The Navigator of New York (58 page)

There was no sign of Francis Stead’s footprints, and when he looked behind him, he saw that his own were fast filling in with snow. So much the better, he thought. The snow will cover everything.

He made his way towards the tolt of rock and soon saw Francis Stead, saw him far away, sitting on the “bench,” his form lit by a lantern that was on the bench beside him.

Dr. Cook quickly extinguished his lantern.

He was not yet close enough to Francis Stead to see the falling snow except as a blurring of the light, such as might have been the effect of fog or mist. All he could make out of Francis Stead was an amorphous form in the light of the lantern.

He walked towards that lone light through a darkness so absolute he was able only to hear and feel the falling snow, which, though his hood was up, gently brushed against and melted on his face, so cold it made his forehead ache, the water running down his cheeks into his mouth and onto his beard, where it turned to ice again.

Soon Dr. Cook was able to make him out more clearly. He was sitting on the bench, his hands clasped about his drawn-up knees. Nothing else was visible but that nimbus, that gloriole of light that seemed to be emanating from that hunched figure at the heart of it. As if the snow was falling nowhere else but on that tolt of rock.

It was so dark, so silent, that it was hard to believe that Redcliffe House still existed, let alone such things as towns and cities.

He stopped perhaps fifty feet away from Francis Stead, directly in his line of sight. Francis Stead had been sitting there almost motionless for so long that snow lay inches deep on his hood and shoulders and on his legs. The snow combined with the furs he was wearing to round his form, enlarge it and obscure his face, so that it might have been some massive-browed, white-haired ape that was hunched there on that rock.

He circled around, keeping his distance from him until he was almost directly behind him.

He recalled the last part of the conversation he and Peary had had before they returned to Redcliffe House that afternoon.

“I want Cook to kill me,” Francis Stead had told Peary. He had set out to Peary exactly when and how it should be done, and what would happen if they did not go along with his demands. “I will do to the boy what I did to his mother,” said Francis Stead. “And when I get back to New York, I will ruin you both.”

All the after-dinner drinks, except his own, Dr. Cook’s and
Peary’s, Francis Stead had mixed with laudanum. Dr. Cook was to have stayed awake until after Francis Stead had gone outside, but he had somehow nodded off and Peary had had to wake him.

Now he moved closer to Francis Stead, so close that he could smell the smoke from his cigar. Between exhalations of blue smoke, Francis Stead rapidly breathed out white plumes of frost. Though motionless for so long, he was out of breath, chest and shoulders heaving rapidly.

Dr. Cook was close enough to touch him. His hand trembling, Francis Stead raised and lowered his cigar, the tip of it glowing momentarily. There was a faint sigh as he exhaled.

He knows that I am here, right behind him, thought Dr. Cook. He knows what is about to happen.

The snow was falling so heavily now that it made a multitude of hissing, sifting sounds, a faint sibilance, as if all the flakes were melting as they landed. How beautiful, how serene it was; how rare a night at such a latitude.

Dr. Cook doubted that, if not for the ether, which was Francis Stead’s idea, he could have brought himself to do it. The ether was used to subdue animals so that their hides could be brought back unblemished. He had two vials in the pockets of his coat.

He took one out and poured the ether onto a piece of cloth, all but gagging from the fumes. Francis Stead shifted, slightly but abruptly, as though about to turn around, but then he faced forward again, his breath now rasping in his heaving chest.

“Get it over with,” he said. “For God’s sake, get it over with.”

Dr. Cook waited for him to lower his cigar, which he feared would ignite the ether. When he rested his cigar hand on his knee, Dr. Cook put one hand behind his head, on his hood, and pushed it forward to meet the piece of cloth. Though Francis Stead was overcome instantly, falling limp against the rock, he kept the cloth in place.

He lit his lantern and walked what he guessed was halfway to the nearest crevasse in the glacier, placing the lantern on the ground, then made his way back to the tolt. He took Francis Stead under the arms
and dragged him off towards the glacier, his heels making a pair of furrows in the snow.

Using the lamp-lit tolt of rock as his pilot point, he made his way towards the other lantern. When he reached it, he used
it
as his pilot point and continued dragging Francis towards the glacier until he felt the ice begin to slope beneath his feet. He laid Francis flat on his back and used his knife for traction, digging it into the ice with his left hand while he pushed Francis with his right, gripping the front of his coat.

When he felt a sharp increase in the slope of the ice, he stopped and removed from his pocket the vials of ether and the cloth and stuffed them into one of his moccasins. He could barely make out Francis Stead, just enough to see that his face and body were covered with snow.

He pushed Francis a few feet more, until the body slid slowly away from him. He could go no farther. He prayed the body would not bring up short of the crevasse. Then he saw it suddenly somersault.

Francis Stead neither spoke nor screamed. Dr. Cook heard a series of muffled thumps. The sounds, as if the crevasse was bottomless, did not so much stop as trail off into silence.

Again using his knife, he inched back up the slope, his gaze fixed on his lantern in the distance and, beyond it, the uplit tolt of rock. Soon he was able to stand safely.

As he set out towards the lantern, his body shook, his teeth chattering as if he had just stepped straight out of the warmth into the cold. Was it only for the boy? he asked himself.

He gathered up his lantern, extinguished it, then made his way to the tolt of rock, where he lit the lantern once again and extinguished Francis Stead’s. The other man’s cigar still smouldered in the snow. He ground it out with his foot. The tolt and the ground around it reeked of ether, but he doubted that, with the snow falling so heavily, this would be the case come daylight.

Putting the cigar butt in his pocket, he proceeded across the scree of snow-covered rocks to the igloos, where he woke some Eskimos, who said they had not seen Dr. Stead since that afternoon. Then
he went back to Redcliffe House to announce Francis Stead’s disappearance.

The others were up and having breakfast. He asked if any of them had seen Dr. Stead.

“Then you have not found him?” said Peary.

He shook his head. “I’ve been looking for him since you sent me out,” he said. “I’m not sure what time that was. About four-fifteen, I think.”

“It was more like four-forty-five,” said Peary. “Where can that fool have gone?”

Four-forty-five. Barely an hour ago. Not time enough to do what Cook had done. Not long enough ago to make anyone wonder why he had waited so long to come back to the house.

“Well, he seems to be missing,” said Dr. Cook, at which Peary became enraged, reminding them all that one of the rules of the expedition was that no one venture out from Redcliffe by himself, except at his instructions. When the others assured him that Stead would return when he felt like it, Peary roared and stormed about.

Francis Stead’s plan had been a good one. It would not have made sense for both Peary and Dr. Cook to follow him outside. If, in spite of the laudanum, one or more of the others had happened to wake up and find all three of them gone, they might have gone out looking for them.

“These were all I found,” said Dr. Cook. “Out by the tolt of rock. His lantern. And”—he dug in his pocket—”this.” He showed them the cigar butt. “It was cold when I found it,” he said. “He must have left it there hours ago.”

The search lasted three days and turned up nothing. The Eskimos corroborated Peary’s statement about what time it was when Dr. Cook went outdoors.

In Redcliffe House, Dr. Cook found the rucksack in which Francis Stead had kept his journals, but it was empty. What Francis had written in them, he had no idea. He prayed that he or Peary would find them first. But like Francis, they were never found. Perhaps Peary had disposed of them. Perhaps Francis Stead had.

“We shall speak to each other again only when it is absolutely necessary,” Peary said when one day during the return voyage he called Dr. Cook to his cabin. “It will be best if we keep our distance from each other from now on.”

He believes, Dr. Cook thought, that I have sullied myself, debased myself in a way that he has not; that he has carried himself with as much dignity as possible considering the circumstances.

“It has been almost intolerable to me,” Dr. Cook said. “All these years, knowing that I conspired with a man like that—that we were, and always would be, partners in the death of Francis Stead, joined for life by something as unspeakable as murder. As for Peary, who knows what memories return to him in dreams?

“During those strange afternoons we spent together in that tupik on the beach at Etah, we spoke of her when Henson wasn’t there. And of you and Francis Stead. He said that I had killed Francis Stead for the same reason he wanted him dead: to save my reputation, to preserve my good name and secure my future. ‘Why don’t you admit it? You did not even kill him for revenge,’ Peary said. ‘You cared nothing for the woman
he
killed. If you had, you would not have turned your back on her. As for the boy, you did not even know him. You had never met him or even seen him when you murdered Francis Stead. Did you even know his name?’ ‘When
we
killed him,’ I kept saying, but Peary would shake his head. He seemed to have almost convinced himself that he had had nothing to do with it, that it had merely been his good fortune that Francis Stead had died before he had a chance to do him harm.

“Peary sent you to me in the hope that, once you had heard everything, you would turn against me, renounce me, perhaps even admit that we never reached the pole. And it seems that he has won. He has driven us apart. I can see it in your eyes.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “You did what you did for me.”

“If only I was certain that was true,” he said. “I betrayed myself long ago, Devlin. I lose nothing by this hoax I have concocted. But
you, if you stay with me, will lose everything. I will not let you be destroyed, by my enemies or by yourself.”

He put his face in his hands and shook his head.

“I never dreamed, when I first wrote to you … I cannot bear to think that I have lost you. And yet it seems certain that I have.”

“You have not lost me,” I said. “I am your son. You are my father. That will never change.”

With tears running down his face, he hugged me.

I felt an exhaustion of spirit that I was sure would last forever. “I must go,” I said, but before I could get up, he slowly left the room.

How strange it was to find out, so many years after it happened, that my life had been saved, let alone how and by whom. And that for years, I had figured in the lives of people I had never met or even heard of.

In a place far removed from where I lived, at a time when I had no reason to think that Francis Stead was not my father, or that my mother’s death was not a suicide, a man I had never met or even heard of saved my life. And that man
was
my father.

D
R
. C
OOK WAS AGAIN ABSENT FROM HOME FOR SEVERAL DAYS
. I dared not glance at a newspaper, knowing it would be full of news about the polar controversy, about him and Peary and what each was doing to undermine the other’s claim. I slept late every morning, then went to the Dakota, instructing the servants that I was not to be disturbed. I tried to think, and unable to do so, I tried to read, only to find myself stalled for hours in mid-sentence.

It seemed a deliverance when I received an invitation from Kristine’s mother, Lily, to meet with her in her apartment. There would be no other guests, she said. She was a widow and Kristine was visiting relatives in Philadelphia. If the date mentioned was not convenient, I could suggest another.

Kristine lived with Lily in an apartment that they had bought following the death of Mr. Sumner some years before. I could see that they were well provided for. An elevator opened directly onto the entrance hall, whose floor was made of lozenges of black marble over which an Oriental rug was laid. Reflected in the marble was an overhanging silver lantern in which burned brightly a single large electric bulb. In the dining room and drawing room, the walls were wainscoted, the panelling made of oak. There was a look of plain elegance about the place. There were no gilded walls, no ostentatious reproductions of Greek and Roman sculpture. Most of the paintings and photographs were of New York—the half-completed Brooklyn Bridge, workmen sitting astride the girders of some building. A
painting of Manhattan as it might have looked in 1650. Artifacts of the New World.

“Kristine speaks often of you,” she said. “She had all but stopped accepting invitations out by the time she met you. She did not much like the sort of young men and women she was meeting, she said, which did not surprise me, since I knew just who she meant. I know their parents, anyway, and the apple does not fall far from the tree. My late husband came from an old, established family, the kind whose name endures long after its money has run out. Which is why I can decline invitations and let people think I do so out of snobbishness. They think I come by it honestly. But Kristine has become a social gadfly since she met you. She is out of sorts for days if you do not turn up at one of those awful events. She was so unhappy while you were away.”

I felt myself blushing. “I missed her very much,” I said.

It was clearly from her that Kristine had inherited her appealing, forthright manner. There was no hint of self-consciousness about her or of any concern about what sort of impression she was making. I could not imagine her spending one moment of her widow’s solitude in brooding self-absorption.