The Arctic Fury

by Greer Macallister

The captain and Virginia locked eyes, and he looked—what? Pitiful? Pitying?

  Virginia seemed to weigh something and make a decision. Then she said quietly, “I’ll go. And Stella will go.”

  They all looked at Stella. She gave a small, weak nod.

  “And any of the other women who want to go with us are welcome,” called Virginia. To the captain, she said, “In return, we take all the supplies we brought with us, and I expect safe passage for the women who remain on board.”

  “You think he’s in a position to make that bargain?” the mate asked, his voice mocking.

  But the captain glared daggers at him, stepping forward, his hand going to the firearm at his hip. “I can make what bargain I like.”

  They were right on the edge of disaster, thought Dove. The aggression that had bubbled just under the surface was about to boil over. It wasn’t just disapproval, what these men felt for these women. It was a deep, choking hate.

  Was she foolish to stay? Perhaps. But her chances of survival were better on a ship than on the land, and she’d always been a smart one for playing the odds. Finding Franklin had been a lark. Now it was about survival.

  “Who’s with me?” asked Dove, stepping forward, addressing the women directly. “I will protect any woman who stays.”

  Caprice took one long step forward, and Dove found herself wondering which way the woman would go. She’d made no secret of her dislike for Virginia, but she was also hungry for glory, and there would be none of that going home on this ship. Their road home would be the opposite of glory.

  So it was not entirely a surprise when Caprice, eyes burning bright, said, “Thanks for that offer, Dove, but I’ll be trying my luck on the ice. We’re with Virginia.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Elizabeth,” said Caprice without looking behind her. It was not a question.

  But the dark-skinned woman’s voice trembled on a single word. “Well…”

  Caprice turned then, smooth and unhurried, to face Elizabeth. “You think you’d be welcome returning without me?”

  “No, but—”

  Caprice drew closer to Elizabeth then and spoke a couple of words in her ear, fast and low. Dove only caught one, reward, and watched Elizabeth’s face carefully. She was wavering.

  Dove interrupted, “Are we going to chitchat or are we going to choose? Because I don’t see much patience where I’m looking.”

  Caprice raised her voice one more time and said to Elizabeth, “Let’s go.”

  And whether it was the authority in Caprice’s voice or whatever Caprice had offered or for her own private reasons, Elizabeth said, “I suppose that’s fine, then,” and stepped forward.

  As the two crossed to stand next to Virginia and Stella—Virginia’s eyes stormy with emotion—Caprice reached out to tap Ann on the shoulder as she passed.

  “I assume Ann is with us, right, Ann?” Her voice was almost cheerful. “Your dogs will want to run.”

  “Right behind you, miss,” Ann said.

  The crew, surprisingly, parted without comment to allow the women to make their choices. Dove drew herself up to her full height. Every woman now knew what was at stake. It was up to each of them to choose.

  For a moment, Dove feared she might be left alone on the ship. Then, she would not be safe. If Caprice could make a case, so could she. So she called, “Althea, Ebba, I assume you’ll want to stay on board. Respectable women like you.”

  Althea murmured, “Yes, of course,” without looking at anyone.

  Ebba’s eyes were on her friend’s face when she said, “We’ll stay.”

  As they came to stand behind her, Ebba took Dove’s arm and whispered into her ear, “Why did you start this? Have you no principles?”

  This was not the time nor the place to explain herself, even if she’d wanted to. “Principles cost,” Dove hissed back. “Too dear.”

  But there was no time for conversation. Choices were being made.

  Next, Siobhan piped up, “Wherever the party on land is bound, they will need a medical officer. Since the nurse is not available, I’ll go.” She moved up to stand with Virginia and Caprice, holding her chin high.

  They all chose. Neither Doro nor Irene spoke their choice aloud, but they didn’t need to. Their feet showed where their loyalties lay.

  The last one to make her choice, as she stepped forward, Margaret hesitated for a moment. Dove reached out a hand to her. A long beat later, the light winking against the glass in her spectacles, Margaret took it.

  In the end, the split was far from even. Eight women would take to the land: Caprice and Virginia, Stella and Siobhan, Elizabeth and Ann, Doro and Irene. Four would remain: Dove, Ebba, Althea, and Margaret. Dove was too stunned to feel relief, but she was glad of the company. The crew would be less likely to mistreat the Englishwomen, who were the wives of British Navy men. It wouldn’t be bad to have the journalist among them either.

  Still. Likely she would just hole them up in that musty cabin and not come out until Repulse Bay. They could hire a ship home from there and make the whole miserable trek in reverse. She didn’t look forward to it, but of the available options, it was clearly the better.

  Then Dove counted the women, those who would stay and those who would go. Twelve. Shouldn’t there be a thirteenth? she thought. Then she wished she hadn’t. For a moment, the dark, small body of Christabel fell through the sky behind her closed eyes.

  When she opened her eyes again, she saw Caprice reach out and grab Virginia’s hand, and it looked to Dove like they both squeezed.

  Well, that was something, she thought. Perhaps the two of them had recognized that there was a good chance they’d die out there on the ice, especially if they turned north to continue the search for Franklin. They’d probably realized that they might as well die on good terms. And once they were out in the Arctic wilds, working together instead of working against each other might make the difference between life and death.

  If they were to have any chance at all. Which Dove was not convinced they did.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Margaret

  Aboard the Doris

  July 1853

  It was Mr. Emerson’s voice she heard during the tense scene on the deck, telling her to stay. Think of your legacy, Miss Bridges, the dream voice whispered to her. Don’t put yourself at risk. Stay with your pages, your story. She felt pulled in both directions, longing to go but feeling fear and the imagined words of Mr. Emerson pressing her to stay.

  It was after the women were launched in their tiny, open craft that everything came clear to her: Mr. Emerson was a fool.

  He was right, of course, that dream Emerson. If she’d gone on land, taking her journals of the journey so far, they would be as much at risk as she was, which was saying something.

  But if she had listened to Mr. Emerson, she wouldn’t have come on this adventure in the first place. Besides, Mr. Emerson was a bit of a charlatan. He’d made her the first female editor of his journal, which was a great honor, and then failed to pay her even a single red cent for her labor over the course of two years, which was an equally great slap in the face. Metaphorical, though she would have welcomed a physical one: if someone slapped her, she could slap them back. Not that violence conducted by women was considered acceptable by men in any case, but if she’d learned anything so far on this journey, it was that when women stopped worrying about what was acceptable and what wasn’t, they were capable of nearly anything.

  She was fully aware she spent too much time calculating. What were the motives of the people she wrote about? Who was putting what at risk and how much? She calculated what queries to ask a subject, how much truth to put in her writing, what to publish anonymously, and what to put under a byline. For years, her byline had been a single asterisk: clear, unique, and as obscure as a bucket of tar. If she ever came back from this
adventure, she’d have more and more questions to consider.

  And now, she supposed, she had nothing but time to consider them. In that breathless, fearful moment, she had chosen the safe path. There was no undoing that snap decision. There would be no more adventure for her.

  She’d been the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College; she’d read more than any person she’d ever met, man or woman, though none of the men would admit as much. Typical. She’d read everything there was to read about women adventuring. Clearly, it was inevitable that she, too, would join the ranks of women adventurers. To do otherwise would be to live life as a kind of encyclopedia: of no use to oneself, only others who pried you open and took what they needed, then shut you up and put you back on the shelf. Margaret Bridges had made the decision to be no one’s encyclopedia.

  Yet now, she was something worse. A book no one had any reason to read. One decision, one moment, and she had hesitated to make the bold choice. Now she would stay on that shelf forever.

  What had she been so afraid of? Certainly, it had something to do with those who had chosen the ice, the members of that party. Their leader and the woman who thought she should lead instead. She knew, with the certainty of a practiced evaluator, that Caprice Collins and Virginia Reeve were going to come to blows. She hadn’t liked Caprice, who always seemed to be trying to get Margaret to write down something that glorified her exploits, but she certainly had a fire to her, one that clashed with Virginia’s. A lazy journalist would have called the women oil and water. If she were writing about them, which she someday might, she would have called them something more descriptive. Snow and sun. Time and space. Spark and gunpowder. Yes, spark and gunpowder, that was good. She grabbed her book to write it, but a thought stopped her hand.

  If nothing else, she could have lit their fires. She could have torn a page out of her journals one at a time and set fire to it. It would have hurt to give up the journals, but when it was the difference between life and death, of course she would have done it. This handful of women, especially if they turned north onto the ice, they would need fire.

  Before she could consider any more, before she could talk herself out of it, she yanked on her cold-weather gear and gathered all three journals in her mittened hands, leaving the women’s cabin behind.

  Death by freezing was painless, or so she had heard. Though she was always suspicious of those who claimed to know what death of one sort or another was like. The only people fully qualified to speak to a particular form of death were those who’d already died from it and therefore spoke no more.

  Margaret raced to the ship’s stern and flung each of her journals, one at a time, into the water. She could not even follow them with her eyes all the way down into the churning deep; there was certainly no question of being able to hear a splash. But what came after that, she let herself imagine. She let herself hope that each book would wend, like a tiny sailboat, across the water to its destination. Perhaps they would wash up on shore. Perhaps the women, following the shoreline of the bay in whichever direction they chose, would spot a waterlogged book and know who had sent it their way. The words would be gone by then—how and why had she ever let herself think words more important than lives?—but they would carefully dry the pages in the wind and save them for kindling.

  So many maybes, Margaret told herself. Too many. She stared down toward the black water, cold and roiling, like a sea in a fairy story, dark enough to hide a monster. But this water didn’t have to hide a monster, she realized; it was a monster. And so was the ice. The entire Arctic was a frozen mouth full of icy teeth, and it would slay those women. They’d become another of the expeditions lost forever on the ice, marching off into oblivion.

  And the journals were gone. Not even one word of what she knew remained. She could not even do them good now as a faithful chronicler of what had happened before they disappeared. She might have made her own fame and theirs if she hadn’t panicked. She was not a woman equipped for quick bravery; she needed time to consider, to weigh, to judge. She hadn’t had time, and she’d erred badly. She’d made foolish decision on top of foolish decision, and now she’d have nothing but time, all the way back to Boston, to remember her foolishness.

  As she stood at the stern, cold wind buffeting her, she swore to herself then that she would be wiser next time, if there ever were a next time. If she had the chance to make it up to those women, the women she had turned away from when the moment came, she would do anything. She would turn back toward them. Support them. Give them anything they needed.

  But what were the chances? Slim to none, and slim had sailed away, she thought as the darkness of the bay stretched out behind the ship to the invisible horizon.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Virginia

  Charles Street Jail, Boston

  October 1854

  The guard who tortures Virginia with the Clarion’s sensationalist stories, Keeler, is reading the latest issue out loud. She is trying as hard as she possibly can to not hear. She doesn’t physically cower or cringe, doesn’t clap her hands over her ears. She won’t show weakness. But inside her head, she is singing at the top of her imaginary lungs, nearly shouting the words of hymn after hymn, to drown him out. She pictures herself standing in a pew, wearing her best, most modest Sunday dress with the eyelet-covered buttons, hymnal in hand and her mouth as wide open as the prairie sky, music pouring forth. An imaginary organist pumps away at the pedals and stops, pounding the keys in fistfuls. An imaginary congregation in their imaginary finery crowds her on both sides, their voices raised, bass and baritone and soprano and tone-deaf howling, each louder than the next.

  Inside her head, they have just finished an utterly rousing rendition of “Crown Him with Many Crowns,” and Virginia is flinging all her spirit into “My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less” when a voice—a real voice—stops her.

  It stops Keeler, too, who trails off midsentence, a sentence Virginia congratulates herself on not having heard.

  “Excuse me. I’d like a word with Miss Reeve.”

  The familiar voice in her ears lands like rainwater on parched ground. The message she sent with the new Siobhan reached its destination.

  Keeler, caught off guard by the fact that he should have heard this man coming long before he was close enough to touch, barks, “Who let you back here?”

  “I have friends, as it happens,” says Captain Malcolm. “Good men and true. Will you be a good man and give me ten minutes alone with Miss Reeve?”

  To his credit, the guard’s first response is, “I can’t leave you alone with her, sir, for her own safety. And yours.”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Sir. It cannot be done. Safety.”

  “There will be bars between us.”

  “Even so.”

  “I swear I’ll keep my distance. All right? Just let me have twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty?”

  “Half an hour?”

  The captain leans toward him with folded money between his fingers.

  Keeler fairly grabs the money, tucks it into an invisible pocket somewhere, and shrugs.

  “Your funeral,” he says.

  Grumbling, reluctant, Keeler shuffles off down the hallway, glancing over his shoulder every now and again to see whether this man, his fists meaty, his frame broad, poses a threat to the prisoner or whether it might be the other way around. But eventually, Keeler loses interest and turns his back.

  Then it’s just the two of them, the bars between. His presence does not warm her—nothing can inside this frozen, stone room—but it fills her with something that makes the cold feel farther away.

  “Miss Reeve,” he says, and if the bars weren’t there to restrain her, she’d reach out to him. Her feelings about him are not uncomplicated, but she knows this, that she would hold nothing back. The time for holding back has passed.

&nbs
p; Her gaze locks with his, the way she did not allow it to in the courtroom, and the power of it rocks her.

  Captain Malcolm sheds the bravado he had with the guard as if it were a coat. His voice is thick with emotion. “I’m so sorry. I have regretted—and I have prayed. When I heard you’d survived, my prayers were answered. But then—this trial—”

  “Don’t lose sleep over me,” she says, meaning to be light, but it comes out harsher than she meant it to. More like a command. As if she could command this man, as if she ever could, as if she could do anything from behind these all-dashed bars.

  “I can’t help it.”

  “Captain,” she says. “You did the right thing. Then and now. And I am glad to see you.”

  “You are a saint, Miss Reeve.”

  “I’m no saint.”

  “But to me—to be able to forgive me—you forgive me, don’t you?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” she says, and this time, it does come out light. As if he were a waiter in the ordinary apologizing for bringing her the egg salad instead of the chicken salad. As if things mattered not at all. As if her life weren’t on the line.

  She says, “You kept your word. You said you’d bring the rest back safe—Dove, Margaret, Ebba, Althea—and you did that.”

  “But I should have—I could—”

  “You couldn’t,” she says firmly.

  “Virginia,” he says this time, and there is a note of urgency to his voice. “I would not have presumed to come. But you called for me.”

  “I’m glad you answered.”

  His voice is still rough with emotion. “Are you truly resigned to your fate? Up in the North, you were always determined. Even when everything was against you. Everything is against you now again, but I hoped I would still see fire in you.”

  “Do you see it?” Now she draws closer to the bars, letting herself look at him. The luxury is dizzying. It may well be the last time she sees him, she tells herself, so why not indulge? His expressive eyes are worried, regretful, their coppery brown dimmed to a darker shade. At the same time as she’s examining him, she realizes, she’s showing herself. Truer than she ever has. The emotion she’s been smothering all these days in the courtroom, all the anger and fear, she lets them out now, lets them radiate out of her like a light.