All the White Spaces E-Book

Ally Wilkes

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 638

Beschreibung

A vivid ghost story exploring identity, gender and selfhood, set against the backdrop of the golden age of polar exploration. Perfect for fans of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights and Michelle Paver's Thin Air.In the wake of the First World War, Jonathan Morgan stows away on an Antarctic expedition, determined to find his rightful place in the world of men. Aboard the expeditionary ship of his hero, the world-famous explorer James "Australis" Randall, Jonathan may live as his true self—and true gender—and have the adventures he has always been denied. But not all is smooth sailing: the war casts its long shadow over them all, and grief, guilt, and mistrust skulk among the explorers.When disaster strikes in Antarctica's frozen Weddell Sea, the men must take to the land and overwinter somewhere which immediately seems both eerie and wrong; a place not marked on any of their part-drawn maps of the vast white continent. Now completely isolated, Randall's expedition has no ability to contact the outside world. And no one is coming to rescue them.In the freezing darkness of the Polar night, where the aurora creeps across the sky, something terrible has been waiting to lure them out into its deadly landscape…As the harsh Antarctic winter descends, this supernatural force will prey on their deepest desires and deepest fears to pick them off one by one. It is up to Jonathan to overcome his own ghosts before he and the expedition are utterly destroyed.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

The 1920 British Coats Land Expedition

Portsmouth, December 1918

1: The Fortitude

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

2: The Ice

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

3: The Huts

I

II

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VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

4: The Dark

I

II

III

IV

V

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VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

5: The Devastation

I

II

III

IV

V

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VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

The Devastation, Austral Spring 1920

Acknowledgements

A Word About History and Geography

Suggested Further Reading

About the Author

“All the White Spaces is a heady and haunting mix of historical fiction, polar survival horror and a meditation on gender, identity and the enduring mysteries of the self. You won’t soon forget Jonathan Morgan and his trial by ice.” Paul Tremblay

“Deeply haunting and full of dread, All the White Spaces beautifully balances grief and loss with concepts of family honour and self-determination, in the midst of frozen survival horror with echoes of Dan Simmons and John Carpenter. Ally Wilkes has crafted something both lovely and unsettling. Highly recommended.” Christopher Golden

“A journey into winter, a growing sense of isolation, a battle with the elements and facing down the ghosts of the past—Ally Wilkes has taken some of my very favourite ingredients and bound them into a deliciously spooky and compulsive tale. Ideal for a dark evening, though you might want to draw a little closer to the fire…” Alison Littlewood/A.J. Elwood

“All the White Spaces is an old-fashioned adventure story with a refreshing modern twist and a healthy dose of atmosphere and spookiness. Best savoured on a blustery winter night, with a hot beverage and a warm blanket for company.” Shaun Hamill

“An intricately described story of loss, self-discovery and belonging in the last gasps of empire. It was wonderfully immersive; I heard every creak and was bitten by the freezing fog. All the White Spaces is a ghost story of the heart that becomes a harrowing battle for survival in malicious barrens. It reads like The Terror meets The Thing in Antarctica.” Louis Greenberg

“This story took me to another age, another place, another skin. I would say it’s timely, but that would hide a more important fact, that it’s timeless.” Francesco Dimitri

“All the White Spaces is a sly and unsettling gem of a book that makes for an immersive read. The storytelling is as taut as the setting is stark, and rife with creeping dread. Despite the blazing summer heat, I was chilled to the bone while reading it, and could not put it down. I loved every frostbitten word!” Camilla Bruce

“Frozen into the desolation and isolation of Antarctica, this stunning debut delivers a thrilling tale of survival, terror and strength that will chill you to the core.” Tim Lebbon

“All the White Spaces is a masterpiece. A journey of discovery that left me breathless and emotional for all the right reasons. With this powerful debut, Ally Wilkes has not arrived quietly on the horror scene; she has scaled a towering iceberg and roared.” Rio Youers

“This gave me the chills in the best possible way. A brilliantly written historical horror story set in the aftermath of war and the freezing darkness of Antarctica. Reminded me of Michelle Paver and Dan Simmons’ The Terror.” Anna Mazzola

“All the White Spaces will chill you to the bone—a haunting, claustrophobic tale of a sibling following his late brothers’ ambitions to an inexorable conclusion.” Marie O’Regan

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All the White Spaces

Print edition ISBN: 9781789097832

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789097849

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP.

www.titanbooks.com

First edition January 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright © 2022 Ally Wilkes. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Men go out into the void spaces of the world for various reasons. Some are actuated simply by a love of adventure, some have the keen thirst for scientific knowledge, and others again are drawn away from the trodden paths by the “lure of little voices,” the mysterious fascination of the unknown.

—Ernest Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic

For anyone who’s survived a Winter Journey

THE 1920 BRITISH COATS LAND EXPEDITION

James “Australis” Randall

leader

Liam Clarke

second-in-command

Christian Mortimer

captain

Jonny Wild

sailing master

Richard Boyd

first officer

Mark Nicholls

navigator

Dr. Alexander Staunton

surgeon

James Tarlington

chief scientific officer

David Laurence

first engineer/motor expert

Reginald Ollivar

second engineer/mountaineer

Howard Holmes

mountaineer

Bert Rees

carpenter

A. K. Duncan

dog master

Harry Cooper

dog master’s assistant/“dogsbody”

Robert Macready

cook

Antonio (“Tony”) Perry

able seaman

Ted Smith

able seaman

Martin Benham

able seaman

Louis Archer

able seaman

Bill Jones

able seaman

Victor Bedloe

storekeeper/seaman

George Ellis

stoker

Phil Parker

stoker

Jonathan Morgan

stowaway/“spare”

PORTSMOUTH, DECEMBER 1918

THE WAR HAD ENDED.

My mother had opened the Christmas jam, as if conscious she had been keeping it in reserve for nothing; the breakfast room smelled of quinces, damsons, and pine needles. Our maid Chloe turned the house into a perfect bower, bending branches over the mantelpieces, garlanding the stairs with ivy and bunching wreaths of holly around the photograph of my brothers. A sort of shrine had grown up in the front hall, where they stood resplendent in their brand-new uniforms. The patch of carpet in front of it was thready and uncertain from my mother’s constant pacing, echoed in the burnish to the sides of the photograph frame, too often picked up and set down.

The telegram—the telegram that changed everything—had arrived early, the boy ringing the doorbell and cycling away without waiting for a reply.

My mother summoned me to her too-hot, too-fussy, floral-scented sanctuary in the morning room. I stood awkwardly at the door in my long, scuffed boots as she flitted around a table heaving with poinsettia. She didn’t look at me.

“I know I’m being silly—Jo,” she said, slender fingers wrapped around the little envelope. “It’s probably just news—they must be well on their way to the coast by now. We’ll have them back for Christmas!”

The shortened name sounded wrong in her mouth; she was using it to jolly me along. Unlike my brothers, my mother normally insisted on my full name, which I hated.

I swallowed, and didn’t trust myself to reply. The War had ended, but Rufus and Francis were still in France, incapacitated by their wounds. Their best friend, Harry, had already sent me a letter—uncensored—about the horrors of the Casualty Clearing Station. I’d hidden it from my parents in the biscuit tin under my bed. Partly because they didn’t like Harry writing to me, it wasn’t appropriate; but mostly because it was so stark and unflinching. Harry had never learned to dissemble.

A week ago my brothers should have been fit for repatriation, put on an ambulance train for the long journey to the coast, Blighty beyond. I’d worried, of course, but small worries, tame ones. Whether they’d have enough blankets, or if Rufus was being rude to the nurses. He had a temper on him.

We were unlikely to get them back as we’d known them, although that hadn’t quite sunk in yet. Their wounds were terrible—septic, Harry had written, badly septic, from the thick mud of the battlefield.

“It’s probably just their arrival date.” Hovering, she still didn’t open the envelope. It wasn’t a thick envelope—contained only a single sheet of paper. But a horrible clawing sensation rose up in my throat as I considered what news that single sheet might hold.

“Sit down,” I said, and she did so with a little sigh. I would do no such thing myself—not on the satin chaise, nor the dainty antique armchair—but I crossed the room, boots muffled by the thick carpet, to stand over her writing desk. Her lily-of-the-valley scent was stronger there, making my breakfast turn in my stomach. A short glance to the clock above the mantelpiece. The sun was still struggling to come over the rosebushes, and Father, as usual, was absent: he wouldn’t be back until long after winter dark.

We looked at the envelope together for a long, long time.

She reached behind and crept her hand into mine. It was the first time she’d done so without remarking how blunt my fingers were, how I bit my nails savagely. Unbecoming.

I thought of Harry’s description of their last engagement: the long quiet stealing over the battlefield when the guns stopped. The smoke billowing over the riverbanks, Harry lying in the mud with his binoculars, not daring to breathe, making terrible bargains. A man could suffer a dreadful wound—it could blow clean through him, painting his insides onto the dirt—and stay silent. He might not even notice how badly he was wounded.

“Here.” My voice sounded rough. “If you won’t.” I took the envelope. Her shoulders sagged, and I realised she’d been waiting all along for me to do it: for one of us to be brave.

I didn’t want to open it, but set my jaw and fumbled with her delicate little letter opener as though my hands were icy cold. I saw the familiar form, my eyes jumping ahead without me, picking out the handwritten words and sentences:

Deeply regret to inform you that—

I felt a wave crashing over me. The ordinary sounds of the household were suddenly far away: Chloe, humming to herself as she swept the back hallway; the birds scratching in the chimneys; the faint growl of a motorcar going by. The ice had spread to my face and mouth, and I could no more speak than I could breathe underwater.

“Oh,” my mother said. “Not the boys, not them—”

The Army Council express their sympathy—

I dropped the piece of paper—so few words, so many blank spaces—onto her desk.

Although I’d lain sleepless for several weeks with my eyes fixed on the ceiling, imagining maps of the Hindenburg Line marching across the plasterwork, I hadn’t understood how very far away Rufus and Francis really were. They always felt just around the corner, as if they’d stepped into the next room. But they had been miles and miles away, dying of their wounds.

I had been at home, when I’d so desperately wished to go with them. I’d been at home, while they—

Both always did their duty—

With some difficulty, I realised I was starting to cry. I scrubbed my eyes furiously with the back of my hand. My mother was still looking at me: I had refused to cry in front of her—or Father—since I was very little.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and my voice was so thick and deep I barely recognised it. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

I put my hand on her shoulder. She was warm, and I could feel her birdlike bones through the fabric. She slapped me away with such force it rang across the room. The telegram lay on the floor.

Died of their wounds without suffering—

They had died together. That is to say—they’d died the same night. They would have wanted it that way. Together in all things. Their bedroom had been cleaned and aired for their homecoming, and in my long nights of half-waking sometimes I thought I heard familiar sounds: the creak of mattress springs as they told ghost stories by moonlight or traced expedition routes on the atlas. On clear summer nights they would sneak out into town, leaving the windows open and bodies made of empty clothing in their beds, coming back for breakfast with tales of adventure, dragging Harry apologetically in their wake.

They would not come back again. The vicious hurt of it grabbed me around the chest and made me stagger away from the desk like a drunk.

“I should go—” I said, my voice finally breaking. “I should fetch Father—”

“No.” Tight, quivering, almost another slap. “Go to your room.”

She didn’t look at me.

I reeled out into the dark hallway, grabbing at the door handles, levering myself down the corridor until I was in the water closet, throwing up my eggs and bacon into the sink. I braced myself against the porcelain and shuddered, wiping the sweat off my face and loosening the stiff fabric of my day dress around my neck. It was normally my favourite, the plainest and most masculine one I had: it did up tight like a shirt collar, revealing no expanse of pale skin.

Our house was large enough that I could wander in a daze through carpeted corridors and narrow tiled passageways. I passed Chloe, peeping out of the kitchen door like an apparition, and it seemed to take an age to climb the back staircase, one step at a time; my boots dragging on the tread; my layers of flannel and velveteen weighing me down like lead. Everything once familiar was strange. I felt as if I were opening doors at random. But suddenly I was in my brothers’ room.

They’d insisted on sharing: of course they had. Their room took up the entire length of the first floor; faced the harbour, across the blur of December fog and half-empty streets. They could look out and see the sea, the distance and the sea, while I had to be content with a small patch of garden wall and my mother’s magnolia. I heaved the sash window up with a judder, the movement making the tight little buttons at my cuffs bite into my skin. I wasn’t expected to raise my arms above my head—I was expected to be satisfied with convention, even when it pained me. I stared out. The wind whipped at my raw cheeks where unchecked tears had dried.

I took a long, shivering breath, bracing myself against the windowsill.

Not the boys.

I tried not to think about my brothers lying under that stinking dirty foreign soil, the same soil that had stopped their hearts. They’d sent letters—at first I’d found them funny—about staying in dusty little French farmhouses, making friends with the locals. About long marches through blasted fields, and the terrible food in the trenches. They’d continued to joke affectionately: telling us it was all a game, and one they intended to win. But when Harry’s letters started arriving on my doorstep in their green envelopes, apologising for the presumption—he needed to tell someone—they had a very different tone.

Duty, and sacrifice. And horrors.

I turned slowly. Dark wallpaper, grey and burgundy, a stark contrast to my own room: chintz and lace and all the things I hated; all the things that had been chosen for me. My brothers’ bedroom was as neat and businesslike as a hospital ward. Blankets tucked in at perfect right angles, unfilled water carafes on the nightstand, sparkling in the pale sunlight like cut ice. Combs and Brilliantine lined up on the dressing table, programmes for social dances tucked into the corners of the mirror. The long north wall was covered entirely with maps. Sea charts. Newspaper cuttings.

I wiped my mouth, and stared across at the perfect jagged ball of Antarctica. Its unfinished edges and tints of pale blue dominated the room entirely: for as long as I could remember, the South Pole had been the centre of everything. I could almost see fingerprints on the glass, ghostly traces, where fingers had slid their way down from the Weddell Sea. Of course Chloe would have wiped it clean by now.

“That’s where we’ll land,” Rufus had said, tapping a finger against his lips. “Vahsel Bay. Base camp. Then the sledging parties—off the maps and straight to the centre.”

“You’d better hope there’s nothing in the way,” Harry said from behind him—Harry’s allotted place—and Rufus raised an eyebrow.

“There won’t be. Old Australis knows what he’s doing.”

From the newspaper clippings, James “Australis” Randall stared down at me, handsome and commanding. He was broke—nearly bankrupt—but insisted he had to try, again and again, for the South Pole, despite the accident that had swooped him off the deck of his ship, crushed him in the freezing water against the hidden terrible faces of an iceberg, left him battling for his life on a floe in thirty degrees of frost. I wondered what it would be like to die from such intense cold. “I imagine it’d be rather like falling asleep,” Francis had replied, and squeezed my shoulder. “Not so bad.”

Randall’s accident had been in the Weddell Sea, that treacherous and deadly expanse of water, churning with pack ice, which blocked the route from the islands of South Georgia down to the Antarctic continent. When he’d returned, he’d tried the ice from another angle, where Liam Clarke had lost his fingers on the pitiless Great Ice Barrier—had refused point-blank to speak to the papers about it—saying that a man was entitled to leave the past behind.

I knew their stories so well.

And I could see traces of my brothers in the impatient choppy edges of each clipping—my mother’s dressmaking scissors, borrowed and blunted and never returned. I could see them in each pin jammed into the wallpaper—my mother’s violent disapproval, and Rufus’s smile behind her back. “Maybe we’ll take you with us,” he’d say to me, half serious, half joking, eyes fixed keenly on mine to observe my reaction. “Would you like that?”

“Don’t tease,” Francis would whisper in reply.

I’d loved him for it, and longed to follow them—but knew I never would. My war-hero brothers, off on their adventure to the great white continent: I could almost see them now. Invincible; laughing; triumphant. Leaving me behind again.

A half-sob. I buried my face in my hands, stretching my fingers wide, pressing into my flesh, trying to mould myself into someone different; someone who wasn’t about to cry. Someone more like my brothers.

More like the man I knew I should have been.

I couldn’t bear the thought of returning to my own room: cloying, stifling, as rigid as the tock-tock-tock of the metronome beating time during my endless piano lessons. The only thing in there which was mine—really mine—was shoved under the bed, hidden from Chloe and my mother as if it contained a hand grenade. But it was just a Crawford’s digestive biscuit tin; a nude, tautly muscled Grecian discus thrower was stamped on the front. The tin guarded my greatest treasures: the fat bundle of letters from Harry—serving as my lifeline to the Front—and a grey woollen armband with a crudely stitched crown. Someone had dropped it on the street outside the recruiting station, in the early days of the big Derby enlistment drive. The army posters had stared down at me as I’d picked it up, slipped it into my pocket. It was given in return for pledging to serve: I couldn’t believe anyone would treat something so precious so slightly.

Sometimes I’d try that armband on, see how it looked on me. I’d prop the biscuit tin in front of my mirror and stare at it. Then bury it back under my bed, with all its contents, shoving it out of sight.

I swallowed another sob. Not the boys.

A rustling. The wind came sneaking in like a thief, fluttering the curtains, toying with the newspaper clippings. The movement sent an unexpected shiver from the nape of my neck right down my spine. The fog made it dark for a December morning, so dark, and for a moment I could feel myself being watched by someone—something—just out of reach.

It was so quiet in the house I could have heard a hairpin drop.

I felt sure that if I removed my hands from my eyes, I would find someone else in the room. No—two someones, standing tall and straight with their backs to me. Hair neatly combed, uniforms pressed. Handsome faces still turned up towards Antarctica.

But Harry had been straightforward, hadn’t spared me the details. While the shrapnel had mostly spared their faces (mostly), it was clear no one would be calling them handsome any more. I thought about the ragged tearing of barbed wire, razor sharp on their tender skin, the mud, the mud, a chaos of shouts and screams and falling rain, the agonies of the men, and in the sudden darkness of the morning—

I opened my fingers, looked around the room. Breathed out. No one was there.

I gulped. I would have done anything to see them again, and it yawned beneath me like a crevasse in that quiet room. It opened up and swallowed me whole.

I knew where I’d find them.

My shoulders shaking, I heaved the window wider. I hung half out of it, a strand of stray hair plastering itself to my face in the pale, wet air. The fog was so thick I could hardly see the street, let alone the harbour, but I could hear the tide in the distance. The long, quiet pull of the sea, breathing itself back and forth against the shore, regular and composed as a sleeping giant.

It seemed wrong—fatally wrong—for it to be so calm. There should have been a storm. Wind lashing at my hair. Waves rushing forwards like dark battalions. The room seemed to lurch around me, like a gale in southern waters, and I clung on.

My brothers had left me behind. I’d hug their memories to my chest; I’d fix them forever in that photograph in our hallway. Rufus, looking straight at the camera with his tiger smile; Francis, a little more reserved, standing to one side. The studio walls were creamy white, and the frame gilded, but they didn’t belong in it—no more than I belonged in this polite little floral world. They belonged outside, with a wider prospect, the sea stretching off into the distance. The endless washy horizon.

But now my brothers would never see Antarctica. Never know a clear day on the South Atlantic, or the jewelled ice of the floes. Their dreams had come to nothing, but I was the last Morgan sibling, and I knew where I’d find them.

I knew where I had to go.

The sea should have risen up. There should have been a tempest, a typhoon, a tidal wave. Crashing over the quay, breaking over me—making me anew.

Because I heard it then: the call of the South. I could hear my brothers.

Maybe we’ll take you with us.

1

THE FORTITUDE

THE FORTITUDE, AUSTRAL SPRING 1919

I

THE STORAGE LOCKER WAS CRAMPED AND NOISY.

When my candle guttered to its end, smoke curling inside the blackened panes of the trench lantern, I felt I’d been nailed into my own coffin. Rattling and shaking, the expedition’s provisions strained at their lashings and tried to pry themselves loose. With sickening lurches, my stomach plummeting, the Fortitude made her way through the South Atlantic Ocean. It was more than I could bear: the all-consuming dark, the confinement, the need to hide. It felt like I’d hidden too long altogether.

I slept under a pile of blankets and tarpaulins: if the crew looked in, I’d be another sack of flour in the flickering light. The blankets were coarse, shot through with little knots and burrs, probably dirty—but I hardly cared. My jumper, a sober burnt green with two polished buttons at the collar, had been picked up on shore in South America; it already made me look like a vagabond. Nothing would be “kept for best” ever again. All the clothing Harry had bought for me, piece by piece until I had an entirely masculine wardrobe—it would be worn to destruction.

My pillows were sacks of dog food, making my cropped hair smell like a rendering house, but at least that dog food gave Harry an excuse to visit. Without him, there was nothing but crushing black, under the weight of all the decks and staircases: no food, no water, no candle. I was as dependent as a newborn child.

I drank in, greedily, glimpses of the Fortitude whenever he opened the locker door: I’d seen her only in the dark, head down and face covered. Stowing away, my heart in my throat. We’d paid the Argentine nightwatchman all the money we had left, and there wasn’t a soul to be seen as we came aboard at Buenos Aires, rain seething off the deck like water coming to the boil.

It felt like an age ago, a dark frustrating age, and I longed to see the Fortitude properly. I’d whiled away long, lonely hours with nothing but my own thoughts; sometimes listening to the men clattering around in the galley, learning scandalous things—things I’d never even imagined, making my cheeks hot—about the women they’d left behind. I’d wished powerfully instead for the easy, idle chatter of Rufus and Francis, talking between themselves. But no matter how hard I longed for them, they weren’t there.

Harry was my only companion. Just turned twenty-one, he seemed infinitely older than when we’d left England; although he’d kept his smart officer’s moustache, his curly hair was becoming wild. He was a long way from the young man I’d met at Portsmouth harbour on that dull January day of the new peace; my mother shut away in her morning room, the house dimmed and shadowy. In the pinprick rain, I’d found Harry Cooper, unexpected—stepping out from behind a lamp post as if he’d been there all along. His face was unfamiliar; it had blurred in my memory, while my brothers’ faces stayed fresh—although they might as well have been side by side in the same photograph frame. Despite the fact that we’d never passed a minute alone together, I knew Harry well, all his half-articulated doubts and fears. I just need to tell someone. Duty, and sacrifice—and men hanging on the barbed wire, worried by crows.

He’d said: “I wasn’t sure if you’d want to see me”—as if we’d quarrelled and he thought I might hold a grudge. I’d embraced him in the street, where anyone might see, and for a moment he’d gone limp in my arms.

I’d known, then, that I could talk him into anything.

But the further we sailed, the more reluctant he seemed. We argued, quietly, by candlelight.

“Can you believe we’ve got away with it?” I almost forgot to keep my voice down—it burst out of me. Harry smiled, an overcast smile that made his eyes seem warm and steadfast.

“Not quite—not yet.” He twisted his shirt around his wrists. “Look, Jo—”

“Jonathan,” I said. “You need to get used to it—”

“Jonathan,” he said, giving me an unhappy glance. “I don’t know. We’ll be at South Georgia soon. What if there’s a telegram—what if they’ve found us?”

I scoffed, although the prospect made my heart beat faster. We’d been lucky to get to Dover and then to the Continent without being stopped. A daring scribble on Harry’s passport had served to admit me—posing uncomfortably as his wife—as if I were only half a person. I’d known where I could find my brothers, felt it in my bones: if my parents had also put the pieces together, the two of us disappearing while the Fortitude sailed for the South Pole—a line from them could still spell disaster.

“What if Randall decides to throw you off? Then you’d be in trouble, stuck on a whaling station, with—with old soldiers and Norwegian criminals, until you could arrange passage home. It’s not a place for you—not without me—”

It would still be southern waters. And if I’d stowed away on one ship, I thought recklessly, then what was another? It must have showed on my face, because he grabbed my arm. “Jonathan, please. You don’t understand what kind of men they are. It’s too dangerous!”

“What, then? I stay locked up in here until we make the Weddell Sea?”

“No, but—”

“Until we drop anchor? Until the sledging parties set out for the Pole, and we can be sure no one’s after us? Harry—we’re in this together. You promised.” My voice sounded shrill, and I hated it.

He sighed. “I know, I know. But they’d have wanted me to look out for you.” He sat wedged between two packing crates, long legs drawn up to his chin. In the shadows cast by the trench lantern, his brown eyes were almost black. I knew I must look ghostly by comparison: short straw-coloured hair and pale eyes, pale skin grimy from the locker floor. A pause. He clasped his arms around his knees, allowing me to see a fresh scar on his hand, curled around the base of his thumb like a comma. I nodded at it.

“Oh—the dogs.” He smiled a little. “They’re brutes. They don’t like me, or their kennels, or the motion of the ship. They fight constantly. Duncan has a technique for separating them—”

I felt I could guess what it was, but raised my eyebrows anyway.

“An absolute haymaker to the jaw of the bigger dog.” Harry’s laugh appeared to startle him. “Can you imagine? Shouting, ‘Come on, you bastard.’ He says we need to show them who’s boss—or else they’ll walk all over us.”

I couldn’t imagine Harry doing anything similar. Seeing my sceptical look, he shook his head. “Don’t worry. I couldn’t stomach it. So when Lurcher and Biter were fighting, I threw a whole bucket of water over them—they let each other go pretty quickly. And not a peep out of them for the next few minutes, they looked so affronted.”

I snorted. I could picture it: the sun on deck, glimmering off the freezing water; two stunned and bedraggled dogs fixing Harry with looks of canine hate.

“The men thought it was hilarious. But the bucket was meant to be holding scientific specimens, so I got it in the neck. Plankton, apparently!”

There was a happy lightness to his voice. Harry had been an outsider to the ship’s crew, having not sailed with her from England: how could he, when I’d needed him so much on the way down. I should be glad he was finding his feet—should be grateful, because so much still depended on it. But as I looked at him in the flickering light, my hands and knees all dusty, my limbs cramped, it couldn’t help feeling like a slap in the face. I didn’t want to hear about his daily life on the ship, not while I was confined. His eyes lighting up as he told me about mugs of hot cocoa on the fo’c’sle, trading nods with the officer of the watch. Beating his disagreeable bunkmate—the guardian of that bucket of plankton—in the chess tournament. Restraining the sledge dogs as they strained madly at their leashes, trying with enthusiasm and effort to pitch themselves off the ship. I bit my lip and drummed my fingers, trying to resist the urge to lash out at him. It wasn’t Harry’s fault, I told myself. He was just doing what we’d agreed.

But it felt like I’d already been left behind. “Honestly, you’re safer down here for now,” he added, as if he could tell what I was thinking. “The sea’s getting much worse. That big squall at dawn? We were taken aback, and I nearly went overboard—some of the dogs, too.” The smile slid off his face. “We might have been swept straight over the railings.”

His horror was plain—and justified. Even if the Fortitude hadn’t been scudding along at nine knots under sail, I still didn’t think Harry could swim, despite growing up beside the sea. My brothers had summers of leisure and idleness, trailing saltwater and sand into the house; the Morgans weren’t expected to concern themselves with how the majority earned a living. But Harry was different: even though the Coopers had come up in the world, their fortune was still newly minted. He was encouraged to spend his holidays learning about warehouses and shipping and stevedores—Rufus and Francis were impossibly glamorous by comparison. Trade, Rufus had teased him—and later, when Harry had earned his commission, temporary gentleman—bowing and scraping and tipping an imaginary cap. Harry, though, had always laughed; had always given as good as he got.

He started to explain, seeing that he’d successfully distracted me from whatever complaint I’d been about to make. The sub-Antarctic Ocean was home to the roughest seas known to man; they had champed their jaws around the Fortitude, and forced her nearly over on her beam ends. Down in the locker, I’d had to wedge myself, breathless, between the splintery shelves, fighting nausea as everything swung around me. Up on deck, though, the rigging had shimmered with movement; Randall had openly cursed the ship’s captain, roared loud enough to be heard over the weather; it had nearly come to blows.

“What was he like?” I asked for the hundredth time. I could hardly bear the thought that I was aboard the expeditionary ship of “Australis” Randall, more legend than man. Harry, too, had been overawed to meet him; attending his appointment at the expedition office in London, the men from my brothers’ newspaper cuttings had come vividly and aggressively to life. But he needn’t have worried: Randall had taken his cash—given him a careless once-over, asked a few searching questions about his service history—and said: “Well, if you can get yourself to Buenos Aires by December, meet me there—I might well find a place for you.”

“Fearsome, I suppose.” I could see in the set of Harry’s shoulders, the way he tried to straighten his cuffs, that Randall wasn’t quite as he’d expected him to be.

“Harry.” I put a hand on his shoulder, trying to choke down my impatience. “You know I’ll be found, sooner or later. We need to go to him before that happens!”

He sighed. “I know. It’s just—” He waved his hands, as if to convey the ship: the whole vast world of it outside my prison. From mast to mast, all the rooms and cabins and decks and kennels and dogs and boats that I’d barely seen—and then only in darkness. He had another bite mark on his left hand, surrounded by sickly green bruising. I envied him even that.

He didn’t want to admit he was frightened of Randall. But I didn’t fear him, or his infamous rages. He could have me flogged, or confined, or turn me off at South Georgia, leave me to the whalers. After three days of darkness, I didn’t care—as long as I could stand on deck and take a breath of good clean air. See the horizon. Close my eyes and feel the rain on my face. Free.

The South Atlantic; my brothers would have liked that.

II

HARRY WAS DELIVERED BY THE SHIP’S BELL: HE scrambled gratefully out of the locker, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the luxury of a new candle for the lantern. I stared at my shadow, thrown against the shelves and boxes. HP sauce; Keiller’s orange marmalade; Tate and Lyle. Just like our pantry at home—if our pantry frequently turned itself upside down. But my shadow was different here.

The sea grew rougher and rougher over the course of the morning, until—with queasy stomach—I could hear a great commotion above me, the sound of countless men on deck. Muffled shouting. A moment later the ship shuddered, as if it had been stabbed, the ground dropping away.

It was a bad fall: too sudden to brace myself, and the bulkhead smacked the wind out of me. I was sure I’d cried out. A small, shameful noise, making familiar bitterness rush through me. I paused on the floor, panting slightly. Listening.

A creaking sound from the deck above. Life went on. It would be a whole day of darkness until Harry returned. I heard the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears, felt the sweat gathering at the nape of my neck. I was locked in the bowels of a ship crossing the most unsettled seas on the globe, only one person aware of my presence. If I was thrown too hard to the floor—knocked out—I knew people could die unattended from such an injury. And should the lantern turn over: “We’re at the bottom of a three-mast tinder pile,” Harry had warned. “Be careful.”

I loosened the scarf from around my neck, telling myself this was my great adventure: the last Morgan sibling was heading South. My face was far too young for my liking, but I was tall for my age, carried some weight to my limbs; thought I might pass for a boy of eighteen. On our journey down, Harry had got hold of a pair of scissors and hacked my hair down to my scalp—then laughed with me as I’d scrabbled for the mirror to admire myself from all angles. “I don’t think I’d be recognised,” I’d said, hushed. “Even if they’d worked it out, wired the British Embassy—” and the thought had clanged around in my head like a stone in a tin can as I stared at the discarded locks on the floor. I could feel the packet ship surging and heaving against the waves, and pressed my hands into fists by my side, willing it to go faster: willing it to fly down the coast of South America to meet the Fortitude, before anything could overtake us.

That night, he’d agreed to finally start using Jo, which was what my brothers had always called me; could possibly be mistaken for Joe if overheard. But that was strictly for when we were alone. Elsewhere, I’d be Jonathan, and I turned it around in my mouth, liking the sound of it, the way something fell into place within me—resounding, deep—with those three syllables.

Somehow it described me perfectly.

The last Morgan sibling.

I crawled over to the locker door, hung up my sweaty scarf on a loose nail, and sat back on my haunches to stare at it—this one small bit of home. A bright crimson fabric, soft and bold together, it had once belonged to Francis. I remembered that day at the beach—a blustery April day, before the War had torn them away from me. Francis had been sitting in a deck chair, struggling to read a paperback, trying to ignore Rufus—nearly a year his senior—gently harassing girls on the promenade. The breeze had plucked at my parasol as if it wanted to lift me up and carry me away; Francis’s scarf unravelled itself, scudding away along the sand. Laughing, I’d kicked off my shoes and chased it along the shoreline in damp stockings.

Rufus hadn’t looked up; my mother had pursed her lips. I was five years younger than the boys, but already expected to behave myself. Francis, though, had pressed the scarf back into my hands with a smile so wide his dimples showed. “Here, Jo. You’d better look after this for me.”

But in the shadows the crimson fabric looked like blood; the hours of darkness wore on, every movement on the deck above me like a gunshot.

I was alone. But I wouldn’t be forgotten or left behind. I wouldn’t.

I sat up when the ship’s bell rang for Sunday service, prompting a stampede of a great many boots on a great many stairs; I was surprised what a relief it was to hear these outside sounds, and the faint melody of hymns. Eternal Father, Strong to Save. Whose arm does bind the restless wave?

Afterwards, voices in the galley gave me a small measure of company—and nerves, as I held my breath. From their way of speaking, I guessed these were Randall’s officers. I could hear the scrape of wood, a muffled curse as the ship moved suddenly. A clattering of metal utensils.

Someone let out a low whistle. “Old Australis on fine form today?” An Australian accent, all upturned sentences. I’d heard him berating Harry for dawdling. Duncan, our dog handler: determined to find fault with everything, particularly a soft English boy with more money than sense.

A snort. A deeper voice. “It’s been doom and gloom with Randall recently, hasn’t it? If it’s not Job it’s Psalms. In their peril their courage melted away, indeed.”

“He must have been quite a peril in the lines—a peril to his own men, too, from what I’ve heard. I’m sure you could tell a few tales, Nicholls?”

“Not really my thing,” a third voice said, rather absently. “Do you know where Macready keeps—”

“Don’t see why the cook should get an afternoon off,” Duncan said snidely. “And we all have to muck in, when we’ve got jobs to do.” To emphasise the point, the deck rocked, causing another crash of falling pots and pans.

The mention of Randall had drawn me in like a fish on a hook, and I’d crept closer to the locker door, pressing my ear against it. I thought about Harry’s reluctance to face him, to own up to what he’d done, sneaking me aboard: a reluctance that couldn’t help seem unmanly. I was sure—so sure—Randall would understand.

“I don’t know what he’s trying to do,” said the doom-and-gloom man. “Having a fucking conchie—pardon my language, Nicholls—doing the reading. It’s a smack in the face even having one of those cowards on board. Equality of sacrifice means nothing. The men don’t like it—”

“He did his time,” Nicholls said, a little sharper, in a way that conveyed he was uninterested in hearing anything further. “Same as the rest of us.”

“Should’ve shot that lot at dawn, if you ask me, rather than giving them nice cosy cells—”

“Oh, shut up, Boyd—”

There was another crash, the sound of the galley door swinging wide on its hinges, and the Scottish tones of the ship’s cook saying, “Made a meal of it, have we, lads?”

The voices died away.

But much later, at a time not determined by bell or dinner or Harry, the galley door opened again, making me freeze under my blankets. I thought those officers had returned to continue debating the Sunday service in private—although why the crew should contain a conchie, a conscientious objector, was beyond me. The very lowest of the low. Should’ve shot that lot at dawn; I’d heard Boyd’s opinion, brutal as it was, so often from my brothers that I barely even questioned it. But there was absolute silence, and I let out a long and shuddering breath.

Then the bolts rattled on the locker door.

I extinguished the lantern, pulled the blankets entirely over me, backing away; tried to breathe quietly, but my breath wanted to escape in great gasps, heart jumping around in my chest.

The locker door creaked open. There was a breeze, faint and steam-scented, blowing in from the world beyond. A soft thudding of floorboards as someone stood in the doorway. I put my hand over my mouth, stifling the childish instinct to call out, “Who’s there?”

Whoever it was, they stayed very quiet. I could see the faint glow of a light being held up this way and that. I closed my eyes, willing it to go away. Not like this. I wasn’t ready. Not like this.

The ship stopped swaying for a moment, as if holding its breath.

Then the light vanished, and I was alone again.

III

MY CANDLE BURNED DOWN; THE DARKNESS WAS INFINITE, like being buried alive. I strained my eyes trying to make out shapes in the gloom. From my corner, the sacks and barrels and crates loomed—seemed to have grown bigger. Three sacks piled on top of one another made a crouching, rounded figure. The ends of barrels, stacked side-by-side on an upper shelf, were a pale row of moonlike faces, flat and expressionless save for their scribbled-ink mouths.

Shapes in the darkness. Somehow watchful. I shuddered.

The Antarctic night would be far worse. In April the sun would set for the last time, and we would spend months in a freezing dark unlike anything else on earth; the ice would be a desolate place, ruled by shadows. I’d read descriptions of the overwinter, which I’d once childishly interpreted as the worst winter possible. I hadn’t been far off. Men went mad under the weight of that relentless dark. Melancholy and paranoia. Hoarding guns, before turning them on their companions—or themselves. It could happen to anyone; man wasn’t adapted to deal with the total absence of light.

The faces looked down on me, and I shuddered, thinking of the ceaseless moaning of winds over the ice.

I pressed myself against the far wall, finding my eyes drawn to the nail where Francis’s scarf still hung. But it wasn’t comforting—its half-glimpsed shape seemed to creep away into the gloom, as if it didn’t want to be seen. Not a speck of that bright crimson colour survived. I swallowed.

Five days alone: maybe I’d started imagining things. It was impossible to believe that there were men out there, and daylight. Maybe I hadn’t seen someone opening the locker door.

Maybe this inky blackness was all there was.

I stared into the darkness, fascinated by the long shape suggested by the scarf, and my heart thudded painfully. We’d lived in a coastal town, under lighting restrictions, the shadow of airship raids along the South Downs. My brothers would only ever have two days—three days—of leave, and be gone again; I’d been so embarrassed to show my childish fear of the pitch-dark house. But when they were home on nights with bad weather, the boom of thunder like guns in the distance, Francis would come to check on me; would linger half-seen, half-sensed, in my open doorway. “It’s all right, Jo.” Only by moonlight might I make out a glimmer of red hair, his shadow thrown over the floorboards. He knew how I hated the dark.

The faint swish of the scarf; a chill breath of air. I pressed my hands to my face, feeling the bones under the skin. I thought how I must have appeared to Harry when he’d opened the door—someone composed of flickers of light and shadow. Half-made. And the locker not a tomb, but an in-between place. Like my brothers, forgotten while others came home. Not quite alive—and not quite dead.

“The other country,” the clergyman had said at their funeral. I felt myself in it now.

In a scuffle of shaky movement, I grabbed the scarf and wound it around my neck; that tall half-glimpsed shape disappeared. I put my head under the blankets. My breath steamed up the thick fabric, making it sodden and unpleasant.

I must have fallen into slumber, because I dreamed Francis was standing in the doorway, bringing me a candle: my room didn’t face the sea, I was (technically) allowed the light, but Father had better not find out. I could almost hear my father’s voice, distant and authoritarian: “in this house we all play our part.” There could be no accommodation made. My brother, though, was trying to tell me something, his voice muddled with the sounds of the Antarctic wind.

A whistling. A howling. Getting louder, louder—

Louder—

The locker door was open again. Clear golden light streamed in, washed over my face. My blankets were off. I screwed up my eyes. A kettle on the galley stove, coming up to the boil, made a low trumpeting sound like hunting horns in the distance.

There wasn’t enough air: I was drowning. I’d been discovered.

Someone was holding my arms, speaking to me in a low harsh voice. I caught a confusing impression of sharp dark blue eyes and neatly parted fox-red hair. There was a strange white patch in my vision, exploding outwards. Then darkness spun towards me.

IV

I CAME TO MY SENSES WITH MY HEAD RESTING ON A TEA towel that smelled of dish soap. The galley was crowded and steamy. Sweat trickled down my spine; I was still wearing my layers of woollen clothing, and my collar remained buttoned, hadn’t been loosened to give me air—to display my smooth and narrow neck. Good. Harry must have seen to that.

Raising my eyes slowly, I could see that the cook—Macready, a small, compact man—had rolled up his jumper sleeves in the fierce heat of the stove. His hair was shaved close enough to expose scars on his scalp.

“You were a terrible liar,” he said to Harry, without malice. “Next time you pretend your lantern and dinner have fallen overboard, remember that Randall could and would throw you overboard too, the mood he’s been in.”

Harry flushed, bending his head.

“But him, though? Childhood friend or not, Cooper—”

“He’s nearly nineteen,” Harry said. I blinked, knowing I looked younger. I could see we’d got this far on luck rather than Harry’s judgment.

“Randall wanted men,” Macready said. “Aged twenty to thirty-five. With experience, and you squeaked on board with little of that yourself.” His gaze settled on me, and he frowned: I attempted a watery smile. “We haven’t met,” he said, not exactly unkindly. “But I understand you’re Jonathan Morgan.”

It rang in my ears, Jonathan Morgan, the enormity of it hitting me.

“Yes,” I said, and stumbled through my how-do-you-dos.

He narrowed his eyes, turning back to the stove. A cast-iron monster, it took up one entire wall; the rest of the room was filled to heaving with buckets and pans and shelves and swinging lanterns. Hatches in the ceiling let in a beautiful pale light.

“I shouldn’t have left you in there.” Harry’s fingers twitched; it looked like he wanted to take my hand.

“You’d better eat something proper, after all that,” Macready said, putting a bowl of porridge on the table before me. I stared as if I’d never seen food before, taken aback by the rich burnt-sugar smell of Golden Syrup, the condensed milk pooling around the sides. The bowl was chipped enamel. Sweat dripped down my back. The food looked like something from a million miles away.

Suddenly, I was all the way awake. I knew—fully—where I was. The Fortitude.

I tried to stand, pushing the bowl aside. Randall. I’d expected to be hauled in front of him by the scruff of my neck, like a disobedient child. My knees caught the table and I looked around, wildly, as I steadied myself. It was surely time. But the galley door, up a flight of steps, was shut firmly against the outside world. The pot on the stove made a slurping sound as it simmered. The oven let off an uncompromising dry heat. Garlands of onions bobbed from the beams. An oddly domestic scene.

Perched on the other chair, the fourth—and silent—member of our little group made a steeple with his fingertips in front of his wide, sarcastic-looking mouth. His fingerless gloves were pulled all the way up to his elbows, despite the heat, and I could see now that his waxed hair was more ginger than red. He looked at me as if I were a perplexing natural phenomenon.

“Easy.” Macready pushed me back with one hand, gentling me like a skittish animal. “You want to get something down you. Randall will send for you shortly, and you’ll need to be in the pink. I don’t ever think I’ve seen him so furious—like a bear who’s stepped on a hornet’s nest. And as for this one”—he indicated Harry—“well, no one has had the sheer nerve to surprise him like this before. Cash or not. There’ll be hell to pay.”

“That’s not particularly helpful,” Harry said quietly, but I could see he was stung at the prospect, and Macready’s casually ominous tone. He was used to being liked by his superiors.

It all felt like a terrible ill omen: my first encounter with the rest of the expedition had me swooning, like in a railway paperback. I needed to stand up from now on. I started shovelling porridge into my mouth: it was immeasurably good. The redhead turned up his nose.

Macready shrugged expressively at Harry. “It doesn’t do Morgan here”—Morgan, just my last name, like I was another one of the men, making me swallow too fast and cough into the back of my hand—“any good to sugarcoat it. There’s a great many you’ve made look like fools—anyone so much as breathes in Randall’s general direction, Clarke knows about it, and Boyd’s been itching to take our poor progress out on someone. Randall, though—this is his ship, his expedition, and we’re almost too late to make our landing, and now you pop up? Like a bloody bear, indeed.”

Randall. He’d designed the Fortitude himself, down to the last rivet: named for his family motto, built in Norway for ice endurance. The crushing pack and the terrible swell. We’d all devoured the accounts of his previous expeditions. He would insist on staying at the wheel, without a waterproof, in the highest seas—soaked quite through, as if listening to the ocean with his skin. This was his world, and I’d stepped through the newspaper pages and dropped headfirst into it.

“I don’t mind,” I said quickly, Morgan still ringing around my head, clear as a bell. “The shouting. He has every right to be furious. What I’ve done is—”

“Pretty bold,” Macready said, with a little quirk of his mouth.

“Absolutely ridiculous,” said the stranger with the ginger hair. His raspy voice belonged to someone who smoked feverishly, and he gave me a long, cool look. “Stark raving madness, that you should think you could just hop aboard a Pole-bound vessel, like some sort of preposterous Boy’s Own adventure. You know you could mean the difference between success and failure for us now? Randall doesn’t carry spares, and we’re short enough as it is. If you take another man’s rations, or fall ill—which doesn’t look out of the question on your showing so far—you’ll be risking all our lives.”

Macready shook his head, gave my shoulder a brief squeeze. I noticed he didn’t rush to disagree.

“I doubt you’d care,” Harry muttered. “On your showing so far. What were you doing in the locker, anyway?”

The stranger snorted. “Cooper. Mind your own business.”

Harry flushed. The redhead gave him a look of great disgust, pushing his chair back from the table. “I hope you enjoy your porridge, Morgan,” he said, taking the stairs two at a time. “Get a hot meal in you. Randall shall be putting you off on the first rock he sees.”

“Oh, come on—” Harry said.

While the galley door was open I had a brief impression of the outside world above: blue light in the sky, people loitering nearby. I craned my neck to see, and it slammed shut with a shudder. The cooler air prickled on my sweaty face.

“He’s always like that,” Harry said. “Tarlington. We’re sharing quarters, and why he can’t just sleep in his precious laboratory, instead of coming in and out at all hours—”

“Our biologist,” Macready said to me. “Chief scientific officer, if you please, even if it’s because he’s the only scientific officer. He gets a nice cosy little lab all to himself, when the rest of us are crammed in nose to nose. Some aren’t too happy.”

I fanned myself. Randall was our last great explorer, heading South for glory. Of course—it went without saying—any Antarctic expedition would have scientists. Meteorologists, to measure the polar winds; physicists, to chart the magnetic fields; geologists, to dig up what lay under the ice. But my brothers would have seen them as an irrelevance: would have focused on the brilliant expanse of the horizon. The fox-haired man—Tarlington—was also an irrelevance.

Taking up space, perhaps, meant for someone else. Someone bolder.

“It doesn’t surprise me that he’s taken against you,” Macready said. “He doesn’t exactly seem pleased to be with us—Randall practically had to beg him. But the others—well.”

A prickle of unease. The idea of Randall begging anyone seemed preposterous. And I’d hoped the men of the expedition would see me as daring. Audacious. An adventurer. But a skinny scientist only a few years my senior had just looked me up and down like a specimen ready for dissection. It was a poor start.

The galley door swung open again, and my breath caught in my throat.

The man in the doorway was bigger than the frame. Six feet tall and broad in the shoulders, I knew him immediately: Liam Clarke, Randall’s most loyal second-in-command. He’d survived a night on the ice with no tent, just a cave burrowed out with his hands and a tin-can shovel, keeping up his strength by gnawing raw frozen meat. I could hardly believe I was seeing him in person. I found my eyes drawn to the tan leather glove on his right hand. Neat little stumps, where frostbite had gnawed away at him; the armed forces had turned him down, and Randall had been criticised for taking a man missing his fingers.

“Get up,” he said. “Randall will have you now.”

A sudden sickening sensation, as though the ship had plunged beneath me.

Macready gave me a sympathetic look as I stumbled to my feet. I pulled Francis’s scarf tighter around my neck; partly to give my hands something to do, partly for reassurance. After my first steps away from home—taking what I could carry, leaving no explanations—this would be my most terrible test.

“Jonathan,” Harry whispered. It sounded an awful lot like he wanted to apologise. I shot him a scathing look.

I watched myself on the steps, dreading the spectacle if I fell over again. At the top, a scattering of men dispersed at some speed when Clarke looked their way. It was a curious time of day—nearly ten o’clock at night, with the southern sun still shining—and the sky was a deep cyan blue, untroubled by clouds. I felt like a prisoner on his way to the gallows.

Conscious it might be my only chance, I drank in the Fortitude. After so long below, she had a feeling of openness, endless possibility, although she was a small three-masted ship, one hundred and seventy feet long, carrying half sail. At her bow end was the galley. At the stern, the large black funnel of the engine. And in between, the bridge—the ship’s wheel, the bell I’d heard so many times—raised up on steps with fine brass banisters. The forbidding doors of the wardroom ahead. Hatches disappeared into the deck, and fist-size glass illuminators, wearing brass hats like toadstools, caught the sun and filtered it down to her secret layers below. Boats hung over the side; ropes; winches; items I scarcely recognised.

She was beautiful, full of harmonies in her shape, her gilding and burnished timbers glimmering in the light.

There were men, too, crowding the decks everywhere I turned. The ship’s carpenter, wearing a beaten tool belt, was braiding rope into something that looked like a hammock, and winked at me as I walked past. A remarkably dashing-looking man—presumably Duncan—pulled dog harnesses from a locker, swore at the tangles, then glared at us.