The Arctic Fury

by Greer Macallister

  It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust from the bright outdoor sun to the tearoom’s dimmer light, but once they do, the sight is everything she could hope for. The room is mostly empty, with only a light sprinkling of strangers, all caught up in their own conversations. No one looks at her, and she relishes the feeling.

  Then she sees their familiar faces. The five survivors are seated in a cluster in front of a brick fireplace that blazes orange, silhouetted in its glow. Doro, tugging on the torn collar of her dress, fidgeting. Margaret, the light of the fire flashing in the glass of her spectacles, a look on her face and a hand extended like she’s explaining something complicated. Irene, her head cocked to listen to Margaret, wearing an indulgent, half-aware smile. Ebba and Althea, sitting hip to hip on a loveseat, one whispering in the other’s ear, both with a contented air. She does not even know where to start.

  She does not have to decide. In only a moment, Doro leaps to her feet and throws her arms around Virginia, sighing out her happiness on a sound instead of a word. Irene is next, flinging her arms around them both. Quickly, Margaret joins, then the others, until they are just a knot of arms around bodies, laughing, not caring who looks, not caring who sees.

  She wants to ask them everything. Now, she thinks, there will be time.

  As she stands before the comforting light of the fireplace, Virginia sighs. The orange glow falls on her cheeks and forehead, her shoulders, her hair.

  Without letting go of her companions, she turns her face toward it like a sunflower.

  In this moment, in this place, at long last, she is warm.

  Author’s Note

  When I first considered writing a book about an all-female Arctic expedition in the nineteenth century, I feared it might be too far-fetched. Any such expedition would have to be funded by an extraordinary figure: a rich woman with an axe to grind, who had sacrificed at least one loved one to the Arctic, who had lost faith in other expeditions’ ability to get the job done and so was ready to do something completely unheard of.

  As a gift, the historical record happened to offer up a woman who fit that radical profile: Lady Jane Franklin.

  Once I learned more about the lost Franklin expedition and the search for its survivors, I found clear historical precedent for many of the story elements I had in mind. Lady Franklin not only had the motivation and the funds to send an Arctic expedition of her own design, she reached out to Americans for help—up to and including then-president Zachary Taylor in 1849, as well as a New York merchant named Grinnell, who financed two unsuccessful expeditions. She also sent letters addressed to her husband with some of the expeditions she funded. She even considered undertaking a polar expedition herself, as the most adventurous female traveler of her time. The meeting I imagine for Virginia and Lady Franklin at Tremont House in these pages is completely fictional, but the litany of exploits Lady Franklin recites—sailing down the Nile, riding a donkey into Nazareth, etc.—is drawn directly from the pages of history.

  (Speaking of Tremont House, experts will recognize that the first ladies’ ordinary in Boston is believed to have been located there, not in American House, as I have chosen to place it for Virginia’s convenience.)

  The deeper I got into researching the 1850s, the more accounts I discovered of extraordinary women on America’s various frontiers, exactly the type of women who might have leapt at the chance to involve themselves in an adventure. Mountaineers like Lucy Walker, journalists like Margaret Fuller, battlefield nurses like Sarah Bowman (also known as “the Great Western”), each one was a spark of inspiration that I folded into the party of thirteen women represented here. Virginia Reed was only thirteen at the time of her family’s famously ill-starred journey to California, and I have taken a few liberties with her story, but her letter to her cousin was indeed published in the Illinois Journal in December 1847. Some elements of Virginia’s story in these pages come from Sarah Ann Murphy, nineteen years old at the time of the Donner Party’s travails, also a survivor. To my knowledge, neither ever served as a guide on the California Trail.

  I also took some minor liberties with the exact dates of the spring thaw of James Bay and Hudson Bay in 1853, as well as some of the details of the terrain. The timeline of the Doris’s journey is roughly plausible, but British ships in search of the Northwest Passage generally approached this area from the north (via the Bering Strait on the west or Baffin Bay on the east, which was the route followed by Franklin’s ships, the Erebus and the Terror). U.S. whaling ships began to ply their trade in Hudson Bay beginning in 1860, so Captain Malcolm’s exploratory foray into the bay is just a little ahead of its time.

  Among the invaluable nonfiction accounts that helped me fill in details of my characters’ fictional Arctic explorations were Paul Watson’s Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition; Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot and Lady Franklin’s Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History by Ken McGoogan; When the Whalers Were Up North by Dorothy Harley Eber; The Arctic Journals of John Rae; and Sir John Franklin’s Erebus and Terror Expedition: Lost and Found by Gillian Hutchinson. The lyrics of Keane’s song “The Fire Ship” are excerpted from a version of the shanty transcribed in the Jack Horntip Collection online. The character of Captain Malcolm was inspired by the legendary whaling captain Absalom Boston of Nantucket.

  Mistakes are my own.

  An Excerpt from Woman 99

  Goldengrove devoured my sister every time I closed my eyes. I saw the angle of her neck as she bobbed her head shyly, ducking it low, even though the high Moorish arch of the door soared far above her. The shift from day-bright sunshine to shrouded darkness as she passed inside. Figures in white all around her, pale as angels, menacing as demons. I hadn’t seen her pass through the majestic front door, yet there the image was, clear as day. I had thought of my vivid imagination as a gift, once.

  Phoebe’s form I knew by heart, of course, never having known a world without my older sister in it; Goldengrove I knew because of our next-door neighbors, the Sidwells, who owned a majority interest. They proudly displayed the literature: elegant brochures with watercolors of a brick building as broad and strong as a castle, wide-open blue skies above. They called it a Progressive Home for the Curable Insane. I used to sense hope echoing in the syllables of progressive and curable, but once Phoebe was sent there, I could hear only the bitter, final punctuation of insane. Whatever else that building might be, it was a house of cheek-by-jowl madwomen, and I couldn’t stand the thought of my poor sister inside it, among them. Swallowed up.

  We had never called her mad. She was a girl like any other, at least in my earlier memories. I knew her voice in all its music: merry, teasing, petulant, sweet. It was in her teenage years that her dark moods grew more forceful, more frightening, until her despair seemed bottomless. My mother insisted on smoothing it all over, pretending nothing was wrong. For a while, nothing really was. Incidents at home we could keep secret. No one needed to know how she wept silently under the bedcovers on the dark days, nor how she burned with a false, brittle gaiety on the light ones. There were many days when she was like anyone else. The other days we kept private as best we could.

  But after she strode down the luncheon table at Maddie Palmer’s house in a giddy fit, turquoise silk slippers punting teacup after teacup to the floor, there was nowhere to hide. Father tucked her away for a fortnight in a San Rafael health house and spun a story about a passing flu. She came back all right, as far as I could tell. My mother forbade me to ask Phoebe what had happened there but of course I asked many times. Either to protect me or herself, she would not say.

  Two years later, at twenty-two, there was another incident, much worse. Shouting in the night. Screaming, howling. I’d fallen asleep long after midnight in a tangle of thick blankets with a pillow halfway over my head, yet I could still hear her. She was a Fury, her voice a righteous
trumpet blast. More voices followed, less angry, but fierce. A lower one and a higher one. Father. Mother.

  My body was heavy as lead in the darkness. I couldn’t lift myself from the bed to follow the sounds. As the first slivers of dawn peeked through the shutters, my fatigue finally overcame me and I slept. When I rose in full day, the house was silent. The maids would tell me nothing. I didn’t know until evening that my parents had delivered Phoebe to Goldengrove, and that this time, her commitment would not be temporary.

  Woman 99

  On sale now!

  Reading Group Guide

  1. Virginia frequently finds herself caught up in reflections on the past. Do you think her relationship to the past is healthy? How have you dealt with difficult memories?

  2. What were your impressions of Virginia’s defense attorneys? Do you think she should have testified?

  3. Lady Franklin chooses Virginia to lead the expedition partly because of Virginia’s experience leading groups of people. How does she demonstrate this leadership? Is it enough for the journey at hand?

  4. What is the source of Ebba’s regard for Virginia? Why does she decide to follow her after essentially being told to stay home?

  5. Virginia wonders several times which group is luckier: the ones who came back or the ones who didn’t. In her place, would you struggle to decide? Who do you think the lucky ones are?

  6. Which of the varied crew did you find the most interesting? Who did you think presented the greatest danger to the mission as a whole?

  7. How did you feel about Virginia and Caprice’s early interactions? Did you agree with Virginia’s decisions to let things slide, expecting Caprice to eventually fall in line? How would the story have changed if she pursued the conflicts sooner or more thoroughly?

  8. What do you see as the final danger the expedition encountered? Which roadblock ensured that they would never, as a whole, come back safe and sound? Were there any missed opportunities that could have prevented disaster?

  9. When the women’s party divided, whose choice made the most sense to you? Who surprised you the most? Did you think any of them chose wrong?

  10. In her musings, Virginia makes a distinction between serving as a guide in unsettled land and being a “true explorer.” What challenges separate these two similar endeavors? Which would you rather do?

  11. At the beginning of the story, would you have expected Caprice’s actions in the crevasse? What changed for her?

  12. Virginia thinks, “They would go home failures, yes. But they would go home.” What do you think of this assessment? What does it mean to fail?

  A Conversation with the Author

  Early in the book, Virginia seems determined to rid herself of the past. As a historical fiction writer, I doubt you share that attitude. How do you consider your relationship to the past?

  Well, I don’t have a past nearly as traumatic as Virginia’s, for one thing! But I suppose I have reinvented myself a few times over the course of my life so far, so we do have that in common. In the broader sense, I do rely on the resonance of past history with current conditions to give my readers one more way to think about modern society. How far have we come since the nineteenth century? Very far in some ways and not nearly as far as we’d like in others.

  For such a formidable journey, the women’s party seems initially scarce on adventurers. What motivated that distribution?

  The exact makeup of the party was one of the hardest things to get right in the early going. What finally unlocked it for me was to make sure that each woman had a real-life counterpart, an inspiration from the mid-nineteenth century I could point to and draw from. And some of those women were doing startling things, like climbing mountains or saving soldiers’ lives on a battlefield, but others were setting themselves apart in different ways, like drawing plants no one else had drawn before.

  How much research do you do before you begin writing a book? If you come up against a fact you don’t know while writing, do you leave a placeholder or take a research break?

  I definitely prefer to do as much research as possible before diving into the serious drafting of a book, but for various reasons, that didn’t happen on this one. So I was still researching while I was writing, which I definitely don’t recommend! But there was just so much to learn about the Arctic, what the women were up against, what the conditions would be in all these locations, that was the only way I could get it done. When I was writing The Magician’s Lie, my first historical novel, I used to stop writing in order to find a fact; that book took me five years to finish. I don’t do that anymore. Placeholders are the only way I can keep forward momentum.

  You develop a tense interplay between the courtroom scenes and the scenes of the expedition. Did you write both narratives simultaneously as they appear in the final book, or did you interweave them after they were both complete? How did that shape the story overall?

  That was easier than I thought it would be, actually! To reference The Magician’s Lie again, which also unfolded in two timelines, I really struggled with fitting together all the puzzle pieces to form one cohesive narrative for the reader—Arden’s story. But this time around, as I was writing both the murder trial timeline and the expedition timeline simultaneously, they just sort of fell into place. My somewhat outrageous decision to include one chapter from the point of view of each woman on the expedition actually helped dictate a lot of that structure—once I knew who died when, obviously her chapter had to come before that point, and I locked in the whole jigsaw before I was done writing the first draft. And it didn’t change during revision, which is kind of remarkable.

  Which of the women from the expedition would you most want to meet in real life? What would you talk to her about?

  Oh, I’ve got a real soft spot for Caprice, insufferable as she can be. I’d let her tell all the stories she wanted to tell about climbing half the mountains in Europe. I don’t think I’d even have to ask questions—she would just monologue freely until her tea went cold, then she’d ring for more and keep talking.

  Each time the expedition loses another member, you somehow introduce a new kind of sorrow. Which was the hardest to write? Was there anyone you were tempted to save?

  The hardest was Ann, because she’s the only one who completely chooses her fate, and she does it for this noble, painful reason that no one else but her would choose. She was also the only one who I had to kill twice. I’d written a different death scene for her early on, but as I got deeper into the first draft, I realized it was way too similar to what I ended up writing for Caprice. I briefly thought about letting Ann off the hook, but I knew how I wanted the numbers to come out, so she still had to go. And it turned out to be, I think, one of the most moving scenes.

  Virginia traces the course of her fate squarely back to the newspaper article about her career as a trail guide. Do you believe there’s always one fateful choice in life that can be treated as the source of everything afterwards? How does that shape your life?

  I do think we have turning points in our lives that we look back on and recognize as significant. The what if of it all. I don’t think there’s just one, and I think that you can make a thousand different choices at a thousand different points in your life and still turn out basically the same. But without question, there are forks in the road, and taking the left side of the fork means you’ll never know what would have happened if you’d taken the right.

  The trial takes a hard turn when Virginia’s past is revealed. How do you think we’re all shaped by the ways we describe the past? Would Virginia’s life be different, for example, if she stopped thinking of the Donner expedition as the Very Bad Thing from her past? Are those stories more important to us individually or to the people around us?

  I think if Virginia hadn’t been running away from that past she would never have made the choice to go to the Arctic, for better or worse. If she’d been ho
nest with herself about how deeply it scarred her to see civilization fall apart in that way, she would have run farther away from adventure, not toward it. The real-life Virginia Reed, from the accounts I’ve read, settled down into a more traditional family life, got married, had children. Was she making peace with her past or avoiding it? I have no idea. But how our pasts affect how other people see us, yes. That’s a big part of what I wanted to address. On the expedition, if Virginia’s past had been common knowledge, I think her fellow adventurers definitely would have treated her differently. But by the time the survivors were there to support her during her trial, that revelation didn’t change anything. They already knew everything they needed to know.

  What have you learned about writing, now that you’re publishing your fourth novel? How has your process changed since The Magician’s Lie? What has stayed the same?

  As I mentioned before, I’ve learned a lot about not letting the forward momentum of your writing grind to a halt in order to do your research! And it’s funny, after The Magician’s Lie, I told myself I’d stick to writing books told only in straightforward chronological order—so Girl in Disguise was that way, but the first half of Woman 99 has all these in-depth flashbacks that form an earlier timeline, and then in this book, I’m just flinging timelines and POVs all over the place. Whatever serves the story, that’s what I’m going to do.

  What’s next on your to-read list? Anything that might hint at your next project?

  I’m always reading three or four different books at once, so some might be more relevant than others! I can say that I’m in the early stages of deciding what my next work of historical fiction will focus on, and I may have checked out a few library books on nineteenth-century New Orleans.