They were all so focused on this pursuit, smiling silently because they did not know whether sound would scare the fish away, that they did not see the storm rolling in.
When they had finally caught as many fish as they could carry, each woman filling her pack to the brim, they turned their attention back to their route home. Virginia heard their simultaneous intake of breath.
The snow began.
Virginia gestured for them to circle close so they could hear one another. “Do we stay or go?” she asked. “You know the dangers.”
They did, and they considered them in silence. The earliest giddiness that had fueled their hunt had evaporated. Now that snow had begun, there was no knowing when it might end. It was smartest to rush back on the reverse heading that had led them here, using the compass. Their best hope was their only known shelter. If they stayed out too long in the gathering cold and the snow blanketed them, stillness meant death. They all knew.
“Let’s go,” said Caprice. “Virginia, why don’t you let me take lead position for a while? My eyes are good in snow.”
Caprice had often volunteered to take lead position on hunts, and something had changed about the way she put herself forward that gladdened Virginia’s heart. Caprice had not insisted or wheedled or flaunted her mountaineering experience. She had simply asked if she might have a turn, please, and after a few polite repetitions of the request, Virginia saw no reason not to say yes at last.
And Virginia was glad for the respite. It was exhausting, making all the decisions, dictating everything. If Caprice wanted to lead, at least in this way, for a change? The release was actually welcome. They would go forward all together regardless of which one was actually at the head of the line, which in the middle, which at the end. How much could it matter if she was looking at Caprice’s back for a change instead of the endless white landscape ahead?
Unfortunately, it mattered very much.
On the walk to the stream, Virginia had been in the lead, roped to Irene, Doro, and Siobhan. Caprice had been at the head of the second rope, tied on with Stella and Elizabeth. They simply switched the order of the ropes, so Virginia was fourth now, and Caprice tied the knot to connect the two ropes before they set out into the swirling white. Doro passed the compass to Elizabeth so she could call out the bearing from time to time, making sure they didn’t veer too far off course.
There was no telling how long they’d been walking when it happened, but Virginia was still feeling the novelty of not walking in the lead. The jagged rises seemed higher, the valleys lower, somehow. Instead of the featureless white before her, there was the bright red of Caprice’s famous coat, a scarlet blot on her vision, followed by the two dark forms of Stella and Elizabeth. There was something she enjoyed about that.
But then she blinked, and when her eyes opened again, she saw only white.
What? she thought.
She felt a hard tug for a moment, pulling her two steps forward, then nothing.
“Caprice!” she shouted.
The wind was strong, and the snow blew in her face, and through the narrow slits of her goggles, she saw nothing. No dark shapes, no red, only blinding white.
Virginia dropped to her knees.
“Down!” she shouted to the others, praying they could hear her over the howling din. She heard a crack. Was it thunder? It sounded like a breaking board but couldn’t be. “Down!”
She felt what she hoped was the two women behind her dropping to the frozen ground, lying flat to spread their weight out as they’d planned to do if something went wrong.
Something was going wrong.
Tiny droplets of ice spat in her face. She searched her thoughts for an explanation. There was only one, but she rejected it. The vanishing, the yank, the end of the pressure. No, no. Let her be wrong. Let it be something else.
There should have been rope in front of her, regardless of what else had happened. The knot that Caprice tied should have held.
It hadn’t.
They must have veered off course, not checking their bearing as often, and stumbled into some kind of hole. She would have to look. To find out how bad it was. She didn’t want to.
They lay there with the snow hammering down on them for so long that Virginia knew a layer of snow had built on top of her. She felt someone kick her then, and the kick might just have saved her life. If no one had tried to get her attention, if they’d just let her lay there, she might never have gotten up again.
But Irene, who’d been behind her in the line, kept kicking at the sole of her boot with her own boot. Was the snow beginning to slacken? Women’s voices called from somewhere below, trying desperately to keep their panic down. She was the one who had taught them not to panic. She tried to hold onto the pride of that for a moment, but it slipped away almost instantly. There was no time for pride.
Then the snow did clear, a final swirl of white sparkle zipping through the air like smoke from a genie’s lamp, and the bright sun reflected off the ice blindingly again. Her snow goggles had gone askew when she fell to the ice, and she could feel that her upper cheek had gone numb. If she lost the eye, she told herself, she might as well find the gun at her belt and shoot herself in the head with it. Though a good Catholic would never do such a thing. Her faith had given her strength when she most needed it, both during the Very Bad Thing and her years as a trail guide. Right now, her faith felt like a taunt, a tease. Why would any god allow these things to happen? Was it the devil at work? Did God simply not care? Or was the fault in Virginia? Had she failed, in this endeavor, to prove herself worthy of His love?
“Caprice!” she shouted. “Elizabeth! Stella!”
Now she could hear a faint repetition of two syllables, over and over, like some kind of far-off bird. But it was not a bird. It was a voice, warped somehow into a lower register.
Suddenly, she understood the syllables. Stay back. Stay back. Stay back.
And she recognized the voice.
Caprice.
“Caprice!” she screamed. “Where are you?”
“Stay back!” came the answering call from somewhere low, sunken. “Back! Don’t fall!”
Inching forward on her belly again, Virginia crept forward with dread, just a very little bit at a time. When she felt the ice fall away under her fingertips, she jerked her mittened hand back as if she’d been bitten.
“Caprice!” she called down. With one hand, she held tight to the ice’s lip; with the other, she chanced lifting her goggles for just a moment, and in that moment, she saw all three women in a deep, narrow crevasse. The narrowness of the crevasse was probably why the fallen hadn’t died on impact; the walls themselves had slowed their fall, bouncing them back and forth, depriving them of momentum all the way. Caprice’s bright red coat shone like a beacon from the cool glow of a faraway blue.
“Don’t be an idiot,” called Caprice, screaming to be heard. “Stay back.”
“You’re the idiot,” Virginia snapped back, but the fear in her blood was rising. The three women were so far down she could barely see them. Did they even have enough rope to reach?
“I’m sorry,” Caprice said.
“No,” said Virginia, because there was nothing else to say, and then again, “No.”
Caprice and the other women in the ravine busied themselves, and Virginia realized what they were doing. She turned to do the same.
“Untie yourselves,” she said to the women behind her. “We’re going to haul them up.”
Siobhan said, “I’m not sure we can—”
“We will,” shouted Virginia, and Siobhan did not protest again.
When Virginia peeked down into the ravine, a woman’s head was closer than she remembered. What had changed? Stella had made her way up to Caprice’s shoulders. One end of the rope was tied around Stella’s waist; she had tied the other around a fish from her pack as an
anchor and tossed it up to Virginia.
“She’s lightest,” shouted Caprice. “Take her.”
There was just enough rope to reach. Virginia untied the fish—comical, but she had never felt less like laughing—and knotted the two ropes together, testing the knot over and over to make sure this one would hold. She lay down and braced herself, feeling Irene’s hands around her ankles, knowing Siobhan was anchoring the entire chain.
She peeked back at the other women, but their faces were unreadable under layers of leather and fur. There was no time to ask how anyone felt. Feelings could not, did not, matter. All that mattered now was what they did.
“All right, brace yourselves,” called Virginia. Did her shouts echo in the narrow chasm that held, or was that pure imagination? When she called three, two, one, now, she heard the faint ghost of her own words, popping like a bubble in the air before the far horizon swallowed each sound whole.
Every inch was hard fought. There were many moments when she thought pulling Stella up would pull the rest of them down. Then they would be lost. But in the end, they edged back and back and back until Stella’s hands slid over the ridge and she lay gasping, whooping, on the ice.
“You’re soaking,” said Virginia.
“The walls are wet,” said Stella, panting, clearly spent. “Keep working.”
They tossed the free end of the rope down to repeat the exercise, and the women up on the ice, five of them now, braced again in a human chain.
They pulled and pulled. Virginia had literally not thought far enough ahead to wonder who they were going to pull out of the hole.
Then she saw the red coat, a bright blot on her vision. For a moment, it was all she could see, that crimson on white, a flag against the endless background.
Always thinking of herself, she thought and reached out for Caprice’s hand.
Only it wasn’t Caprice.
“She insisted,” said Elizabeth, tears frozen on her face.
“We’ll get her next,” said Virginia.
But they didn’t.
While the women readied themselves to pull again, Virginia shouted, “You’re next, Caprice. Hold tight!”
There was no response.
Against her better judgment, Virginia crept forward and stared down into the sheer, wet crevasse. The thin Arctic light, filtered by the ice, glowed blue.
“Are you injured?” Virginia shouted down.
“Only my pride,” joked Caprice.
“Stop that. Stop,” said Virginia. This was no time for joking.
Once she was secure again, belly-down on the ice, she began to feed the rope down into the hole, hand over deliberate hand. Foot after foot of the rope disappeared into the gap, vanishing, swallowed up by white like everything else was in this godforsaken, hungry land.
“Ready?” she shouted.
Caprice shouted back, “No.”
She edged closer, though it was unwise, to see what was going on. When she did, her throat closed up.
Caprice reached up toward the rope, but its frayed edge dangled at least four feet above her outstretched hand.
Elizabeth had stood on Caprice’s shoulders to reach the rope. So had Stella. Now there were no other shoulders left to stand on.
Unless some sort of miracle transpired, Caprice was dead, even while she spoke and laughed and gazed upward at the far-off gray of the sky.
Behind her, Elizabeth said, her voice a sob, “She knew. She knew it wouldn’t reach.”
“What can we do?” Stella asked.
Virginia said, choking out the words, “I don’t think we can do anything.”
Caprice called up, “Tell everyone to stay back. It’s melting. Everything’s melting.”
Now that she’d said it, Virginia could feel that the snow under her chest was wet. It was soaking her furs. The cold had tried to kill them; now it was the warmth, minor though it was, that could spell their doom. The irony was that the warmth up here, in the daylight, meant the crevasse might cave in, but down there in the darkness where the light didn’t reach, Caprice would freeze to death before she could die of starvation.
Virginia could hear and feel someone else trying to crawl closer, and she called back, “No! Stay back. It’s not stable.”
She turned her attention back to Caprice and stared down into the abyss. Incongruously, Caprice was smiling.
“You know what I wish, Virginia?” she said. “I wish we’d had more time to insult each other.”
It took her a moment to understand what Caprice was really saying.
Then Caprice shouted, “You’d better go. The cold. Keep moving.”
“No,” Virginia said. “We can’t leave you.”
“Virginia.”
“We can’t!”
Caprice yelled, “You’re too close.”
Virginia no longer slid forward toward the yawning gap, but nor could she move away. Caprice’s false cheer was gone; without her coat, she was already turning cold, the blue all around her now reflected in the blue cast to her lips, her cheeks, her limbs.
“Don’t give up,” shouted Virginia, her voice breaking. “Please. Please.”
Somberly, as steadily as she could given the shiver that had already seized her body, Caprice looked up at Virginia.
Then she raised her palm in one of the two signals Virginia had taught her what seemed like a lifetime ago. Not the outstretched palm of supplication, of asking for help, but the other one. The forbidding palm, the warning motion. The one that asked the viewer to stay away.
No, said the signal. Don’t.
The warm wind howled. The snow blew. The danger wasn’t just how close they were to the chasm, where any of them could fall in, especially Virginia, who dangled treacherously close now. The danger was coming at them from all directions. The danger was west, east, north, south. Their only hope, and a slim one at that, was to get back to camp while there was still some light to show the way and heat themselves back up inside their snow house as quickly as humanly possible. They might not even make it if they tried, but if they didn’t try, there would be six deaths today and not just one.
While Virginia stared down toward her friend, whose fists were clenched tight and turning a ghastly white already, snow blew harder. Virginia felt a tug at her ankles: the chain of other women securing her, making sure that she would not fall in.
Caprice locked eyes with her and uncurled one fist to repeat the motion, palm up, this time over her head with all the force she could muster.
Don’t, the motion said, and this time, Virginia heard it loud and clear.
Don’t stay for me, Caprice told her. Don’t endanger them. Don’t die because I’m going to.
A hollow ache inside her, snow and regret stinging her eyes until they burned with it, Virginia obeyed.
She backed across the ice, crawling, until it was solid enough to stand. The women looked to her for a command, and she could not give it, not with her voice. She spoke with her actions. She tested the rope and began to walk, back in the lead.
Virginia turned back only once. She could barely spot where the disaster had happened. The hole in the ice where Caprice had disappeared was surprisingly small to have swallowed so much.
It didn’t seem large enough to tear a gap in the world.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Virginia
Massachusetts Superior Court, Boston
October 1854
After Virginia tells the story of Caprice’s death—a story that, in her courtroom telling, includes the deaths of both Elizabeth and Stella, with a rope that never reached far enough for any of the three to grasp—Judge Miller abruptly adjourns the session for the day. While he does not verbally note that several women in the courtroom are openly sobbing, including the bejeweled Mrs. Collins, Virginia suspects this is the reason. She’s sure it wi
ll be held against her that her own eyes are dry.
She notices, idly, that the guard sent to fetch her back to the jail is not one of her usual escorts. Thinking about whether her story landed like the truth on skeptical ears distracts her.
It is not until she finds herself alone with the uniformed man in a long, dark, unfamiliar hallway that she thinks to question who he is and where they are going.
Virginia’s distraction turns quickly to panic, and she realizes the only reason she has followed this man, a complete unknown, toward an equally unknown destination is his familiar uniform.
The corridor grows longer and darker. Or perhaps it just seems that way now that she expects, at the end of it, to find nothing good.
But they are no longer alone. A dark figure joins them. The man in the guard’s uniform checks her wrist cuffs and her ankle shackles and then shoves her forward toward the dark figure.
“Be good,” the supposed guard says to Virginia, his voice flippant, almost amused. To the man, he says, “You know how long you have.”
Virginia does not know how long that is. How long does this new, unknown man have to damage her, to abuse her, alone in the bowels of the jailhouse? This one has not even bothered with a uniform.
But then she sees his face in a shaft of light, the undistinguished features, hard to describe. She recognizes the tense body, its broad shoulders. She realizes the kind of abuse she’s in for isn’t what she feared. There may still be damage, but it will come at familiar hands.
“Brooks,” she breathes.
“Miss Reed,” he says in return, emphasizing the last name with a particular sharp delight. “So you have begun your testimony. A bold choice, that.”
“I did not factor your thoughts into my defense strategy, as you were not present. Are you here to help?” She knows he’s not, but if he’s here to needle her, she’ll indulge in needling him back. What, at this point, does she have to lose?
The Arctic Fury Page 30