The captain remembered that even when he was a small boy—before he went to sea at age thirteen—he had carried his deep mood of melancholy within him like a cold secret. This melancholic nature had manifested itself in his pleasure at standing outside the village on a winter night watching the lamplights fade, by finding small places in which to hide—claustrophobia had never been a problem for Francis Crozier—and by being so afraid of the dark, seeing it as the avatar of the death that had claimed his mother and grandmother in such a stealthy way, that he had perversely sought it out, hiding in
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