“Be mindful,” Bullion went on, “that it is possible to have these men summoned here to Minnesota. Lord…ah, Mr. Soames has indicated that he could arrange it.”
“I knew those men,” said Gustav, crestfallen, as lawyer Willoughby wiped his face with a handkerchief.
“Well, then, here’s the decision,” Bullion concluded. “The marriage of Kristin Rolfson, known in these parts as Kristin Gunnarson, to Gustav Rolfson is hereby dissolved.” He banged his gavel. “Custody of the child known in these parts as Haakon Gunnarson, goes to Mr. and Mrs. Eric Gunnarson. Or Starbane. Say, why don’t you make up your mind on that, Eric?”
VIII
“Eric Starbane,” Kristin said, cupping cold pure Lake Superior water in her hands, “here I hold your image, as I would hold your body and soul. May I drink it and have you, forever to keep?”
There were tears in Eric’s eyes. “Yes,” he said.
Kristin drank, and her eyes were shining, too. Memory. Destiny. The promise of hope.
Then Eric bent and scooped crystal water from the vast, magnificent lake, and held it before her. Sunlight danced in his hands, along with Kristin’s image.
“Now I hold you in my hands,” he said, “love and desire, yesterday and tomorrow. May I consume them and have them, forever to keep?”
Kristin nodded. Eric drank. They embraced and kissed then, for a long time, at the mouth of the Knife River, where it poured into Lake Superior on the wild rock coast of the north shore.
It was now August 1872. After the trial they had left Windward and come north to look for a place to build a second home in Duluth, so that Eric could be near the Mesabi Range. They bought land on the highest of Duluth’s hills, with a view of wilderness to the north and the lake to the east.
The house would be known as Bethland. It would be there, waiting for Elizabeth’s return. She would be found. Eric and Kristin were convinced of that. It was only a matter of time and search.
“She was here in Duluth all winter,” Pinkerton agent Pierce Trifle had reported to Eric. “Big Elk found the house in which she was held. One of the two men who brought her north disappeared, but the other was joined for the winter by a woman. She came to the market regularly, and always paid cash. Seldom conversed, but was always polite. Just before Big Elk and I came to Duluth, the ice broke on Lake Superior. The man, the woman, and Elizabeth disappeared around that time. By boat, most likely. Somewhere east, I suppose.”
Somewhere.
But why!
Eric and Kristin stood holding one another on a rugged, primeval shore. Behind them rose an empire to be conquered, ranges containing wealth against which the minerals of Lesja, Norway, would seem scraps of metal fallen from a smithy’s forge. Haakon was theirs now, and they were each other’s. Only two shadows loomed. One was J. J. Granger, and as Eric turned inland, it almost seemed he could see the one-eyed adventurer stalking along the horizon, could almost hear the acquisitive, insinuating click-click-click of Granger’s pickax as he chipped away at rocks, seeking the red vein that meant fortune. The second shadow was far blacker. Cast by a vanished Elizabeth, it was made of strange fire that tore the hearts of Kristin and Eric. Yet they were full of hope. Big Elk and Pierce Trifle had reported the child always to have been well cared for. There was some meaning, some destiny, for which little Elizabeth, daughter of Eric and Elaine, must have been chosen. She had been taken for a reason, had she not? Or had it been merely an accident? Rolfson’s hired hands, surprised by Indian Ned, seizing the wrong child in panic and confusion?
After Judge Bullion had adjourned the trial, Kristin herself had confronted Rolfson. He was a beaten man, but undefeated. He had lost a major battle, but not a war. That perfervid Rolfson meanness still burned there, far back in his eyes.
“No, I don’t have Elizabeth,” he had told her, looking straight into her eyes. “You could come to my home in Chicago right now, if you wished. You would see she is not there.”
“You are lying,” she had accused, even though she sensed, at that moment, he was not.
“What does it matter to you?” he had asked, with his old insensitivity. “She was Gunnarson’s daughter by the farm girl. You have Haakon.”
“Yes, I have Haakon.”
Then she had seen it: genuine, visceral pain, not to be eradicated, in Gustav’s eyes, expression, even in his bearing. He was barely able to form the words, but he did.
“Haakon is truly not mine?”
“No,” she told him.
He was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, it was the hard, abrupt Rolfson she had always known.
“Well, I will always have something of yours, too, my darling.”
“What’s that?”
He gave an indeterminate gesture. “Your memory, my love,” he replied cynically.
“Could it have been Gustav all the while?” Kristin asked Eric now, on the north shore. “Maybe we were right at first. He had to get Haakon, and tried to do that by kidnapping. It failed. The only other means available to him was a trial, which he knew would be risky. That was why he delayed so long in filing the suit. But could he have Elizabeth, somehow?”
“Trifle and Big Elk will find her,” Eric said soothingly. He was still looking inland, toward the range.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked.
“How best to transport the iron ore out of the wilderness and to the harbor in Duluth.”
“You haven’t found the iron yet.” She laughed lightly, teasing him.
“But I will. And then I’ll load it onto freighters, and…here,” he said, bending to the narrow strip of sand on the beach. He made a line with his finger. “This is the north shore of Lake Superior…” he said,
“…and here is the south shore…”
“…and this is how she flows into Lake Michigan…”
“Eric?” Kristin cried.
But he was busy drawing, and with a swing of his hand, he showed her where Chicago was, a burgeoning industrial city at the base of Lake Michigan.
“Eric!” she cried again, her heart in her throat. “It’s like the lines Ned drew before he died!”
Together they stared at Eric’s diagram in the sand.
“Chicago!” Eric gasped. “Rolfson has Elizabeth! What was it that we asked Ned? ‘Did the men say where they were going?’ Indians know the lay of the land for a thousand miles. Ned was trying to tell us what the men had said. And since they would have been spotted on the railroad, and did not want to cross all the distance between St. Paul and Chicago on horseback, they came to Duluth and waited for the ice to break up before taking Elizabeth on to Chicago by boat.”
“And that’s why Gustav sounded sincere at the trial,” said Kristin, “when he said she was not at his home, she was not at his home then. But she is now.”
Her heart was in a tumult of hope and certainty.
“And he also said,” Eric added, “he would always have something of yours.”
They clung to each other, clinging also to the very real possibility that they were right.
“We have not come all this way to be flouted now by that wolf-eyed animal,” Eric said then. “This shall be the end of him.”
He was angry, but his anger was contained, controlled. He would go at once to Chicago. He and Kristin belonged to each other now, and would never be parted again. That union, so long in coming, had brought with it a mature strength, which was as hard as the iron Eric sought, and as tensile as past struggles had made him. Kristin was still in his embrace, and he looked down at her, kissed her. Sonnendahl Fjord glimmered in memory, and the ocean they had crossed, and this great continent into whose western regions destiny had led them. “Here we are,” Eric said. “Here we stand. Here we shall triumph. You and I and Haakon, and Elizabeth, too.”
More from Vanessa Royall
Come Faith, Come Fire
A love that burns more fierce than any holy flame threatens to engulf Spain in this scintillating historical romance.
&nbs
p; Proud as her aristocratic upbringing, bold as the ancient gypsy blood that ran in her veins, the beautiful, golden-haired Maria saw her family burned at the Inquisitor's stake, watched her young lover, the adventurous Rafael de Alagon, forced into the priesthood.
Desperate, and bound by a forbidden love, she defied the Grand Inquisitor himself, fled across Spain with the gypsy king, was enslaved by the Blue Sultan, and escaped to entreat Queen Isabella's favor at the dazzling Spanish court.
But through all of her travels, Maria is bound to Rafael by a love more unshakeable than faith, that burns hotter than the fires of the Inquisition.
Firebrand’s Woman
From a master of historical romance comes a sweeping tale of the American frontier, and a love that could not be, but also could not be stopped…
After losing her parents to ruthless soldiers, Gyva is cruelly banished from her tribe, forced to live as an exile in the foreign world of white men. But she will return to lead her people, for pride and for love.
Firebrand, the legendary Chickasaw chief, has waged war against the white settlers who flood his people’s land and force them westward on what has become called The Trail of Tears. He has sworn to defend his people and their land to the death, sworn with the power of his love for Gyva that he will push back the invaders, and forge a brave new dream with his one true love.
Fires of Delight
From the Scottish moors to the shores of a new world, they fought for freedom and love...
Selena MacPherson is a beautiful rebel who was exiled from her native land. She swore to avenge her father's death at the hands of the British.
Royce Campbell is a bold privateer, scion of a fabled Highland clan. He would stop at nothing to bring the hated monarchy to its knees.
From a New York prison to a sensual nightmare of sorcery in Haiti to the streets of Paris ablaze with the flames of revolution, they were destined to cheat death and share a dangerous passion.
Flames of Desire
In ancient Scotland, a searing love triangle changes the course of three turbulent lives.
Selena MacPherson is the proud princess of Coldstream Castle. She's never met a man who doesn't desire her, but she has yet to meet the man whose desire she welcomes...
Royce Cambell is the fabled son of a ruthless Highland clan. He has fleets and warriors ready to do his bidding. His frightening legends glitter about him like a cloak. He is promised to another, yet when he meets Selena at an Edinburgh ball, there is no denying the burning promise of ecstasy between them. It is across raging seas that the destiny of that promise has its chance to be fulfilled…
The Passionate and the Proud
Beyond the majestic Rockies lay the promise of land, the promise of love.
Beautiful Emmalee Alder was escaping a Cincinnati orphanage when a black-eyed rogue spirited her aboard a Missouri-bound riverboat. Blind to Garn Lander's true passion, she does what she must to escape his bold advances; she sells herself into servitude to a wagon train heading West.
Obsessed by a proud dream of independence, swept-up in the fever of land rush, she has yet to learn that claiming land was only half the battle. There is farming, ranching, and bone-deep toil. And there is Garn, the man who may just help her grasp her golden future.
Seize the Dawn
As America rises to become a great nation, one woman unravels the mystery that is her past, and rediscovers a love that could change her life forever.
Elizabeth Rolfson had been kidnapped and carried across the seas, yet for as long as she could remember, she knew that her destiny lay in America. She arrived in Chicago in 1885, the stunning heiress to a vast empire.
As men of daring pressed westward towards America, Elizabeth was swept into the savage struggle. Driven to learn the secret of her past, to find the one man who could still the restless yearnings of her heart, she would stand alone against the mighty to claim her proud birthright and grasp a dream of undying love.
Connect with Diversion Books
Connect with us for information on new titles and authors from Diversion Books, free excerpts, special promotions, contests, and more:
@DiversionBooks
www.Facebook.com/DiversionBooks
Diversion Books eNewsletter
Wild Wind Westward Page 47