The Arctic Fury Read online

  Also by Greer Macallister

  The Magician’s Lie

  Girl in Disguise

  Woman 99

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2021 by Greer Macallister

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Chelsea McGuckin

  Cover images © Magdalena Russocka/Trevillion Images, aleksle/Getty Images, Faraz Hyder/Getty Images, aleksandarvelasevic/Getty Images

  Internal map by Travis Hasenour

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Macallister, Greer, author.

  Title: The Arctic Fury / Greer Macallister.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020015957 (print)

  Subjects: LCSH: Franklin, Jane, 1791-1875--Fiction. | Northwest Passage--Discovery and exploration--British--Fiction. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A235 A89 2020 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015957

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Members of the Women’s Expedition

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Author’s Note

  Excerpt from Woman 99

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my grandmother

  We cannot say what the woman might be physically, if the girl were allowed all the freedom of the boy.

  —Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  The real work of an expedition begins when you return.

  —Louise Arner Boyd

  Members of the Women’s Expedition

  Margaret Bridges, journalist

  Irene Chartier, translator

  Caprice Collins, mountaineer

  Dove, nurse

  Ebba Green, British Royal Navy wife

  Stella Howe, housemaid

  Christabel Jones, illustrator

  Elizabeth Kent, lady’s maid

  Ann Montgomery, dog breeder and trainer

  Siobhan Perry, medical student

  Althea Porter, British Royal Navy wife

  Virginia Reeve, leader

  Dorothea Roset, navigator

  Chapter One

  Virginia

  Massachusetts Superior Court, Boston

  October 1854

  In the front row sit the survivors.

  Virginia can see them clearly from her seat in the dock. Even when she looks away from them—toward the judge, the jury—she still feels their presence. Five women, broken and brave, who came to this courtroom against all odds. She wonders if they feel jarred, the way she does, minding the rules of civilization again: caring what they wear, watching what they say, wondering how their actions make others feel. They were free of all that, not so long ago. Then again, what a steep price they paid for that fleeting freedom.

  Only five. Not all who survived, that’s a mercy, but all who choose to stand up and be counted as survivors. She feels the ones who aren’t there as much as the ones who are. If she closes her eyes, she can see each of the lost before her. One laid out cold and blue as cornflowers. One swallowed by the ice, its hungry maw open just wide enough to devour. One bathed, writhing, in blood. Each a pinpoint tragedy Virginia will never forget, never stop regretting.

  Even the ones who sit here today are missing parts of themselves they’ll never get back. How many fingers, how many toes? One ear, Doro’s. The right, if she remembers correctly, and how could she forget? Also lost: a sliver of each of their souls, including Virginia’s. She does not close her eyes to picture any of that, any of those losses. She knows them well enough.

  Five women present and willing to be known as survivors of the expedition, not counting Virginia, who had no choice about whether or not to be known. If they had to be counted—in happier times, they joked about it, a welcome thing, an optimist’s dream—there should have been eleven. Virginia the twelfth. That was the size of the expedition they’d planned for, though not what they’d launched with, and certainly not what had returned. The numbers don’t add up, but then again, the numbers have never added up correctly. That was Caprice’s fault. Virginia should be done with her anger at Caprice by now, but she’s not. She ma
y never be done.

  “All rise for the Honorable Judge Elton Miller,” calls the bailiff.

  Virginia rises.

  The judge is younger than she would have thought, though not young, exactly. Dark hair instead of white, not a flash of gray among the jet. Her eyes land on a reddish streak along his jaw. Careless with his razor? A stumble in the night? She is sick of analyzing injuries. Siobhan should be here to do that. But Siobhan, like so many others, is not.

  “You may be seated,” the judge says, and the whole courtroom dissolves into soft rumbles and thumps as they shuffle to comply, exactly like a congregation. Virginia half expects to hear an organ lumbering into the opening strains of “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

  Instead, the not-old, not-young judge continues, “We are here today to hear the case of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts versus Miss Virginia Reeve. How do you plead, Miss Reeve?”

  From the defense table comes a reluctant but forceful voice. Higher than it should be. Virginia winces at how young he sounds.

  “Judge, the charges,” says her counsel, whose name is Clevenger. He looks young as well as sounding young, all apple cheeks and skinny limbs. Clevenger is the tallest man in the courtroom, yet somehow, at least to Virginia, he seems to take up the least space.

  The judge blinks. “Come again?”

  Her counsel shuffles papers, makes another attempt. If Virginia were the lawyer, she tells herself, she would make a stronger beginning. If ifs and buts were candy and nuts, Ann would have said to that. Poor Ann.

  And poor Virginia. Five faithful, living women in this courtroom form a silent, united line, and it’s the voices of the other seven who won’t shut up.

  “I believe the charges should be read first? And I will tell you how she pleads?” says her counsel.

  “Oh, I apologize, Your Honor!” booms the judge, not a whit of apology in his voice. “I forgot to address you as Judge! And in your own court no less. What an embarrassment.”

  More twitching, more shuffling of papers. “Your Honor, I’m not a judge.”

  The judge says, with great relish, “Precisely.”

  Virginia’s counsel is silent.

  “Now may I proceed?” asks the judge, though it’s not really a question.

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Rise,” says the judge, though Virginia doesn’t hear him until he repeats, more stridently, “Rise.”

  Virginia rises.

  “Read the charges,” he says to the bailiff.

  “One count of kidnapping and one count of murder,” the bailiff says, “in the death of Caprice Collins.”

  Whispers zip around the courtroom, a handful of flung pebbles skittering on slick ice. But from the row nearest Virginia, there is only a thick, welcome pocket of silence. She feels herself resting on it like a pillow. Shock and surprise may bubble over everywhere else, but nothing surprises the survivors. The capacity for surprise was blasted out of them, frozen out of them, wrenched out of them in the Far North. They froze solid up there. While their bodies are warmer now, something within them has never thawed. She doesn’t believe it ever will.

  The judge turns away from Virginia, away from the lawyers and the women who sit in the front row, away from the unknown faces who make up the audience for this—what? Circus?

  “Men of the jury,” he addresses them ponderously. “Know that the prisoner at the bar, Virginia Reeve, has heretofore pleaded and said she is not guilty of each count of the indictment. For trial, she puts herself upon your good judgment to try the issue. If she is guilty on either or both of said counts, you are to say so, and if she is not guilty on either or both of said counts, you are to say so, and no more. Good men and true—stand together and hearken to your evidence.”

  Of Virginia herself, he shows no awareness.

  His heavy indifference, she thinks, threatens to sink her. She cannot let herself be drawn down. She has endured worse than this man’s disdain. And she has a choice in how deeply she lets him cut her. She turns her attention away from him, toward the only people in the courtroom she truly knows.

  The five survivors buoy her up with their silence. She fears the words they may speak when called upon later—not to mention the words of others with damaging, dark things to say, true and otherwise—but for now, their quiet reassures her. All she wants from them right now is nothing, and that is exactly what they have left to give.

  Chapter Two

  Virginia

  Tremont House, Boston

  April 1853

  As she entered the lobby of Tremont House, Virginia only heard her first three footfalls. One, two, three steps on slick golden marble. The plush, deep carpet smothered the sound of four, five, and everything after.

  She moved forward silently in the flicker of the gilt lanterns, the luxurious sofas beckoning with their rich crimson cushions, the cavernous ceiling soaring overhead. Two women sat on the farthest couch with their heads bent together, clearly in conversation, but in such a vast room, she couldn’t even hear their voices. Silent as the grave, she thought, unbidden. For years, she hadn’t felt right in open spaces, either outdoors or in, and she fought back the urge to flee.

  Behind the desk sat an attendant in a shirt as white and smooth as fresh snowfall, his eyebrow rising at her approach.

  “May I help you, miss?”

  “I’m Virginia,” she said, and when the hush around her swallowed her voice, she spoke louder the second time. “Virginia Reeve. I’m expected.”

  The attendant’s head went down, possibly checking some kind of list. She saw no signal, but as if by magic, a tall man dressed entirely in black appeared just behind her. In the glimpse she caught over her shoulder, he looked like a crow, and she started, a high gasp in her throat.

  Her escort, well trained enough not to call attention to her mistake, merely nodded, clicking his heels together.

  “Miss Reeve, it would be my pleasure to show you to Mrs. Griffin’s suite,” he said.

  She trailed him up the stairs and down another hallway of that plush, rich carpet, soft and silencing. The miles she’d traveled to be here exhausted her. The rough wool of her traveling dress made the side of her neck itch, and she longed to scratch the spot. She’d been through far worse, of course, but this always amazed her: how the worst pain, no matter how terrible, could recede into the past. At some point, it no longer breathed into one’s ear like a hungry wolf. The minor irritations of daily existence became irritating again. Suffering stayed suffering in all its myriad forms, all its degrees.

  She knew not to speak of what she’d been through. No one wanted to hear. What did the mysterious Mrs. Griffin want to hear instead? Virginia had crossed the entire continent to find out.

  Her escort rapped lightly on the door of Room 17, bent his ear to the door to wait for an answer, and appeared to hear one. He gripped the doorknob and swung the door open wide, gesturing for Virginia to enter.

  “That’ll be all, William,” said a woman’s voice, accented, low, and husky.

  “Very good, Madam,” answered the escort, stepping back into the hallway and closing the door with practiced care, making no sound.

  The entire room seemed gilded. The bright light of day peeked through the gossamer curtains, lighting the white and gold of the room until it glowed. It felt like Virginia imagined a Greek temple might have felt, far back in ancient days.

  Virginia turned her attention to the only other person in the room. Mrs. Griffin could well have been an alabaster statue, as still and pale as she sat. Her plush chair curved gracefully around her seated body like a throne.

  Though a close observer could see the signs of age on the backs of her hands, Mrs. Griffin had been maintained with great care. Her cheeks were soft with cream, her faded hair still sculpted and pinned as carefully as a bride’s. The extravagant folds of her watered silk gown woul
d have offered a litter of collie pups shelter for the night. In age, she might have been Virginia’s mother or even her grandmother, but in appearance, it would be obvious to anyone the two never could have sprung from the same family tree.

  The older woman spoke without rising. Her accent was clearly British, crisp as a starched sheet. “I must apologize, Miss Reed. I’ve begun our acquaintance with subterfuge.”

  Dumbfounded, Virginia did not know how to respond. She latched onto what she could. “Sorry, ma’am. Miss Reeve, you mean.”

  As soft as the woman’s face looked, her eyes were hard and sharp.

  “I know what I mean.”

  “And yet,” Virginia said, “my name, begging your pardon, is Virginia Reeve. You wrote to me under that name, did you not?”

  “I did,” the older woman said, “and yet names can be deceiving. That is the subterfuge I speak of. I am not—and here I beg your pardon, a fair trade—a Mrs. Delafield Griffin.”

  “Well then, what’s your name?”

  “Goodness. The Americans of my acquaintance are direct, as one expects, but you—how do they put it? Take the proverbial cake.” This in a dry voice, cool and collected, but not without a hint of humor. “The proper way to address me is Lady Franklin.”

  In wonder, Virginia blurted, “Lady Jane Franklin?”

  The woman gave a controlled, careful smile. Virginia had the distinct feeling that Lady Jane Franklin rehearsed her smiles in the mirror to choose the most flattering. “It seems that my fame precedes me even to the Western frontier of your wild country.”

  “A Canadian friend of mine was quite fond of your song,” Virginia said. She didn’t even really mean to begin singing it, but she opened her lips, and out came the memory:

  In Baffin’s Bay where the whale fish blow,

  The fate of Franklin no man may know.

  The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell,

  Lord Franklin alone with his sailors do dwell.

  A warm feeling was gathering in her veins—the song reminded her so strongly of Ames—but when Lady Franklin held up her hand for silence, Virginia swallowed down the words.

  “I have heard of your many talents,” Lady Franklin said. “Singing does not rank among them.”