Wild Wind Westward

by Vanessa Royall

  “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.”

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