Murphy snorted and said, “I can tell you now, it’d be a hard sell with the grunts.”
“But transfusions, from our present blood supply, could address the problem on a temporary basis,” Darryl suggested. He looked around at all of their faces. “Until we can figure out a cure—assuming one exists—I don’t see how we can avoid doing something like that.”
“I think she may have a head start,” Charlotte said, and Michael guessed that this was what she’d been holding back. “A plasma bag has gone missing. I thought I’d misplaced it, even though I couldn’t imagine how. But now, well, I guess I know what happened to it.”
Michael could hardly credit what he knew, in his heart, was probably true.
“That’s just great,” Murphy said in exasperation. “Just great.”
Michael knew what was going through the chief’s head—the endless reports he would have to write and the internal investigations he would have to conduct in order to account for all of this to his overlords. And how could he, really? They’d be carting him off to Bellevue in no time.
“And let’s not forget that there’s still another one out there,” Murphy added. “And he’s still on the loose.”
The young lieutenant, Michael thought. Sinclair Copley.
“It’s awfully dangerous out there,” Lawson commented. “Unless he made it back to the whaling station, he’s probably at the bottom of some crevasse by now.”
“From your lips to God’s ear,” Murphy said.
But Michael wasn’t prepared to give up so easily, nor did he feel it would be right. Given all that this man had already survived, who was to say he had succumbed to the storm, or the polar extremes? Glancing out the window at the clear skies and the low, drifting snow, he said, “We’ve got a break in the weather. We could use it to mount a search. If we know anything at all about the guy, it’s that he’s got a powerful will to live.”
“And there’s something else, too,” Charlotte put in. “We’ve got the most important thing in the world to him. Someone he’ll want to get back—no matter what.”
The cold hand that had brushed across Michael’s chest earlier suddenly brushed him again, and to his own surprise clamped down like a vise.
“Charlotte’s right,” Darryl said. “When it comes to bait, we have the best.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
December 21, 11 p.m.
ELEANOR FELT LIKE A PRISONER who had been returned to her cell. Dr. Barnes had left her yet another of the blue pills and a glass of water, but she did not want to take it. She did not want to sleep anymore, and she did not want to hide in the infirmary any longer…especially because the temptation in the white metal box was too great. (What, she pressed herself, had they called it? A fridge? Was that it?)
Regardless, she’d seen the bags inside—clear like a haggis casing, but brimming with blood. And she could feel the need coming upon her, again. The very walls around her seemed drained of color, and she often had to close her eyes, then reopen them, simply to restore everything to its natural state. Her breath, too, was growing short and shallow. Dr. Barnes, she believed, had noted the change in her respiration, but Eleanor could hardly explain to her the cause—much less the remedy.
And here she was, alone again, or, as Sinclair had often recited from his book of poetry, “All, all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea!” Where is Sinclair right now? In the church, sheltered from the storm? Or lost in the snow and ice, searching for me?
She paced the room like a tiger she had seen in the London Zoo, back and forth, over and over again; even then she had felt for the poor beast’s isolation and confinement. She struggled to keep her gaze from the “fridge” and her thoughts from straying into the same dismal channels. But how could they not? Her past life had been taken from her completely—her family, her friends, her very country—and her present life was reduced to a sick bay at the Southern Pole…and a ravening need that it appalled her even to think of.
On that fateful night in the Barrack Hospital, after Sinclair had come to her, she had indeed rallied. By the next day her fever was nearly gone. Moira had exulted over her, and Miss Nightingale herself had brought her cereal and tea and drawn a chair up to her bedside.
“We have missed you on the wards,” Miss Nightingale said. “The soldiers will be glad to see you back.”
“I will be glad to see them, too.”
“One soldier, I should think, in particular,” Miss Nightingale said, and Eleanor had blushed.
“Isn’t he the man who once barged into our hospital in London,” Miss Nightingale went on, while holding up a spoonful of cereal, “and required stitching up?”
“Yes, mum, he is.”
Miss Nightingale nodded, and when Eleanor had eaten the cereal, said, “And an attachment has formed between you since?”