And yes, his father lived, but was failing.
Skye choked.
“Why should I go back there, risk my liberty, sir?”
“Because you must. We’ve friends in the right places. I had an HBC man approach the king’s chancellor, Lord Pims, directly about it. We told his lordship that you’d prospered with the Yanks, that you’ve a stout heart and the destiny of Empire may hinge on fetching you back and jacking you to command. The Oregon country’s up for grabs and jointly claimed by the Yanks and ourselves. We made the case, and Lord Pims will see to the royal pardon. Mere form, actually.”
Skye listened, amazed that so much whirled around his person. “Who are my adversaries and what might go wrong?”
“Simpson, George Simpson, up in York Factory. He sees no good in you and he’d clap you in irons the moment he lays eyes on you. He’s not only the governor of HBC in America, but he’s also the king’s man. He rules the territory by leave of King George. If he catches you and sends you off to England, there’s not a thing I could do. He’s the law. We must obey it. That’s why I’m not sending you back via York Factory or Hudson’s Bay, but around the Horn.”
“Who else?”
“Count on envy to make enemies, Mister Skye. I’m passing over a dozen men.”
“Why do you trust me?”
“I don’t, entirely. If you go to London, get your pardon, see your family, and fail to return to us, then I’ll know the measure of you.”
“My circumstance also requires trust. Will I arrive in England and be clapped in irons?”
“The admiralty would like it—if they knew of it. They don’t. So far, this is between you, me, my contact on the board of governors of HBC, and Lord Pims. No one else knows.”
Skye sighed. This forceful man seemed the soul of honesty, yet a man of cunning and a thousand schemes.
“How will all this happen?” he asked curtly.
“In two days our schooner, under Emilius Simpson, sets sail. You’ll be on it. He won’t have any idea you’re a seaman and you obviously won’t reveal it. Your past must remain obscure.”
“I have a family here.”
“A family, a family?”
“Victoria and our dog.”
“Victoria should go with you if you feel she can master it. My women have, easily. Marguerite is, for all intents, a white woman. But the dog, that’s up to the master of the Cadboro.”
“I’ll ask him, then.”
“By all means. And if he says no, we could subsist the dog here and you’d be reunited in less than two years,” the factor added.
Skye didn’t like that. Something bad was crawling through his mind.
“We’re penniless. I don’t even have my rifle. We have nothing for passage.”
“Three fine horses, Mister Skye.”
Skye nodded.
“Here’s what they’ll fetch you. A fine suit of clothes and a spare frock coat and boots; two dresses, slippers, shoes, nightgown, and everything else required to outfit a lady for London, including a shawl. A good beaver hat, to replace the, ah, unsuitable one. A few pounds of traveling cash. A mug of soap, brush and razor, and any other toiletries you and Mrs. Skye might require. Good Scottish wool capes to keep you warm around the Horn and in England.
“We’ll keep your dog, if need be, and outfit you for work when you return. I’ll do an accounting: the value of the saddle horses is considerable here, and we are short and willing to pay a hundred Yank dollars, or twenty pounds, apiece. Sixty pounds will buy you the finest wardrobes this post can supply—and we can do you up, believe me. You’ll sail to London and return, debt-free, but with an obligation.”
Skye pondered that, half liking it, half itchy and unhappy.
McLoughlin pressed further. “Time’s flying, sir. It’ll take every hour of tomorrow to fit you out. The women are fine seamstresses, but not even they could outfit Mrs. Skye in less than a day.”
Skye hesitated.
McLoughlin pulled a folder close and extracted a letter.
“Here, sir.”
Skye held it to the lamp so he could read. He needed spectacles but no such thing could be found in the mountains.
It was dated October, the year previous.
“To my son, Barnaby, wherever you might be …”
Barnaby Skye’s hand trembled. At the base of the brief letter he discerned his father’s own signature, crabbed and thick.
A kind gentleman from Hudson’s Bay Company has sought me out to tell me that you live somewhere in North America, and all the rest. We thought you were dead, the victim of some foul waterfront deed. Your mother and I grieved.
But that is the past. She is gone now, having left us in eighteen and twenty-nine, never knowing that you lived. May she rest with the angels. The rest of us live, though my health is precarious, dropsy and gout afflicting me.
I rejoice in this news, and urge you to come home swiftly, while time remains for me to behold you with my own eyes. The gentlemen have apprised me of your difficulties and assure me that the matter can be remedied in the king’s chancery. We yearn to see you, and wish you Godspeed in your long journey. With this news, God has granted me my fondest wish.
With most loving affection,
Your father,
Edward Barnaby Skye.
Skye read it, and again, and let the memories of the man who had sired him flood through him. His sire would be old now, and his slim sisters would be fleshy. Something deep and primal stirred in him. He would go. And he would accept the costs and consequences and risks.
twenty–five
Victoria marveled at the skill of the several women who swiftly sewed her new clothing. That day they hurried her into a room where seven of them had gathered, measured her and set to work.
“These are the latest fashions from London,” explained Marguerite McLoughlin.
“What is latest? This I do not understand.”
“White women are forever changing their way of dressing. What is good one year is bad the next.”
“That is very strange,” Victoria said. “They are all mad.”
That evoked some smiles and a giggle or two.
They fitted her first for a woolen winter dress of stiff gray fabric, and then for two dresses of cotton. And several of them had dug into their own chests and given her assorted accessories and underthings. One supplied a broad-brimmed straw hat sporting an extravagant feather much larger than any Victoria had ever seen.
“The feather is from Africa,” someone told her.
“What is Africa?”
“I don’t know.”
Victoria discovered that these women sewed clothing in much the way as her Absaroka sisters made it. Two of these women were white, the rest were women of the Peoples, or breeds, such as Marguerite.
“What is England like?” she asked, but they did not know.
The two white women were Canadians and had never seen England.
“I would not want to go there,” said one Cree woman. “They would look down on me.”
Victoria supposed that might be true. Skye had desperately tried to tell her everything he could about London, but she only grew confused. She finally realized she didn’t know what he was talking about. He could not explain things she could not imagine. She could not even think about their King George, and what he did, and the people surrounding him. And when he described Parliament, she thought of a council of elders passing the pipe and speaking in turn, and that proved to be mostly wrong.
So she would have to see. And learn. But, she reminded herself, he had to learn the ways of her Kicked-in-the-Belly band of Absarokas, and he had been strange and shocking to her people for many months until he learned the ways, the rituals, and especially what was sacred and deserved uttermost respect.
She knew what she would do: be silent. She would not get into much trouble in this London if she said nothing and was careful to imitate the conduct she saw around her.
But the seamstresses at Fo
rt Vancouver tried anyway to explain matters.
“When you enter a church, you should wear a hat or a veil,” one said.
“What’s this church?”
“A building where they worship God.”
“What is worship?”
This went on through the morning, and by noontime she knew less about Skye’s people than before, because everything she thought she knew proved untrue. One thing she knew: everything white people did was vastly more complicated than her own ways, especially making medicine and talking to the spirits and the winds. When the women finally dressed her in all the proper underthings and the gray woolen dress, she felt constricted and anchored down. Her own durable, supple fringed doeskin dress with its quillwork was stronger, more comfortable, and more beautiful to the eye, and she didn’t have to wear layers of little skirts under it.
But the women swarmed over her, fitting the clothing, adding a hat and gloves, and then led her to a looking glass.
Victoria shrank back from the image. She knew this was not herself.
“What the hell do I do when I must go to the bushes?” she asked. “Three of these little skirts and these pants?” She laughed maliciously.
None of them had been to England, so no one knew. They knew of chamber pots and privies, but little else.
Skye would know and she would ask him.
Later that afternoon she found him but barely recognized him. He wore a dove-gray cutaway coat with a double row of black buttons, black vest, a white shirt, blue britches, black leather shoes, and his battered beaver top hat had been exchanged for a glossy new one. He had lost his beard, too, and gazed at her from a smooth and ruddy face.
“Sonofabitch!” she yelled. “You some big medicine man!”
He grinned.
They laughed. She had never seen Skye looking like this. He had never seen her looking like a white woman. Suddenly Skye was a British gentleman; suddenly she was a dusky British lady. She took his arm and they promenaded round about the confines of the fort, following the footsteps of the bagpiper the night before.
That had been a terror. At sundown that first night she had heard the strangest howl, a noise that sent a chill through the marrow of her bones. Skye was closeted with McLoughlin and she didn’t know what to do, so she slammed the door of their small apartment and waited. But the howl droned on, never stopping, like the groan of a dying dog, but there was more to it. She heard a whining melody, soft and cruel, like the wailing of mourners when her people lifted a dead person into its scaffold, and this wail sent chills through her. The yellow cur lifted its nose to the sky and howled.
Still, no one seemed alarmed. She heard no shouts, no running, no clamors, no war-cries. She softly opened the door a crack and peered out upon the dusky yard of the post, and there she beheld a man in a skirt, holding some fiendish device, walking in measured paces about the perimeter of the post. Then she had understood: he was a medicine man, chasing away the devils of the night, scaring the wandering spirits away from the post so the people could sleep in peace. Ah! A holy man!
She had watched this strange man, with the strange skirt and strange cap on his head, and this fiendish machine piping away the evils of the underworld, and she knew it was well. Skye had never mentioned this custom to her and she had planned to ask him about it. But she forgot, because when he returned to their apartment, he was filled with his meeting with McLoughlin, and that is what they babbled about.
But now Skye was strolling with her on the very path the medicine man with the fiendish device had paced so slowly that she had wondered if he were ill.
“What was that noise I heard last night?” she asked.
“What noise?”
“Like a hundred dying wolves.”
He brightened. “Bagpiper. An old Scots custom.”
“A medicine man?”
“You could say that,” he said. “I haven’t heard one since I was a lad. Call it a warrior’s pipe. It’s a big flute.”
“Ah! It terrifies the enemy.”
He explained what he knew of the piper, but she understood little. Maybe she would learn more in this London.
“You look very beautiful,” he said, with some strange feeling in his voice.
“I do?”
“You … remind me of my sisters.”
That disappointed her. She wanted him to like her as an Absaroka woman, not someone wrapped in these strange clothes that scratched and tortured her.
“I don’t like your stuff,” she said.
She saw some sadness in his face. He lifted his top hat and settled it. “We’ll be coming back soon. Soon you’ll be wearing your beautiful doeskin dresses and I’ll be very happy.”
“And you?”
“I confess I enjoy these clothes. I am, for the moment, a man of parts.”
“Well, goddamit, let’s go.”
No Name found them and growled his disapproval.
Skye turned silent.
The dog chose a path between them, his pace matching theirs as they hiked around the vast yard.
She knew that silence. Whenever Skye was torn, he turned silent, and now he was terribly torn.
“They will feed him,” she said.
But she didn’t believe it. This yellow dog was a spirit-animal and such a creature had to go wherever its brothers went. But tomorrow they were going somewhere no dog could go.
They pierced the great gate, strolled down the gentle slope to the riverbank, and stared at the schooner bobbing there at anchor. The dog followed, whining once and then trembling.
The ocean canoe looked mighty to her, another wonder of the white men, but Skye was not impressed.
“This isn’t much of a ship,” he said. “Big merchant ship would be thirty or forty feet longer and ten or fifteen wider at the beam. This is a little thing for a big ocean. I wonder how the company can store a year’s worth of furs in that hold.”
She couldn’t imagine a larger vessel.
“But she’s seaworthy,” he continued, talking to himself. “And she’ll run. She’s rigged to run, fore and aft sails …”
The dog was trembling.
She reached to touch its head, and the moment her hand touched the dog, it quieted.
“You must find a way to take him, Skye,” she said.
“It will be up to the master.”
“If he says no, we shouldn’t go.”
They stopped their stroll.
“Sometimes a man has to do hard things, Victoria. Give up something to receive something larger. I’m prepared to leave the dog behind if I must.”
She didn’t reply at first. Then she said, “He will not give you up. If he would give you his name, then he would be an ordinary dog you could give up. Any ordinary dog has a name. That is what names are for. If this dog had a name, you could leave him with McLoughlin. But he has withheld his name and that means he is bound to you for all of his life. He is not just a dog. He is a dog appointed to watch over you. He is more important to you than I am.”
“That cannot be, Victoria.”
“But it is so,” she said, her tone adamant.
The dog was trembling again, and her heart was heavy.
twenty–six
Skye stood on the teak deck of a fine schooner, feeling joy. He was on his way to London to recover his good name. He was an Englishman returning home. He had a future assured in North America, working for a mighty English company. He could return to his homeland in the future. He would see his father and sisters and cousins and return to the bosom of his family. He would see nephews and nieces he had never seen.
He would not lose Victoria or his new life, either. She would go with him and return to her native land with him, and see her own family and tribe a year or so hence. No Name would remain. Skye had tried to win passage for the dog, but the master, Simpson, had flatly refused.
“I’ve never shipped a dirty dog, suh, and never will,” the master had said.
McLoughlin had agreed to keep th
e animal. No Name would be waiting for Skye here in this massive post.
As he stood at the rail watching the crew smartly prepare to sail, he beheld almost the whole population of this amazing outpost. Several hundred men and women, not least of them the White Eagle, were watching the departure of the ship that linked them to the Mother Country so far distant; the ship that came but once a year and a half, bearing amenities and news of loved ones, as well as the staples of life. Skye waved one last farewell to Nutmeg, who waved back, full of good cheer.
No Name had tried to follow Skye out the short wharf and up the gangway, but two bosuns turned him back and then the dog slinked back to the riverbank and watched quietly. Skye was relieved: this would be all right. The good doctor would look after the strange creature.
Victoria held his hand, resolute in the midst of her fears.
“You have courage,” he whispered to her. “We’ll be back.”
She didn’t smile. This trip was for her like sailing over the lip of the world. But it wasn’t the trip that held her; it was the dog, watching them mournfully from the shore, its head tucked between its front paws, forgotten by all the excited crowd of Indians, voyageurs, farmhands, clerks, and laborers collected in knots before the fort.
He knew he would not forget this spectacle, this bright October day, this vast panorama.
A breeze freshened even as Emilius Simpson’s topmen raised the canvas. The master wore white kid gloves and stood quietly on the quarterdeck watching his hands twist the capstan that raised the anchor, while others looked to the sails.
Skye watched them carefully, knowing his life would be in the hands of this crew, and was satisfied. Simpson’s quiet demeanor said much. The man radiated iron command in a curious way, as if some great reserve of force lay behind his gentle direction. He addressed his chief mate and bosuns, or deck officers, softly, but there would be no questioning this master’s order. The kid-gloved hands occasionally squeezed shut, only to open again. It was as if Simpson needed the layer of soft leather to separate the duties of his hands from the rest of himself. Such as holding a whip.
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