“Thomas Hutchings was right on the hand of proposin' to me when your great-grandfather come courtin' and I chose him instead,” Mary says. She instructs Rachel to write this all around the margin of the page where Lavinia described how her brother Ned came to marry Mary Bundle.
For of course it was Ned Andrews she had married—foolish Ned, the dancer, the singer, the liar—Ned who would never in his life own one gold piece, much less a boxful.
He had been one of the people on the wharf the day she arrived. Mary remembered his red hair and red beard, the grinning devil weaving in and out among the dour, silent people. He'd been dancing his small daughter around the wharf, warbling some foolish song about ships filled with diamond rings. His voice had wafted up to the deck, mingling with the smells of spring, bright with promises of wealth, of security, of fine clothes and jewels, of ships laden with everything Mary had ever wanted. And she, soft and sick from a night locked in the fetid galley, heard the promise, picked up her baby and marched ashore.
In her haste she had not noticed how the little point of sand with its rock spine jutted dangerously out into the sea, did not see that it held but one fish store and one lonely house, could not know that these people, looking as if they had grown out of the rocks, had themselves newly arrived, had spent one winter in the place and almost died of it.
Unbeknownst even to himself Ned Andrews had lured Mary Bundle onto the Cape and for a long time she held that against him.
After the fish had been culled and counted, loaded aboard the Tern and sent to St. John's, when the only proof it had ever been taken out of the sea was a briny crust on the store floor and a few marks in Thomas's account book, when the last ship had left the coast and the first ice had glazed over fresh water, when Mary knew her decision to stay the winter could not be changed; during that period, when her thoughts were continually occupied with Thomas Hutchings' coins and how she might lay hands on them, then, sometimes, she slipped into the store. It was empty of fish now, holding only their winter supplies and Thomas' belongings, a desk, a chair and a bed crowded around the fireplace, and, at the far end, the long keel of a boat Ben Andrews had started to build.
One day when she was alone in the fish store—staring at the tin filled with money she dare not touch, thinking dark thoughts about Caleb Gosse and the piles of dried fish now stacked in his St. John's storerooms, or in the hold of some ship already sailing to England—Mary became aware of a great commotion on the wharf attached to the store.
“The last ship,” Mary thought, “the one that'll get me out of this place!” Her escape—coming late from Labrador—sailing just ahead of ice that will soon freeze the sea solid as lead.
She did not stop to consider. Never for a instant asked herself why such a ship would turn in to the Cape, where it might be going, or if she would be let aboard. Lifting her brin apron so that it covered Thomas Hutchings' desk, she pulled down the tin and upturned it, spilling a glittering pile of gold and silver onto the brin. Quickly she folded the brin over the money, knotting it onto the rope that kept the rough apron tied around her waist. She dropped the empty tin and picked up Fanny who has been sitting on the floor nearby. The child, so used to being jolted about, only blinked as Mary raced out onto the wharf.
Outside, every youngster in the place, even staid Annie Vincent and her surly brother Peter, even Ned's sooky son Isaac and Meg's Willie, were skidding across the wharf, screeching and yelling, slipping about on their arses and bare feet. Ned was there, of course, flinging dippers of dark blubber about and singing. Each dipperful, which he scooped out of the barrel of cod livers that have been bubbling in the sun all summer, slopped half its oily contents down the front of his jacket and pants. Unconcerned, he danced about like a lunatic, spreading the cod blubber on the boards in front of the crazed children.
As Mary rushed through the door, Ned slipped and tumbled onto a great moving mass of children. Mary was barely aware of the noise, the shouts, the swirl of arms and legs gliding towards her. She saw there was no ship. In the instant before Mary fell her mind registered that—and nothing else—that beyond the wharf the sea was steel grey, cold—and empty.
Then she is off her feet and sliding. The world was a noisy blur. She hit the water—hard—as if it were already solid. But it was not solid and she sank. The baby, the tangle of skirts and apron, the weight tied to her waist, pulled her under. Water and terror filled her mouth, her eyes, her ears. Everything was silent.
The rope around her waist was being tugged, it cut into her body. There was a hand under her jaw, her head was pulled around. Face up, she gulped air, saw the sky
Mary remembers it all, every detail. Although years later, Annie Vincent will swear that Mary did not even ask what had happened to her baby, Mary knows she was calling Fanny's name as they hauled her out of the water.
“Steady on, now—steady on,” someone is saying, “steady on—while I gets ya aboard.”
She is hoisted over the side and flops into the dory like some large, wet fish. The boat has not even been untied, it bangs against the stagehead. The man in the boat hoists her up, children reach down, dragging her onto the wharf where she sprawls on her knees and vomits. Groaning she rolls onto her back, lies in a spreading pool of seawater, kelp clinging to her hair, tangling in the rope and brin knotted around her waist.
Mary sees that the man who has saved her is Ned Andrews, fighting to hold back laughter, he stares down at her. Silent, wide-eyed children peer into her face, one of them begins to giggle.
Mary wishes the little brats would die—or she would die.
“Shag off!” she mutters when Ned reaches out a hand to help her up. Ned Andrews had laughed out loud. “Such words to come out of the mouth of a lady!” he said in mock horror. Then, “Thomas's after savin' your young one,” he nodded towards Thomas Hutchings who Mary could see climbing onto the wharf holding Fanny under his arm as if she were a sack of flour.
“Some good dive!” Ned calls to the dripping man.
Thomas glowers. “You'll kill someone yet, Ned Andrews, with your carelessness!” he says and without a glance at the woman lying on the wharf he strides off towards the Vincent house with the squalling baby.
“By the sound of her she'll live! Come on maid, let's get ya inside before ya catches your death,” Ned grabbed Mary's hands and pulled her to her feet, then ordered the children to go get Meg, “and tell her to bring some hot tea and a quilt,” he called as they raced away, each one eager to be first with the story of Mary Bundle's plunge off the wharf.
Inside the fish store Ned propped Mary in a corner as if she were something made of wood, an oar or boat hook perhaps. Then he looked around, went over and picked something up from the floor. As he walked towards her, Mary saw that he was holding the money tin in one hand and a knife in the other. Numb with cold and fear she wondered if Ned Andrews was going to kill her.
But the red-haired man stands in front of her smiling—smiling and humming, singing softly:
My mudder says I never should,
Play with the gypsies in the wood,
If I did she would say,
‘What a bad boy to disobey…’
“Gypsies should be smarter,” he said and slashed across the brin apron.
The coins clattered into Thomas Hutching's tin and Mary began to cry. She is never going to get the money! Never going to be rich! Never going back to St. John's, much less to England! She continues to cry as Ned puts the box back on the shelf. So he held her, rubbing her cold arms, blowing on her hands, pulling bits of seaweed and cod-liver from her streaming hair. And she kept on weeping as if her heart would break.
Throughout that winter Mary had reasoned with herself—sometimes even when lying in Ned's arms: “A person'd be some stunned to make fast to a man don't have n'ar thing to his name, not boat nor house, nor pot to piss in. A man what don't even care!”
It was the not caring that had bothered Mary most, it was what made men die paupers, the not carin
g. It was what made Ned so different from men like Tim Toop or Thomas Hutchings, men who tallied up every coin, men who had little hoards of gold.
“Was Meg of course who tormented Thomas Hutchings into sayin' words over Ned and me. Meg talked to God—told us he spied on the Cape through a hole in heaven. And she thought a wonderful lot of Thomas, wouldn't hear a word against him, even later on when we all knew what he done.”
But Mary let it happen, had gone quietly to the altar—or to be more precise to the cloth covered splitting table Meg had improvised as an altar. Because she saw that to own anything on the Cape a woman must have a husband, because sleeping with Ned Andrews had been enjoyable—infinitely better than spending another winter in the crowded coldness of the Vincents' loft.
That day, watching Thomas Hutchings write the names Mary Bundle and Edward Andrews in his little book, her feelings had been a strange mixture of apprehension and happiness. Thomas had drawn a swirl below the words. “There,” he said, and shook Ned's hand, “The first marriage on the Cape. Congratulations, you're a fortunate man, Ned!”
“Liar!” Mary had thought. But she held her tongue and smiled, still clinging to the hope that the money in Thomas's tin might somehow, someday, belong to her.
ten
The last winter of Mary Bundle's life is the stormiest she has ever known. In notes that her great-granddaughter Rachel scratches around the margins of Lavinia's journal, the sky is always dark, the sea rough, the wind always blowing a gale.
In the dim, over-heated kitchen the girl and old woman lose track of time, morning blurs into evening, evening into night, days run together. Mary talks quietly to people long dead—asking questions unthought of until now. The small room is full of ghosts, sometimes Rachel can see them—beautiful Lavinia smiling mysteriously from the corner, Ned sitting astride a chair, chin resting on his folded hands, eyes focused on Mary's face. It seems to the young woman that she has been sitting here forever, that the past, the present and the future are all one—like a shell curved in on itself so you cannot see where the outside ends, where the inside begins.
“You done that on purpose—just for badness, didn't y a, Ned Andrews?” Mary says one day. Then she smiles, begins to cackle and, for the first time in an hour, speaks to the living person who sits beside her in the shadowy kitchen: “I were so contrary that first winter me and Ned was married 'tis a pure wonder the poor man didn't run off,” she says.
“All the Andrews—Meg and Ben's four youngsters, Ned and his children by Hazel, a daughter named Jane and Isaac, his nuisance of a son, even Lavinia and the old Missis, along with me and Fanny—thirteen of us all cooped up together in somethin' no better'n a tilt, for all Meg called it a house. Bread and potatoes, salt fish, rolled oats, molasses and partridge berries was what we had to eat. Enough ta keep us from starvin' but some tedious. Nowhere near as good as what me and Tim used to eat under Gosse's wharf!”
“Jane was a good enough young maid but Isaac was forever bawlin' and clingin' onto his father so as me and Ned was never alone for a minute. Fanny was cuttin' teeth, Meg's oldest girl Lizzie almost died of fever, the baby Willie along with Pash and Emma all got some kind of croup and every mortal one of us had chilblains.”
“On top of that Meg kept Ben poundin' and hammerin' all day and half the night. I were fair out of me mind thinkin' on what I'd gone and done by marryin' in with such a crowd. I didn't have a civil word for any of 'em—especially not for Ned—for all he were good as gold.”
One day that winter Mary told Ned she had never been hunting and why didn't they go. “Maybe we can find a fox, or duck, or even some salt-water birds like Josh Vincent's all the time bringin' home,” she said.
“No fox hereabouts, maid. Anyhow it'd freeze the arse right off ya out there t'day—and we don't want that, do we?” Ned gave her a wicked grin and made a grab at her behind.
They had gone, though. When Ned saw she was desperate to get out of the house he capitulated, became enthusiastic, sent Jane off to borrow two pair of racquets from the Vincents and went himself to get the old gun Thomas Hutchings kept in the store. Mary stuffed bread and roasted caplin into a sack and told Jane to keep an eye on Fanny.
“Better you stayed home and looked after your own youngster, Mary Bundle! Never heard the likes—a grown woman traipsin' about this time of year!” Meg glared at Mary who was wrapping her skirt around her hips and hauling on a pair of woollen leggings.
When Ned came back with the old muzzle loader and powder bag, Meg started in on him, “Haven't got a mortal grain of sense, neither of ye! Can't put your trust in weather this time of year—civil enough now but s'posin' the wind comes up, or ya comes across some wild creature—a bear, or even a wolf? Ye'd both perish and who'd be left then ta take care of Fanny—or of Isaac and Jane, comes to that?”
“Don't worry, Meg girl, I'll make sure no wolf don't eat sweet little Mary,” Ned made a terrible face, growled and dashed at the children, sending them into the corners squealing—all except Isaac who grabbed Ned's leg, whimpering that his father was not to go.
He picked the little boy up and danced him around:
Isaac Andrews went a-hunting,
For to catch a hare,
He rode a goat about the street,
But could not find one there.
He went to shoot a wild duck,
But the wild duck flew away;
Says Isaac, ‘I can't hit him,
Because he will not stay.’
Ned gave his son a great smacking kiss and planked him down on Jane's lap.
“Grease up the bakepot and keep the fire goin',” he told Meg as they went through the door. “We'll be back by dark with a feed of duck.”
“Nomedoubt!” Meg's voice was tart but she rolled a flint and a candle inside two pair of knitted socks and stuffed the bundle into the sack Mary was carrying.
It was bitterly cold outside, but sunny and still. Along the beach frozen spray covered everything. Driftwood, upturned boats and rocks glittered in the sun. Above the beach, where snow had swirled into great looping drifts, Ned and Mary laced the racquets onto their boots and waded back through small woods and over snow-covered marshland.
Neither of them had ever worn snowshoes before, but Ned seemed to know instinctively how to swing his legs in a wide arc, breaking a trail across the powdery snow. Mary wallowed behind, stumbling and cursing for an hour before she fell into a rhythm that accommodated the awkward foot gear.
Only then did she become aware of how silent the world around her was. All she could hear was the whoosh of snow underfoot and her own gasping breath. She could see for miles across the frozen bog to a line of spruce-covered hills on the horizon. Nothing stirred. Not bird or animal, only Ned, a large dark figure well ahead of her, moving gracefully despite the muzzle loader and powder bag slung across his back. Ned, moving silently, swiftly away from her across the vast whiteness, a white mist rising around him as he plowed into the snow.
Watching him, a sudden sense of loss, of abandonment, hit Mary like a blow. Without thinking, she screamed his name. He stopped, swung around. She saw his face, and the panic, or whatever it had been, left.
“Look!” he yelled and pointed to a clump of alder on their left.
A great flush of birds rose towards the sky. Brown, hen-like creatures, speckled, with white underbellies, cackling in fright over their heads.
“Partridge!” Ned said, dropped to his knees and began scravelling through the powder bag.
It seemed to take him forever to find a paper of powder and a piece of greased rag, to slip the powder and the rag down the barrel of the rifle, to pack in the shot and ram it home. Mary had watched Josh Vincent show Ned this method of loading a dozen times but never had it taken so long.
The birds collected their wits, stopped bawling, their flying became orderly but Ned kept frantically pushing more and more shot into the muzzle loader. Some of the birds disappeared back into the clump of bushes. Still, others—many, many more
than Mary could count—swooped and circled overhead.
Finally Ned rolled onto his back, pointed the long barrel skywards, braced the stock against his shoulder and fired straight up into the cloud of birds.
The gun roared. Not one bird fell but the sky was instantly empty. Everything became silent and Ned lay sprawled on his back with the rifle in the snow beside him.
“Ned, Ned for God's sake!” Mary floundered towards her husband. It seemed to take years to get to where he lay in the snow surrounded by a black circle of burnt cloth and gunshot.
His eyes were closed and blood dribbled from between his lips. Certain he was dead she fell to her knees, grabbed his shoulders, pulled him up to a sitting position and screamed: “I've gone and loved ya and now look what ya done—killed yerself! Ya stunned bugger!” Half mad with fear and spite she kissed his blackened face, cursing and shaking him by turn.
Ned's mouth opened and two teeth dropped out. Mary stopped shaking him. His eyelids fluttered, he began to groan. She eased his head down on the powder bag, got a handful of snow and began rubbing it into his face.
“Lord, girl! What ya trying to do, kill me altogether?” the words came out of one corner of his mouth. “How's about a bit more of that lovin' and kissin'—fair warms the cockles of me heart that stuff do,” he lay there a few minutes more as if hoping she would kiss him again.
“Got the guts frightened half outta me you have!” she said and made as if to rub more snow in his face.
He pushed her hand away, got slowly to his feet and touched his cheek gingerly, “Friggin' gun slammed up agin' me face, wouldn't doubt but me jaw's broke!”
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