He had left without saying good-bye and without asking for her help. She was finishing his business again at great expense, and it made her angry.
It was snowing hard now, covering the decks with an inch of frozen blanket, and once the ship had been secured in the inner harbor, it settled quietly into its anchorage, sleeping finally after a long journey.
Emmy looked out from her cabin window onto a moonlit scene that resembled a Christmas painting of a seaside village, much like the ones she had seen in an art exhibit as a child in Boston.
She would be ferried ashore the next morning, and she fretted for the wait she had to endure. Perhaps Jacob had been sighted. Perhaps the British authorities had news or already had even intervened in some way.
She had heard that such a thing had happened before, across the strait on the Haida Queen Charlotte Islands two years before, when a British surveying expedition had made an exchange with one of the Haida clans for two Vancouver children who had been snatched earlier in the year.
Perhaps Jacob was in Fort Simpson already!
She looked at the small town and said a prayer to St. Jude, whom she was told the Catholics considered the patron saint of the impossible.
Two hours later, she was awakened by a loud knock at her door. It was the first mate.
“Come. Captain has something belongs to you.”
Emmy followed the mate up to the snow-covered main deck and then aft to the captain’s quarters.
Varienko, dull-eyed, obviously awakened from a drunken sleep, and wearing a filthy smock coat and shoeless, was slouched against the doorway of his cabin, waiting for her.
As she came closer, he leered at her, eyeing her up and down in a way that made her reach up and pull her robe tightly across her neck. Then he pushed open his door.
Sarah, covered with soot, pale and anxious, was sitting next to his cabin stove, shivering.
Varienko belched.
“Eet appear da lyetel gyurl want to companyou, Meezus Hyevers.”
With a terse apology and an offer to reimburse him for the extra passenger, Emmy turned to take Sarah back to her cabin, and as she did so, she noticed Varienko followed both of them with a strange, sly, perusal.
Emmy was furious. She pulled Sarah across the deck and down to her cabin in the aft hold.
“How could you do something like this after I told you how dangerous this could be? How could you?”
Sarah, shivering and exhausted, stared numbly ahead.
Emmy stopped talking, poured water into the small basin on her bed, and proceeded to vigorously start scrubbing Sarah’s face of the soot from the coal bin in which she had hidden.
But if embarrassment and anger had overcome Emmy, her fury with Sarah’s actions was short lived. In her cabin an hour later, while grooming Sarah’s hair from the knots and grime, she heard another knock at her door.
It was Varienko.
He held a bottle and two pewter goblets, and his britches and underpants were off, fully exposing him. He pushed his way into the room.
“Meezus nyeets a dryenk with captain.” Then he grabbed both Sarah’s and Emmy’s wrists and fell forward onto Emmy.
In the screaming, angry struggle that ensued, Sarah wrested herself away. Without a pause, she quickly picked up the flagon he had dropped and struck him with it squarely across his right temple with such force that the bottle broke into several pieces.
He collapsed to the side of Emmy and did not get back up.
Stunned, Emmy pushed herself up and looked at Varienko. Had Sarah killed him?
When Varienko groaned a half-minute later, she sighed in relief, then recovered her wits.
She and Sarah dragged Varienko out to the deck, bolted their door, pulled out the pepperbox, and held each other closely all night, listening to the commotion outside an hour later as the crew discovered their inebriated, bloodied, and snow-covered captain on the deck.
The next morning, the first mate ferried them across the harbor and deposited them with their belongings onto the wharf. He did not make eye contact with either of them during the entire passage and left them without a word.
Emmy did not register a complaint, fearing retribution. The Pietrevos, with its cargo loaded hastily by a crew on double time, was gone by the evening’s tide.
Emmy learned quickly that the only lodging available was at a small tavern-inn, the Red Pelican, on the west wall of the fort. She had sent word to the fort’s commander to query assistance but was told that he and most of his staff were south in Victoria participating in an official reception for Douglas, the territorial governor.
Undeterred, she presented herself to Captain Simon Whitefall, the acting commander, who received her after making her wait for a full day.
Entering his sparse office, she noted that unlike the other soldiers she saw in the fort, he wore neither jacket nor wig. He hadn’t bothered to shave for a few days she saw, and, sitting across the table from him, thought she smelled alcohol on his breath. A faded print of Queen Victoria’s image was pinned to the wall behind him. She handed him the letter she had received from the Fort’s commander, Colonel Pardeen, and repeated the questions she had conveyed upon her arrival at the fort.
“Well, I’m very sorry to disappoint you Madame,” Whitefall said, as he inspected the letter.
“In answer to your first question...no, no captives, adult or children have been reported in the past month.”
Whitefall showing no sympathy at Emmy’s disappointment, continued. “In response to your second question...yes, we know about the Tsimshian Potlatch scheduled up the Skeena River beginning in
