When they got up on deck, where the weather spat and blustered under a dim gray sky, she immediately regretted her suggestion. It was more open, but there were other men milling about, and a few began to draw closer, curious. They were out of the frying pan and into the fire.
“You were saying,” Keane prompted, his eyes glinting, “about whether there’s been things thieved from your party as well as our crew.”
Virginia bristled inwardly, looked at the women who’d followed her up on deck—most of them—and forced herself to speak in a calm tone. “It seems there may have been a small item or two. It’s a very serious accusation, thievery, especially when items might just be misplaced. Small things like tobacco pouches or…”
“Earbobs,” volunteered Althea.
“Well,” the captain laughed, “haven’t seen any of my men in new earbobs of late, have you?”
It seemed he was trying to lighten the mood but unsuccessfully. Murmurings and stirring passed through the clutches of sailors, and she did not know what they might do.
A voice from a knot of men close by called, “Sounds like one of the women’s been thieving!”
“Now, now,” said the captain, putting his hands out. “That’s not what I meant at all. I merely thought it unlikely that a sailor would steal earbobs, though of course I know many of you have sweethearts at home or could sell…” He trailed off. They were all in it now.
“A thief is a thief,” broke in Caprice, “whether he steals for love or money.”
“He?” fired back a sailor. “I think it’s a she!”
“Oh, do you now? Who’s got evidence either way?” Caprice said loudly, tossing her head.
Virginia flinched. Of course another voice would not make the situation better. Particularly not this voice.
The sailor murmured something under his breath, something about show you my evidence, and the men around him laughed in a way Virginia found unsettling.
“Search the women!” shouted an unidentifiable voice from the crowd. She knew a few faces and names, but most of the sailors were still interchangeable to her. Usually, she was glad they kept their distance, but today, things were different.
Either another voice joined the first or the first one repeated—it was impossible for Virginia to tell—“Search the women!”
“Search the men!” Caprice yelled back.
“That’s enough, Caprice,” Virginia hissed under her breath.
“Oh, is it?” Caprice shot back, but after a look around the deck, she fell silent.
The captain shouted, his voice ringing with authority, “Enough! I will handle this! The thief should be rooted out before more goods go missing. Every man on the crew will be searched.”
Hisses and grumbles toured the deck, but when the captain held up a hand for silence, they obeyed.
Then he turned to Virginia, and she caught a glimpse of true regret on his face before he set his expression back into impassivity. “For all the same reasons I have given the order to search the men, I must insist the women also be searched.”
Almost immediately came a shout, “I’ll volunteer to do the searchin’!” This time, Virginia saw the speaker’s face, his leering grin. He was the only red-haired man on board, freckled everywhere from his hairline to the backs of his hands. “Get ’em in a line, and I’ll limber up my fingers!”
The laughter that rippled around the clutch of men on deck sent a chill down Virginia’s spine, even in the cold. Any one of them might put his hands on a woman now; the others thought it would be good sport, and from there, the more the merrier.
She looked over toward the women, so close by and yet so far, and saw several of them putting their hands out discreetly in small, waist-level gestures toward Virginia: help. She said the only thing she thought could get them out of the immediate danger, create time for this tension to dissipate.
“Fair,” said Virginia, speaking clear and loud, speaking to the captain for all to hear. “I’ll agree that the women be searched.”
Howls and hoots sounded from the crowd, and she wished she’d been more specific from the start, but as it was, all she could do was carry on.
“There are conditions, of course,” she said.
“Of course,” the captain said eagerly, and she could hear in his voice—could anyone else hear it?—that he was as keen to have this situation resolved peacefully as she was. She hadn’t thought before about how it must feel for him, to sail with a baker’s dozen of women when likely no woman had ever set foot on the ship before. In their way, they must be almost as strange to him as the Esquimaux.
“Just as your men will only be searched by your men,” said Virginia, again in as clear and loud a voice as she could muster, “our women will only be searched by our women.”
There were mutterings and harrumphs but no louder protests than that.
Virginia went on, “Our medical personnel will do the searching, one by one, in a closed cabin. They will report to me anything that they find. But there will be complete privacy, no matter what.”
The captain nodded, not looking at his men, only at her.
“So I recommend,” Virginia said, holding his gaze, “that your men line up to be searched at the same time. Then we’ll have the whole business done.”
“And none can pass their ill-gotten gains from one to another,” the captain said. “Straight from here to the searching places, no detours, no chance to squirrel the thieved things away. Does that meet with your approval?”
“It does,” she said, almost wanting to chuckle at his formality. Ames had never been one for formality. But then again, she reminded herself forcibly, this man had nothing to do with Ames. He’d showed that by knuckling under.
“Dove and Siobhan,” she said. “Do you need anything to conduct your search? Besides a closed cabin?”
“No, ma’am,” Siobhan said promptly. Dove looked unhappy, but Virginia had no intention of exploring the form and shape of her unhappiness with a whole ship’s muster of men and women looking on.
So she shepherded the women back toward their cabin and lined them up in the hallway outside. They mumbled and murmured to one another, but she was surprised to see how few of them took this invasion ill. Althea and Ebba seemed the least disturbed by it; likely, they knew from their husbands how hard justice was at sea and that the only way through was to keep one’s head down and hope to emerge on the other side.
But Caprice. Of course Caprice could not just keep her head down. It was not in her nature. After the women formed an orderly line, Caprice elbowed her way through them until she was close enough to tug on Virginia’s sleeve, then spoke in a low voice directly into her ear. “I understand we’ve got to keep up appearances. But you don’t actually think any of our women did the thieving, do you?”
Virginia found her eyes sliding to Stella and forced them back to Caprice’s face. “I don’t know,” she said. “It makes sense to check.”
“Well, you don’t have to check me, obviously.”
“We’ll check everyone.”
“Come now.” Caprice’s voice went silky. “That’s all well and good for the others. But you know I’m not a thief. I’ll go into the cabin with the searchers, and you can just tell them to keep me in a minute or two to make it look good, yes?”
“It’ll look like what it is. You will go in, be searched, and come out. Like the others.”
“But I’m not like the others,” Caprice hissed.
“Just for now, try thinking of yourself that way.”
The look Caprice gave Virginia could have done just as much as ice to freeze her solid.
Virginia waited outside with the women in the hallway to keep order while the first few were searched. As she’d thought, Althea and Ebba were the first to volunteer, and both came out unruffled.
“They’re asking for you, mum,” sai
d Ebba quietly.
Had they found something already? Virginia slipped quietly inside the cabin.
As she entered, Dove glared at her, arms folded. “Didn’t think this through, did you, Reeve?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you’re out there,” she pointed through the closed door back toward the hallway, “it’ll be obvious what’s happening when we call you in here.” She pointed again, this time to their feet.
“Oh.”
Dove echoed her oh in a disgusted tone and turned her back as Siobhan opened the door for Margaret to enter.
So Virginia stood awkwardly to the side as the women briskly searched the journalist, then the next few women: Ann, Irene, Doro. Caprice grumbled through her entire search, but it took no longer than the others. She was pronounced innocent and sent on her way. Virginia did not even look up at her.
Then there was Stella.
She was joking quietly with Siobhan as the nurse and doctor worked. Virginia had her back turned but heard them say something about the fit of her coat and how high the waist on her divided skirt had been shifted.
Siobhan said something in a quiet, teasing tone, too soft for Virginia to make out the words. But then she sucked in her breath sharply.
After a moment, Dove said, “Oh.”
“Virginia?” Siobhan’s voice was more cautious than usual.
As soon as the word thievery had been mentioned, Virginia had thought of Stella, but then she’d pushed the thought away. Now disappointment flooded through her. What would she do about it? What could she do? But perhaps she’d misunderstood. She forced herself to ask, “Did you find something?”
“Oh yes,” Dove snorted. “But not at all what we were looking for, I can tell you that much.”
“What’s happened? What did you find?” Virginia looked to Stella’s face, which was streaked with tears. Silently, she was crying, perhaps had been crying the whole time, but utterly without sound.
“Tell her,” said Siobhan harshly.
It was so out of character for their doctor to be harsh with anyone, Virginia couldn’t imagine what in the world had turned her against the girl.
“I can’t,” Stella said.
“Show her, then,” Siobhan said, and without waiting for a response, she reached over and, without ceremony or shame, loosened the string at the waist of Stella’s skirt and tugged it down several inches.
Virginia gasped out loud.
Stella’s belly swelled outward, low and looming. The higher-class women among them would have said she was increasing or in the family way. But the first thing that sprang to Virginia’s mind was neither polite nor elegant. Instead, she thought, Oh. Stella’s stung by a serpent.
Siobhan said, “Five months along, I should think. Give or take.”
“Could be as much as seven,” said Dove.
Virginia wanted to ask Stella if she’d known before they left Boston, all those weeks ago. Had Brooks? Lady Franklin? What was it Elizabeth had said—they wanted her out of the way. Her employers. Was this why? Not because of any suspected thievery, although perhaps, she thought grimly, that too. The affair with her employer’s son that Elizabeth had told her about, that Stella hadn’t mentioned, oh yes. The pieces fit together all too neatly. She didn’t like the picture they made.
And what was she supposed to tell the captain? His men were already surly at the presence of women on board. Not a one of them would tolerate a woman with child, let alone, if they were still on this ship when the time came, a baby. Virginia’s stomach turned just thinking of what the crew might do—to Stella, even to Virginia—if they found out.
“We’re keeping this to ourselves, the four of us,” she told them in a harsh whisper. “Not a word. You hear me? Not a word to anyone until I tell you.”
Every day, they were closer to their destination. Now every day, they were closer to something else.
She had started this mission with twelve women. Christabel was dead, God rest her soul, leaving eleven.
But now Virginia realized she didn’t have charge of eleven women. Ten women, yes. And one powder keg in a woman’s shape.
That shape would grow and change every day. And one day, like a powder keg, it would explode.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Virginia
Massachusetts Superior Court, Boston
October 1854
The next witness is no surprise. So far, the witnesses have painted a picture of Virginia that damns her completely. She’d threatened Caprice Collins with death, said the butler. She was a liar who couldn’t be trusted, Thisbe had sneered. Caprice’s father and the law expert made the case that the rich girl had been lured away and didn’t come back and that somehow, that was enough to prosecute Virginia on. Women had started dying on her watch almost immediately, Dove had told the court. Where to go from there?
So this witness next. If he had something terrible to say, wouldn’t they have called him sooner? The men of the jury will believe a man in a way they’d never believe a woman. Even men who think themselves enlightened. There had been men who’d attended the National Women’s Rights Conventions in Worcester and Syracuse, yes, those men existed, but she’d bet her shiniest nickel that none of them were currently present in this room. This man could speak with authority on a certain part of their ill-starred expedition. If there was damage to be done, he could absolutely do it.
From the moment he enters the courtroom, rigid as a walking stick, Captain Malcolm doesn’t meet her eyes. She doesn’t really want him to.
“The prosecution calls Captain Jacob Malcolm to the stand,” the prosecutor intones.
He looks even larger in this environment. She knows how much space he took up on a large ship under an open sky, and in this closer space, he verges on the comical. He seems too large for the chair, too large for the room. His hands in particular are awkward. He cannot make them settle. After he swears his oath, his dark, nimble hands still move. His constant motion would make her nervous if she weren’t already as nervous as she can be.
His hair and beard are trimmed with precision, his suit an impeccable navy blue. She wonders if a woman is taking care of him. In some ways, she hopes so. Perhaps he looks larger than she remembers because he is. Maybe he has put on weight with good cooking. They’d all lost pounds from their frames aboard ship, even before they set across the ice, those who made that trip. Though he has always been, in most but not every sense, solid.
The prosecutor begins, “Your name again for the record?”
“Jacob Malcolm,” he answers, his gaze down but his voice clear.
It is impossible not to notice that Captain Malcolm has the darkest skin in the room. The judge, the jury, the bailiff, all are white men, as is the attorney peppering him with questions. “Captain?”
“Yes.”
“And is that your military rank or an honorific?”
“I am currently captain of the Doris, a whaling ship out of Provincetown harbor.”
“And is that all the Doris does?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Whaling. I ask whether that’s the only purpose for which your ship sails.”
“For the most part. Occasionally, she’s engaged for other purposes.”
“Such as?”
“Sir,” Captain Malcolm says with a sharp tone, “will you please just ask me the questions you want answers to? We’re wasting the time of these good people with your song and dance.”
The prosecutor, theatrically offended, raises his eyes to the judge, who considers his silent appeal for a long moment, then shrugs. Judge Miller is not entirely a fair man, Virginia thinks, but neither is he as unfair as he could be. She doesn’t waste a glance toward her own counsel, knowing for certain he has given up even pretending to have an interest in the proceedings.
“Very well, then, Captain
, I’m going to ask you some questions about a voyage you undertook last year to transport certain passengers the length of Hudson Bay. Do you know the voyage I mean?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you did sail the Doris last year with a purpose other than whaling?”
“I did.”
The prosecutor appears smug, as if this is some kind of meaningful admission, though Virginia can’t see how it would be. He follows up quickly. “So who funded your voyage?”
Malcolm shifts in his seat. “We earned what we made.”
“I don’t doubt it. But you must have started with capital. Who provided that capital?”
Without emotion, the captain says, “Our initial expenses were paid by a benefactor.”
“And what did that benefactor ask you to do?”
“Transport a party of twelve women from Moose Factory to Repulse Bay. If there were any important decisions to be made along the way, I was instructed to follow the directives of Virginia Reeve.”
“And weren’t you suspicious of this offer, Captain?”
“I’m not sure how you mean that.”
“To agree, sight unseen, to transport strange women to the wilds of the outermost frontier. Well, they could have been unwilling, for example. It’s a sad truth that there are men who wish to do vulnerable women wrong.”
“Unfortunately, yes, that is true,” agrees Captain Malcolm, though his brow lowers in suspicion.
Virginia shares his trepidation. Where is this going?
“It seems one reads of these scandalous horrors every day!” says the prosecutor, animated now, clearly playing to the men of the jury. “The terrors that men of a beastly nature might visit on poor, innocent young ladies. Unspeakable. Sold off into…well, I wouldn’t even use the word in a room like this, with fine people like yourselves present.”
He turns away from the jury at last to address Captain Malcolm in the witness’s chair. “Suffice it to say, sir, I hope you had some way of knowing you weren’t facilitating white slavery!”
The Arctic Fury Page 17
