[While religion is not a focal point in Goodsir's life, it is nonetheless interwoven simply by virtue of his culture. It is this distance that allows him to treat Tim's faith as something perfectly acceptable - were he another of the men he'd sailed with (one John Irving, perhaps) he would consider the man a heathen.

He spares Tim a soft smile.]

Yes. But he still died on my table. His daughter was in a panic - she wanted to take him outside, to the ice, so he could expire there. And after he was dead, at the instruction of Sir John, we dumped his body down a fire hole cut in the ice.

[Goodsir's voice remains soft - it almost always is - but there is a note of bitter anger lurking at the edges of his words.]

We still thought the creature to be a bear. Even I, who had seen it. So a blind was set up, to shoot the thing. And indeed, it came for us. Killed Byrant. Killed Sir John.

[He stops pacing abruptly, looking Tim in the eye.]

Can you guess where the creature dumped Sir John's body? Down the same bloody hole.

All we had to bury of him was his leg.

[He shakes his head.]

The man we killed, he was a holy man. He first, and then his daughter, the Lady Silence. To this day I do not understand it all, but I do know that when that old man died it left the creature without a master. And it hated us. Oh, how it hated us.

[Goodsir squeezes the bridge of his nose.]

One of the men realised the connection between it and Lady Silence. And that brings me back 'round to what I told you, how she came to be held aboard Erebus.

A nasty tale, is it not? And one for which I bear some responsibility.

[Indeed, more than he knows - if he'd not interfered with the body's possessions, would that have helped anything? Very possibly.]