Aurorarama - Jean-Christophe Valtat [93]
Brentford, with as much agility as his fur clothes permitted, jumped aboard and slipped inside the round cabin. It was small and Spartan but convenient, well padded all around, with the helm at the front, a central gas stove in the middle that he immediately lit, a half-circular desk on one side covered with charts and instruments, and a small but well insulated bunk on the other. In the rear, a hatch in the floor led down to the hold, and flashlight in hand, Brentford checked once again that everything he needed, or hoped not to need, was there as he had ordered: pellets of Cornwallis zinc to recharge the motor fuel cells; one month’s supply of “Vril-food,” dried soups, pemmican cakes, cod roe, whey powder, aleuronate bread, bars of his favourite chocolate, lime juice, and coffee; a small sled and harness; a primus stove; a pharmacy; a 16-bore Paradox rifle with boxes of shotgun shells and cartridges; a caribou-fur sleeping bag; spare warm clothes; oil-cloth tarpaulins; ice-axes and guncotton powder; a toolbox with everything necessary to build and live in a snow house or an improvised cave; a captive oil-silk balloon that he could send up to project light signals on—everything that could come in useful to prolong his life or his agony. Satisfied with what he found, or thinking that alea was pretty much jacta anyway, he went out to unmoor the ship, and, with a leap that was very much of faith, went back to the helm, started the motor, and headed northward-ho.
The routine of leaving the harbour and setting the course correctly was not engrossing enough to prevent Brentford from ruminating on his current situation, which wasn’t, he had to admit, exactly Polaris-bright.
His marriage, to start with, had lasted but a few hours. He had always suspected that it would be more an end than a beginning, for Sybil’s light was not one that you could easily put under a bushel, however benevolent. But he would never have thought its demise would be so quick, nor so loathsome. Brentford fancied himself as a bullet-biter, but it did not mean he had to swallow everything. If he resented Gabriel as much as he could, or could not, for his behaviour and his aggressive way of breaking the news, he knew instinctively that there was more truth in all of it than he would care to admit. He had been too tired and confused to take any decision the night of the wedding, but having slept badly over it, and woken up to find a dummy trying to stab him and Sybil gone sleepwalking back to that damn magician, he had decided all of a sudden that it would be better to call it a day, even if days, in New Venice, could hardly be called that. Did he really need to accuse Sybil or anyone else? Brentford, after all, had got the Kinngait ready the very day after his meeting with William Whale. The call of the North was one thing he could feel, the call of Helen another, which went deeper still. He could have resisted either separately, and he had tried, hadn’t he? But as soon as the hand that retained him had let go, there he was, darting like a wobbly arrow toward an invisible mark. It was as if he had been waiting for the catastrophe to happen as an excuse to flee.
He wondered if he had done anything wrong, if there might have been another way out of his predicament. Certainly, he had not respected his part of the deal with Arkansky Jr. and had never meant to. Had he really known who the Ghost Lady was at the time, he could have considered trading the secret against Sybil, but instead he had deliberately bluffed about it. When he realized that the ghost was Isabelle d’Ussonville’s, he’d also