For a moment, Annie and Strat were paralyzed by horror. “We can’t get through the forests without a sleigh,” whispered Strat. “We would die of the cold in minutes.”
“Then we have only one hope. We must stay a lady and a gentleman. Bluff our way out.” Annie forced open the half-frozen side window.
The police were already there. “Has he taken you a hostage, ma’am?” they asked anxiously, and to Strat, “Do not hurt this lady. You are surrounded and cannot get away. Now step out of the carriage quietly so we are not forced to hurt you.”
Annie prayed. No flirting this time. She must be cool and tough and strong. She must be her mother on Wall Street.
“Gentlemen, you have been duped,” she said. “As always in my experience, a man who pretends to be a doctor is believed. I understand you think Wilmott is actually a doctor. However, he is not.”
Strat squeezed her hand. In a calm sturdy voice, he said, “This lady is a representative of the Lunacy Law Reform and Anti-Kidnapping League.”
“Is that so?” said one of the men. “Well, why don’t you get out of the sleigh and talk it over with us.”
They had no choice. Annie got out first. She held out a gloved hand for assistance. She required them to help with her skirts. She wished for more light, so that they could see her face, but she would have to make do with her voice. “I certainly thank you for your prompt response,” she said as warmly but as haughtily as she could put together. “It is so good to know the police are so quick. However, your information is incorrect.”
“We’ve known Dr. Wilmott many years,” said the policeman.
“And have you not dealt with our representatives during that time?” said Annie, arching her eyebrows even though this was invisible behind the slope of her hat. An actress must follow through on detail.
“Well, yes,” said one of them reluctantly.
For heaven’s sake! There really was an Anti-Kidnapping League. “Mr. Hiram Stratton, Jr., is possessed of a vast fortune,” said Annie. “If you were notified by a cad named Walker Walkley, this is the fiend responsible for kidnapping Mr. Stratton.”
From the way the police looked at each other, it was clear that Walker Walkley had indeed notified them.
They shifted a little on the snow.
Three police and a driver were ranged against a girl swamped by her own clothing and a boy weak from imprisonment.
Annie said, “We are bound for Saranac, where—”
“I think not, ma’am,” said the policeman. “No matter what League you say you’re from, Dr. Wilmott was hurt. We are taking you back to Evergreen.”
Walker Walkley hardly thought of Strat or of Harriett.
He hardly even thought of the money.
His mind whirled at Anna Sophia Lockwood.
He paced at the station in Albany.
No train till dawn. That was what happened in the north woods. Godforsaken nightmare up here.
Dr. Wilmott wanted to hit his secretary. How dare she posture and prance just because she had known the girl was a fake and he had not? It was necessary to hit somebody.
He chose Katie and Douglass.
It made him feel so much better.
And soon—yes, in this very cell—he would put the girl. Whoever she was. Who cared who she was? It was her suffering that mattered, and Dr. Wilmott knew how to make a person suffer.
He smiled, and Ralph the attendant smiled, and again he slapped Katie.
Strat bowed slightly to the opposition. Annie could not think what he meant by it. Was it surrender? They must not give in! They must fight, somehow. They could not allow themselves to be taken back to Evergreen.
“Dear friend,” Strat said to her, his voice formal, “allow me to help you back in the carriage where you will be warm.”
She resisted, glaring at him from under her hat brim and the rolled-up veil, which was now unrolling and making it harder to see and think and believe. “Trust me,” he breathed. She did trust him. But those four were stronger. If there were a fight, he was going to need Annie. However, in a fight, she would be doomed by these ridiculous clothes. She couldn’t even bend down to take off her own boot and hit somebody with the heel, because a woman in a tightly laced corset could not bend.
His hand on her elbow moved her toward the door of the carriage and Annie heard herself sob. She lifted the skirts she now hated, the miles of satin and velvet, and managed to find the first high step with the sole of her boot.
Strat shoved her hard with his hand, throwing her into the carriage like a suitcase. She felt the sleigh rock dangerously and heard Strat shout to the horses.
The men shouted, too, but one slipped in the snow, one was holding the reins of his own horses, one was on the wrong side of the carriage, and the driver Ethan was thrown to the snowbank by the force of Strat’s driving shoulder.
They were off!
Annie grabbed the edges of the door and hauled herself into the carriage. Easier said than done in a Victorian gown. Seams ripped under her knees and the wind threw her hat by the side of the road. Oh, well, she had the hatbox here. She’d wear the other one.
Annie yanked the flapping side door closed, got on her knees to yank the little front window open and shouted to Strat’s backside, “Way to go, Strat!”
He was laughing.
Annie loved a guy who could laugh under these circumstances.
“I haven’t forgotten how!” yelled Strat, turning the horses expertly. He was having a wonderful time. He was nothing but one more teenage boy, taking the corners as fast and hard as he could.
The wind through the open slot was sharp as a weapon.
Annie wrapped herself like a cocoon in the furs. In her day, furs were not politically correct. But what the furs really were, was really warm.
A sleigh race.
Horses in the night.
Moon and stars keeping watch.
Strat shouted and whipped and threw his body weight left and right to help at the curves.
Pines screened the moonlight, like black lace.
A fox barked.
And behind them, four men, presumably four angry and possibly hurt men, followed.
Strat took a corner too fast, too hard, and the sleigh overturned.
Strat leaped clear of the falling vehicle. The horses staggered, but did not get tangled in each other or in the complex tack. He was relieved by that—he could never have left the horses to break each other’s legs. He would have had to clear them, and that would give their pursuers time to catch up.
He climbed onto the carriage side and opened the door awkwardly. Annie was shaken but unhurt. She could barely climb out in her skirts, but to take them off would mean freezing to death. She got out, and they slid to the ground.
Their pursuers’ shouts and pounding horses were right above them.
“Into the woods,” said Strat, and they ran, thigh deep in wet snow that clung and tugged and slowed and caught. Their feet stumbled on rocks and fallen branches at the bottom of the snow, and twice they fell together and crusty cruel snow tore at their faces.
Like crippled rabbits, they tried to hop over tangles and under branches. Tried to find a safe hole in which to crouch till danger flew by.
“Come back!” cried the tenor voice.
“You’ll freeze to death in a hour!” shouted the bass.
“Don’t go with the maniac, miss!” shouted Ethan, her driver. “The woods is terrible. There’s bears and wolves. There’s half-frozen ice and cliffs that break off from the weight of the snow! It’s not a pretty way to die!”
They were deep among black and dreadful spruces, invisible to the road and to the four men and the huffing, stomping horses.
They had probably gone a hundred yards.
Nothing. No safety zone at all.
A horse stamped. Sleigh bells trembled softly.
They were all cold, and nobody had any source of heat, but Annie and Strat were also wet, and wet was the greatest disaster.
The four men could simply return to their homes for a good night’s sleep. When they returned at dawn, they would find the frozen corpses of Annie and Strat.
Devonny had told Annie to prove her worth. Well, she had failed. Annie did not know which pain was greater: the pain of failure or the pain of this terrible, vicious cold.
Nobody moved.
“Miss,” said Ethan sadly, “the lunatic is not worth it.”
But Strat was worth it. He had always been worth it. She loved him. Oh, Daddy! she thought, caught between centuries and sadnesses. Daddy, Mom is worth it too. Come back to her!
“Come back with us,” cried the men. “Leave him there to die.”
Strat wrapped the beaver coat tightly around Annie and pressed her to his body to give her warmth. It’s my heart, she thought, my heart needs warmth.
“Does he have you prisoner, miss?” shouted Ethan.
Annie grit her teeth against the chattering of her jaws and after a long, long time, the two teams left. There were advantages to sleigh bells. Sound informed them what was happening. They knew, too, that both teams had gone back toward Evergreen.
“Come on,” said Strat, “we have to use the road. These woods are too terrible to cut through.”
“What if one of them is waiting for us?”
“One of them we could handle. We know at least two are gone, since both teams left. And I cannot imagine that reasonable men would stand alone in the winter in the wilderness risking death. They’ll come for us at dawn. But we won’t be here.”
They slogged back, falling and sliding. Her toes were so cold they hurt, her ankle was twisted and her face cut by the slapping of hemlock branches.
They reached the road. Moonlight gave it a faint glow. There was nothing in sight. They turned and ran toward Saranac. In twenty steps, they were out of strength. They walked. Tottered, Annie thought, would be a better word. “Too bad we don’t have an all-terrain vehicle, or at least a Ski-Doo.”
Strat looked at her nervously. It was this kind of vocabulary, vocabulary that didn’t exist, that had caused some of the trouble in his famous essay.
“See,” said Annie, “in my day it doesn’t matter what the surface of the earth is. Roads don’t count.”
“Roads don’t count?” repeated Strat. He could not comprehend her description of a snowmobile, for which barriers were nothing and to which no field or wood was closed.
They held each other up.
They could actually see the village of Saranac, a few lights in the night across a lake. Annie did not dare cross a lake after the story Ethan had told. What if they fell through where there was no ice, only a treacherous layer of snow?
But they would not live long enough to circle the lake. No human without the proper clothing could survive this. The police would come in the morning and scrape up the bodies like roadkill.
“We’re not going to make it,” she said. His lips were blue. Hers felt dead.
“Let me tell you about a friend of mine,” said Strat. “Her name is Katie. If she can get up and keep going every day, so can we. We are going to make it. We’re going to tell stories, and the rhythm of our words will match our feet, and we will make it to a building that is warm.”
Annie tried to believe it.
“I’ll start,” he said. “We used to come hunting here, years ago, when life was good and my family was close. Autumn is the best season, of course. The sunlight is gold, the falling leaves are gold, and the hope that you will shoot a great buck is gold.” He laughed at his poetry. “Tell me, Annie,” he coaxed, making her participate, keeping her alive, “is it still forever wild?”
He meant a hundred years later. Had the stewards of this land, the people of New York, kept their bargain? She nearly said, “Strat, there is nothing wild left in my America. Only pockets of pretend wild.” But this was storytelling, and he needed a story, and she said, “The wolves and the bears and forests of green are still there.”
“Forever wild,” said Strat happily.
“I, personally,” said Annie, who thought that a nice Ford with a great heater would be a very good idea right now, “prefer forever civilized. Tell me about Katie.”
He told her about Katie.
The story truly kept Annie going. “Why, Strat,” she interrupted him, “it sounds like a cleft palate and harelip. That’s nothing. Plastic surgery takes care of that when the baby’s born. My brother Tod had that, and he hardly has a scar. He’s handsome.”
But Strat, of course, had never heard of plastic surgery, and it had never occurred to him or anyone else that they might simply sew up the deformity and be rid of it.
Walker Walkley wanted to rip the telephone out of the wall. “Where can they go?” he demanded. Every moment he had to stay in Albany made him more and more angry.
“Heaven or Hell,” said the officer in Evergreen simply. “They won’t be alive.”
“You don’t know that girl. I swear she has the devil on her side. Could they get to Saranac? Could they get anyplace else?”
“I couldn’t. Three miles in that cold, wet clear through, and the cloth frozen to their skin? They’re dead already, Mr. Walkley.”
“Nevertheless, you warn those officials in Saranac, do you hear me?” Walk was shouting into the phone. He never quite trusted that wire. He said, “I can’t believe you lost them to start with! Small towns! I would have thought you could manage a few weaklings like that without trouble.”
“And did you manage the woman on the boat without any trouble?” said the small-town officer. “It was a woman, wasn’t it, who—”
“Just you notify Saranac!” yelled Walk, slamming the phone down.
The Evergreen official put his phone down more gently. There was no need to notify anybody. Except the funeral parlor.
They knocked on the door of the first farmhouse they came to. “Please,” cried Annie as the door fell open. “Please help us.”
Country people would not dream of failing to help. The frozen strangers were rushed in, their wet clothing stripped off without regard to modesty. They were put before a fire so hot it hurt. A stout, friendly woman in layers of skirts and aprons rubbed Annie’s skin down, and put her bare feet in a basin of warm water. A thin, gnarled man with a gray spiky beard spooned hot soup into Strat’s mouth. When Strat whispered that he would pay for a real meal—for beef and potatoes—the man grinned, and heated up a vast pot of stew: beef and turnips and squash and onions and gravy and potatoes. And Strat ate and ate and ate.
“Thank you,” said Annie over and over again. “Thank you so much. Thank you so much.”
“Whatever happened?” asked the woman. She was not suspicious. She was just comforting. Annie even had some stew. Normally Annie considered stew a sort of school-cafeteria idea: the kind of thing you steered around rather than ate. But this was delicious. She, too, ate and ate and ate.
“We went for a romantic sleigh ride in the night,” said Strat, “and I lost control. We tipped over and the horses ran on. It was entirely my fault. If I had killed us both by us freezing in the night, I would have none to blame but myself.”
“Well, now,” said the woman comfortably, “didn’t happen, did it? Now, we got no extra beds, but you’ll curl up on the rug by the stove and be warm for the night. Whoever’s worrying about you, they’ll just have to worry till morning.”
And they were wrapped in rugs, and left to sleep the night in peace. Annie was asleep in a moment, but Strat required no sleep. He had had a lot of sleeping in the last year.
He stared at Annie, asleep in the firelight.
How undefended she was in her sleep.
How young.
She had saved him, and in return he had nearly gotten her killed. It was so difficult to believe in himself as a person of worth. But Anna Sophia believed in him. She had crossed a century to come to him.
In the shadows, his hand a dark quiver by the light of the fading fire, he touched a strand of her hair. It was hot from lyi
ng near the embers. He wove it between his fingers, and thought of love, and Annie, and Harriett, and Katie. And he—supposedly a gentleman—what was he to do now? There must be a wise course to follow. But what was it?
By dawn’s early light, police from both Saranac and Evergreen would converge on the place where they had abandoned the sleigh. If they bothered to call the Anti-Kidnapping League on Fourteenth Street, they would know that Annie had not been employed by them. She was no innocent to be rescued from the maniac. Annie was in as much trouble as he was. Much as Doctor deserved death, Strat hoped that he had survived—if Strat and Annie had killed the man, hordes of police would descend upon them.
Strat and Annie must be gone and leave no tracks. How? In such snow, with so many witnesses? What must they do, and in what order? Where could they flee to?
At four in the morning, Strat got up and dressed. Annie’s clothing was dry now, draped on a wooden clotheshorse by the kitchen coal stove. She slept in a ball, a mass of long dark hair hanging out of the furs and spread across the braided rug. He touched her hot cheek.
She woke instantly, throwing off the fur like a stranger.
She was wearing a huge white nightdress their hostess had brought. It buttoned right up to the throat, had long sleeves that tightly clasped her wrists, and reached to her toes.
Strat averted his eyes. It was a trespass, that he should see her in her nightclothes.
Annie herself woke up fast. She remembered all of it instantly: their whole success and their whole failure.
When Strat turned from the sight of her in her nightie, she grinned. I love these 1890s guys. They’re so cute. Well, one of them anyway.
She tucked herself up against him, snuggling until she found a really good hug spot, and they whispered. Travel could not occur until daylight and Strat was bursting with need. He told Annie about Walk and the essay and his professor and the accusations and his own father’s betrayal.
Annie kissed his hand. Even his fingers were thin. “Oh, Strat! They were so terrible to you.”
“Nobody ever even wrote to me!” Strat cried out, his whisper emotional and hurt. “Nobody ever came. Not my mother, not my sister, not even Harriett, who I thought would come to me over hell or high water.”