The Arctic Fury

by Greer Macallister

“Be on your way,” comes a voice from behind her.

  “Delilah,” Benson growls back, whether it is a name or only a description, she does not know. “Think you can tell me what to do, can ya?”

  “It’s merely a kind request,” simpers the doxy. “I’d very much appreciate your departure. We’ll see you again soon enough, Mr. Benson, won’t we?”

  The guard seems irritated but says nothing else before he leaves. The sight of his retreating back fills Virginia with relief.

  “Thank you,” says Virginia.

  “Didn’t do it for you. Just don’t want him thinking he can boss any of us,” says the doxy, rubbing her arms briskly to warm herself before crossing them over her half-exposed chest. “Plus, he’s cutting into my beauty rest.”

  She saves Virginia the trouble of deciding whether she should converse by turning away, her face toward the wall.

  Alone. She’s surrounded by women. A dozen in this cell alone. How many in the jail? The city? The Commonwealth? Yet she feels far more alone here than she ever did up in the Arctic, even when she was one of only six souls for miles around.

  Benson has left the newspaper, so she pulls it out to read.

  It occurs to her, almost as an idle whim, that she could kill herself. Probably none of these women would stop her. She could crumple up these pages and stuff them down her throat. One by one or all at once. She thinks about it so seriously, her fingers tighten around the paper, and she hears it crinkle. She could cram one page between her teeth, atop her tongue, then another and another. Eventually, she would choke.

  What he wants her to read is the first page, and she skims the article quickly enough to see that the names of the murderers he cites are right there. It is possible he only learned them today. The reporter is reaching into the past to predict the future. Virginia remembers that there was a far more famous murderer named Tirrell, tried here in Boston seven or eight years ago, whose case turned out very differently. Caprice had told the story of his ridiculous trial during the months in the ice house when they shared nearly every story any of them could think of, and she stunned them silent with the tale of the supposed sleepwalker who slit the throat of his troublesome mistress—nearly took her head clean off, he did—and got off scot-free. Of course the papers don’t mention him, thinks Virginia. His lawyer trumped up a story about sleepwalking, got family and friends to testify, spun the tale that even if he did do it, he couldn’t be held responsible for doing it. A jury of his peers, probably with troublesome mistresses of their own, agreed. He lived.

  To distract herself, she turns the paper’s remaining pages, letting her gaze settle on other articles, anything that talks about anywhere but here.

  Something catches her eye. The word Arctic.

  Yet the article does not mention her or her trial. It’s a small item, only a few lines long, deep into the inside pages. An Englishman named John Rae has returned from the Arctic and claims he knows what happened to the Franklin expedition. The name tickles her brain: Doro had told her all about him, his many journeys up the Coppermine and the bay and the Great Fish River, his unmatched knowledge of these Arctic lands. The results of his report to the committee will be published soon, the article says, but at the moment, all that is known is that he has brought back proof of the death of Sir John Franklin.

  Poor Lady Franklin, she thinks first and then feels shock at her own sympathy.

  Next, she feels the old unease in her stomach, that creeping sensation she felt back on the expedition when she read Lady Franklin’s final letter. All the woman’s words had been lies. In her letters, she had encouraged Virginia, called on sisterly solidarity, claimed to believe that in Virginia’s capable hands, anything was possible. All to mislead her, make promises she had no intention of keeping. She was trying to beat John Rae, Virginia realizes now, sending this ragtag group out like a wild, muttered prayer. If Virginia had succeeded, yes, perhaps she could have become the older woman’s protégé, someone Lady Franklin could dispatch to the places she herself could now only go in spirit. But she had not succeeded.

  She looks back down at the newspaper, letting her finger rest on those few lines of type, words that could make an enormous difference. She had blamed the Collins family for this whole trial, for trying to kill her to exact revenge for their daughter’s death while she was in Virginia’s charge. But were they fully responsible? How much of the blame lay at the Collinses’ feet and how much at Lady Franklin’s?

  This was it, she thinks, tapping her finger on John Rae’s name. This is what changed, why Brooks brought that late-breaking offer from Lady Franklin. They must have found out this news was coming. If Virginia had agreed to lie, it would have been her word against John Rae’s, and if Lady Franklin threw her weight behind Virginia’s story, it might have enough strength to win. Lady Franklin had famous friends like Charles Dickens who would lend their voices to hers. It might have worked, thinks Virginia now, especially told with flair. The surprising newness of the story, the sheer novelty of it. Women doing this thing that no man before them could manage to do, under the direction of the woman whose husband’s fate had finally been determined. But Virginia valuing the truth over her biggest secret, over her own life, has blown their plan to smithereens.

  And now that Virginia had refused to lie for Lady Franklin, to protect the one thing the woman valued above all price or reason—her husband’s reputation—she was of less than no use to the Englishwoman. The nagging feeling turns into something worse. A shimmering, uncertain anxiety. A question to which Virginia has no answer but dread.

  Now that Lady Franklin knows Virginia won’t give her what she wants, what else will she do?

  Accordingly, if Lady Franklin has now left the Collins family to their own devices, without her protection or interest, what desperate action might they take?

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Doro

  Boston

  October 1854

  “Doro, you have a visitor,” says her father’s voice, and she hears the disapproval in it. She has never heard these words from her father, not in the thirty-two years of her life, and she can’t make sense of her feelings about hearing them now. Too little, too late. It’s like a mockery of courtship: a man appearing at the door, asking for her, waiting patiently while she descends the stairs. Is it a man, actually? Her father didn’t say. She only knows that whoever waits for her, there will be no romance to it, no seduction. Someone will want something from her. Only by descending and confronting the visitor will she find out whether it’s something she wants to give.

  Her father is still holding the door when she enters the room, and how old he looks is like a punch in the gut. The time she was gone seems to have aged him several years. Now, standing in the dim light, his head down, waiting, he looks half in the grave.

  Standing in the door frame is a woman, a stranger, older than Doro but not quite as old as her father. Her clothing is uniformly dark, but Doro spots the quality of the silk right away. Doro has only ever used silk so fine for her little embroidered globes, and then only for the smaller ones, because the shop around the corner gave her their useless scraps for free. This woman’s heavily ruched and bustled dress must use seven, eight yards of that silk under a cloak of wool nearly as fine. She’s a rich woman trying to look poor and failing.

  There is a familiar look to the width at which her gray-green eyes are spaced. Doro remembers eyes like that. She saw them for the last time on the ice. This woman is more beautiful than her daughter, but those eyes give her away.

  Doro turns to her father. “Papa,” she says. “Do you know who this is?”

  The woman interrupts in a brisk, ringing tone. “I did not give my name. My business is with you alone, Dorothea. May we speak in private?”

  Doro’s eyes meet her father’s, and the look in his eyes sickens her further. He doesn’t know what this stranger wants, but whatever it is,
he wants Doro to know he disapproves.

  But he nods his head to Mrs. Collins with respect and immediately shuffles off, turning his back on Doro without a word. She wonders, not for the first time, if his mind is going. It was only the two of them for so long before she left, and he has not been the same since she returned. She hadn’t told him she was going; it wasn’t until she returned that she figured out that the stranger who’d spoken with her father the week before she’d met Virginia had been Brooks. Brooks had intended to invite her on the expedition. When her father had demanded a steep sum to let her go, Brooks had declined to pay. Then Virginia had come for her, and her father had lost Doro anyway, with no money to show for it. Without her, he let the shop go and let many of his clients slip away. If she’d been gone another six months, he would have been in the poorhouse. Her guilt at his decline is inseparable from resentment: he should not be her responsibility, and yet because he raised her, she owes him a debt she doesn’t know how to repay.

  She watches his retreating back until the silence stretches out, fills up the room, settles over both her and her visitor in a thick, unnerving haze.

  “What do you want?” she asks Mrs. Collins finally.

  “I’ll allow your rudeness,” says the older woman in a frosty voice, “assuming your manners were iced right out of you by your Arctic ordeals. But I believe it’s customary to invite a guest in.”

  “Because of you, my friend is on trial for her life, which she may well lose because of your vindictiveness. For a crime she did not commit. I don’t want you in my home.”

  “It’s not yours, really, is it? It’s your father’s. And from what I understand, it won’t be that much longer either.”

  So that’s it. The Collins family knows about her family’s financial situation, the painful secret that drove her north in the first place, though the Arctic trip did not solve the problem as she’d hoped. Probably that same Brooks fellow, who’d lied to the courtroom about knowing Lady Franklin or Virginia, had told them. She can hate him without knowing him, she decides, based on what Virginia told her and what she saw with her own eyes. She wondered what reward he’d reaped for lying like that in front of God and the law.

  In a flash, Doro knows what Mrs. Collins is going to ask of her. The mere idea fills her with disgust.

  It also might be her only choice.

  Apparently deciding to make herself at home, Mrs. Collins begins to remove one glove. The sight of a glove coming off, exposing skin, still fills Doro with dread. She smothers a gasp.

  “Are you quite all right?” asks Mrs. Collins.

  Without missing a beat, Doro says, “I think you know I’m not.”

  “Very well. Since you seem eager to get to the point, I’ll oblige you.”

  Doro should thank her and doesn’t.

  Mrs. Collins draws off her other glove and seats herself on the only chair in the room. “Dorothea, your testimony is on the schedule for tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you will say…what?”

  “Why should I tell you tonight? You can just hear it for yourself tomorrow.”

  “I have not decided yet whether I will be in the courtroom,” she says. “I don’t think you realize how much it wears on me. All this talk of my daughter’s death. I expect her murderer will be punished, but I fear she won’t be, and I must confront that fear every single day as I enter the courtroom.”

  “You struggle with your fear?” asks Doro with venom. “Think about how Virginia Reeve feels.”

  “Miss Roset.” She shifts her form of address, as if that will help her case, and does not point out that Doro is using Virginia’s alias instead of her real name, the name that implicates her in other crimes entirely. “I’m sure you know why I’m here.”

  “I assume you have a proposition for me.”

  “As I said, I worry that the guilty party will not be punished.”

  “Justice is always done, isn’t it?” says Doro.

  “I worry. It’s a mother’s worry. You perhaps don’t understand, but I assure you, your mother would have.”

  Horrified, Doro answers, “You know nothing about my mother.”

  “I know that mothers will do anything to protect their children. And that is what I am here to do. Even though I know the jury is very likely to rule correctly and lay the blame for my daughter’s death at Virginia Reed’s feet where it belongs, I am concerned they might need one more…let’s say nudge, in the right direction.”

  “And what form,” Doro says with great effort, “do you see this nudge taking?”

  “A very lucrative financial offer. One that will save your father’s shop. And make the two of you rich enough that you’ll never have to work again.”

  On the inside, Doro is stunned. On the outside, she remains calm. It is with that calm that she says, deliberately inflammatory, “Oh, I see. You want to pay me to lie so you can see my friend hang?”

  Offended, Mrs. Collins draws herself up. “I did not say any of that.”

  “You did,” she says, “without those words. Because you’re a dodge and a lousy human being.”

  “Careful,” says Mrs. Collins, a note of true menace in her voice.

  “Why now?” asks Doro. “Why didn’t you try to bribe me earlier?”

  The rich woman sighs. “We did not feel it was necessary, and truth be told, perhaps it is not even necessary now. Now that the truth is out about Miss Reed’s background, the jury likely will feel just fine about condemning a cannibal. But Mr.—excuse me, the other concerned party in the case—feels that the very last impression the jury and judge gets will make a difference to how the situation resolves. You are the very last witness on the docket. If your testimony gives the right impression, a sentence of guilt—the sentence she deserves—will come more easily. And we are prepared to compensate you for it, as I said. Handsomely.”

  “What do you want me to say?” asks Doro, stalling.

  “I don’t have an exact script,” she says. “Only you know what really happened up there.”

  “If I tell what really happened, I don’t think you’ll be very happy with me.” Even as she says it, a small uncertainty creeps into her mind. Does she actually know what really happened? She saw everything before and after, but did she really see?

  As if she can sense Doro wavering, Mrs. Collins asks in a less confident voice, “Did you see my daughter die?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  “She fell. In a storm. The five of us were on a rope—we tied ourselves together in that weather—and she fell.”

  “Which five? You, my daughter, Miss Reeve—Reed, I guess I should say now—and who else?”

  “The rest didn’t come back.” It’s the lie they all agreed on, and she’s not going to break that confidence, not even now, not even when she’s considering breaking an even more important one for the sake of the money that could save her father’s shop, her family’s future. Stella’s fate, Elizabeth’s, Siobhan’s, these are not for the courtroom to know. Everyone has assumed every woman not sitting in that front row is dead, but it’s far from the case. For the first time, she wonders if they did more harm than help to Virginia, sitting there in the front row to comfort her. What did they signal to the jury? All this time, instead of thinking these five women believe in her, they support her, have all these men been thinking, why only five?

  “And where were you on the rope? Who was in the lead?”

  “Caprice.”

  “Why? Shouldn’t Miss Reed have been in the lead, given she was the leader?”

  “She’d agreed to let Caprice have a turn.”

  “Perhaps she knew there was danger and wanted my daughter put in harm’s way.”

  “No, that wasn’t it at all.”

  “Listen to what I’m saying,” Mrs. Collins says more int
ently, laying her bare fingers on Doro’s sleeve. “When you tell the story, you could tell it that way, couldn’t you?”

  “Lie and say she put Caprice in the front to risk her life on purpose?”

  “You could tell it that way.”

  She stared.

  “For the right price,” says Mrs. Collins.

  “That’s the third time you’ve mentioned compensation,” comes a gruff voice from the other side of the room, and Doro almost jumps. Her father is standing there watching the two of them. Obviously, he’s been listening. She had not even considered that he would do so. How thoroughly she forgot the rules of civilization in the months she was in the North. The rules are that men can do whatever they want. And so her father has.

  Mrs. Collins has turned her attention completely to Mr. Roset. “Would you like me to tell you exactly the size of the compensation we’re proposing?”

  Doro’s father says, “I would.”

  She names a truly outrageous number, and Doro’s throat goes dry.

  It would be enough. More than enough. She could secure the shop with it, and with that, her father’s life. Maybe even his respect. Wouldn’t that be something, she thinks, her hand rising against her will to stroke the knob of skin where her right ear used to be. All her study of the ice, her brave undertaking in the Arctic, her devotion to him all these years, and the thing that will finally earn his respect is her willingness to tell a harmful, even fatal, lie.

  “Not enough,” says Doro’s father.

  “Come again?” says Mrs. Collins, not sounding like a fine, high lady at all but any slattern on the docks.

  Doro’s father says, “You’re asking my daughter to take a risk for you. Lying in the witness box, that’s a grave act. Even a sin before God, some might say.”

  “God took my daughter from me,” says Mrs. Collins. “I do not care for matters of religion at this time.”

  “The law, then. Have you no respect for that? You’re asking her to violate the laws of the Commonwealth and the nation.”

  “For a settlement large enough to ease both her conscience and yours. And I am prepared to settle the funds on you here and now.”