“I hope you don’t come down with the fever,” said Lady Franklin, her clipped British accent brushing away her ending r’s. Feev-ah. “It might interfere with the plans I have for you.” Int-ah-feeh.
Virginia smiled. Small talk was done with, it seemed. “Your correspondence referred to a journey, an expedition. And now that I know who you are, I suspect the travel you have in mind is entirely northward.”
The older woman laughed, a throaty, husky sound, and looked Virginia up and down. “Do you, now.”
“Your husband is lost,” Virginia said simply. “I assume you want him found.”
“Those are the facts of it, yes. I would expect most young women—or thoughtful people of any age or sex—would phrase it with more care, having some regard for my feelings in the matter.”
“Feelings are a luxury, ma’am,” said Virginia, respectfully but firmly. She figured Lady Franklin would appreciate a hard head. “Feelings did not bring me here.”
Lady Franklin’s sharp eyes grew even colder, indicating that she’d miscalculated. “How jaded you are, even at your age. Feelings are what make us human. It is my deep love for my husband that drives me to continue to seek him out, despite so many obstacles, so many failures.”
Taking a new tack, Virginia tried to appear contrite. “I apologize. I confess I do not know the whole of what you have done so far to seek him. West of Fort Bridger, news is thin on the ground.”
“And yet you know that song, the one you referred to as mine. ‘Lady Franklin’s Lament,’ they style it.”
“As I said, my Canadian friend was fond of the tune. He was a better singer than I am.”
“Was?”
Virginia ignored the question, forging ahead. She had come a long way for this opportunity; she would not let it slip away without knowing what was truly on offer. “If it’s a northward journey you have in mind for me, Lady Franklin, I hope you don’t misunderstand my background. I have spent no time in the North.”
“Your expertise is in leading people. I need people to be led.”
“Over land or sea?”
“Both, as it happens. And lakes as well, which may be new for you. Land, lake, sea. Good things, I am told, come in threes.”
“And deaths,” said Virginia.
“Beg pardon?”
“It’s a superstition,” she said, feeling her cheeks redden. “I’m sorry. Deaths also come in threes, they say. But I apologize, I should not have steered us off course. Tell me, what sort of people do you have in mind for me to lead?”
Lady Franklin sat up straight in her chair, curling her fingers around its soft arms like an eagle’s talons on a branch.
“I have determined,” said Lady Franklin, “a key similarity between all the expeditions—and I now need a second hand to count them—that have failed to find my husband.”
“And that similarity is?”
“Men,” said Lady Franklin, not with rancor but still investing the word with a sharp importance. “Each of these failed expeditions has been conceived by men, run by men, peopled by men entire.”
“Forgive my ignorance,” Virginia said apologetically, though she was getting the distinct sense that Lady Franklin may not. “Aren’t all Arctic expeditions so run?”
“Yes.” Lady Franklin smiled a wry little smile. “They have been, so far. But I have a theory about women. Would you like to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“Women can do far more than the narrow lens of society deems fitting. I suspect there is nothing, literally nothing, of which women are not capable.”
It was a shocking statement on the face of it. Virginia happened to agree.
Lady Franklin went on, “I myself have done things only a handful of travelers of my generation can lay claim to, man or woman. Sailed down the Nile. Ridden a donkey into Nazareth. Visited a quarantine station in Malta, the docks of Alexandria, the shining Acropolis. Can any man of your acquaintance say he has even been in the presence of janissaries? Bedouins? A pasha? I have met them all.”
Virginia’s awe was sincere. This elegant, carefully arranged woman—sixty years old if she was a day—bore no signs of such adventure. Her soft cheeks, rich dress, sophisticated air, all seemed at odds with the idea of such unusual achievements. “You are clearly extraordinary.”
“You mistake me!” Lady Franklin leaned forward, intent. “I do not argue my own exceptionalism. What I have done, a thousand other women could do, given the chance. This westward expansion of yours proves it. These American wagon trains. Women drive wagons or trek alongside them, learn to shoot firearms, protect themselves and one another, survive the worst storms and the baking sun, shift for themselves through hardships. Over thousands—thousands!—of miles. These intrepid women. At the end of it all, they make it to California or Oregon or Washington Territory.”
“Except when they don’t,” Virginia blurted.
Pinning her with a direct look, still from the comfort of her gilded chair, Lady Franklin said, “Well, yes. To attempt great things sometimes means failure. But even in failure, there are often kernels of success. That party of settlers that went astray on the way to California, marooned in the deep snow of a mountain pass for months, more than half of them dead at the end, you know who survived?”
Virginia held her peace. So many possible answers. Lady Franklin’s was the one she wanted to hear.
Lady Franklin said, “The women. If women can live through that, who’s to say they can’t succeed where men have failed and bring my husband back to me?”
“What if there’s no husband to bring back?”
“Girl,” said Lady Franklin, her voice turning harsh again, “I said it before, you have no regard for feelings.”
She’d spoken too plainly, Virginia realized, and she tried to recover from the mistake without showing weakness. “I understand your feelings, ma’am. Fully. Yet I believe they are not the only reason you called me here. I believe you wanted to offer me some sort of employment.”
“I did.”
“If you do still,” Virginia said, “I am more than willing to listen.”
Lady Franklin’s pause was long, but it ended with clear, steady words. “Simply put, I propose you lead an expedition to the North to bring back my husband. He is a great man, and the world does not yet recognize his triumph. Once he returns, his name will be sung far and wide.”
Virginia was eager to embrace the proposal, but she forced herself not to agree just yet. Why her? She had to be clear, just in case. “Leading wagon trains through the pass to California is not the same as leading people on foot through the frozen North. What we were looking for, I already knew how to find.”