The North Water(15)

CHAPTER SEVEN

When Black finds Sumner, he looks dead already. His body is wedged into the narrow crack between two ice floes; his head and shoulders are above the water, but everything else is below. His face is bone white apart from the lips, which are a dark, unnatural blue. Is he even breathing? Black leans down to check, but he can’t tell—the wind is too loud, and all around the ice is screeching and grating in the swell. Everything about the surgeon appears frozen up and solid. Black takes his sealing rope and secures it around Sumner’s chest. He doubts that he can pull him out on his own, but he tries anyway. He yanks him sideways first to dislodge him from the crevice, then, setting his heels in the snow, hauls upwards with all his might. Sumner’s stiff and motionless body rises with remarkable ease, as though the sea has decided it doesn’t want him after all. Black drops the rope and lunges forwards, grabbing the sodden epaulettes of Sumner’s greatcoat and pulling the rest of him onto the surface of the ice. He turns him over and slaps him twice across the face. Sumner doesn’t respond. Black hits him harder still. One eyelid flickers open.

“Dear God, you’re alive,” Black says.

He fires his rifle in the air twice. After ten minutes, Otto arrives with two other men from the search party. The four men take a limb each and carry him back to the ship as fast as they are able. His wet clothes have frozen solid in the arctic air, and it is more like carrying a heavy piece of furniture across the ice than a human being. When they get to the ship, Sumner is lifted aboard with a block and tackle and laid out on the deck. Brownlee looks down at him.

“Is the poor cunt even breathing?” he says.

Black nods. Brownlee shakes his head in wonderment.

They carry him down the hatchway into the wardroom and cut off his frozen clothes with shears. Black puts more coal in the stove and tells the cook to boil water. They rub his icy skin with goose fat and wrap him in scalding towels. He doesn’t move or speak; he is still alive but comatose. Black remains by his side; the others come in occasionally to stare or offer advice. Around midnight, his eyes flicker briefly open, and they give him brandy, which he coughs up along with a smear of dark brown blood. No one expects him to live through the night. At dawn, when they find he is still breathing, they move him out of the wardroom and into his own cabin.

When he comes to, Sumner assumes for a moment that he is back in India, that he is lying in his humid hill-tent on the ridge above Delhi and the sounds of ice blocks crashing against the keel of the Volunteer are actually the sounds of heavy ordnance being traded back and forth between the bastions and the pickets. It feels for a moment as if nothing terrible or irrevocable has yet happened to him, as if he has been given, incredibly, a second chance. He closes his eyes and falls asleep again. When he opens them an hour later, he sees Black standing by his bed looking down.

“Can you speak?” Black asks him.

Sumner looks back at him for a moment, then shakes his head. Black helps him up into a sitting position and commences to feed him bouillon from a teacup. The taste and heat of the bouillon are overpowering. After two spoonfuls of it, Sumner closes his mouth and lets the liquid dribble over his chin and down onto his chest.

“By rights you should be dead,” Black tells him. “You were in that water for three fucking hours. No normal man survives a dunk like that.”

The tip of Sumner’s nose and sections of both cheeks just below the eyes are black with frostbite. Sumner doesn’t remember the ice or the cold or the ghoulish green water, but he does remember looking up, before whatever happened to him happened, and seeing the sky above him crammed with a billion snowflakes.

“Laudanum,” he says.

He looks hopefully across at Black.

“Are you trying to say something?” Black asks, tipping his head closer in.

“Laudanum,” Sumner says again, “for the pain.”

Black nods and goes into the medicine chest. He mixes the laudanum with rum and helps him drink it. It burns Sumner’s throat, and he thinks for a moment he will vomit it up, but manages not to. He is exhausted by the effort of speaking and doesn’t know (since he is definitely not in India) where or who he is. He shudders violently and starts to weep. Black lowers him back down onto the bunk and covers him over with a coarse wool blanket.

In the wardroom that evening, over supper, Black reports that the surgeon is showing signs of improvement.

“Very good,” Brownlee says, “but there will be no more sixth boat from now on. I don’t wish another fucker’s death to trouble my conscience.”

“Just bad luck, that’s all,” Cavendish says offishly. “A man slides off the ice in a snowstorm, could happen to any of us.”

“Ask me, it worked out well for him,” Drax says. “The fucker should rightly have been crushed or drowned. After ten minutes in that kind of water, a man’s blood gets claggy and his heart gives out, but the surgeon’s still alive somehow. He’s fucking blessed.”

“Blessed?” Black says.

Brownlee holds up his hand.

“Blessed or not,” he says, “I say there will be no more sixth boat. And while we mariners are busy hunting fish, the surgeon will remain safe in his cabin reading his Homer or pulling on his pizzle, or whatever the fuck it is he does in there.”

Cavendish rolls his eyes.

“Easy enough for some bastards,” he says.