A Dark and Promised Land

by Nathaniel Poole

  Declan sits to the other side of her, staring around at the impenetrable wall of reeds, fingering a borrowed musket. Mary glances at the Highlander with distaste, her arm tightening around Rose. While the Isbister family watched and protected her, Declan had made his intent toward her known in the brigade, both as additional comfort to her, and to forestall any who might see her as free for the taking. As far as the brigade is concerned, she is effectively Declan’s property, and all have noticed his continued practice with the musket.

  Mary Isbister has little use for Declan and is inclined to send him packing with a curse and a tossed pot, but Rose recognizes her vulnerability, and knowing her father’s final hope for her, encourages his advances. She is aware there is no room for an unwed spinster in the land of her father’s dreams. Especially one on the verge of dissolution. All that she has cared for has been taken: country, family, lover. Her mind is an soaring edifice of sticks, and, with each jar, each tragedy, each witnessed death and loss, it feels as if one or more has been yanked out, the whole thing in danger of tumbling around her. She holds herself rigid, willing with all her inner strength to maintain composure, the terror of collapse and exposure the one tiny candle that warmed her spirit, kept her taking the next breath. She feels that if she relaxed but a moment, her house would collapse and she would be reduced to a gibbering idiot.

  She feels the Devil tugging at her mind, wishing to destroy whatever humanity she still holds within her. Often as they had rode up a swell, Rose had held her breath, hands gripping one another as she willed a sense of permanence and stability in a rolling, pernicious world. At such times Mary had watched her, aware of some great struggle within, but wary of speaking, afraid that any request of her, even speech, might prove too great a disturbance. So she held Rose’s hand, wishing for her strength to flow into the grieving girl.

  “Lord, you are cold,” Mary says to her, wrapping her in a blanket. Rose smiles faintly at her.

  “It is nothing,” she says.

  “Oh, it is something, all right. The falling damps … sure you will get a chill. Come sit closer to me. Be a dear and move over, Margaret. That’s a girl.” With a sigh, Rose relaxes against her friend, her face gaunt and tired. She rests her head on the bony shoulder as the thin arm wraps around her, imagining Alexander’s embrace protecting her from a hard world.

  It is more than the series of shocks she has been subject to: so much has been removed, so much upon which she has shelved her idea of herself, that there seems precious little of her left. And what to replace it with? There is nothing around her that she can see capable of supplanting that which she has lost. She is in an unknown land at the brink of war; hungry, cold, and frightened, and bidden to a man for whom she has little feeling. What is there to replace the world of security, predictability, and dashing risk-taking that she had known for so long? Even if return to Orkney was possible, nothing remained there for her; what few kin she has are scattered throughout the Empire. It might have been possible to ally herself with one of Lachlan’s friends, but that would mean entering a parasitic relationship, one likely to devolve to little more than prostitution.

  Even if she had been willing to consider such an arrangement, there seems no way to return to York Factory, or arrange for passage back to Stromness. On the entire journey, they passed no brigades heading east. In this country, the only people she can lay claim to are these ragged and rugged individuals she accompanied across the Atlantic. But now she is a supplicant, and so had determined to leave behind her status and become one of them. Over the ensuing weeks even Cecile Turr forgets who and what she used to be.

  The brigade proceeds a short distance into the marsh before pulling up onto a muddy bank. The landing is small, a greasy strip bounded by water and thick reeds. Several men stamp around in a circle, flattening the grasses to make room for the people to disembark. Declan and a few armed Highlanders fan out, instantly disappearing, though leaving a clear track through the rushes.

  After the death of her father, no one challenges Rose’s forays away from the camp. As soon as the evening meal is complete, she leaves her companions and follows a deer trail back to the shore of the lake. The sun has long since set, and only the last vestiges of twilight remain on the land. But, as daylight departs, eyes adapt and the land and water become luminous. Declan finds her sitting alone under a wizened jack pine murmuring with the cold breeze off the lake. She sits quietly on a pile of needle duff, a blanket wrapped around her and legs drawn up with her feet pulled inside. Holding a rag of hat in his hand, he kneels beside her. She feels his hip pressing against her, trembling. Without speaking, he stares into the emergent night, his hand moving towards her. Blunt and grey, it looks to Rose like the head of a venomous snake. She does not move as it searches her lap, finds and swallows her own small hand. Still without looking at her, he speaks in low tones about his dream of starting his own empire, and needing a wife, a companion and confidant, to care for him and support him as he seeks their future and glory. In exchange, he promises her fealty and love, and undying devotion.

  She looks out over the lead-gray surface of the great lake, the red eye of rising Aldebaran glaring off its surface. For a fleeting moment, she feels an urge to cast herself into its frigid bosom. It feels like the one act of freedom left to her: the slave always having the final choice of the gallows or the shackles. In the distance a grouse booms, the sound so deep she feels as much as hears it. Another male making a supercilious claim to love. Declan mistakes her tear as that of joy, her slight nod as evidence of barely contained emotion. Which, of course, the latter is. Later that night, he and his friends force trade liquor from Turr’s stores, and become very drunk in celebration.

  They find a brown and dead landscape at Fort Douglas. Successive cold nights have flattened the pasture grasses and delicate frost tendrils grow like seedlings on black fallow soil. The thin, blue sky has emptied of fowl and the land holds its breath for the coming, inevitable snow. Night after night, wolves and coyotes praise the return of winter, the season of death.

  Fort Douglas is small and shaggy, an outpost intended for the simple gathering of furs, not a beachhead for an empire. It stands alone as a shoal; a dark reef of presumed conquest marked on London-made maps and troubled Indians’ dreams. Naked on a featureless plain, obvious, imperious, gnawed by wind and weather, and by a landscape that lends itself to madness. Visible from more than twenty miles, obscured only by the curve of the earth itself.

  As most things that survive this land, winter in the fort is usually a time for sleep and rest and patience — waiting for spring and the breaking of the land. Seed waits like hope in the granary, dormant with promise, the colonist’s entire enterprise trapped with a few bushels of golden kernels. But the level of seed falls daily in a race to see which will prove the greater: the dilatory yet implacable change of the seasons or the hunger of foraging mice.

  The fort is busier now than any previous winter. Due to Nor’wester hostilities and the rumour of war, many who farmed in the area had retreated to the fort once their crops were off the ground, and the place is not happy to receive Rose’s brigade — yet another cohort of mouths at the beginning of the hungry season.

  Poplar poles are cut and dragged from the river valley, and the crowded, walled-in space echoes with the sound of axe and adze as several new shacks are built to house the newcomers. It all feels a race, a deep breath before the plunge of winter.

  Rose marries Declan not long after arriving at the settlement. There being no priest, Governor Semple performs the rites, assuring them that his moral and spiritual authority equaled or exceeded that of a deacon. Several amazed colonists witness them, and the event becomes impetus for a massive, several-day drunk for many of the fort’s inhabitants.

  Rose has no idea if her choice is wise or foolish, just that events have taken on a life of their own, and it is her fate to follow them to their conclusion. She prays that the child she carries benefits from her choice.

&nbs
p; “Here, let me help you with that, Mary,” Rose says, taking the dish of turnips from her. They are in the fort’s kitchen preparing the midday meal with several other women. The hearth fire is roaring and women flit about, chatting like so many sparrows on a pile of spilled seed corn.

  Mary wipes a lock of her thin, prematurely grey hair from her eyes and smiles at Rose. Rose takes the turnips and carries them to a table; she sits on a stool and begins cutting the knobby vegetables. The chunks fall into the bowl with a wooden clatter. A raw, earthy smell rises from them. But the knife slips and cuts deep into her palm. Blood appears like a surprise, and Rose’s stomach lurches. She runs through the doorway and vomits on the threshold.

  Mary rushes to her, and, kneeling, places a tiny red hand on her back. Rose can feel the heat of it through her dress. Frost rises from the ground into her bleeding palm.

  “I-I’m sorry,” Rose chokes.

  “Hush, girl, don’t you say anything. Margaret, be a dear and grab a wet cloth?” She smoothes Rose’s hair back. “Oh, you have cut yourself … and you are quickening fast,” she adds softly, feeling the swell in Rose’s belly. Rose hesitates, startled. She looks at Mary.

  “How did you know?”

  Mary smiles faintly at her. “I am a woman. The signs are not hard to see.” She pauses, lowering her voice. “Does Declan know?”

  At that, her eyes fill with anguish. A couple of fur traders pass by, giving them both quizzical looks. “Not here,” Rose whispers. Margaret arrives with the cloth, and Mary wraps it around Rose’s bleeding hand.

  “Come with me,” she says, taking her hand and helping her to her feet. As always, Rose is surprised at the small woman’s strength, her frame as hard and knotted as a birch burl. She leads Rose to a food storage shack; when she opens the door, mice burst from the room, running over their shoes and scurrying along courtyard walls. The cold-soil smell of stored vegetables is strong in the dark space.

  They leave the door ajar just enough to allow a slender V of light into the room. Mary sits Rose on a sack of pemmican and takes the girl’s hands in her own.

  “Tell me,” she says, kneeling before Rose and looking into her eyes. A vertical band of soft light illuminates the seated figure, and, for a moment, she appears to Mary like a grieving angel.

  Rose looks down at the slender, calloused fingers in her own, and her tears fall with tiny pops into the dust. She opens her heart, telling Mary of her trysts and loves and her dangerous games in Stromness. She tells her about the yearning that drove her, the seeking, and the emptiness that she felt inside that she hoped to assuage in the arms of another. She tells of her many conquests and her few failures and of disasters narrowly averted. She had never worried much about conceiving and never kindled, although she rarely took precautions. Therefore, it was a great shock to her when she missed her time, and the morning illness arrived.

  Mary listens to her in shocked silence, wondering how such a life could be; what it meant to her and her family. Sin aplenty she herself was guilty of, but never with such wanton desire, with such conscious will. A fear and jealousy rises for her man and she now has an image of Rose as a succubus. She fights an urge to pull away. But then the door groans open, pushed by a gust of wind burdened by snow. The illusion fades and all she sees is a lonely, lost woman, weeping and afraid.

  “Why did you choose such a life?” Mary asks.

  “There have been many nights I’ve pondered that question. It was more than a spoiled brat’s distraction, although I was less than honest with myself. Yet I’ve since found far more meaning in a child’s hungry tears than any man’s lust. I’ve become an orphan, and yet it seems to me that I have found myself, waking as if from a dark dream. Your kindness and the kindness of our people have shown me love, if I may call it that.”

  “Does Declan know?” Mary asks, after a long pause.

  “No, no, you are the only one I have told.”

  “I see. Well, he will have to know about the baby, at least.”

  Rose looks up at her. “I do not think the baby is his.” She sees the unspoken question in Mary’s eyes. “Alexander. It’s likely Alexander McClure’s”

  “Alexander McClure? The Half-caste?” Mary says, shocked again.

  Rose nods. They sit in silence for a while. “I don’t know what to do,” Rose says at last, her voice entreating.

  “Do? You are not really showing yet, so there is time. And clothing can hide many sins.”

  “But I will have to tell Declan what I suspect.”

  “You will do nothing of the kind, girl. As you said, you are not sure. You are to be wed soon and Declan will be the father of your child. Come; let us speak no more of it. We must return to the kitchen. I shall catch my death of cold in here.”

  The sun is low in the sky, its reach withered with the aging season. Blue shadows reach across the square, the palisade logs silver against the white ground. Rose and Mary sit outside in the courtyard, wrapped in white trade blankets and watching the fort’s children play. One group represented the marauding Half-breeds, the other the beleaguered colonists. Rose cannot tell which group represented whom, as they took no particular care to dress their parts, but she suspects that the much larger group must have been the Half-breeds. If she had a choice, she knew which was likely to be the winners and would throw in with them. Shouts and mock gunfire and blood-curdling screeching echo in the square.

  Rose tells Mary that she yearns for the courage of Isobel Gunn, an Orkneywoman who had impersonated a man and under such guise travelled to Rupert’s Land to follow her lover. But someone discovered her true sex, raped her, and she was found out when she whelped a bastard in the great hall of Fort Douglas itself. Gunn was returned to Orkney in shame with her son. As Rose saw it, the woman had the greatest backbone when she defied the core of social convention simply to follow her own heart.

  Mary opines that Gunn was a fool, albeit a tragic one. A woman may earnestly love a man, but none are worth such a price. The fact that she had been raped gave further credence to the value of men in general.

  Rose considers this, and wonders about her own choices. She had searched for something permanent in Orkney; sought it in the company of old men and young girls, in bankers and fishmongers, soldiers and cripples missing limbs from the wars with Bonaparte and the Americans. All to no avail.

  “Perhaps her greatest terror was that she would never find another love, and emptiness would forever haunt her days,” Rose says.

  “You speak as if love is something to find and keep. That has not been my experience. When I choose to love, I find it waiting; when I do not, love distains me.”

  After a moment’s reflection, Rose realizes that even the sweetest, most tender boy rarely elicited more than a moment’s stirring in her heart, and this in a woman who once believed that love was her birthright. She wanted to love, craved it, in fact, but could not get her stubborn heart to respond. Something always seemed to draw down between her and the other that she had thought so promising. Now with a new husband sharing her bed, she wonders about the strange evolution of love in her life; how she had arrived at this place. The cause, if there is one, is not obvious.

  “Perhaps not all are fated for love.”

  “That’s not what Jesus tells us.”

  Rose shakes her head. What did Jesus have to teach about love, other than as something to be tortured and die for? When she was still quite young she had invited Jesus to her heart’s bedchamber, but of all her lovers, He was the most demanding and the least satisfying. She clutched at Him with all the ardour at her command, but he stood away, mute and unapproachable. No matter how the priest exorcised her lack of true faith, no matter how hard she tried to surrender her will to Him, His essence lay as cold and unmoved as the type in her Bible. In the end, her love for Him devolved to one of distant warmth: they way one cares for a sweet uncle who only visits occasionally.

  “I believe that when one is human, flesh still matters; a theology cannot warm like a pa
ir of strong arms or a lover’s breath on your neck.”

  “Perhaps. But what fruit did that bear you?” Mary asks in a quiet voice, but at the same time opens her blanket. Rose moves into the warm space and breathes deep, as the older woman’s arms wrap around her. Rose immediately knows the answer. She had gone into the world with her ache an unseen golem buried under fine powder and a charming smile. And each touch only confirmed her pain.

  Her thoughts turn to scones and strawberries and warm milky tea, the fire laid out before her and the comforting sounds of the servants talking quietly in the corridor. It might be dull, but it surely is safe; if she had known the evils the journey to Rupert’s Land held for her, she certainly would have refused it. How that simple Orkney girl had managed it, alone and ever fearful of discovery, Rose has utterly no idea. Perhaps she simply is no Isobel Gunn. Mary is of the opinion that she is better for it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The red glow of a May early morning silhouettes the two horsemen, a warm breeze whispering through the brown foxtail as they make their way across the rim of the coulee. The upper limb of the sun touches the horizon and morning bursts across the prairie, and, as if on cue, a melody of birdsong lifts from the surrounding mats of wet fescue emerging through the snow. From one of the riders a hearty accompaniment — sung with more lust than tune — of “En roulant ma boule” drifts with the wind.

  “You are uncommonly cheerful this morning, my friend,” Alexander observes.