The Devil's Web [Paperback]

USChapter One


The cliffs of the south coast of England were visible to larboard, the morning mists having lifted, though the clouds still hung low and heavy and the sea was slate gray and heaving. The Adeona, one of the ships belonging to the North West Company of Canada, was bringing furs to the auction markets of London.

The cliffs of England. Of home.

A clerk of the company, one of those whose task it was to accompany the furs across the Atlantic and to transact the company's business in London, stood at the rail of the ship, one arm propping him against it, the other hand clinging to a taut rope attached to the rigging, his feet planted firmly apart for better balance, and tested the thought in his mind.

Home.

Soon he would set his feet again on his native soil, the very soil he had shaken from them four years before without a moment's hesitation. As he had once said to someone in England, though he did not care to remember whom, he had liked the sight of the sea because it represented his escape from England. And he had escaped.

But she had said that perhaps it was from himself he wished to escape and that it could not be done. For wherever he went, however far he ran, he must inevitably take himself along too.

She had been right. He had taken himself to Canada-to Lower Canada to be precise, to Montreal. And since that had not by any means been far enough, then he had become a clerk with the North West Company, a group of merchants and traders in furs, and had taken himself off with a canoe brigade beyond Lower Canada, even beyond the limits of Upper Canada, beyond the limits of civilization.

Three thousand miles beyond Montreal he had journeyed. He had spent three years there, in the Athabasca country, with only a handful of other fur-trading men and the native inhabitants of the country for company.

He could have gone no farther without falling entirely off the end of the world, it had lÃ'