"Victoria's Secret" enjoys the distinction of generating more discussion on the Due South List than any other episode. (We have all analyzed it so much that one Dueser suggested that a degree course be offered in it.) We know only what we see in this mesmerizing, award-winning drama, which had its roots in an incident that transpired 10 years earlier in the Yukon. But what really happened at Fortitude Pass? What caused the softer emotions of Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP, to become as thoroughly iced over as the body of the unfortunate Ice Man who lay down to sleep one night in the Tyrolean Alps and was found 5,000 years later, when a glacier shifted on a spring day? What was it about Victoria that possessed Ben like an enchantment? Could it have been, perhaps...

The Darkness Inside Her

by Diana Read

"You know, there was a woman once, Ray. We were, uh...I don't know what we were. In the end I tracked her up above the 62nd parallel into a place called Fortitude Pass. A storm had been blowing for days; the whole world was white. By the time I found her I had lost everything--my packs, my supplies, everything. She was huddled in the lee side of a mountain crag. She was almost frozen, very near death. So I staked a lean-to and draped my coat across it, drew her inside, and I covered her body with mine and I just held her...while the storm closed around us like a blanket, until all I could hear was the sound of her heartbeat, weakening. I forced her to speak to me...just talk to me...say anything to keep the cold from taking her.

And it snowed for a day...and a night...and a day. I was delirious; I almost gave up. The only thing I had to hold onto was the sound of her voice, which never wavered. She recited a poem. I must have heard that poem a thousand times that night; I never heard the words. It ended...badly. She had a...she had a darkness inside her...and the most beautiful voice. The most beautiful voice you've ever heard."

Myself, talking to Ray (who was asleep in a chair anyway) during a stakeout

The snowmobile was, of course, useless: the engine had seized up during the blizzard. I had to leave the snowmobile anyway, to climb the mountain to where Victoria lay, and a slow, tedious climb it was, even with snowshoes. The plane that had carried Victoria and the pilot across the border from Alaska to the Yukon lay buried under snowdrifts, but even if we had taken the time to look for it, flying it would have been out of the question in the absence of a runway.

We never found the pilot's body, either. It may have come to light during the spring thaw...whatever might have been left of it.

I used my compass to set our downward climb the same way I had come three days earlier. My eyesight was (as it is still) excellent, so I was the first to spot the packs where they lay. They made unusual shapes beneath the crystalline snow that the Inuit called pukak.

"Victoria!" I turned to look at her, reclining in the primitive travois I was pulling behind me. I was the only one who had snowshoes, of course, so I wove a sled out of branches, using my scarf and belt tied together to pull her. She couldn't walk through the snow in the shoes she had been wearing when the plane landed. "Victoria, look! Food!"

She sat up, shielding her eyes against the glare of the whiteness surrounding us. "Let's have it now, Ben! I can't wait, I'm so starved!"

I was so relieved I couldn't help laughing as I unpacked. Yes, it was all there, even the collapsible camp stove with methyl alcohol for heating the food and melting snow so we could drink. She had wanted to eat snow the day before, when the blizzard ended, but I wouldn't let her.

"That's certain death, Victoria. If you ate snow, you'd use up too much of your body heat to melt it. You'd die of exposure, essentially."

"I know. I grew up in Alaska. All right, we'll do this your way, but I'm so thirsty...!"

Quickly, I made a little hollow in the snow for us to sit in, and we began on the food in my packs while we waited for the can of snow to melt on the camp stove. We ate everything: the beef jerky, so salty that I wished we'd saved it to eat last, the fruit leather, the soup, even the pemmican. We finished by drinking the water, passing it back and forth between us, until finally our hunger and thirst were assuaged and we could afford to think about something other than our stomachs.

"How long do you think it'll take us to reach the nearest outpost?"

I squinted up at the sky, now a bright hard blue. "If it doesn't snow again--if it stays clear like this--we can reach Selkirk in three or four days. The place where I found you is called Fortitude Pass, just above the sixty-second parallel. Your plane went down in the Dawson Range."

Victoria looked away. I wondered if she were thinking about the pilot who had left her to die at Fortitude Pass. I had certainly thought about it in the last few days: what kind of creature could he have been, to abandon her like that? My heart had contracted with pity when I found her, so near death, looking so small, like a snowbird; and even as I tamped my rifle down into the snow, covered it with my coat, and piled up snow around it to make a crude shelter for us, I could feel warm tears trickling from my eyes and mixing with the cold sting of wind-driven snow against my face. And then I had crawled inside the shelter, to lie on top of her to warm her, and we stayed like that until the storm broke two days later.

Now, I poured the remaining water into a drinking bottle and began to repack the gear into my bags. "Do you feel like pushing on while we still have daylight or do you want to rest some more?"

"No, for God's sake, let's get a move on. Ben...we just ate all the food, didn't we?"

I looked straight into her eyes and let myself smile, to reassure her. "Don't worry. I've got my rifle, and now that we have my packs, we also have an ice axe and a fishing line. We can shoot small game or catch fish. We'll make it, Victoria."

She smiled, then, and I suddenly became aware of something I hadn't noticed before, preoccupied as I had been with the necessity of leaving the Pass and finding the survival supplies. I saw that the curly tendrils of hair escaping from her cap were as soft and dark as woodsmoke. I saw that her eyes were a deep sparkling brown, the color of freshly milled cider. And I saw, that weak and pale as she was--like a ghost, almost--she was beautiful.

I couldn't afford to spend any more time looking at her, although I would have liked to, so I hoisted the packs on to my back, slung my rifle across my shoulder, and helped her back into the sled. Then we resumed our course toward Selkirk.

Despite the deep snowdrifts, we made pretty good time that day. I wanted to stop before it was completely dark, in the hope of catching or shooting something for us to eat. Luck was with us, again; in the place on the mountainside where we decided to camp for the night, I drove my ice axe through a pool of ice, lowered a line, and caught a fish. I removed the hook and line from the fish, laid them aside; then, holding the fish in my hands I stood up, turned away, and bowed my head. I recited an Inuit prayer of thanksgiving under my breath.

Victoria looked at me quizzically when I turned back. I took my knife out of my pocket and was reaching for the fish to start cleaning it, when she stopped me.

"Let me do that. You can start the camp stove."

"Fine," I said. "I'll have this thing going in no time."

She set about the task of cleaning the fish very efficiently: clearly, this was not new to her. After a few minutes, she glanced at me. "What were you doing with the fish, when you turned away just now?"

Embarrassed, I mumbled a reply. "I was giving thanks to the Great Mother, for letting us have this fish so we can eat and survive. And then I thanked the spirit of the fish, for letting us have its body."

"Huh! You don't really believe that stuff, do you? It's kill or be killed in this world, eat or be eaten. Do it to them before they do it to you, in other words."

I regarded her for a minute. "Is that the 'stuff' you believe?

"Yeah. That's reality."

"You know...I'd rather believe my stuff than your stuff," I said, in as light a tone as I could manage.

There was something about her remark, and the business-like way she dealt with the fish, that chilled me. I don't know quite what I expected her to do and say: I knew little about her beyond the fact that she was a fugitive, intelligent, and unused to manual labor. I could tell that by looking at her hands. Still, for a woman who looked well-cared-for, if thin and bedraggled at the moment, she displayed remarkably little sentimentality.

Finding my packs had put new heart into us. We were almost cheerful as we unpacked the geodesic dome tent in my pack and put it up. Before we hoisted the tent, I first hollowed out a place for it in the soft, deep snow called mauja, as the sled dogs did in the days of dog teams. That done, I set about cooking the fish and melting some snow so we could drink. We talked while we waited for our meal to cook.

There were many things I wanted to ask her about, but some of them would have to wait. There was one question I felt that I could ask now. "Victoria...that first night when you talked all night long, to keep me from slipping away...what was the name of the poem that you were reciting?"

We were sitting at the opening of the tent, the cooker between us. She looked across at me and smiled. "The name of it is 'The Windhover.' Do you know Gerard Manley Hopkins?"

"I've heard of him. One of the nineteenth-century Catholic poets, along with Francis Thompson, Coventry Patmore, Alice Meynell..."

She inclined her head in mock reverence. "That's right. I see you know your English literature."

I set down my mug and stretched. "Well, my grandparents were librarians. They had a lot of out-of-date books and time hung heavy on one's hands in Yathkyet Flats, where I grew up. There wasn't much to do in the long winter nights, except read."

"Tell me about it." She laughed softly. "I grew up outside of Fairbanks. My father was a trapper. We actually used oil lamps in the winter! For a long time, a book of poetry that my mother picked up at a church sale was the only book I had to read. We were so poor...God, you can't imagine. I was eighteen before I ever tasted beef. That was when I went to the city to live. Before that, all I knew was the game my old man caught...elk, caribou, ptarmigan..."

"So. You're used to the cold, to cleaning fish, hunting."

"Oh, yes."

There were many more things I wanted to ask her: what was her family like? Why had she gone to the city? What did she do for a living? I could see that she was about my age. Her speech was that of an educated person, and her voice...I thought of her voice as having mystic powers, since the sound of it had anchored me to this life when I had been very near crossing over to the next. Her voice was as beautiful as she was.

We ate the fish as best we could, with the utensils from my mess kit, and then used some of the hot water to rinse out the dishes. I used a little of the remaining hot water to make us each a mug of coffee--there were still a few precious spoonfuls of instant coffee left, tucked away in a waterproof container in one of my packs.

It was January, then, so the northern night fell early and lasted long; we were comfortable inside the tent, but not yet ready for sleep.

"Victoria, did you see that?" I pointed toward the entrance.

"That glow over the horizon? Is it the Aurora?"

"Yes. Want to watch it?"

"Why not? There's nothing else to do."

We put on the layers of clothing we had taken off when we came inside the tent for supper. Then we crawled outside, stood up, and almost sank to our knees again, awestruck by the power of the forces that lit up the sky.

Even though I knew the explanation for the cause of the phenomenon--the particle physics, the quantum leaps in atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen--the sight never failed to leave me feeling awed. The Northern Lights danced across the night sky like Salome trailing her veils--veils of white, green, and red that flickered, flared, and faded. So powerful were the waving curtains of light that we could see the snow-covered landscape around us as if it were bright moonlight.

"Ben...it's almost scary."

"Don't be frightened. Did you know the Inuit think you can attract the aurora if you whistle to it? And that if you clap your hands it'll go away."

I clapped my hands, but the aurora continued to writhe and curl and fold in on itself, like a red serpent coiling and uncoiling.

Victoria reached for my mittened hand and took it in her own. I let it stay there, pleased by the contact with her; then, feeling that the extraordinary event we were watching suspended ordinary rules of behavior, I pulled her close and wrapped my arms around her, so that she leaned back against me, using my shoulder as a headrest while we continued to gaze skyward.

It was as if the Great Spirit had put on this show especially for our benefit. I felt as if my whole life had been nothing but a dress rehearsal leading up to this moment, in this place, with this beautiful woman in the Arctic night. Was it at that moment in our snow-driven odyssey that my pity for this lost snowbird turned to love? The two of us were miles from the nearest human habitation. We might have been alone in the world, so far away were we from everyone and everything. The night was so quiet that I could hear the faint crackle and hiss of the lights as they danced.

At last the show was over; we opened the tent flap, crawled inside, removed our clothes and footgear. Although the inside of the tent was of course warmer than the air outside, it was still cold enough that we had to hold onto each other to conserve body heat. I had explained to Victoria a couple of days ago that in the absence of anything to make a fire with, we would have to sleep skin to skin, inside the one sleeping bag I had in my pack, if we wanted to stay alive. She hadn't seem outraged, simply nodded her understanding. That relieved me considerably: it would have made matters much worse if she had uttered maidenly protests of outrage. In our situation, whether we lived or died would depend on how well we accepted reality. There would be time enough to worry about the niceties of convention when we were back in society again..if we did make it back.

Now she snuggled up to me quite naturally, and as I held her in my arms while her eyes closed and she drifted off, I realized that I liked the way we had to sleep, curled up against each other. Despite the all-too-real dangers facing us before we reached civilization again, I was oddly happy. Somehow it was as if we belonged together, Victoria and I.

Our days began to settle into a pattern. In the mornings, after breakfast, we each took turns in the latrine I constructed every night from a snowbank. Then we would break down the tent, pack it away, and continue our slog through the snow. During the day we passed the water bottle back and forth from time to time, ignoring any hunger pangs until couple of hours after sunset. Then we'd put up the tent, sit down inside it, and talk while we waited for our food to cook.

The day after we watched the Northern Lights, I saw the distinctive tracks of a snowshoe rabbit heading away from us. I tracked it to a snowcave and again prayed for its spirit while I shot it. Victoria tied the carcass to the sled with the string I had used to link my mittens, and we kept on, cheered for the rest of our day's journey by the thought of the hot meat we would have that night.

That evening, after we made camp, I picked up the rabbit carcass and glanced at Victoria, who stood with arms akimbo, watching me with a slight smile. "One more duty to perform before we skin this and cut it up," I said.

Turning away, I closed my eyes and thanked the Great Mother for our dinner. Then I turned back and handed her the rabbit. "Do you want to do the honors?"

"No problem."

Once again, she wielded the knife with skill. She was as matter-of-fact about cutting up the rabbit as an Inuit woman would have been. Having little experience with women of my own kind, I didn't know whether or not this was normal behavior: somehow I'd imagined that a woman from the city would have been sentimental about the rabbit, perhaps might even have burst into tears because we'd had to kill it to ensure our own survival. Victoria took it all in stride, wiping the blood off her hands with snow as unconcernedly as if she'd been washing out a tablecloth.

"Tell me," I said that evening, after we had finished eating and were waiting for the snow to melt on the stove for our drinking water. "Tell me how you came to be in this situation."

"What do you want to know?"

"Well, for a start...how did you come to be involved in robbing a bank?"

"Stupidity, mostly. I left home when I was eighteen and went to the big city--Fairbanks." She uttered a short, cynical laugh. "I had a scholarship to the community college there but after a while I lost interest in going to the classes. They didn't seem to be getting me anywhere. So I decided to get a job."

I listened, delighting in the velvety sound of her voice, wishing that it were not so dark inside the tent so I could see her.

"I went to work in a jewelry store. I liked it at first; I thought maybe I could get somewhere if I was smart and worked hard. During the day I worked in the store from ten to six, and on Saturday nights I went out to take part in what little night life Fairbanks has to offer."

"Did you make friends, Victoria? Did you live by yourself or with roommates?"

"At first I shared a place with some girls from the community college, but after I met Ed, I moved in with him."

"Ed--the one who died?"

"Yes." She paused; I wondered if she was grieving for her dead friend, or whatever he had been to her...what seemed nowadays to be called a "significant other." Or had he been her fiance?

"How did you meet Ed?"

"In a bar one night. We danced, we talked, we drank--a lot. He was funny, and smart, and ambitious. I started seeing him regularly, and then I moved in with him." Victoria shifted restlessly. I held my breath, hoping she wouldn't stop telling me her story.

"As time went on, Ed started getting more and more dissatisfied with life. He was tired of being a mechanic. He wanted a lot of money, but he didn't know how to go about getting it."

Victoria laughed, and the sound made me wince. "You remember that old saw, If you keep talking about the impossible, it soon becomes quite possible?' Well, that's basically the way it happened. It started as a joke. We were sitting around one night, drinking a lot and getting silly, and Ed said, I guess the only way to get a lot of money is to rob a bank!' I said, Oh, yeah, right, and which one would you rob?' Well, it sort of grew from there.

Over the next few weeks, every time we started drinking, we kept talking about it, adding details as we went along. Then one day...it wasn't a joke any more."

Victoria reached for my hand in her own. I squeezed it to let her know I understood, and she went on.

"Ed came home one night and brought Jolly, a colleague of his at the garage, along. Jolly had done a few little heists on the side already and knew about fences and things like that. He told us a lot. From then on, it was serious. Every night Jolly and Ed would sit down and go over and over their plan, perfecting it. I knew Jolly was a mean customer, I could see it in his eyes. They told me I was to drive the getaway car. Really, Ben, what could I do?"

Victoria now had tears in her voice. I pulled her into my arms--she didn't object--and wiped the tears off her cheeks with the tip of my thumb. "You were caught up in something you didn't understand," I said. "You're not a criminal by nature."

"No, I'm not," she agreed, resting her head against my chest. "I wanted to run away, but I had no money, nowhere to turn. I didn't want to go home, back to that horrible cabin at the edge of the forest, where my family were still living fifty years behind the times. I had to pretend to go along with Ed's plan, to be safe. Otherwise, I know Jolly would have killed me."

She shivered violently, so I hugged her, to let her know that she was safe now.

"He would have killed me, and made it look like an accident. I was so afraid of that man! I still am. And he got away, you know. They shot Ed...but Jolly got away."

"They'll find him, don't you worry," I said. "They'll find him and put him behind bars."

She stiffened in my arms. "Ben...are you going to put me behind bars too?"

I heaved a sigh. "Victoria...the law is the law and you broke it. You just asked me, What could I do?' Now I have to ask you the same question: Victoria, what else can I do?"

* * * * * * * *

On the seventh day after I found Victoria, we reached the outskirts of Selkirk.

The long Arctic night had already set in by the time we caught sight of the faint glow of the lights of the town and saw the church steeple, lit up like a beacon in the darkness. We were both tired and hungry. Just another hour, and we could make it in to town and enjoy the benefits of civilization: warm rooms, plenty of food, hot showers, clean clothes, comfortable beds. But we would not enjoy those benefits together, I well knew.

I stopped in my tracks, turning to look at her, huddled behind me on the travois.

"Victoria, what do you want to do? Push ahead or stop here for the night? It would take us about an hour to get there at this rate."

"Let's stop here, Ben. We have enough food for supper, right?"

"Yes, such as it is." I had brought down a bird yesterday, and we could make soup from the leftover stewed meat. "All right, if you like, we'll camp here."

We followed our usual routine of setting up camp and talking as we waited for our supper to heat. Only, tonight we spoke of inconsequential things: my heart was heavy as I thought of what the morning would bring. In the morning we would have to separate, she to be swallowed up in the machinery of the law, I to go back to my RCMP post. The Arctic night in January is 20 hours long: I wished it were never-ending, so that morning would never come.

Because I knew, as inescapably as I knew I was a man, a Mountie, and a child of the Great Mother, that I loved the snowbird I had saved from the storm. The old rule--those whom we benefit, we love--had held true. I loved Victoria. We had saved each other from death, so I owed her as much as she owed me. But did she love me as I loved her?

In the darkness of our tent I couldn't read her face. I could only tell what she was thinking by the sound of her voice, the most beautiful I had ever heard, the voice I would hear in my dreams forever after. But her voice was trailing off into sighs: I guessed that she was thinking of the morning too.

When it was time for us to sleep she came into my arms as always, but this time she didn't rest her head against my chest and close her eyes. This time she pulled my face down to hers and kissed me full on the lips, and I could feel the warm wetness of the tears that trickled down her cheeks.

She did love me, then! Eagerly, I returned her kiss, feeling my heart beat as frantically as had the wings of the bird in her death throes the day before, when my rifle shot brought her down. I shuddered in delight as I felt Victoria's tongue slide into my mouth, and I wrapped my arms around her: how thin she felt, how fragile and small. When I let my hands slide down to explore her body, I could feel her ribs.

Her skin was warm, as smooth as satin. At first she tasted like tears and sweat, and then like honey and cream. I forgot everything, time and space, place and circumstance, everything except the reality that I was holding the woman I loved in my arms and she was kissing me back, her hands exploring my body as mine were exploring hers, and that the heat inside us was building into a blaze that swept through us with the intensity of the Aurora Borealis exploding in the night sky.

She was clearly experienced, I was not: she guided me when I needed it, until at last we connected and I plunged deeper and deeper into the darkness inside her, into Victoria's incredibly sweet, secret place, which held me prisoner for all too brief a time before my inevitable release. The Northern Lights we had seen a few nights earlier seemed to explode once more inside my mind, my heart, my blood, waving veils of red and green through my brain until I could no longer think. In the silence that followed our last long, shuddering wave of passion, I realized that the music had stopped...the music of our blended moans of ecstasy.

It suddenly occurred to me that Victoria might be uncomfortable, so I rolled off her, onto my back. I was still too overwhelmed to speak. If I had thought earlier that evening that I loved her in this lifetime, I knew now that I had loved her for a thousand lifetimes. It seemed to me that I had known her always: from the time we had farmed in the hot flat plains of Sumer, to the time we fled from the wrath of the erupting Vesuvius in the year 71 A.D., to the time we endured three months of seasickness and misery as we crossed the Atlantic in creaking wooden ships to find religious freedom in the New World. After a long time, Victoria raised herself on one elbow and broke the silence.

"Ben...is this the first time you've ever...?"

"Yes."

"How old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

"And you've never made love to a woman before?"

"I've never been in love before."

"You love me?"

I shifted my position so I could kiss the top of her head. "I love you, Victoria. More than I've ever loved anyone in my whole life."

She laughed a little. "Thank you. Ben...." she traced the line of my jaw with her fingers. "If you love me so much, will you do something for me?"

"Anything. Anything at all."

"Then let me go."

This shocked me. Since it was too dark to see, I put my hand on her cheek so she wouldn't turn away. "I can't do that, Victoria. Anything but that."

"Why, Ben, why? No one knows you found me, unless Mounties have telepathy and you've signaled to them already! I could walk away tonight. No one has to know we've been together all this time."

"Victoria, I can't let you go because the simple fact is that you've broken the law. I found you, and it's now my duty to bring you in."

"For God's sake, Ben, don't be so bloody pious! I told you, I got caught up in something that got out of control. If I could have escaped before it came to the actual robbery, I would have. But I had nowhere to go."

"Victoria, look. Turn yourself in and give the money back. I'm sure the judge would take into consideration that you have no previous record and give you a lighter sentence. And then when you get out, I'll be waiting, and we can be together--"

"Oh, don't be so naive! Jolly killed a bank guard in the robbery. They're not going to overlook that, I guarantee you. And besides, I don't know where the money is. Ed hid it."

Something didn't fit here. "I thought you said Ed died."

"He did, but not right away. The bank guard shot Ed, then Jolly shot the guard and killed him. Ed was badly wounded. I was in the car, waiting. Ed jumped in with the bag; we looked for Jolly, but he was nowhere to be seen. I drove Ed home and took care of him as best I could. I took some of the money and went off to find a plane that could fly us out of town. When I came back--"

Victoria's voice broke. I pulled her into my arms again, patting her on the shoulder to let her know I understood.

"--the money was gone, and Ed was dying. I packed a few things and got out of there. Then I went to the airfield." Victoria's voice held a note of wonderment. "Eight days ago, that's all it was. Eight days ago."

We argued for the rest of the night, but try as I might, I could not make Victoria see that she should turn herself in and help the authorities to recover the rest of the money. "Even if I knew where Ed hid the money, why should I tell the police? They'd just help themselves to it. The bank would never get it back anyway!"

"Victoria!" I was shocked. "Of course the police wouldn't help themselves to the proceeds of an armed robbery. What are you thinking of?"

"Life as it really is, that's what," Victoria said. She was sitting up now, with her arms wrapped around her knees. "Ben, you are so good. How can anyone be as good as you? You almost seem like you're from another planet."

"Well, I'm not. I'm just a man, a man who loves you."

"And I love you." She leaned over to kiss my cheek. "I wonder what you look like without that beard."

I sighed. Morning was all too near: by the time she found out what I looked like without my beard, it would all be over. I didn't want to think about it. "Victoria, for the last time--will you turn yourself in or do I have to arrest you?"

"I'm not going to turn myself in. Arrest me if you want to, drag me into town behind you tomorrow, if it suits you! I don't care what you say, I'm not going to make it easier for them by turning myself in."

I suppose if all this had happened to someone else, I could have found some kind of humor in the situation: there I was, stark naked in a tent, in the darkness of a January morning in the Yukon, about to seal the fate of a woman as unclad as I was. But there was nothing humorous about it to me. With a heart that was near breaking, I said what I had to say:

"In that case, Victoria Metcalf, it is my duty to place you under arrest."

* * * * * * * *

It was snowing that March day in Fairbanks, the day of the plea bargain between the State of Alaska and Victoria Metcalf.

I had taken a couple of days' leave to fly to Fairbanks to put in a good word for her. As I hadn't known her very long, there was a possibility that the judge would discount my testimony, but I wanted to do what I could.

I was waiting in the courtroom when she came in with her lawyer. Although she was in custody, for this occasion she had been allowed to dress in civilian clothes. I caught my breath, she looked so beautiful: with her smoke-dark hair falling across her shoulders in ringlets, and the enormous hoop earrings she wore, she looked like a gypsy, mysterious and enchanting.

She caught sight of me and her eyes widened. Then she smiled and passed her hand over her chin in a sweeping motion. As if she had spoken aloud, I caught the thought she sent my way: "So that's what you look like without that beard!"

When I was called to the front to speak to the judge, I walked up the aisle, carrying my hat in my hands. I couldn't resist stealing a glance at her, sitting to the right of the courtroom with her lawyer. I smiled at her encouragingly, and she smiled back. I felt my heart lift: surely everything would be all right. I knew that Victoria had changed her mind and turned State's evidence. Surely, the combination of her previous clean record and her testimony against Jolly would convince the judge to give her a light sentence. For a moment I let my imagination soar as I contemplated the life we could have together after she had served a two- or three-year sentence. With good behavior, her term of imprisonment might be reduced even more.

And then I would help her to live the life she was intended to live, with me. I would sweep away her inner darkness, teach her to trust those she now held in contempt. We would have a wonderful life together. For her sake, I would even leave my remote outpost and move to the city.

I spoke to the judge for a few minutes, then returned to my seat to wait. It took an hour for the lawyer to make his presentation, after which the court recessed for lunch.

Afterwards, the judge wasted no time in getting to the point. In view of the seriousness of the crime, he wanted to make an example of this case. "Let those who contemplate violating the law in the future, study the outcome of this case and be warned." He banged his gavel sharply. "I hereby sentence the defendant, Victoria Metcalf, to a term of ten years without parole."

Ten years!

The words seemed to drop like a stone into the room. The buzz of whispered conversations stilled to no sound at all. I looked at Victoria. She was as pale as death, as pale as when I'd found her that January day on the mountainside.

I felt her eyes on me, and reluctantly, I raised my head to meet her gaze.

I knew what she was thinking. I could see it in her face. We didn't need to speak.

"You lied to me, Fraser," her eyes said. "You said if I cooperated they'd give me a lighter sentence. You lied."

"I didn't know," my eyes told hers. "I've never heard of such severity. It's true that an innocent man died, but you weren't the one who killed him. Without parole...no time off for good behavior, even...I didn't expect this. I didn't, Victoria!"

"You could have let me go."

"No, I couldn't."

"You could have. You didn't."

"I'm sorry."

"I thought you loved me, Fraser. You betrayed me. Why?"

"I'm sorry. I didn't know it was going to turn out like this, I swear I didn't!"

The bailiffs led her away; she didn't look back at me then, but I moved to the window to watch as she got inside the police car that was to take her back to jail. Snow was still falling, the light, gentle snow that the Inuit call qannialaaq. Just before she got into the car, she looked up at the window as if she knew that I was standing there, watching, and mouthed one word.

Even as far away as I was, even through the tears that scalded my eyes, I could understand it.

"Why?"

* * * * * * * *

Whitehorse
The Yukon
April 1985

I've gone over it again and again in my mind.

I've asked myself a million, no, two million times--could I, should I, have done the unthinkable and let Victoria go?

I found her. I saved her life so I could bring her in, and I did bring her in. She broke the law and the law demanded that she pay her debt to society. I did my duty: I maintained the right. I did what was moral.

But is the moral thing always the right thing? What if I had let her go? She might have gone straight. I could have helped her...we could have had a life together. She's the only woman I will ever love.

How she must hate me, now. How betrayed she must feel, after I spent all night trying to convince her that turning State's evidence would get her a lighter sentence. And now she has to serve ten years. Ten...years.

Ten years, without parole. Even if I could write to her, visit her, would she want me to? All she probably wants is never to hear my name again.

Oh, God, should I have done what I did? Should I? But how could I do otherwise?

I slog my way through the days, now, hardly able to concentrate. I don't think I'll ever again feel anything but this awful pain in the empty shell that used to be my heart. In my life I've loved two women, my mother and Victoria, and they were both taken from me. I couldn't do anything about my mother--I was only six when she died--but Victoria!

I went to the library yesterday and borrowed an anthology of nineteenth-century British poets. I wanted to find "The Windhover," to try to memorize those incredibly complex rhythms: I caught this morning, morning's minion/Kingdom of daylight's dauphin... In a way, I owe my life to that poem--or rather, to the person who recited it to me.

But while I was leafing through the book, I came across a sonnet by Alice Meynell. It captured what I was feeling so perfectly that I felt she had written it for me:

I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong,
I shun the thought that lurks in all delight--
The thought of thee--and in the blue heaven's height,
And in the sweetest passage of a song...

The only way I'm going to be able to get through the rest of my life is by using my pain as a shield. Forever after, when someone mentions "love," I'll think of softly falling snow, and passion, and heartbreak. From now on I'll do my duty and not allow myself to think of Victoria. In the daylight world I'll be the perfect Mountie.

But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,
When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,
And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,
Must doff my will as raiment laid away--

Yes, at night, in my dreams...I can go wherever I want to, in my dreams. In that other dimension I cast off my daytime, Perfect Mountie self, and become the Benton Fraser I was for that wild, enchanted week in the snow.

And that's when my soul calls to yours, Victoria, my love. Across the barriers of time and space, every night...

With the first dream that comes with the first sleep
I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.

The End

Opening quote is from the Due South episode You Must Remember This. Ending quote is from "Renouncement," by Alice Meynell. Copyright November 1996 by Diana Read on all original story content. Not meant to infringe on copyrights held by Alliance Communications, or any other copyright holders for DUE SOUTH. Please do not reproduce for anything other than personal reading use without written consent of the author. Comments welcome at scribe@his.com.