The Arctic Fury

by Greer Macallister

  But Virginia desperately wants certain survivors to stay far away from this place, this trial. She must protect the secrets that are not and never were hers to reveal. She protects none of Dove’s secrets. She’s not even sure Dove has any.

  The prosecutor is still fumbling, still awkward. “But this woman claims to have been a passenger on the Doris, and we call her to attest to events thereon here today.”

  “You don’t have her legal name? What do you have?”

  “Begging your pardon, I believe, sir, she is called Dove.”

  “I am,” rings out Dove’s voice, “and no one needs to beg anyone else’s pardon for it. I sure won’t.”

  “All right,” the judge says, pointing his gavel at the woman. “You’re being called to the stand, Miss…Dove.”

  “Thank you kindly,” she says and picks up her skirts all proper, proceeding to the front of the room to sit. A crackling charge of energy sweeps through the room at exactly the same speed as her passage; one does not see women of Dove’s stature every day. She looks every inch of her six feet in this room, with a sturdy, curved build that goes from broad shoulders to narrow waist to broad hips in a way that the men of the jury seem unable to look away from. Dove is larger than life in every sense of the expression.

  Virginia watches Dove approach with a heady cocktail of relief, dread, and familiarity. The woman looks less changed than most of them. Her skin had already been weathered by years of sun and wind, hard living on the border with Mexico, before she joined their expedition. She did not waste away from lack of food like some of them, though Virginia does not care to let herself linger on the reason. The dress Dove wears is new and stiff, and she wears it with unconcern, as she has done most things in the time they’ve been acquainted. Dove has proved herself to be passionate about saving lives, but otherwise, it seems there is little that Dove cares much about.

  And now Dove testifies from the front of the room, her dark eyes level and inscrutable, the toes of her sharp boots pointed just so. Unlike some of the women, she did not lose any toes on the journey, at least not that Virginia knew of. It did not seem like the kind of event Dove would keep to herself.

  After she’s sworn in, the prosecutor begins, “You go by the name Dove?”

  “I thought we’d established that.”

  “One can never be too careful,” the attorney intones, “when entering information into the official record.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I’m called as a witness in a murder trial.”

  “Miss Dove, please, if you could confine yourself to responding when a question is asked.”

  She makes no effort at all to hide her annoyance as she says, “Ask a question, then.”

  “You were a member of the expedition that sailed north on the Doris? The same one the defendant, Virginia Reeve, sailed on?”

  “The Doris was really only part of it.”

  “Yes, of course, ma’am. I think we’re all aware of that.”

  “I thought you might not be from how you phrased the question.”

  “A question you have not answered.” His tone is almost as annoyed as hers now, though he’s trying harder to hide it. “Did you or did you not sail on the Doris with Virginia Reeve?”

  “I did.”

  “Yet when the prosecution put out a call for members of the expedition, you did not answer.”

  “I did not.” Her eyes are flint.

  “Why not?”

  “I have more important things to do.”

  “Indeed! More important than a murder trial?”

  “Actually, yes. I am supposed to be on my way to Crimea. You’ve heard there’s a war there, I assume? Surely, you’re aware that lives are being lost there every single day, without enough trained nurses to care for the wounded? Crimea—that’s in Russia, as I’m sure you know—is where I am needed. I am not needed here.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be your decision to make.”

  “Can we get on with it? Because I have passage booked tomorrow. I suppose that’s how you found me, on the ship’s manifest. Do you really think any information I can provide to these proceedings outranks the actual saving of lives?”

  The judge breaks in, “Miss Dove, as the attorney directed you, he’ll be the one asking the questions.”

  She swivels to eye the judge, not a trace of fear or even deference to be seen. Virginia had always hated this attitude when it was directed at her, but she has to admit there is something very satisfying about seeing it leveled at someone who could stand to be taken down a peg. She’ll say this for Dove. She is a force to be reckoned with.

  “And as I said to that one, I’ll say to you, Your Honor,” Dove goes on. “If he wants me to answer a question, he should go ahead and get to asking.”

  “All right, then. You have your orders, Counsel,” Judge Miller says, clearly more amused than angry.

  “I’ll proceed,” says the lawyer, making a great effort to get himself under control and mostly succeeding. “So, Miss Dove. Let’s talk a little bit about your background. You were a nurse in the Mexican War?”

  The disdain on her face is unmistakable, but her voice is plain and firm. “I was.”

  “And your medical experience, that was what led you to join the expedition?”

  “In a sense. Nursing can be done anywhere, and for my part, I got tired of war. Thought a trip into the frozen North would be a novelty at least.”

  “And was it?”

  “Better than war, certainly, in some ways. Worse in others.”

  “Worse than war! Do tell!” To Virginia’s ear, his theatricality is grating, but the rest of the room seems to eat it up. All but those five women in the front row, who gaze on Dove without either contempt or affection. They know her, but they won’t lay claim to any more than knowing her. That is why they sit in the front row and she sits in the witness box. They are sacrificing to be here. Their time, their privacy, their conflicting loyalties. Dove has chosen not to sacrifice, at least not for Virginia’s sake.

  Virginia hopes Dove makes it to Crimea. Some people were simply better off at war. Dove respects soldiers, and whatever else they were, the women of the expedition had not been soldiers. Their battles were too secret, too sly. Nor had the sailors of the Doris acted in soldierly ways. They followed orders most of the time, but they did not unite in pursuit of a common goal the way soldiers did. And despite the hierarchy on the ship, as Captain Malcolm would have admitted with that haunted look of his, they did not truly fall into line. Not when it counted.

  “In war, we were on the move,” says Dove, looking out over the faces of the jury to make sure they’re listening. She must like what she sees, because she goes on. “On a ship, there’s nowhere to go. Especially a ship in the North. Too cold to breathe the air, even. And inside, you go a little stir-crazy.”

  “Crazy! That’s quite an allegation.”

  “Not alleging anything, sir,” she says as primly as a parson’s wife, a parallel that had never come even close to occurring to Virginia before this moment.

  “Explain what you mean, then.”

  “As I nursed fallen soldiers in the Republic of Texas, it wasn’t pretty work, no mistaking. Blood in the dust, dirt in the wounds. Battles followed so hot and heavy on one another’s heels, stopping to save the wounded after one skirmish might mean getting caught by incoming fire from the next.”

  “That sounds terrible, miss.”

  “It was,” she says, but her voice sounds more like pride than regret. “But if I got tired of it, I could just up and leave. I think that was part of what kept me on the battlefield. The knowledge that I was choosing to be there. Every day, I woke up, and I chose. I chose to help those men. I chose to save lives.”

  “And the expedition was different?”

  “As a bee from a bunting, yes, sir.”


  “Tell us more.”

  “Instead of rising every morning and choosing to serve, I was stuck. Moving, but stuck. You get what I mean?”

  “Yes,” he says, though Virginia doubts it. He just wants to get to the meat.

  The attorney goes on, “And do you think your emotions clouded your opinion of your shipmates?”

  “Not at all. On the battlefield, I had to get good at sizing people up. Still am.”

  “Then tell us what you think of Virginia Reeve.”

  “Frankly, I think she’s a danger to herself and others,” says the nurse, her voice matter-of-fact.

  Instant clamor.

  After the judge manages to quiet the room, the prosecutor says, “Sorry about that, miss. Please. Continue. You were telling us your opinion of the defendant.”

  Dove continues as if never disrupted, same look on her face, hands folded in her lap like she’s clutching needlework. “I think she started off this voyage with a misplaced sense of self-confidence, and once that was shattered, there was no putting her back together.”

  It hurts to hear Dove’s assessment, but Virginia has to admit, she doesn’t think the nurse’s view is entirely wrong.

  But Dove goes on, and what she says next hurts more, wounds deeper. “To be honest with you, she was a wreck from, well, not the beginning, but close to it.”

  “From when, then? When did she begin to fall apart?”

  Dove looks out, seeming to savor the attention for just a beat before she speaks, an uncharacteristically coy moment. Then she says, “I suppose it was just as soon as women started dying.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Virginia

  Aboard the Doris

  June 1853

  What surprised Virginia as they sailed north into Hudson Bay was how the day could be every temperature at once. With the evidence of her eyes she saw the mottled, jutting ice still cluttering much of the bay’s surface, but her cheeks were warmed by sunlight. The cold would be unrelenting farther north. In the June gleam here in the bay’s southern reaches, the air tasted of summer. When she had pictured this journey, she had seen herself and every other person swaddled in their winter slops up to the tips of their noses. But so far, some days, such precautions proved not just unnecessary but unwelcome. Some days, if you wore your wool mittens, you’d roast in them.

  The third day after they launched from Moose Factory was such a day.

  The women had initially been reluctant to gain the deck, but the enforced closeness belowdecks had already started to breed resentments. Dove and Siobhan, for whatever reason, developed an instant antipathy for each other that rivaled Virginia and Caprice’s. Ann spent every waking moment in the small cabin where the dogs were kept, and Virginia wouldn’t have been surprised if she started sleeping there too, preferring the company of friendly canines to wary human women.

  Today, things were starting to change, and some of the women proved themselves venturesome. Ebba and Althea could be seen strolling arm in arm about the deck, steadying each other, heads bent together in conversation. Doro stared northward from the prow as steadily as a painted figurehead, scanning a horizon she’d read about a thousand times but never seen. Her look of wonder never failed to pluck a string in Virginia’s heart. Margaret, the journalist, was always observing with a weather eye. The translator, Irene, kept to herself—she was still largely a mystery—but she, too, stood on the deck with a look more joy than fear, and Virginia hoped that someday soon, she’d begin to reveal something of herself. It would be good to know what she thought of this journey, what she thought of their chances once they disembarked at Repulse Bay. They would rely entirely on her to communicate with any natives they might meet on land, and if Doro’s accounts of John Rae’s overland explorations were accurate, successful trading with the natives could easily make the difference between life and death.

  But no one took to life on the ship with as much gusto as Christabel, the delicate, birdlike illustrator with the dark eyes. She hadn’t told Virginia her story, but she’d read it in Brooks’s files: one day at a church picnic, the rest of her family—parents, young brothers—had been trampled under the hooves of a runaway team of horses, and there were no other relations to take her in. She’d had to make her own way through skill and luck. A talented student under the tutelage of a local artist at the time of her parents’ death, she immediately began hiring herself out for portraits and sketch work. She’d made enough of a name for herself to be profiled in the local newspaper, which must have been how Brooks found her for Lady Franklin. It was not so different from her own story in the main, thought Virginia, though highly divergent in the particulars.

  But while Virginia had expected Christabel to be shy, sticking to her pencils and paper and observing from afar, instead, the young woman had leapt into the action of the ship. The ship’s boys had taken a shine to her and she to them. All three dark-haired and bird-boned, they seemed to belong together somehow, the only people on the Doris so far to find the gap between the male crew and female passengers surmountable. The three could be seen scampering together across the deck, leaping up whenever possible onto coils of rope, interior railings, the occasional crate. Their fleet feet took Virginia’s breath away.

  She cast her eyes about for the captain, hoping he wouldn’t chastise the ship’s boys or Christabel for their play, but she only glimpsed him at a distance. The broad shoulders in the dark coat, always turning away. They still had not spoken. At this point, it had to be deliberate.

  But she would not chase him. They could ride all the way to Repulse Bay in silence if that was what he wanted, she thought in a fit of pique. She had other fish to fry.

  One of the boys had shimmied up the mast and, to Virginia’s astonishment, Christabel followed. Even in her divided skirt, heavier than the boys’ fitted breeches, she somehow managed to cling tightly against the post with her knees as well as her arms. The boy below them shouted directions, directing her to footholds and handholds, and her cheeks were flushed with both excitement and exertion as she made upward progress. The other boy scuttled up after her, and then all three were in the rigging.

  When the bright sun made it hard to follow their motion, Virginia returned her eyes to the deck, blinking. She saw a woman’s form moving toward her, and while it was sometimes hard to tell the women apart in the thick woven coats Virginia had issued, she recognized the red-gold of Stella’s hair.

  “Come,” she said. “How are you finding the journey so far?”

  The other woman shrugged. “Cold.”

  “Sorry to say it’ll be getting a lot colder,” said Virginia, then regretted it. How far did the limits of Brooks’s requirements stretch here? She had technically already brought Stella on the journey, fulfilling the letter of the law. What if instead of disembarking with her at Repulse Bay, she sent the young woman back? Immediately, she rejected the thought. She could never send one woman on a ship alone with two dozen men, no matter who that woman was, even Caprice.

  Above their heads, laughter pealed.

  Stella tilted her head, looking up into the rigging, squinting against the sun. “Who’s that?” asked Stella.

  “Christabel. The illustrator.”

  They gazed up in united wonder, watching her antics. Christabel skipped as lightly as a bird along the mast, swinging her body up into the rigging and setting her small feet along the thin spars until it looked like she was flying.

  Virginia turned her gaze discreetly to Stella’s face. The pretty woman bit her lip, closed her eyes, opened them again. She seemed to be wrestling with something.

  For her part, Virginia was still troubled by what Elizabeth had told her. Was there anything to the rumors about Stella? Was she a seductress or a thief, and if so, did it really matter out here on the water? It certainly wouldn’t on the ice. But the fact that she was here at all meant that someone powerful must ha
ve wanted her far, far away, and Virginia was more than idly curious to know the reason.

  Stella said nothing. Neither did Virginia.

  The wind puffed and swirled around them, and Virginia heard the sail flap once, a remarkably loud sound in the vast, empty air. She looked up. The white cloth snapped hard at the mast, and if she hadn’t looked up to watch it ripple at that precise moment, she would not have seen what she saw.

  Christabel, falling.

  Her heavy coat parted as she fell, a dark, divided flap of cloth so unlike the sail, her body no longer like a bird’s, because instead of swooping upward on the wing, she simply fell straight down.

  There was no other sound, not until they heard the thud of flesh arrested, with sickening suddenness, by the deck.

  The next moment was long and awful and utterly silent until it got loud.

  Someone howled. It sounded like it might have been Doro, possibly Althea. The howl was high, almost a scream, but deeper in the throat, darker.

  “Dear God!” shouted a man’s voice.

  Virginia turned from Stella and ran straight to the fallen girl, arriving in unison with Dove, whose face was a stony mask. The two women got there faster than any of the sailors could muster.

  It was only hours later that Virginia realized the men had moved toward the illustrator’s fallen form slowly on purpose. After a fall from that height, there were no patients, only messes to clean up, blood and brains to swab away. The women had run because they hoped. The sailors—wise, seasoned—had not wasted time hoping.

  She and Dove knelt closest, but she felt other women gathering behind and around them, their hushed voices murmuring and grieving, the occasional gasp of horror as another straggler joined the cluster around the small body on the hard wooden boards.