Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  I protested we couldn’t shame her so.

  “Shame her be damned! Let her dress under the bedclothes if she thinks we want to peep at her. I’d rather shame her than be caught like a rat because of her trickiness.”

  He picked delicate garments from a chair, peered at them curiously, sniffed loudly at them, expelled his breath in a noisy, ecstatic sigh, and pitched them onto the bed. “Get into those!”

  “You great beast!” Mary said. “I’ll touch nothing you’ve had in your hands.”

  “Oh, ho!” Cap said. “You’ve got finicky since you used to go barelegged and wear blue cotton in Arundel. Put ’em on, or I’ll put ’em on you myself.” Again he paused, adding “Sister!” in a mincing tone.

  “Cap,” I said, “I don’t like the way you talk! It’s no way to talk to—to—it’s no way to talk to Mary.”

  “No, it ain’t, and that’s a fact; not to Mary.” He took a silver-backed brush from a dresser and attacked his hair with it. “That’s a nice brush,” he said, looking at it admiringly “H. G. deS. Those your initials, Sister?”

  Mary was under the bedclothes and couldn’t answer.

  “Cap,” I said, “I won’t have it. You’ve got to stop.”

  Cap pulled me out in the hall, leaving the door open so he could keep an eye on Mary and her squirming beneath the coverlets. “Listen, Stevie,” he whispered hoarsely. “We can’t get out of this house till dark, if we get out at all. We might have to stay in here all day! God knows how we’ll get out, in that case, or who may come while we’re here. Guerlac might, for one, unless he’s dead, and I’ll bet he ain’t. Now don’t go getting soft about this Mary of yours until you know she won’t stick a knife in your back if she gets a chance. She ain’t our kind of folks any more, Stevie. She’s a lady, and we’re nasty, terrible people.”

  “No,” I said. “She’s frightened, poor thing.”

  “That won’t hurt her none!” Cap growled, going back into the bedroom.

  She was dressed by now in a gown of heavy blue stuff that clung to her. It had a collar that turned back from her white neck, and sleeves that came down over the backs of her hands. I had never seen a dress so fine or a face so beautiful as Mary’s. There was a fragile, disdainful look to her: a look as though the labor of smiling would be more than she cared to undertake, and one that might crack her face into the bargain. There was a golden dust beneath her eyes, the dust that had caused the Frenchman Sharl to call her a Lily of France when he told me of her; and the braids of her hair seemed as golden and heavy as the loops of golden candy my sister Cynthy makes from molasses at Christmas time and pulls over an iron hook with butter on her hands. Yet I couldn’t keep from thinking what would have become of this hair and this soft white skin in the swamps of Lake Megantic.

  I stood looking at her. Truth to say, I stared and stared like an owl, and had no more to say than an owl. For, grown man as I was, I was like a boy who has a long daydream broken into suddenly. That was the case of it with me, in true fact; but the boyhood daydream had lasted within me over years. How many thousand times had I pictured my meeting with Mary when I should come to rescue her, what I should say to her and what she should say to me. And now the meeting had come to pass at last; but here was no Mary Mallinson at all before me. Here was a fine lady, Frenchified and delicate; and it was in her eyes that she thought of me just what she would have thought of an oversized, wet, and grotesque black bear out of the shaggy woods, if such a creature had come blundering into this exquisite bedchamber.

  So I looked and looked at her and tried to speak, but instead I swallowed; and then, to find at last the makings of some sort of sound to make easier a kind of misery within my chest, I coughed several times as heartily as I could.

  “Well—” I said, coughing again. “Well—” And saying no more I went to the front of the house and stood there.

  After a little I turned into a room at the left of the corridor, and found Natanis peering out through a peephole in the closed shutter. There was an iron stove in this room, and fur rugs on the floor and paintings on the wall. Hanging from the ceiling, in glittering festoons, was a candleholder, made all of pieces of glass.

  “The snow has let up,” Natanis said, “but I think it will storm again. There has been no man on the street. This house is strong. There’s an iron shutter on each window, and two doors, both iron.”

  I went to the door and unbolted it. It was as Natanis said. The first door opened inward; and three feet beyond it was the outer door, also of iron, opening outward. I showed Natanis that I was unbolting the outer door and leaving the inner door fastened.

  “If any man comes, call me. Then open, and hide yourself behind the door as he enters. Between us we’ll have no trouble. Keep watch. Soon there’ll be food. I think we’ll come well out of this.”

  I went into the kitchen. Hobomok sat against the back door, watchful; and in the middle of the room there was Mary sitting in a chair, looking straight at the wall. Cap, standing before her, was in no pleasant mood.

  “Damn hert” he said. “She swears to God she don’t know how to cook, and I’m beginning to believe her. It’s a disgrace to the town of Arundel and the whole damned province of Maine, if you ask me! Can’t cook! Gosh! I never expected to live to see the day a Maine woman couldn’t cook!”

  Mary never looked at him, nor at me, but she spoke in a husky voice. “Maine woman? I? You take me for a filthy Bostonnais?”

  Cap’s jaw dropped. He put a hand on each knee, squatting, open-mouthed, to stare at her the more strickenly. “Filthy who?”

  “Mind your own business!” I told him. “There’s plenty of women in Maine that can’t cook, either, not any more than a chipmunk can, though they call it cooking. Why don’t you cook your own breakfast?”

  “Well, mebbe I better,” Cap said, straightening up. “Us filthy Bostonnais have got to have our food.”

  “What can we have?” I asked.

  “Why,” said Cap, in some surprise, “there ain’t nuthin’ left in the world but pork, is there? Pork and wine wouldn’t be bad for breakfast, Stevie: a little pork and a lot of wine.” He turned to Mary, and the tone in which he addressed her was more polite than his words. “Where’s the pork, Sister?”

  “Where are my servants?” Mary asked.

  “Everything’s in the cellar,” I told Cap. “You know it well enough. Bring up two dozen eggs and some of that Beaune if there is any.”

  Cap went down into the cellar with a candle, and there was a sound of squealing from below as he went. At this Mary turned her eyes on mine so that I was fair sickened by the uncomfortableness that her glance put upon me, but made shift to answer what seemed to be a scornful question in her look.

  “The womenfolk are down there, but they’ll come to no harm,” I told her gruffly. Then, with what I knew to be a loutish awkwardness, and most lamely, while her eyes still remained upon me, I tried to say some of the things I had so many, many times dreamed I should say to her some day. But I failed, of course. I stammered, and was not able to conclude a sentence, so that my speech, like my presence of mind, was all fragments.

  “I—I followed you with my father, but—” I said. “We tried to rescue—we tried—and after that every year I thought that I could—I always meant to come—I never forgot—”

  She broke in on me with a cold little laugh. “There’s one thing I know,” she said, sliding her eyes toward me in a way that had stayed in my heart for many years, “and that is that this man wouldn’t be where he is if the Bostonnais had captured the city.” She meant Hobomok and his watching at the door with his musket between his knees.

  “Mary,” I stammered, “of course I always meant to come some day—on account of my promise—”

  “Promise? You made a promise?”

  “Why, I mean the promise after we’d had the lobsters in the dunes—when you—you kissed me and made me promise to marry you.”

  She had a wisp of a handkerchief in her hand. She
dabbed at her lips with it. Her eyes sank until they rested on my feet. Then she lifted them and looked at my hands as though they weren’t clean, though I think they were because of the deal of snow that had melted on them since I had started out of the barracks into the storm.

  I swallowed again. “I think we can find some way of getting you out of the city, Cap and I, if so be you’ll come. We can go back to Arundel. I’ve always expected to take you back to Arundel.”

  She raised her eyes to mine again. They were as blue as my mother’s teacups that Captain Callendar brought her from England; as blue and as hard.

  “Arundel! That stinking nest of log huts among the fish bones?”

  “What!” I said, gaping at her. “Is that what you think of it?”

  “You!” she cried suddenly and loudly, hurling the word out of her throat with such a fury of disgust in it that I almost staggered back from her. “You—you peasant! You innkeeper!”

  “Well, for God’s sake! What are you talking about!”

  “Look around you!” she bade me fiercely. “Are you such a fool that you cannot see what this house is? There’s no finer house in all Quebec! Do you know who comes to it? The governor comes to it! There’s no man in Canada who is not honored to come to this house and eat at my table! Do you know how many men would give their souls to kiss this slipper?” Almost to my horror she thrust out at me her little foot in gilded leather, with a high red heel. “And do you know who they are, and do you know their quality? The highest here! Officers and gentlemen! And you talk to me of going back to your fisherman’s cesspool! You boor, with your dirty, smelly clothes and your nasty rough face! You’d never be allowed in this house unless you came like a thief, you and your gaol-bird companions!”

  “Good God!” I muttered. “Good God!”

  There was a clatter behind me. Cap dropped the trapdoor with a bang and stowed an armful of meat and eggs and bottles on the table. “Gosh!” he said, walking over to Mary and staring hard at her face. “I heard what she just said, Stevie; and now I know who she reminds me of! It’s her father, Stevie! He never said a sensible word in his life, and she’s inherited it from him!”

  He poked the fire and reached for a saucepan, when Natanis opened the door and spoke quickly in Abenaki.

  “Take care of her, Cap,” I said. “No noise!”

  With that I went out after Natanis. He had said that Guerlac was coming to the house, alone.

  I went close to the front door with Natanis and stood there. We could hear a fumbling at the outer latch, and catch the faint whine of hinges. There was a metallic banging at our very ears. My heart leaped as Natanis drew the bolt and opened the door. It folded back and hid the two of us in that dim corridor. Guerlac stepped jauntily past us, tugging at his sash and his blanket coat.

  “Marie!” he called. “Marie!” As I closed the door behind him, he added in French some words I could not understand, following them with what he may have considered an imitation of our own nasal New England speech. “Couldn’t do nawthin’!” he shouted gaily. “Captured or killed every mother’s son of ’em, the damned dirty rabble!”

  He stopped and listened. “Marie!” he shouted again. He turned, his coat in his hand, seemingly with the intention of tossing it to the person who had opened to him, and saw Natanis standing there, not two feet distant.

  He sprang away, clawing for his sword, and put himself squarely in my grasp. As I closed my hands around his arm Natanis took the other. He strained against us for a moment; then went slack.

  “This is unexpected,” he said, in the dry, delicate, displeasing tones I well remembered from my one meeting with him. “My eyes are dulled by the snow. To whom am I indebted for this greeting?”

  “Old friends of yours,” I said. “Old friends. You have a slit ear to help you remember my father, who gave it to you; and you may recall giving me the scar on my own forehead. There’s another old friend of yours with us: one who hasn’t seen you since he kicked you into the mud, where you belonged.”

  The door at the end of the corridor flew open on the candle-lit kitchen and Cap Huff peered out to see what we were about. I tightened my hold on Guerlac, thinking he might try to break from us at the sight that met our eyes—Mary bound hand and foot in a chair and gagged with a towel, done by the forethought of Cap Huff to keep her from trying to warn Guerlac of what awaited him; Hobomok leaning against the door with his musket between his knees, glowering at us; and Cap towering over both of them, a gaudy figure in his British officer’s garb.

  We took Guerlac to the kitchen, where Cap lashed his feet together; and we made him fast to a chair with his hands tied behind him. Then we took the gag from Mary’s mouth, an easement that in a way seemed useless, since she sat silent.

  “So!” Guerlac said, staring at us coolly. “Four deserters who ran from comrades in peril!”

  This was no time to lose our tempers, I knew, and I could see Cap knew it too. I studied Guerlac. He had changed little since his visit to our inn at Arundel. His hair was gray over his ears, and there was a scar across his right cheek and ear where my father’s arrow had clipped him. Beneath his chin there was a little fullness; but otherwise he was as slender and haughty as the picture of him that had clung in my mind.

  Cap sliced pork into the saucepan. “Gosh! What with tending this wench, and waiting for this damned light-fingered murderer you just brought in, I’m starving!” He slammed the saucepan on the fire, where it sizzled bravely, sending out a cloud of fragrant smoke.

  “Yet,” said Guerlac, “it should be nourishment enough to know that when your comrades are rotting in gaol, you’ll be hanged for spies. That will happen, I take it, as soon as my friends come here and find you.”

  “Get some cups, Stevie,” Cap said. “We want to make a kind of holiday out of this. ’Tain’t every day you catch a murderer in his own house, and it’s New Year’s Day and all! We wouldn’t want to drink this man’s wine out of a bottle, not even if we are filthy Bostonnais.”

  He fished the pork from the saucepan and broke a dozen eggs into the sizzling grease. We found bread in a box beneath the table and made a fair breakfast, with two dozen eggs and the pork, and cups a third full of the coffee the cook had left on the stove and two thirds full of wine, a fine satisfying wine called Mersault. God knows I needed something to hearten me, what with the hours we had kept and our fight in the Lower Town and the manner in which Mary had spoken to me, and now this news of Guerlac’s that our men had been killed or captured. Whether to believe it or not, I didn’t know; but I knew that if I showed him I wanted to know he would lie to me fit to tangle my brain like a wet anchor rope.

  Cap tilted back in his chair when he had finished and looked with a cold eye at Guerlac. “I’m surprised, I vow I am, that you haven’t got Mallinson’s scalp hanging up as a decoration.”

  Guerlac sat silent, his eyelids drooping.

  “I thought of you often,” I told him, “after you took Mary and did your best to split my skull in doing it. Lately I’ve wondered why you, a captain in the regiment of Béarn—you, an English-hater—should now be fighting with the English against Americans. All other Frenchmen are with America, to be revenged on the English.”

  “Why,” he said, “you’re as ignorant as all Bostonnais! Some of us in Quebec recognize the justice of the British cause. Colonel Voyer and Captain Dambourges and Captain Maroux and Captain Alexandre Dumas fought with the English in the Sault-au-Matelot, this very day, against your rabble.”

  “That may be,” I said, disregarding his attempts to enrage me and watching his face carefully, “but you gave Colonel Arnold to believe you sympathized with him.”

  He laughed lightly. “To be sure! I had sympathy for him until I learned he seriously intended to be such a fool as to attack Quebec. Then I withdrew my sympathy.”

  “And his letters,” I said, “I suppose you gave to the government.”

  “Why,” he said, “you’re as good as a lawyer! I’ve had no letter
from Colonel Arnold in three or four months.”

  I saw I could get nothing from him, nor was I sure he had anything for me to get.

  We were silent, a strange, uncomfortable company; and the stillness lasted until there was a movement from Hobomok. He hissed a warning and got up from his chair, bringing his musket to his hip.

  “No shooting!” I whispered.

  Cap picked up the poker from beside the stove and wagged it lightly between Guerlac and Mary. “A little noise from anybody now,” he whispered, “even from a lady, would be awful dislikable!”

  There was a fumbling at the latch of the bolted door, and then a sharp rap.

  “How many?” I asked Hobomok softly.

  “Two! Eneas and Hook!”

  I shot the bolt and tore open the door. It was Hook who had rapped, and Eneas stood behind him. I had already made up my mind what to do, and instantly I leaped out at Hook; but he was quicker than I: my reaching hands did not touch him. I stumbled and fell flat in the snow, the leap carrying me clear of the doorstep.

  Now this was a mischance that proved a grave one; for we had to deal with men not only powerful in muscle, but nimble and quickwitted in fighting; and within a trice they were near to our undoing.

  Eneas jumped upon me before I could move. He had his knee into my back so that the breath left me, and he jerked upward with his hands beneath my chin, to break my neck. His act was so quick and so violent that I seemed to be in a paralysis and had no power to throw him off, but only to stiffen the muscles of my throat as much as I could. I seemed to feel them breaking, and the spine that braced them cracking.

  With eyes starting out of my head, I saw Hobomok a little before me, and it seemed to me he was running away, as if stricken with panic. Then I heard a dreadful groaning kind of grunt, which I knew to be in the voice of Cap Huff; and a great scarlet body seemed to hurtle through the air as if heaved by some mighty power, and it flopped down beside me and lay inert, a crimson splotch in the white snow. It was Cap Huff, apparently dead.