Arundel

by Kenneth Roberts

  Phoebe, I thought, would be in the attic uncovering my silver. I went up the ladder at the side of the room, opened the trapdoor at the top, and stepped up onto the floor.

  At the far end of the attic I saw Jacataqua digging in the thatch. In the middle of the barren square space was Phoebe, on her knees before a double row of silver. I thought to call to her, but there was a fullness in my chest and throat, most embarrassing.

  Although I made no sound, she suddenly looked over her shoulder into my face. She turned away, as though to find Jacataqua; then whirled to stare at me again. It seemed to me my appearance was strange to her, or not to her liking.

  I looked down at my blanket coat, to make sure it was properly belted, and felt of my face, which had less beard than usual, because we had shaved before we fought. Finding these things in order, I rid myself of the tightness in my throat and chest by main force and said, though it was not at all what I wished to say, that I had come to see whether the silver was still here.

  She scrambled to her feet, small and straight in her gray blanket coat and blue sash, her French snow leggins over her gray breeches, and her little fur cap pulled tight over her hair. She looked, in that shadowy, cold room, like a half-grown boy. She came up to me and put her hand against my chest, then nodded, twining her fingers in the string of cat’s eyes at her throat.

  “It’s all here,” she said, “and Cap’s picture. I was going to take it home. Do you want me to take it home? Shall I—shall I take Cap’s picture home?” She drew a deep breath, and pools of tears came into her eyes and hung on her lashes. When they spilled down her cheeks, the life came back into me and I got my arms around her at last.

  I wondered how I could ever have thought her back was hard and flat. She was softer against me than Mary Mallinson with all her smell of French perfume and her night rail that could be seen through when wet.

  “Now here,” I said, feeling an unpleasant hotness in my own eyes, “I won’t have any of this crying nonsense!” I picked her up in my arms, finding her no more in them than a young lamb, and carried her to a bale of straw, so I could sit down with her and get her fur cap off her head and my fingers into her hair.

  After a time she tightened her arm around my throat so I couldn’t breathe. “You’ve got to answer me!” she said, when I took steps to break her hold. “I’ve asked you four times about Cap.” I saw then that Jacataqua had come around in front of us and was watching us with interest.

  “He’s well,” I said, motioning to Jacataqua to get back to her thatch. “I left him snoring fit to knock the chimney off the inn, and Natanis and Hobomok with him.”

  She held me off again with an arm as rigid as a steel band. “For God’s sake!” I said, in a rage, “will you stop pushing me away from you when I’ve wasted God knows how many years; or don’t you want to be kissed?”

  “I don’t mind being kissed,” she said. “You can see how I feel about it from this.” She showed me what she meant, and I saw she had spoken the truth. “What I must know,” she went on at length, “is how long a leave have you got from the army?”

  “Why,” I said, “I’m traveling express to Cambridge for Colonel Arnold, and Cap and Natanis and Hobomok with me, and we have orders to act as your escort. I have a wedding present for you from Colonel Arnold. We can be married by the priest here at this place unless you think you’ll be everlastingly damned if a papist is mixed up in it. We ought to be at it, what’s more, for we must buy snow-shoes, and I’d like to be across the river by noon.”

  “Well,” she said, “I don’t mind the papist, but I don’t see how I can be married without proper clothes.”

  “Proper clothes! Since when did you begin thinking of them?”

  “Why,” she said, eyeing me reproachfully, “you told me once that breeches were no fit garb for a woman. Since I love you dearly, I must please you by wading through the snow in long skirts.”

  “Phoebe,” I asked, “shall we be married now?”

  “I’ll die if we aren’t!” she whispered, and then fell silent.

  “Steven,” she said, after a little, “when the guns pounded and the wind screamed at the windows and the men began to come back, staggering and falling down and dragging each other, and leaving blots of red in the snow—I watched for you—and watched for you. I saw Colonel Arnold carried past, and Matthias Ogden with the shoulder of his coat a smear of blood. The butcher from York came by with poor Nathaniel Lord across his shoulders like a sheep, a bullet through his lungs. When I ran to Nathaniel to see what word I could take to his people, he choked and died.

  “There were none of the others, Steven! Noah and Jethro and Ivory and the rest of them didn’t come back—nobody! Morgan and Steele and Topham and Thayer and Goodrich and Dearborn and Bigelow and Greene and Meigs and all the rest—they none of them came back: none of them! I was afraid you—afraid you wouldn’t come either!”

  She clung to me. After a time I told her that most of them had been captured and would come safe home at last. Then there was a bellowing and hallooing below us, and I knew Cap had come hunting for his picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry.

  “Steven,” said Phoebe, while the ladder was rattling at the trapdoor, “you found Mary—”

  “Yes, we found her.”

  Phoebe said no more, but lay against me, stroking my shoulder. It seemed to me I had never known, before this moment, what it was to be at peace.

  There was a roar from the trapdoor, and we looked up to see Cap’s face, mouth and eyes wide open, shining at us over the door’s edge like a pumpkin in the light of a harvest moon.

  “So it’s you?” I asked him. “What do you want?”

  Cap stared. “What do I want? My God, what do you think I want? Where’s my picture!”

  Phoebe pointed, and his whole face brightened as his eye fell upon the rolled engraving of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry. He pounced on it with a delighted bellow.

  When he had unrolled it and studied it for a time, he sat himself down on his heels and looked at us with the air of one who has made a great resolve. “I’m no fool,” he said. “I can see the two of you are thinking of entering the holy bonds of matrimony.”

  “I don’t know what makes you think such a thing,” I said, “but it happens you’re right.”

  Cap stood looking at us, then at the picture he held in his hands, and then back at us. He swallowed painfully. “I’ll do it!” he said, his voice trembling a little. “I’ve got to make you a wedding present, of course, and it ought to be a good one. I’ll give you my picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry!”

  The distress in his face was all too plain, and evidence of what a sacrifice his generosity was forcing him to make; and I told him immediately we couldn’t accept. “It’s too fine and valuable a picture,” I said, “for the simple house we plan to live in.”

  “Damn it!” he roared, “why don’t you give Phoebe a say in it! She’s the one that’s going to have the say, anyhow.”

  “Nay,” said Phoebe hastily, “we can’t take the picture, Cap. We’ll be living on a ship much of the time. If we took it with us on a ship it would soon become stained and moldy.”

  “Well,” Cap sighed, and it was pleasant to see how he wiped his forehead in relief, “if you won’t, you won’t; but if I ever find a copy of it you’ve got to take it. Here: I’ve got some other things with me. Maybe there’s one or two of ’em you could use.”

  He emptied the pockets of his breeches and his coat, pouring out silver shoe buckles, gold spoons, pieces of lace, a gold watch with a jeweled fob, two miniatures on ivory, a small gold box, a silver-backed hairbrush, four gold scent bottles, a heap of gold coin, a bag of soft yellow leather, a set of razors with silver handles, pieces of scented soap, and several small objects, such as rings and buckles and seals.

  “Now here,” Cap said, dragging something from the depths of his breeches pocket, “here’s something Phoebe might use.” He opened his
clumsy fingers to disclose a band of jewels that seemed, in that dim attic, to be filled with blue and red fires.

  “Those are diamonds,” he said, “and this contraption is for a woman to wear, like in one of those miniatures.”

  Phoebe sat erect on my knee, took it from him, and snapped it around her forehead, so that it bound her tousled hair. She sat there with her hands in her lap, a half-smile on her lips, as though she held some secret from us that we would never learn. Jacataqua came from her delving in the thatch and leaned against Cap’s shoulder, and the two of them stared at her in silence. As for me, I wondered how, if I had lacked the wit to see she was beautiful, I could have had the brain to eat and sleep and go about my business.

  She shook her head at length, and took the thing off, turning it in her hand so that fiery glints flashed from it. “I can’t wear this. It must be worth a fortune. Take it back.”

  Cap waved his hand airily. “Keep it. If you can’t wear it, sell it or trade it.” Phoebe dropped the band of jewels at his feet, and he picked it up and polished it on the front of his blanket coat. “Well—” he said. “Well—” He wriggled his hand into the yellow leather pouch and took out a string of round white beads, soft and velvety looking.

  “Here’s something you can wear.”

  “Mary’s!” she said.

  “What do you care?”

  Phoebe looked quickly at me, and I saw what I had never noticed before: that there were flecks of gold in her eyes. She turned back to Cap and shook her head gently. “No,” she said.

  Cap hefted the string, as if pondering what to do with it. Jacataqua slipped under his arm and hung there, wedged against him, as she had wedged herself against me many months before and so aroused Phoebe’s ire. Cap closed his thick fingers over the pearls and tightened his arm around Jacataqua until she squeaked a little, though not distressfully.

  “Well, now,” he said, frowning at her severely, “I might have knowed this would happen. If I’d got me some pearls long ago, maybe you wouldn’t gone running off after other folks like Burr or George Merchant.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t,” Jacataqua said, rolling her eyes at him enticingly.

  “Yes, and maybe you would!” He dangled the pearls from his forefinger and whirled them in the air, at which she made a snatch at them, a snatch that was unsuccessful because of his grip on her.

  “Now, now! None of that! That won’t get ’em for you. You got to be a nice quiet girl, and look out for Phoebe going home, and not run after anyone we come across, and then maybe you can have ’em.” He closed his hand over the pearls again. “Yes,” he added suspiciously, “and how did that damned red Sabatis get out here with you?”

  Phoebe struggled to her feet, pulled her sealskin cap over her hair, tightened the knitted sash of her blanket coat, and buttoned the coat around her neck. “He came out of the city when the attack began, and went with Paul Higgins and his Abenakis. He guided them across the bay of the St. Charles so that they got away. His place, he said, was with his brothers from the Kennebec. He’s a good Indian. He’ll help us get home. We’re lucky to have him, and it’s time we started.”

  “Where’s Paul and his men?” I asked, feeling that she was right, and that Sabatis had done what he was bidden to do by Eneas, all with no thought of doing wrong.

  “Gone to Indian Lorette,” she said, “to make snowshoes and dry some meat for their trip home. They wouldn’t stay with Arnold any longer, because they say this isn’t their kind of fighting. Will you look for the priest, Steven, or shall I hunt him myself?”

  Cap stowed his loot in his pockets. We packed up the silver and the picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry and scrambled down the ladder to find the leather-faced French waiting for us below.

  They went readily enough to hunt the priest when they learned there was to be a marriage, with cider and brandy. By the time we had stopped at the tavern for the brandy and located the priest in the pleasant house beside the papist chapel, we had fifty Frenchies tagging along behind us, laughing and screaming in their silly twittery lingo and singing countless verses of “Vive la Canadienne.”

  They brought us all the snowshoes in the town as soon as they discovered we had the money with which to pay for them. I believe Cap was right when he said there are no people more obliging or politer than the French, once they know you have money to spend and are willing to spend it.

  It may be there are some priests to the papist French not blue-jowled and not powerfully scented with garlic; but all I saw looked so and smelled the same. It was so with the one who married us, Claude-Marie Delacroix.

  When he stood up before us in his long black dress like a night rail and jabbered French, we would have been at a loss except for Jacataqua. At times she would poke Phoebe and Phoebe would say “Yes”; and at times she would poke Cap, who stood close behind me, and Cap would almost push his forefinger through my back, whereat I would say “Yes.”

  The affair went smoothly, except at a point where Jacataqua whispered anxiously to Cap, and Cap fumbled in the pocket that held the largest part of his loot, while I wondered at his fumblings. He worried out a ring, which he handed to the priest; and all of us stood staring at it. It held a red stone as large as Ranger’s eye, a stone as brilliant and fiery as though cut from a red sunset. Around it were small glittering diamonds; and it must have graveled the priest, lying in Cap’s chapped paw, as unexpected as a thousand-pound note. Before the priest could reach out for it I got back my wits. Telling Cap to put away his bauble, I took Arnold’s ring from the pocket of my buckskin shirt, and we were wed with it.

  When, later, I asked Phoebe whether she felt married with the words that joined us being spoke in such a lingo, she said she would have felt married if an Abenaki m’téoulin had united us in the sign language.

  The day was still young when we set off up the river for the crossing place, where a passage had been cut through the tumbled mass of ice cakes that are jammed up into mountain ranges in the middle of the river by the force and strength of the current. Nor am I ashamed to say I had liefer face a dozen Guerlacs or Hooks, or find my way out of Quebec ten times over, than cross the frozen St. Lawrence. When we came to the passage through the ice cakes there were thunderous bangings and crashings on both sides of us and beneath our feet, louder than any artillery, and a trembling of the ice, and a fearful coldness that bit through our garments as though they had been made of cotton. I was in a freezing sweat for fear the ice would open under Phoebe and swallow her up.

  My fears came to naught, as do most fears; and we set off down the St. Lawrence, traveling rapidly in single file, Natanis in the lead, and then Jacataqua and the dog Anatarso and Cap and Sabatis and Phoebe and myself, and in the rear Hobomok. That night we reached the town of St. Mary’s on the Chaudière, and lodged at the inn where Cap had found the keg of Spanish wine. Here they made us welcome and set out a wedding feast of chicken pasties and bear meat and apple pies and Spanish wine and a villainous brandy.

  It was here, in the middle of our feast, that it came into my head to ask Phoebe why she had married James Dunn. She looked at me with a queer, misty smile and said nothing at all, so that I didn’t learn; nor did I ask her again, ever, because I didn’t care.

  In spite of the weight of pork and flour we carried, we moved quickly; for our hearts were light and there were no heavy storms to hinder us, only snow flurries, and those mostly at night while we lay snugly on spruce branches in our snow-walled shelters. There was no day on which we failed to travel forty miles; for the lakes and ponds and swamps we had crossed with such labor during our march to Quebec had become broad white thoroughfares; and the jagged stumps that tripped us on the new-made trails over the Height of Land and the Great Carrying Place were hidden deep beneath a level covering.

  On the third day after we left St. Mary’s we crossed the ice of Lake Megantic, ascended the serpentine curves of Seven Mile Stream to the beautiful meadow, and scaled the Height of Land as easily
as walking from Saco to Arundel.

  Here we found ourselves at last upon a descending trail; and although the dawns were slow in coming, and darkness fell early, we covered fifty miles a day, a prodigious journey.

  As we went over the snow, and at night, lying upon spruce boughs, I thought a thousand times—as I have thought ten thousand times since then—of all our labor and our anguish as we struggled along this same way upon the march to Quebec. I thought of the groaning and sweating men of that little army, half dead with exhaustion and the pain of torn and ailing bodies: starving and freezing, yet ready with heroic laughter, and never stopped by what still seems to me the very incarnate demon of ill-fortune.

  I thought of lost muskets, of broken bateaux, of torn fragments of tents, down below us, frozen into the ice; and more, I thought of terrible stark forms, staring upward, eyeless, from deep beneath our feet. And it seemed strange and like a dream that we should pass now so easily and lightly over the way that had been agony. And in the murmur of the forest it seemed to me always that I could hear, as I can hear in the woods of Arundel to this day when I go into them, the voices of the bateaumen, the cries of stragglers, the shouts of officers—all the voices of Arnold’s army.

  Three days after we passed the Height of Land we came to deserted Norridgewock and lodged there; and on the following day we came to Fort Western, whence we had started four months earlier. Here we learned how the British captain, Mowat, who must have been, as Cap Huff firmly swore, the lousiest knave that ever wore a British uniform, had warped his two ships of war up to the Falmouth docks on the eighteenth day of October, bombarded the defenseless town, and burned more than four hundred buildings, leaving the entire population of the town without shelter for the winter. For that reason there were none of the settlers left along the Kennebec. The burning of Falmouth had destroyed their source of supplies, so they had gone down to the coast, all of them, to live on clams and whatever else they could take from the salt water.