The Short Version
Today it’s the ending of The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon, and it answers the question the whole book hangs on: who killed Joshua Burgess?
The short version: Judge North is acquitted. Rebecca’s baby proves who fathered it. Martha fights back in the mill. And the killer was hiding in plain sight the whole time. Let’s break it down.
The Trial
First, the trial. By the time it reaches the Supreme Judicial Court in Pownalboro, the charge has been cut down to attempted rape, because there was no other witness. Martha’s diary is entered as evidence.
But Rebecca and her husband, Isaac, never show up. Without her, the jury acquits North. Rebecca later tells Martha she couldn’t face another room full of men.
The Baby
Then, in April, Rebecca goes into labor with a breech baby. The healer known only as Doctor turns the baby by hand, while Martha holds Rebecca.
A girl is born with a strawberry birthmark behind her knee, the same mark Burgess had on his temple. It proves Rebecca’s story, and it tells her who the father is. Rebecca won’t even look at her.
The River
Doctor smuggles the baby out in Martha’s bag and tells Isaac she was born dead. At the cracking river, Martha thinks about it, and can’t. She has already buried three daughters.
Instead, she takes the baby to Sarah White, a young unwed mother who still has milk. And the man Sarah loves, Major Henry Warren, has just come back to marry her. He’s also the man North claimed as his alibi, and he was three hundred miles away that night.
The Mill
Now the big scene. Before dawn, Martha’s horse throws her, and inside the mill, North is waiting with his dog. He tears pages out of her diary.
Because he can’t be tried twice, he confesses everything. Then he tries to rape her too. She breaks his nose with her head, grabs her husband’s hooked blade, a knife he named Revenge, and castrates him.
Severe Mercy
Then she stitches him up. Ephraim arrives, and he calls it severe mercy. North is handed over to the doctor with a story about a woodworking accident.
Ephraim sends what she cut off to Rebecca in a box. Rebecca throws it into the fire and weeps, and Martha takes that as a beginning.
The Land And Cyrus
Meanwhile, the plot against the Ballards falls apart. North had been trying to take their mill and land. Ephraim brings proof to Boston, and he comes back as an agent of the Kennebec Proprietors, owning the land outright.
North’s Boston lawyer turns out to have paid for a forged warrant to arrest Martha’s son, Cyrus. The lawyer is charged with bribery, and the charges against Cyrus are dropped for good.
Who Killed Burgess?
So who did it? Not Isaac, not North, and not Cyrus. Martha notices that Sam Dawin carries a strip of torn lace, and her son Jonathan lets slip that the rope used to pull Sam out of the ice was bloody.
Sam confesses. Burgess raped Sam’s fiancée, May, at the November dance. After watching Rebecca dragged through the courts, Sam tracked Burgess through the snow, beat him and hanged him. And his helper that night was Jonathan.
Martha’s Choice
Martha keeps their secret. At the last court day, Jonathan stands up and admits he’s the father of Sally Pierce’s baby, and Martha tells him to ask his father about a man named Billy Crane.
That’s the final twist. Back in seventeen fifty four, Martha herself was raped, and Ephraim helped make sure the man hanged. The book sets three acts of justice outside the law side by side, and it seems to approve of all three.
The Last Scene
The book ends in spring. The ice breaks, the mill wheel turns again, and the silver fox that has watched Martha all winter brings out her kits, under the oak where Ephraim laid three stones for their lost daughters.
There are four kits: one red, and three silver. Three daughters lost, three small lives playing over their stones. The winter that opened with a body in the ice ends with new life.
My Verdict On The Ending
I loved the reveal about Sam and the baby’s birthmark. Both were planted early and paid off well. The mill scene is shocking, and it will divide readers, but Lawhon defends it in her author’s note: the real North was never punished.
What didn’t work: too much gets wrapped up offstage in a few pages, and North’s confession is pure movie villain. Tell me in the comments: was Martha’s revenge justice? My review and true story videos are linked below.
