Wild Wind Westward
Vanessa Royall
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
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New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1982 by M.T. Hinkemeyer
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition September 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-416-5
More from Vanessa Royall
Come Faith, Come Fire
Flames of Desire
Fires of Delight
Seize the Dawn
Firebrand’s Woman
The Passionate and the Proud
To Al, Joan, Jim, and Suze
During the nineteenth century the towns grew; Norway filled up with landless men, storekeepers, sheriffs, moneylenders, bailiffs, notaries in black with stiff collars and briefcases full of foreclosures under their arms. Industries were coming in. The townsmen were beginning to get profits out of the country and to finagle the farmers out of the freedom of their narrow farms.
The meanspirited submitted as tenants, daylaborers; but the strong men went out of the country as their fathers had gone out of the country centuries before when Harald the Fairhaired and Saint Olaf hacked to pieces the liberties of the Northern men, who had been each man lord of his own creek, only in the old days it was Iceland, Greenland, Vineland the Northmen sailed to; now it was America.
From: U.S.A.
John Dos Passos
Prologue
Adolphus Rolfson and his son, Gustav, rested their wet and blown horses on a high meadow overlooking the little village of Lesja, in Norway. The village nestled in a lush valley that followed the S-shaped curve of the Rauma River. Father and son had come a long way to this valley and this village, from Oslo in the south, because the time was right, they were ready to make their strike, and they wanted to savor the sweet sensation of victory over these stubborn, independent mountaineers.
Victory had been a long time coming, too. But now, in June of 1860, all the machinations were prepared, all the bribes had been delivered, and everything lay in readiness for a stunning series of land acquisitions that would make the name Rolfson a power throughout Scandinavia. And that was only the beginning! Europe, and the world, were poised upon the brink of an era of industry and business hitherto undreamed. To those bold enough to seize, the day, to take command of the new forces moving in the world, would go fortunes compared to which the legendary gold of Midas would seem a couple of copper coins at the bottom of a jar.
Adolphus Rolfson had no doubt that he was one of those selected by destiny to build commercial empires. These he would pass along to his handsome, charming, arrogant son—a fine, hard boy, and how he could stare a man down—until, in not too long a time, the name Rolfson would be emblazoned on properties all over the globe. Today the village of Lesja; tomorrow the world. Adolphus was going to achieve his dream, by God, and too bad for anyone who got in his way.
“See that mountain range to the north of the Rauma Valley,” he said to his son, pointing. “Once we get our hands on those pastures and the timberlands beyond, there’ll be no stopping us.” He shifted slightly in his saddle, which was made of the finest English leather, leaned over, and, as if accentuating the vehemence of his ambition with a small, crude gesture, shot a gleaming brown swath of tobacco juice down upon the rocks of the trail.
Gustav looked away momentarily. He respected the old man, and had worshiped him once, but the habit of tobacco-chewing was not one designed to ingratiate those who occupied the high places he intended to enter. Gustav himself appreciated a fine cigar. But he also knew that his irascible father supported his every ambition, and had, in fact, gone to considerable expense to eradicate from him some of the sharp, crude habits of a rougher time. Not all of those habits, however.
“I’m pleased you asked me to accompany you on this trip,” Gustav said to his father. “Perhaps I’ll find pleasure in one of these mountain wenches.”
“Find your pleasure in the business of foreclosures first,” growled the older man, but then he smiled to himself. He had never been able to conceal, not even behind a hard-bitten severity that was far more than façade, the indulgent delight he took in his only son. And he knew already, from previous, solitary trips to Lesja, trips during which he had set up the great trap he was now about to spring, that the village held a young woman to whom his son would be immediately attracted: Kristin Arnesdatter, just eighteen, eldest child of the poor farmer Arne Vendahl.
“You are amused, father?”
“What’s that?”
“I saw you smile.”
“Anticipation. Simple anticipation, boy. For you as well as myself. Now the horses are somewhat rested. Let us ride down into the village and keep our appointment with solicitor Thorsen. He will have ali the proper legal papers ready to serve upon the…villagers.”
He had almost said “victims.”
The two men touched with steel spurs the still-glistening flanks of the bays they rode, and began their descent along the stony trail into the village. It was rocky country, indeed, seldom offering more than subsistence to the people who farmed it, unless the something more was freedom and independence. But Adolphus had no use for freedom and independence, not someone else’s anyway, and he found the hard earth quite charming. He had known for some time, since his hired German surveyors had completed their work, that just beneath these mountains and pastures and hard, rocky hills lay iron and copper and nickel, metals for which the factory barons of Europe would pay vast ransoms of gold.
June was a gorgeous month here in the north. The long, dark winter was forgotten; the body-breaking cold, the soul-numbing burden of eternal midnight were cast aside. The sun reached its zenith, and on Summer Solstice, longest day of the year, the people celebrated with spirits and dancing and song, just as the residents of a Mediterranean town might observe the feast of a special saint. But the citizens of little Lesja might not party so happily this year, thought Adolphus, with grim satisfaction, as he and his son galloped into the village, scattering chickens and a few pigs and blond, blue-eyed children who scrambled away from the pounding horses. The children showed no fear—strong mountain youngsters seldom did—but they regarded with a watchfulness close to suspicion these two riders, the wide old husky one and the tall lean hard one, knowing by instinct that the strangers were related. Knowing by instinct and also by an unusual feature shared by father and son: a hard flat bony bridge of nose, which seemed to set their small eyes farther apart, like those of wolves.
The Rolfsons reined in their horses before one of the grandest houses in Lesja, a narrow, two-story, four-chimney structure of the finest mountain pine, with wide stone steps and a balcony outside the fashionable French doors on the second floor. Adolphus, who had spent his youth sleeping with animals for the heat of their bodies in a ramshackle building that was half barn, half house, thought the French doors grand indeed, but young Gustav did not care, even remotely, for anything that suggested the French. He admired the English; he had even learned the language.
A sign above the main door of the house said:
LARS THORSEN, SOLICITOR IN THE LAW
and Lars Thorsen himself appeared in the doorway beneath his sign, bustling down the wide steps and yelling
for a stablehand, who came on the run from a barn behind the house.
“Here! Here!” cried Thorsen, grabbing the reins and handing them to the servant. “See to these horses! See to these horses!” He spoke to the stableboy as if the young man had never cared for a horse before, and, even if he had, would certainly find a way to mishandle the task this time. Solicitor Thorsen spoke to all subordinates in this scornful, and yet somewhat patronizing manner. He was a stocky, balding, red-bearded tyrant to anyone he considered inferior to him. But to those above him, or to those from whom he conspired to gain something—occasionally approbation but more often money or power—he could appear to be a fawning, bowing lackey, managing in spite of his bulky body to convey fussy obsequiousness.
He looked, to the Rolfsons, like an old red-haired hound, all too amenable, all too eager to please.
And that was very good.
“Let’s go inside directly,” snapped old Adolphus, swinging stiffly from his horse. Too old to be in the saddle so long a time. “I want an immediate accounting of the situation.”
Something about Thorsen’s manner caught the eye of young Gustav, who had trained himself to watch for weakness, and to strike when he saw it. “What’s wrong?” he demanded of the solicitor, who, after a couple of gulps and swallows, managed only: “Nothing. No, nothing. All right Let’s go inside,” leaving in the street a group of children watching the fine horses. From the windows of the village houses their parents were watching the closed door of the solicitor’s expensive residence. The mountaineers, these old, hard, honest country farmers, knew. They knew. They knew that the law was at work behind that closed door, and they also knew that the law at work behind a door, especially Thorsen’s, would not be of benefit to them, who waited outside. For the one hundredth time fathers tried to recall the exact wording of the notes they had signed. (Solicitor Thorsen was to have returned copies, but none had been forthcoming.) For the two hundredth time wives glanced worriedly at their husbands, but did not speak out. What good would it have done? What waited, waited.
Inside the house Lars Thorsen couldn’t stop asking the Rolfsons to sit down, have a seat, take their ease. He kept on asking until Gustav interrupted.
“We are seated, solicitor, and have been for some time, as you can well see. Now, answer the question I asked outside. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Thorsen replied in a quavering voice, perspiring freely and dropping into a sturdy straightbacked chair that had a thick cushion to receive the weight of his wide behind.
Old Adolphus leaned forward from his place on the couch upholstered with reindeer hide. His slitty eyes were icy, and his voice was even colder.
“If you fouled this plan for us, Thorsen, the Sonnendahl Fjord will never give up your bones.”
“Sonnendahl Fjord,” repeated a croaking Thorsen.
“What about it?” demanded Gustav, leaning forward, too, just like his father, and fixing the solicitor in a frigid unrelenting gaze.
“That’s…that’s where the trouble is.”
“You had better explain. And damned quickly.”
“Yes. Yes. I meant to. It’s just that…”
Gustav stood up and smacked the heel of his hand against the pistol he wore at his belt.
“Yes, please,” gabbled Thorsen, turning to Adolphus. “You know how it was, sir, when you came here last year posing as a banker and giving notes to tide the farmers over during the bad harvest?”
The old man nodded, and made a grimace that was not unlike a smile. He had given loans to everyone, small loans, asking in repayment terms nothing more than ten percent of the loan payable to him each year for ten years, plus an equal payment of ten percent of the original loan for two more years, as interest. He had, for this, been regarded almost as a savior, just last year when the harvest failed and the cattle stood gaunt and milkless in the pastures. In the original loan documents repayment had been scheduled every September. But the original documents had been altered.
“Did Thorvaldsen fail to forge the new documents?” he demanded.
“No,” bleated Thorsen. “His alterations are expertly done.”
“Did Amundsen turn down the bribe?” he shouted, referring to a local judge who had been handpicked to supervise the court orders of foreclosure.
“No, no.”
“Well, if the altered documents show a repayment date in June, and everything is in order, then I should get the land. We know that all of these farmers signed over their land as collateral, confident that, even with a scattering of bad harvests, they could easily manage to repay small loans in twelve years.”
He sat back against the cushions of the reindeer-hided couch and regarded Thorsen contemptuously.
“I’m…deeply involved in all…this,” blithered the solicitor uncertainly, “I just want to make sure of one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The job you promised me? In Oslo, with your shipping company? Is it still on?”
“Are you going to serve these foreclosure notices here in Lesja or not?” interjected Gustav, staring at the solicitor with his hard blue eyes.
“Yes, but…”
“But? But? It seems damned late for a ‘but.’”
“But I’m afraid!” Thorsen managed, in what sounded like a suppressed sob. Then realizing how, pathetic he must sound, went on: “You see, at Sonnendahl Fjord today—”
“What the hell has this got to do with Sonnendahl Fjord? There’s nothing we want at Sonnendahl Fjord!” shouted Rolfson senior. The fjord was miles to the northeast. Leave it to the fishermen, the dreamers, the lovers of beauty.
“Eric Starbane is at the fjord today. Or he was. He is on his way back to the village now.”
Yes, Starbane, thought Adolphus. The Starbane farmstead, which, according to centuries-old custom, also gave its name to everyone in the family for as long as they owned the land, was small and tidy. Its soil was relatively rich, as well. But, as the German surveyors had reported, the Starbane land rested upon what was most likely the richest deposit of nickel from the North Sea to the Ural mountains of Russia.
“I thought Gunnar Starbane owned that land?”
“He did. But he died. That’s the problem. Unlike most of these people, Eric can read, he can think, and he will fight. I would not put it past him to take this whole matter beyond Amundsen, who, crooked as he is, could still find ways to cow the others.”
“We can handle him,” said Gustav brashly.
“Wait,” cautioned the old man, raising his hand. “Don’t boast until you have seen your enemy. So,” he said to Thorsen. “You’ve had a spy on him?”
“It is a matter of great delicacy.”
“There is no such matter in business, solicitor!”
Thorsen debated with himself for a while, deciding whether or not to reveal his secret, and thus face burdens known only to him, or to chance a loss of the job in Oslo that Rolfson had promised, a fine job in an exciting city, far from the morose drudgery of these mountains. (He had always seen himself as a great man, immersed in high affairs.)
“I am in love with a girl…a woman of the village,” he said, rather sheepishly, as if it were a weakness to be in love.
Adolphus laughed. He guessed the truth immediately.
“And she loves Starbane instead, am I correct?”
Thorsen nodded, flushed, hangdog, downcast.
“And she went today with him to the fjord?” goaded Gustav, snickering. He had never been rejected by a woman. He proceeded forcefully at the first flicker of rejection. Who cared? They might yield, they might fight, they might scream. But they were all the same, were they not?
Old Adolphus, though, had an immediate suspicion. “What is the girl’s name?” he asked.
“Kristin. Arnesdatter. A Vendahl.”
The old man nodded, thinking of the present he had meant for his son, thinking of the golden hair spilling down over her shoulders, over the breasts full and high behind her white peasan
t’s blouse, thinking of the swell and curve of her hips, which were as good as or better than the finest he had known in his day, a day, thank God, upon which the sun had not yet entirely set.
“And did your spy tell you what the two of them, Eric and Kristin, were doing up near Sonnendahl Fjord?” he asked the red-faced, red-bearded lawyer.
Thorsen nodded awhile, and sputtered awhile more, but he finally managed to spit it out. “They were making love,” he said, then added, as if it were a thing of incomprehensible wonder, “They were making love on the cliffs above the fjord. Right there in the open air. In front of God and…”
“And your spy?”
More nodding.
Adolphus thought it over for a minute. “We’ll serve the first foreclosure papers on Eric Gunnarson,” he decided. “If he’s really a troublemaker, we’ll deal harshly with him, and then the rest of these fanners will toe the line.”
“Gunnarson?” asked Gustav. “I thought his name was Starbane.”
“It won’t be after his land is mine.” The old man leered. “That is the custom. Loss of land means loss of name. He will be nothing but some dead man’s son.”
“And someone’s lover,” added Thorsen, uncomfortably.
Part One
Norway,
1860
I
Poised upon the moment of first loving by a man, Kristin Arnesdatter remembered all the words. Her mother’s words. Her father’s words. Quaint Pastor Pringsheim’s words. Even the words of her friends at school. Kristin remembered everything they had ever said about being loved by a man: the obvious danger of it, the presumed ecstasy of it. And she knew beyond knowing, knew with her body more than with her soul or mind, or even heart, that all their words were false. That none of these people knew anything about love at all. She knew only the truth forged in the smithy of this body, her own, which was now so gloriously alive, more alive than it had ever been: Each love is different, and if one does not create love for one-self, it will not be.
Wild Wind Westward Page 1
