57°03”N, 135°19”W #5
They have spent three days at Kekoor Castle, but it is one thing to stay in a house as a guest and quite another to live there and consider it one’s own, they think to themselves as they wander through its many rooms. In the ballroom they find a life-size portrait of the Tzar, furniture of exquisite St Petersburg quality, but most beautiful of all is the panorama from the windows: behind the house, the mountains, in front of it the ocean, and bobbing in the ocean the tree-covered islands.
The windowpanes have been blown from fine, thin glass, allowing them to take in the view as though the panes didn’t exist at all, and to the west on a clear day they can make out the rounded summit of Mount Edgecumbe, the place that the Tlingit call L’úx, the flashing one.
Anna is pleased to discover that the house has an excellent library too.
One thousand two hundred books have been sent to the colony from St Petersburg, books in all the languages of the civilised world, though Baranov is claimed to have said that, given the choice, he would have brought a doctor instead of books, for in the colony there are very few who can read Latin or Greek. But nobody asked his opinion.
Kekoor Castle is more splendid than any house Anna has lived in before.
If it were anywhere else, calling it a castle might seem something of an exaggeration, but here the name is warranted.
The structure towers high above the crumbling town, like something from another world, a realm of mirrors and lighting fixtures where they can afford to keep the lights on in every lamp.
The governor’s wage includes limitless supplies of candles, paraffin, meat and fish.
Additionally, the Company gives them a substantial discount on tea, coffee and sugar. My, what a pleasant life they have!
There is only one thing that disturbs Anna.
She tries to open her bedroom window, just a fraction, but it has been been bolted shut.
And while Anna Vasilevna was a sweet lady, her housekeeping left much to be desired.
The house is dark and dusty, sealed up as though they had arrived in the Arctic and not a place where there is barely any winter to speak of.
The only thing that might fly out of those windows is her health, and Anna asks the servants to remove the bolts.
There will be a breeze in this house; everybody knows that fresh air keeps diseases at bay.
The servants try to dissuade her, but Anna pays no heed to their objections; she pushes the windows wide open, and a summery sea breeze blows through the house.
She had imagined the north would be covered in nothing but desiccated lichen and stunted trees, but the garden at Kekoor Castle is lush.
Herbs and berry bushes push up through the rich soil, few-flowered shooting stars and harebells too, and their scent attracts rufous hummingbirds.
Anna has never seen anything like them, these tiny, translucent winged creatures.
She sits in the summerhouse, eating blackberries and listening to the hum of the birds, and suddenly she feels the child move inside her.
She has a handsome home and a fine, attentive husband.
On her birthday, Hampus arranges a party and gives her a gift of two canaries.
They sing to her like obedient toys, and the guests are enchanted – what an expensive and special gift – and Anna is thrilled.
The English royal family keep canaries in their rooms too, and after all she is related to them, albeit distantly, and she looks on as local officials flock to the cage.
How did the governor manage to bring the birds all the way out here, alive, these light, bright creatures made for palm leaves and softer winds?
One of the duties of the governor’s wife is to invite the ladies of the colony to the castle.
Being an excellent housekeeper and a loving wife who looks after her husband and the manor is not enough; as the governor’s wife, her duties include the mission civilisatrice.
She must educate the women and children of the colony, steer them towards a life of virtue and set a good example in both deed and demeanour, and to that end she finds herself sitting in the blue salon surrounded by the other wives, and she is taken aback at her guests’ attire.
The women are shabbily dressed, wearing badly cut skirts in garish colours, and what’s more they do not hesitate to tell Anna how much they miss her predecessor, Anna Vasilevna.
The dear lady was always so happy, her laughter knew no end, and she never forgot to send the women gifts on their name days.
And they sing the praises of Margaretha Etholén too, the wife of the previous Finnish governor, what a wonderful woman she was, and they forget themselves and start speaking Russian, but Anna doesn’t speak the language well enough to take part in their conversation.
She sits in her chair, dumbfounded, and realises that of all the residents of Novo-Arkhangelsk, the governor’s wife is surely the loneliest, for in all the colony there is no-one quite her equal.
Their colony is home to two thousand four hundred souls, four hundred settlers and two thousand Indians.
Five natives for every Christian – a ratio that it doesn’t do to dwell upon.
In the mornings, the natives are allowed to approach the gates of the town, and the Tlingit, the Aleuts and the Yupik can sell their wares to the settlers – fish, meat and handicrafts, spoons and handles carved from the horns of mountain goats – but otherwise they have no business in the town.
Only a year ago, there was a terrible incident in which the Tlingit killed two merchants.
The motives for the attack were unclear, though Hampus suspects they are in fact very well known, but that they are the kind of motives that the Company is better off not knowing about.
Be that as it may, in response the Company’s soldiers shot seventy Indians, and tensions have been high ever since.
Now it is Hampus’s task to make sure such a thing never happens again.
Everybody knows that a warring colony reaps only poor dividends.
The officials and the workers lower their heads and doff their caps as the governor passes, but when they visit the morning market afterwards, Anna notices that the natives do not bow their heads out of respect but stare at them with harsh eyes, muttering words she does not understand but in a tone that is unmistakable.
Hampus does not seem to notice this insolence, but buys a raven carved from a walrus’s tusk.
This is Kah-shu-gooh-yah, the first bird who created the world and its ways.
Despite Anna’s protestations, Hampus invites the tribal elders to Kekoor Castle and decides not to put the soldiers on guard to protect them.
Anna does not attend the dinner but watches through the window as the chieftains process through their door.
The Tlingit have axes on their belts, and their clothes are embroidered with strange, grimacing creatures, the insignia of their respective tribes, with names like Auke, Hoonah, Chilkat, Stikine, Tuxekan and Sitka, or the tribes of the small lake, the lee of the north wind, the salmon cache, the bitter water, the coast town, and the edge of the branch.
The curious names feel like stones turning in her mouth.
In August, a ship docks in the harbour at Novo-Arkhangelsk, carrying post from Europe.
Anna wakes up early, quickly dresses, then settles herself in the garden.
The sun rises and Anna takes her breakfast of scones and honey, and at half past seven she makes out the sails of the Sophie Adelaide.
From her summerhouse, she watches the bark slowly make its approach until shortly after noon it lowers anchor, and she sends one of Hampus’s manservants down to the harbour.
She would dearly like to go to the quayside herself, to get her hands on her mother’s words the very moment they arrive in Alaska, but Hampus has no time to go down into the town and Anna doesn’t dare walk around outdoors without her husband to escort her, so she sends Wickstrom in her place, tells him to hurry, and bedamns him when he stops on the steps to catch his breath.
Finally, the moment has arrived. There are a great many letters, and Anna hurries back to the summerhouse with the bundle of post in her arms. She places the letters on the table then savours the excitement a moment longer before beginning to look among the names on the envelopes for her mother’s familiar hand.
She goes through the letters once, then again, but not one of the envelopes bears her name.
How is this possible? She has written to her mother every day, sent a thick bundle of letters with every departing ship, all tied together with pretty ribbons.
She has sent her correct address many times, but the Sophie Adelaide does not bring a single line from her mother or Florence, and the next ship is not due until October.
Will she have to suffer a full six months without news, half a year of unbearable silence?
Has something happened, has her mother forgotten that she has another daughter too, one that has been sent to the ends of the earth all alone?
At luncheon that day, she watches as the officials read their post, each with a letter in his hand, and she is unable to swallow a single morsel of food.