The Ice Child

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PRAISE FOR ELIZABETH COOKE WRITING AS ELIZABETH McGREGOR

The Ice Child

“Engrossing … a full-bodied work that ably spans generations and continents.”
—People

“A compelling epic of exploration, loss, and wonder.” —
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[Elizabeth Cooke’s] descriptive skill and the captivating pacing of the stories make this a can’t-put-it-down read.” —
Houston Chronicle

“That rare novel that has it all: adventure, suspense, endurance and love, all wrapped in a plot that will keep you up too late.” —
The Plain Dealer

A Road Through the Mountains

“Gracefully written and affecting … [Cooke] has a real gift for character.”
—The Washington Post

“A powerfully moving novel, vivid and passionate … [Cooke] is a wonderful writer.”
—New York Times
–bestselling author Luanne Rice

“Lyrical … [a] poignant tribute to the tenacity of love.” —
Booklist

The Girl in the Green Glass Mirror

“An intriguing, ambitious literary work that will reward.” —
Kirkus Reviews

“Absorbing, well-written … The author is at her most lyrically persuasive when detailing her overarching theme: a life without art is not life at all.” —
Booklist

The Ice Child

A Novel

Elizabeth Cooke writing as Elizabeth McGregor

For Kate, who can see in the dark

Prologue

Summer 2000

The great white bear lifted her head, narrowing her eyes against the driving Arctic snow. She looked back along the rubble ice to the cub that followed her, waiting for him in the white-on-white landscape.

All around her the ice of Victoria Strait groaned as it moved, compressed by the pressure that flooded from the Beaufort Sea, forcing its way through Melville Sound toward the Northwest Passage.

It was desperately cold. Colder, certainly, than a man could tolerate for long. But the bear did not register the temperature, padded as she was by four inches of fat and insulating fur. She was in her country, her kingdom, impervious to any law but her own.

The Greeks called this place Arktikos, the country of the great bear. From November to February it kept the long watches of the world’s night; but in the spring it was more alive than any other country.

Three million fulmars, kittiwakes, murres, and guillemots fed in Lancaster Sound in the summer; over a quarter of a million harp, bearded, and ringed seals. In May and June ten million dovekies, with their stocky little black-and-white bodies, passed over Devon Island. And above them all, clearly bright in winter, shone Polaris, the yellowish star that never seemed to move, with the lesser stars of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, circulating around it. Most beautiful of all were the lights—lights that the Inuit said were the torches held by the dead to help the living hunt—the aurora borealis, whose pale green and rose-colored flags streamed and undulated across the skies.

The polar bear had mated on the ice floes of Peel Sound last May. She had been an exceptional and solitary traveler, even among her own long-ranging kind. Swimming all that season, rarely resting on the ice, she had crossed the Arctic Circle opposite Repulse and was spotted, though not tagged, by a marine mammal research team, as she crossed the old whaling routes, in March. On most days she could swim fifty miles without a rest, churning through the checkered ice at six miles an hour.

In December she had given birth for the first time, in a snow den deep underground.

Her single male cub had arrived complaining, mewling, flexing his feet against her within minutes. He weighed less than a pound at birth and fitted neatly into her curled paw; but by April he had grown to twenty-six pounds, and she had broken her drowsy sleep and pulled down the door of the den to the outside world.

She came out onto the snow, thin from her prolonged starvation, her cub following her. At first, she simply sat contentedly in the sun at the den’s entrance, closing her eyes against the light. Even then she had no desire to eat, but she would occasionally roll backward to let her son feed, while she looked up at the endless wide sky. Sometimes, the cub would lie on her stomach, and she would rock him in her forelegs, just like a human mother rocking her baby in her arms.

But it was August now, and the light was beginning to change. And she felt—had felt for days—that the angle of the light was subtly wrong. She had, perhaps, tracked too far before denning; perhaps she was too far west. The internal mapping that ought not to fail her seemed to have done so, and in the first spell of real cold now, she stood indecisively on the freezing floe.

There was something strange here.

She felt a thread of danger—just a beat in the blood, a message transmitted in nerve impulses and scent. She wanted to turn back, to trek south, where her own kind was concentrated—and it was starting to be a command, this low-key tremor in her consciousness. But louder still was the knowledge that the cub was sick—too sick to travel far. Still watching him now, she saw him drop to the ground, roll over, and lie passively in the snow.

The polar bear raised herself up on her hind legs and, after pausing only for a second, slammed her full nine-hundred-pound body weight down. If the same mammal tracking team that had recorded her last year had seen her now, they would have been puzzled at this out-of-place behavior. With such force she was able to break through into seal dens, stealing the pups before they had ever seen the light, or break through ice to make swimming holes. But neither purpose was fulfilled here, in the whiteout of the storm.

She could feel the wreck underneath her, on the seabed below.

It smelled, even now, even after lying under the ice for a hundred and sixty years, like man. The wooden and iron bulk had left its insoluble human mark—this sense of
un
rightness, a kind of dislocation in the frequencies. The echo touched the animal above. She paused, balanced on her hindquarters, swaying, seven feet high at the shoulder, her immense forepaws extended in front of her.

Then she dropped down to all fours, and turned.

She turned back toward the cub, scenting—rather than seeing—him in the blizzard. As she drew level with him, she dropped to the ground and wound her body around him, pushing him gently into her shoulder, until she felt his faint warm breath against her.

P
ART
O
NE

Spring 1997

One

It had begun in April, in the spring.

Easter Saturday was sunny, the first warm day of the year. All through Victoria Park the cherry trees were in flower, and the hornbeam were coming into leaf, and there was that first iridescent promise of summer showing in the dusty haze of the city.

When she thought about it now, Jo would see herself in that same café on the corner of Bartlett Street, Gina leafing through the newspaper at her side. And she would link those two: the cherry trees and the newspaper. The first day that she ever really gave more than a passing thought to Douglas Marshall.

She was twenty-six years old and had been writing for
The Courier
for four years, where Gina was her editor. From time to time Gina took it upon herself to see that Jo’s life ran a more ordered, less frantic pattern, and it was this concern that had found Jo, at midday on Good Friday, bundled into Gina’s battered blue Citroën.

“It’ll do you good to get out of London,” Gina had told her, on the way to Bath down the M4. “You can’t have another weekend cooped up in that flat.”

“I am not cooped up,” Jo had objected. “I like it,” she added, defending the three rooms she could barely be described as living in. Most of her possessions were still in boxes six months after moving there. The cupboard was very often, as in the nursery rhyme, bare. She lived on milk and cheese biscuits, from what Gina could make out.

“You want to take care of yourself.”

A roll of the eyes from Jo. “Gina. I
do.
”

Gina glanced over again at Jo’s profile and saw a stubborn little grimace of independence.

Whenever people met Jo, they would most commonly screw up their faces, trying to dredge a name to fit the face. “Don’t I know you?” was the commonest opening gambit.

Jo’s photograph on the top of
The Courier
’s guest column pictured her sitting on a scattering of books and newsprint. The image had been taken from above so that, laughing, she was shown marooned in a little sea of paper, her head turned slightly away, so that sunlight slanted across her face and apparently naked shoulders.

If Gina herself had a characteristic expression, it was a sardonic smile below her rounded, you-don’t-say eyes. Somewhere back along the line, Gina was both Indian and Spanish, a mixed heritage from a Jamaican port that the tourists didn’t see. Her parents had come to England in the fifties. Gina’s father was an engineer, her mother a nurse, and between them they had produced five lusty, forthright, hard-to-ignore children, of which Gina was the youngest. Gina had propelled herself to features editor at
The Courier
by the time that Jo was taken on as a freelance, a babe-in-arms of twenty-two.

Perhaps it was Jo’s sheer outlandishness that pleased her friend; the complete refusal to be deterred. Jo’s career had been checkered, to say the least. She had dumped university in favor of following a radical student theater group on tour, and had found her way into journalism by gate-crashing the rock-classics concert of Excelsis at the Edinburgh Festival. She had been spotted there by a morning TV show and hired to present their entertainment slot—and by this route, single minded and outspoken, she had arrived at Gina’s desk one morning.