“Beg pardon, please, Your Honor,” says Mr. Mason. “Is this a productive line of questioning?”
“I very much agree, Mr. Mason,” the judge says, proving that he at least can keep track of one change. “Back to the point, Counsel.”
“Of course, Your Honor, of course. You testified previously that Lady Jane Franklin hired you to undertake this polar adventure.”
“No.”
“No?”
“It was not a polar adventure,” she clarifies. “We were not asked to journey as far north as the pole.”
“I stand corrected. But in the main, let us confirm: you did say Lady Jane Franklin engaged you?”
“Yes, I did. Because that’s the truth.”
“And do you have any proof of this?”
“I have my word,” she says and regrets it instantly.
“Be that as it may,” he replies dryly with a long look at the jury. “The court desires tangible proof. Do you have any documents that she signed? Payments she made to banks on your behalf, drawn on her accounts? A record of contact between the two of you?”
“No,” she says, discovering the unwelcome truth of the words as they pass her lips. “When she initially contacted me, she used a false name.”
“Goodness! Now why would she do that?”
“You could call her as a witness and ask her.”
“Oh, Miss Reeve, I assure you, we’ve tried.” He flaps a hand, acts put-upon. “You see, I was told of the claims you’d make, so we reached out across the pond to the estimable Lady Franklin. Would you like to hear what she wrote?”
Virginia would not, because if Lady Franklin had written something that made Virginia look innocent of wrongdoing, she wouldn’t be hearing about it from the prosecution. The counsel wouldn’t have this look of simmering, simpering pleasure on his face.
The prosecutor went on. “I have here a letter from Lady Jane Franklin. In it, she answers our inquiry by categorically denying any contact with or knowledge of this young woman. I quote her letter in part: ‘It mystifies me why this young woman would pretend a connection with me. I suppose she is one of the many shameless fortune hunters who wish to wring benefits from association with my famous predicament. I assure you all I only wish to be left alone. I have made my peace with my husband’s disappearance, God rest his soul.’”
Of all the untruths that Lady Franklin has packed into the quoted portion of the letter, this is the lie that truly upsets Virginia. The idea that Lady Franklin could calmly accept and acknowledge her husband’s death. Outrageous.
“So. The fine lady says she has no connection to you. Do you care to change any of your testimony so far?”
“I do not.”
“Very well. Judge, may we enter this letter into the record?”
“You may.”
“Consider it so entered. I do not want to waste anyone’s time reading through the less essential parts. Instead, I will return to questioning the defendant so we can expose the truth as quickly and effectively as possible.”
Is anyone believing this tripe? Virginia wonders. She refuses to look over at the jury for fear they will look credulous. She may not be able to remain steadfast in the face of those looks, so her gaze falls on the faces of the five instead. Ebba is looking at the judge; Althea is looking at Ebba. Doro is absentmindedly smoothing the thick coil of dark hair over the right side of her head, where the missing ear used to be. Irene and Margaret have poker faces. She wonders if they have sat in courts before. It was not a matter they ever discussed.
“What else can you tell us,” intones the prosecutor, “about the reason for your journey north? Whoever hired you, if you were in fact hired, what was the reason for your decision?”
She thinks about what to say before she says it, but she doesn’t mince words, nor does she change the facts in any way. She’s been sworn in, and she takes that oath seriously, like every other one she’s ever taken. “I had formerly conducted business in leading settlers safely westward to California. When I left that field, I wished to explore a new portion of the world, and when the Arctic presented itself, I believed God was calling me to use my skills in pursuit of this new goal.”
“Now, when you say God was calling you, do you mean you hear His voice?”
“Not in the way you mean it, sir.”
“How do I mean it?” He looks amused, which she finds insulting beyond belief.
The anger rises in her, so very hard to suppress. Clutching the sprigged fabric of her skirt in her palms, wringing her fury into it, she mostly succeeds. “Sir, I believe you mean to make me sound insane. If I were to claim that I hear God speaking directly in my ear, you would make a Joan of Arc of me.”
“You feel you’re the same as Joan of Arc?”
“No! What I said is that you…but let’s leave that aside.” The burning joy in his eyes shows her that she cannot let herself get drawn into his game. She must be the most levelheaded, most reasonable, most trustworthy young woman who has ever sat in this witness box. If she’s anything less, she fails.
Calm, calm, she tells herself. The five. A motley crew, to be sure, though here in these four walls, they are clean and bright. She wishes she could speak freely to these women, tell them how much she appreciates them. How they keep her going. How much it means to her that they come here day after day, sitting with gloved hands in their laps and their ankles crossed, constant.
“Miss Reeve, are you attending? Miss Reeve!”
She forces herself to look at him without appearing startled. She’s already damaged herself by not hearing him. Look calm, she has to tell herself. Look like you don’t care. But is that the right course of action? Everything is wrong. Everything is a mistake. She can feel her chances slipping away.
“Well, I can understand why you might not respond to that name.”
A sinking feeling swims its way up into her throat. As bad as the last time she saw Caprice, as bad as that moment on the ship when she first saw Stella’s swollen belly. In moments like this, she is suspended between before and after. There will be no going back to before. She savors the last scrap of it and tries not to choke on what’s to come.
The prosecutor says, “Your name isn’t Virginia Reeve, is it?”
“Of course it is.”
“Because you changed it.”
Virginia says nothing.
The prosecutor goes on, “You’re wise not to object. I have the papers, of course.”
Mason jumps in to respond, his voice thick with grit. “Excuse me, what bearing does this have on the case?”
Virginia’s eyes fly to him, but there is nothing she can do. She should have told him, but he never would have let her speak if she’d done so. She hoped the truth wouldn’t get out. She should have known it would. Didn’t it always?
The prosecutor says, “Here is the evidence for the court, a document from California Superior Court, 1850. The legal name is, yes, Virginia Reeve. Miss R—well, miss, would you mind reading the name that it was changed from?”
“I would,” she says, and she is surprised she has any calm left to muster, but muster it she does.
“Judge,” says the prosecutor wearily, with one of his theatrical sighs, “is it necessary for me to compel the witness?”
The judge says, in a steady voice much more terrifying than the prosecutor’s playacting, “The witness will comply.”
The prosecutor slips the paper under Virginia’s nose, but she does not look at it. She knows what it is. Maybe she shouldn’t have bothered filing a court document, but at the time, it had felt important. Momentous. A clean break between the grim past and a promising future. And here that past was again, a hand on her throat, an arrow in her gut.
“The name, please?”
Without looking, Virginia says, “Virginia Reed.”
The defense lawyer sa
ys, “And what difference does that make? That she changed her name a few paltry letters? Judge, can we move on to a different line of questioning?”
She does not look at the judge, and she doesn’t need to. There is barely a pause before his answer. “I anticipate the prosecutor has a reason for this. We’ll see where it goes. But not too much more, Counselor.”
“Almost there, Your Honor,” says the prosecutor and slips another piece of paper onto the stand. She doesn’t look at this one either. “Our next document for evidence. Miss Reed, do you remember writing your cousin a rather extraordinary letter?”
The sick feeling in her chest spreads down to her stomach and up to her throat. Her face feels frozen in place, and by the Almighty, she certainly recalls what that feels like. In the Sierra Nevada Mountains. On the ice fields of the Arctic. The people who knew her in her first freezing are so far away, yet here comes her past, twining around her ankles like a snake.
“Miss Reed?” the voice comes again, and the prosecutor leans so hard on her true last name she wants to slap him.
Instead, she says with no emotion in her voice, “There is no telling what is extraordinary to some.”
His eyes sparkle with delight. Perhaps she misstepped, but heaven knows, there are precious few right steps here. Too late to run, too late to hide. Neither the truth nor a lie will help her. There is no help. She’s beyond it.
The lawyer says, “Oh, I think we’d all agree, this one is quite extraordinary. Is it ordinary to have a private letter to one’s cousin published in the likes of the Illinois Journal?”
She shakes her head.
“A verbal response for the court, please.”
“No, I suppose it is not ordinary.”
“Why do you think this publication was so interested in your correspondence?”
“If you have an opinion,” Virginia says dryly, “why don’t you go ahead and share it?”
Judge Miller interrupts. “Miss…I don’t know, Reed or Reeve or whatever you call yourself, we are not interested in his answers to your questions but your answers to his. Kindly answer.”
“And what was the question again?”
The court reporter reads back, “‘Why do you think this publication was so interested in your correspondence?’”
Again without looking, her voice empty as a jar, Virginia says, “There was public interest in what happened during my family’s journey west.”
“Indeed?”
“Judge, does that count as a question?”
“Oh come now,” he says. “This is getting drawn out. Counselor, please tell us the relevance of this questioning.”
“Gladly!” The counsel is preening now, a peacock in full fan, basking in the collective gaze of dozens. “Miss Virginia Reed, for those who do not recall the name, was a member of what has commonly become known as the Donner Party.”
The gasp of the courtroom is not even a gasp. The whole place melts down in a shocked rush of air. Someone in the back gets up and bolts out the back door, which slams behind him.
The disarray is so total that the judge bangs his gavel over and over, but they do not stop. People are fanning themselves, swooning, muttering to their neighbors with shocked expressions. She is glad she cannot make out any of the words. She cannot even look at the five. Will they desert her now that the truth is known? That she was trapped in the mountains with desperate people, people who consumed the flesh of others who died because it was that or die themselves. It’s an ugly truth, a shocking one, and that is exactly why the prosecutor has chosen this moment to unearth it. Even if she had not gotten up on the stand, he could have used it, but it played so much better with her up there for all to see. She shouldn’t have taken the stand. She had to. Either way, it’s done now.
“Recess! Adjourn till tomorrow! Take the prisoner to her cell!” The judge has to shout to be heard, and even then, the din doesn’t stop. As the guard grabs her to comply, he’s rougher with her than he’s ever been. She suspects that tomorrow, she will have a perfect line of bruises along her upper arm, four fingers on the flesh that faces outward, a fat, hard thumbprint of purple just above the inside of her elbow.
“Wait!” cries a voice, and she wrenches herself in the guard’s grasp to see who has yelled.
It is the prosecutor, that bastard.
“I move,” he shouts, the room not quieting but his voice just rising and rising, “that in light of this new information, the prisoner be stripped of the privileges she has enjoyed during this trial. The private cell, the visitation rights. They must stop. She is dangerous.”
In the mayhem, Virginia cannot see the judge’s face clearly, but she can see that he stands behind his bench with one fist anchoring him to it, and as his other hand bangs down, she can hear the strike of the gavel as clear as the report of a gun.
“Be it so enacted,” the judge says. “Guard, you hear? Strip the defendant of her privileges.”
He can’t mean it. He must not know what he’s saying. To throw her in with the other criminals of this prison, especially if they find out what’s just been said—her history as an alleged cannibal—it’s a punishment beyond anything she deserves. Not that deserving has anything to do with any of this.
As the guard drags her back to the jail, half on her feet, half off, she thinks wryly of how clever the prosecutor is. She suspects he didn’t even really care whether she kept her private cell. He wanted the visitation rights gone. Now that she has a competent lawyer in Mr. Mason, they have to be kept separate. Well, the prosecutor’s gotten that and everything else he asked for.
In a completely different part of the jail than she’s used to, on the ground floor near the main entrance, the guard swings a door open to a much larger cell and shoves her inside. The door clangs shut. There are other women here—she can smell them if not see them—lurking in the shadows.
But she doesn’t look. She walks straight to an empty cot and lies down on it, still wearing the new dress. It seems like days, not hours, since she put it on. She plans to sleep in it, but as it turns out, she doesn’t sleep. She turns her face to the wall and ignores any and all voices in the half dark around her. At least they remain only voices, for now.
Hours later, on the cusp of sleep, Virginia claws at her neck. First, she blames the new dress, but that isn’t it, she has to remind herself. It doesn’t button up as high as it feels like it does.
That constricting feeling isn’t the neck of her dress. It’s her body anticipating the feeling of the noose, which she’s imagining drawing tighter and tighter around her throat.
Chapter Fifty
Virginia
On the Expedition
May and June 1854
Even though the thaw had not yet come, they decided as one not to wait for it. No one wanted to continue in the search they knew was futile, not at this cost, not anymore. It was time to make for Repulse Bay. The six remaining survivors abandoned everything they could not carry on their backs and started their eastward trek.
They did their best to make time, grueling mile over grueling mile. Without the dogs, in a different season, and headed over ground they’d never traversed before, everything was different. The ice was buckled and ridged, utterly unpredictable. Some days, it felt like they covered more territory vertically than horizontally, made more progress toward the sky than the horizon.
But all in all, at the end of each day, Virginia still sent God a heavenward prayer of thanks. They were moving. They were eating, if only a little. They were not yet dead. In a land that seemed to actively desire the death of anyone who dared to cross its surface, one more day spent living seemed a minor miracle. She hoped to string enough minor miracles together to meet their goal and make it back to civilization. Was she hoping for too much?
Two weeks in, volatile spring storms hit them in earnest, and during the day, the wind was so brutal the
y could no longer talk to one another. They did not untie themselves from one another for any reason. They slept fully dressed with their ropes still tied tightly around each woman’s waist. They did not even leave one another’s company to perform bodily functions, but truth be told, these functions had become few and far between. Stella was the one to propose the solution to a problem none of them wanted to admit having and told every woman to wear her rags day in and day out so they would catch any liquid. Though they had had so little to drink, they rarely urinated, and when they did, they produced concentrated golden droplets. At least that was what Virginia did, and she did not care to discuss the matter so frankly with her fellow travelers, so she made assumptions. She knew sisters who told each other everything. These women were her sisters now, and she would tell them almost anything, but she did have limits.
She muttered a prayer every time they summited a hill and she looked out on a new field of ice, buckled and pockmarked. Would this be the one where they lost another member to the deep, invisible crevasses? She missed Caprice. She never would have expected that she’d miss her. But when she closed her eyes, she still saw her last glimpse of the rich girl’s face, drawn and beginning already to go blue, her hand raised in that solemn, unmistakable signal, Don’t.
At night, when they huddled together to rest, they stared blankly at one another, wordless. She could not even see the other women’s faces clearly, but she’d memorized them, chanted their names like an incantation across those endless miles of walking on the ice. Doro. Elizabeth. Stella. Siobhan. Irene. Back on the ship, they’d left Ebba, Althea, Dove, Margaret. As far as she knew at least, ten of them were still alive out of the original thirteen. Why did it feel like they’d lost so many more than that? Because every loss was total. Every woman was precious in an uncountable number of ways. Even, or maybe most of all, Caprice Collins.
Caprice had never been kind, and she had never been flawless, but toward the end, she had become dear. And now she was gone.
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