The Dakota Cipher

When she obligingly left for her little fortress so we men could talk over port and pipes – Somerset making a show of lighting a cigar, an innovation out of the Spanish Main – I made an excuse, crept out before Porter or anyone else could manoeuvre ahead of me, and scampered across the parade ground to her blockhouse. My knock was answered by her maid. I announced I’d loaned out my weapon and wanted to make sure it was handled properly. Smirking, the girl let me in.

‘Is this what you’re inquiring about, Mr Gage?’ Aurora’s voice floated down from above. The muzzle of my longrifle appeared in the trapdoor entrance that led to her chamber above, like a probing serpent. ‘I was surprised to find this tool in my bed, though I’m informed by a note that it may be useful.’

‘Your comment about shooting savages made me think you might enjoy practicing with a well-made rifle,’ I said. ‘We could study this evening.’

‘Forged in Lancaster, I presume,’ her disembodied voice said.

‘Jerusalem, actually. It’s a long story.’

‘Well, if we are to go shooting together, do come up and tell the tale. Aim is improved with understanding, don’t you think?’

So up I scrambled, closing the trap and dropping a couple of furs over it to muffle her expected cries of passion. At her invitation I perched myself on a trunk while she smoothed her gown to sit daintily on the edge of her bed, her eyes flashing and her wondrous hair glowing in the candlelight. She was just dishevelled enough to look erotic, two buttons carefully undone, escaping strands of hair artfully aglow, her slim boots slipped off her white stockings.

‘The gunsmith was a British agent, and the stock was carved by his beautiful sister,’ I began.

‘Was she really?’ Aurora tossed her hair.

‘Not as beautiful as you, of course.’

‘Of course.’ She stretched like a cat, giving a dainty yawn. ‘But you’d tell this other woman the same thing, wouldn’t you? Naughty man. I know your type.’

‘I’m sincere in the moment.’

‘Are you?’ The rifle was across her lap. ‘Well, Mr Gage. Then do come over and show me how your weapon works.’

And so I did.

Now the most astonishingly beautiful being in all nature is a woman, and the best become a gate to heaven. I appreciate a sweet girl. But then there are the hotter, more disturbing, more tempestuous types who are a gate to a place of an entirely different sort. That was the ruby fire of Aurora, her auburn hair tumbling to white shoulders, eyes flashing, mouth hungry, breasts pink-tipped and as taut and aroused as I was, skin flushed, all curve and fine waist and wondrous, mesmerising shank: there was no mountain as glorious as the rise of her hip when she lay beside me, no glen as lush and mysterious as her particular vale. She was a paradise of fire and brimstone, an angel of desire. I was lost in an instant, except I’d already been lost when she came down the stairs at Detroit. The smell of her, the glow of her skin, the beauty mark on her cheek that demanded obeisance: oh yes, I’d thrown the reins away and would go wherever she stampeded. We writhed like minks and gasped like fugitives, and she coaxed sensation out of me I didn’t know was there, and suggested things I’d never quite imagined. Yet pant as we might, she never seemed to lose her curiosity about the famous Ethan Gage, her sly questions about my rifle giving way to murmured entreaties as we embraced that I share just what exactly it was that we were looking for beyond Grand Portage.

‘Elephants,’ I mumbled, and went at her again like a starving man.

My mention of pachyderms only added to my mystery and so when we finally caught our breath I tried to put her off by explaining curious ideas I’d picked up from Napoleon’s savants and the new American president. They thought that the world might be older than the Bible, and home to strange creatures now entirely extinct, and that the whole puzzling cornucopia of life, while testimony to the Almighty, also raised questions about just what our Creator was up to, so as a naturalist myself …

‘You are toying with me!’ She was beginning to stiffen, just as I was not.

‘Aurora, I’m on a diplomatic mission for President Jefferson. I can’t share all the pertinent details with every bedmate …’

Then I was rolling from her furious push, landing with a thump on a wolverine pelt on the floor.

‘Every bedmate!’

I peeked above the mattress. ‘That’s not what I meant. We just don’t know each other well yet.’

So she attacked me with a pillow, breasts heaving, and it was such a wondrous sight that if she’d smothered me then and there, I would have died happy. Blazes!

But at length she was spent, flopping on the bed, her rump graceful as a snow drift, her lips ripe and pouted. ‘I thought you loved me and would share everything.’

‘I have shared all I am capable of this evening, believe me.’

‘Pah.’

‘I am entirely boring, I know. I go where greater men direct me, a simple savant with some slight knowledge of electricity. To find Venus on the edge of the wilderness is a greater discovery than any elephant.’

She rolled onto her back, her gaze lazy, and blessed my compliment with a slight smile. ‘So you think I’m pretty?’

‘I think if you were painted, it would set off such frenzy that there would be a riot. If you were sculpted, it would cause a new religion. I think you are manufactured of moonbeam, and fired by the sun.’

‘Fancy words, Yankee Doodle.’

‘But so true they should be chiselled into the stone of Westminster.’

She laughed. ‘What a flatterer you are! But you are a scamp not to trust me. I don’t think you can go in my cousin’s canoes after all.’

This was worrisome, since our only transportation off this island was with the British. ‘But we will be useful!’

‘How?’

I looked at my longrifle, which had found itself onto the plank floor in all our manoeuvring. ‘I can shoot that, too.’ I gave my most fetching smile. ‘We’ll practise together.’

She shook her head. ‘What an ungrateful rascal you are.’

‘Not ungrateful, believe me.’

Now the look was hard. ‘All right then, you and your hairy Norwegian can come with us to Grand Portage, but in a separate canoe, and when you look at me across the water, when I’m beneath my parasol, I will not deign to return your glance because I am a great lady of England and you are a directionless adventurer who will not share any confidences.’

‘I am a victim of your beauty.’

She wriggled back to rest herself more upright against the pillows. ‘You will be punished for your secrecy, at camp, by my indifference. You must attend to me or I will persuade Cecil to leave you behind for the Indians. They eat their enemies, I’ve heard. But we will have no more intimacy there until you demonstrate your trust by confiding in me. Until you reform, this is the last time you can gaze upon my body.’

‘Aurora, I believe we are already the deepest of friends.’

‘So prove it. Again.’ She parted her thighs. ‘And again. And then maybe someday I will take pity on you – if it suits me, and if you have earned it.’

I gulped and nodded, summoning new enthusiasm.

It’s a challenge being a diplomat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

A North West Company freight brigade of six canoes fetched us from Mackinac Island on its way to Lake Superior. Each vessel, improbably made of nothing but birch bark, wood strips, and roots used for twine, was thirty-five feet long, carried sixty 90-pound packs of trade goods, and had a guide at the bow, a steersman at the stern, and eight paddlers as driven as galley slaves. In the segregation of labour that had followed the British