Virginia did not let herself cry, not then. She’d seen enough bodies on the trail to control her response to them. Death saddened her, of course it did, but it no longer shocked her. At that moment, she needed to manage the situation, and that meant moving the women away from the sailors to grieve in private. Up here on deck, tears would provide occasion for the sailors to shake their heads and say Yes, see, these women don’t understand. They’re weak. All emotion. Fools to the last.
So perhaps she shooed the women away too quickly. One by one, with a private whisper in each woman’s ear, she ordered them downstairs to the women’s quarters. She did not have to urge any of them twice. The pool of blood under Christabel’s head was still spreading outward, and most had little enough experience with death that they still regarded it as somehow contagious.
She herself didn’t even want to stay. But in mere minutes, there were only three of them left, the three who’d stared death in the face enough times to know him well: Virginia, Dove, and Siobhan. While Dove and Siobhan had yet to exchange a civil word, Virginia was glad to see that in a situation like this, they could set their differences aside. They discussed in hushed tones what to do with the body.
A low voice several inches above Virginia’s head said, “Miss Reeve, I’m so sorry.”
Those were the first words Captain Malcolm ever spoke to her. Turning to face him, she caught sight of the ship’s boys who had climbed down from the rigging, their faces pale and horrified, wet with tears.
“We’ll take good care of her,” he said. “You may go.”
Dove and Siobhan melted away, heading toward the women’s cabin. The men who had dared to approach parted for them without ever looking in their direction.
Angling her head back to look the captain in the face, Virginia said stiffly, “You have my thanks. But I will not go until you tell me what arrangements you mean to make.”
She knew her anger was misplaced. What had happened was not his fault, not really, not more than anyone else’s. It could only be laid at the feet of Christabel herself and the cold, dispassionate wind. But she could not read him, and that fueled her worry. Was he treating her with kindness or pity? Did he think her incapable?
His deep brown eyes, which she now saw turned down at the corners, gave nothing away. “I suppose, Miss Reeve, you are unfamiliar with death at sea.”
“At sea, yes.”
“Our options are limited. Once we get farther north, it’ll be cold enough in the hull to keep bodies on ice.”
“Bodies!” Virginia exclaimed, unable to help herself. “Today, let us only speak in the singular.”
Virginia cursed herself for that exclamation, so womanly, but the body of a person who had trusted her to stay safe now lay dead on the boards at her feet, and keeping the tears back was getting harder and harder. The anger helped.
“As you wish,” said Captain Malcolm. “The body will be wrapped and stored until I determine the proper time for a burial at sea.”
“I wish to help make the determination.”
“It is my ship,” he said.
She answered, “It is my expedition.”
His eyes hardened then, finally losing their sympathetic softness, and she felt a perverse pride in angering him. There. Now they were on a footing.
Then she remembered the ship’s boys still watching, the deck they stood on, the blood at their feet.
She told him, in a softer voice, “I would like to say a prayer.”
“At the service? Or now?”
She’d meant the service, but then she heard herself saying, “Both.”
He nodded and surprised her by reaching out to take her hands in his. His hands were cold, but the firm confidence of the motion was still reassuring. He bent his head. She bent hers and closed her eyes.
“Our Father,” he began, and she mouthed the familiar words along with him, her voice a hoarse whisper, only cracking when she reached Thy will be done, then settling back into the oft-repeated rhythm again.
Once the prayer was done, she spoke quickly, feeling the tears almost upon her. “Excuse me. I have kept the rest of my party waiting too long. I trust you and your crew to make the arrangements.”
He inclined his head in agreement.
Before the pity could return to his eyes, she turned away and hastened toward the women’s cabin. The women would need comfort. Only she was not sure she had any to provide.
By the time she got to the cabin, all the women knew what had happened from the ones who were on deck, and she regretted having taken any time at all for her own grief. All she could offer them were platitudes, terrible accident, no one to blame. Afterward, they clustered among themselves, speaking no louder than a whisper, and boxed her out.
That night as they bedded down, her heart nearly broke when she saw Elizabeth and Stella, who she knew did not care for each other, lying side by side on their shared bunk. They’d both chosen to share their discomfort rather than move to Christabel’s now-empty bunk below.
Once the lights were extinguished, Virginia lay sleepless, overwhelmed by all the ways she’d already fallen short. Not only had she let Christabel die, no one had turned to her for guidance or succor, not that she had any to give. She could not reach out to them; they did not reach out to her. A leader who could only take her flock through the good times was no leader at all.
A hand reached up and squeezed her wrist. She looked down to see who the hand belonged to. Improbably, it was Caprice’s.
“We’ll be all right,” said Caprice, her voice disembodied in the darkness.
Virginia had no good answer. She could not agree, because Caprice wasn’t necessarily right, but she’d be a monster to disagree aloud. The other woman’s confidence was born of naivete. Of course all her adventures had turned out all right. She’d traveled in a carefully crafted bubble of money and power. Inside a bubble like that, there were no true adventures.
In the end, she only answered, “Sleep well, Caprice.”
In the night’s long darkness, she could not help but let the worst of her thoughts, the most cynical one, in. Losing Christabel was far from the worst that could happen on this journey. When they returned, there would be questions about any other woman. Christabel had neither family nor employer waiting for her return.
Virginia lamented that Christabel had died, but perhaps some good could yet come of it. Perhaps now that they had seen how easily danger could come for them, the women of the expedition would turn to one another, form stronger bonds of trust. She had seen death give life before. It was a paradox, to be sure, but contradictions did not make the truth less true.
She knew by then but let herself forget in the darkness that Christabel might not be the only one they would lose.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Virginia
Aboard the Doris
June 1853
Christabel’s burial at sea was a somber but brief occasion. Both the men and the women attended. The captain said a few words—Known but little, gone too soon, and the like, along with two well-worn Bible verses he recited without opening the book—and the group muttered Amen. Then two sailors chosen for the duty tipped the wrapped form over the side, and after a splash that was both louder and softer than Virginia expected, it was done.
None of the women lingered. Virginia alone remained on the deck with the sailors, and in just minutes, the shift in their mood was a palpable thing. Quick and frightening, like a rainstorm filling the banks of a dry creek. Shedding their somber manner like a cloak, the men were already back to business as usual; she heard one deep guffaw, then another. Perhaps their laughter was just amusement or an attempt to lift the sad mood, but Virginia heard menace.
To cover her fear, she turned to Captain Malcolm and forced out the right words. “Thank you.”
“Not much to thank me for,” he said, “but I’m s
ure you’re welcome.”
“You read well. The Bible, I mean.”
“I preach to the men on Sundays if you’d like to attend.” His hands on the railing were large, well-formed. His cap covered most of his close-cut hair, and as it had been on the first day, his beard was still tightly trimmed. Its defined line ran black and sharp against his skin, which was very close in color to the planks of the ship’s wooden deck. The connection seemed fitting. He was an extension of the ship in a way, or the ship was an extension of him.
She asked, “Is that usual? For captains?”
“It is. Though I am more than usually qualified. I was studying for the ministry before I went to sea.”
“Oh! Why did you leave?”
“Why does a man do anything?” he said with a tight smile, directed out over the water, not toward her. There was no mirth in it. “For a woman.”
Carefully, she ventured, “You have a wife at home?”
“No wife. And this ship is my home.” His eyes returned to the inland sea. He seemed uncomfortable in her presence, his tone distant. “We were whalers, not so long ago, you may know. But this year, for the first time, we are a transport ship. Running south to north in the bay, north to south, west to east and back again, carrying supplies between the factories. Until the ice fences us in.”
“When do you expect that to be?”
“All too soon. I hope it will be long after we deliver on our contract and put you off at Repulse Bay. You should hope so too. But in any given year, no one knows exactly when the freeze-up’s coming until it’s already here. Please excuse me. I have duties to attend to.”
She watched him go and immediately caught the eye of the ship’s mate, Keane, who was watching her with undisguised suspicion. He was a lean man, craggy and knobbed, as if carved from pale, weathered wood. His gaze unsettled her. Ever since the first day, when he stood at the top of the gangplank to block Ann and her dogs, he had made no secret of his antipathy. She could guess its cause well enough: old salts who believed women had no place aboard ship were far more common than men like Captain Malcolm, who would transport them when it suited. She’d heard Keane singing late one night on the watch and paused to listen. His voice was lovely, his notes pure, and she might have let his talent soften her heart toward him if she hadn’t listened long enough to make out the words of his song as they shifted from a sprightly, charming chorus into an entirely different kind of verse.
She had a dark and a rovin’ eye,
And her hair hung down in ring-a-lets.
She was a nice girl, a proper girl,
But one of the rakish kind.
So up the stairs and into bed I took that maiden fair.
I fired off my cannon into her thatch of hair.
I fired off a broadside until my shot was spent,
Then rammed that fire ship’s waterline until my ram was bent.
Then in the morning she was gone; my money was gone too.
My clothes she’d hocked; my watch she stole; my sea bag was gone too.
But she’d left behind a souvenir, I’d have you all to know,
And in nine days, to my surprise, there was fire down below.
She had a dark and a rovin’ eye…
Today, he did not sing, only stared. Holding her gaze, Keane spat onto the deck, a great hocking glob of something, and it took all she had not to wince. But she held his gaze in return, held and held it until he was the one forced to look away. When she turned, she could feel her heart pounding away under her heavy garments, hammering like a woodpecker on a rotten oak.
Keane was on her mind when she went down to the women’s cabin and called the women to gather. She even sent Doro to fetch Ann from the cabin where the dogs were kept so they would all be present.
Once the women were gathered, eleven faces—dark and pale, wide-eyed and jaded, hopeful and suspicious—turned toward her expectantly. Their attention jangled her nerves, but no matter. She pressed on.
“We are very different women,” Virginia told them. “We have come from different places for different reasons. But we are all women on a ship of men. And I would like to see us stick together.”
“What do you mean by that, ‘stick together,’ miss?” asked Stella, concern on her heart-shaped face. She was always the picture of innocence. If she was truly as innocent as she sounded, Virginia worried for her; if she was not innocent but made such a flawless show of seeming so, Virginia worried for the rest of them.
Virginia said, “My meaning is that we should be ready to render assistance to one another.”
“What sort of assistance do you think we will need?” Caprice asked, her voice openly sharp.
“In my days on the westward trail to California,” Virginia began, choosing her words carefully, “there were many dangers. We were in danger from hostile natives, from wild animals, from the risk of thirst or starvation, from extreme or sudden weather, from the very land we crossed. Many of those factors will not be present on this journey—I expect very few wild animals on the Doris—but many will.”
She examined their faces one by one, not lingering long on any but taking a quick read of their attitudes. Most seemed receptive. Caprice was obviously skeptical. Dove’s eyes were narrowed, but that was not unexpected. The journalist, Margaret, was taking notes, and she, too, looked less than convinced.
Virginia addressed her. “Miss Margaret, can I ask you not to write this down?”
“I’m here to document the journey.”
“This is not about the journey. This is about our safety as women. So we survive long enough to have a legacy others will want to read about.”
Margaret eyed her with displeasure, but she put the pen down.
Virginia told them, “Some of the women traveling westward weren’t just threatened by outer dangers. The real threat to them came from other members of the party.”
Again she scanned the room. Irene looked away, her eyes darting downward. Althea looked at Virginia with something between surprise and confusion. Ebba looked only at Althea.
Virginia saw that many did not understand, so she made herself clear. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but some were endangered by their very own husbands.”
“Endangered how?” asked Althea, while at the same moment, Dove grumbled, “Sounds about right.”
“And it wasn’t always safe for them to ask for help in so many words. So when any new woman joined the party, I took her aside and taught her two hand signals. I would like us all to know them so we can use them if we must.”
Virginia faced Doro, who sat nearest to her, and said, “For example, if I saw you on the deck talking to a sailor, and you wanted to signal to me that his attentions were unwelcome…”
“Goodness!” exclaimed Doro. “Attentions?”
“These men are not accustomed to female company. There is every chance they will try to take advantage of the situation in ways you may find…unpleasant.”
“Do you have any evidence of that?” interrupted Caprice. “It seems to me you are introducing paranoia into the situation. You are the one making us less safe.”
Virginia shook her head, doing her best to keep her voice utterly calm. “No. That is not true. This is preparation. This is necessary.”
“Well, I’ve traveled all over the world with hired men,” said Caprice, directing her remarks to the entire group. “And not one of them ever showed me anything other than the greatest respect.”
“They were hired men, you say?” said Virginia, not too loud.
“Yes.”
“And who hired them? Your father?”
“Well, yes.”
“And you’re sure it was you they respected?” said Virginia, making it clear with her tone that she did not expect, or welcome, an answer. A cloud crossed Caprice’s brow, but she kept silent.
Virginia let the silence hang in the air for one more moment so the women could come to their own understanding, then continued. “I will teach you two signals. If our shipboard companions are as dignified and respectful as Miss Collins believes they will be, you will only ever need to use one.”
She was careful not to look at Caprice, quickly turning back to Doro. “So if a sailor addresses you, and I am close enough to see you but not to hear what’s being said, I might wonder if you want me to intervene. If you don’t want help, you simply do this.”
She raised her hand, elbow down and fingertips up, facing her palm toward Doro. Doro moved to imitate her: palm facing outward, warning her off, but in a subtle way.
“I see. It could be mistaken for a greeting,” said Doro.
“That’s the idea. We will know what it means. They do not need to.”
“So this”—Margaret mirrored the gesture—“means do not intervene?”
“Yes. It means essentially don’t. Or no.”
Virginia looked at them expectantly, and one after another after another, they raised their hands and put their palms up, almost as if expecting a childhood game of pat-a-cake. Every palm went up but Caprice’s.
“Very good,” she said, pretending they’d all complied. “So that’s the first.”
Margaret prodded, “And the second?”
Virginia turned to Doro again, reached out for her hand. “May I?”
“Of course.”
“If you do want me to intervene—if the man’s attentions are unwelcome for any reason at all—you only need signal this way instead.” She flipped the other woman’s hand, keeping the palm flat but moving it to a resting position parallel to the ground. The palm was outstretched this time, a gesture of supplication. Open. Asking.
Doro said, “So this means help.”
“This means help.”
The women mirrored the gesture, twisting their wrists and extending their hands flat, all those waiting palms extended in anticipation in front of them. This time, every palm went out, all twelve, including Caprice’s.
“That’s it?” asked Caprice.
The Arctic Fury Page 15
