He had done it many other mornings.

But not this morning. He was too weary. And it was too cold to stand here for even a minute with only four layers of wool and cotton on. Four a.m., Crozier knew, was the coldest belly of the night and the hour at which the most ill and wounded men gave up the ghost and were carried away into that true Unknown Country.

Crozier crawled under the blankets and sank his face into the freezing horsehair mattress. It would be fifteen minutes or more before his body heat would begin to warm the cradled space. With luck, he’d be asleep before that. With luck he’d get almost two hours of a drunkard’s sleep before the next day of darkness and cold began. With luck, he thought as he drifted off, he wouldn’t wake at all.

Silence was missing, and it was Third Lieutenant John Irving’s job to find her.

The captain hadn’t ordered him to do so… not exactly. But Captain Crozier had told Irving to watch over the Esquimaux woman when the captains decided to keep her aboard HMS Terror six months earlier in June and Captain Crozier never rescinded that order, so Irving felt responsible for her. Besides, the young man was in love with her. He knew it was foolish – insane even – to have fallen in love with a savage, a woman who was not even a Christian, and an uneducated native who couldn’t speak a word of English, or any language for that matter with her tongue torn out as it was, but Irving was still in love with her. Something about her made the tall, strong John Irving weak in his knees.

And now she was gone.

They first noticed she wasn’t in her assigned berth – that little den set back amid the crates in the cluttered part of the lower deck just forward of the sick bay – on Thursday, two days earlier, but the men were used to Lady Silence’s odd comings and goings. She was off the ship as much as she was on it, even at night. Irving reported to Captain Crozier on Thursday afternoon, the eleventh of November, that Silence had gone missing, but the captain, Irving, and the others had seen her out on the ice two nights before. Then, after the remains of Strong and Evans had been found, she’d gone missing again. The captain said not to worry, that she’d show up.

But she hadn’t.

The storm had blown in that Thursday morning, bringing heavy snow and high winds. Work teams labouring by lantern light to repair the trail cairns between Terror and Erebus – four-foot-high tapered columns of ice bricks every thirty paces – had been forced to return to the ships that afternoon and hadn’t been able to work out on the ice since. The last messenger from Erebus, who had arrived late Thursday and been forced to stay on Terror because of the storm, confirmed that Silence was not aboard Commander Fitzjames’s ship. By this Saturday morning, watch was being changed on deck every hour and the men still came below crusted with ice and shaking with cold. Work parties had to be sent topside into the gale with axes every three hours to hack the ice off the remaining spars and lines so that the ship would not tip over from the weight. Also, the falling ice was a hazard to those on watch and did damage to the deck itself. More men struggled to shovel snow off the icy deck of the forward-listing Terror before it built up to a depth where they couldn’t get the hatches open.

When Lieutenant Irving reported again to Captain Crozier on this Saturday night after supper that Silence was still missing, the captain said, “If she’s out in this, she may not be coming back, John. But you have permission to search the entire ship tonight after most of the men are in their hammocks, if only to make sure she’s gone.”

Even though Irving’s officer-on-deck watch had ended hours earlier this evening, the lieutenant now got back into his cold-weather slops, lit an oil lantern, and climbed the ladderway to the deck again.

Conditions had not improved. If anything they were worse than when Irving had gone below for supper five hours earlier. The wind howled in from the northwest, blowing snow before it and reducing visibility to ten feet or less. Ice had recoated everything even though there was a five-man axe party hacking and shouting somewhere forward of the snow-laden canvas sagging above the hatchway. Irving struggled out through a foot of new spindrift under the canvas pyramid, lantern blowing back toward his face, as he searched for one of the men not swinging an axe in the darkness.

Reuben Male, captain of the fo’c’sle, had watch and work-party officer duty, and Irving found him by following the faint glow to the other man’s lantern on the port side.

Male was a snow-encrusted mound of wool. Even his face was hidden under a makeshift hood wrapped about by layers of heavy wool comforters. The shotgun in the crook of his bulky arm was sheathed in ice. Both men had to shout to be heard.

“See anything, Mr. Male?” shouted Lieutenant Irving, leaning close to the thick turban of wool that was the fo’c’sle captain’s head.

The shorter man tugged down the scarf a bit. His nose was icicle white. “You mean the ice parties, sir? I can’t see ’em once they get above the first spars. I just listen, sir, while I fill in for young Kinnaird’s port watch duty. He was on the third watch shoveling party, sir, and still ain’t thawed out.”

“No, I mean on the ice!” shouted Irving.

Male laughed. It was, quite literally, a muffled sound. “None of us have seen as far as the ice for forty-eight hours, Lieutenant. You know that, sir. You was out here earlier.”

Irving nodded and wrapped his own comforter tighter around his forehead and lower face. “No one’s seen Silence… Lady Silence?”

“What, sir?” Mr. Male leaned closer, the shotgun a column of ice-rimmed metal and wood between them.

“Lady Silence?” shouted Irving.

“No, sir. I understand that no one’s seen the Esquimaux woman for days. She must be gone, Lieutenant. Dead out there somewhere, and good riddance, I say.”

Irving nodded, patted Male on his bulky shoulder with his own bulky mitten, and made his way around by the stern – staying away from the mainmast, where giant chunks of ice were falling out of the blowing snow and crashing like artillery shells onto the deck – to speak to John Bates where the man stood watch on the starboard side.

Bates had seen nothing. He hadn’t even been able to see the five men of the axe party as they set to work.

“Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but I don’t have no watch and I’m afraid I won’t hear the bell what with all this choppin’ and fallin’ and the wind blowin’ and crashin’ of ice, sir. Is there much time left on this watch?”

“You’ll hear the bell when Mr. Male rings it,” shouted Irving, leaning close to the ice-shrouded globe of wool that was the twenty-six-year-old’s head. “And he’ll come around to check on you before going below. As you were, Bates.”

“Aye, sir.”

The wind tried to knock Irving off his feet as he went around to the front of the canvas cover, waited for a break in the falling ice – hearing the men curse and shout in the main-trees and thrumming rigging above – and then he hurried as quickly as he could through the two feet of new snow on deck, ducked under the frozen canvas, and clambered through the hatch and down the ladderway.

He’d searched the lower decks multiple times, of course – especially behind the remaining crates forward of the sick bay where the woman had previously had her little den – but now Irving walked aft. The ship was quiet this late at night except for the stamping and crash of ice on the deck above, the snores from the exhausted men in their hammocks forward, Mr. Diggle’s usual bangs and curses from the direction of the stove, and the ever-present howl of wind and grind of ice.