“It appears you don’t know much about me or my family, Miss Reeve. Soon, I will be curious to hear what you do know, about anything, but I assure you that if I want something, my family will not stand in my way. And I want this.”
“But why?”
“Why do you? Why does anyone?” Caprice crossed her arms in front of her. Virginia could see her fingertips digging into the soft flesh of her upper arm, so fierce was her grip. Whatever her flaws, she meant what she said.
Caprice went on, “The North is there. Few have seen it. I want to be one of those few. To be extraordinary.”
“There are other ways to be extraordinary.”
“I want this one,” the rich girl said. She might have said the same words in the same voice about any number of things: a toy, a pony, a handsome young suitor. Virginia suspected she’d said it about all three at different times in her life. Odds were good she’d gotten what she wanted each and every time.
Virginia struggled to find her next words. If she could not be genial—and that ship had sailed—she could at least be clear. “Are you sure you’re prepared for the difficulty of this journey, Miss Collins? We’ll be miles from civilization. From ballrooms and porcelain teacups and silk dancing slippers. I expect it’ll be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.”
“You have no idea what I’ve done, actually,” interrupted Caprice. “Did you know I’m a mountaineer, probably the most ambitious one in the entire country? I’ve climbed Alps that would make your head spin. I’m used to the cold, and I’m used to hard work. I’ve woken before sunrise to summit some of the tallest mountains in Europe. Clambered over stone. Saw an avalanche rip down the side of Monte Rosa. On Mont Blanc, I collapsed from the insufficiency of the air, and after I regained consciousness, I got right back up and started climbing again. So no, Miss Reeve. I’m not so sure this will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Virginia was impressed with the litany but couldn’t let herself show it; that would feel like backing down. Instead, she pushed harder.
“But we’ll be on our own,” she said. “No porters or guides. Humping all our own gear. Once we’re on the ice, hunting our own food. You’ve climbed all those mountains, but have you ever climbed one no one else has climbed before?”
Caprice narrowed her green-gray eyes. “I don’t see why that’s relevant.”
“We will be in the complete unknown. No buildings, no succor, no one to catch us if we fall. It’s like nowhere else on earth. Frankly, Miss Collins, I don’t think you will like it.”
“As it happens, Miss Reeve, I don’t give a fairy’s whisper what you think.”
Her euphemism was laughable, but the sentiment behind it was unmistakable disdain.
Virginia answered her disdain in kind. “Shall I speak freely?”
“Oh, you shall,” said the rich girl, her chin up, her lovely eyes challenging in her unlovely face. “I insist upon it.”
“Well then. You, Miss Collins, are an arrogant, empty-headed fool.”
“Am I?” She seemed undaunted by the insult, the tone of her voice unchanged. “And on what basis do you make this estimation?”
“In these few minutes, you have made your personality very clear. All I have to do is observe your behavior. Listen to your words. I can tell already that you will not listen to me, that you will not follow a leader. On a journey like this, that habit is often fatal.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No, absolutely not,” said Virginia, who certainly had not meant it that way. “But you were not appointed the leader of this expedition, for whatever reason. So once we go north, if you try to substitute your judgment for mine, the outcome can only be…imperfect.”
“Speak plainly,” Caprice taunted. “You said you would.”
“If you insist on going to the Arctic and you behave in such a careless and disruptive manner…” Even as bold as she felt, she found it hard to complete the sentence, to say what she could not take back once spoken.
“Don’t shilly-shally! Be plain.” Caprice slapped a delicate side table with a flat palm, the sound of the slap high and sharp in the silence.
“All right then.” Virginia’s voice was loud and low, sounding to her almost like a stranger’s. “I wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn for your chances. Come to the Arctic, disobey me on the ice, and I’ll lay odds you’ll never come back.”
Caprice chuckled. Something merry flashed in her gray-green eyes, which had darkened to a mossy shade in the afternoon light. With a smile, she said, “Very well then, Miss Reeve. I can’t say you didn’t warn me, and I’ll take those odds. When shall we begin?”
Chapter Seven
Virginia
Charles Street Jail, Boston
October 1854
Has the weather turned, thinks Virginia, or is her blood just thinning? When they came back, worn thin by the deep freeze, she’d felt hot every hour of the day and night. She’d slept hot, breathed hot, lived hot. But now, even though her cheeks still burn against the cooling air, her hands and feet feel the chill.
Perhaps it is the jail itself. No doubt they don’t want to waste money on heat for the prisoners, although the jail has been built with all the modern principles, incorporating light and air. The cell itself is eight feet by ten feet and made entirely of granite. Stone holds cold, she remembers. Like dead flesh. Once life goes, heat goes, and a human body can easily freeze all the way through once there’s no heart to warm it. Everything becomes ice once the temperature drops low and long enough. Tears. Muscle. Blood.
Perhaps this feeling of cold is something to be happy about, Virginia tries to tell herself. Perhaps it means that her body is regaining a range of feelings instead of the numbness of those final months, that constant thrum of cold, exhaustion, regret. But why bother regaining feelings if she’ll just lose them again? If her neck will be in a noose before the year’s out, better not to feel.
Today’s guard is Keeler. Without a word, he slams down her meal on its tray, and she starts at the sound, mostly because she hadn’t even heard him approaching.
It isn’t like her to be so wrapped up in her own thoughts. But perhaps this, too, is progress. At the end of her time in the North, she was a constant closed fist of worry. She’d flinch at the faintest whisper, even the sound of a needle in hide. Anything louder frightened her clear out of her skin. She slept fitfully, if at all, and the lack of sleep wore her brittle. If her time in this lone, chilly cell has dulled her senses, so much the better. Again she thinks of the possibility of her impending death, its breath on her neck, inescapable.
Keeler speaks, his voice an irritated grumble. The grumble says, “Reeve, you’ve a visitor.”
She welcomes the distraction, turning to see who he’s brought her.
Unfortunately, it is only Clevenger, her round-faced counsel. Not high on the list of people she would want to see, not even on the list at all if she’s honest. She will keep this honesty to herself.
The guard pulls up a chair for her visitor to sit in, which is surprisingly kind of him, but its metal legs screech across the stone floor, sending twin shivers up the back of Virginia’s neck. Perhaps the noise was the point of the gesture.
Still, she smiles sweetly. “Thank you for your kindness.”
“Fifteen minutes,” he responds. Something in his voice makes Virginia think he doesn’t like her counsel any more than she does.
The counsel in question drops himself into the seat, rustling his papers as always, even here in her cell instead of the courtroom, shuffling them into a case that hangs mostly empty. There are not so very many papers, it seems. Then why must they always make so much noise?
“Well, that went swimmingly,” she says.
He sighs a grand, theatrical sigh, as overwrought in its way as the prosecutor’s sympathy for poor dead Caprice had been. That butler hadn’t even liked
Caprice, hadn’t really known her the way Virginia had. Living under the same roof as someone did not guarantee you understood who they were, the limits of what they might do when the situation demanded it. Virginia herself had known people for years and then one day discovered she’d never really known them. And the prosecutor, that gruesome bullfrog, had never even met Caprice. How dare he pretend to feel even a shred of the sorrow that Virginia feels. She feels other things too, of course, but the sorrow is still there. The sorrow will always be there.
Clevenger says, “You could have told me what to expect.”
“Could I? And what good would that have done?”
“I might have cross-examined him.”
“You might have. But nothing I remember would have been useful. You’re the one to come up with the questions. Hammer at the witness’s weaknesses.” Virginia wants to leap up and jam her arms through the bars and grip this young pup’s lapels in her fists. He might even be close enough. She does not. She doesn’t even move an inch, her voice level, her fingers resting lightly in her lap.
“If he had any,” counters her counsel.
“Everyone does.”
“Well, if you don’t know what they are and neither do I, we’ll have an uphill climb,” he says.
“My climb might be the steeper,” she says sharply, “since I’m the one who could hang.”
Her counsel says, “I only ask that you be more forthcoming.”
“I didn’t know I wasn’t.”
“Miss Reeve. Please. What the witnesses say can’t come as a surprise to me. So tell me the truth. You didn’t get along with Caprice Collins?”
“Not when we met, no, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“This isn’t relevant,” she says, her irritation showing. There’s nothing he can do with this information now that Bishop has already testified, so by pushing on this, Clevenger is just wasting her time. She may not have much of it to waste.
“I don’t get along with lots of people,” says Virginia. “I rarely kill them.”
He throws up his hands. “Are you attempting humor? Do you think this is funny?”
“I am aware it is deadly serious,” says Virginia.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
Urgently, she says, “Fight for me.”
“And how can I? When you won’t even tell me the truth?”
She looks away from him, lays her fingertips on the nearest metal bar. It is cool to the touch. “I have always told you the truth.”
“You have told me nothing. You have said only that the charges are bunkum. You did not kidnap Miss Collins, and you did not kill her. You say.”
“Because I didn’t. The kidnapping charge is merely a ruse to place the case in the Commonwealth’s jurisdiction…”
“Yes, yes.” He waves his hand. “I’m the lawyer here.”
She has to bite back the response that springs unbidden to her lips. Then act like one.
He goes on, “But you tell me nothing about the circumstances of Miss Collins’s death. If in fact she is dead.”
“She is dead,” says Virginia grimly.
“So was it an accident? Were you there? Did you see it?”
“I saw it,” she said, which wasn’t strictly true. She did not stand there and watch Caprice die. She knows there’s no chance she’s alive either. Death was a certainty. But if she’d stayed long enough to see Caprice draw her last breath, see the last spark of life drain from her eyes, Virginia might have died too, and others with her. “Put me on the stand and I’ll say so.”
His eyes squint tight, and she is horrified for a moment that he might burst into tears, like a child whose favorite toy has fallen out of reach. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Why ever not?”
“You’re not reliable. Not credible. Not to them. The prosecutor would tear you apart.”
“Let him try,” she said, lifting her chin.
He balls one hand into a fist, smashes it into his other palm, wraps the fist in his fingers. If another man made these same motions, she might feel threatened, but Clevenger’s actions feel more like playacting. His voice is louder, though, as he tells her, “There has to be a better way.”
She says, not unkindly, “I very much hope you find one.”
“So you didn’t cause her death, but you saw her die. Was anyone else there? Anyone else who can confirm your story?”
Virginia says, “No,” but of course, she is thinking of Siobhan. Siobhan could, were circumstances different. But circumstances are what they are. No use crying over spilt milk, as the saying goes.
“You are not a foolish girl, Miss Reeve. I know you understand. Your word is all we have,” he says, “and your word is no good. You cannot testify.”
Some part of her wants to fight. On another day, she tells herself, she’ll muster the strength to. But she is exhausted by all this. Not in a physical way—she could endure, has endured, so much more than this—but in her soul. She can just let it happen. Let her fate sweep her away like the current, the eddying motion of water in Hudson Bay that forces ships into the shrinking space between the ice and the rocks and then crushes them between. Better women than she have died on her watch. Perhaps this fate is the one she deserves. If she sits in the witness box, tells her story, she’ll just be making excuses. If they don’t hang her for Caprice’s death, they could hang her for the others. No one’s fate was all her fault, but if different decisions had been made…but they hadn’t been. She knows this. She’ll suffer.
And her lawyer, as miserable and incompetent and foolish as he is, is also right. About the testimony anyway. If he knew the whole truth—is there any chance he knows it?—he’d be even less likely to let her speak for herself. Even the truth he knows is too damning. She’s an upstart girl from nowhere, an adventuress willing to lead other women into death. What a terrible person she must be. And such a person as that, she can imagine all these upstanding Bostonians thinking, must be capable of anything.
They have no idea what she’s truly capable of.
Chapter Eight
Ebba
Revere House, Boston
April 1853
Upon meeting Virginia Reeve, Ebba’s first thought sang out like an unwelcome star soprano inside her head: Just who does this girl think she is?
When she and Althea were first invited to America to help Lady Franklin raise funds, she’d been against it. Althea had persuaded her. She’d spun a pretty picture of the two of them sipping tea and making polite but firm requests, convincing Americans to invest heavily in the next expedition going north, carving out possibilities where the Royal Navy fell short. They’d be such ideal wives, Althea said. No person with a heart could resist their appeal.
In Althea’s case, of course, the appearance was reality, Ebba knew. She truly did miss James like a limb. They’d been such a lovely couple, as well matched as a pair of long-legged carriage horses, both so fair-haired and regal. When Althea plucked at the lace on her cuffs and told the Americans how she would give anything in the world to have her husband back on British soil again, her eyes brimmed with real tears. Ebba’s perspective was more complicated, but the principle still applied; why not very publicly support one’s husband, vanished or no? Even if—especially if—he would never return?
If the men were dead, there would be pensions. Tens of thousands of pounds would be settled on Lady Franklin, who stood to gain the most, though she needed it the least. Officers’ wives like Althea and Ebba would still see thousands of pounds, funds they needed to live. Althea, of course, would far rather have her husband than the money his death would win her. Ebba had her own preference.
Indeed, there had been teas, as promised. So many teas. With Lady Franklin’s puppetry behind the scenes, the two of them met potential backers in the privacy of their own home
s, at clubs, in parlors, even on yachts at anchor. They went to New York, Philadelphia, Washington. They drank toasts to the missing men, shed tears when tears were called for, spoke touchingly of their unsettled, uncertain state. America might not be better than England, she had told herself, but surely it could not be worse. And dear Althea would be with her—without the commitments that usually kept her away, sealed her into her own precious, gilded bubble. So bring on the discomfort, the distance, the Americans. She was persuaded.
But the Americans were harder to convince than Althea had thought. Even in lush surroundings, Ebba had tired quickly of making the same plea to upstart ruffians who had no more sympathy or tenderness than a blank brick wall.
Then they were invited to go north themselves, and Ebba was the one who had to do the persuading. An adventure, she said. We can be bold, she said. When will we ever have a chance like this again? she asked, then answered it herself, Never. Althea protested, reluctant, but at length, she had agreed. Having come so far, why not go just a bit farther? Now they were ready to meet the leader of the expedition, whose secretary had written them to set a meeting in their hotel.
When the girl walked in, Ebba assumed she was the secretary.
Virginia Reeve was of average height with a mass of black curls on her head, imprecisely gathered into a topknot that added several inches to her frame. Her pale-blue dress was neat and clean with a high collar and no decoration, proper and plain. Her face might have been pretty without the broad nose; her eyes were a warm, intelligent brown, drawn down a bit at the corners. She was young, thought Ebba, even for a secretary. When she introduced herself as the leader of the expedition, Ebba was absolutely certain she’d misheard.
“You mean you represent the leader of the expedition, of course?”
“No,” Virginia said, making a sound that might have been a laugh.
Althea jumped in, as was her way. She was the diplomatic one, the born mother, though she had not yet been blessed with children. “You’ll have to forgive my friend. Her background is very traditional. As is mine, I must confess. Indeed, before this moment, neither of us has ever heard of an expedition of this kind led by a woman. Are you very experienced?”
The Arctic Fury Page 5
