“They pulled me off the worksite,” Liam said, heavy hands shaking as he rubbed them together, trying to get the feeling back. “Wouldn’t say why, wouldn’t say what for. Thought I was being let go, sent home, and I got so mad, I didn’t even hear when they…when they told me…”
Sitting there, in Maggie and Rían’s barely-there house, Liam was almost unrecognizable. Always so cheerful, full of life, his handsome features had been worn away by a ghostly pallor that left dark circles under his eyes. There was a paleness to his lips that made him seem two feet from the grave himself. When he looked at her, he almost broke down crying again.
Maggie held her breath a little longer, holding back tears, refusing to give ground.
“I don’t even know…” he said. “I lost a brother, but you lost another… a…”
She shook her head as if it would ward off the words a little, turned and paced around the tiny room as Colleen got the fire in the hearth going. No one spoke.
Maggie went to the hooks by the door where Rían had left his old jacket in favour of his constables’ furs, and ran her finger down the patched-up sleeve, stray threads hanging loose where she’d bit them off. It smelled of him, like the smell of his sweat after a long day in the cold. She breathed it in, knowing there would only be so many times she would ever feel this close to him again.
She could see him, smiling at her in a world full of green, squinting at the warm sun, giving her a wink on his way out the door. She could see him so clearly, it made no sense that he was gone. She was going to make him stew, tell him about the flower she’d lost, listen to him tell her about his day, and how he’d—
How he’d died.
She felt the radiant heat of her earlier happiness, taunting her, laughing at her for being so blithely content. As if that could ever last. As if she had any hope of being happy. She should have known better. She really should, by now.
“How?” she said, voice a whisper. “How did it…how did he…?”
“There was an accident on the road,” said Liam. “That first night, an accident, and he…” He winced rather than saying anything more, hoping it would suffice.
“He what?” she asked. “What, Liam, what? What happened to him?”
He looked down at his hands, picking at the callouses there. “‘Death by snow,’ they said.”
Maggie shook her head, let go of the coat and started pacing again—but stopped short as anger rumbled its way up her throat into her mouth. “Death by snow? What does that…what does that mean? He had a sleigh, didn’t he? And furs, too. How does snow—”
“There was an accident on the road,” Liam repeated, as if it made any more sense the second time.
“What accident?”
“Th-they didn’t say,” Liam muttered.
Maggie turned away again, headed for the hearth like she had a purpose, but when she got there, looked as lost as ever. Colleen stood aside, to give her room, but it only made her feel more isolated and alone. She finally settled on tea. Tea was something to do. She took her pitted metal teacup off the shelf and then grabbed the kettle off the fire, and—
“Ah!” she hissed, recoiling at the searing heat. She hadn’t wrapped the handle before touching it, and the suddenness of the pain jolted her back to life—and anger. She threw the pot across the room so hard it left a mark in the wall. “Ah!” she screamed, and doubled over, falling to her knees, hands laced through her hair.
Colleen knelt beside her, rubbing her back gently. “Shh, dear,” she said. “Shh.”
Maggie looked up at Liam, who hadn’t even flinched, so lost in a daze was he. But there, under her tortured gaze, he met her eyes and winced.
“I need to see him,” she said.
“Oh Maggie, no…” said Colleen.
“I need to see him,” she said.
She stood, hands clenched into tight fists, and said, to no one and everyone at once: “I’m going to see him. Are you coming?”
Colleen shrank back at the question. Maggie looked to Liam, who just kept staring into the distance, lower lip trembling as he said: “I just… I can’t.”
Maggie grabbed her coat off the hook and opened the door to the vicious cold again. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll say goodbyes for all of us.”
The magistrate wasn’t at his office, and his clerk seemed put off at having visitors at all. He set down his book and peered over his half-moon glasses at Maggie like she was stark raving mad.
“Pardon me, what?” he asked.
“My husband. I need to see him.”
The magistrate’s office was less of a building than a single room with a desk and some shackles and clubs in a pile in the back. There was one exit, no windows, and so little furniture it felt like the place had been looted.
The clerk made a point of looking around carefully, despite the room being absolutely deserted save for the two of them. No one there, no one there, no one back there either. After going through the motions, he raised an eyebrow at Maggie. “He’s not in.”
“No, you see—”
“Drunk and disorderly, check the pens at Barracks Hill. Or the taverns, more likely. Good luck, ma’am.”
“He hasn’t been arrested,” she said. “My name is Maggie Kelly. My husband is—was—Rían Kelly. Constable Rían Kelly.”
The clerk looked up at that. The colour drained from his face. “C-constable Kelly?”
“Is he here?”
“M-Mrs Kelly…I d-don’t know how to phrase this, but—”
“I know,” she said, holding back her crippling sorrow a little longer.
“No, but he—”
“I know,” she said, letting her fists squeeze away the grief. “I need to see his b-body.”
The clerk’s face ran through a series of emotions, from confusion to horror to concern and all the way back to confusion again. He tried to find the right words, but ended up settling on: “That’s not really… uh…possible.”
“Not possible why?” she asked.
“I mean he…it’s not proper. Perhaps in the spring, at the funeral—”
“The Spring?” she said, heart taking a jolt. “Why the Spring?”
“I mean, the ground’s too frozen to dig a proper…I mean—”
“I demand to see my husband,” she said. “Bring me to him. Now.”
The clerk stood, and spoke gently: “Mrs Kelly, I am so sorry for your loss, but the shed’s no place for a woman to—”
“Wait, what shed?” she gasped. “You’re keeping him in a shed? This is how you treat one of your own?”
“It’s only until Spring,” he said. “It’s where we keep all the, uh, departed, in the winter months. But rest assured, he’s been well cared for. In the, uh, shed.”
Maggie was trembling far more than the cold could have caused. All her resolve was shedding off, leaving her bitterly alone and facing a world that just made no sense.
“Please,” she murmured. “I never got to say good-bye.”
The clerk reached out a hand, touched her arm lightly, and nodded. “And you shall,” he said. “In the Spring.”
She pulled away like his touch was acid, stormed out the door and slammed it so hard, it blew out the candles on his desk.
The magistrate’s office was just north of the market, a short walk away from the spot she’d bought the flower not two hours earlier. She staggered down the street in a daze, barely registering the goings-on around her. There, to the left, was the door she’d waited outside…waiting for vegetables she would use for…that she thought she’d use…. She had a flash of the romantic dinner that never would be, of the smell of the stew and the look on Rían’s face as he touched her cheek and leaned in for a kiss that would never…would never, ever—
She stopped, suddenly, in the middle of the street. Someone bumped into her from behind but she didn’t budge, didn’t even hear their complaints.
Rían was dead.
Rían was dead, but it still felt like a dream. Like the taste of his lips, tonight, was just as real as the idea of him lying in a shed somewhere, frozen through and forgotten until the goddamned weather decided to spare her some mercy and let her bury him in the muddy, mucky ground he’d tried to defend, protecting this evil village that had left him to die all alone while life went on without him, and she…she…she…
She screamed. And not a little scream, either: the roar came from the depths of her soul, shredding her voice until it was just a crippling sound that made everyone within earshot stop and stare. She spent every last ounce of emotion she had left, howling into the brutal January sky.
When she was done, she stumbled to her knees, in a daze.
A blonde woman in a blue dress, across the way, was the only one who dared head Maggie’s way. She knelt down next to her, spoke in a soft, French voice: “Are you okay?”
“No,” said Maggie, venom in her mouth. “No I am not.”
“Would you—” said the woman, but Maggie was on her feet again, storming back toward the magistrate’s office and leaving all the onlookers behind.
Maggie skipped the front door entirely, arcing around to the back of the building, where she found a stable, an outhouse, and there, a short ways away…a shed.
She paused at the door, hand on the metal handle, and was struck by the question any sane person would have asked long before getting to this point: What was she doing this for? What would seeing him accomplish? Would it make her feel better, or so much worse? Was this a terrible idea or just the best bad idea available?
She shook those questions off, and pulled the door open.
It was dark inside, with no windows that might let wild animals in. Thin beams of light cut through where the wooden planks were slightly askew, making for an eerie experience that made the whole world colder than even the world outside. It was a bigger structure than the magistrate’s office had been, lined with tables that were…stacked with bodies. So many bodies.
The men wore shirts and breeches, their warmer clothes being put to better use, elsewhere. The women still wore their full dresses, and seemed to be arranged like they were in mid-dance, lying down. It was the oddest thing, walking through this above-ground graveyard, all the lives staring back at her with whitened eyes.
She paused by Henri, the Canadien from earlier. The blood on his face was still fresh, the slice that’d killed him seeming to ooze blood, despite his heart long having stopped. She wondered who had her flower now.
She got to the end of the room and turned around, coming to the slow realization that she hadn’t found Rían yet. Despite herself, she had a moment of elation, thinking perhaps this had all been a horrible mistake and he was fine and waiting for her at home, ready to have a long laugh over the dark and awful misunderstanding she’d been through.
She wanted to hope, but she felt the tug of fate begging her to turn to the right, to see the thing she hadn’t seen yet.
She twisted her neck, eyes barely open at all, and—
“No…” she gasped, and rushed to the far side of the room, where a body was laid out on a table of its own, shirt stripped off to reveal…so much horror. Flesh torn apart, bruises that had frozen in the ice, stab wounds and broken bones stuck at odd angles, and his face…oh, his face! If she hadn’t known to look for him, she wouldn’t have known it was Rían at all. His nose, cracked; his teeth, broken; his left ear, cut off; his cheeks so battered she cried out at the sight of them.
She pressed her head down on his cold, cold chest, running her hands through his sticky hair, and somehow felt surprised she didn’t hear his familiar heartbeat to calm her. All she heard was her own, thumping like mad and in danger of giving out completely.
She stood, looking at him once more, and whispered: “I’m so sorry, my dear. I’m so, so sorry.” And she kissed his bloodied lips, and swore never to forget the taste.
She closed his eyes, gently, and said a quiet prayer for his soul. The kind he’d want to hear. The kind that he imagined made a difference.
“Death by snow,” she said, voice a bitter whisper.
She was about to leave when one last detail caught her eye: she leaned in closer, and despite the faint light seeping in through cracks in the walls, she could still make out the oddest thing, bludgeoned into the pulp of his cheek…
…the imprint of a ring with a fleur-de-lys across the centre, and blood all around.
Canadiens had done this. It was an image she would not soon forget.