He gestures back toward her without fully turning around, without raising his arm all the way. Something desultory about it, almost demeaning, but subtly so. “The defendant, Virginia Reeve, has no family. No history. No one to vouch for her, except for these poor, misguided young women”—he indicates the survivors with a backward sweep of his hand, and Virginia wants to launch herself at him like a bearcat and rake the very flesh from his pompous pink cheeks—“whom she has clearly placed under some kind of spell. As we will prove she did to her victim.”
A year ago, even half a year, Virginia would have laughed at the idea that anyone would call Caprice a victim. But the realities of the trial, what’s at stake, have sunk in. She does not feel at all like laughing now.
After a stately pause, the prosecutor resumes his address to the men of the jury. “Each had her own reasons for believing the lies Miss Reeve told. But make no mistake, good gentlemen of Boston. She swindled every one of these girls into believing a lie, the same lie she’ll tell you—if her counsel even lets her speak.”
As much as she wants to leap up and tear into him, Virginia gazes out from the dock with a blank look, seemingly impassive. For all the terrible things her Arctic ordeal has done to her, not to mention the ordeals previous to it, it has at least done this one good thing: her face keeps many secrets. When she was young, she had a nimble face. Flashing eyes, pink lips quick to smile, the guileless expressions of a girl who wore her heart for anyone to see. No longer.
And so the people in this courtroom, this judge, this jury, will not be able to find any trace of what she feels inside by looking at her outside. They’ll see the neat slate-gray dress her counsel shoved through the bars of her cell without comment, neither cheap nor extravagant, blamelessly plain. They’ll see the toll that the cold North took on her face, the red bloom on her cheeks that never quite goes away no matter how cold or warm the room might be. They’ll see her dark hair parted in the middle and gathered in a smooth, tight coil at the nape of her neck, not a strand out of place, as if she were a painted picture of a woman and not flesh and blood.
But they won’t see her anger, the anger that has burned in her for years, unladylike, unquenchable. They won’t see how she truly feels about what happened to Caprice, the fierce, haunting regret.
Most importantly, they will never, ever see her fear.
“Thank you. The prosecution rests,” says the lawyer, and Virginia stares straight ahead at a knot in the wood of the witness stand, on the far side of the judge’s bench. She pretends it’s the most interesting knot in the world.
The sound of shuffling papers comes from the defense table. If she could reach, she would slam her hand down on those damn papers to silence them. Her counsel is preceded by rustling everywhere he goes, like a preening debutante who fluffs her skirts to draw attention.
She has spoken with Clevenger on exactly two occasions. Neither filled her with optimism. But she tries to reassure herself: Clevenger is a trained attorney, not a dilettante. The entire purpose of his profession is to protect and defend people like her, and as long as this trial lasts, her specifically. And while she does not feel entirely comfortable in his hands, there are no other hands on offer in which to place herself.
She keeps her body still, turning only her face in his direction to watch him while he rustles, clears his throat, and stands. The assembled courtroom listens with sober attention.
Clevenger addresses the jury, the bystanders, the survivors. In his reedy voice, he says, “My client—Miss Reeve—is innocent.”
A long, long pause follows those six words. In Virginia’s mind, the pause stretches to fill hours and days of fretful possibilities, of worry and rot, of glaciers and icebergs crashing upon distant shores, of the sun soaring overhead to blot out the blue of the sky until the oceans drain, until the flesh of every person in the courtroom melts away to leave nothing but bone. In her mind, it takes that long. And her counsel isn’t even the one to break it.
Long after the silence becomes uncomfortable, the judge says, “And, Counsel?”
Clevenger says, “We will prove it.”
Virginia pleads with her eyes for him to say something else, anything else. For him to advance what she’s told him about Lady Franklin, about Brooks, about Captain Malcolm. Is Captain Malcolm here? she wonders. She will not let herself turn to look. She remembers the five survivors to her right, reaches out for their strength, lets herself rest on it while she waits for her counsel to make her case. Any case.
Clevenger says to the assembly, with a firm and completely groundless pride, “That is all.”
It takes everything Virginia has not to put her head in her hands and weep.
Chapter Four
Virginia
American House, Boston
April 1853
After their long talk at the Tremont House, Virginia and the Englishwoman had concluded their conversation with a firm, definite handshake. Virginia had heard enough of the particulars to say yes, she would undertake the expedition for the agreed compensation, and yes, she would await Lady Franklin’s designee at her hotel to make all the necessary arrangements.
But it had been three days, days that had suddenly and irrevocably slipped through her fingers. With nothing to do but wait for Lady Franklin’s envoy, she could feel her patience dissolving like sugar in tea. On the trail with Ames, she had always been in motion; stops at forts lasted no longer than absolutely necessary, and with California-bound parties coming through so frequently, they rarely waited more than two or three days for a hire. A room this size in Fort Bridger, she thought to herself with a grim smile, would have slept two dozen. Thinking on inequities like this made her want to scream; best, then, not to think on them.
Though it was not as extravagant as Tremont House, Virginia’s hotel was by far the most comfortable place she’d ever stayed, and certainly the most private. In the American House, she had two rooms behind a locked door entirely to herself. The indulgence! Virginia imagined Lady Franklin looking down her nose at the relatively stark bedroom and sitting room, not an inch of gold leaf to be seen anywhere. But one’s upbringing helped determine one’s definition of luxury, and for Virginia, nothing was more luxurious than space.
Virginia’s semipermanent lodgings had included two farmhouses, three wagons, and one cabin she barely let herself remember, but in none of these had she ever had one entire room to herself, let alone two. She stood stock-still among all the damask and the chintz, the silk and the mahogany, and drank in the excess. She would have strewn her belongings around if she’d had more belongings. But the lack would soon become an advantage. Certainly, she would not be able to take much with her on the proposed expedition. In some ways, she was perfectly suited for this undertaking, but it would still be unlike anything she’d ever done before.
She was already humming with excitement. The Arctic! The cold was no friend to her, and yet there was a thrill to this adventure that she could not, would not, shake. To seek this lost man and his company and find them when no one else could. The impossibility of it was exactly the allure. The potential reward was enormous, yet the reward was not the only thing that drew her. Going north felt like fate. It felt, in so many ways, like escape.