Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  “What in God’s name have you been doing?” I asked. “I’ve been in a state about you, you blundering ox!”

  “What are you talking about!” he exclaimed. “Can’t I take a little walk without being spied on?”

  “A little walk!” I cried. “How many days do you need for a little walk? Didn’t you get enough walking on the Chaudière?”

  “What’s the matter with you!” he growled benevolently, giving Jacataqua an affectionate slap in the ribs that made her cough.

  “The matter is that the army moves back to Pointe-aux-Trembles at dawn to-morrow. I’ve been hunting you high and low so you wouldn’t be left alone in this damned country, and spend the rest of your days in a British prison.”

  Cap rubbed his red face with his vast hands.

  “To-morrow! They couldn’t go to-morrow! They just got there!”

  “You fool! How long do you think you’ve been away?”

  “Two days,” Cap said, scratching his head.

  “Well, there’s something wrong with your arithmetic, because all of us know you’ve been gone five days.”

  “Like hell I have! I slept in a kitchen night before last. Last night I slept here in this kitchen with Pierre Lemoine and his wife and his mother and his son and his three daughters and a dog, and I think there was a pig as well, though maybe it was a cow.”

  “It’s not worth arguing about,” I said, “but Natanis found two kitchens where you slept, both full of empty brandy bottles. God knows how many other places you occupied!”

  Cap came close to me, smelling brutally of garlic and wearing a smirk that made his round red face look like the full moon coming up out of the ocean on a hot summer night. “That accounts for it! I was put to it to understand how all that stuff could have come out of one house.” He came closer and breathed on me until I near choked. “Listen, Stevie: did you ever hear of Normandy cider?”

  I shook my head, strangled by his nearness.

  “Why wasn’t we told about it, Steven?” he demanded. “Steven, that’s a great drink! They got brandy in those cellars forty years old! Fifty, some of ’em! I want to tell you, Steven: you take a gallon of that Normandy cider and add a pint of old brandy to it, and you got a drink to put hair on a pumpkin!” He shook his head, as if recalling something that gave him pain. “Listen, Steven: I can talk French!” He rolled his eyes at the ceiling, put his head on one side, and ejaculated in a high, monotonous voice: “On Normandee noo boovong doo see-druh.”

  “What did you mean,” I asked, when I had pushed him away from me, “by saying you didn’t understand how all that stuff could have come out of one house? All what stuff?”

  Cap passed his hand reflectively over his moist red forehead. “Didn’t I tell you about the picture? The picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry?”

  I shook my head.

  “Didn’t I tell you about getting the cariole? Didn’t I ask you whether you had any use for a fur coat or some silver knives and forks and spoons?”

  “Nothing at all: you asked me nothing at all. We’ve just come here.”

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “I believe you’re speaking the truth, since I ain’t seen you for two days or five or something. Steven, I’ve got the most beautiful picture: Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry.”

  “I could use knives and forks and spoons,” I said. “Leastways, my mother could. And what was that about a fur coat?”

  “Let me tell you about this picture,” Cap insisted.

  “What kind of fur was the coat? Was it a man’s or a woman’s?”

  “I dunno,” Cap said. “I can’t hardly tell the difference between ’em. I think it was sable, though I disremember.”

  “Well,” I said, “I want that coat.”

  “I got to tell you about this picture. This is the most beautiful picture in the world. Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry. It’s engraved. You can see ships on the river and people walking on shore, all as lifelike as if they was alive. I’d ruther have it than any picture I ever see! There’s another one there, an oil painting, twice as big, of cows in a field; but I’d a thousand times ruther have my Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry. You can see a cow any time, and there ain’t anyone don’t know what a cow looks like; but it ain’t everyone that can get to Philadelphia, and looking at my picture is just like going there—better, too, in lots of ways. It don’t take up near as much room as Philadelphia itself would.”

  He put his arm around me. My head throbbed from the fumes of his brandy-and-garlic breath. “Stevie, there ain’t a man alive powerful enough to get that picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry away from me.”

  I got him silenced and pushed into a chair after a time. It was a quiet gathering at first, in spite of Cap’s noisiness and his eagerness to have my opinion of Normandy cider strengthened with brandy. When all of us, even the brown-faced boy with the pipe, had sampled it a few times I saw that Natanis, who had been brought up in the Frencli-Abenaki town of St. Francis, could speak this whiny French tongue with ease, and that Jacataqua could make herself understood by the two brown-faced girls. After Cap had borrowed the stubby pipe from the little boy and sucked at it and then pretended to strangle, falling to the floor with a crash that shook the house and writhing there in seeming agony, there was more freedom among us.

  The two brown-faced girls, Lizette and Zhulie, prepared the dinner for the next day, which they said they always did on the night before. Lizette climbed a ladder into the attic to cut a piece from the meat hanging there, and Zhulie climbed down a ladder into the cellar to get vegetables. When Cap tried to climb the ladder after Lizette, a rung broke so that he pitched down and wedged his beefy body into the hole. It seemed as though we might be obliged to cut the ladder from him, what with the bland, helpless way in which he lay where he was, refusing to move.

  Nothing would do but I must master the song he had been singing; so we kept at it and kept at it, learning the verses from Lizette and Zhulie, who sat in our laps to teach us the better.

  “Nos amants sont en guerre,

  Vole, mon cœur, vole;

  Nos amants sont en guerre:

  Ils combattent pour nous!

  Ils combattent pour nous, doux, doux;

  Ils combattent pour nous!

  “On passe la carafe,

  Vole, mon cœur, vole;

  On passe la carafe;

  Nous buvons tous un coup.

  Nous buvons tous un coup, doux, doux;

  Nous buvons tons un coup!”

  In the quiet of later days the verses would come back to me, a scrap here and a scrap there. They were about love and wine. Judging from the French songs we heard at the Taverne de Menut in St. Roque’s outside of Palace Gate before we were through with Quebec, all French songs deal with these matters, nor do I know any better things for them to deal with.

  My eye was taken by the dinner that Lizette and Zhulie prepared as well as they could for keeping out of the way of Cap, who would lean all over them whenever he moved, unless they dodged him, which it seemed to me they made no pointed effort to do.

  They took a piece of meat not as big as my fist, and put it in a kettle with a tight lid. With it they put a part of a cabbage and some garlic and a few potatoes and three or four turnips cut into pieces, after which they filled the kettle with water and set it on the stove. On the following day, at noon, they took it off and ate what was in it. They had put in, it seemed to me, less than enough to feed one man; but what they took out was a fine, meaty stew for six or seven persons. Meanwhile it had kept heat in the kitchen, which is a good thing in winter, since the kitchen is the place where the family sleeps, and guests as well, and any living thing that happens along.

  Our host, Pierre Lemoine, said little; but what he said was to the point. When we spoke of the English, with Natanis interpreting between us, he used a word that Natanis did not know. He made an effort to get at the proper meaning of this word, but could
not. He said it was not only a bad word, but a worse word than any of the bad ones he had heard used by Frenchmen.

  What we did to the British, Lemoine said, he didn’t care, provided we left no dead bodies in front of his farm during the day, to cause talk among the neighbors.

  When I told this to Cap, to soften his hard feelings against the French, he nodded his head complacently, as if he had invented the French people. “That’s right!” he said. “These frog-eaters ain’t got no use at all for the British. I dunno how they’d be to fight, but they’re powerful haters! They hate the English something terrible! They ain’t bad people, either, once you get used to the awful stinks around their houses—garlic and manure and their pipes.”

  “Look here,” I said, “I want to be sure to get that fur coat.”

  We finished our cider and brandy; and Cap, taking a lantern, led me through an adjoining grove of trees to one of the summer residences overlooking the St. Lawrence. It was a neat affair, a wooden house with gables; but the inside of it seemed to have been struck by a hurricane, everything overset and twisted out of place.

  Cap apologized for its appearance. “I was in kind of a hurry, and I guess I wasn’t standing up too well. Seems to me I never saw a house with so many things to fall over. I moved out a lot of stuff and packed it in the cariole.”

  “Whose cariole?”

  “Well, that old Lemoine, he told me himself I drove up to his house in it, so I guess it must be mine.”

  He got the fur coat from a compartment beneath the stairs. It was, as he had said, a sable coat; one that would keep Phoebe as warm as though she nestled in a feather bed.

  He showed me the cellar under the kitchen, and bragged of it as though he had not only built it but filled it. The bottles were all in racks, each bottle in a hole by itself, and I had a powerful desire to taste the different liquors, some of which I had never heard tell of.

  Cap brought me a bottle with Beaune le Grève, 1761, printed on its label. He thought it must have been this, he said, on top of some brandy, that had rendered him unconscious for three days, while still leaving him able to walk about as though in full possession of his faculties. Knowing a half-bottle could do us no harm, we knocked off the neck and sampled it. I found it so pleasing that I took away four bottles, though warned by Cap that brandy was more helpful in this bitter weather, and safer.

  We went back to Pierre Lemoine’s farm, with the Great Dipper turning slowly above us and the tremendous cold flames of the Northern Lights marching across the sky. Lizette and Zhulie came out and helped us into the warm kitchen, where we sang “Vive la Canadienne” until long after the hour when honest people should be asleep.

  XXX

  I THOUGHT, when I looked at the weather-beaten farmhouses of Pointe-aux-Trembles, clustered drearily around a papist chapel on the desolate bank of the broad, ice-flecked St. Lawrence, that there would be no man of our little army, ever, who would speak good of the place, or hear its name without bursting into heartfelt curses. The snow was deep, and scarce a day passed without a fresh blanket of it being laid upon us; and full five hundred of our men had no rag to their backs save the tattered remnants of the garments in which they had marched out from Cambridge in the hot September sun.

  Yet, miserable as they were, they had food to put in their bellies; and they lived in the warm, snug farmhouses of the long-queued French, neater and snugger than most of those on the frontiers of Virginia and Pennsylvania and Maine. Somehow, despite the scurviness of their appearance, they were followed about by the children and seldom spurned by the farmers’ sprightly daughters. So in spite of eating themselves into stupors and heating themselves to the boiling point over pot-bellied kitchen stoves, and then going out into three feet of snow with their threadbare coverings, and suffering from coughs and quinsies and God knows what all, they contrived to endure their misery.

  In after years I heard these very folk speak of Pointe-aux-Trembles with a wagging of their heads and a smacking of their lips, as though they had found it a place of heavenly pleasure; yet I remember how full of rancor they were at the time. Thus I have learned to disbelieve the tales men tell me of the delights of their younger days.

  I had thought to avoid trouble by persuading Cap Huff to give his mysterious horse and cariole to Pierre Lemoine; but Cap wouldn’t hear to it.

  “Steven,” he said, “you ain’t got the trading instinct! That horse and cariole was a gift right out of heaven; and we got to cart away a lot of stuff with us. We got to have that cariole.”

  “But you can’t keep it! They’ll take it away from you—a colonel or somebody.”

  “Not from me, they won’t,” Cap said. “Not while I got my health and my trading instinct.”

  We had some trouble with the packing of the cariole, because of the vast store of goods Cap had unearthed during his three days of unconsciousness. Bottles of brandy and Beaune and Spanish wine had to be protected between feather beds. On top of the beds we placed cushions, counterpanes, blankets, and other odds and ends, including a few garments for Phoebe, several dozen handsome case-knives and forks, and a set of dessert knives, which I knew would be gladly received by my mother if it should be my good fortune to return to Arundel. In among these things, where we could find room, we stowed firkins of butter and lard. On top of everything we balanced ourselves, Cap carrying the rolled-up picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry, he having made as much to-do over removing it from its frame as though it had been his major general’s commission from Congress, engraved on gold.

  There were some of Morgan’s riflemen on guard at the edge of the town when we drove up to Pointe-aux-Trembles; and their faces steamed with excitement when they saw our cariole.

  “Jeeminy!” said one of them, “where you been to get feather beds!”

  He was huddled into himself with the cold. I remembered I hoped to go with these men in case there was fighting at Quebec, because they were wild enough to fight their way out of any difficulty.

  “Where we’ve been,” I told him, “there’s enough truck to make you rich for the rest of the winter. You ought to be there instead of here.”

  The rifleman looked at me for a minute, then bawled down the road to another rifleman: “Hey, Buck! Tell Old Dan to come out here, ’n’ hurry!”

  He felt enviously of the blankets. “Any more of these left?”

  “We can take you to hundreds,” Cap said. “Blankets and brandy and silver and lard and beef and French girls just itching to sew up the holes in your shirt.”

  The hulking figure of Daniel Morgan bore down on us, his eyes a pale blue in the red of his face. “What’s this?” he bellowed.

  “They know where there’s tons of this stuff,” the rifleman said.

  Morgan thrust his hand between the feather beds. I knew he felt the bottles, but he drew his hand out empty and rocked himself back and forth, missing no detail of our load.

  “What’s that?” he snapped, rapping his finger against the rolled picture.

  “Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry,” Cap said. “Prettiest picture ever I saw.”

  Morgan grunted. “You never saw a picture of Winchester, Virginia, then! Where’d this stuff come from?”

  “Down the road a piece,” I said. “There’s provision wagons passing all the time on that road. Seems as if there ought to be some men down there to stop ’em from carrying food into Quebec.”

  “One company enough?”

  “Plenty! We could show you where these places are. I was kind of figuring there might be room for us in your company in case of an attack.”

  “Hell, yes!” Morgan said. He took a firkin of butter and two bottles of brandy from the cariole and started away.

  “Take this, too,” I said, fishing out a bottle of Beaune. “You’ll be surprised if you never had any.” He came back for it, tucked it under his arm with a growl that might have meant anything, and hurried down the road. I gave another bottle of brandy to the rifleman who
had stopped us, and we trotted briskly toward Arnold’s headquarters.

  “I guess it’s all right, Stevie,” Cap said, caressing his picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry. “Your trading instinct ain’t as bad as what I thought. I’d ruther fight under Morgan than under anyone except Arnold; but ain’t they the thievingest lot you ever set eyes on?”

  Cap took the cariole and our belongings to hunt for Goodrich’s company while I went in to see the colonel, carrying two bottles of brandy and two bottles of Beaune hidden under my coat. Ogden was acting as adjutant, and he was a polite young man, handsome and at his ease.

  “I want to see the colonel,” I said.

  Ogden looked at the lumps under my coat, and winked affably, a gay and frivolous officer, and a better fighter than more serious men I have known. “There’s some gentlemen from Quebec with him just now, but as soon as they’re out I’ll put you in.”

  “How did they get here?”

  “Carleton turned out everyone who won’t bear arms against us.”

  “How did Carleton get to Quebec?”

  “Down the river,” he said angrily. “Damn him! Sailed down the day we marched here. Now we’ll have hell’s own time getting into the city. He’s smart!”

  When the Quebec gentlemen came out, solid-looking men in fur hats and coats, Ogden held the door open for me.

  “Well!” Arnold said when I came in, “I was looking for you to carry word to Hanchet, at Point Levis, when we started back here. I thought you must have run into the city to pay a visit to your young woman!” He said it pleasantly enough, but his face was swarthy and nubbly. I suspicioned he was not overly pleased with me or anything else.

  “I was hunting Cap Huff,” I explained. “I wanted to make sure he got into no trouble with the French.”