The Arctic Fury

by Greer Macallister

  “Virginia,” he says in response, throatily. “Tell me. What can I do?”

  “I have a favor to ask. I don’t know anyone else who can help, but I hope you can, and I’m in dire need.”

  “Done.”

  “You don’t know what it is yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Whatever you need. Done.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I will do all I can to save you,” he says, and she does not tell him what comes instantly to mind, because she isn’t sure he could handle it, but the thought rings out in her head over and over even after he leaves and Keeler returns with a glare and her dinner: It will not be enough.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Virginia

  On the Expedition

  July 1853

  As the hooded, swaddled women huddled together on land for the first time since Moose Factory—a lifetime ago, it felt like—Virginia could not stop counting.

  Twenty boxes of ammunition. Twelve sets of snow goggles. Ten sled dogs. Nine guns. Eight women. Seven slabs of pemmican. Six axes. Five bundles of trade goods, mirrors and trinkets, nails and tacks.

  What else did they have? One tidy little shallop that had borne them from the Doris—a fine, seaworthy craft, but off the water, useless as a hatful of bent nails. One sledge, disassembled and packed away for now. It would slow them down until the ice came, at which point it would be essential, if they even found the ice before the ice found them.

  Then, the things that could not be touched or gathered, not in a physical sense. She counted those too.

  One mission, compromised, a goal that might have been close to an impossibility to start with—to find a lost man, his lost company, and his lost ships out here in the vast, unmapped nothingness of the Arctic—but was now even less possible than it ever had been.

  Zero hope.

  But her lack of hope, Virginia decided, was not the point. She stepped back from the cluster of women and scanned the horizon, gathering herself. She could not allow her hopelessness to dictate all their fates. On the ship, she’d had hope, and here they were anyway, farther from their destination than they’d ever thought to be, almost certainly doomed to the failure of their mission. Hope had not delivered the expected result. So perhaps hopelessness would not either.

  They were such rare, savvy women, thought Virginia. If they were men, they would be world striders: generals, scholars, victors of every stripe. Her eyes threatened to prickle with tears at the sentiment of it, even knowing it was so cold the tears would freeze on her face as they formed.

  She could not afford sentiment.

  That was why she put the choice to them, the eight women who had chosen the land. They had put themselves at risk for the chance to continue northward, rejecting safety, or as close to it as could be found in this part of the world. They had as much of a stake as she did. Each had an equal say: one life.

  “We must decide,” she said to them all, “in which direction our fates lie.”

  Given her unmatched familiarity with the maps of where they were and where they hoped to be, Doro was the first to understand. As hard as it was to see her eyes in the furred maw of her raised hood, Virginia caught the flash of recognition in them right away.

  Caprice was the next to catch on and the first to speak her mind. “You mean we can choose safety or we can seek Franklin but not both.”

  “Almost,” corrected Virginia. “We can choose to seek safety.”

  “I fail to see the difference,” Caprice said dryly, “between that and what I said.”

  “We can seek safety,” clarified Virginia. “I cannot guarantee we will find it. There are two safer routes, one north and one south, and even those are not safe. We could freeze. Starve. Suffer attack. Break our legs falling over one hazard or another—a gully, a hole in the soft ice, a ravine, a buckle—”

  “We know the dangers. You needn’t list them all.” Caprice’s tone became more combative, not less.

  “I can’t list them all,” spat back Virginia. “There are too many.”

  At that, Caprice fell silent a moment.

  Doro spoke into the silence, raising her voice to be heard. “We have three options. We follow the coast south to Churchill, a settlement something like Moose Factory, a place from which we could join others going south, toward home.”

  Caprice made a dismissive sound, a hmph in her throat, though it was not possible to tell if she’d been loud enough for the other women to hear.

  Doro went on, “Second option, we follow the coastline north instead, to Repulse Bay. Where we’d planned, Victory Point, is both west and north of there. From there, we could either wait for a ship home—the Doris or another—or overwinter and set out for Victory Point again as soon as the thaw permits.”

  “How long would that take?” asked Elizabeth. “To get to Repulse Bay?”

  Doro’s face clouded with doubt. “A couple of months or longer. Depends on how fast we move and when the cold comes in. We’ll actually go much faster with ice and snow under us, once we can use the sledge. Walking is the slowest possible way to go.”

  Elizabeth spoke again. “And the third option?”

  “Northwest. As direct a route to Victory Point as we can manage. Same issues, same timeline.”

  It was Elizabeth who asked the next question. “If we head northwest, are there rivers to follow, maybe somewhere we could sail the shallop? What’s the terrain like?”

  Doro spoke a single, ominous word. “Unmapped.”

  “Oh.”

  Virginia looked from one face to the next, hunting for their expressions in the darkened shadows cast by their raised hoods. “And if we decide not to follow the shore, maybe we leave the shallop behind.”

  Ann said, “Nope. The dogs can pull it.”

  “Across the ground?”

  “Across the ground,” she echoed. “With supplies in it. Spreads the weight out. Unless you want to hump all that?”

  She gestured into the shallop, and seven other heads turned to look. The heaps of supplies that had seemed reassuring only moments ago looked daunting if they proposed to carry them. Perspective was everything.

  Ann went on, “Shallop makes a good cover to sleep under too. If we realize we don’t need it later, we chop it for wood then. And if we hit a river…”

  “I’m convinced,” interrupted Siobhan. “We keep the shallop.”

  “Except if the terrain gets too uneven, both the shallop and the sledge slow us down,” Doro interrupted. “That’s another risk.”

  “As if we needed more,” said Caprice.

  You could have stayed on the ship, thought Virginia. Why didn’t you? But she did not speak the words aloud. Whichever route they chose, the days that lay ahead would be so much harder than this one. If she didn’t want to stoke conflicts that could present dangers as deadly as the terrain, she would need to hold her tongue. Best to start now. A good leader knew not just when to speak but when to listen.

  Irene tapped Doro on the shoulder. She squinted at the horizon, then back at the shore, turned her body toward her left shoulder, and pointed out over the landscape, her eyebrows raised.

  Doro guessed what she was asking. “Northwest.”

  Then Irene shifted her hand a few degrees back to the right, pointed again.

  Doro answered, “North.”

  Irene pointed in the opposite direction.

  “South,” Doro said.

  Then Irene brushed something invisible from her heavy coat, pushed back her hood, and pointed again in the first direction. With her hood rearranged, they could all now see the grin on her face.

  Doro said, a hint of wonder in her voice, “Irene votes for the northwest, it seems. And I’m with her.”

  Caprice said, “No.”

  “No?” echoed Virginia.

  “I don’t
think we should take a vote,” Caprice said, addressing the group. “We are all together. If some of us vote one direction and others vote differently but the majority rules, some may grow to resent the others. We cannot split up; there are few enough of us as it is, and this is a clear case of safety in numbers.”

  Virginia scanned the women’s figures, reading the language of their bodies. They were nodding. Leaning. Listening.

  Caprice finished, in a ringing voice, “Anyone who wanted to play it safe had the option to do so back on the ship. So let us throw ourselves into this adventure together. We will survive together or not.” Then she took a step closer to Virginia and said, “Right, Virginia?”

  Grateful and a little stunned, Virginia answered, “That’s right.”

  In the changing light, she could see their faces better, and she examined each in turn. Each had a similar, determined expression. Even Stella, who’d been worn to a shell of herself mere days before, turned her back on the rocky shore, facing toward the open, daunting flatlands.

  Virginia said, “All right, ladies. Northwest it is.”

  The shallop already had supplies arranged down the middle like their canoe had, and Ann took only a moment to strap the dogs, yipping with excitement, into their traces. The remaining women arrayed themselves in two lines, one on each side of the shallop, slotted into place like the kitchen utensils hung on the wall of the Doris’s galley.

  Irene reached out for Stella and gestured toward the back of the shallop. Stella’s face was drained of color, and as determined as she looked, Virginia realized Irene was right. Stella should ride, not walk, if that was at all possible, as long as she was still recovering.

  As they headed out, Virginia wiped any hint of concern or consternation from her face. Not that the women could necessarily see it around the shielding of her hood. But the brave face wasn’t just for them. It was also for her.

  Ann snapped the traces over the dogs’ backs, and they began to pull, too fast at first, but under Ann’s practiced hands, they settled into a speed that was only slightly faster than the walking women.

  They were on their way.

  That first night, they did not stop. They were tired, yes, but the sunlight stayed with them, so they could see the shape of the terrain they crossed, and it was smooth and featureless. Virginia tried not to think too hard about how unmarked all this space was, how it would be so easy to become lost if Doro weren’t steadily shaping their direction.

  No one asked Virginia if they should stop, but if they had, she would have forbidden it. Because moving was the thing that kept them from freezing. There might not be ice on the ground, not yet, but it already felt like there was ice in their veins.

  She knew, in theory, what the Arctic cold would be like. She’d even gotten flashes of it on the ship, belowdecks where the ice-clogged water of the bay chilled the planks of the hull so thoroughly they radiated that cold inward. The heat only went so far, and one could walk around a corner from relative comfort into a sharp bout of cold that caused you to inhale sharply, but when you did, the insides of your nostrils instantly froze together. More than once, Virginia had found this happening to her and flung up her mittens against her cheeks and backed around the corner again into the relative heat.

  Here, there would be none of that. Nowhere to retreat to. In the day, there was some relief, but at night, there was only cold: unending, unrelieved. Their instruments said the temperature of the air itself was above the freezing point, but the harsh slap of icy wind on their cheeks told a different story.

  Hours into their walk, in the hours near midnight when the light thinned and dimmed into something that was barely a glow but still not darkness, Virginia strongly considered giving up. If she stopped long enough, there would be peace. The cold would take her away if she just let it. It could take all of them away. In death, there would be no struggle, no anger.

  Because there was so much anger in her. She’d had no idea. When she’d looked at the map of the far North and seen the word Fury, it had only occurred to her that this was a word for a vengeful goddess. That so many Arctic features had been named for hazards because it was a world of hazards. But now she saw its other meaning. Fury, as in anger. As they marched ever forward, she thought only of how unjust it was that she and these women were forced farther away from their goal instead of closer. What could they have done if they were helped instead of hindered? Now they would have to work twice as hard just to get back to where they should have been. Those ignorant, superstitious sailors. Foolish Stella and her thievery. The weak, fearful captain. And she did not spare herself from her anger: she, too, had been weak. She, too, could have done better. This anger burned, but it did not, on any level, keep her warm.

  Of all things, it was the memory of the Very Bad Thing that helped her continue on. Because if she could survive that, she could survive this. She even would have told the other members of the party about it, reshaping its ghastly horror into a rallying cry, if she didn’t think they wouldn’t be able to look at her the same way afterward. Once someone knew what was in her past, they’d see her as a different person. She couldn’t take that chance.

  That was probably what she’d loved best about Ames. He knew everything about her, and he didn’t judge her for it. To be known for oneself is a powerful gift. She felt she’d only received it once. Maybe these women would give her the same gift, she thought to herself, but then doubt swarmed over her. They did not love her now, and they would love her less if they knew everything about her. Particularly Caprice. Caprice’s lip would curl in a horrified sneer if she knew what Virginia had done. The rich girl already looked down on her for living hard on the trail, traveling with a man, wearing men’s trousers—trousers!—and not even seeming the least bit sorry. Imagine her outrage at the Very Bad Thing, at Virginia’s role in it, which her youth at the time did not excuse.

  So she would not tell them that, but in her private soul, it gave her the hope that she’d been missing. Bad could come from good; good could come from bad. She’d seen that happen before.

  Virginia sent up a prayer, squared her shoulders, and kept moving.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Virginia

  Massachusetts Superior Court, Boston

  October 1854

  Sundays in the prison are Virginia’s worst days by far. There is no respite from her cell when court is not in session; the Sunday guard is a matron, an oddity. The nameless woman slides trays of food into the cell at the appointed times but does not speak or even look at the inmate. Does she disapprove? Think of Virginia as a gender traitor? If so, what part of Virginia’s behavior has offended her? There are so many possibilities. But her silence makes Virginia miss the guards who engage with her, even when that engagement takes the form of hatred. When court is out of session, Virginia is alone with her thoughts, and she does not like the company.

  But there is one reason to look forward to Sundays, one she has forged herself. On Sunday mornings, because she cannot go to church, church comes to her. She stands and sits as if called to from the pulpit. She opens her hands in front of her like a hymnal, like a prayer book, and sings, sometimes even out loud. For the postlude, she hammers out an approximation of organ music on the hard edge of her cot, though if her hands touched actual keys, she would make only noise, not music. Afterward, she doesn’t always feel better, but at least she doesn’t feel worse. And distracting her busy mind is a welcome, necessary break. Ever since she decided to try, to ask Captain Malcolm to help her take control of her fate, her emotions have been flooding her body. She almost misses those early days in her cell when all she felt was the cool, reassuring virtue of resignation. Hope, when it alternates with fear, hurts more.

  Monday dawns, though she cannot see the sunlight to welcome it, and even though she knows she will be led forth in chains, her whole body leaps forward eagerly to move beyond the cell’s walls.

&n
bsp; When she arrives in the courtroom, she looks out at the five survivors, as is her practice, but today, what she sees surprises her. She sees something she hasn’t seen in their gazes in a long time.

  Hope.

  What is it? she wonders. What do they know that she doesn’t?

  She looks at her counsel, who doesn’t bother to look at her, and she risks a glance out into the sea of spectators. She does not spot Captain Malcolm. There are more people than she remembers, but she has been intentionally avoiding looking at the crowd these past days, so there’s no telling when it grew.

  Then the bailiff calls the name of the next witness, one who wasn’t on the list her counsel had gathered at the beginning of the trial. If he knew this was coming, he’s kept it to himself.

  “The prosecution calls to the stand Levi Brooks.”

  Brooks! In her roiling thoughts, which should be consumed with the same hope her friends are feeling, she can only focus on one overwhelming thought: so Brooks was his last name all along.

  Somehow, it feels powerful to know that. They have been trading in names, she and he, since the day they met, and his was always kept back. Caprice Collins, the first name he said to her, that fateful, fraught name. Dorothea Roset, the one he’d never intended to give her, that she’d tracked until she solved the mystery. Stella, the name he’d never even told her, the fact of a body all that mattered to him from his comfortable perch in civilization. Names added to lists and struck from them. Names of the living and the dead. And now, Levi Brooks. Levi. Knowing his name feels like an ingredient in a wizard’s incantation. Those two short syllables feel like a place to put her anger, store it away, for now. Two syllables, just like the word fury.

  But there is no more time to dwell on his name, because here comes the man himself, striding to the front of the room with familiar, steady confidence. He has the swagger of the voyageurs, but he’s so different from them he looks almost like a different species. The tailoring of his trim black garb is impeccable. Unlike the women he sent north, he has not changed in any way since the journey began, and why should he? He is not an adventurer, just a factotum. They left civilization, endured the wild, created their own pocket nation, struck out into the unknown, fought their way back to civilization again. They have evolved. He, with the rest of society, has remained.