The Sun At Midnight

The Sun at Midnight

Sandra Field

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER ONE

IT WAS heaven.

Sheer heaven.

Kathrin Selby smiled to herself. Very few people would feel that her present location bore any relation to paradise. In fact, a great many of them might equate the landscape that stretched in front of her with hell rather than heaven. But to her it was astonishingly beautiful.

She settled herself a little more comfortably on the boulder and cupped her chin in her gloved hands. She was sitting on a granite ridge that overlooked the meadows of a wide valley, its far side flanked by plateaux of loose grey shale and by drifting, sunlit clouds. There was not another human being in sight. Behind her lay another valley where a glacial river tumbled and churned beneath snow-covered mountains. From her perch she could not see that river. Nor could she see the sea or the pack ice, nor the camp where she and the other scientists were staying. The only other creatures sharing the landscape with her were a herd of muskoxen, grazing on the slope below her.

Kathrin had spent the last five days out on the tundra watching the herd, taking copious notes and a great many photographs. She had nicknamed the herd bull Bossy, because of his huge horn bosses and because of his habit of displacing the cows from the best clumps of grasses and sedges. Now she picked up her binoculars and focused on him once again. As a species, muskoxen had changed very little in the last ninety thousand years, and it was all too easy in the deep Arctic silence to imagine herself in another time, a time long ago, when hunting these great beasts might have meant the difference between life and death.

The wind stirred the long guard hairs of the bull’s outer coat. He looked not unlike a boulder himself, his dark brown hair almost hiding his thick, light-coloured legs, his huge hump and pale saddle a solid mass against the evening sun. He was browsing on the tiny, ground-hugging willow, the only tree that grew this far north.

Kathrin shifted, pushing back the sleeve of her jacket to check her watch. It was nearly seven o’clock, and she had a three-hour hike to get back to the base camp. She was almost out of food; she had to go back. But she was reluctant to leave the peaceful valley, which was bathed in soft gold light as the sun moved in its slow circle around the horizon. Reluctant, too, to leave the herd that from long hours of observation she was beginning to know so well. The three cows, two yearlings and two new calves dotted the tundra, the cows moving with stately grace, the calves leaping among the rocks as if there were springs in their heels.

She felt another upwelling of happiness. At the age of twenty-four she had finally found her niche. She was doing work that she loved in an environment whose vastness and solitude spoke to her soul. Not many people were that lucky, she thought humbly, and stood up, taking a long breath of the chill, pure air. Bossy raised his head, his dark eyes gleaming. He pawed at the ground, rubbed the side of his face along his foreleg, then lowered his head to graze again. Slowly Kathrin turned away and began walking towards her small yellow tent.

She would be back here tomorrow. Deciding to leave her tent up, she ducked into it, shoving her dirty clothes and her camera gear into her backpack, then pulling the pack outside. Carefully she zipped up the tent flap and anchored the pegs with rocks. Then she heaved the pack on to her back and clipped the straps around her hips. As she did so, the plaintive call of a plover drifted to her ears, and to her surprise she felt tears prick her eyes. She was so incredibly lucky to be here.

She stood still. The luminous clouds that were piled high over the plateau, the big, slow-moving animals with their long shadows on the grass, the cry of the bird: all coalesced in her heart so that for a moment out of time she and the tundra were one.

Then the plover called again and the spell was broken. Her lips curving in an unconscious smile, Kathrin began trudging up the hill towards the ridge. The quickest way to the base camp was across the ridge and along the river valley. She hoped there’d be some supper left. Even more urgently, she hoped tonight was the night that Garry Morrison, the camp leader, was firing up the sauna. After five days of living in a tent, she badly needed to renew acquaintance with hot water, soap, and shampoo.

She walked easily, her long legs moving at a steady pace. After climbing the rock ridge, she descended into the valley, her knee-high rubber boots squelching in the bog; the permafrost was only a foot down, so the water had nowhere to drain. As she automatically scanned the valley for wildlife, the constant broil of the river assaulted her ears. The ice-cap high in the mountains was its source, and Kathrin had never tasted water as cold or as clean. She took a drink from her water bottle, stooping to admire the magenta flowers of an early patch of willowherb before she struck out north-west towards the camp.

Its official name was Camp Carstairs, after the scientist who had founded it thirty years ago on the western shore of Hearne Island in the Canadian High Arctic. Before she arrived, Kathrin had pictured something more imposing than the reality: a small cluster of plywood-faced buildings and insulated tents, all brightly coloured so as to be visible from the air. Now, as she scrambled over a scree slope and rounded a cliff, she saw in the distance the orange of the radio shack and the bright blue of her own little hut and smiled again. It would be good to see the others. While she loved being alone, it was a little difficult to carry on a meaningful conversation with a muskox.

Even though she could distinguish the individual buildings, Kathrin knew she still had at least an hour’s hard hiking ahead of her. Distances, she had learned early, were deceptive in the clear northern air, where there were no trees of any height to give a sense of scale.

She began the slow descent to the lowlands, which were pockmarked with lakes and ponds. It would not only be good to see the others, Pam and Garry and Karl and Calvin, it would be good to be home, she thought. Then her brow puckered. How, in only four weeks, had the motley collection of outbuildings come to be called home?

It had been a long time since she had felt like calling anywhere home. Not since she had left Thorndean.

Thorndean...Kathrin could never think of the formal stone mansion, where her mother had been the housekeeper and where she herself had grown up, without remembering the two young men who had shaped her life so definitively and so destructively. Ivor and Jud. Half-brothers, sons of the owner of Thorndean. Ivor, whom she had loved, and Jud, whom she had trusted...

She had seen neither of them for seven years.

Her boot caught in a willow stem, throwing her off-balance, and with a jolt she came back to the present. She was a two-hour flight from the nearest hospital; she’d do well to remember that. She couldn’t afford to be careless.

The past, by definition, was past. Over and done with.

Determinedly Kathrin forced her mind to the prospects of a warm kitchen and her own bed. Nothing like five days in a tent to make six inches of foam mattress seem like utter luxury, she thought wryly.

Not that she’d slept much the last four nights. Hearne Island was at so high a latitude that the daily passage of the sun made a halo around the tundra rather than a line across it, and therefore bathed the hills and valleys in constant light. To Kathrin it seemed as though the days had no beginning and no end, each one blending into the next in a plenitude of time that delighted her. So she’d tended to skimp on sleep, preferring to follow the muskoxen as they wandered their way along the valley, and to catch catnaps when she could. She was enough of a pragmatist to realise also that the Arctic summer was short and that in less than six weeks she’d be on her way back to Calgary to work on the data she’d accumulated.

Red-throated loons were swimming in the lakes between her and the camp. They wailed a warning signal, a chorus so eerie and mournful that it never failed to raise the hairs on the back of Kathrin’s neck. Obediently she kept her distance from their nesting sites, the frigid wind that was blowing off the pack ice scourging her cheeks.

Offshore, the humped cliffs of Whale Island were black against the sky. Garry had promised he’d take her and Pam out there one day soon. There were ancient tent sites on the island, with the bones of bowhead whales slaughtered hundreds of years ago; and nesting on the cliffs were gyrfalcons, the rare white-feathered hunters of the far north.

Kathrin topped the final rise and then her boots were crunching in the loose stones on the airstrip. She marched along it between the two rows of oil drums that were its only markers. She was hungry. Surely Pam, who was the camp cook as well as Garry’s girlfriend, would have saved her some supper? Real food instead of freeze-dried rations, she thought dreamily...that, too, could be considered very close to heaven.

The building that was a combination kitchen, dining-room and library was painted a garish orange. Kathrin pushed open the porch door and slid her pack to the floor, leaning against the wall. From inside she could hear the murmur of voices and a burst of laughter. After leaving her boots on the mat alongside several other pairs, she stepped into the kitchen.

The heat from the coal stove enfolded her, bringing an added pink to her cheeks. She blinked a little, pulling off her jacket and her knitted cap, so that her hair fell in untidy wisps around her face. Sniffing the air, she said, ‘I sure hope you guys have left me something to eat.’

In his stilted English Karl said, ‘We have left much food.’

‘Not a thing,’ said Calvin. ‘You’re too fat.’

Pam gave a snort of laughter. She was too fond of her own cooking and hence rather plump, and openly envied Kathrin’s ability to eat well and stay slim. ‘It’ll only take me a couple of minutes to heat it up,’ she said. ‘I left a plate out for you.’

Karl was lanky and bespectacled, frighteningly clever and unfailingly serious; he was on a scientific exchange programme from Sweden. Calvin, short, stout, and cheerful, was a lover of pretty women and practical jokes, not necessarily in that order. To all who would listen, he professed himself madly in love with Kathrin’s dark eyes and chestnut hair; yet she would have shared a tent with him on the tundra and known herself to be entirely safe. She liked him very much. ‘I thought you were supposed to be collecting algal samples in the bog,’ she said sternly.

‘I got my socks wet,’ he replied. ‘How were the muskoxen?’

Kathrin dropped her jacket over the back of a chair and hauled her sweater over her head. More of her hair was tugged free of its braid, to lie in chestnut strands on the shoulders of her green shirt. ‘Wonderful!’ she said. ‘I followed the herd for nearly five days—I think I’ll go back out tomorrow.’ She caught sight of Garry standing by the stove, his bearded face flushed from the heat, and added, ‘After I have a sauna, right?’

‘It’ll be ready in half an hour,’ he rejoined. ‘And you might have company to go and see the muskoxen tomorrow—we have a visitor.’

As she raised her brows in inquiry, not best pleased at the thought of sharing her solitude, a voice spoke from behind her, a man’s voice. ‘Hello, Kit,’ it said.

Only one person in the world had ever called her Kit.

Swept back into the past with an immediacy that petrified her, Kathrin felt her eyes widen with shock and her muscles tense in rejection. Her whole body rigid, she clutched at the sweater she had draped on top of her jacket. She would wake up in a minute and find this had all been a dream. Or a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep.

Because it couldn’t be true. Jud couldn’t be here.

Not Jud.

Very slowly, aware at some distant level that Karl was looking puzzled and Calvin gaping at her, Kathrin turned her head. A man was sitting in the far corner of the room, his chair tipped back, his thumbs tucked in his belt. His eyes were fastened on her face. In front of him on the flowered plastic tablecloth was an empty coffee mug.

She recognised him immediately, and at the same time saw that he was unutterably altered from the man she had known so many years ago. She could not have smiled to have saved her soul, for the flesh seemed to have frozen to her face and she could feel herself being drawn into the cold blue pits of his eyes in a way that appalled her. No one else she had ever known had eyes of so intense and vivid a blue as Jud; yet right now they reminded her of nothing so much as the meltwater that collected in pools on glaciers, deep turquoise over hidden depths of ice. Struggling to find her voice, she croaked, ‘Jud...Jud Leighton.’

Pam banged a saucepan on the stove and said matter-of-factly, ‘Your supper’s ready, Kathrin.’

Rescue. With a huge effort Kathrin unlocked her gaze from her antagonist’s—for instantly she had known that was what he was—wondering in some dim recess of her brain if she were physically capable of walking across the room and taking the plate that Pam was holding out to her. It’s not Ivor sitting at the table, she thought dazedly, it’s Jud. Ivor was the brother she had been in love with, the one who should have roused this storm of emotion in her breast. Even though Jud had materialised without warning in a place thousands of miles from Thorndean, she would never have expected him to have upset her so strongly. So why was she standing here as stiff-limbed as a plastic doll?

Because Jud’s betrayal had been worse than Ivor’s.

Ten times worse.

This new knowledge slammed into Kathrin’s body with the force of a fist. She should have known it seven years ago, and had not. It had taken Jud’s sudden reappearance into her life to make it clear to her how deep was the wound he had inflicted. Deeper than Ivor’s more physical wounds. Deeper, too, than her exile from Thorndean, terrible though that had been. Numbly she became aware that Pam was now standing in front of her holding out the plate, her long-lashed grey eyes concerned. ‘Are you OK?’ Pam asked. ‘You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.’ She turned an unfriendly gaze on the man on the other side of the table. ‘Jud didn’t tell us he knew you.’

Not hurrying, Jud lowered the legs of his chair to the floor and leaned his arms on the table. ‘I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. There must be more than one Kathrin Selby in Canada.’

In an unexpected and invigorating rush, like flame seizing upon dry wood, Kathrin lost her temper. ‘More than one with red hair and brown eyes, who loves wild places and wild animals?’ she blazed. ‘Give me a break, Jud!’

‘You overestimate yourself,’ he mocked. ‘I didn’t bother asking for any details. When I heard your name, I just tucked myself in the corner and waited to see who would walk in the door.’

His voice might be as smooth as the exquisite silk scarf he had given her for her sixteenth birthday; but she still knew him well enough to realise that beneath a thin veneer of control he was furiously angry. He had no right to be angry, Kathrin thought blankly. None whatsoever. She was the one who had been wronged, not him.

As if a wound had been reopened, she was suddenly flooded by all the anguish of the seventeen-year-old girl whose world had collapsed around her one summer long ago. There had been no firm ground to stand on that summer, for everything that she had taken for granted had shown her another face, a demonic face, ugly and frightening beyond belief.

Frantically Kathrin fought to collect her wits. She might have been knocked off balance a few minutes ago; but she was not so disoriented as to challenge Jud’s anger in the camp kitchen in front of an audience as rapt as any play-wright could have wished. With a fresh spurt of fury she realised how easily Jud had gained the advantage over her, just by sitting out of sight of the door and waiting for her to walk into the room. All her shock and horror had been written on her face for him to read. Him, and everyone else in the kitchen.

Pam was still holding out the plate of food, while Garry, Karl, and Calvin had been listening to every word in a fascinated silence. With a gallant effort to achieve normality Kathrin said lightly, ‘Well, no one’s going to miss the soap operas tonight, are they? Jud and I grew up together, parted on somewhat less than amicable terms, and haven’t seen each other for seven years.’ She glanced over at Calvin. ‘And that’s all you’re getting out of me. Pam, that looks wonderful, thanks.’

She took the dinner plate with hands whose tremor she could not quite disguise, and pulled up a chair as far from Jud’s as she could. The plate was heaped with roast chicken, mashed potatoes and canned green beans, and she had totally lost her appetite. Grimly she began to eat.

Garry, who disliked too much emotion, said bluffly, ‘Guess I’ll go check the sauna,’ and strode out of the room with visible relief. Pam sat down next to Kathrin, blocking her from Jud’s view, and started describing the latest antics of the Arctic fox that came scavenging at the kitchen door every evening. Calvin and Karl were talking to Jud. Kathrin chewed and swallowed, and with a quiver of inner laughter that hovered on the edge of hysteria realised that she was also furious with Jud for spoiling her first real meal in five days.

When Pam pushed back from the table to get Kathrin some coffee, Jud’s chair scraped the floor as well. He was on the opposite side of the table from Kathrin. Unable to help herself, she watched as he walked past her to the stove to refill his own mug. He still moved with the long-limbed grace that had characterised him even as a boy, for he had never gone through that awkward, gawky stage of most adolescents. While he had always been lean and narrow-hipped, she had not remembered his shoulders being quite so broad or so impressively muscled. Instinctively she was sure he could move with the lethal speed of a bullwhip. Prison would have done that for him, she thought sickly, and stared hard at the remains of her mashed potato as he walked back to his chair.

Pam put a mug of steaming coffee and a piece of apple pie in front of her and sat down again. ‘You didn’t mind being alone out there?’

‘I loved being alone,’ Kathrin said in a carrying voice. ‘It’s a place that calls for solitude.’ Garry, what seemed like aeons ago but was probably only a few minutes, had mentioned she might have company on her next trek to the muskoxen. If Garry was cherishing the slightest thought that she was going back to the valley with Jud tomorrow, he could think again. Jud, watching her every move? Jud, sleeping in a tent only feet from hers? She’d die rather than go anywhere alone with Jud; and the sooner Garry understood that, the better.

Ignoring the vigour with which Kathrin was attacking her pie, Pam said with a chuckle, ‘You’re hooked. Garry always says he can tell within a week the people who are counting the days until the end of summer, and the ones who’ll be back north on the first plane at spring break-up.’

Glancing through the window at the rectangular patch of blue sky, Kathrin said, ‘Up here, I forget there are days.’

‘Cooking breakfast every morning keeps me on track,’ Pam said drily. ‘More pie?’

The piece of apple pie seemed to have disappeared. Kathrin shook her head. ‘That was delicious, Pam, thanks. Maybe I’d better go over to my place and find some clean clothes...you don’t know how much I’m looking forward to the sauna.’

On cue, Garry pushed open the door. ‘It’s up to temperature,’ he said. ‘You and Pam go first, Kathrin, and one of you let me know when you’re through.’

The sauna, at the far end of the camp, was heated by an oil-driven generator, and as such was treated as a luxury item. Kathrin got up, carried her plates to the sink, and left the room with Pam, all without so much as glancing Jud’s way. ‘Ready in five minutes,’ she called to Pam, and hurried across the road to the little blue hut that, as the only other woman in the camp, she occupied alone. The outer door creaked on its hinges; she left her boots on the mat and went inside.

The interior of the hut consisted of one room with unpainted wooden walls. Two bunk beds, a desk, a chair, and a set of plain board bookshelves were the entirety of the furniture, along with a kerosene stove. But Kathrin had arranged her books and some rocks from the shore on the shelves; the colourful mat her mother had braided and that went everywhere with her lay on the floor by her bed. Cheap flowered curtains softened the two small windows and she had pinned four of her favourite photographs on the walls. The room was neat, for Kathrin had lost the careless untidiness of her teenage years—along with so much else—when she had been banished from Thorndean: neatness gave her an illusion of control that she still needed. The room was also, despite the sparseness of its furnishings, very welcoming.

She leaned her pack against the wall. Her toilet articles were on one of the shelves; she put them in a plastic bag along with two towels, and from one of the drawers under her bed took out the clean clothes she would need. There. That was everything.

But beneath her socked feet she was suddenly aware of the thickness and warmth of her mother’s rug. One of the braided strands was a deep blue; it had been a shirt of Jud’s the winter he had turned fifteen. Kathrin sat down hard on the chair, closing her eyes. Jud was here. A man she had thought never to see again had thrust his way into her life, confronting her with a past as painful now as it had been seven years ago.

To the best of her ability she had worked at healing the damage Ivor had done. But she now knew how deeply she had buried Jud’s betrayal, not even allowing herself to recognise how badly it had scarred her.

Someone knocked on her door. She gave a violent start, terrified that it might be Jud, then with a rush of relief heard Pam’s cheerful voice. ‘Ready, Kathrin?’

‘Coming!’ she called in a cracked voice and scrambled to her feet, grabbing her clothes and the plastic bag.

Pam was waiting outside. If she saw the strain on Kathrin’s face, she chose not to mention it, saying instead as they set off down the road, ‘I wish it weren’t so difficult to get an oil supply up here—then we could do this more often.’

Because everything had to be flown in, the camp was prohibitively expensive to run, and part of Garry’s job was juggling the figures to enable the research to be carried out each summer. ‘If we could have a sauna every night, we wouldn’t appreciate it nearly as much,’ Kathrin said fliply.

‘Try me!’ said Pam. ‘By the way, Garry’s going to run the washer for a couple of hours tomorrow if you’ve got dirty clothes...isn’t the sky beautiful?’

From eleven at night until one in the morning was Kathrin’s favourite time, for the light had a gentleness, a tranquillity that she found very appealing. Although the sun was well above the horizon, the clouds were tinged with the softest of pinks and golds, and the tundra itself seemed to harbour that gold as if gilded by the most skilful of artists. Aware of the first measure of peace since she had heard Jud’s voice in the kitchen, Kathrin jogged down the slope to the sauna.