Peter C. Brown’s dramatic debut novel, “The Fugitive Wife,” is about the search for gold, love and integrity. Set in 1900, the story moves between the Nome, Alaska, gold strike and the flat valley along Minnesota’s Red River. Esther Crummey, a farm girl with grit, is more comfortable with animals than with people. Grieving for her little boy and betrayed by her volatile husband, Esther has left her unhappy marriage to Leonard Crummey and is headed west to visit her sister. While waiting on the Seattle docks, she is alarmed to see some horses caught in the rigging as they are being loaded on a ship. Instinctively, she steps in to take charge. Among those watching is Nate Deaton, the mechanical engineer in charge of loading the gear and supplies for the Cape Nome Co.
Nate cares nothing for the horses. He considers himself a man of science. For him, the expedition to the Alaska gold fields is a way to make his fortune so he can return to marry the wealthy and beautiful Lily Wilder.
Yet the horses are his responsibility, and if they are to survive the 2,000-mile ocean journey to Nome, he knows now they will need more than the man he hired to get them there. He strikes a deal with Esther: If she will care for the horses, he will guarantee her return passage.
Esther spends most of her time on the deck tending the horses. There she often finds Nate, who becomes increasingly intrigued by her frank, take-charge attitude.
Arriving at Nome where there are no docks, Esther must take a launch with Nate from the ship, which has weighed anchor 2 miles offshore, to make arrangements for the horses. The wide beach swarms with thousands of gold seekers. Hiking to the town, Esther finds a stable for the horses.
After a few days, hopeful for mail, she stands in a long line outside the post office and studies the situation. The next time she will also wait for others who hope for mail, but for a fee. Soon she has as much business as she can handle. Her success at doing something beyond what she had done on the farm pleases and emboldens her, and she decides to stay for a while.
The next time she sees Nate, she brags that she has been to sea in a walrus and stick boat and learned how to butcher horses the Eskimo way. He warns her of the dangers for a single woman, and it is then that she tells him straight out that she left her husband. The news does not surprise Nate: “There was a fury to her that he aimed to get a hold of if she was going to stay.”
The story then turns back five years to Minnesota when Esther first saw Leonard Crummey. That summer had been a bumper crop in a depression year. Leonard is part of a harvest crew moving north in record heat. A young boy catches his arm in the separator, “all belt and pulleys, a wondrous machine,” and Leonard pulls him free. After the funeral, the locals ask Leonard to stay.
He begins to fit in. Soon he and Esther, already pregnant with his child, marry. Though both are practical by nature and need, they begin to take risks with the farm.
Back in Alaska, Esther and Nate are going on outings. She is impressed that he knows so much about the birds that live this far north. Recently, Nate’s dreams of returning to New England not just as a man of wealth but of science are giving way to a growing reluctance to return to that well-ordered life. But for now he must answer to the men who hired him. The Cape Nome Co. has not found gold, and he is ordered to go “up the creeks” to find it. His first thought is to ask Esther to come.
Even as she is drawn to Nate, Esther knows that Leonard, a man who never gives up, will come after her. And he does. He is good at picking up clues from men’s expressions, from what they say when he asks for her. Yet “disaster lays in wait at the back of Leonard’s mind. It was a thing he courted, terrible thoughts that he played out in his head to shore himself up against the unexpected.”
In the end, the heartache, sacrifice and decisions made are as inevitable as they are surprising. Inspired by the diaries of the author’s grandfather, an engineer for the Cape Nome Hydraulic Mining company at the turn of the 20th century, “The Fugitive Wife” is storytelling at its best.
Sybil Downing is a Boulder novelist.
The Fugitive Wife
By Peter C. Brown
Norton, 414 pages, $24.95
