Stef Penney - The Tenderness of Wolves

During the night, the temperature plummets. A light dusting of snow greets Donald when he rubs frost off the inside of his window and looks outside. He wonders if Jacob spent the night in the stables. Jacob is used to the cold. Last winter–Donald’s first in the country–was relatively mild, but still a shock to him. This bone-aching morning is just a foretaste.

Knox has arranged for a local man to accompany Mackinley on his pursuit of the Frenchman. Someone sufficiently lowly that Mackinley will not have to share the glory with him … Then Donald dismisses the thought as uncharitable. More and more of his thoughts seem to be uncharitable nowadays. This is not what he had expected before he left Scotland–the great lone land had seemed like a promise of purity, where the harsh climate and simple life would hone a man’s courage and scour off petty faults. But it isn’t like that at all–or perhaps it is he who is at fault, and isn’t up to the scouring. Perhaps he didn’t have enough moral fibre in the first place.

After Mackinley has gone, terse and prickly to the last, Donald lingers over his coffee in the hope of seeing Susannah. Of course it is also a pleasure to sit at a table covered with white linen and look at the paintings on the wall, to be served by a white woman–albeit a rough Irish one–and to stare pensively into the fire without crude jokes being aimed in his direction. Finally his patience is rewarded, and both girls come in and take their seats.

‘Well Mr Moody,’ Maria says, ‘so you are guarding our safety while the others pursue the suspects.’

It is extraordinary how in one sentence Maria can make him feel like a coward. He tries not to sound defensive. ‘We are waiting for Francis Ross. If he doesn’t return today then we will go after him.’

‘You don’t think he could have done it?’ Susannah frowns at him charmingly.

‘I know nothing about him. What do you think?’

‘I think he’s a seventeen-year-old boy. A rather good-looking one.’ With this, Maria looks slyly at him.

‘He’s sweet,’ Susannah says, looking at the table. ‘Shy. He doesn’t have many friends.’

Maria snorts sarcastically. Donald thinks that it would be hard for any youth to appear other than shy and awkward in the face of Maria’s acidity and Susannah’s beauty.

Maria adds, ‘We don’t know him that well. I don’t know who does. It’s just that he always seems rather a sissy. He doesn’t hunt or do the things most of the boys do.’

‘What do the other boys do?’ Donald tries to assume a great distance between now and his seventeen-year-old self, when he did not hunt and would undoubtedly have been called a sissy by these young women.

‘Oh, you know, they go round together, play practical jokes, get drunk … Stupid things like that.’

‘You think someone who doesn’t do those things couldn’t commit murder?’

‘No …’ Maria looks reflective for a moment. ‘He always seems moody and … well, as though there are things going on under the surface.’

‘There was once, I remember, at school,’ Susannah says, her face brightening. ‘He was about fourteen, I think, and another boy, was it George Pretty …? No, no, it was Matthew Fox. Or …’ She trails off, frowning. Her sister gives her a look.

‘Well Matthew, or whoever, tried to crib his task, and was showing off about it, you know, making sure his friends saw … and suddenly Francis realised and went into the most frightful rage. I’d never seen anyone’s face go white with anger before, but he did–he went paper-white, and his skin is normally sort of golden, you know …? Um, anyway, he started hitting Matthew as if he wanted to kill him. He was in a sort of frenzy; he had to be dragged off by Mr Clarke and another boy. It was quite frightening.’

She looks at Donald, hazel eyes wide. ‘I hadn’t thought of that for ages. Do you suppose …?’

‘It wasn’t a frenzied attack, was it Mr Moody?’ Maria has remained calm while Susannah worked herself up into a state of excitement.

‘We can’t rule anything out.’

‘Mr Mackinley thinks it was the French trader, doesn’t he? That’s why he’s gone after him. Or perhaps he just wants it to be the French trader. You don’t like free traders do you, Mr Moody, in the Company?’

‘The Company tries to protect its interests, of course, but it is generally of benefit if trappers can get a fixed price for their skins; and the Company looks after a lot of people–the trappers know where to go and the situation is … stable. Where there is competition, prices go up or down, and the free traders don’t look after their families. It is the difference between … order and anarchy.’ Donald hears the patronising tone in his voice and winces inwardly.

‘But if a free trader offers a higher price for a fur than the Company, surely a trapper is entitled to take it? Then he can look after his family himself.’

‘Of course, he is free to do so. But then he must take the risk that that trader will not be there the next year–he cannot rely on him in the way he can rely on the Company.’

‘But isn’t it true,’ she persists, ‘that the Company encourages the Indians they trade with to become dependent on liquor, and makes sure that it is the only supplier of liquor, so that they always come back?’

Donald feels a warm flush rising above his collar. ‘The Company does not encourage anything of the sort. The trappers do what they want, they are not coerced into anything.’

He sounds quite angry. Susannah turns on her sister. ‘That is a horrible accusation. Besides, it is hardly Mr Moody’s fault if things like that go on.’

Maria shrugs, unconvinced.

Donald walks outside, letting the air cool his face. He will have to try and find Susannah alone later–it is impossible to have a conversation with the rebarbative Maria around. He lights his pipe to calm himself, and finds Jacob in the stables, talking to his horse in the nonsense language he uses with them.

‘Morning Mr Moody.’

‘Good morning. Did you sleep well?’

Jacob looks puzzled, as he usually is by this question. He slept–what else is there to say? He also lay awake, thinking about the dead man and the warrior’s death he met at home, on his bed. He nods, though, to humour Donald.

‘Jacob, do you like working for the Company?’

Another bizarre question. ‘Yes.’

‘You wouldn’t prefer to work for someone else–like a free trader?’

Jacob shrugs. ‘Not now–with my family. When I am away, I know they are safe and won’t starve. And Company goods are cheap–much cheaper than outside.’

‘So it’s good that you work for the Company?’

‘I guess so. Why, you want to leave?’

Donald laughs and shakes his head, and then wonders why this has never occurred to him. Because there is nowhere else for him to go? Perhaps there is nowhere for Jacob either–his father was a Company man, a voyageur, and Jacob started working when he was fourteen. His father died young. He wonders now if he was involved in an accident, but as with so many other aspects of Jacob’s life, he cannot think of an appropriate time to ask.

The reason Donald became so agitated was because Maria was right to say the Company jealously guards its monopoly–but it has good reason to fear competition. Tired of its centuries of supremacy in the wilderness, a number of independent fur traders–mainly French and Yankee–are attempting to break the Company’s hold on the fur trade. There have been rival outfits in the past, but the Company subsumed or quashed them all. But this new alliance, the one known as the North America Company, has the mandarins worried. There are deep pockets behind it, and a disregard for the rules (rules laid down by the Company, that is). Traders offer trappers high prices for furs and extract promises that they will avoid the Company in future. It is likely that bribery and threats are being used–more than probable in fact, since the Company uses them itself. Trade, and consequently profits, are suffering.