Free The Ice Child by Elizabeth Cooke

’s armoring that reached back twenty feet from the stem.
    “Know what’s under that?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Three inches of English oak doubled with two layers of African oak, laid diagonal,” the man told him. “Overlaid with two inches of Canadian elm, diagonal again. Five belts of timber ten inches thick.” The man slapped his back. “That is Terror ,” he said. “That is what a British ship is made of.”
    Augustus grew hot. His mother would be looking for him. She would be furious, and she had a quick temper. But he couldn’t say that to this officer. No sailor here had a mother looking for him. That wouldn’t make him a man.
    “Who are you?” he was asked.
    He spoke his name.
    “Look up at me, lad.”
    Augustus obeyed. He saw a round but handsome face, with sandy-colored hair. Gold fringing on the jacket. A double row of buttons. A black stock below a white collar. Clean shaven. Blue eyes.
    “You are Thomas Peterman’s son. Your uncle recommended you. And Mr. Reid, the ice master.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    The man nodded. “Your father was a fine seaman. A brave man.”
    Gus said nothing. His father had been dead for four years, and he could not remember him. He only knew the story that his father had gone down by Home Bay in the Davis Strait. The harpooner of number two boat had delivered his blow, and the whale—the crew said the same whale that had passed several times under the ship, as gentle as you could please—had suddenly lunged upward. Her enormous bulk had struck the harpooner boat, capsizing it, throwing the crew into the water. The other boats killed her by lances as they tried to get the men out of the sea, and his father had been found still holding on to an oar, floating quite dead in the mess of blood and foam, killed instantly, they said, by the first strike of the fish.
    The officer suddenly squatted down now on his heels. He looked up into Gus’s face. “I knew of him, Gus,” he said. “We met Esquimaux on the Whalefish Islands who had sailed with your father’s ship out of Hull one summer.”
    Gus looked into the blue eyes.
    The man held out his hand. “I am Francis Crozier,” he said.
    Gus stared down at the open hand. He knew who Francis Crozier was, and the realization dried the words in his mouth. There was no way to reply. Crozier was second-in-command of the expedition, and captain of the Terror . If Terror was every boy’s dream of a ship, Crozier was every boy’s dream of an explorer. Only James Clark Ross was better known to him, and Ross was Crozier’s friend. Crozier had spent ten winters in the frozen seas. He had sailed at the right hand of Ross and, on those voyages, gone farther south in the world than any other man. Before that he had sailed with William Edward Parry, and gone farther north in the world than any other man. He had survived the loss of the Fury . He had been at sea since he was thirteen—thirty-six years. He had sailed the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Oceans as well as the Mediterranean Sea.
    It was unusual for a captain to notice a boy, less still—unheard of—for him to offer to shake his hand. Gus extended his own small palm, to see it not quite swallowed up in Crozier’s grasp.
    “I am indebted to you, Augustus,” the Irishman said softly, “for coming with us on this adventure.”
    Gus tried to say something. It came out a blur, a few stumbled syllables. He stood open mouthed as Crozier walked away.
    He was still standing like that when his mother found him. The first he knew of her was a stinging blow to the side of his head. Then she grabbed him by the wrist. “I’ve been searching high and low,” she muttered.
    She took him to the long row of warehouses. There his name was taken, and he was given a pack, and she leaned down and kissed him roughly, just once.
    As he stood on the dock with the feel of the swift kiss still on his cheek, waiting to board, he wondered about the great white bears.
    Although Augustus had been