with the slick of his own cunt juice, until she laughed a bit unkindly and said, “Enough, enough,” pushing him off like he was an enthusiastic dog.
He rested, panting, beside her for a bit.
When he had recovered his breath, he sat back on his haunches and got one of her legs over his shoulder, spreading her cunt out wet and open in front of him, but turning his head away from it to kiss the underside of her knee instead. Almost as an afterthought, the rough, thick pad of his other thumb drifted lightly over her engorged clit, teasingly. He looked at her out of the corner of his eye with that small rakish smile of his that showed just the flash of his gapped teeth, as if he knew that his lack of attention was driving her mad.
She rolled her eyes and thumped him lightly on the head with her foot, and he looked up at her with puckish amusement crinkling in the laugh-lines around his eyes.
Finally he leaned down, her leg still thrown over his shoulder, his eyes locked on hers, and ran the great flat edge of his tongue all the way up her cunt. He seemed helpless to stop himself from pressing his nose into the thick dark hair at the base of her and taking in a great deep breath, eyes closing in something like bliss.
“I think I have never seen a woman so beautiful as you in my life,” he said, against her thigh, hands stroking reverently up her legs. “And if I have I can’t remember it.”
He set at her properly this time, licking and suckling at her hungrily, giving just the skimming edge of teeth as he tugged at the hood of her clit, and she raked her nails at what she could get at of his broad back, though they were cut short and blunt enough that no matter how she scraped she couldn’t draw blood. Damn practicality; she wanted him to feel her, not just today but tomorrow and the next day and the day after.
He looked up at her from under his lashes, lips shining wet from her cunt juices, and gently placed one of her hands in his hair, letting her tug and push him where she wanted. She grasped his head in both hands and pushed his face further into her cunt, thrusting wildly with what leverage she could get with one leg still on his shoulder, tugging at his long unruly hair.
He let her fuck him like that, pliant as a doll, and she was wound up enough that her own end came quickly enough; which was probably for the best, as she wasn’t sure how long he could last with his face pressed into her without breathing.
“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” he said, laughing a bit hysterically and gasping for breath, when she finally let him go. He collapsed back on the blanket, staring up into the blue sky, broad chest heaving, his hair a wild mess around his face and his thin lips wine-dark and wet and spread into a dazed smile.
Sophia sat up and shook out her hair, which had come loose from its pins sometime in the exertion; then, feeling restless, she got up and walked a ways toward the cool water, stepping carefully on the smooth stones. She turned back and caught Crozier watching her, head propped up on one elbow. As she looked, his hand tugged his shirt back down to preserve his dignity, and he still had his ridiculous boots on.
“You should join me,” she called back to him. “Unless your sense of propriety forbids it?”
“Let an old man rest,” he called out to her, and she shrugged and dove under to swim a lap to the other the edge of the pool, limbs still filled with a tingling restless energy she couldn’t seem to exorcise.
When she emerged from her third lap of the pond, she could see that he had joined her, his shirt finally off and his broad sloping shoulders out in the open air, showing off a constellation of freckles that shouldn’t have been nearly as endearing as they were. He was clearly more confident a swimmer than an equestrian, and as she swam playfully away from him he caught up to her easily, and gathered her up in his arms from behind.
“You are gorgeous,” he breathed into her neck. “Divine.” He kicked his legs in a leisurely fashion, effortless and easy in the water in a way he never seemed on land.
She slid her fingers back and down into his cunt to feel where she had fucked him, and he gasped and shuddered and let her wriggle out of his grip.
She caught him playfully by the arm as she turned and ducked him under, and he spluttered and splashed and grinned up at her foolishly through the wet curtain of his hair.
“Do you think we have scared off the venomous platypuses yet? Or shall we have to draw the Devils out to eat them for us?” He asked, mock-seriously.
“You are,” she declared fondly, “A ridiculous man.” And she splashed him.
And in the sun under the trees it had been easy to tell herself that what she was doing wouldn’t have any consequences.
——
Some weeks later, Francis was kneeling in the garden.
"But you love me," he said.
"No, Francis," she told him. It was not meant to be unkind, though it was and she knew it. "I know you, which is rare enough, but it is not the same thing. Someday, I hope, you will find someone who can do both."
His mouth was tugged into a miserable little line, and his light cream trousers were being stained by the dew-wet grass.
“Know that my heart is in sympathy with yours, Francis,” Sophia said softly. “But sympathy of feeling is not enough to build a life on.”
“Would you be some other man’s wife?” Frances asked. What he did not say was, Is it that you wouldn’t be mine?
“No,” she said. “No, and you know I wouldn’t.”
Sophia had ever been easy in herself, was the problem. She had never felt the desire to be married to a man, to subsume her name and her prospects to his. It was what had created the sympathy between them, but that same sympathy meant that they could never make each other happy: they were two people united by the desire never to be called Mrs. Francis Crozier.
But that wasn’t quite true. Francis did want to belong to someone, to put his name next to others—an entry in a ship’s log book, his existence made real, set down in ink next to its comrades, slowly making its way up the ranks. What was the marriage register if not the log book of society? A book which had, until now, been closed to him.
Until Sophia, he had thought it impossible.
After Sophia—well.
Explorers lived on hope.