The Arctic Fury
Page 27
“Around here, I may as well be a foreigner.”
“That’s as may be,” he agrees. “But what we need here is doubt. You’re familiar with the standard of guilt in American courts, I assume?”
“This is the first American court I’ve ever set foot in,” she says, “and I dearly hope it will be the last.”
His lantern jaw tightens visibly, and she realizes her mistake. Whichever outcome results from this trial, that will almost certainly be the case. Either she’ll walk free and live an exemplary life hereafter or, once her legs swing in the air as she dances from the hangman’s noose, she won’t set foot in a courtroom or anywhere else.
“In any case”—she hastens to cover her error—“I’m not the attorney here. Tell me. What is the standard of guilt of which you speak?”
“It comes from England, actually, but it holds here. The presumption of innocence: ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ A gentleman named Blackstone said it another way: ‘It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.’”
She thinks about this for a while and does not know what to say. Which category does he think she fits in?
“You’ve suffered,” he says.
“And you believe in my innocence?”
“Your guilt, to me, is like your credibility. Not important for my purposes. Your innocence is preferable but ultimately irrelevant.”
“So you think I did it, and you’ll defend me anyway?”
“Not at all,” he says, almost cheerfully. “I’d like to believe you’re innocent, but it doesn’t matter what I believe. I was hired to serve the law. I’m required to give you the best defense I can, so I will.”
Still too stunned to speak, she tries to digest this. Her new attorney doesn’t even believe she’s innocent? What about Captain Malcolm, who hired him—what does he believe? She realizes he has no idea what really happened. He’d seen her with Caprice on the Doris early in their acquaintance, their frequent clashes, jealousy, competition. Maybe he thinks her a murderer but knows men like him have committed similar sins when in dire straits. Maybe his willingness to hire her counsel is a sort of hope that someone else would do the same for him.
Now Mr. Mason tells her, “You can plead guilty if you want. They might reduce your sentence. Argue leniency if you’re truly repentant.”
“But I’m not repentant,” she blurts.
“I simply want to give you a realistic sense of your options.”
“I can’t repent what I didn’t do. I didn’t kill her.”
This time, when he speaks, he doesn’t meet her eyes. “And that’s the other thing you can do, which obviously, you already grasp. Maintain your innocence. And if that’s your gambit, then, our path is clear.”
Her stomach wrings and twists as she says, “And what is that path?”
He tells her, “We let you speak for yourself.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, she replies in a firm voice, “Good.”
Whether it is truly a good thing she doesn’t know. But what she knows is that she must speak on her own behalf. Even though there are plenty of reasons for her not to. That way, whatever comes of it, her fate will belong to her. She cannot stand the idea of being totally helpless, of standing aside while the real decisions are made about her fate. She would rather participate and lose than stand back and win.
She hopes, of course, that those aren’t her only two choices.
Are they?
Chapter Forty-One
Virginia
On the Expedition
October and November 1853
Winter fell upon them like a hammer. One morning after sleeping in a huddle under the overturned shallop as usual, they awoke to find an inch of snow had turned the world white while they slept. After that, they added a layer of canvas to their nighttime shelter so any morning snow could be shaken off quickly before they got back on their way. Irene had taught them that trick. She’d also been the first one to realize it was time to put on their snow goggles, which narrowed their vision to a mere slit but kept them from going blind from the sun’s glare reflected on the snow. Now that they were well and truly on the ice, thought Virginia, the whiteness seemed to go on forever.
Yet someday, it had to end, didn’t it? Miles from here or just over the next ridge. There had to be somewhere that was not this place. Somewhere that Franklin and his men, if God smiled upon them, might still be.
Virginia hoped that they would get there, but days like this, she wasn’t sure they would. Doro assured her that they were making progress toward their destination. While she was not entirely sure how long it would take them to reach the search area designated by Lady Franklin, she thought it could be measured in weeks, not months. If they could get there before the bone-chilling cold prevented any forward motion.
The good news was, with the ice coating the landscape beneath, they’d assembled the sledge, which sped over the miles far faster than the shallop had. And unlike the shallop, the sledge could haul all the women and not just their goods. It didn’t matter if one of the women was feeling weak, slowing her pace, and forcing the others to match her steps to avoid leaving her behind. The dogs were the only ones that mattered, and they were untiring, fearless. Day after day, week after week, the dogs took them northwest, closer and closer to King William’s Land.
The other good news was that Caprice had recovered quickly from whatever sickness had struck her back at the cache. Whether she’d been sickened by what was in the tins or not, no one could be sure, and they’d left the cans behind in their worry, so it hardly mattered now. She later confessed to having eaten some weeds the day before that she’d dug out of the snow, too hungry to resist, too selfish to share, which in the end was a blessing. Whatever caused it, Caprice bore up far better under the sickness than Virginia would have expected. She was pale but determined. Without complaint, she’d forgone her ration for two days rather than take a chance on vomiting it up.
They were all keeping a weather eye on their food supply. This far north, the hunting grew poor. During an unseasonably warm turn, they had paused for several days to hunt in earnest. They shot and dressed as many animals as they possibly could, drying meat of all varieties on racks next to a bonfire: rabbit and venison, anything they could find. Irene had laid traps that brought down a host of lemmings, and she’d dressed the furs with ruthless efficiency along with drying the meat, so each of the women now had a spare pair of mittens to wear while their other pairs dried. With practice, Elizabeth’s talent at shooting had surpassed even Irene’s; she took down more animals than anyone else with her patient, precise aim. But the cold had clamped down like a fist again, all too soon. They had not seen game in a week. The women, by agreement, severely constrained their rations. The dogs ate more generously—Virginia worried Ann overfed them, more tenderly solicitous of their appetites than she’d ever been of her human companions’—and the heap of supplies visibly dwindled on the long days.
The women, eating twice a day at most, had grown lean. Virginia wished they’d had likenesses made at the beginning of the journey so she could compare the dramatic changes. They’d be a sideshow. Come see the amazing transforming women! From hips and bosoms to skin and bones in mere weeks! Irene, already thin, was the least changed of the party. Virginia suspected she had gone longer periods on less generous rations before, given how unaffected she seemed by the hardship. The change in Stella was the most dramatic; her moon-shaped face had thinned and hardened, and Virginia was stunned one night in the firelight to see she no longer reminded Virginia of her younger sister, Patty. Enduring one disaster hard on the heels of another had stripped her of her innocent charm. While still beautiful, Stella now had the face of a woman with no illusions left. With a start, Virginia realized that the woman she now resembled most closely was Virginia herself.
As they moved north and west and the temperatur
e fell and fell, the land gradually began to slope upward. One day, Doro called a halt at a flat patch of territory that abutted a sharp hill, the beginning of a far steeper climb.
The women tumbled down from the sledge in quiet compliance, stretching their legs, solicitously checking one another’s welfare. The dogs yipped and circled Ann, who patted and stroked them, praised their smarts and strength as if they could understand every word.
“This is it,” said Doro.
Virginia looked around. If they continued north, they’d be heading into more challenging territory; she was not even sure if the sledge could be used on ground that looked almost mountainous. To the west, the smoothness of the snow gave it away: a frozen lake lay underneath.
Caprice, who’d always had the best eyesight, squinted toward the east and said, “Is that what I think it is?”
They all squinted in the direction she pointed, though the narrow slits in the snow goggles blurred their vision, and it was Irene who answered by tapping Caprice on the shoulder and giving a vehement nod. Yes.
“What is it?” asked Siobhan.
“Woods,” said Caprice.
Doro turned to Virginia. “What do you think? Do you agree?”
“Yes,” said Virginia.
“What is it?” Siobhan, always the most willing to voice her questions, asked.
Virginia told them, “We’ll stop here. This is where we’ll spend the winter.”
And so it was. There were fish in the lake, at least for now, and unless they could find the open polar sea before winter—deeply unlikely, said Doro after consulting the map—this was the best place to make their camp. It was not yet so cold that they couldn’t continue, but in the rockier territory north, there was no certainty; they might not find a spot this ideal again. The steep terrain to the north would help block the worst of the wind. The nearby woods were equally important to survival and not just because they might harbor game to be hunted. The trees, too, would help them. Without wood, there would be no fire. Without fire, they would not be able to melt ice for water. Even a very small amount of food each day would keep them alive, but if they did not drink, they would die.
During the Very Bad Thing, Virginia remembered, water was much less of an issue. The one thing they’d had in limitless supply was snow. Snow could be melted in one’s mouth without much danger, or one could warm it in their hands to give to a child or weakened adult to drink. Virginia had done both many times. Here on the ice, that was not an option. In the deepest winter, taking off a mitten could mean losing a hand. When death by freezing was only a degree or two away, putting ice in one’s mouth to melt it could bring a body’s temperature down, and it didn’t take a scholar to understand what the result could be.
The first night, they erected a tent over the sledge, with the dogs tucked in among them like blankets, but as soon as the sun rose into the sky, Irene sprang into action. She rummaged among the tools deep in the supply pile and came up with something resembling a saw, and as she set to work on a patch of hard-packed snow and ice, Virginia was shocked by the breadth of her smile.
Irene cut large blocks of snow, humming under her breath as she shaped and smoothed them, and then began to stack. The women who watched her began to see what was happening, and they turned to one another in wonder. Was the mute woman doing what it looked like she was doing?
She was building them a house.
It was the kind of round house the Esquimaux built, Virginia realized, with no space whatsoever between the bricks and a low, half-circular tunnel as entrance. Once the building was complete, Irene invited them in, indicating that she would build a second one that the dogs could have to themselves if Ann wanted, but for now, they would sleep close together here, since their bodies would grant each other warmth that the shape of the house would keep from escaping.
The first night inside the house, it was so warm Virginia began to cry. She cried even harder when she realized the tears on her cheeks did not freeze.
As the winter grew colder and the days shorter, by necessity, the women grew comfortable in the dark. There was no point in wasting fuel to see one another’s faces; they each knew them as well as—or better—than their own. Instead, they told one another stories, and Virginia especially began to look forward to that moment each day when they all settled down, lined up like cordwood, and one woman—whoever had decided to begin that night—inhaled audibly in the darkness.
The stories they heard from one another in those endless weeks of winter were like a whole separate adventure. Adventures in the plural, really—the amazing things seen and done by an extraordinary group of women who had lived extraordinary lives. Stella had them laughing until their sides hurt with the tale of an uppity rich woman who ran through the house shouting at the servants to hunt down the source of a disgusting smell that seemed to invade the whole building when in fact she had a brown smear of her tiny, awful dog’s shit stuck to her own expensive heel. Siobhan, almost as hilarious, spun tales of the follies and foolishness of her fellow medical students and the outrageous things she’d seen dressed as a man that she’d never be allowed as a woman. She’d been a visitor, a spy, in a whole other world.
Elizabeth, in a tentative voice full of wonder, described a panorama she’d seen one Wednesday afternoon in Amory Hall. She’d found five cents in the street and feared someone might take it away if she didn’t spend it, so she’d done so right away. She lost herself in the lush, detailed images of The Grand Panorama of a Whaling Voyage ’Round the World, the surge of the music, the huge and soaring pictures of the ships, so vast they felt as real as the real thing. That was why, when she’d set foot on the Doris, it hadn’t scared her, she told them; she already felt she’d stood on the deck of a topsail schooner, inhaling the cold salt spray.
But it was Caprice’s story that took their breath away.
I saw myself an angel in rainbow light, she began and told them of an Alpine phenomenon called the Brocken spectre, when a person’s own shadow is reflected off the snow at a certain angle by the rising sun and appears as a huge, looming presence in the sky.
My own long form rose into the sky, said Caprice, her voice musical in the darkness. I feared it was God’s judgment come upon me at first; then I feared it was Satan who taunted me so. My punishment for daring too much. My very spirit ripped from me and cast up into the clouds. I watched to see in which direction my enormous shade would travel—up toward heaven or down to hell?—and held my breath so long my consciousness began to dim at the edges, the brightness of the Alpine sunrise turning black like a burnt crust of toast held too close to the fire.
When she fell silent, no one broke the silence. No breath was even audible in the dark. They were prisoners in her palm, eager for the next word, caught in the power of her spell.
Then in a different tone, as light as spun sugar, Caprice said, But it was no such thing. The sunlight crested the peak. My shadow disappeared from the sky all in a breath. My spirit flew back into my body, where it has remained to this day. I never saw Brocken spectre before or since.
When her turn came, Virginia told the story of the first time she guided a party to California with Ames, the long-awaited moment when the clouds parted above them and the sun shone onto the settlement in the valley, revealed as if God were showing off His handiwork. She did not tell them about her own first voyage. No matter how long the winter was, she doubted she would ever share that tale. The purpose of the stories was to buoy the women up, not terrify them.
In those moments in the dark, during the stories before sleep, Virginia could let herself forget the bad days she knew were coming. She knew the food would grow more and more scarce over the course of the winter. She knew the air around them would grow colder than they could even conceive. She knew that the days would grow shorter and shorter until the daylight was a thin, milky cast for a couple of hours a day and everything else was darkness.
But for the moment, she let herself relax and treasure the warmth. Worrying about the future would not improve anything in the present. She simply lost herself in the pleasures of the moment. The sound of other women’s voices, trusting and tender, in the darkness. The pleasant, drowsy feeling of knowing sleep was not far off. Her own well-being, whatever measure of it God decided to grant her, as long as that might last.
Chapter Forty-Two
Virginia
Sierra Nevada Mountains
1846
In the throes of the Very Bad Thing, during the worst of those miserable days, Virginia could not stop people from dying. There had been deaths even before the snow had marooned them in the mountains, even before they realized the sum total of their mistakes had added up to doom for the entire party. Halloran had failed to outrun the consumption that drove him to seek California in the first place; a handful of others had fallen victim to accidents along the way. Those deaths had felt different. If they were anyone’s fault, they were not hers. But the deaths in the mountains, she felt responsible for somehow, though she was far too young and powerless to take any true leadership of the party. Each one felt like a personal failure, a defeat she could have somehow prevented if she’d only taken different, better actions along the way. It took her a long time to let go of that feeling. While the Very Bad Thing was still happening, it had its icy fingers wrapped around her throat nearly every minute of every single day.