Free The Wild Rose by Jennifer Donnelly

sharif of Mecca, and his sons. If you could feel their hunger for independence, for freedom.” He shook his head suddenly, as if embarrassed by the depth of his feeling. “If you could do these things, Mr. Finnegan, you would turn your back on Antarctica in a heartbeat.”
    “Oh, I don’t know, Mr. Lawrence,” Seamie said, baitingly. “I don’t think your sand dunes can live up to my icebergs. To say nothing of my seals and penguins.” His voice turned serious. He matched Lawrence’s poetry with his own. “I wish you could see the sun rising on the Weddell Sea, its rays striking the ice and exploding into a million shards of light. I wish you could hear the song the wind sings to you at night and the shrieking of the ice floes shifting and shattering on the restless seas. . . .”
    Tom listened raptly as Seamie spoke. They were talking about such vastly different parts of the world, and yet their kinship was immediate, for each understood the passion in the other. They were explorers, and each felt the force that called one into the great unknown. They knew the pull that made one give up the comforts of hearth and home, the nearness of friends and family. It was no accident that they were both unmarried, Seamie and Lawrence. They belonged to their passion, their yearning to see, to discover, to know. They belonged to their quest, and to nothing else.
    For a few seconds after he finished speaking, Seamie’s heart clenched with sorrow. It was so good to sit with these people. So few understood what drove him, but they did. There was another who understood. But she wasn’t here and he wished—with his heart and his soul and everything inside him—that she was.
    “I’m going back as soon as I can,” Lawrence said, breaking the silence, giving voice to the urge they were both feeling. To get out of this gray, smothering London and back into the wild, beckoning world. “I’m going back to Carchemish. I’ve been working under William Ramsey most recently, the renowned New Testament scholar. He’s with the British Museum. I’m back here to give a report on our findings. It has to be done, of course, but as soon as I’ve finished, I’m heading back to the desert. There’s so much more to do. And you, Mr. Finnegan? Have you any further adventures planned?”
    “Yes,” Seamie said. “And no. And . . . well, possibly I guess.”
    “That’s a strange answer,” Lawrence said.
    Seamie admitted that it was. “Ernest Shackleton is getting up another expedition to Antarctica, and I’m very interested in going,” he explained. “But I have a compelling reason to stay in London now, too.”
    “Really?” Eddie said, raising an eyebrow. “Who is she?”
    Seamie ignored her. “Clements Markham offered me a position at the RGS. Just yesterday in fact. He wants me to help with the money-raising efforts for new expeditions. I’d have an office and a fancy brass plaque on the door and a salary, and he tells me I’d be a fool not to take it.”
    “He’s right,” Albie said. “You would be. You’re getting too old for this Boy’s Own adventure stuff.”
    “Why, thank you for pointing that out, Alb,” Seamie said.
    A melancholy quiet descended on both Seamie and Lawrence at those words. Perhaps he is thinking himself too old for further adventures, too, Seamie thought. Or perhaps, he—like me—travels the world because he’s lost someone and hopes that if he goes far enough afield, if he’s cold enough or hot enough, in deep enough danger, hungry enough or sick enough, he might just forget that person. He never does, of course, but he always keeps trying. The strange, sad mood persisted until Lawrence said, “And what do you do, Mr. Alden?”
    “I’m a physicist,” Albie said. “I teach at Cambridge.”
    “He writes the most horrible, inscrutable, incomprehensible equations you’ve ever seen,” Eddie interjected. “On a blackboard in his office. All day long. He’s supposed to be on sabbatical,