Read Online When Nights Were Cold by Susanna Jones - Free Book Online

better than we were.
    â€˜Why should you care what she thinks?’
    But I did care what Parr thought. I cared because she was the captain and, despite her strange manners and eccentric qualities, I looked up to her. It was what Father had taught me and what I had learned from all my reading about explorers and heroes. We must respect our leader, even in difficult times. I wanted her to think well of me but, of course, Locke was right and I should not care.

Chapter Six
    The Nimrod had sailed from the East India Dock to Temple Pier for exhibition to the public. Admission was 2s 6d. I had the money in my hand before I reached the Embankment. It was a cool day in late October but the crowds were pink-faced and sticky-looking. A group of boys played at the river’s edge, trying to get a dog to jump over sticks and into the water, laughing and cheering as it splashed and panted. I became distracted watching them, tripped over a man’s foot and fell into a shoe-shine boy, sending him sprawling. The boy waved away my apology, set out his stall again with a stoical shrug. I fought through families, couples and groups of young men to reach the pier, wondered why so many had come to see what I wanted to believe was my own private interest, and then I stopped. The sky and river thickened and thinned as I stared. Sounds flattened until there was just the soft lapping of water.
    The ship was as long and narrow as the pictures had suggested, striking with its black hull and high masts. It lay calmly in the water as though, after its turbulent voyage, it wanted sleep. I had heard that members of the expedition team might be here to explain things to visitors and I prayed that there might be the smallest possibility of meeting Shackleton.
    When I stepped onto the ship, the spirits of the explorers were so thick in the air that, were the real men here, I would not have noticed them. I peered into the men’s sleeping quarters – they called them Oyster Alley – and the areas for the ponies and dogs and sledges, the food stores. Everything was just as the newspapers had described it and almost as I had imagined, but the ship was not thousands of miles away at the bottom of the world. It was here and my feet were touching the deck and its dust and air were going into my nostrils and down into my lungs. I reached to touch the wall. My hand rested on the wood as crowds shoved past. I shut my eyes to feel the place better.
    We were out on the ocean, sailing across the Weddell Sea, icebergs hunched and sleeping. The men shuffled in and out of their quarters, up and down the ship, some silent, some muttering, one shouting to another. Water sloshed around my feet and sprayed my hair. Salt seared my cheeks and pricked my eyes. Ernest called out to me, asking for my help.
    Farringdon, make sure that the ponies are all right.
    Aye, Captain.
    Aye, Captain?
    What a fool. If I did not try to keep a grip on reality, I might lose my mind and slip into the wrong world, just as my father always did, and wind up talking to ghosts and sea spirits when I needed to concentrate on studying and learning.
    I crossed the Embankment to the Medical Examination Hall to see the exhibition of stores and equipment. Photographs lined the walls, windows to a crumbly white world where coal-eyed men huddled to light pipes with mittened hands, where ice made an atlas of the sea, and the ship tilted, tall and black against the sky, as birds wailed above the masts. Around the room were stuffed seals, penguins, skua gulls, positioned as though ready to jump or to fly. A dummy explorer stood by the door of a weather-beaten tent all prepared to set out onto the ice. He was dressed in the clothes of a real expedition member. He looked as though there was warmth in him, as though he might open his mouth and exhale a white ball of breath. I wanted to touch him and I lifted my hand but didn’t dare reach out, lest I disturb or interrupt him. There were two