#roberthouse

After Mr. Hickey's dressings were rewrapped and he'd buttoned up his wool pants again, Mr. Goodsir escorted him to the curtain of sickbay. Hickey was no longer walking with any visible sign of discomfort, but Mr. Goodsir knew the lashes Captain Crozier ordered the month before must still be stinging the Caulker's Mate each time he sat, stood, slept, or carried anything of weight. Goodsir thought also of how Mr. Hickey's posterior would carry scars of his night of punishment for the rest of his life, quite remarkable scars in fact. Every time a physician or a shipmate (or a lover, Mr. Goodsir surprised himself thinking) gazed on Mr. Hickey's back side, the question would come up--asked or not, answered or not, but certainly there: What'd you do to deserve that?

What had the man done, indeed? By all accounts, Mr. Hickey had engineered the kidnapping of the Esquimax girl the men had begun calling "Lady Silence." Goodsir had had the privilege to spend quite a lot of time with the girl since Mr. Hickey had dragged her back to the ships, and he felt confident Mr. Hickey and the other men with him hadn't compromised her in any way, hadn't taken anything beyond her liberty. But the Caulker's Mate had also back-talked, and challenged the Captain directly. For this, Mr. Hickey had becoming a growing concern to the officers, and something of a folk hero to some of the more listless men and boys in the crew. Mr. Goodsir had also heard whispers that the man was a sodomite. He had certainly heard sodomy happened aboard Royal Navy vessels, but as yet he personally knew no one who'd fallen prey to it. Goodsir could imagine how some confused lad might be seduced by the likes of Mr. Hickey; there was the matter of his smile. He'd never seen a more beguiling smile on a man. It seemed almost permanent the way it shined on his face. He'd even heard rumor that Mr. Hickey smiled at Capt. Crozier through the final lashes. What kind of man existed under a smile like that? If Lady Silence was a mystery Mr. Goodsir intended to solve, Mr. Hickey was one he intended to leave alone. Nothing good could come of poking around there. Mr. Hickey was marked.

No, unless Mr. Hickey intended to keep his backside from view of any other living soul for the rest of his life, the punishment the captain ordered would haunt him always. Not all punishments are humiliations, Mr. Goodsir thought, but all humiliations punish.

But Goodsir's instinct told him Mr. Hickey might not agree. Mr. Hickey might wear these scars as badges of honor; might, in fact, enjoy showing them off in moments of intimacy, answering the question others might dread with a simple prelude to his own version of events: "I did what I thought was right." That was the thing about Mr. Hickey Goodsir could not feel settled about, the man seemed dangerous as well as sympathetic, knowable and also beyond reach. Mr. Goodsir had only met Mr. Hickey at most a dozen times before tonight on various muster lines and land watches back during their first winter on Beechey Island, but they'd never spoken before today. But when Goodsir heard the story about how Mr. Hickey had been punished, as a boy, he found himself trying to see it in his mind's eye, trying to imagine Mr. Hickey stripped and tied to a table carried out from this very sick bay and then struck over and again before all the company assem- bled there. He found his heart went out to Mr. Hickey in spite of the man's crimes.

What strange thoughts these were. And how strange a man they regarded. Mr. Goodsir would have liked to ask Mr. Hickey about that night, the night of his Great Humiliation, but he would never be so bold with someone who was not a close friend. In- stead, Mr. Goodsir told him:

"We should be about through with the salt now. You're mending nicely." Goodsir nodded, about to retreat back into sickbay when Mr. Hickey responded. "Your kindness is unstoppable, Mr. Goodsir." Mr. Goodsir half-nodded, never an easy recipient of compliments. "I mean that," Mr. Hickey continued. "There's not a more generous man on these ships." Mr. Goodsir found he had to look down in the face of this praise. For a half second only, he let himself feel the rosy warmth of it, but then Mr. Hickey continued, asking:

"Was...Lady Silence brought on board to be questioned by the Captain?" Goodsir looked up at Hickey then, watched his face make an attempt at an expression of innocent curiosity. Goodsir found he both admired and feared this small performance. What control the man had. And what cheek!

"Does that really work with anyone, Mr. Hickey?" Goodsir asked before he could stop himself.

Mr. Hickey, now caught like a boy with his hand in the chocolates, turned and faced Mr. Goodsir with a smile of amusement so genuine Mr. Goodsir could even detect in it a note of welcome surprise there--surprise that he himself was quicker, and cleverer, than Mr. Hickey might have supposed. Goodsir could read this reaction as clearly as a line in a handbill. For asking a question that every other person Mr. Goodsir knew would have chafed at, Mr. Hickey seemed to like him better. Oddly, Goodsir felt an odd pang of pride at this, one he couldn't quite follow the logic of, so he reached up and pulled the curtain closed, cutting off that troubled angel's smile from his sight.

...

Later in the afternoon, after conversing at length with Dr. Macdonald about the strange case of the Mate John Morfin's gums, Goodsir went to see if Lady Silence was getting on. They'd installed her in a slops closet on the orlop deck, which, apart from the dustiness of its contents, was actually larger and more comfortable than where they'd berthed her on Erebus. She was fine, but in the middle of braiding her hair when he knocked, so they spoke briefly before he left her to finish in peace lest she ask for his help, which seemed the sort of thing a native might ask, but the sort of thing an Englishman in good consci- ence should not do.

Terror had begun canting horrible, her beams beginning to be squeezed by the ice. You could hear them squealing lowly, slowly every few minutes. Goodsir was curious as to how they'd buttressed her from inside, so he went and examined the additional supports they'd pounded into place. Most of the men were heading up on deck now to start the next phase of an experiment which involved firing off six-pound rounds from the canon, and it took a group of them to pull off, so the orlop was empty apart from Lt. Irving, who was guarding Lady Silence. Goodsir could hear the men slide open the hatch on the deck above, and then could feel the cold air wander down past him, like some curious ghost.

Goodsir wandered himself down into the hold to take a look at the rest of Terror's provisions, and to examine her water tanks, now that Dr. Macdonald had put the subject

of lead in his mind. Were their tanks in fact made of lead? Mr. Goodsir thought so, but now was not sure if he had heard that outright, or if he'd merely assumed it. He climbed the ladderway down into the cold dark to check as if might prove important somehow.

Goodsir got to the bottom of the aft ladderway and took down the guide lantern hanging on a peg there, which was only murmuring light, its wick turned low. Out of habit, Mr. Goodsir turned it up, but quickly remembered there was a recent order about conserving lamp oil in any lamp outside of sickbay, so he turned it down again, and proceeded, squinting, into the shadows beyond.

He found the hulking globe-like shapes of the water tanks up ahead reassuringly modern. He put a hand out and touched one. They advertised for Mr. Goodsir exactly how advanced were these ships. No one had ever sailed on ships as technologically savvy. He raised the lantern high and admired the pipe work snaking away from them, all frosted now with a powder of ice and glinting in his weak light. Each deck one climbed down into dropped twenty additional degrees in winter, and while the few men up in the Fo’c’sle were sweating in just their undergarments and rag shirts because of this ingenious boiler system, here it was well below freezing. He scratched the tank and examined his fingernail. It was lead indeed.

He walked between the tanks to go and examine the hull of the ship, where he could see more skeletal braces in the shadows there. They weren't ingenious, but they were crucial. He could see two spots where the planking was buckling in an alarming way. If the ships were afloat, he wasn't sure they'd still be able to call Terror seaworthy with breaches like these, and who knew how many more there were, or were coming. That was a sobering thought. He knew the men were beginning to despair, beginning to wonder if this place was to be their wind-hammered grave. Goodsir couldn't bear to think these thoughts, couldn't bear to imagine he would never walk the back of Scotland, smell its gorse, see his brothers, again.

Just then, he heard someone coming down the rear ladderway. It wasn't until the man was fully down and had turned up the other lantern there that he could see it was Mr. Hickey. He was just about to hoist some coal into a bag when he noticed Goodsir in the dim glow of his lamp over in the shadowy company of the water tanks. He looked surprised at first, then amused. Not knowing what else to do, Goodsir gave a small wave. There was something about the near-constant groaning of the hold that made Goodsir not want to call out to him if he would have to yell. So Mr. Hickey came over. Just as Goodsir was about to offer an apology for interrupting Mr. Hickey's work, Mr. Hickey raised a finger to his lips and pointed over their heads. From what Goodsir could tell, it was the general spot where Mr. Irving was sitting outside of Lady Silence's closet, reading some leather-bound book from the Captain's library.

"May I come to you?" Mr. Hickey asked, in his quietest voice that could still be heard. "Of course," Mr. Goodsir replied, not understanding the question's meaning. So Mr. Hickey stepped up to him, his blue eyes smiling: "I'm glad to find you here, then," he said. Something about the way Mr. Hickey intoned this, made it seem like this conversation was already some promise of a secret. Goodsir fumbled to understand what his mind was holding just out of reach: Where were most sodomites discovered on ships? The hold. It was no mystery. It was the only place one could imagine having any kind of privacy.

"I was looking at the bracings. They're top notch," Mr. Goodsir mumbled, but before his last word was even out, Mr. Hickey's lips were on his. Goodsir tried to retreat, but he was already backed up against a main beam of the hull brace. Mr. Hickey cupped a hand around the back of his head so Goodsir wouldn't bump it on the beam. For some reason this, above all other things, made the strongest impression on Mr. Goodsir when he later recalled this confusing moment. Mr. Goodsir had not kissed many women, and never a man, but was shocked to discover one was as easy as the other, except, perhaps, for the feeling of Mr. Hickey's whiskers on Goodsir's shaved upper lip. It made Mr. Goodsir feel equally unmoored for a moment. When their lips parted, and Goodsir could say a word, to his great surprise, he said not "stop," but "thank you."

"I would have knocked my head for sure," he added. This was all the encouragement Cornelius Hickey needed. He kneeled before Mr. Goodsir and began quickly undoing the buttons there. Mr. Goodsir both wanted it to stop and go on, and so was frozen between these two perfectly contradictory impulses, he remained almost completely still and silent there while Mr. Hickey took his care.

Once it was happening, once the threshold had been crossed and there was no going back, Mr. Goodsir endeavored to ejaculate quickly and return to the upper deck, likely even back to Erebus, at first possible opportunity. He would never speak of this, though he understood even now that he would be turning it over in his mind a dozen times a day, possibly most days, until the end of his life. They were rocking gently together at first and then Mr. Hickey put a hand on Mr. Goodsir's leg to show him how they should rock opposite one another. As soon as this change was made, Mr. Goodsir was lost in the velvet canter of it, alternating between shivering from the painful cold and quaking from the hot weather of Mr. Hickey's mouth. Goodsir was not expert in receiving fellatio, but he knew what Mr. Hickey was doing--his method and his talent--was quite something. Goodsir would come close to climaxing, but his mind would rush in with what it all meant and he would have to let all thought go to try to get close again. It took a minute or two each time. If Mr. Hickey was getting tired, he showed no sign of it. He had one hand on Mr. Goodsir's calf now and the other around privates, to keep the exposed parts warm in the frozen air. He's keeping away the frost, Goodsir thought, and then for some reason followed it with "even by the manger." What did he mean? In the lamplight, in the hold of this ship with its oak beams and hulking shapes, a stable had come to mind. If only he could stop shivering.

Around and around Mr. Goodsir went, his thoughts continuing to sabotage what his body wanted to do, all his body wanted to do, in fact. He finally calmed his mind the way he first did as a child, facing his first fevered night alone after his brothers had been moved to little Robert's nursery down the hall for several nights while Harry had smallpox at five years old. John and Joseph were only a few years older than he, but to Goodsir, the difference was surpassing. They could keep all fear, all danger away, in the night. No despair or loneliness would ever dare approach him while his brothers were in beds just two feet away. But while he was alone in the dark on those smallpox nights, he taught himself to close his eyes and think of the things in his father's curio cabinet one by one until he was asleep. The tooth of the wolf, the auger shell, the place the trilobite left in the mud. The faceted crystal of streaky quartz. The jade. The auk. The barrel sponge. In the middle of thinking of all these triumphs of nature locked in the cabinet at the turn in the stairs of his childhood home, Goodsir came so hard he nearly cried out. He came so hard, a tear was squeezed out of one eye and immediately froze on his cheek. He was panting, spinning in huge spasmodic circles of pleasure, trying to be as quiet as he was humanly able. Then it was cold again, and dark. The hull groaned. The glorious bright spots faded from Goodsir's eyes.

Mr. Hickey swallowed and carefully packed Mr. Goodsir back up and away in his wool leggings and trousers, not unlike he'd done himself an hour before in sickbay. Then he stood. Mr. Goodsir would have expected anyone else to move off in a dark afterburn of shame, but Mr. Hickey did not. He smiled at Goodsir once more, this the most knowing smile of all, and somehow his most gentle, and said:

"Unstoppable, indeed, you are, Mr. Goodsir. Bravo." Mr. Goodsir resisted this compliment as well, but Mr. Hickey took his hand. "This is not for everyone, I know. But if you decide it is for you, I am only a howling mile's walk away, through a terrifying winter night."

"And with a monster," Mr. Goodsir added, not quite knowing what he was saying. Mr. Hickey touched his frozen tear with one finger.

"Don't let him get you, Mr. Goodsir." "Not a chance, Mr. Hickey," Goodsir replied. "Nor you." And with that, Mr. Hickey returned to the coal pile, built up a bag, and carried it toward the ladderway. Then up he went, with one last tip of his head to Harry Goodsir.

...

Mr. Goodsir remained flurried all that day. It wasn't for him, at least that's what he thought by the time he'd climbed up to the cabin they'd lent him and warmed sufficiently up to stop shivering. But when he was called to the Captain's great cabin to discuss Lady Silence, he couldn't stop talking. He went on and on about the Inuktitut dictionary he was writing until Mr. Blanky nearly rolled his eyes.

And then the conversation went sideways, Captain Crozier struck Commander Fitzjames, the creature tore a vicious, bloody hole into their day, men we slaughtered, and Mr. Blanky's leg was lost down the thing's stinking maw, and there were a million more important things to think about than Mr. Hickey's hand 'round the back of Goodsir's head to keep him from rattling himself against the beam there.