The Captain's Frozen Dream

by Georgie Lee

‘You never help me with gentlemen, you only drive them off, like you and Uncle Jack did with Mr Eversham,’ Matilda spat, still clinging to the perceived slight after all these years.

  ‘If the sheriff had been more interested in you than your small inheritance, and not kept three mistresses, one of whom was with child, we wouldn’t have chased him away.’ Matilda had always been a poor judge of character, throwing her lot in with anyone who showed her the least bit of attention, especially if they held a modicum of influence. His aunt, on her deathbed, had asked Conrad to look out for Matilda and he’d done his best to keep his promise. Yet Matilda always wanted him to do what no one but she could—make her more palatable to others, especially men.

  ‘Better the wife of a cheating man than a spinster.’ Matilda pouted.

  ‘Fine, I’ll make the introduction.’ He moved to approach Mr Rukin and mollify his cousin when Mr Stockton stopped him.

  ‘Captain Essington, where is Miss Vickers?’ The short, balding gentleman glanced around the room, then focused back on Conrad. ‘We haven’t seen anything of your fiancée since your return.’

  ‘She’s decided to remain in the country for the time being.’ In the excitement surrounding his resurrection, there’d been no good time to announce the end of his engagement and he’d found a fake fiancée useful for keeping enamoured women and eager gossips at bay.

  ‘Yes, well, it’s probably better she elected to remain in the country,’ Mr Stockton remarked with a knowing raise of one bushy eyebrow.

  Conrad didn’t demand the secretary explain himself, he didn’t need to. He’d never asked anyone to relate the exact rumours surrounding Katie and no one, not even Matilda, had been brave enough to offer him details. However, he’d caught the hint of them in comments and sideways glances from members like Mr Stockton. Conrad didn’t give a fig for their twittering; it was his uncle’s interest which kept him silent about the rift between him and Katie. Once his uncle returned from the Continent and Conrad at last made his break with Katie public, the man would gloat over his success. It was the single victory his uncle would ever enjoy over him, the one Katie had handed to him when she’d walked out of Heims Hall in the middle of the night.

  Conrad shifted the medal away from his neck again when a sight at the back of the room shocked him still.

  ‘Are you all right, Captain Essington?’ Mr Stockton asked. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’

  ‘I think I have.’ Conrad strode off towards the woman, keeping the blonde curls in sight as best he could through the ever-shifting throng of people.

  ‘Excuse me.’ He pushed his way through the crowd, his rising anger quickening his steps. He would not have this, not here, not today when he was already struggling to maintain his calm and not bolt from the room. ‘What are you doing here?’

  He caught the woman by the arm and swung her around, letting go as a pair of startled green eyes met his.

  ‘Oh, Captain Essington,’ the woman exclaimed, her indignation melting into admiration.

  Conrad locked his arms at his sides. ‘I’m sorry, miss, I thought you were someone else.’ I thought you were Katie.

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about.’ The woman tilted her head and batted her long eyelashes at him. ‘I’m quite an admirer of yours.’

  You shouldn’t be, no one should.

  ‘Thank you.’ He forced the words through a tight jaw. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’

  He wound his way through the crowd to the front of the library in a daze, too stunned by the force of his reaction to acknowledge the many congratulations tossed at him as he passed. If a woman with the same shade of blonde hair as Katie’s could rattle him into forgetting himself, and in public no less, what weakness might the real Katie elicit from him?

  Stopping to speak with Mr Rukin, he shoved the worry and so many others deep inside him. There was no reason to concern himself with it, he wasn’t likely to see Katie again.

  * * *

  Conrad balled his hands into fists and rested his knuckles on the cool desktop, steadying himself against the shock threatening to undo him. It’d been three days since the Naturalist Society ceremony and the encounter with the woman he’d mistaken for Katie. Both had brought up a bevy of grief and concerns which had kept Conrad pacing the floors for the last few nights, leaving him in no mood to face the very woman who’d haunted his dreams as much as the Arctic. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to congratulate you.’ Katie twisted the opal ring on her finger as she stood across the desk from him, her face a mask of contrition he almost mistook as genuine. ‘I read about your election to president of the Naturalist Society, and the publication of your expedition report.’

  ‘I’m sure you haven’t come here simply to congratulate me,’ he said in a measured voice, determined to maintain more control than he’d exhibited at the Naturalist Society.

  ‘No, I need your help.’ She shifted on her feet, her discomfort offering him little joy. ‘I didn’t know who else to approach.’

  ‘Why? Is Mr Prevett no longer eager to assist you?’

  She winced and inwardly so did Conrad. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t care for you, Conrad, only I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t make the same mistakes my mother did.’

  Conrad narrowed his eyes at her. ‘So I’m now nothing more to you than a mistake?’

  ‘No, you were so much more.’ She spread out her hands, pleading with him to understand, but he refused.

  ‘Go back to Whitemans Green. I can be of no assistance to you.’ Conrad sat down at his desk and took up his pen, determined to return to the despised journal and give Mr Barrow his damned book. He dipped the nib in the ink and began to copy out a passage about the fierceness with which winter had arrived. Weakness crept into his hand as he formed each word and only with the greatest pressure did he keep the nib steady. He waited for Katie to leave, expected it, silently demanded it, but she stubbornly remained.

  ‘I can’t go back,’ she said, her voice sombre enough to make Conrad’s pen pause over the parchment. ‘I sold Father’s fossil collection and gave up the house. There was no other way to settle his debt or keep from creating new ones.’

  Conrad looked up from his work, shocked again by the exhaustion whitening her cheeks. It seemed she’d slept as poorly as he had since leaving the country. The idea of it should have offered him some sense of vindication, but it didn’t. He flipped closed the journal, wishing he were as hard as some of the captains he’d served under during his first years in the Navy. He shouldn’t care about her, or her plight, but he couldn’t help it, any more than he could turn his back on any man who’d ever been under his command and fallen on hard times. ‘Where are you living now?’

  ‘With my widowed aunt in Cheapside.’

  ‘And your American collectors?’

  ‘We still correspond, but with the distance, their patronage isn’t enough to sustain me.’

  ‘What about your mother’s family?’

  ‘I wrote to them, but they ignored my letter, like every other one I’ve ever sent them.’ A sadness he recognised choked her words. He knew such isolation, it surrounded him now. ‘Even if they did deign to respond, they aren’t going to consort with a woman whose reputation has been savaged by the Marquis of Helton.’

  ‘If you’d believed in me the way I once believed in you, I would have made it right,’ he reminded her with an edge of disgust he couldn’t suppress.

  ‘Then do so now and help me.’ She faced him with a bravery he grudgingly admired. It revealed something of the old Katie, the one who hadn’t let her sex, her father or anything stop her from pursuing her dreams, a woman who in so many ways reminded him of himself. ‘I’ve been studying the creature from the drawings I did at Heims Hall, but they, and the few books I’ve secured, aren’t enough to finish my research. I need to
see the bones and gain access to the Naturalist Society library. If I can publish my paper, showcase what I know and what I can draw, prove to the men I’m as talented as they are, then maybe I can gain work as an illustrator, or find some esteemed gentleman to hire me to catalogue his collection.’

  Conrad didn’t answer right away. The image of her at the table in the conservatory, her slender back curved while her blonde hair fell forward, her light breathing matched by the faint scratch of her pencil against the paper, rose up to tease him. It was crushed by the anguish he’d experienced when he’d awakened to find she’d run out on him. ‘I can’t help you.’

  ‘You must. You owe me.’

  ‘I owe you?’ He tossed down the pen and jumped to his feet. ‘I offered to help you, to assist you in your work, to make you my partner in life and give you the security of my name. You rejected it all, then threw everything you meant to me and my efforts to come home to you in my face. Now you have the temerity to demand favours from me?’

  ‘It was my aunt’s idea,’ she stuttered, her bravery wilting beneath his outburst.

  ‘Then you’re both very mistaken about my regard for you, or any desire I have to assist you.’ Conrad jammed the pen in its stand, working to regain his calm, afraid if he didn’t Katie might see the weakness inside him, the one threatening to chew out his insides. He rounded the desk and marched into the entrance hall. ‘Mr Moore, please see Miss Vickers out.’

  The butler pulled open the door and the dim light of the gathering November clouds crept in beneath the warmth of the candles.

  Katie walked slowly into the hall, stopping in front of Conrad. ‘You’re right, I shouldn’t have come. I won’t trouble you again.’

  She fled into the crush of people passing on the street.

  Mr Moore swung closed the door and Conrad flinched as the brass lock clicked shut, the finality of it as striking as when the tent flap had closed behind Aaron.

  He returned to his study and stood over the desk, forcing himself to look past the water-stained journal to the framed nautical chart on the wall. He’d failed his men by pushing north past the date they should have sailed south and getting them trapped in the ice. He might have found a way home, but he never should have risked trapping them in the first place, just as he shouldn’t have made promises to Katie he couldn’t keep. He’d once vowed to keep her safe from his uncle, and anyone else who might look down on the daughter of a country doctor for daring to marry the nephew of a marquis. It was the promise he’d made to gain her acceptance of his proposal, the one he hadn’t been able to keep.

  The image of Katie’s blue eyes pleading for his help before he’d dismissed her haunted him. Whatever had happened in the past six weeks, it had increased the despair which had marked her at Heims Hall. He’d never seen her so desperate or gaunt. He knew what deprivation did to a man and his soul, the lengths it might drive him to, including the extinction of his very being in an effort to free himself from misery. Aaron had chosen death over another day marching through snow and starvation in search of a ship or whaling station Conrad couldn’t guarantee existed. If Katie was desperate enough to come to him, what might she do?

  * * *

  Katie wandered down the street, the weariness which had dogged her since coming to London making each step more laborious. Approaching Conrad had been her last hope and now it was gone. Without the Naturalist Society and access to the bones, there was no chance of completing her paper, gaining employment or doing anything more than falling deeper into the poverty threatening to overwhelm her. Aunt Florence was kind enough to allow Katie to stay with her, but her aunt’s means were limited. Her aunt augmented her meagre inheritance from her husband by taking in sewing, but even in this Katie couldn’t assist her. Her mother, having grown up with servants and dressmakers, had possessed few domestic arts to pass on to Katie. Even if she’d known how to wield a needle, she would have had to have roused herself from her gloom long enough to sit patiently with a child and teach.

  The knowledge of fossils and her ability to draw were the only skills Katie possessed, but with no connections and a tattered reputation, she wasn’t likely to find work. One option was fast becoming the only path open to her.

  She glanced down the street to where it ended at the river. The tall masts of ships were visible in the gaps between the buildings lining the muddy banks. Each day she studied the schedule of ships leaving for America, memorising their dates of departures, fares and expected travelling times. If she wished to reach America before Mr Lesueur set off, she must book passage within the next two weeks or even this opportunity would be gone.

  Katie watched the tall mast of a ship slide behind a building, the round crow’s nest at the top the only thing visible over the lead roof. There was just enough money left from the sale of her father’s things to pay for the journey, but she wasn’t prepared to leave yet. If she reached America, and Mr Lesueur had already set off, she’d be destitute on a foreign shore, though she wasn’t sure being poor in America would be any worse than her current situation. With Conrad refusing to help, there wasn’t much left for her in England and little reason to delay the voyage.

  With heavy steps Katie started off towards Cheapside. People bumped and pushed her as they passed, irritated by her slow pace, but there was no point hurrying. The research was the one thing which had kept her going during the past six weeks, the thing she’d turn to each night after spending the day packing up her father’s collection and seeing it off. As the collection departed, the house had grown even more lonely and empty than before. In her small bed at night, the peace she’d experienced in Conrad’s embrace had mocked her and more than once she’d regretted both surrendering to him and her fears.

  With her thumb, she flicked the band of the opal ring through her thin glove, Conrad’s nasty words making her cringe. Never in all their time together had he treated her so callously, though she deserved his scorn. He was right, he’d opened himself to her and she’d forsaken him, running out the way her mother had done to her and her father, but she couldn’t have stayed, even if it meant security. Her father had been attentive to her mother until they’d married, then he’d forgotten her, too absorbed with his work to feed her the small kindnesses on which love thrived. Katie couldn’t suffer the same tragedy, or spend another year wondering if the man she loved would ever return.

  ‘Katie, wait,’ a deep voice called from behind her, the sound nearly lost in the din of horses and carts jamming the street.

  She turned to catch Conrad weaving his way through the crowd, apologising to the ladies and gentlemen he passed until the fast fall of his boots on the pavement grew louder than the cries of the hawkers. He stopped in front of her and a dangerous feeling curled inside her at the sight of him. He wore his hair longer than before and swept back from his strong forehead. A new coat of fine tan wool covered his torso and a crisp white cravat sat tucked beneath his cleft chin. He was fuller through the cheeks, having regained a good measure of the weight he’d lost on his expedition. The change in his appearance was enough to keep her fixed to the pavement though she wanted to run from him, her problems and all the troubles dogging her.

  ‘Allow me to escort you home.’ His offer was as bewildering as her strong reaction to him.

  ‘No, you were right, you owe me nothing. It’s best if we part ways.’ She moved to leave, but he caught her by the arm, pulling her back from the kerb.

  ‘I do owe you. It was my uncle who did the damage to your reputation and it’s up to me to put it right.’ He let go of her, but the pressure of his hand on her arm remained. ‘I’m sorry if I was harsh. The last six weeks have not been easy for me.’

  Katie wanted to ask why, but she bit back the question. Whatever it was which clouded his eyes with sadness was none of her concern, though she wanted to chase it away, as she had his nightmare at Heims Hall. Despite their differences, she
didn’t want him to suffer.

  ‘I’ve thought over your proposal and believe I can be of some help to you.’ He waved down a passing hack, drawing her to the edge of the kerb as the driver manoeuvred the vehicle to a stop in front of them.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted his help, or if she should accept it. It’d been a mistake allowing her aunt to convince her to see him. All it had done was dredge up the awkwardness of their parting and all the damage it had done to both of them. ‘You don’t have to help me.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have my reasons.’ They no doubt had more to do with thwarting his uncle than assisting her. ‘Now come along.’

  He placed his hand on her back and urged her into the hackney. She didn’t resist, but stepped inside the musty vehicle. If his change of heart was merely a chance to strike at the marquis for the many transgressions he’d made against Conrad and his family, it didn’t matter. He was offering her his help and she needed it.

  He settled in beside her in the cramped hack, his arm pressing up against hers, the lack of space between them as unsettling as his unexpected change of mind.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, trying to shift away, but there was nowhere to go.

  ‘The Naturalist Society.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘The present is always the best time.’

  ‘I don’t have my notes or my things.’

  He threw her an encouraging smile. ‘You don’t need them, I know you don’t.’

  Katie gripped the strap above the window, more to steady her nerves than her body. The man who sat beside her now wasn’t the one who’d looked on her with such hate and anger in his house a short while ago. This was the Conrad she’d first fallen in love with, the one who could take command of any situation and make her feel safe and protected. It was confusing to find him beside her again. ‘You’re right, I don’t.’

  She could recall nearly every word of what she’d written, each hypothesis she’d laid out and the evidence she needed to prove it. With the resources of the Naturalist Society, she could prove her theory, assuming Conrad succeeded in escorting her inside. ‘Are you sure they’ll allow me in as your guest?’