The Tenderness of Wolves (37 page)

‘It’s all right, darling, your brother’s just being silly. They’ll be back in a moment.’ On impulse she bends down and puts her arms round her daughter, shuts her eyes against her cold, greasy hair.

It is probably no more than a few minutes before they
reappear between the trees. Espen’s face is set hard and he drags a cowed Torbin by the hand. But by then Line has realised that something far worse has happened.

She and Anna have been searching, at first thinking, we’ll find it right away; a round, hard, steel object like a compass doesn’t belong here, it will stick out like a sore thumb. Line turns it into a game for Anna, with a reward for the one who finds it. The game soon palls: the ground here is particularly treacherous: humps of rock, ankle-twisting hollows, hidden rabbit holes and tangles of roots, crisscrossed with dead and rotting boughs. She can’t remember if she dropped it when Torbin hit her, or after, or when she was trying to pull the horse behind her. The tortured ground gives no sign of where they have been.

She tells Espen she can’t find it, and Torbin sees the fear in their faces and shuts up. He knows it is his fault. All four of them start to look, treading in stoop-backed circles around the indifferent horses, pulling aside lichen and rotten leaves, sticking their hands into dark, clammy holes. Every direction looks mockingly the same: scrub pines growing and dying where they grew, falling and leaning in each other’s arms, weaving around them a matted, deadwood trap.

Anna is the first to notice. ‘Mama, it’s snowing.’

Line straightens, her back aching. Snow. Silent, dry flakes float around her. Espen sees the look on her face.

‘We’ll keep looking for another half-hour, then we’ll go on. We can work out the direction pretty well anyway. It was more important to know the direction to reach the forest. This is the easy part.’

Once Torbin gives a cry and pounces, but it turns out to be a round grey stone. Line is secretly relieved when Espen calls a halt. She loves him for the way he takes command, gathering them together for a little talk, and picking the direction to go in. He points out that lichen gathers on the
north sides of the tree trunks, so that is what they have to keep an eye on: where the lichen gathers. To Line the lichen looks evenly distributed, but she shuts this thought away, slams and locks the door. Espen will know; he is their protector. She is only a woman.

Espen takes Torbin on his horse, and they move off silently. The snow muffles everything, even the clink of bridles.

I go to the stables for no good reason, other than that I am thinking about talking to the women, but, to tell the truth, I am afraid of them. They look tough and alien and contemptuous, tempered by grief. Who am I to question them, I who have never been overburdened with charity and kindness, or even curiosity about my fellow men? The dogs at least are pleased to see me, crazy with the boredom of confinement. Lucie rushes up, tail wagging, her jaws stretched wide in that happy dog-smile. I feel an absurd rush of fondness for her, feeling her rough head under my hand, her tongue like hot sand. Then Parker is there. I wonder if he has been watching for me.

This is the first time he has come to find me. The first time, that is, since he knocked on my door in the middle of the night and we made our bargain. Yesterday I would have been pleased; today I’m not sure. My voice comes out shriller than I would have liked.

‘Have you got what you wanted?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why you came. It was nothing to do with Francis or Jammet. You wanted to see Stewart again. Because of something that happened fifteen years ago. Because of a stupid fight.’

Parker speaks without looking at me. Carefully. ‘That’s not so. Jammet was my friend. And your son … well, he loved Jammet. I think they loved each other, didn’t they?’

‘Really!’ I utter a strangled sort of laugh. ‘What a strange way of putting it. You make it sound …’

Parker says nothing. Lucie goes on licking my hand and I forget to move it away.

‘Really, I …’ Parker seems to have his hand on my arm, and although a part of me wants to fling it off, I don’t. ‘Really, I don’t …’

I can’t believe I didn’t know. ‘What are you saying?’ My voice crackles like dry leaves.

‘Jammet was … Well, he had been married, but sometimes he also had … friends. Young men, handsome, like your son.’

Somehow he has guided me away from the door, over to the dark corner stacked with bales of hay, and I am sitting on one of them.

‘The last time I saw him alive–it was in the spring–you know, he mentioned someone who lived nearby. He knew I didn’t judge him; not that he cared about that.’

There is a half smile on his face. He begins to light his pipe, unhurried. ‘He cared about him deeply.’

I smooth my hair into place. There are some loose strands that have slipped out of the knot, and I can see in the long light from the doorway that a couple of the hairs are white. I have to face facts. I am getting old, and my head is full of thoughts I cannot bear. I cannot bear the thought I did not realise what was happening. I cannot bear the thought that Angus hated him for it, for I realise now that he knew. I cannot bear the thought of Francis’s grief, which must have been–must be–extreme, secretive, unbearably lonely. And I cannot bear the thought that when I saw him, I did not comfort him nearly enough.

‘Oh God. I should have stayed with him.’

‘You are a brave woman.’

This almost makes me laugh. ‘I am a stupid one.’

‘You came all this way for your son. Hating it. He knows that.’

‘And it has done no good. We haven’t found the man who made the trail.’

Parker doesn’t jump in and deny this. He smokes for a minute in silence. ‘Stewart showed you the scar?’

I nod. ‘He says you did it in a fight while you were on a journey.’

‘Not on the journey. After it. I’ll tell you a couple of things he probably didn’t say, and then you can make up your own mind. Stewart was promising. Everyone said he would go far. He was the right sort. One winter at Clear Lake he made a group of us go on a journey to another post. Three hundred miles. The snow was three feet deep before the drifts. The weather was terrible. You don’t travel in the middle of winter unless you have to. He did it to prove that he could.’

‘Was this the famous journey Mr Moody spoke of?’

‘It was famous, but not for the reasons he gave. There were five of us, to start with. Stewart, another Company man called Rae, Rae’s nephew, who was seventeen. The boy didn’t work for the Company; he was visiting the country. Then there was myself and another guide, Laurent Jammet.

‘As I said, the weather was bad; deep snow and storms. Then it got worse. There was a blizzard, and by some luck we found a cabin, a hundred miles from anywhere. The blizzard went on and on. We kept waiting for it to blow itself out, but it was one of those January storms that go on for weeks. We ran low on food. The only thing we had plenty of was liquor. Jammet and I decided to go and get help. It seemed like the only chance. We told the other three we would come back as soon as possible, left all the food there was, and set out. We were lucky. After two days we found an Indian village, then the weather got worse, and we couldn’t go back for another three days.

‘When we did eventually get back, something had
happened. We found Stewart and Rae in a drunken stupor. The boy was dead, lying on the floor, suffocated on his own vomit. They never made much sense, but what I think had happened was this: Stewart had talked of what he called, “going out in a blaze of glory”. He joked about it. I think, when we didn’t come back right away, he gave up. He decided they should drink themselves to death. Rae and he didn’t make it, but the boy died.’

‘How do you know it was his idea?’ I am shuddering inside at the thought. The boy was the same age as Francis.

‘That was the way he thought.’ His voice is flat with disgust.

‘And then what? Didn’t they sack him?’

‘How could they prove it? It was just a tragedy. A mis-judgement. That’s bad enough. Rae went back to Scotland, Stewart moved on, and the boy’s under the ground. I left the Company. I haven’t seen him since.’

‘And the scar?’

‘I heard him criticising the boy. Saying he was weak and scared, and wanted to die. I drank then.’ He shrugs, without regret.

There is a pause for the longest time. All the same, I know that he hasn’t finished.

‘The other thing?’

‘Yeah. Five or six years ago the Company was short of men, so they brought men over from Norway. Convicts. Stewart was chief at Moose Factory, and they had a group of these men. Norwegians joined up in Canada too. The widow at Himmelvanger, the one who looked after your son–her husband was one of them.’

I think of the widow–young, pretty, with an impatience and a hunger in her. Perhaps that explained it.

‘I wasn’t there, so this is hearsay. Some Norwegians mutinied and took off. Somehow they managed to take a lot of valuable furs. They set off across country, blizzards came
up, they vanished. Stewart got into trouble that time, both for the mutiny and for losing so much valuable stock. Someone in the stores must have been in on it.’

‘Stewart?’

‘I don’t know. People exaggerated, of course, saying there was a fortune in furs to be had for the man who found them. Dozens of silver and black fox.’

‘That doesn’t sound as though it was worth so much trouble.’

‘You know how much a silver fox pelt is worth?’

I shake my head.

‘In London, more than its weight in gold.’

I am shocked. And I feel sorry for the animals. I may not be good for much, but at least I’m worth more alive than dead.

‘Stewart was sent out here. There are no furs here now. Nothing but hares. Worth nothing. I’m not sure why they bother to keep Hanover going. For an ambitious man, it was an insult. You don’t get promoted from a place like this. It was punishment for what he might have done.’

‘What has this to do with Jammet?’ I am impatient to get to the end of this.

‘Uh. Last year …’ He pauses here to fiddle with the tobacco in his pipe–deliberately, it seems to me. ‘Last winter … I found the furs.’

‘The silver and black fox?’

‘Yes.’ There is a hint of amusement in his voice, or perhaps it is defensiveness.

‘And were they worth a fortune?’ I feel–I apologise to Francis for it–a thrill of excitement. Treasure comes in many forms, however gruesome, and it always makes a shallow heart like mine beat faster.

Parker makes a sort of grimace. ‘Not as much as people said, but … enough.’

‘And … the Norwegians?’

‘I didn’t find them. But any traces would be long gone. They were out in the open.’

‘You mean wolves?’ I can’t stop myself asking.

‘Maybe.’

‘But I thought you said they would … leave parts.’

‘Over the years, all sort of creatures would come; birds, foxes … Maybe they had gone on. All I’m saying is, I didn’t see anything. The furs were cached as though they intended to come back. But they never did.

‘So, I told Laurent. He was going to arrange buyers in the States. But he could never keep his mouth shut when he’d been drinking. He boasted. Word must have got out, and got back to Stewart here. That’s why he died.’

‘What makes you think it was Stewart?’

‘Stewart wanted those furs more than anyone. Because he lost them. If he got them back, he would be a hero. The Company would take him back.’

‘Or he could make himself rich.’

Parker shakes his head. ‘I don’t think the money matters. With him it’s pride.’

‘It could have been someone else–anyone–who had heard Jammet talk and wanted the money.’

He turns his eyes on me. ‘But the trail led here.’

I think about this for a moment. It’s true. It’s true but it’s not enough.

‘It led us here but now it’s gone. And if we can’t find the man …’

Suddenly I think of something, and go hot with excitement.

‘Here, I found this at Jammet’s …’ I pull the scrap of paper out of my pocket and hand it to Parker. He peers at it, slanted towards the door, dim even so.

‘Sixty-one, that’s the outfit, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Yes it is. You found this?’

‘In his flour bin.’

Parker smiles. I feel flushed with pride–for a second, and then it fades. It doesn’t prove anything, other than that Jammet was interested in the furs in some way. It doesn’t help.

‘I gave that to him, with a silver fox pelt. It made him laugh, so he kept it. Sold the pelt, of course.’

‘Keep it,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you will think of some use for it.’ I don’t even ask myself what I mean by that. Parker doesn’t ask either, but the paper has disappeared. I still don’t know what to do. Of course it is Moody who needs to be convinced.

‘Will you tell Moody all this? Perhaps then he will see it.’

‘It’s not proof, like you say. Moody likes Stewart; Stewart was always good at making men like him. Besides, Stewart didn’t go to Dove River. There is someone else.’

‘Why would anyone kill for someone else?’

‘Lots of reasons. Money. Fear. When we know who it is, we’ll know why’

‘It could be one of the men here. Perhaps it was Nepapanees, and then he … he threatened to talk, and Stewart killed him.’

‘I was thinking, I wonder if they’ll ever find his body.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Meaning, they went in the direction Stewart told them to go. The snow will have covered the tracks. They’ve only got his word for how it happened.’

The silence is so intense that even the dogs’ whining cannot break it.

They come to the place Stewart told them about towards evening. The light has seeped out of the sky, and everything is grey: pearlescent grey clouds, pale grey snow. The smoothness of snow on river ice gives it away; a wide road curving through the plain six or seven feet below ground level. The river has worn its way deeper into the earth’s rind ever since it began to flow.

There are signs of someone having been here recently, veiled by the new snow. A roughened, much trodden place where the ground slopes down onto a sort of beach. From above, the skin of ice on the river is a flat and even white, except for a patch, further up, where it is darker, shadowy, meaning it was broken and new ice has formed, thinner and only lightly dusted with snow. That must be the place.