Page 15 of Echoes of Twilight (Dawn of Alaska #4)

15

I t took Mikhail only a quarter hour to find rabbit tracks. They led under a bush, and he was able to kick up two rabbits, shoot them, and field-dress them in a handful of minutes. He scared a third rabbit out of some brush on his trip back to camp and quickly shot and field-dressed that too.

He wasn’t gone long, maybe forty-five minutes, but the entire time, he couldn’t help missing the feeling of Bryony trotting along beside him, whispering an occasional question so as not to scare away the animals or silently watching the forest, her eyes soaking in their surroundings. If only she had proper boots and a hat that would force the rain to drip down the outside of her parka, then he could have let her come with him and shown her how to shoot a rabbit rather than snare one.

And she could help him think through how best to proceed in the morning. He glanced through the trees toward the top of the mountain looming over them. It was the last one standing between them and the river. He’d traversed it when he followed Heath and Richard back to the camp near the glacier, but now the mountain’s top was shrouded in dark clouds, indicating a blizzard started about halfway to the top.

He refused to take the team into more snow, but that meant forging a way around the base of the mountain. But just as he discovered with the mountain they’d already hiked over, he didn’t know what they might encounter. A canyon too big for them to cross? A river with rushing water they couldn’t safely ford? The list was endless.

But after what had almost happened to Heath...

Mikhail pressed his eyes shut as the image of Heath hanging over the side of the mountain filled his mind. Please, God, allow me to lead everyone safely back to Sitka.

It was a prayer he uttered every time he accepted the responsibility of leading an expedition. Hopefully God would answer this one favorably.

“No. You’re not taking this one. I refuse to let you.”

Bryony’s voice carried through the woods, and Mikhail stilled, searching the area for her.

“How much do you want for it?”

Richard was talking now. Mikhail could recognize his smooth-sounding voice anywhere, but he didn’t see either of them. He hedged forward, silently crossing the small creek on the opposite side of the hollow and heading toward the camp.

“It’s not for sale.” This time when Bryony spoke, Mikhail caught a flash of movement through the trees.

The wet fur of Bryony’s parka looked almost black against the green of the spruce trees, but he could still make out her form, and Richard’s behind her.

“Surely you don’t mean to keep it from me, Bry. It’s beautiful.” Richard took a step toward Bryony and reached for whatever she held in her arms. “The public will want to read it. They always do.”

“I’m not giving this one to you.” Bryony opened her parka and tucked the object against her chest, then wrapped the coat over it. “I told you there wouldn’t be anymore after I gave you my journal last summer. I don’t want to continue our arrangement.”

Richard’s body turned rigid. Mikhail could see it even from his position behind the tree. “You can hide it from me now if you want, but you won’t be able to keep it from me once we’re married.”

“I’m not going to marry you!”

“You can’t be serious.” Tightness laced Richard’s voice. “I’m going to be secretary of the interior. If not this year, then next year, or the year after that. It’s only a matter of time.”

Bryony raised her chin. “And what makes you think I’d want to be married to the secretary of the interior?”

“Every woman wants to be married to a man like me. That position is pure power. I alone would get to appoint the next governor of Alaska. I would get to open entire regions of the country for exploration. I could authorize the formation of gold and silver and copper mines across the entire United States.” Richard took a step closer, crowding her with his body.

Mikhail found his grip tightening on the rope holding the rabbits.

But Bryony didn’t take a step back. She held her ground, meeting Richard’s gaze evenly. “And just how many of those mines will your family have a stake in?”

Richard’s laugh was short and humorless. “There’s nothing wrong with having a stake in the mining industry. Someone has to own the gold and silver and copper mines. It’s how the world works.”

“That may be, but I want nothing to do with it.”

“You’ll marry me, Bryony.” Richard leaned even closer, his tone growing lower and darker. “And we’ll have a good life together. I’ll treat you well.”

That was enough. Mikhail wasn’t going to stand here and listen to a second more of this. He hung the string of rabbits on a tree branch and took a step forward.

“Well enough that you’ll turn out your mistresses?” Bryony’s voice sliced through the air, a thousand accusations in that single sentence.

Mikhail found himself growing still once again. He shouldn’t be surprised that the other man kept women, not after how Richard had treated the Athabaskans. And given Richard’s wealth and position, it was probably expected that he’d have a mistress or two.

But that didn’t make it right.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Richard brushed a dismissive hand through the air. “I’ll be just as discreet with them after we’re married as I am now. You only know they exist because you overheard Heath and me talking, not because I was being flagrant.”

Bryony leaned forward, bringing herself nearly nose to nose with the lout. “You listen to me, Richard Caldwell, because I’m not going to repeat myself anymore. I’m not going to marry you. Not today, not tomorrow, and not ever.”

The man’s jaw tensed. “I need a wife if I’m going to look attractive enough for the president to name me secretary of the interior.”

Bryony stepped back just enough to put a sliver of space between them. “Then marry a senator’s daughter.”

“I’d rather marry the daughter of a leading scientist.”

She let out a brittle laugh. “Who just so happens to steal other people’s work and publish it under your own name. Excuse me for not feeling more flattered.”

Her words echoed through the rain, and Mikhail pressed his eyes shut.

The field guides. All those carefully detailed works Richard had paraded as his own for the past five years—they were Bryony’s work?

A chill ran through him, colder than the rain falling around him.

Bryony chose that moment to turn and stomp away from Richard.

Richard only laughed at her retreat. “Storm off now if you like, but there won’t be anywhere to run once we get back to Washington, DC.”

She was heading deeper into the woods, and Mikhail knew he needed to move if he wanted to stay hidden. But he couldn’t bring himself to take so much as a step. All he could do was stand there seething, his gaze boring into Richard Caldwell.

The fact Richard didn’t sense that he was being watched proved just how poor of a frontiersman he was.

The sound of feet trampling underbrush grew louder, and he shifted slightly, hiding himself behind a tree half a second before Bryony came into view.

She tromped straight by him and headed toward a creek. She didn’t bother to find a log or rock to sit on, just sank to her knees in the mud beside the stream in a way that was sure to soak the dry clothes she’d just put on.

She yanked the journal from inside her parka, and he nearly turned around. She was clearly expecting privacy, and he should give it to her if she wanted to sketch.

But she didn’t pull out a pencil. Instead, she fisted one of the journal pages in her hand as if she was about to tear it out and throw it into the stream.

He started toward her. “Don’t.”

She jerked, her head whirling around to reveal eyes streaked with tears. “Leave me alone.”

“Only if you promise not to tear up your work.” He crouched beside her in a way that kept his weight balanced on his feet so his trousers wouldn’t get muddy.

“You don’t understand.” She fisted the page in her hand again, and he had to set his own hand atop hers to keep her from tearing it.

“Your sketches and writing are lovely.” Or at least, he assumed her writing was lovely, even if he wasn’t able to read it. “And I know half a dozen cartographers back in Washington, DC, who would love to get their hands on these maps. Don’t destroy any of it. Please.”

“He’ll steal it if I don’t, and I’d rather have it end up in the river.”

“If you really want to see it published, I bet you could do so without giving it to Richard.”

She stared down at the journal again, and he found himself reaching out and tucking a strand of red hair behind her ear so he could see her face.

That was probably a mistake, because it brought the bare skin of his fingers into contact with the softness of her face.

And it also allowed him to notice the fresh tear streaking down her cheek.

“I don’t want it published under your name either.”

His stomach twisted. Was she so used to having her work taken for granted that that was the first thing she assumed? That he wanted to take it from her rather than help her? “That wasn’t what I meant. You don’t need to publish any of it if you don’t want to. You could just keep it for yourself as a memory of your time here. But please give copies of your maps to some of the cartographers back home. You’ve got a knack for drawing them, and I know they can be helpful.”

She swiped at the tear. “How much of that conversation did you overhear?”

“Enough.”

“Is that your way of saying you heard all of it?”

He shifted, then plopped himself into the mud beside her, never mind that his trousers would need a good washing now. “I heard the part about your journal, and his mistresses, and you not wanting to marry him.”

“Did you hear the part about the other books?”

“I heard that you want the journal you gave him last summer to be the final one. I assume that means you’ve given him several.”

She glanced over at him, a layer of dullness covering the eyes that were normally so bright and curious. “You don’t look surprised.”

Mikhail leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. The steady patter of rain filled the silence between them, and for a moment the world felt smaller—as if it contained just the two of them sitting in the mud beside the creek. “I wish I were surprised, but that first book Richard published, the one about the Yukon River and his time with the Athabaskans, half of that was stolen too. When he started publishing field guides five years ago, I should have known he’d found someone else’s work to steal.”

But even if he had been skeptical and suspected that Richard was working with another writer, he never would have guessed the field guides’ origins to be a woman with fiery red hair and soft hazel eyes.

“I gave Richard my first journal.” Bryony looked down and fiddled with a page of her journal, not seeming to care about the rain splattering it. “The thought of being published, of seeing something I wrote in print and knowing that people were reading it, made me happy. I knew that no one would read a field guide written by a woman. But Richard had connections with publishers from his first book, and he said we could split the royalties as long as I gave him all the credit for the book.

“I agreed and signed a contract stating that Richard was the sole author. The book sold well, so we published my field guide from our next expedition. And the one after that, and...” She twirled her hand in the air, then flashed him a faint, humorless smile. “You can imagine the rest.”

A hollow cavern opened inside his chest. “I can imagine it, yes. But that doesn’t make it right.”

“Our plan worked for a while, but now it’s time to marry.” She pinned her eyes to the creek as she spoke, preventing him from seeing the tears he imagined were still flowing. “Everyone wants me to marry Richard, but I don’t want to. And it’s not just him. I don’t want to marry anyone else I’ve met either. That means I need to find a way to support myself, which was why I wanted to go to Wellesley this fall and study education, but now...”

Her voice cracked, and she ducked her head, hiding her face beneath the edge of her hood, though she couldn’t hide the shaky, erratic plumes of white breath against the cold air. “Oh, I don’t know what it means. What am I going to do? How will I be able to support myself if I can’t teach? Father won’t write me a letter of recommendation to be a research assistant at the Smithsonian. He says a woman has no place in a science lab, and?—”

“He told you that?”

She turned to look at him despite the hood still pulled low over her head. “Yes, why?”

The hollow sensation in his chest turned into an ache. “Because you clearly have something to offer the scientific community.”

Her cheeks flushed, and she swallowed, just a subtle movement of muscles, but he couldn’t help but notice the way the slender column of her neck moved. “I don’t think that’s how the world sees it.”

He reached out, setting his hand atop hers on her knee. “That just makes the rest of the world fools then. I can tell based on how intricately you draw sketches of the plants your father needs and how painstakingly you categorized all of his findings this summer. And don’t tell me that wasn’t you. I recognized your handwriting when your father showed me his notes. None of them are written in his hand.”

Bryony looked down at the open journal on her lap. He was tempted to tell her to put it inside her coat, that if the pages got any wetter, the ink might start to run, but she hunched forward, using her body as canopy as the rain pelted her back. She flipped through pages until she stopped at one with a map that he recognized from the other night.

Then she flipped back a page to the sketch of the tree beside the creek, while her handwriting filled the opposite page. She stared at the sketch for a moment before bringing her gaze up to meet his. “Did you like what you read last time? Richard says my writing is too flowery and useless without his editing, but you seemed to like my ramblings well enough.”

He pressed his eyes closed. How could he answer such a question when he couldn’t actually read? “Read the page to me again.”

Her brow furrowed, just as he’d known it would. It had to seem like the world’s oddest request. “I want to hear your words in your own voice.” Guilt rose in his throat, but he swallowed it down, hoping she wouldn’t see through him.

She didn’t, because a moment later she picked up the journal and began reading.

High among Alaska’s granite peaks, a glacial lake lies as still as morning light, like a mirror cradling the surrounding cliffs. The water, a deep, ancient blue, is fed by the melting ice fields above, each drop a fragment of forgotten winters drifting from the glacier’s turquoise streams.

The cliffs lean in protectively, as if shielding this sacred pool from the world beyond. In such a place, one feels both the weight of ages and the timeless peace of nature.

The words were beautiful, just as he’d known they would be. She was so observant of everything around her and took so much care with her sketches and maps. He’d expected her words to be detailed and careful too, but he hadn’t realized they’d be so lovely.

He might not have been in that glacial valley with Bryony, but after hearing her description, he felt like he’d lived there all summer.

“I’ll help you get this published,” he whispered. “Without taking so much as a cent from the royalties.”

She straightened, then closed her journal, tucking it back into her parka. “You’d do that? Why?”

“Because someone should. And because you deserve the chance to do what you love without having to rely on a man like Richard to give it to you.” He nodded toward the hidden journal. “All that knowledge you have? It deserves to be shared with people who’ll respect it.”

Her lips pressed together, and she shook her head, causing a tendril of damp hair to cling to her neck. “That’s where you’re wrong. No one wants anything a woman’s written. And Father has been clear. He wants me to marry Richard. In the spring. If I’m not going to marry him, then I need some other way to support myself. And the only thing I can think to do is become a teacher. That’s why I wanted to go to Wellesley. And while I don’t relish the idea of teaching English or history, I’ll get to teach science to my students, so it can’t be all that bad.”

A teacher, when she was such a talented artist and cartographer, when she was both a skilled writer and research assistant. What was wrong with the world that it forced talented women into roles that didn’t suit them, just because some roles seemed more womanly than others?

“At the very least, you should have money to pay for whatever kind of college degree you want, seeing how you’ve been getting royalties from your book sales. I mean, Richard’s field guides are pretty popular. Are you sure you can’t just live on those?” Then she’d at least have freedom to write and sketch whenever she wanted, even if she wasn’t working with her father.

“I wish they were enough, but they come to maybe a hundred dollars a year. Even if I move into the cheapest apartment I can find, I’d still need twice that to be able to live.”

“A hundred dollars a year? I thought you said Richard published five of your journals.” His voice emerged tight, the edges of his words sharper than he intended.

“He did.” She patted the journal through the top of her parka. “He wants this one to be my sixth.”

“A hundred dollars a year for five books?” Mikhail surged to his feet. The series of newspaper articles he’d published had paid him three times that.

He began pacing, his mukluks squelching against the wet ground. A hundred dollars a year wasn’t nearly enough money, not considering how popular Richard’s field guides were. If he had to guess, Richard was keeping eighty to ninety percent of the royalties for himself.

“I mean, for a while I thought the book royalties might be enough to live on.” Bryony shifted, angling her body so she could look up at him. “That I could write a field guide each summer and have it published under Richard’s name, and I wouldn’t need to worry about finding a husband. But that was before it was apparent that the secretary of the interior suffered an apoplectic fit, and Richard decided that marrying me would make him look like an attractive choice to the president. Then he decided that since he was going to marry me, I should let him take all the money from the books.”

Mikhail stopped pacing and turned to look at her. “He’s taking all your money? You’re not even engaged.”

“No. But he hasn’t given me a dime for my books since last fall.”

Mikhail took a step closer, then extended a hand to help her to her feet. How could she sit while they discussed Richard Caldwell stealing her money? How could she be so calm? “Do you have copies of the publishing contracts?”

Bryony nodded, then placed her hand in his. “I think so, somewhere back home. Why?”

“Because after you return, I want you to send copies of the contracts to me. I’ll pass them on to my sister, since she’s a lawyer.” He pulled her to her feet, working to keep his grip light and his actions calm, even though he could feel his pulse beating in his ears. “If the contracts are set up as they should be, not only is it illegal for Richard to suddenly decide to withhold royalties from you, but I suspect you’ll be able to have the past royalty payouts analyzed to make sure he’s actually been paying you what he should.”

“You think Richard has been underpaying me all along?” Confusion filled her eyes as she looked at him, as though searching for some explanation that wouldn’t make her feel so foolish. “I assumed I was just missing money from last winter.”

He wanted to howl, or maybe to scream. To clench his hands into fists and shake them at the sky. To do something that could somehow right the injustice that Richard Caldwell had put the intelligent woman in front of him through.

But he was helpless to do much of anything at the moment. And if there was one thing he hated more than anything else, it was being helpless.

“If lawyers get involved, won’t everything become public?” Bryony sank her teeth into her bottom lip. “Then the world would know he’s not the one writing the guides.”

He could hear the worry creep into her voice, and he turned away, staring at the mountains, at the sky, at the cool stream of water trickling through the moss and rocks and brush of the forest. Anything to help him retain a semblance of calm. “The world should already know that.”

He turned around to find that Bryony’s face had turned white and she’d curled her shoulders inward. “Richard would hate me, and so would my father and Heath.” Her hand crept up to press against her chest. “And the rest of Richard’s family.”

He shoved a hand through his hair. Had his oldest brother, Alexei, ever had these kinds of conversations with Evelina and Kate? When Alexei had said he was sending the twins to Boston so Kate could go to medical school, Mikhail couldn’t recall Alexei so much as blinking. It had seemed like such a natural fit for his sisters to pursue the things they loved.

He couldn’t imagine a world where Alexei forced Evelina and Kate to work for the family shipping company. Or worse yet, a world where they were so good at their jobs that working for the shipping company made the company extra money every year, but Alexei refused to pay them and then said they had to marry deplorable, dishonest men.

It made him want to wrap Bryony in a giant quilt, carry her back to Sitka, and promise that he’d find a way for her to earn a living in the field she loved, no matter what it cost or what he had to sacrifice.

But she wasn’t his to protect, at least not like that. The two of them were nothing more than strangers thrust together by unusual circumstances and destined to part, returning to two different lives the moment they reached Sitka.

So he drew in a breath, still fighting to find a bit of inner calm. “Have you ever read the parable of the master and his servants?”

“You mean from the Bible?” Bryony tilted her head. “Is that the one where the master goes into another country and leaves his three servants with different talents?”

“Yes. It’s in Matthew chapter twenty-five. The master gives his first servant five talents, his second servant two talents, and his third servant one talent.”

“Two of the servants go to work and double their talents. But the last one hides his talent, right?”

“He buries it in the ground.” His breath puffed white against the cold. “Time passes. Maybe one year, maybe ten—the Bible doesn’t say. But eventually the master returns, and he calls for his servants. The first servant shows the master his ten talents, and the master tells him, ‘Well done.’ And because the servant was faithful with the few talents given to him, the master said he would make him a ‘ruler over many things.’ Then the same happened with the second servant, who—even though he was given fewer talents than the first servant—still doubled his two talents and turned them into four.”

“And you think this somehow applies to me? To my writing?” Bryony reached up to where her journal was tucked away in her parka.

Couldn’t she see it? “Well, what happens when the last servant stands before the master?”

“He only has the one talent that he buried to show his master,” she answered quickly, almost as though the question was too simple to bother asking in the first place.

“Yes, and the master takes the talent from him, gives it to the servant who has ten talents, and sends the third servant away in judgment.”

“I don’t understand.” She shook her head. “Do you think God is going to judge me for not giving my journal to Richard to publish?”

“No. I think that God gave you talents in the fields of science and cartography and art and writing, and he doesn’t want you to bury them simply because you’re a woman. If he wanted a man to have those talents, he would have given them to someone like Heath or Richard, but he gave them to you. So the question is, how can you be faithful to God with the skills you have?”

He gestured toward the journal hidden inside her parka. “It’s not settling for a profession that doesn’t suit you or marrying a horrendous man because he has access to scientific research. And it’s probably not hiding your name from the world when you want to publish your own work.”

She tucked her bottom lip between her teeth, something he was starting to recognize she did whenever she felt uncomfortable.

“Promise me you’ll look at the publishing contracts as soon as you get back to Washington, DC, and if there’s a problem with any of them—if there’s something you don’t understand or you think that Richard is doing wrong—then write me. My sister invested the talents God gave her and used them to become a lawyer even though it’s a profession dominated by men. And she specifically goes out of her way to help women who’ve been mistreated.”

Bryony stared at him for a moment, and he could see the battle waging within her—the desire to believe him, and the fear that doing so might upend her life. “What if the contracts aren’t set up as they should be? What if I signed something that gave Richard full control over the books and the money? What do I do then?”

He could see that scenario playing out all too clearly. Could see Richard giving her the last page of each publishing contract to sign without showing her the page that said she was allowing him to get full royalties for her work, or possibly even giving him full rights altogether.

He wanted to promise that her fear wasn’t true, that even if she hadn’t understood everything she’d signed, Richard wouldn’t have taken advantage of her that way. But he couldn’t. “Let’s start with figuring out what the contracts say. Then we’ll go from there.”

She swallowed, the muscles of her throat working as she hugged the journal to her chest beneath her parka. “I don’t know if things will work out as easily as you say once we get back to Sitka, but thank you for helping.”

He reached down and tucked a wet strand of hair into the hood of her coat. “I’m happy to help. Truly. If you ever need anything from me, either here in the woods or once you return home, you only need to ask, do you understand?”

She nodded as though she did, but as she turned and headed back to the camp, he couldn’t help but wonder if she even knew what true help felt like, or if the men around her had taken advantage of her for so long, she couldn’t recognize when someone truly cared for her well-being without wanting anything in return.