“It’s not your job,” she said. “It is mine.”
Michael fell silent, to let her concentrate, thinking instead of the graveyard that lay below him, the wreckage of hundreds of ships—schooners and sloops, brigs and frigates, trawlers and whalers—mauled by the ice, broken by the waves, ripped to pieces by the searing wind. And he thought of the thousands of men who had fallen into the raging, empty, endless maw, men whose last sight might have been the masts of their ships snapping like twigs, or a slab of glistening ice tumbling over their heads and plunging them down—what had she said, one thousand five hundred meters?—toward the bottom of a sea so deep no light had ever penetrated it.
What exactly lay right below them, many fathoms under their hull, frozen to the floor of the ocean for all eternity?
The ship careened suddenly from one side to the other. The Ops spun the wheel back to the right and said, “Hard starboard, sir!” to the captain down below. Michael saw the wave, too, gathering force and coming at them like a wall, spreading its wings to either side, lifting chunks of ice the size of houses, and blotting out even the deadening light of the constant sun.
“Hold on tight!” Kathleen barked, and Michael braced himself against the walls, his legs straight, his feet spread. He had never seen anything so large move with such velocity and force, carrying everything—the whole world, it seemed—before it.
The Ops tried to turn the boat so that it would miss the brunt of the wave, but it was too late and the wave, no less than a hundred feet high, was too huge. As it rushed toward the cutter—a streaming wall of angry gray water, rising and widening every second—something else—something white, no, black—something out of control, caught in the storm’s unbreakable grip—rocketed toward them even faster. A second later, the window shattered with the sound of a shotgun blast, and shards of ice sprayed the compartment like flying needles. Kathleen screamed and fell away from the wheel, knocking into Michael, who tried to grab her as she slid to the floor. Freezing water pelted his face, and he shook it off, to see—alive and cawing—the bloodied head of a snow-white albatross lying atop the wheel. Its body was wedged against the broken window, its twisted wings splayed uselessly to either side. The wave was still surging over the boat, and the bird clacked its ruined bill, flattened like a boxer’s nose. Michael was staring straight into its black unblinking eyes as Kathleen huddled on the floor, and the blue light of the flooded console screens sputtered and went out.
The wave passed, the ship groaned, rolled one way, then back in the other, and finally righted itself.
The albatross opened its mangled beak one more time, emitting nothing more than a hollow rattle, and then, as Michael tried to catch a breath, and Kathleen moaned at his feet in pain, the light in the bird’s eyes went out like a snuffed candle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
June 20, 1854, 11 p.m.
THE SALON D’APHRODITE, known to its regular clientele simply as Mme. Eugenie’s, was located on a busy stretch of the Strand, but back from the street. A brace of lanterns always hung from the gates of the porte-cochere, and so long as they were lighted, the salon was open for business.
Sinclair had never known them to be out.
He was the first to step down from the hansom cab, followed by Le Maitre and then Rutherford, who had to pay the cabbie. Thank God he was of a rich, generous—and just now drunken—nature, as he would also have to pay for their privileges of the house. Mme. Eugenie could occasionally be persuaded to extend credit, but it was at a usurious rate of interest, and no one wished to be hauled into court for an outstanding debt to the Salon d’Aphrodite.
As the three of them mounted the stairs, John-O, a towering Jamaican with a pair of gold teeth in the front of his mouth, opened the door and stepped to one side. He knew who they were, but he was paid in part never to say so.
“Good evening,” Rutherford said, rather thickly, “is Madame at home?” As if he were paying a call on a society acquaintance.
John-O nodded toward the parlor, partially concealed by a red velvet drape; Sinclair could hear the sound of the pianoforte, and a young woman singing “The Beautiful Banks of the Tweed.” With the others in tow, he moved toward the light and gaiety. Frenchie lifted the drape to one side, and Mme. Eugenie looked up from a divan, where she was seated between two of her girls.