How far we had come I couldn’t tell. We must have been more than half a mile from Palace Gate; and from the manner in which we had curved to the right, it seemed we must be near the center of the Lower Town, and approaching the tip of the point on which Quebec stands sentinel at the juncture of the two rivers.
We passed more prisoners, hunched over miserably, their backs to the driving sheets of snow, and came suddenly on the second barrier with our men milling at its foot. They, too, had prisoners. Between the two barriers we must have captured more than one hundred and twenty men. There was a turmoil at the barrier, with Virginians and Maine men and Rhode Islanders mixed together seemingly without leaders. From their way of speaking and moving I knew their nerves were frayed and jumpy, like my own. It seemed to me we had floundered through the snow for hours; yet there were no signs that day would ever break.
Far back, in the direction from which we had come, there was still the confused noise of cannonading and musketry fire. Captain Thayer ran past me and kicked open the door of a house close to the barricade. I followed, asking for Morgan.
“Good grief!” he said, “he’s gone ahead alone to see what’s happening.”
“Can’t we go ahead too?”
He hissed despairingly. “We’re stuck! We’ve got more prisoners than ourselves. If they get away, they can turn the guns on us from either barricade!”
“Where the hell are the others?” Cap growled, crowding behind me.
“Where’s Montgomery?” Thayer countered. “Montgomery ought to be here! This is where we meet! Mountain Street’s just beyond the barrier. We can’t even set fire to the town till we know where he is. The wind might carry the flames down on him!”
“Gosh!” Cap said, looking at the dark buildings that leaned over us, “what a box to be caught in!”
“We’ll have to take to the houses!” Thayer said, stamping through the doorway. “At least we can shoot from ’em with dry powder if we have to!”
Natanis came close to us where we stood looking after Thayer. “There is a door in the barrier. The street is empty beyond. The guards have run in a panic.”
We followed him to the log face of the barrier. At the left end, where it joined a house, there was a narrow sally port, closed with a tight-fitting door of logs, a loopholed door. Hobomok stood by the door, his eye at a loophole. As we came up he opened the door and went through, and so did we. Beyond the barrier the street bent to the right, then divided, one of the divisions curving upward and the other running along the base of the cliff, as had the Sault-au-Matelot. The streets lay empty and snow-filled before us, shrouded in a pallid, wind-swept darkness.
“I’m going up into the other town,” Cap said. “This curving street is Mountain Street. Somewheres beyond it are the steps that go up into the Market Place. What was it you said? A hundred and thirty paces to the right; turn to the left and go eighty paces; turn to the right and go thirty paces downhill; and the house is on the right. That’s it, ain’t it?”
“We can’t leave them this way!” I protested.
Cap took me by the sash of my blanket coat and ran me into the shelter of the houses on the lower street, Natanis and Hobomok following in our footsteps. “You damn fool! We’ve fought our way into the city! What’s going to happen if Montgomery doesn’t come, and the garrison comes back and catches ’em in that street? Do you think they’ll ever get out of that trap?”
“Let’s get them through.”
“Not by a damned sight! They can’t move till Morgan comes back to tell ’em what to do. For that matter, they can’t move anyway. They’ve got more prisoners than they can handle. They’re finished as soon as any man fires a gun, because the prisoners will jump on their backs. You can’t help anybody by staying behind that barrier; and you’ll never get another chance to see Guerlac and Mary if the city ain’t taken to-night.”
“My God!” I said, “if Arnold was only here!”
“Well, he ain’t!” Cap said. He started off up the street and we followed him. He turned back to us. “Listen! You’re my detachment. If anybody speaks to us, keep your mouths shut while I talk English to ’em.” He went ahead again, hulking and swaggering in his jaunty hat and his new coat, a fine figure of an officer. Far away to our right there were dull reports still; near at hand nothing but silence, as though the tall houses stared down at us with bated breaths.
A door creaked open at our shoulders and a woman scuttled out, an old woman with a bundle. She squeaked when she saw us; turned to scuttle back; then slipped and fell. I suspected how she felt; my heart had leaped within me, as at a partridge roaring from under foot, when the door opened. Cap pulled her to her feet, observing gravely, “On Normandee noo boovong doo see-druh!”
The woman burst into a flux of French, kissed Cap’s hand, and went spraddling through the snow ahead of us. We overtook her. Cap picked her up, bundle and all, and swung her onto his shoulder. An old man and two women, one of the women dragging a child, popped out of an alley, stopped at the sight of us, then came on again, panting and struggling at our sides. I took the child under my arm, for it sank to its withers in the snow; and its mother, if mother it was, seemed to lack strength to drag it.
Ahead of us we saw five or six women and old men, each with a child or two, and some of the children crying, thin and futile in the whirling snow.
There was grayness in the air, the grayness of dawn. We came into a small square. On its far side was a steep-roofed papist chapel. We went past the chapel, and saw the folk ahead of us turn sharp to the right. In the snow were many footprints, all bearing to the right; so we guessed there had been a panic in the Lower Town, and a great fleeing to the Upper Town.
There was a gate, flanked by small guardhouses, where these folk had turned. When we ourselves turned we saw a long, long flight of steps, walled with a stockade of logs in which there were small bastions for light artillery and muskets: a flight of steps so long and so steep that its top was shrouded in the storm. For all we knew, it led into the clouds or into heaven. It was spotted with climbers, slipping and falling as they climbed. With no word to each other we started up behind them.
I don’t know to this hour whether the guards of the stairway, which was one of the two methods of getting from the Lower Town to the Upper Town, had gone to repulse an attack at some other place, or whether they had fled in a panic, as had the guards at the second barrier, or whether they were hidden in their guardhouses and failed to challenge us because we were dressed as the British were dressed and were helping fleeing citizens of the Lower Town. I think they had fled in panic, as they had done at nearly every barricade in the city at certain times during our attack. None of us cared why they weren’t there: we cared only that they weren’t, and thanked God for it.
By using our muskets as staves we came safely up the broad treads of the stairway, mounted a steep road that continued upward from it, and found ourselves in a wide square with a great building at each end, one of them a church with towering steeples. The wind howled dolefully across the square, piling up the snow in drifts. Those we had helped spewed out a tangle of French at us and lurched off into the snow. We turned sharp to our right in the dim gray light, plodding after Cap.
“One hundred and thirty!” Cap said.
We were at the entrance of a narrow street, wider than those in the Lower Town, but none too wide in case there were musketmen peering at us from the shuttered windows.
We turned into it. The houses were one story high and close together. Between and behind them we could see tall trees which creaked in the furious wind. I could hear Cap counting under his breath. When he reached eighty we were abreast of a narrow street pitching steeply downward to our right. The houses on it were large and surrounded by trees.
“That’s the street!” I said to Cap. “Thirty! Hurry! It’s getting light!”
We hurried on, stepping in Cap’s footsteps to leave as little trail as might be. We could hear a cheering from the town below us, com
ing straight down wind; then, from the direction of the second barricade, scattered musket shots. A bell clanged and clanged, mournful in the high wind, the sound swelling and dying as though the bell suffered for those who had fought and died in the snow.
“Thirty!” Cap said.
On our right was a white house with a curved roof, such as Quebec folk build as protection against cannon shot—a house sheltered among tall trees. My heart was pounding. The musketry fire in the Lower Town had grown so heavy I could scarce think. “Into the trees,” I ordered. Cap went into them with long strides, the rest of us after him.
“What if it ain’t the house?” he asked.
“It’s the house,” I said. “I can feel it. How’ll we do it, Cap?”
“Send Hobomok to pound on the front door while the rest of us go in the back.”
“No,” I said, “all the men in this town are being used to defend it. It’s best to leave no marks at the front door in case they come home. If any man comes to this house we can’t have him scared away.”
“Not till we’re ready to scare him,” Cap agreed. “We’ll rip off a blind and throw you through a window.”
“All right! Work fast and make no noise. When we’re in, close and bolt everything behind us. Get at it!”
“I hope to God we’ll find something to drink!” Cap whispered hoarsely.
“I hope to God we’ll find Mary!” I said.
We stole out from the trees in single file and made for the back of the house.
I remembered an old saying of my father’s—“Try the simplest ways; they work oftenest.” I hissed at Cap, ran up the steps outside the back door, and tried the handle gently. It turned in my hand. The door opened and I went in.
XXXIV
THERE was a fat woman in a decent gray habit standing over the stove, a spoon raised to her lips. Beside her, holding a tray, was a comely wench in a black dress. Sitting at a table near by was a serving girl, a small pretty thing, her gray skirts bunched in her lap and one hand thrust into the leg of her stocking so she might ply a needle on it with greater ease. Over everything was a smell of coffee, a rich, pungent, delicious odor that set my mouth watering.
Misliking the manner in which the white showed around the fat woman’s eye when she turned her head from her spoon and saw me over her shoulder, I went quickly to her and took the hand that held the spoon, swinging her down upon the floor, where I could get my hand comfortably over her mouth or around her neck. The comely wench dropped the tray with a clatter, but before the gurgle in her throat became a shriek, Cap had her. I could tell from the way he looked at the serving girl, who had wrenched her arm in her agonized haste to get her hand out from her stocking and her skirts down where they belonged, that it pained him to be unable to deal with the two of them.
Natanis had the serving girl before she could cry out, though I doubt she could have uttered a sound.
“The first one that screams,” I whispered, giving the fat cook’s face a sharp squeeze, “gets a hatchet in the head.” I told Natanis to repeat it in French, which he did. I set Hobomok to hunting for the door into the cellar, which is beneath the kitchen in these Quebec houses.
A bell in the corner began to jangle. Hobomok took the cook from me and hustled her through the trap in the floor, while I made fast the door through which we had entered. The bell jangled again while Cap and Natanis dragged the others after the cook. I listened at the inner door, and in a moment there came a faint voice, soft and pleasant, calling, “Justine! Justine!”
“Get a rope and fasten them down there,” I said to Cap. “I’m going in.”
I opened the door quietly and went into a long corridor. There were doors on each side, and at the end a larger door, which I took to be the front door. The corridor was warm and had the heavy feel of a house still asleep or half asleep—that, and a sweet odor of violets. I stood there listening, uncertain which door to open until the voice called again, impatient and peremptory, for Justine.
I moved down to the door. It opened. The girl who stood there, wild-eyed at the sight of me, was the same brown-legged Mary Mallinson who had last looked at me from the shadow of the pines across the creek from our garrison house. She had on a nightdress that clung to her, as I could see by the light of a candle she carried in her right hand. Her hair was thick and golden, and she was working at it with her left hand, as women will, to twine it into the semblance of order. Across her nose, from cheek to cheek, was a faint golden dust of freckles. I saw she was beautiful; yet I could see no great likeness between her and my Mary because her face was twisted from the fright I had given her.
I cleared my throat to speak. She threw the candle at me, darting back and pushing at the door, screaming as she did so, a shrill, terrified scream, that must, I thought, go out through the walls of the house and into every other house in Quebec as sharply as it pierced my own ears. I stopped the door from closing with my foot, forced it open, and caught her before she could scream again.
“Mary,” I said, putting my hand over her mouth, “Mary, don’t scream! I’m Steven Nason. You remember me, Mary!”
She wrenched herself away and screamed again—or started to; for before she could get on with it I clutched her tight against me and choked off her breath. The caked snow from my blanket coat was melting from the heat of the room. Her nightdress was as wet from it as though she had stood in a rainstorm.
“You keep your mouth shut,” I said. “Keep it shut tight! I’ve come too far to get a bullet through me because a woman can’t be quiet!”
My mind should have had room for no one but Mary, who had held my heart and my love from the first day I knew about such things. Yet my thoughts turned to Phoebe. What, I wondered, would Phoebe say if she could see me dripping water on Mary’s nightdress? What would she do? Would she laugh? Would she jeer at me? Would she twist her cat’s eyes between her fingers and sniff, and cough her hard, dry cough? Phoebe!
“Cap!” I shouted, still clinging to Mary and clutching her mouth none too gently with a hand that must have felt to her like a rough and wrinkled boot.
“Right here!” He seemed to have been standing behind me, listening.
“Get lights,” I said. “Put Natanis at the front of the house and Hobomok at the rear, so we’ll know if anyone comes. And get lights!”
Mary struggled and squirmed in my arms like a soft warm kitten, but her fingernails scratched me like the claws of a cat. I damned her and shook her until she lay quiet.
Cap hurried back, a candle in one hand and a bottle of brandy in the other. He went around the room lighting the candles that stood in sconces against the wall, enough candles to have lit ten rooms. The bed was the size of a sloop; and raised above it on four posts like masts was a red velvet tent, rich and useless. There were velvet curtains at the windows, and on the floor a quantity of skins, mostly white bearskins. There were chairs, all carved and cushioned; and on the bed were silken coverlets. The heady scent of violets had, in this room, become almost piercing. I still held Mary tight in my arms while I looked around; and the thought in my head fair graveled me, for it was that I must remember everything in order to tell Phoebe. Phoebe! for God’s sake! I said to myself. I dragged Mary to the bed and threw her onto it, drawing the coverlets over her wet nightdress.
“Now listen to me,” I said, with my hand still over her mouth, while Cap stood at the foot of the bed, sipping from his brandy bottle and eyeing Mary and dripping snow water from his coat on the silken coverlets. “If you scream when I take my hand away I’ll gag you so your tongue will be pushed half down your throat.” I freed her and stepped away, stripping off my sodden coat.
“Good idea!” Cap said. He removed his own, carrying the two of them from the room.
Shivering and cowering in the bed, Mary burst into a flux of French. She sobbed and snuffled and poured out French at me. Her blue eyes, peering out over the edge of the silken coverlet, never once moved from my face.
“Mary,” I said, “
I don’t know a word you say. “I’m Steven Nason from Arundel. The other is Cap Huff, who threw Guerlac into the mud when we were children. We’ll do you no harm if you’re honest with us. You’ll have to speak English.”
Again she rattled at me in French, emphatic and indignant.
I could tell she was insisting that her name was De Sabrevois—insisting, too, that I should leave the house.
Cap came back with his brandy bottle and wandered around the room, picking up small silver articles from tables, examining them carefully, and peering into drawers.
“Cap,” I said, “she doesn’t remember any English.”
Cap took a small leather case from the back of a drawer and opened it. “Don’t be a damned fool! She stopped screaming, didn’t she?”
Her glance traveled from Cap to me. Cap tossed the leather case into the drawer and turned sharply on her. “Hark, little lady! Do you think we dodged bullets and cannon balls and climbed into this lousy city to have you make a fool of us with your damned frog-eating French?”
She watched him without speaking.
Cap snapped his fingers impatiently. “Speak up!” Seemingly as an afterthought he laughed and added, “Sister!”
“What do you want?” she asked faintly.
I was stonied by the suddenness of the question, and racked my brains for a reply. Cap spoke up again. “I want something to eat. That’s what I want and it’s what you want, too, Stevie.”
“Yes,” I said, “I do. So does Mary. We broke in on her breakfast. She can get dressed while we’re in the kitchen.”
“She can get dressed while we’re right here,” Cap said, pulling out another drawer and rummaging among its contents. “She’s too tricky to suit me.”
Arundel Page 53