• 
• 
• 

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 unrightness, 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.

 Chapter 1

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.

Gina's first thought had been that Jo hardly looked painfully young. She was, as Gina's mother would have said, five foot five of fresh air—thin, almost scrawny; antsy with impatience; quick to humor, quick to anger. Her smile hid a sharp, ironic mind. She stuck out her hand that first day and shook Gina's with a fierce grip. It had been quite a job to get her to sit down, such was her enthusiasm to get going.

Sitting now in the city center, looking at her, Gina smiled to herself behind the newspaper page. Jo was stretched out in her chair, eyes closed and turned to the sun. For a second she looked the perfect picture of relaxation. Until she opened one eye, yawned, and tapped the newspaper in Gina's grasp.

"What's the opposition say?" she asked, ruffling her hair and wriggling upright in her seat.

"Nothing radical," Gina said. "Except for that." She held open the paper at the third page. Jo shielded her eyes against the sun and looked at the article.

There was a map on the top right-hand corner-an indented coastline and contour lines of mountains that ran down to the sea.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Greenland," Gina said. "You know Douglas Marshall?"

Jo had to think for a second. "Give me a clue."

"BBC Two."

A long moment went by. "Gardening," Jo guessed at last.

"Not even close," Gina said. "Archaeology. Far Back."

"Ah," Jo acknowledged. "Lots of running about with bits of pottery. Which one was Marshall?" she asked.

"The tall hairy one."

"They were all hairy."

"The smiling one. The ship expert."

"Oh, him." Jo vaguely remembered a tall man, habitually dressed in a battered leather jacket. Not a good color. Dirty red. Faded flash.

"What's happened to him?"

"He's lost."

"What, there?" Jo asked, glancing at the map.

"In the land of ice and snow, uh-huh."

Jo took the page from Gina and took a second to skim the article. Douglas Marshall had been reported missing while on an archaeological trip in one of the most inhospitable landscapes on earth. She sighed heavily. "This guy's gone on some harebrained personal mission in a snowstorm, and now we're supposed to all go out and find him," she said. She pointed to the final paragraph of the article. "Look, they've actually sent a bloody frigate. What a waste of money."

Gina frowned at her. "You don't mean that."

"I do," Jo countered. "The expense! What has he gone there for, really? Personal glory. Some obsession or other, I bet."

"You cynic!" "It's true," Jo retorted. "I mean, it's like these other idiots who cross Siberia in a balloon, or something. Hang-gliding down Everest, whatever. It's comic-book stuff."

Gina took the page back from her. "Actually," she said, "it's an academic exercise. An expedition."

"Same thing."

"But he could be dying, Jo!"

"Did we ask him to do it?"

"We have to do something."

"Send out the fleet?"

"Yeah, send out the fleet, why not? He's a British subject."

Jo burst out laughing. "What ho," she said. "Wave the flag." She looked away, down toward the traffic.

"So ... what's the alternative?" Gina asked. "Let him freeze?"

"Yes," Jo said. And she almost meant it.

Jo had almost forgotten the conversation when she went into The Courier the following Tuesday. It was ten o'clock, and the building was already busy. She put her head around Gina's door, just to wave hello.

"Hey, come here," Gina called.

"I'm going up to the clippings library," Jo said.

"In a minute," Gina replied. "Sit."

Jo did so. "What is it?" she asked. "Something good? Send me to Cannes, Gina. Look at me. I'll die if I don't get sun."

Gina was sorting through papers on her desk. "Marshall," she said. "I've been thinking about him. He's still missing. I want you to do a piece."

Jo's gaze settled on her. "You're joking. Not the madman."

"No. I want you to go and talk to his wife."

"His wife? Ah, Gina. No."

"Why not?" Jo shook her head.

"I can't go steaming in there. And I don't know a thing about him. And I don't really want to either. You know that."

Gina nodded, but briefly, the nod dismissing the objection rather than seeing its point. "We haven't heard anything at all from Mrs. Marshall, and that's why I want you to go."

"To talk to her ..."

"To talk to someone who knows the family."

"Because?"

"Because no journalist has ever spoken to Alicia Marshall."

Gina found what she was looking for on her desk. "Here's Marshall's biography," she said, handing Jo five or six stapled sheets. "Marshall's pretty upfront, but his wife likes to keep a low profile. Power-behind-the-throne stuff. A lot of money. She's a trustee of the Academy. Rumored to be a bit of a bitch."

Jo raised her eyebrows, interested at last. "Oh, yeah?"

"She was asked for a comment this week, on Monday," Gina said. "And she said, 'No comment.'"

"Who to?"

"The Times."

"Ha," said Jo, amused.

"You've seen the latest on him?"

"No."

"They found the GPS."

"What's a GPS?" Jo asked.

"Global positioning. The one thing you need, a kind of satellite compass. It was dropped on the ice."

Jo hesitated. "It's really not my scene, you know," she muttered. "Can't you send someone else?"

"I've got a hunch," Gina replied.

"What kind of hunch?"

"Dunno. Could be good for you."

"Hmmph," Jo responded, unimpressed. She leafed quickly through the papers in her lap. "I don't even know what he was looking for in ruddy Greenland."

"Medieval settlements. Something about Vikings and Eskimos."

"Oh, thrilling."

Gina ignored her. "The archivist at the Academy in Cambridge is called Peter Bolton." She passed a page of notes across to accompany the photocopies. "He can only see you at eight tomorrow morning. He's teaching all day."

Jo held Gina's eye for a few long seconds, before conceding. She knew the glint in her editor's eye only too well to refuse. "Great," she grumbled, as she packed the papers together.

It was a long way on the tube to Jo's flat. After a full day correcting copy and researching for another piece she was scheduled to interview for on Friday, Jo was still not really interested in Marshall. Riding the stuttering rail, crammed into a carriage with a hundred other commuters, she only skimmed through his biography.

Douglas James Marshall, born Ontario 1960. Fellow of Blethyn College, professor of archaeology, specialist in marine sites, special interest Victorian ship construction, chairman Royal Commission 1989-92 Naval Heritage, author of The Shipwreck Society (1994), Under the Mediterranean (1996), The Search for the Caesar Augustus (1997)....

Over the last couple of years Douglas Marshall had become the spokesman for the University Exploration Academy, and was regularly wheeled out to comment on anything where a tame historical expert was needed. Plus, he had been a regular on the BBC 2 series. She could bring the title pictures to mind, even see the landscapes, and the stills that the Sunday supplements had used in various articles. But as for Marshall himself, she couldn't visualize him beyond a broad, blurred smile.

When she got home, the light on the answering machine was flashing, and she saw the fax waiting. She ignored it while she showered and made herself a sandwich. Only grudgingly, after she had got out, and wrapped herself in a towel, did she read what Gina had given her.

Alongside Marshall's biography was a copy of the Saturday article.

He had gone missing at a place called Uummannatsiaq.

Frowning, Jo went over to one of the moving firm's boxes, where she rummaged for a moment among the books inside. She emerged with her old school atlas and sat down with it, rifling through the pages.

Uummannatsiaq ... she couldn't even find it. She looked across from the islands of the Northwest Passage, over Baffin Bay, to Greenland. Even from the map she could see that the coastline there was mountainous and unforgiving. Surely at this time of year there would be ice packed deep into the fjords and way out to sea. If, indeed, the ice ever broke up at these places. She shuddered involuntarily. She had never liked the cold, and the thought of spending even one day in such an unforgiving climate was horrendous. Give her a beach with warm sand, somewhere that you could kick off your shoes and clothes.

She smiled to herself and flicked back through the atlas pages.

The book was a mixed bag of memories. Inside the cover her own childish hand had written her name, followed by the address she'd had at seven: Rheindahlen JHQ, West Germany. Her father, a career civil servant, and already fifty when Jo had been born, had been an advisor to the MOD. The atlas pages were grainy and thick, the lettering and layout old fashioned. As her father regularly traveled, it had been her daily ritual when a child to find where in the world Daddy might be. She vividly recalled turning to those countries, known to her even now by the texture of the paper under her fingers. She'd traced her father to places in the world whose very names had become part of his identity. Kuwait. Singapore. The Falkland Islands. More islands. Offshore islands like these, swept by wind and current. She looked at the great green sweep of Canada now, fringed with its border of ice.

She closed the page and replaced the book.

As she did so, she paused to look at the frayed red spine of the returned atlas, so out of place among the newer paperbacks, its fabric shedding, showing the cardboard underneath. The expression on her face was impenetrable. She had lost both father and mother in the last five years, and the isolation was still fresh.

Yet people like Douglas Marshall actually chose to exile themselves. She wondered, still staring at the spine of the school atlas, what kind of family she would find, waiting for Marshall's return.

Only as she finally turned out the light did she catch sight of the fax machine again in the hallway. With a cup of coffee balanced in the crook of her arm, she pulled the piece of paper out, and managed to tear it.

Doug Marshall's face, ripped in two, stared back at her.

On the top of the piece of paper Gina had scrawled, This is your man.

She slotted the two halves together. It was not a great photo.

Marshall's face was screwed up against bright sunlight. Impossible to guess his age from that shot, though she might have tried at something less than the biography had told her. A frown into the camera, a backdrop of ocean. He was leaning on a white rail and holding something in one hand. She squinted at the image.

Impossible to say what it was that he was holding. It could have been a piece of iron, a metal rod, a wooden stick.

She sighed as she trailed to the bedroom.

"Oh, I'm going to love you," she muttered as she closed the door.

The Exploration Academy was housed in a Georgian building, set back in its own gardens. It had once been a private house, whose discreet black railings, ornately finished with complicated patterns of leaves and vines, separated the residence from the street.

McCullock Road was in the heart of the city, close to Lion Yard, and by the time Jo got there, just before eight, the traffic was already building up. Cars were backed up in the narrow street, waiting for a delivery van unloading in front of one of the colleges. A hundred yards away down the street Jo glimpsed an archway with a wooden door, a green quadrangle beyond, a red coat of arms on the medieval wall above.

The double glass doors of the Academy led onto a large foyer. Pressing the doorbell, Jo could see a reception desk, with some sort of office behind, and glass-fronted cabinets in the hallway. To the left another door opened into a bigger room. To their right was a flight of stairs.

A woman came out of the office. She smiled at Jo through the glass as she unlocked the door and ushered her in.

"He's upstairs," she told Jo. "I'll tell him you're here."

She was shown to a chair in the hall.

The place was huge, the ceiling thirty feet high. Jo noticed, now, that at some time fairly recently the whole of the back of the building had been remodeled; beyond the flight of stairs the wall was glass, and a room-wide corridor led to another building, a modern block that looked like a library.

Several minutes ticked past.

Eventually she got up and walked to the cabinets that were ranged against the far wall.

She rested her hand on the sloping glass of the first. Under her palm lay a meaningless scatter of objects and a few sepia photographs. There was a silver spoon with a copper repair on the handle. The tattered remains of a small book, empty of pages, and what had once been gold initials faded on the front. A tiny piece of red tin or aluminum. A page with a drawing of some kind of engine.

She peered at the photographs. Four men in uniform, only one of them youthful. They had the very posed and rigid look of early Victorian daguerreotypes. Their names were underneath, but she barely read them. Not one was looking directly into the camera. Behind them in the case was a long and narrow map of a waterway.

"Miss Harper?"

She turned.

She hadn't heard him approach, but a man was standing at her shoulder. He was barely her own height, not more than five foot six, and was incredibly round. He held out his hand.

"Peter Bolton."

"Jo Harper."

She liked him on sight: he had the face of an enthusiastic schoolboy. He was overweight, probably more than two hundred twenty pounds, and breathing heavily from the exertion of walking down the stairs.

"Come far?" he asked her.

"London," she said.

"Ah," he replied, commiserating. "Come with me. I've got hot choco- late." He stopped and peered at her. "Do you drink hot chocolate?"

"Yes," she said.

"Good."

They went back to his office. In this assumption, made while she was driving here, trying to visualize both him and the institute, Jo had been right. It was a typical academic's room, so much a cliché that it might have been prepared for a film set. Shelves lined the room floor to ceiling. Books lined the floor. Dust was everywhere. They could just about get in the room by pushing hard on the door, and picking their way over to two chairs marooned in a wash of files and paper.

Bolton fished a thermos from under the desk. "We have a machine here that never works, and we have Mrs. Cropp, who does. But I don't like to bother her," he said, pouring the drink into two plastic cups.

They sipped.

"My phone has never stopped ringing," he said.

"You must be fed up with us all."

"No, no," he replied cheerfully. "I'm very popular all of a sudden."

"Has Douglas Marshall been missing before?"

"No. Never."

"But he's been on expeditions...."

"Oh, yes. The Antarctic, you know. Turkey. Asia. The Caribbean."

"And the Arctic?"

"Yes, twice."

"I see," she said. She glanced around her. "Have you known him long?"

"Over ten years."

"Really?" she said. "I'm sorry. You must be frantic."

He nodded slightly. "Yes ... it's unlike Douglas. But ... one tries not to be frantic, exactly."

"But anxious ..."

"Oh, yes."

"And his wife."

"Alicia?" He stopped. Paused just a fraction too long. "Yes, of course."

Jo smiled. "I would like to talk to her. Is that possible?"

To her surprise Bolton blushed. "No."

The abruptness of the reply took her aback. "A very short interview," she said. "Perhaps a photograph?"

Bolton shook his head. "Alicia never gets involved in the public side."

"Just five minutes. Do you have her address?"

"No, I'm sorry ... if you want to ask me about Doug's journey, anything about that ..."

She let it go temporarily. "I might as well tell you, I know nothing about Doug Marshall and I don't understand this passion for Greenland."

"You don't know his background?" Bolton asked.

"Not really."

"Qilatitsoq?"

"No."

Bolton shook his head. He stood up and took a box file from one of the closest shelves. Opening it, he took out a sheaf of papers and began removing pages from among the pile. "I was going to make a press release, if I ever got around to it," he said. "Take a copy. It's Doug's curriculum vitae ... a couple of articles he's written...."

She took the papers from him. "Thank you."

"The Inuit communities are where he started," Bolton continued. "Because of Franklin. Franklin has been Doug's lifelong passion. Of course, he's done other things—a considerable number of other things—but the Inuit and Franklin were the subject of his original doctoral thesis. That set him off on the Greenland mummies. You've heard of them?"

"I'm sorry."

Bolton ran a hand through his hair. "Six women and two children. Dead for over five hundred years. They were in a magnificent state of preservation."

"Oh ... like these ones they found in the Andes?"

"Similar. Similar preservation. Cold and dry, you see?"

"And these were ..."

"Inuit. What we once called Eskimo. Or Esquimaux." He spelled it for her.

"And this is why Doug Marshall is there again, because of mummies?"

"Yes."

"He's found more?"

"Not quite. Doug feels there is one other, a crucial religious site, deeper in the fjord."

"I see," Jo said. But in all honesty she couldn't see. A people living on ice. She couldn't imagine a place dominated by the dark.

"And of course," Bolton said, "there's the Franklin connection."

The phone rang. He picked it up.

Jo sat watching him. She had no idea at all who—or what—Franklin was. She felt her mind go momentarily blank and recognized it as her hitting-the-wall feeling, a sensation she habitually got when her interest in a story waned, or the smell of it left her. A good story had that speeding sensation, and the scent of revelation. There was nothing to reveal here, except a passion for the dead. And even that was an old story. She gently tapped Bolton's desk gently, to attract his attention.

"How long has he been looking for these other bodies?" she whispered.

He put his hand over the mouthpiece. "Six years."

"Six ..."

Forget that, then, she thought. How crazy did you have to be, for God's sake, to look for six years for dead people in a place that was permanently frozen?

Bolton started to flick the pages of the diary open in front of him. His gaze drifted away, as he listened to the caller on the other end of the line. "He has an oral at two-thirty...."

Jo got to her feet. Taking a piece of paper from her bag, she scribbled on it, Are you free at lunchtime?

He glanced at it, nodded, wrote 1:30 on the page. Perhaps.

"Thanks," she said.

Going down the stairs, she stopped halfway, thinking.

The world was looking for a man who couldn't be found. And the press were looking for a woman who didn't want to be found.

"We'll see about that," she told herself.

She went over to the reception desk, and the same woman who had shown her in got up from a desk beyond the counter and came over to her.

Jo smiled. "Mr. Bolton's given me the address of Mrs. Marshall, but I don't know Cambridge," Jo lied smoothly. "If I take a right from ..."

Mrs. Cropp paused only for a second before she glanced down at the map that Jo was holding open in front of her. She shook her head. "Oh, you can't get to it that way," she said. "Go down the 603. You'll come out at the highway. Cross over the bridge and carry on down toward the Eversdens."

Jo took a gamble. She glanced at the map. "And the house is at Little Eversden?"

"No. Pass the Eversdens. But don't get into Haslingfield. That's too far."

Jo gave her her broadest smile, folding the map. "That's great," she said.

"You're welcome."

Well, Jo thought, going out of the door.

Someone's going to get to the wife eventually.

It might as well be me.

According to her road map, which was not greatly detailed, there were maybe ten villages in those twenty square miles. She drove out into a cool, gray-on-green landscape. Roads that had been laid down centuries ago crossed the flat fens. Jo, who had an abiding passion for mountains—or at least a place where there were defined hills and valleys—always felt a little lost in the wide sweeps of East Anglia. The light was high and curious.

She passed a string of houses, bordering each side of the narrow road. The village was there and gone in thirty seconds. A fine mist of rain obscured her windshield. She put the wipers on, negotiated a right-angle turn that appeared from nowhere. The road narrowed further, to the width of a lane, and began to bump through sunken patches. On either side of the road were black-and-white markers, to show flood heights of the river that ran alongside. Ahead she could see a church.

She pulled in close to it and looked again at the map. The Marshalls had to live somewhere close. She imagined it would be a largish house, one known to the locals. Looking up, she saw a man walking his dog. She wound down her window.

"Excuse me," she called, "Is Mrs. Marshall's house here?"

He shortened the dog's leash, so that the spaniel wouldn't jump up. "Marshall?"

"Alicia Marshall?"

"Don't know a Marshall," he said.

She drove on. Frustratingly, before long she found herself back at the A603 again. Gritting her teeth, she crossed the main road and headed south.

The rain began in earnest, and the light grew dim enough to need the lowbeams. Just as she switched them on, she saw a sign in the hedgerow, a little black-and-white sign at the edge of a path. But it was a full hundred yards before it registered with her, and she stepped on the brakes.

Franklin House.

It was worth a try.

It was a beautiful mellow stone building, with a steep tiled roof.

She guessed at eighteenth, maybe early nineteenth century. A huge magnolia tree so dominated the front of the house that it well nigh obscured the door.

Jo rang the bell. It was a long time before she heard footsteps, and the door was opened.

The woman who had answered was in her early forties and very tall. She wore a dark suit and had dark hair pulled back from her face. She was well groomed and composed, and, if not beautiful, certainly striking.

"Yes?"

"I'm looking for Mrs. Marshall," Jo said.

"And you are ... ?"

Jo held out her hand. "Jo Harper ... have I got the right house?"

The woman did not reach out her own hand. "What is it in connection with?"

"I've been speaking to Peter Bolton at the Academy," Jo said.

Alicia Marshall's face clouded. Her mouth turned down in an expression of distaste. "He sent you here?"

"No," Jo replied, "but I was speaking to him an hour ago. I'm from The Courier."

The mention of one of most prestigious British newspapers sometimes eased the way into a conversation like this one; if it was anything at all, it was at least a guarantee that any story would be intelligently handled. Jo expected to see a softening in Alicia Marshall's face.

Instead the other woman began to close the door.

"I was wondering if you could tell me about this trip," Jo said. "Why your husband went ... how you feel about such"-she hesitated for a second under the scathing gaze—"such adventures."

For the first time Alicia Marshall smiled. "Adventures?" she echoed.

"Have you heard from your husband?"

"No." The door caught a little on the flagstone floor of the hall- way. Alicia pushed it hard.

"You've heard nothing at all? Since he left?"

"No. Now please—"

Jo put her hand on the door frame. "Are you separated?" she asked.

Alicia Marshall gave Jo a lingering look. Then, "You people," she said at last, contempt in her voice.

"Would you speak to me about him?" Jo persisted.

"Please take your hand from the door."

"Are you worried?"

"No."

"I'm sorry? You're not worried at all?"

Mrs. Marshall stared pointedly at Jo's hand.

"Do you think he's alive?" Jo asked.

"I really have no idea."

Astonished at her tone, Jo dropped her hand.

Alicia Marshall shut the door in her face.

For some time Jo remained where she was, staring at the heavy iron knocker. Behind her the rain pattered down through the magnolia. Turning, she glanced up and saw the drops forming on the first half-opened petals on the naked branches.

"Not worried," she murmured.

Past the tree a field stretched away to a patch of woodland. Nothing stirred in the landscape at all, not a blade of grass, nothing in the blue blur of the distant city. It was a picture book, with Douglas Marshall's house delicately penciled in the foreground.

Jo wondered what had happened here, to make a wife want to seem careless of a husband's life or death. And suddenly she felt very sorry indeed for Douglas Marshall.

And very interested indeed in what had taken him away from home.

Chapter 2

John Marshall was dreaming.

He knew it, but he couldn't wake up.

He could see his father out on the ice, a long way out, a pinprick of black on a frozen ocean. The sky was a pale eggshell-blue above him. Doug was saying something to his only son—something very important—while he turned his head away, his words swallowed in the vast, flat space.

John looked down.

At his feet, outlined in the snow with curious clarity, were polar-bear prints. All four massive paws had left a closely spaced track: the claws had left long trails between each print. He stepped forward now and put his own foot inside one of the enormous depressions.

When he looked up, his father was gone.

Instead, not twenty yards from him, and rising, on her side, from the ice, was the Jeanette. Shock coursed through him. You're dreaming, he thought. You're at home—in bed—and asleep. It's not real at all. And yet it did look so real—De Long's pretty little ship, bought in England, wooden hull, steam powered. He moved toward it along the line of bear prints, seeing how they circled the lifeless wreck.

How many years was it since the Jeanette had sailed? A hundred and thirty? She was not even a wreck now, but somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, crushed and broken ... and yet here she was, not a man aboard her.

But him.

He suddenly felt the handrail as he came up the hatchway. He was climbing her with ease, the fluid ease of sleep. Just at the first rung, the rail was puckered and fluted, a lighter color showing in the oak. He knew that for almost two years the Jeanette had lived in a deadly, drifting dance. She had sailed free for only a matter of weeks, until the ice claimed her, and had held her, month after cold month, week after frozen week, as she trailed in a helpless triangular journey dictated by the polar drift.

He knew the details of the journey as if he had made it himself.

They had sailed from San Francisco in July 1879. They had passed through the Bering Strait at the end of August. They had been chasing a dream-the fantasy of a Polar Ocean. They had gone confidently north, planning to winter in the Chukchi Sea, believing that, where the Kuro Siwo current met the Gulf Stream, the ocean would part, the ice would change to warmer water, and that there would be a straight path directly to the Pole.

They chased the dream for three years, and became stuck in ice in 1881. On June 11 that year the Jeanette's hull suddenly began to murmur—very soft and low at first—as soft as a baby's cry. Then, the ship began to grunt, like a human being receiving a blow to the solar plexus, over and over again.

John murmured in his sleep now, as if he himself were transfixed.

At four in the afternoon the ice suddenly pressed against the port side, jamming the ship hard on starboard. The Jeanette immediately keeled over to sixteen degrees, and the starboard ceiling opened over an inch between the beams, and De Long ordered the starboard boats down, and hauled away from the ship onto the ice floe.

The ice, meanwhile, was coming in the port side, raising the port bow and forcing the starboard bow down. In the engine room they saw that the Jeanette was breaking in two down its center, and water was pouring into the starboard coal bunkers. On deck the work of off-loading the dogs and foodstuffs went on with a silent desperation, every man momentarily expecting the ice to move again and the ship to split in two. She was warped, twisted like wet paper, the bolts barely withstanding the pressure, the deck slipping to a twenty-degree list, and sliding unstoppably underwater.

Then, suddenly, at five, the ice moved like a locomotive.

The spar deck buckled, and the crew was ordered to take everything—clothing, bedding, books, and provisions—off. As they ran, another broadside collided with the hull, and the ship filled fast with water. It tilted to thirty degrees, and the last of the men got down, trying to pull the whole of the ship's freight clear.

The Jeanette hung in the half-light, suspended in its death throes. The crew could hear it, as if it were breathing—its dying voice echoing around them.

She went finally down at four in the morning.

They stood on the floe and watched while the smoke-pipe top flooded and while the yardarms, which had been so far over that they had rested on the ice, righted themselves. Jeanette went down almost upright, as if she had wanted to raise her head up as she died and look around her for the last few seconds.

John could almost feel it—almost feel the cold water flooding the timber. Feel the great gulf of ice collapsing over her. For a second, ice flowed through his own bloodstream and invaded his senses. With a tremendous effort he willed himself from her.

He walked away in his dream, following the bear's track, seeing how it mingled, occasionally, with his father's own footprints. He looked at the long gray-and-white miles of the floes, and he shut his eyes tight, so painfully tight that it caused flecks of color, a starburst of blues and oranges, a sprinkling of fireworks. When he opened them, he caught a faint halo around the sun. The cold penetrated his body, through every inch of skin and bone.

He looked around once, to stare at the ghost of the Jeanette, the ship that could not be there again in this world. But perhaps he was not in this world.

"Dad!" he called. "Dad..."

His voice went barreling away across the ice, silenced in seconds. Thin trails of blowing snow, more like vapor than flakes, were already wiping away the tracks of both the bear and his father. The idea rushed in on him that he was lost, truly lost. He had vanished into the same empty gulf that his father had traveled before him, and there was no way back. No path. No guide. No exit.

He had an urgent desire to lie down on the ice itself.

"John," a voice said.

He was aware of his naked arm.

"John," she repeated.

And slowly he opened his eyes.

Amy Wickham was looking at him.

She had her hand on his arm.

"You," he said.

"Me," she agreed. "You're bloody cold."

John Marshall winced, flexing the arm that had been out of the bed. "I was dreaming," he said. "Jesus, I feel like I'm freezing to death." He grinned at her. "Warm me up, why don't you."

She put her hand under the cover and rubbed the skin of his arm. He caught her hand and turned over and she lowered her face to his.

"You smell good," he murmured.

"I wish I could say the same for you," she told him.

He smiled lazily. He worked at a college bar at night, and last night had been a busy one. He had been bought half a dozen drinks, and now his head was aching. As he lay back in bed, Amy considered his rumpled good looks with a smile. He picked up on her desire. "Get in here with me," he said softly.

She started to laugh. "Not with you stinking like a distillery," she said.

"Get in."

She rocked back on her heels, out of his reach. More than pleased to tease him. "What were you dreaming of?" she asked.

He ran a hand over his face and turned away from the glare of the window, where she had drawn the curtains. The sun was pouring in. "De Long," he said. "And the Jeanette."

"Him again," she retorted. "You are truly obsessed, Marshall. Obsessed." She stood up.

"And Dad," he said.

She looked down at him, her expression mixed; somewhere between concern and trepidation. She didn't know what to say to him about his father; Doug was so rarely spoken of normally that it was all uncharted territory for her. Having only known him for a matter of weeks, she felt something like a trespasser. She walked away to the window, twisting a strand of hair around one finger. He had time to watch her as he stretched, trying to shake away the Jeannette's image. He put his hands behind his head and looked at her.

Amy Wickham was his own age, nineteen. She was five foot two, black haired, sturdy rather than slim. He had met her at the end of last term: seen her dancing, alone, on the tiny floor of a pub in town. She must have been wheeling about there for at least ten minutes before he stepped forward to catch her arm and pull her toward him. She had a strong little body, fists raised to the music, hair slicked at the back of her neck.

"When are you going to marry me?" he demanded now.

"Don't be daft," she told him, not even turning her head.

Which was just as well, because there was no way that he meant it.

She turned around and he saw, by contrast, that her expression was serious. The thought of continuing to tease her left him at once, to be replaced with a sudden gut dread.

"What is it?" he said. He sat up.

"It's not your father. There's no news."

Relief plucked the dread away.

"But your mother rang," Amy said.

John sighed, and dragged himself out of bed. He picked up his jeans off the floor, where they had been thrown last night. He didn't ask what Alicia had said.

"Didn't you hear the phone downstairs?"

"No."

"It was ringing when I came through the door. There's some reporter here from The Courier, trying to do a family piece on you," she said. She was watching him dress. "A woman. Your mother wants you to go home. Not to talk to her. She said it three times. Her name is Joanne Harper. Not to talk to her."

"I don't want to talk to anyone anyway," John said. He pulled a sweater over his head.

Amy had walked to the table with his computer on it, and was leafing through some of the printouts that he had made last night, after he had come in from work. "What's this?" she asked.

"Nothing you'd be interested in," he told her.

She was holding up a picture, turning it this way and that, trying to make out the detail.

"What is it?" she repeated. "Looks weird."

"Ice drift," he told her. He took the printed page from her and showed her the image. "Lancaster Sound," he explained, tracing the shorelines with a fingertip.

"Yeah?" she asked.

"You remember I told you about this group?" he said. "Eighteen people going after Franklin relics. The Canadian historians. This is from their Web site. This is yesterday's ice drift in the sound, and going south, down McClintock Channel."

"Right," she said.

He smiled at her. "Pretend you give a damn."

She raised her chin, returning the grin.

He slung his arm around her neck from behind, holding the page in front of her face. "Historian people looking for big story," he said, as she wriggled, her breath against his cheek. "Big historian people chasing big Victorian ship, big ship disappeared, men disappeared, whole fucking thing disappeared, never seen again. Lots cash and kudos for guy finding wreck."

"In all that ice? No way."

"In ice," he confirmed. "Thousand mile wide, yeah. Go sikkim."

She feigned a yawn. "So boring."

He released her. "No imagination," he said. "That's your trouble."

She shrugged. "I'm mathematics, remember?" she said. "You're archaeology." But a second printout on the desk, a photograph, caught her eye. She snatched at it. "Oh, sweet!" she said.

It was a picture of a polar bear, way out on the ice: blue-white ice, with turquoise shadows, a slanting and blinding sun, and the bear's head lowered in the characteristic pose of listening for seal.

John sighed resignedly. "That's not sweet," he told her. "That's the world's largest land carnivore. A killing machine." He pulled the picture away from her grasp. "See the crescent scar on her face?" he said. "This maritime history crew have got a photographer with them, a guy called Sibley. He takes shots like this ... grizzly, caribou. White bear. They call this one the Swimmer."

"Why?"

"Why d'you think?" John said, grinning. "Because she swims a hell of a long way."

"Excuse me for asking," Amy replied. She looked at the photo again. "But look at its feet. The size of them! Aaaaah. They're just cuddly feet."

This time John didn't even hear her. The enormous predator with the scar across her face, according to the Web site from where these pictures had been taken, was following the course of Franklin's ships almost mile for mile. It was eerie. He considered her, the long neck, the powerful shoulders, the intensity of the bear's look.

Amy had picked up her bag and slung it across her shoulder. She was standing with one hand on her hip, looking at him. "John," she reminded him, "your mother told you to go home. Right now. Today."

John at last tore his gaze from the paper in front of him, flung it onto the desk, and rubbed a hand through his hair. He looked pointedly at the bed, and back at her. He began to smile, a little-boy grin that lit up his face, all innocence and charm.

"But I don't want to go home," he told her.

Jo was driving back to the Academy when the mobile phone, on the seat next to her in the car, rang.

"Jo? It's Gina."

"Hi, Gina."

"Where are you?"

"Driving back into Cambridge," she said. There were traffic lights ahead of her, turning red. She eased her foot onto the brake.

"Drive back out of Cambridge," Gina said.

"What?" she thought that she had misheard her.

"Come back here."

"Why?"

"I've had Mrs. Marshall on the phone."

Jo joined the line of traffic. Students were crossing the road, books tucked under their arms. A girl in a tight black T-shirt cycled across the road. She saw the man in the car ahead turn to watch her.

"And?"

"She's furious."

"Why?" Jo objected. "I was politeness itself. You should have heard me. I didn't even get over the doorstep."

"Peter Bolton rang me too."

"But he was perfectly okay!"

"Not now."

"God," Jo breathed. "She came to the door, I didn't argue—"

"She's a trustee of the Academy, remember?" Gina said. "A benefactor, no less."

"And so we aren't allowed to ask her anything?"

"It's not worth it," Gina said. "We can't press it. Private grief."

"He hasn't died," Jo pointed out. "And anyone less like a grieving wife I have yet to witness."

The car behind blew its horn.

The lights had changed.

"Leave it," Gina told her.

There was an opportunity to take a right turn, toward the M6 southbound.

Jo hesitated just for a second before she put her foot on the accelerator, and made for the city center.

She got to the doors of the Academy at one-thirty.

Peter Bolton was just coming out.

When he saw her, his face fell a mile.

"Can I speak to you?" she asked him. He had come out of the doors and was walking down the steps, without stopping for her. She walked at his side, out of the gates, turning along the street.

"I have a class," he said.

"Mr. Bolton ..."

He did stop then, and looked at her.

"You lied to my assistant."

"I'm sorry."

"I did not give you Mrs. Marshall's address."

"No."

He looked exasperated. "Have you any idea how much trouble you've caused?"

"I'm sorry...."

He shook his head. "You can't walk roughshod over people."

"I didn't walk roughshod!" Jo objected. "She seemed to know nothing about what her husband is doing. Did you know that?"

He opened his mouth to say something, then evidently thought better of it. "Nice try," he said.

"Is it a state secret?"

"Yes."

"Is it, really?"

"Yes." He gave the ghost of a smile.

"Is Doug Marshall's visit to Greenland controversial?"

"No, of course not."

"Did he go unprepared?"

"No."

"Is there another issue at stake, other than finding these Inuit relics?"

"Not at all."

"It's just Mrs. Marshall's privacy."

"Yes."

She frowned. "I wasn't at all rude," she repeated.

"That's not the point," he told her. "That you were there at all, that is the point. Aren't your relationships private? Do want strangers asking pointless questions when you have a crisis?"

But Alicia Marshall had not been in a state of crisis. She had been composed, cool.

"Is Douglas Marshall concerned by his marriage?" Jo persisted. "Has he gone missing because of his marriage?"

This time Peter Bolton laughed out loud. "Because of ... ? No, no, no."

"He isn't concerned about the state of his marriage? It wouldn't have affected his judgment?" This was the idea that had been preying on her mind. One of those out-of-the-blue hunches, the result of adding two and two and getting five. Douglas Marshall in a life-threatening situation and just not wanting to come home. Seeing no point in coming home.

Bolton stared at his feet for a while, then sighed. "What is it," he said, "about his marriage that so fascinates you?" he asked. "His marriage is no different from anyone else's. His marriage in no way affects his professional judgment, and no one else in the country is the least interested in it, which is as it should be."

"But—"

"You really must excuse me," he said. "I'm now late."

She watched him cross the road and walk away.

For a while Jo followed him, not particularly intentionally, but simply because he was heading in the direction of the shopping district. After a while she lost him in the crowds. She dawdled along, irritated at his dismissal and at Alicia Marshall's having rung Gina. It was like being reprimanded by a headmistress. In fact, that was exactly who Alicia had reminded her of—Jo's own headmistress, a buttoned-up virgin, a Miss of uncertain age, who favored a beehive hairstyle long after the fashion had died and been buried. She had never once seen the woman smile.

Stopping outside a pub, Jo thought about Alicia. Thought of her smiling. Laughing, even. Thought of opening her arms to welcome her husband home, have a meal waiting, a warm bed.

No, it did not compute.

Alicia Marshall's face was colder than Greenland itself.

Jo shrugged. There was nothing here, other than the fact that Douglas and Alicia Marshall had a terrible relationship, which enabled him to go ice-hopping at regular intervals without a moment of regret. He probably wasn't the kind of man, anyway, to sit down in the snow and weep over his private life.

Yet she wondered. She still wondered.

Most of all, she wondered who Franklin had been, what the lure could be. Someone who, by Bolton's own admission, had been the passion of Marshall's life.

She looked briefly at the blackboard menu, propped on the wall outside the pub, and went in.

Excerpted from THE ICE CHILD © Copyright 2001 by Elizabeth McGregor. Reprinted with permission by Penguin Putnam. All rights reserved. 

• 
• 
•