More Than Sorrow

by Vicki Delany

  “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Hannah Manning.” A man stood there, a big grin plastered across his ugly face. My stomach rolled over and my head began to swim.

  Rick Brecken was beside him, looking somewhat pleased with himself. “Afternoon, Hannah. We’d like to talk to you for a bit, if we may. Your doctor’s not around? That’s too bad.”

  I ignored him. “Gary Wolfe. I won’t say it’s a pleasure.” I had known Wolfe in Afghanistan. We were not, to say the least, friends.

  “Mind if we come in?” Wolfe said. He didn’t wait for an answer, but stepped forward. Instinctively I moved out of the way, and they were in the house.

  “It was you at the police interrogation of my sister earlier, wasn’t it?”

  Wolfe studied his surroundings. A typical modernized, nineteenth-century Ontario farmhouse, full of family pictures and mementos, children’s shoes and toys, insignificant art and cheap souvenirs, books and magazines. All the stuff of an ordinary family living an ordinary life.

  I did not want Gary Wolfe in this house.

  “I’d like you to leave.”

  “You don’t look too bad,” he said. “Bit on the thin side, and I don’t like your hair that way. Other than that, you look almost…normal.”

  “I’m surprised to see you here, Wolfe. What, you’ve been given a well-deserved demotion and are now investigating small-town murders?”

  His eyes flared. “Hila Popalzai wasn’t any ordinary small-town woman.”

  “No.”

  “Afghan refugee. From an important family. Did you know her back in Kabul?”

  “No.”

  “Why’d you kill her?”

  “Don’t give me your bull, Wolfe. I’m not answerable to you.” A headache was moving in, bringing clouds over my mind, and my range of vision was narrowing. In a battle of words and wits, I’d be no match for Gary Wolfe.

  “You’re as answerable to me as anyone else, Manning. I’ve seen your medical records. I know your mind’s a ball of pure mush. You’ll never work again. You can’t write a sensible sentence, can you?”

  “Leave now.” I said. It came out like a plea, not a demand as I’d intended.

  “Not that any of your treasonous diatribes were worth the paper they were printed on in any event.”

  To my horror I felt tears behind my eyes. I fumbled in the pocket of my shorts and my fingers found my cell phone.

  He leaned forward and leered into my face. I smelled tobacco on his clothes and the hamburger he’d had for lunch on his breath. “I’m only sorry it wasn’t me who got you. At least the Taliban were good for one thing.”

  “Gary, back off.” From the dark edges of my consciousness, I heard Brecken’s voice tinged with alarm . Wolfe was going too far. “Let’s go. She doesn’t look good. Anything she tells you will be suspect.”

  Waves crashed into my head. Omar laughed. I narrowed my eyes and tried to focus on the phone in my hand to pull up Joanne’s number.

  “Calling your doctor?” Wolfe asked, his voice low and menacing. “What’s her name? Oh, yes. Mansour. Now, what kind of a name’s that, I wonder?”

  “Gary, let’s go. This isn’t helping.”

  “Sure.” Wolfe sounded cheerful now, friendly. “Thought I’d drop in on an old war acquaintance and say hi. Sorry to hear about your injury, Manning. Next time, I’ll bring flowers. He paused. “Calla lilies, I hope.”

  I heard footsteps and the door closing. My legs trembled beneath me and I crumbled to the floor. I lay there for a long time, while Omar danced the jig across my eyeballs.

  Gary Wolfe was a major in the Canadian Army. He was with the Intelligence branch, and our paths had crossed more than once in Afghanistan. I was a reporter. I had a job to do and stories to tell. He was a military man, with secrets to keep. Personal secrets as well as military ones.

  I’d written a story about a warlord, a big man in a small district. The warlord was supposedly our ally in the war on terror. I thought he was worse than the enemy. Everyone knew he was deep into the drug trade, and that he had a fondness for boys—the younger and more cowed the better. He kept a fully equipped torture chamber (which I had, fortunately, never seen) in the cellar of a mansion so over-decorated it made mad King Ludwig’s palace look sedate. My story laid it all out—the drugs, the debauchery, the cruelty.

  I also suspected, although couldn’t prove, that he slipped drug money to one Major Gary Wolfe. That part of it I did not include in my story.

  Military intelligence got wind of what I was investigating and ordered me to stop. They sent Wolfe around to badger me. Until then I’d merely suspected the major was taking bribes from the warlord. When I saw the fear and hatred in his eyes, fear of being discovered, hatred of me for uncovering his secrets, I knew it.

  Threats were made, on Wolfe’s part, not mine. I refused to withdraw the story.

  The brass went to my bosses, demanding the paper not print the story, saying it was a threat to national security as our army needed the warlord’s good will.

  The paper pulled the story.

  I never quite forgave them for that. I could understand their point of view, but how we were winning the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan by letting someone rape their children and torture their cousins and brothers, never mind act as a conduit for hard drugs flooding the cities of the West, was beyond my understanding.

  I’d been angry at the paper, for giving in and not standing up for what was supposed to be their responsibility, but in a way I understood and I’d moved on. I hadn’t exposed Wolfe, which I wouldn’t do without proof, and heard he’d been posted back to Canada shortly thereafter.

  I remembered the way he spoke to me that day in Kabul. As if me, my job, was a personal affront to him. He’d spat words like treachery and sedition and sworn he’d see me ruined.

  I’ve found that, no matter where or when, once the language gets ratcheted up to talk of treason and liberty there can be no compromise. Particularly not when it was used to conceal an underlying fear—fear at being exposed and disgraced.

  All that had happened a year ago. I’d forgotten about Gary Wolfe and that petty warlord. Clearly Wolfe hadn’t forgotten me. He must have been following me: my career, my injury, my recovery. There was no reason at all anyone in military intelligence would be concerned with the murder of Hila Popalzai. Only, Wolfe, who’d never forgotten me.

  Or how much he hated me.

  ***

  I woke up on the living-room floor. My head full of pain. I couldn’t let Joanne find me here, like this. Certainly not Lily or Charlie. I rolled onto my stomach and slowly, very slowly, pulled myself as far as to my hands and knees.

  I opened my eyes only enough to see the patch of floor in front of me, and I crawled up the stairs. Like a baby or an old dog. I felt my way to my room, and then to my bed. It took all the strength I had to pull myself to my feet and roll onto the bed.

  The air conditioning was off and my room was overly warm. It didn’t matter as I didn’t have the strength to crawl under the covers. Only a few hours ago, I’d told Jake I’d move out if he wanted me to. I’d been somewhat optimistic, to say the least.

  I lay on the top of my bed for a long time, wrapped in pain and misery.

  And fear.

  Hila’s death was a terrible thing.

  But it had nothing to do with me. With us. With my sister, my family.

  Was Gary Wolfe going to make it about me? Just because he could?

  Why not? If Hila’s death was an ordinary murder, someone who saw her on her own and took advantage of the opportunity for a bout of rape and murder, Wolfe wouldn’t care. It wouldn’t matter to him if the perpetrator got away. If he could nail me for it, he’d consider it a job well done.

  He didn’t even have to have a case to take to court.
A security certificate maybe, restricting my contacts and movements, perhaps even an involuntary confinement in a psychiatric hospital.

  I reminded myself that I was not without resources. My mother was a doctor; she and Rebecca Mansour would ensure I wasn’t declared insane.

  Wouldn’t they?

  I was thinking of the missing hours, the hours when even I couldn’t account for my whereabouts or actions, when I fell asleep.

  ***

  November 3, 1783

  In November 1783 the British abandoned New York and America forever. Ships packed with refugees left with them. Many returned to England, many went south to the warmer colonies of Bermuda or the Bahamas, but more than half went north, to the largely unsettled areas of Canada. Maggie accompanied Nathanial Macgregor and his family and the group heading to Upper Canada with Captain Peter van Alstine.

  She went because, quite simply, she had no place else to go.

  She didn’t care for Nathanial’s wife, a whiny self-pitying thing with airs beyond her station, and Maggie glimpsed a cruel streak in Nathanial, which he managed to keep hidden, most of the time, behind a façade of charm.

  But what choice did she have? Her friends were joining their husbands, starting new lives of their own.

  Maggie had no one else in the world to offer her protection. If she travelled alone her reputation, not to mention her personal safety, would be in great danger. Nathanial had assured her there were plenty of men in Upper Canada in need of a wife. Disbanded soldiers who decided to stay on in the colony rather go back to England or Germany; single men or widowers eager to take up the British offer of land of their own.

  She met men in search of a wife on the ship and in Montreal where they prepared for the journey west. But she turned aside their feeble attempts to court her. She knew she had to get over the loss of Hamish and Flora and all they had. She needed to start a new life, a new family.

  In a new county.

  But whether it was because Maggie couldn’t bear the idea of man who was not Hamish coming to her bed, or because Nathanial was hostile to any potential suitors, by the time Maggie arrived in Fifth Town in July of 1784 she was a servant in all but name to the Macgregor family.

  ***

  July 15, 1786

  It had been a hellish journey. First the overcrowded ship, packed beyond civilized endurance with families consisting of everything from screaming babies to confused grandfathers. Rations were poor, tempers were short, the weather poor. As the creaky old ship tossed on the waves the stomachs of many of the passengers, a great many of whom had never even seen the sea, much less been cast adrift upon it, tossed as well.

  They disembarked on shaky legs and were loaded onto more boats for the journey up the river to Quebec. They could not stay in Quebec; it was an English colony but still French, French laws and customs and language. The English-speaking refugees were not wanted there, nor did they wish to stay. They wintered in Lachine, north of Montreal, and a cold, lonely, boring, miserable winter it was, everyone waiting. Waiting. To be on their way to their new homes. Babies were born and old people died. Children died too, and strong young men and women, of accidents and infections and of despair. They almost lost Marie and Nathanial’s daughter Emily to the fever, but Maggie put everything she had into saving the little girl, and one day, while a blizzard raged in the night and the last of the candles burned low, Emily opened her eyes, bright and clear, and said, “I’m thirsty.”

  Spring came at long last, and they set off, up the river to Upper Canada. More than a thousand of them, a motley pack of refugees, many of them ex-soldiers, in a party led by Captain Peter van Alstine, formerly of New York. The British government had granted every Loyalist family a plot of land, hundreds of acres, and supplies. Maggie, of course, got no land of her own. Bateaux were loaded with men and women, cows and oxen, chickens and children, and all they would need to carve a life out of the vast wilderness. Maggie looked at the pile of supplies that were to get the Macgregor family started and thought it pitifully small.

  Her heart lifted the moment she saw the lake. Blue water, stretching farther than the eye could see, sparkled in the sunlight. As vast as the ocean, yet not tempest-tossed but calm and peaceful. Trees, taller than the masts of the ship that had taken them from New York, wider than the boat on which she perched, lined the shore. At the edge of the water, everything was green and bright and sun-touched, but beyond the first line of trees the forest closed in, dark and foreboding. Trees had stood here for hundreds of years, growing tall and broad without ever hearing the sound of an axe or feeling the touch of fire save from an Indian hunting party’s small flame.

  Yet this band of refugees, soldiers, blacksmiths, shopkeepers, innkeepers, cooks, only a few farmers, were to work this land and make a living from it?

  Each night they pulled their boats up to shore and made camp. Firelight flickered against the dark, impenetrable forest, and ex-soldiers and townsmen kept watch and no one dared venture far.

  “You seem like an educated lady,” an elderly woman said to Maggie late one night, as the last of the men extinguished their pipes and the solders among them changed guard and the women lay down beside exhausted children. She sat on the ground watching the flames of the communal fire and tried to remember Hamish and the face she had loved so much.

  “I have little formal schooling,” Maggie replied. “But my mother and father loved to read and our library was considered quite grand.”

  The old lady reached into the depths of her shawl and pulled out a small book. She handed it to Maggie with no expression on her face. Maggie took it. It was small but very fine, good quality paper bound in black leather. She opened the book and flicked through the pages. It was a ledger, the sort that a shopkeeper might use to record sales. The first several pages were full of small cramped writing and neat rows of numbers, the rest of the book was empty, still waiting the touch of a pen.

  “It’s very nice,” Maggie said, passing the book back. From the edge of the woods an owl called. Small yellow eyes blinked at them from beyond the rim of firelight.

  The lady shook her head. “Keep it, my dear. It belonged to my late husband. We had a dry goods shop in Albany. Our neighbors killed him for continuing to stock tea. I kept the book, thinking I might use it to make a record of my journey.” She fumbled in her pockets with crooked fingers and coughed. “But my journey will not be a long one and books will be rare where we are headed. I’d like you to have it.” She pulled out a small bottle of ink and passed it over.

  “Me? Why are you giving this to me? I don’t even know your name.”

  “That is of no importance. I’ve been watching you and I know you will take care of it. Use it carefully; perhaps someday someone will read the story of your journey.”

  She got to her feet as if every movement was an effort. “Good night, my dear. Travel well.” She disappeared into the night.

  Maggie was pleased with the gift and tucked it safely away with her small bundle of belongings. She lay down on the rough ground, pulled her blanket over her and slept.

  The morning was, as always, a chaos of breaking camp and loading everyone back onto the boats. Several days passed before Maggie thought to seek out the kind woman and inquire as to her health.

  The light had been poor around the fire, shapes shifting and shadows deep, and Maggie could scarcely remember what the old woman looked like. She probably wasn’t even all that old: the war, the journey, had taken its toll on them all. She didn’t find the woman, and soon forgot her, as word spread that they were approaching their destination.

  After a month on the river, having left some of their party in various places along the route, the ragged band of refugees crossed the bay and landed on a peninsula of untouched wilderness, jutting into the great lake. Lots were drawn, land assigned, and the new settlers set about making a home. They worked
in groups at first, cutting down sufficient of the giant hardwood trees to clear a patch of land for the first crops and harvest wood to build a rude shelter for the coming winter. Then it was on to the next farm and a home for the next family.

  All the money Maggie’s mother had sent her, all of her earnings in New York, her mother’s jewelry, even the wooden box itself had been sold long ago.

  As well as the half-used shopkeeper’s ledger and bottle of ink, Maggie’s worldly belongings consisted of two dresses, one for every day and one for the rare occasion to attend church services, one pair of sturdy, although worn boots, a couple of blankets, a heavy shawl, two lengths of hair ribbon—one blue and one cream—a white nightgown with lace many times repaired, a set of sewing needles and thread, one pot and one frying pan that Fiona, the cook, had insisted she have as her share for working in the kitchen. Flora’s soft baby blanket, from which the scent of the little girl had faded long ago, she used as a pillow.

  And the diamond earrings Hamish had given her on the occasion of their wedding. She kept the earrings, tied together, pinned to the inside of her dress, out of sight.

  Someday, she continued to hope, she would be able to make a life of her own, away from Nathanial and his stifling wife.

  Nathanial never behaved improperly toward her, but sometimes she saw something in his eye, the way he watched her, which she did not care for.

  The first winter in Fifth Town had been long and bleak. As snow fell the family, and Maggie, huddled in the small log house they’d built around the few pieces of furniture Nathanial and his sons managed to make out of logs and stumps. They had a few chickens, which didn’t lay well in the dark days, and a single small red and white cow Nathanial had managed to purchase in Lachine provided milk for the children. Otherwise their diet consisted of their allotment of rations from the government: a great deal of salt pork. Some of the men were able to supplement their family’s rations with deer or geese they’d hunted with muskets they’d brought with them from the army. Nathanial had no weapon, and his attempts at setting snares and traps were rarely successful. Caleb was able to catch some of the gray squirrels brave enough to nose around his traps. They were tough and unappetizing, but the squirrels were meat and enough of them could feed the family. Heavily salted they could be stored for leaner times.