The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  She watched the fish brought up to the deck in baskets and Evered climbing aboard, then disappearing into the hatchway toward the stern. The three crewmen bringing barrels and sacks out of the hold and stacking them along the rail. Evered reappearing sooner than she expected and spidering back down to the boat, the materials passed overside to his outstretched hands.

  The Hope weighed anchor to catch the tide before Evered slipped through the skerries and Ada stepped out from under the shelter to wave the tricorn as the sails were set and took wind. Only one man turned her way to wave back.

  She helped Evered unload the supplies at the stage but they didn’t say a word over the sound of the rain. Not half enough for the winter. Evered walked past her and hefted the flour barrel onto a shoulder. He headed up the rise and she followed after him with a brin sack of peas under her arm. They made two more trips for the rest and then sat next the fire in the tilt, picking spots where the rain wasn’t dripping through the ceiling.

  “I guess we wouldn’t welcome in Mockbeggar,” Ada offered.

  “They’ve had as bad a time of it as we,” Evered said. One side of his face was swollen up with the toothache that had been tormenting him off and on since the spring. They’d run out of rum halfway through the summer with what he’d been drinking as a medicinal and there was none came in with the new supplies. “They’ll be lucky folks don’t starve there the winter the Beadle says. We’d only be more burden to them.”

  They sat quiet a long time. Ada felt she’d been unfaithful to Martha even letting Evered raise the question with the Beadle and part of her was relieved despite what staying meant.

  “He give us what he could spare,” Evered said. “It was more than what the season was worth.”

  “We’ll make do,” Ada said. “We always does.” And almost as an afterthought she added, “Our Martha will look out to us.” Evered stared at the girl, fighting the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her. He said, “Martha’s dead, Sister.”

  She glanced across at him and he turned to the struggling bit of fire, rubbing absently at his swollen cheek.

  “I knows she’s dead,” she whispered.

  * * *

  —

  There was an illness running among the crew of The Hope and Evered took sick in the days after the ship left them. He was bedridden a week with fever and headaches and a fierce cough, insensible half the time and waking only to talk gibberish to people who were not in the room. Ada made a poultice of cod-liver oil and wet bread for his chest and she sat up with him to bathe his face with a cold cloth until she fell ill herself. And they passed by each other in the fever’s long dark hallway, Evered coming slowly to himself as Ada descended deeper into bouts of the shakes and delirium and periods of near oblivion.

  Evered was too fragile and woolly-headed to help his sister beyond keeping her warm and trying to recreate the useless poultice she’d concocted for him. She couldn’t be coaxed into eating even hardtack soaked in sweet tea. When she opened her eyes she didn’t know her brother and she spoke only to Martha though there was no logic or sense to her rambling. With each passing day he was more convinced she was going to die in her bed and he sat holding her clammy hand hours at a time as if that might be enough to tether her to him.

  He left her only long enough to carry in wood for the fire and to bring water up from the brook and to empty the chamber pot in the landwash and rinse it in the cove’s bitter cold. At the top of the rise he would stand scanning the empty horizon, the breadth of the barren grey sea. Nothing out there and nothing out there.

  Until a morning at the beginning of October, a slur of blowing snow like a haze over the water and the vague apparition of a vessel in the distance. A fever dream, a ghost ship that winked in and out of sight among the drift. He was barely well enough to be taken in by the illusion, to feel even a rote imitation of hope. He shuffled inside to find Ada’s spyglass and spent a while watching the schooner making way across his field of vision. It wasn’t until he could see the bowsprit with his naked eye that he gave in to the fact of it.

  He made a torch of a handful of blasty boughs and stood waving that noisy flag on the rise as the ship leaked past the cove, just visible through the snow’s blowing curtain, and he knew the little light he held up was useless. He dropped his eyes to the cove, to the stage still standing on the landwash, waiting to be taken down. He gathered an armful of dry brush and carried it to the salt shed, piled the tinder in a bulkhead and set it alight. The structure was weather-cured wood and went up in a rush, along with the lean-to shelter and the cutting table and Evered had to scramble down to the boat and slip it free of the stage to row it away from the flames. He drifted out toward the skerries with the oily black smoke’s distress signal billowing above him. But the schooner was beyond the cove by then. And because there was nothing more to be done he said, “Please Martha.” Hating himself to be reduced to the helpless plea. And he repeated those two words aloud until he saw the sails of the vessel dropped and furled and a wherry let down overside and two figures rowing through the blowing snow toward the cove.

  Captain Truss and Mrs. Brace. A Bitch-Bear; Her Cub.

  Captain Solomon Truss was an Englishman from Oxfordshire and for many years an officer in the King’s army where he rose to the rank by which he still introduced himself. He was sent as a young cadet to the East Indies where he obtained an ensigncy in Colonel Alderson’s regiment by the death of Captain Lyon. In Germany he served the late Marquis de Canby as aide-de-camp and expected to be in the sure line of promotion but took a pension to avoid the mortification of serving under two junior officers who purchased companies that Truss would otherwise have been offered. He spent a year hunting in the Scottish Highlands where it became apparent his pension would not suffice to keep himself and two servants and three brace of dogs in meat and out of the rain. He’d followed a younger brother to Newfoundland almost on a whim and returned several summers running for the abundant fish and game and ten years ago he borrowed the money to set up a handful of enterprises on the Labrador coast, seining for cod in summer, hunting and trapping through the winter, and trading with the Eskimos for fur and tusks. He was just now bound for England by way of Fogo Island to settle his father’s affairs as executor of the will, having lately received his brother’s news of the man’s passing some months earlier. There was no inheritance of substance but there was a family manor and some property, the sale of which would be enough to settle the debts Truss had fallen into in the prosecution of his trade and to allow him to live a gentleman’s life somewhere outside of London’s extravagance. Portsmouth was his notion at the moment though he allowed that might change.

  Evered nodded yessir, yessir as Truss carried on with his exhaustive autobiographical recital though the man might have been speaking a language other than English altogether. It reminded him of the Beadle’s description of his church office and of the funeral service he’d performed for its alien vocabulary, its rush of incomprehensible notions waterfalling one on top of the other. He’d never heard of ranks or pensions or hunting dogs or any such place as Oxfordshire or the East Indies or Portsmouth. Even Fogo Island and Labrador existed on the very fringes of his knowledge of the world.

  “Captain Truss,” Mrs. Brace interrupted, “I’m sure the young one has heard enough for an evening.”

  Truss looked across the room to where the woman was seated at Ada’s bedside. “Your concern for our host’s tender ears is commendable, Mrs. Brace. I suspect he is not alone in having heard enough?”

  “No sir,” Evered said. “No such thing.” He was willing to let the man speak till Kingdom Come if that was the price to be paid for their improbable rescue.

  “He might like to rest is my meaning,” Mrs. Brace said. “He’s not long past the girl’s condition himself.”

  “Of course,” Truss said. “I have forgotten myself.”

  “Would that we were so lucky,” Mrs. Brace said under her breath and Evered saw Truss give he
r a look and deciding not to address the comment.

  “I’m best kind where I’m to,” Evered said. “Don’t bother about me.”

  Truss stood from his chair to lay more wood on the fire, stooping low to keep from smacking his head against the rafters, and Evered marvelled again at the man’s compass. He had hands the size of platters and a wingspan that allowed him to nearly touch opposite walls of the tilt at once. His mutton-chopped face was as long and narrow as a fox’s tail.

  He’d rowed into the cove from the passing schooner and stepped from the boat onto the shore like he was stepping over the lintel of a doorway. He carried a rifle that stood almost to his height when he rested the stock on the ground. He introduced himself and shook Evered’s hand and loomed over him as the youngster tried to explain the nature of the emergency. Truss turned to the man at the oars of the wherry. “You’d best go back for Mrs. Brace,” he said. “I’ll want the black bag from my cabin. And I suppose you’d better send in my shotgun.” And he lifted the bow of the boat with one hand and pushed it out into the cove.

  Evered led the man up the rise away from the collapsed and still burning stage and directly to Ada in her bed.

  Truss knelt on the sand beside her. “Have you candles or a lamp?”

  “We got an old slutlamp.”

  Truss got to his feet and ran out the door in a hunch and Evered heard him bellowing across the cove to the man in the boat to bring candles and matches as well. He came back in, walking in the same hunch to Ada’s bedside. “The lamp,” he said to Evered. “The smoke may choke us but it will be better than nothing.”

  In the shadowy light they could see that Ada’s face was flushed a bright partridgeberry red. She was staring at the ceiling with a fierce fixed look and seemed not to know they were with her and she fainted dead away for a few moments.

  “Sister,” Evered called to her.

  He shook her shoulder and shouted again and she opened her eyes, flicking a blank stare left and right. And a few minutes later she went under a second time.

  Evered reached to shake her again but Truss stopped his hand. “How long has your sister been in this state?”

  “I don’t rightly know. I was laid up myself when she took sick. Days,” he said. “A week?”

  “Fainting in this manner?”

  He shook his head. “First time ever I seen it.”

  Ada opened her eyes again and watched them blankly awhile and fell away again.

  Truss rubbed his massive palms against his mutton chops a moment. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” he said.

  “She idn’t going to die is she, sir?”

  “I’m afraid it’s quite likely,” Truss said. “Evered, I will need a sharp knife and a bowl of some sort.”

  “A knife?”

  “A sharp one,” he said. “And stoke up the fire, it’s too damp in here to do the girl any good.”

  By the time Mrs. Brace was delivered to the cove with the black bag and candles and shotgun Truss had opened a vein in Ada’s arm and taken off twelve ounces of blood. He handed the bowl of nearly black liquid to the boy beside him. Evered could feel the warmth of it seeping through the bowl’s cold clay.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “Now we wait,” Truss said, “and pray that God in His mercy.” And he left the thought there.

  * * *

  —

  The strangers had been in the cove with Ada and Evered two days and two nights since.

  When Mrs. Brace arrived Truss lit a handful of candles on the crowded shelf above the sickbed and he rummaged in the black bag. He gave Ada seven grains of James’s Powder and then he left Evered in the tilt with Mrs. Brace at his sister’s bedside with orders to look for him if the situation deteriorated.

  “Where’s he after going?” Evered asked the woman.

  “Hunting for his supper,” she said. “You look poorly yourself, Evered Best.”

  “I been better.”

  “You should sleep.”

  “Don’t think I could,” he said but she tucked him into the bed opposite Ada and against his own desire he drifted off, startled now and then by the sound of Truss’s rifle firing and echoing around the cove. Each time he rose up on his elbows in a panic, asking after Ada, and Mrs. Brace settled him back.

  “She’s still with us,” the woman said. “You sleep.”

  Truss returned hours later with three shell-birds and two grey plover and a saddleback gull. He turned the game over to Mrs. Brace and looked in on the patients. He administered another dose of James’s Powder to Ada and set about making a pot of Labrador tea with leaves foraged near the brook. He let it steep several hours and in the evening he sugared it and gave a mug to Evered to drink and then set about bleeding Ada a second time.

  “Will she be all right after all?” Evered asked.

  “If she makes it through the night, she might recover.”

  “She got the nerve of a mule Ada have.”

  “Evidently,” Truss said and he smiled at the youngster.

  Ada made it through the night and through the night that followed as well. On the second day she was able to keep down a few spoonfuls of broth and a little of Truss’s Labrador tea. But she was awake only minutes at a time before falling back into a state more like unconsciousness than sleep.

  The schooner had come around to anchor off on the Barrow Ledge. Truss spent his days in the backwoods or being sculled along the coast by a manservant in the wherry, shooting at anything that moved. He bagged a goose and a bottle-nosed diver, three ducks and four strangers, seven ptarmigan, two brace of hares and a silver fox and he sent most of the game back with the wherry for the servants and crew still on board The Hydra, save for his favoured meat of the haul which he brought to the tilt and delivered into the hands of Mrs. Brace.

  Evered had never been in the company of a strange woman other than Mary Oram and he was almost struck dumb to be left two days alone with Mrs. Brace who he was belatedly taking in now that Ada seemed past the worst. She was somewhere between his mother and Mary Oram in age but more than that he couldn’t guess. A bit wide in the boughs his father would have said. Sturdy. A bosom the likes of which Evered hadn’t considered possible. When he wasn’t asleep in bed he sat near the hearth, as far from the woman as the room allowed.

  “Is it just the two of you on this property?” she asked from the bedside.

  He nodded.

  “Has it always been just you two?”

  He shook his head and she smiled down at her hands.

  “We been on our own the last little bit,” Evered managed. “Mother and Father is both dead for long ago.”

  Mrs. Brace nodded. She seemed embarrassed suddenly and for a moment Evered was afraid he’d said something indecent or impolite.

  “Where were they from?” she said then. “Your parents?”

  “From?” he said.

  “Their people,” Mrs. Brace said. “Is there no one you could have gone to?” she said. “After they passed on?”

  He shook his head, embarrassed himself now. “They never said one way or the other,” he admitted.

  They had a stew of rabbit and potatoes for their supper. Evered’s mouth was so swollen up with a toothache he could barely chew his food but he felt well enough afterward to sit in front of the fire as the evening came on—which Truss took as an invitation to recite the details of his life story, until Mrs. Brace intervened with her jab about the Captain forgetting himself.

  He didn’t know what to make of their exchanges. Truss referred to her as his housekeeper which Evered took to mean a servant in the Captain’s employ, the same as the men aboard The Hope were the Beadle’s underlings. As little as he knew of the world Evered could sense she took liberties no servant would dare or be permitted. He slept beside Ada in the sickbed and Truss hung a blanket down the middle of the room, lying on the other side of that thin wall with Mrs. Brace. And both nights Evered woke to the half-strangled sounds of two people struggling agai
nst each other.

  “Mrs. Brace,” Truss said as he placed a junk of wood on the fire, “has expressed some concern about your provisioning for the winter.”

  “It was a late spring,” Evered said. “And we had a wet August month besides. We’re in a bit of a blind look-out the winter I imagine.”

  “I took a look at your store today,” Truss said, “and at your cellar. Forgive my intrusion. You will need some luck with that flintlock of yours to carry you through.”

  Evered glanced at the firearm standing in the corner near the hearth. “That old thing was Father’s,” he said. “The works is rusted solid and the spring is gone. It idn’t much good to us.”

  Truss picked up the gun and weighed it in his hands. “You don’t hunt for meat over the winter?”

  “I sets a few snares for rabbit.”

  “You don’t use this at all?”

  He shrugged. “I can’t say as I knows the first thing about it.”

  “Well,” Truss said. He turned to smile at Mrs. Brace. “We have a virgin on our hands.” He squinted down the sights. “If I can set this thing to rights and you’re feeling up to it perhaps I could teach you to shoot?”

  Evered couldn’t keep the grin from his face at the prospect and that act caused him so much pain that he doubled over in his seat, massaging his jaw furiously.

  “First thing tomorrow we will deal with that tooth,” Truss said. “And then we will go shoot something.”

  They all stopped still then at the sound of Ada calling weakly. “Brother,” she said.

  He went to sit beside her on the bed and touched her face. “Now, Sister,” he said. “You’re back in the land of the living are you?”