The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor

by Sally Armstrong

  “Stand back that we may shoot!” John Murdoch cries.

  Several marines struggle to withdraw their bayonets, but in that moment, Martin grasps one of the blades in his bare hand and pulls it from its weapon. Before the owner can react, Martin tosses it, misses and buries the point in the main mast. Two others thrust their bayonets into the Indian’s body. He falls lifeless to the deck.

  Blake turns to Ross, who sits against the rail, John Malcolm at his side.

  “Daniel, where are you shot?”

  Before Ross can answer and when all eyes are elsewhere, the corpse of Martin springs to life. He shrieks and looks about wildly. Every man starts and steps back. Then, eyes still bright and bulging in his bloody face, he wheels to look down on the other brave, who lies on his back on the deck, bound and bleeding. Marines rush forward as Martin falls to his knees and fixes his hands around the neck of the captive man, who only has time to emit the first part of a scream. Martin loudly chants a rhythmic song rocking back and forth, his legs straddling his hapless comrade. The Irish marine Robert Beck drives his bayonet through Martin’s back just behind his heart. The man’s rage ends in a final spurt of blood.

  “God save us,” says Beck, still panting with his exertions. “He was the very devil himself.”

  The deck is crowded and noisy with men. Beneath their feet, the captured warriors rage like damned souls.

  “Lay out the mainsail!” Blake calls. “Mr. Smith to the wheel, please.”

  He stops. The forward deck moves—not the movement of the sea, but another, less familiar movement. It moves again, lifting an inch. There could be no doubt that beneath him, a score of men or more are contriving in the darkness to raise the planking above them.

  “John! Alex! Stand here with the boys!” He turns to his bo’s’n. “Jack.”

  “Sir.”

  “Have the men drag both anchors here and bring all chain forward. The deck seems not so secure as it should be.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  Blake goes back to where Ross remains at the rail. The wounded man looks up and attempts a smile.

  “Mr. Malcolm here has stopped the bleeding, John. ’Tis nothing I cannot withstand.”

  Blake stoops and examines the arm as best he can without removing the bandage of cotton that binds the wound.

  “The surgeon on the Viper will determine that, Dan. For now, we’ll make you a proper place to lie.”

  The foredeck shakes again and the howls of the men trapped between the decks carries above the sound of water and wind.

  “From the noise of it, you might think we’d caged a whole tribe below,” John Murdoch calls, not without some awe in his voice. “Perhaps the savage is tamed on the Miramichi.”

  Blake looks past the bow. They are making near to eight knots. He could expect to rendezvous with the Viper before dark.

  “Aye,” he says. “We do appear to have caught his many heads in a single basket.”

  LE VAIRON SAILS the next day about noon for the upper banks of the Miramichi River. The Viper and the Lafayette sail for Quebec. The captives are in due course transferred in irons to Halifax and imprisonment. Only six ever find their way back to the Miramichi. Louis Goneishe is not among them.

  THE MORNING had been dense with fog and now it rolls sluggishly along the river throughout the limp, breezeless day, not troubling itself to lift entirely even when the nearly invisible sun is high at midday.

  From the clearing comes the sharp crack of the axe as Charlotte cuts and stacks her firewood and the soft thwack as she splits the cedar kindling. From the house comes Elizabeth’s cooing and chuckling as she sits by little John’s cradle. Yet the day carries a sense of poignant, shrouded isolation and this, she thinks, is what unsettles her. She walks again and again to the water’s edge and stares at the patches of fog. She had observed John Murdoch board an American gun ketch. Heard the sounds of muskets and men’s voices raised on the river. Events are everywhere obscured.

  ’Tis the fog only, Charlotte thinks.

  Within a week, the work of harvest and storage must get underway. She, like the squirrels, must begin the gathering, the drying, the burying. Each task she contemplates returns her thoughts to Blake and then to the melancholy fact of his absence. Blake would be a settler, he had said, not a sailor. I’m impatient perhaps, she thinks, but she cannot subdue quicksilver flashes of anger when she takes account of the dangers she faces with their children. Meanwhile he betook himself—where? The fat Plumnell had doubted the West Indies. Where then? Her heart sinks again to think of what might have befallen him and she scolds herself silently for the petty reproaches she administers him in her imagination. For if he remains a stranger in some respects—a man both swift and clumsy, eloquent and mute, strong and weak, open and closed—and if his unfounded starts and fears that she might turn her attention elsewhere had caused them both needless misery—she had witnessed John Blake strive to make of himself a proper husband and provider. He had cut wood and fished fish and hoed the ground for her plantings. He’d sat awake all night in May when the bears had come. And when he’d departed three weeks ago, he’d held her as she’d always hoped he would—as a man should hold a woman—tenderly but strongly—and promised he would hurry back to her. He is her husband and she has given him something more—or perhaps something other—than her heart: she has given him her life’s devotion.

  And these are in large part the very thoughts she has as she stands by the river in the waning afternoon. A soft breeze springs up and blows the rest of the fog down the river. She sees the far bank of the Miramichi and then a flight of geese and then a big fish leaps. Then a sail appears to the east in midstream and John Blake comes home.

  HE ROWS TO SHORE in a small boat alone. Le Vairon sets its sails and tacks across the river in the direction of the Henderson homestead. She watches him from a distance. And is suddenly furious. He shoulders his pack and walks to where she waits. She’s so angry now she can hardly spit the words from her mouth. “The Vairon … you’ve come on the Vairon … were the winds so fortunate, John, that you could sail to the West Indies on the small Vairon and return in but three weeks?”

  “No,” he says. “I was never bound for the West Indies. I’ve had business in these waters.”

  “And am I, your wife, not to have knowledge of your whereabouts these many weeks?” She picks up both speed and voice now with her diatribe.

  “Am I to cut your wood, tend your hearth, raise your children while you … sail about these waters with your friends on the Vairon … which belongs in the Gaspé … on the Baie de Chaleur. Is that where you’ve been, John Blake?”

  He’s flabbergasted. “Charlotte, come here to me. I have much to tell you. There’s been a bloody battle with the savages.”

  She stands before him, her fists still pummelling her thighs, the heels of her boots still stomping the ground around them when he begins to tell her the story. He hadn’t known whether the battle would take place so near their lot or even if it would happen this soon. But yes, he says he’s been piloting ships these many weeks but as a lookout for the British navy more than as a river merchant. And yes, there has been a mighty confrontation with the Indians; one that was planned these last weeks since the series of attacks on the settlers around them.

  It’s Charlotte’s turn to be surprised. And although she knows full well it would be better to hold her tongue, she blurts out her first concern. “The People from the Baie, were they involved in this fracas?”

  “Why wouldn’t they be?” he says sharply and turns toward the cabin, asking, “The children, are they well?”

  Around the hearth that night she tries to explain her turmoil to her husband. “It is clear that your bravery saved many lives on these banks, John Blake, but I must share with you my utter perplexity about the actions you describe versus the people I lived with at the Baie. They are not warmongering people. They have been invaded themselves by those who came to these shores from away. They are a gentle folk;
they treat their children with limitless tenderness and their elders with utmost respect. Even their method of nourishment is a testament to their values. They share what they have—even with a stranger like me. They give thanks to Mother Earth for everything from the fish in the sea to the rain from the sky. How can these people you call savages be the same ones who sheltered me with such goodness?”

  He has nothing to say, but there are other unspoken facts for each of them to consider that night. Their cabin has not been attacked as others had been. Charlotte’s laundry blows in the breeze untouched while the Murdoch’s goods are stolen, burned or torn to shreds.

  It’s Charlotte who finally breaks the silence between them.

  “So you’ve been busy at war, John Blake.”

  “I’ve wanted only to defend us.”

  “Ah. And are we defended?”

  “By God’s grace, we may be the better for it.”

  “The rebels are gone?”

  “No. Far from that. But their Indian friends are quieted.”

  “Have you killed some Indians then, John?”

  “I have killed none, though they might have killed me—and our children too.”

  She sits still a long while.

  “I may have killed an Indian,” she finally says. “Though his death has broken my heart, however it came to be.”

  He walks to where she sits and puts his hands on her shoulders.

  “I’ve heard all,” he says.

  In those few words he somehow contrives to convey the depth of his devotion and the extent of his pride that he should be the husband of Charlotte Blake. And for her part, Charlotte takes the cue and says, “Come to bed, John Blake.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Miramichi

  1781

  Charlotte is moved by the powerful beat of her life here on the river. She sits on the bank one afternoon while taking a break from her endless chores and notices sandpipers hopping along the shore, jittery little creatures that move as one when they take flight. She watches them soar over the river, their speckled bodies contrasting with the leaves that reflect in the water below and thinks this ever-changing river has become the rhythm of her life. Its morning mist rising like droplets, the sun’s rays turning them into sparkles like fairies playing in the haze. The dunes on the shore are forged and carved by the rising and falling tide. The river rolls and heaves, slips by her land, its waves winking in transit in summer, then freezing into a byway for laughing children snuggled in sleighs. It threatens and warns and sucks unsuspecting souls to its depths. It gives forth food and brings the far-flung world to its exiled shores. This Miramichi has seasons of stillness and vigour, of calm and commotion. It is enduring, suffering, timeless and sustaining.

  She thinks back over the four years that have passed since she came here and how the seasons have shaped her.

  When spring thawed the Miramichi, the fiddleheads would poke up along the banks of the creek and a new generation of blackflies would come out to torment the hapless harvesters eager for the first fruits of the year. The red-tailed hawks mated and made their nests in the pines and their chicks ate the mice that abandoned the settlers’ houses for the greater bounty of the fields and pastures. The bears woke up hungry and shambled to the river’s edge to gorge on salmon and stretched out on the grassy banks in the sun and watched their cubs like wardens. In the barns the cows’ ribs showed through their hides and their hollow eyes watched until the settlers led them at last to the pastures that sprouted shoots of sustenance.

  In the spring of 1778, George Walker died and was buried in the Church of All Hollows, Barking-by-the-Tower. The news wound out from London via Liverpool, Nova Scotia, and on the distant Miramichi there was a woman who wept bitterly to receive it. After his return to England, Walker had always intended to look up General Taylor and plead reconciliation with his daughter but had never found the opportunity. His labours at Nepisiguit had gone largely unnoticed by the administrators in Halifax, and unrewarded by their loftier superiors in Whitehall. But like the proper pirate he was, he eluded his foes or took broadsides without sinking or found a treasure when all was lost and in the end succumbed to apoplexy and sailed off in his own bed.

  That same spring, on a particularly soft evening, when John Blake was fishing off the bank, Charlotte had heard the sound of a whippoorwill in the woods above the cabin, and she had responded with her own best whippoorwill call and believed she heard the bird call back. But whippoorwills will do that, she thought.

  WHEN SUMMER CAME to the Miramichi, it would bring a rush of growth that was the botanical equivalent of insanity. The stern geometry of trunks and twigs, the curve of hillsides and the sharp edges of riverbanks were swept to bedlam by a mad surge of rebirth. Charlotte would hoe around the hills of André Landry’s potatoes, the offspring of the seedlings he had shyly passed to her as she said goodbye to the People that June day in 1776 and passed a last time down the trail to George Walker’s now vanished house. She would undertake to hoe as early in the morning as she could, but a woman with two children—one still nursing—could count on interruptions. When the sun had passed the meridian, she would still be in the patch, her clothes soaked with sweat, the deer flies gathered from miles around to buzz her head and whir in her masses of tangled hair. They were good potatoes, as André had assured her they would be, and would have been better if he and his hoe could only have followed them.

  In the summer of 1778, Charlotte Blake gave birth to a child she called Mary Ann, whose hair was a blaze of red like her mother’s and soon grew to frame blue eyes that were born looking into the distance and were still looking there well into the following century.

  That summer, too, Blake built another room on the cabin. Young Peter and George Henderson came across the river to saw lumber and help raise the beam. When they were finished, it was a pretty snug little addition, perhaps more solidly made than the house itself, and would provide a bedroom for the children as they grew.

  In the summers, American privateers resumed their customary raiding along the coast. The river traffic brought news of every pillaging and burning, actual or feared. Many families were fled now, following Davidson and Cort, who had gone first, having the most to lose. But Alexander and William Wishart had returned to resume fishing. In the summer of 1779, Mi’kmaq from far upriver, not so easily cowed as had been thought, burned the Wisharts out. The brothers boarded the Viper for Quebec, where they were to take commissions under General Haldimand.

  Late that same summer, the frantic ringing of a Henderson bell brought the Blakes to the shore at midnight. There were flames across the river at their farm. Blake gathered his weapons and set out by boat. By moonlight, Charlotte could see the boats of the Murdochs crossing too. But the Hendersons, as it transpired, were too many and too alert to lose all and Blake was back before dawn.

  “These were no privateers,” he said.

  AUTUMNS ON THE MIRAMICHI had the poignancy of autumns in all the northerly colonies: bursting with a riot of colour, the fields a bountiful gift of harvest, the time before freeze-up ticking loudly like a warning. Charlotte often thought of the burnished seduction of late fall as a whispering lover who proposed a few more hours together before he was gone forever. She stooked the dry hay in the field and carried it to the mound and stood with her husband when they were finished to assess whether it should keep a cow alive until Christmas. Inside the house, two casks of John Blake’s spruce beer sat bubbling in the larder and the shelves above them were heavy with tea and molasses and sugar loaves and flour and whale oil. Janet Murdoch had learned cheese making at St. John Island and she in turn taught Charlotte. A dozen hard cheeses joined the other provisions.

  When the hay was in and the wood was cut in the autumn of 1779, John Blake made a last venture with Daniel Ross to Liverpool on the sea coast southwest of Halifax. The hull of Le Vairon was filled with the best oak and here was a last bounty for the year and, provided they did not cross paths with privateers, a chance to
buy better tools.

  Wioche had appeared at dusk one day as though he had materialized from the earth. Charlotte had run to where he stood at the forest edge, had taken his two hands in hers but had not invited him into the cabin. Behind the cover of tall timbers, they had shared the events of their lives. She fingered the fresh braid of sweetgrass he had given her while he explained that the raids and attacks had been planned by the American privateers to rid the river of the settlers so they could claim the land for themselves. His people helped because they, too, had been attacked by the British and it was the wish of the grand council to even the score.

  “There are many changes for the People,” he’d said. “The British are taking our land.” The moon was high over the river when he rose to leave and reminded her to watch for the signs—“the rabbit skin is thick, the air sacs on the fish are long, winter will be hard”—and then he’d added, “You won’t be alone.”

  SHE’D WATCHED the seaward stretch of the river anxiously in the days that followed. Then on the second of October, the little ketch had appeared, its boat in tow. And John Blake paddled triumphantly to shore with a nanny goat in the cargo. “We shall have milk even if we lose the cow,” he’d told her.

  Winters on the Miramichi made a dignified arrival when the land had given up its growth and lay still to await its fate. The air would seem suspended, motionless, as quiet as a settler family at grace until, as the Mi’kmaq tale allowed, Summer fulfilled her end of the bargain and the first skiffs of snow settled on the fields under grey skies. Blake Brook was always first to freeze, then the salty waters of the river took refuge under a thin sheet of ice that thickened every night. Finally, usually in December but some years much earlier, the snows would come and cover the land and everything on it.

  Winter was a respite from hard labour and an invitation to gather in houses, sample one another’s beer and talk by the warmth of the fire. In the winter of 1779, such talk turned to the rebel war to the south, to the raids now suspended on account of weather, and of course to the Indians. One Dougal Shank, whose claim was that he had been a preacher in Scotland, had constructed a rough shelter on the north bank of the river not far upstream of the Hendersons. He was a humourless man, not easy to warm to, who neither traded nor farmed. His high, beetling brow and thin line of a mouth lent credence to the strictness of his religious beliefs.