How many more of them would survive, find Repulse Bay, board a schooner back to civilization? She could not imagine these women back in the world, not after what they’d been through. Were Elizabeth and Stella meant to go back to toadying up to well-off women, following orders and completing tasks, when they’d proven themselves capable of so much more? Were Ebba and Althea meant to return to England and sit with their feet up on cushions, ringing porcelain bells to call their own servants? Was Irene meant to attach herself to another man who would abuse and mistreat her for lack of better options? And what about Virginia herself—where did she belong? Nowhere.
She hoped they would live long enough to face the conundrum of their futures, but she was not at all sure they would. The best thing that could happen would be that they’d be faced with impossible choices.
More likely, they wouldn’t be left alive to choose.
Long before the sun rose, the women rose and started out again across the ice.
So blind was Virginia, so focused on putting one foot and then the other in the snow ahead of her, that she didn’t understand for a long time why she could hear shouting.
“Stop!” She finally heard the word. “Stop!”
Who was calling, and where from? It had to be one of her own women. She would have to stop, as much as she hated to. She tugged on the rope, one, two, three times. She felt an answering tug. All forward progress ground to a halt. Virginia turned.
She could only see the vague shapes of the women around her. They were so difficult to tell apart in their furs.
“Look!” Siobhan was shouting. Her voice, thought Virginia, sounded unusually strong and powerful, in a way it hadn’t for days.
She followed the woman’s pointing mitt and gasped when she saw where it led.
There were shapes on the horizon. Were they cairns? No, they couldn’t be. Patches of ground showing through the melting snow, at last? Not that either. The shapes were moving. Toward them.
Then she looked down and saw tracks in the snow. Tracks made by feet other than their own.
As the other party neared, she began to be able to make them out. Six people, moving. The same as their own party, at least in number. In what other ways were they alike or different?
A noise she did not understand came from just over her left shoulder. She was too rapt, staring, to turn toward its source. She could not look away from the approaching hunters.
They were hooded, swathed in furs, with something like snowshoes strapped to their seal-fur boots. She couldn’t see the color of their skin or any other details of their faces, but from their relative sizes and the way they moved, the party seemed to include both men and women. Several had misshapen bodies, lumps in their fur. She blinked to clear her vision. No, she had mistaken the meaning of their shapes. Members of the party had dead game strapped to their bodies. A brace of rabbits at one figure’s waist, a full-size deer roped across someone else’s back. They had been hunting. Successfully.
If they had weapons, they did not raise them. Virginia’s eyes sent a signal to her brain to produce tears of joy, though her eyes were too weak and dry to comply with the order.
That noise again. This time, Virginia forced herself to turn. The noise came from Irene.
All at once, Irene broke out running toward the new arrivals, heedless of the ropes until they yanked tight and Elizabeth and Doro on either side of her tipped and fell into the snow.
But when they fell, they laughed, because Irene was crying, making an incoherent sound, and a medium-sized form freed itself from the line of hunters—they were easily identified as hunters now—and flung her arms around the fallen woman.
“Irene!” shouted the fur-dressed woman in a joyful voice.
Irene sobbed back a sound of happiness, of relief, of a thousand other things Virginia couldn’t understand or name. In the sound was everything.
We’re saved, thought Virginia, her lips moving silently in a prayer of thanks. We’re saved, we’re saved, we are saved.
Once the roped women were hauled to their feet again, still laughing, the leader of the hunting party addressed himself to Virginia.
“Who are you?” His accent was not recognizably French or English, and his words were direct.
She was not sure how to answer, and without exactly deciding, she told him, “We were explorers.”
“Where are you bound?”
“Safety,” blurted Virginia. “We will follow you anywhere safe.”
To his credit, the man did not laugh. “Safety in numbers they say. Let’s share camp tonight. Will you?”
“Yes. With gratitude.”
He drew out the conversation no longer. He gestured to his people, who formed themselves into a kind of wedge alongside and around Virginia’s party, and they all moved forward in step together.
Virginia noticed they were not backtracking in her party’s footsteps, but neither did they go due forward along the bearing they’d been taking. At the end of that path, what would have awaited her? Perhaps safety, perhaps not. They would take a different path now.
She put her head down, narrowed her eyes against the sunlit brightness, and let herself be led.
After an hour, the man signaled for them all to pause, and his mittens disappeared into the folds of his fur covering. Irene gestured at him, mittened hands flying.
“Yes,” he said. “We have enough to share.”
And by a miracle, he was passing around squares of fish, not dried but fresh, bright pink and slippery. Virginia crammed her square into her dry mouth, and the saliva that sprang up to make the meat slick as she chewed felt like as much of a gift as the food itself did. She had not thought to ask for food. She was no longer fit to lead. Her mind did not wallow in the realization, did not fall into an obsessive loop of blame. She simply thought, I am not fit to lead, I know that now, and when they resumed walking, her thoughts went back only to putting one foot forward, then the other, until they could at last reach a safe destination.
The destination turned out to be a small stone house on the edge of a river, encircled by ice houses like the one Irene had helped them make.
“The stone house was built by southerners,” the leader of the party said. “You may stay there if you want, but it is cold.”
“Please, we are grateful for any shelter. Put us wherever you please.”
The head of the party divided them up between the ice houses, untying Virginia’s women from the rope, and there was a long moment when it became clear they were not all going into the same house. They did not want to leave one another, not after so long together. But just as clearly, none of the houses was large enough to hold the entire party. They were lucky there was shelter for them at all, given that they were interlopers.
Virginia, Stella, and Elizabeth went into one house with the leader and two others; Doro, Siobhan, and Irene followed others into a different house.
Once they were inside the ice house, which was, like all such houses, bigger on the inside than it seemed on the outside, the man opened his hood, and Virginia was shocked to see his skin was dark, darker even than Elizabeth’s.
Elizabeth laughed, a warm sound Virginia had forgotten the sound of. “And how did you get here, sir?”
With a smile, the dark-skinned man said, “Some years ago, the clever men ran north. I am so clever I ran farther than anyone.”
Elizabeth laughed again. The charm of it was a balm on Virginia’s soul. After Caprice died and they lost their way, she was not sure any of them would ever laugh again.
“But there will be time for stories,” he said. “Let us eat and get warm.”
“We’re grateful to you,” said Elizabeth. “We can’t pay…”
“I would not abandon anyone on the ice, not even strangers,” he said. “The day may come when we need others to feed and warm us. We will be the strangers the
n.”
And it was warm, blessedly so. Their bodies in the small space were already heating it. Virginia thought she had not been this warm since they left the Doris, and probably not even then. Perhaps she had not been warm since Boston. One of the other men had removed his gloves and scooped a few chunks of ice into a spirit stove, melting it into water for them to drink.
The man introduced himself as Jasper, and the woman who had greeted Irene handed around raw strips of dressed rabbit, and when Virginia felt strong enough to speak, she asked Jasper for their story.
“We’re headed back to Repulse Bay,” he said. “We had been part of a group traveling up Back’s Great Fish River, but there was a disagreement, and we’re the ones who didn’t want to stay.”
He gestured to the young woman who was animatedly chatting with Stella. On her other side sat a man who looked at her raptly, either her husband or something close to it.
“And you knew this camp?”
“He did,” said Jasper, gesturing to the other man. “I’m glad to see it’s here.”
Stella asked, “And once you return to Repulse Bay? What will you do then?”
“We don’t have a plan,” admitted Jasper. “Some of us may stay there and find work. Or sail on a ship, perhaps. I hear the whalers are starting to come into Hudson Bay. We’ll be there in time for the start of the season.”
“But none of you will return south?” asked Stella, and the note of hope in her voice made Virginia pause.
“There is no need to,” Jasper said. “Not for me. My life is here.”
“What kind of life is it?” asked Elizabeth, and Virginia heard the same note in her voice she’d heard in Stella’s. A brightness, a curiosity. A note of hope she hadn’t heard from either of them in months. Perhaps ever.
Jasper said, “A hard one. A free one. The only one I ever want to lead again.”
At that, both Stella and Elizabeth smiled.
Virginia saw instantly that she would lose them too, in a different way than she had lost any of the other women on the expedition but one that was just as permanent.
They stayed at the camp for five more days. Jasper suggested they wait for the full moon to make the trek to Repulse Bay; more light would mean less likelihood of turning from the right path. They could not afford any more mistakes, not even with the hours of daylight lengthening and the thaw finally imminent. As they’d found on the day three of them fell in the ravine and only two came out, the cold was far from the only thing in the Arctic that could kill.
During the five days, Virginia took each of the women aside to ask them their plans. Elizabeth and Stella, as she suspected, wanted to stay. Doro, eager to return to her father’s business, had no desire to remain in the North; she seemed to regard the entire suggestion as somewhat ludicrous. Siobhan, though she was tempted by the greater freedom, felt she would prefer her life back in Boston where she could pursue her dreams as long as she pretended to be someone she wasn’t.
It was Irene’s choice that surprised Virginia the most. She approached her while she was talking with her friend, using string pictures to communicate. When she asked Irene if she wanted to stay, Irene shook her head strongly in the negative, taking Virginia by surprise.
“Why not? You traveled through these lands with your husband, didn’t you? This is territory you know. Your friends are here.”
Irene grabbed the hand of her friend, made sure she was watching Irene’s face, and moved her hands in a flurry Virginia couldn’t understand.
“Are you sure?” the woman asked Irene.
Irene made a single motion in front of her own mouth, and this time, Virginia could read both the intent of the motion and the words Irene was shaping without speaking aloud: Tell her.
In halting words, the friend explained that Irene’s husband had been a dangerous drunk—as so many men were on the frontier—and he was the one who had cut her tongue from her mouth in a violent rage. She spoke too many languages he didn’t know, made him feel too small.
“What happened to him?” asked Virginia.
“He took his knife and cut out her tongue. She took his knife and cut out his heart,” the woman said.
Irene nodded with satisfaction.
The woman went on, “Her husband had friends here. She does not want to remain. Even if it is very unlikely she would ever see those particular men again, she wants to put that life behind her. She answered the advertisement to lend help where it was needed, and she was not sure how she would feel being here again. But now, she knows she cannot stay.”
“I understand,” said Virginia, who did not fully understand but knew something about turning one’s back on the past in hopes of a better future.
On the fifth day, they all left the camp together, moving toward Repulse Bay, though not all would go into what passed for the city. Every moment of the hike toward Repulse Bay felt so, so different from the rest of their journey, Virginia thought. The motions were the same, yet there was something entirely new about this. Possibly because she knew where they would part ways. Possibly, she thought ruefully, just because this time, they knew their destination.
When Jasper told them they were close enough to Repulse Bay to reach it that day, after the midday break for food, Stella fell into step next to Virginia. She kept her voice low so others wouldn’t hear.
“I wanted to tell you. Before we part ways. I’m so grateful,” said Stella.
“For what?”
“I would never have known what I was capable of without coming here,” said Stella. “Following you onto the ice. Breaking away from all the things in life that I thought defined me. Out here, with you, I realized I can do almost anything.”
Virginia said, “Anything. You can do anything.”
“Not anything,” she said, and the look on her face broke Virginia’s heart. “I can do anything but go back.”
Virginia grasped her hand and squeezed, feeling her strength through the double layer of mittens. When they met, Stella had reminded her of her innocent little sister. Later, she’d reminded Virginia of Virginia herself. Now, with her look of optimism and her thin shoulders squared, Virginia realized there was no one else she resembled. Stella now looked only like Stella.
“Crossroads,” called Jasper, and the party drew to a halt. The hunters who had saved them drew aside to allow the women of the expedition a private moment to say goodbye, and Virginia was grateful.
For the last time, the six of them gathered into a tight circle, arms around one another, heads together. They made a pact never to tell anyone what had happened, not for any reason. To talk about Stella’s and Elizabeth’s fates would be to invite someone to come after them. Only if others believed them dead would they be truly safe.
They would be lost, from Virginia’s perspective and from the world’s. But from their own, they were free.
The group parted then, the hunters heading southward toward a camp they knew, a place they could continue to live wild, make their own way.
Virginia, Doro, Irene, and Siobhan turned toward Repulse Bay. An hour later, Virginia realized she could hear the sounds of lively chatter in the distance, the squawk of seabirds, sounds she thought she might never hear again.
The sound of a ship’s horn reminded her of the Doris, and a sick feeling roiled her stomach. Part of her knew the only way she would ever leave the Arctic alive was on a ship. A different part of her could still hear Stella’s screams echoing off the hull of the Doris. She would never board a ship again without hearing those sounds inside her mind.
Now that Virginia had tasted water again, the tears in her eyes became real. She did not wipe them away from her cheeks.
They would go home failures, yes. But they would go home.
Chapter Fifty-One
Virginia
Charles Street Jail, Boston
October 1854
She recognizes the voice of Benson growling toward her before she sees the toes of his shoes.
Virginia has never held with the activities of spiritualists, never thought a person’s aura could be read, but when she looks up at Benson, she feels contempt pouring off him like water. Earlier in the trial, he was more gentle and affectionate than Keeler, but now that he has turned, he seems more dangerous. Today, he is like an illustration of the word contempt in a child’s lesson book. It would be amusing if she weren’t so worried about what contempt might drive him to do.
“They hanged Washington Goode, you know,” says Benson. “They hanged that Professor Webster, what killed Parkman. Newspaper says nothin’ keeps a woman from being hanged just the same as a man. No tender mercies for the fairer sex, they say.”
Virginia is done holding her tongue. “I don’t ask to keep my life because I’m a woman. I ask to keep my life because I’m innocent.”
“Same as Goode said, far as that goes,” he says, unmoved. “Webster finally confessed, hoping for a lesser sentence, but Goode said he never did it. Right up until the noose wouldn’t let him say a word more.”
Delightful man, this. She cannot believe she ever thought him kind.
“I sure did hope you wouldn’t hang,” he says. “Seemed a waste. But now that I know who you are, well, hanging’s too good for you.”
Fear zings up her spine; does he mean to harm her? Would he do it with witnesses present? She supposes witnesses of this kind can be bought or ignored easily enough. They were no longer people, not in here, not any of the women behind bars, herself included.
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