The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor

by Sally Armstrong

  The other men in the room exchange amused glances while Charlotte upbraids the noisy Hierlihy. The man himself is so astounded he shuts up entirely. He’s never heard a woman talk to anyone like this, much less to a former sergeant in the Prince of Wales American Regiment. Just as Charlotte had heard of him and his ways, he has heard of her, the widow who was the first woman to settle here and who by the age of thirty-two is the mother of five children from three fathers, all dead. He doesn’t really know what he was expecting of “that woman,” but this red-haired beauty with the trim body of a girl and the language of a logger mesmerizes him. Though he fights back, of course. It’s his nature.

  “What, you think you deserve these oversized lots on the river and that we should be satisfied with a grant half your size? How will the place prosper if it begins with injustice?”

  The reference to justice catches her off guard and for a time she just glares at him. But it is the beginning of a conversation that carries on and off for the rest of the meeting, and indeed, when he says he will see her safely home, all during the trek back to Lot Eight from the meeting point at the marshlands.

  “I don’t need a man to be safe,” she replied curtly but walks along the path with him anyway.

  He returns to visit the next day, and she invites him for tea. As much as he irritates her, she is always fascinated by the details of a person’s life, the events that influence a man’s behaviour. And soon she finds herself putting the kettle on again and asking for his story.

  As she guesses from his accent, he was born in Ireland and immigrated to Middletown, Connecticut, as a youngster with his family in 1753. He says they were descendants of Dermot O’Hurley, the archbishop of Cashel, who was tortured and hanged by the neck in Dublin in 1584 for refusing to embrace the Queen’s religion. Charlotte contemplates the parallels in the lives of William’s and Philip Hierlihy’s ancestors. “Mr. Wishart’s ancestor was martyred by a Scottish Queen for being Protestant,” she says, “and yours was murdered by an English Queen for being Catholic, less than forty years apart. It’s not unlike the turning tides of the Indians, the Acadians, the Loyalists and the old settlers over the last three decades right here in New Brunswick. Longevity seems very much attached to point of view.”

  And Hierlihy actually laughs with her, enjoying the interesting twists of her mind, if not the comparison with the family history of her dead husband.

  She discovers he’s descended from Milesian Irish Celts who, over time, altered the name O’Hurley to several variations that ultimately became Hierlihy. Their Catholic faith was altered as well. His father, Cornelius, was a lieutenant in the British Regiment when they came to Connecticut, and just two years after arriving in the New World he was killed in a battle with the French not far from this very place. Philip’s older brother, Timothy, became the family patriarch, and when he married a woman from the Church of England, the entire family abandoned the Catholic faith and became Anglicans.

  His stories of life in Connecticut paint a picture of a prosperous, thriving colony that dissolved into a violent crucible between those who favoured the King of England and those who wanted to become masters of their own fate. When war became unavoidable, he followed Timothy into battle with the Prince of Wales American Regiment.

  He then treats her to some of the most gruesome accounts of battle she has ever heard, as if her attention has released something in him. Hiding in the woods to escape the rebels, some of the men starved, others froze to death, and their lingering cries for help still torment him. When they attacked with muskets and bayonets, sometimes they were unable to strike a killing blow. “The moaning and shrieking, the bleeding and emptying of bowels, the puking and choking—that’s what men did to men. We marched and attacked and retreated and marched again week after week, year after year. The innards of men—friends and foes—stains upon your person and squelching under your boot is a sight that stays with me.”

  His hatred for the men who chased his family from their homestead in Connecticut is palpable. And Charlotte begins to understand his festering resentment of the sour welcome he received when he arrived on the Miramichi as a soldier who felt he had saved the land from marauding privateers.

  “Your brother is said to have started a settlement in Nova Scotia. Why did you not go with him there?” Charlotte asks.

  “Most of the men in the disbanded regiment were granted lots of land near Frederick Town, but my brother knew about this parcel of land in Nova Scotia and asked for the grant especially. I went with him for a time. It’s a good place he has in Antigonish. But a lad I served with, Daniel Menton, knew of this Miramichi River, and said he would lay up logs for a tilt and we would prosper from the fish and the timber. I decided to come with him.”

  As he says his goodbyes that evening, having stayed past tea, and through all the preparations for supper, and sat down at the table with her children, she thought, No wonder he’s dangerous with the rum on him. That is one lonely, and wounded, soul.

  He doesn’t settle for one visit, but comes the next day and the next and the one after that, till she starts assigning him chores in the garden as she can’t sit still and humour his conversation.

  And inside two weeks—though she knows full well that part of her attraction for Hierlihy are the lots that she owns—when he asks her to marry him, she says yes.

  In early September, they stand together with Pad’s daughter Elizabeth, John’s children, John, Polly and Robert, and little William Wishart in front of James Horton, Justice of the Quorum for Northumberland County in the newly named Parish of Newcastle, and are duly married according to law.

  When they return to the cabin, Charlotte slips the legal document in with her treasured books and marks the date on the wall. Married to Philip Hierlihy, September 11, 1787.

  PHILIP’S FIRST TASK as her husband is to build another addition. A bedchamber for the girls is tacked on, making the place look like an old man’s squashed top hat. New beds are built, without mattresses but laden with furs to cushion the boards and warm the children on them.

  By October 1787, she is pregnant again, and the New Year is hardly begun when she discovers John Humphrys is claiming ownership of Lot Fifty-three, the very lot she bought from him just seven months earlier. She threatens to harm the man if he doesn’t quit the property, and when he defies her, she sends a memorial to John O’Dell, the provincial secretary in Frederick Town, dated January 7, 1788, demanding retribution.

  She capitalizes the words she wishes to emphasize, penning her blunt demand in flourishing letters that make the page look more like a work of art than an accusation. She reads it aloud to Philip before dispatching it. “I shall sign my name as Charlotte Blake since that is the name under which I made the purchase,” she says.

  Honourable Sir,

  You have Desired me to send a Certificate of what cleared land was on No. 53 South side of the river but the man will not sign it for me as he means to try to get located for it himself after the Selling of it and Giving a Deed which Sir you have in your office which is Drawn by Mr. Ledwiny and Signed by John Wilson Esquire.

  Honourable Sir I hope you will see me testifyed in this affair and have me Registrate for said Lot as it seems to me that he have a mind to try to cut me out of it after I buying of and paying for it.

  Charlotte Blake

  N.B. The man is John Humphrys

  She’s still waiting for a reply when the first Hierlihy child arrives in the midst of a howling nor’easter in June. She names him Philip, after his father, who behaves as though this is the first child who has ever been born, despite the evidence to the contrary all around him.

  Jimmy, now a strapping young man, announces that he’s leaving them for a job in Frederick Town the same week as Philip gets himself appointed assessor of rates and surveyor of roads for Northumberland County Middle District. Philip makes so much fuss of his new station in life that she feels like she’s barely had a moment to acknowledge that Jimmy is leaving them. The
morning he sets off, though, Charlotte makes him a gift of William Wishart’s winter boots, and his great coat. And for a time he hugs her like the colt of a boy he once was.

  Soon after, Philip is sworn in by the grand jury in the newly established premises for the Court of General Session up by the forks. Watching him, Charlotte’s pride is somewhat tempered by the fact that he appears to like his new title overmuch, the status it confers more than the duty. She’s been keeping him off the rum, but she can’t deny that his bad temper and brawling style in public threaten the position that is so clearly dear to him.

  Barely a year after Philip’s birth, the second Hierlihy child arrives. Eleanor Helene raises the tally to three children under the age of four and five over the age of eight. Philip wears his large family like a badge of honour, the beginnings of his empire.

  That same winter William Davidson dies from the effects of exposure after falling through the ice in the river. It’s a painful loss for Charlotte. She trusted him, enjoyed his company and found comfort in the fact that he clearly approved of her nonconformist behaviour. Not so her husband, who has begun to remind her incessantly that she should behave more like the wife of a man with a position in the government.

  Although Philip disapproves, she continues to go with Elizabeth, and sometimes Janet Murdoch, to the Indian camp to help the women and children. It’s on the way back from the camp one spring day, with baby Eleanor tied to her mother’s back—Charlotte, a little short of breath as she is pregnant again—that Elizabeth mentions that she wants to stop at Duncan Robertson’s lot to deliver a parcel.

  “A parcel of what?” Charlotte wants to know.

  She’s taken aback when Elizabeth confesses that she’s made strawberry tarts for the handsome young man on Lot Five, who came to the river after serving with the 42nd Black Watch regiment in the American War. He’d recently been appointed by the government to act as the attorney on the river. Elizabeth’s cheeks turn crimson when her surprised mother asks what such a gift is meant to convey to Duncan Robertson.

  Charlotte can’t imagine how the girl has managed to make strawberry tarts without anyone noticing. But remembering the moments she stole with Pad as a girl, she knows that a young couple can and will find a way. And here she thought fifteen-year-old Elizabeth had just been slipping away from the cabin because she wanted a rest from incessant child care. Unlike her rambunctious sister Polly, Elizabeth is shy; she’s sweet with the younger children and is always an adoring daughter. It never occurred to Charlotte that she could be seeking the company of a man.

  Elizabeth looks at the ground, shuffles her feet in the pine needles and says in a barely audible voice, “I want to marry Duncan.” Charlotte whirls around to face her so fast, little Eleanor almost swings right out of the sling.

  “Marry? You really want to marry this man?”

  Charlotte stands on the bank of the river, as still as the trees all around her, confronting her first-born child, the daughter who was conceived in England and born in Nepisiguit and has been by her side for almost sixteen years. Other local girls Elizabeth’s age have become wives, she knows, but she is utterly perplexed that she has missed the cues that her girl was even interested in men. Elizabeth is looking stricken and so guilty that Charlotte, finally, simply has to laugh and give her blessing. She is the last person on Earth to want to stand in the way of love, knowing how short a season it is in bloom.

  The day before the nuptials, Charlotte calls her daughter to her bedchamber so they can be alone, and she twists two strands of silver into a bracelet around her delicate wrist.

  “This was your father’s. He wore it with the pride of a man who dared to dream of a larger future. I saved these strands for you to wear at your wedding. When you look at them, spare a thought for the father who would have smiled on your sweet face and loved you just as much as I do.”

  On September 22, 1791, a very pregnant Charlotte, her husband, Philip, and their brood of seven children travel to Bettvin, known to some as Bay du Vin, to witness the ceremony, performed by James Horton Esquire, now a Justice of the Peace. Charlotte’s heart lurches only a little when he pronounces that “Elizabeth Willisams and Duncan Robertson, both residents of the Parish of Newcastle, are married by law.”

  The wall at the back of the cabin is now marked with births, deaths, and the marriage day of her first-born child.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Miramichi

  1791

  For a brief time, there is one person less in the cabin, but James Hierlihy is born just before the river freezes over in November 1791. Space has become an intolerable issue at Blake Brook. Mealtime is chaotic as six children vie for their portion of stew, and the seventh one cries for his mother’s breast. Bedtime is worse. They’re packed in, two and three to a bed, with the infant James in a cradle. Philip has managed to find another homeless boy, Donovan, to tend the livestock. He sleeps in the shed, not the house, but they have to find him a place at the table.

  Elizabeth has been coming every day to help her, treading the well-worn path from her “marriage home,” as she likes to call the tilt Duncan has built on Lot Five, to the Hierlihys’ collection of huts. But now she is expecting her first child, and her mother decides she has to wean herself away from her support. Elizabeth cannot be expected to tend to her brothers and sisters when she’ll be feeding her own child. So Charlotte decides to seek a girl to help with the children. What’s one more under her roof ?

  Still, when she calculates the crops she can grow that spring and the number of mouths she has to feed, the tally tells her they are on the short side of even. So they rent more land, plant more potatoes, buy more livestock. She knows of one family that sold a cow in the fall to buy eight bushels of potatoes; another traded three sheep for a half a hundredweight of flour. She doesn’t want to be in that boat, and she likes to remind her husband that she is resourceful. “I once ground buds and leaves into the grain to make it stretch when the crop produced so little it might as well have failed.”

  But another daughter, Honnor, is born in February 1793, and life begins to feel like a constant game of stretching. A month later, Elizabeth makes Charlotte a grandmother when she gives birth to Duncan Junior.

  One evening after she has visited the new mother, and spent some time on the snowshoe journey back thinking about the future her children and grandchildren now face, Charlotte tells Philip about the place William Wishart visited, about the huge meadows, the easy access to the river, the ocean teeming with fish. The fact that no one lives around there but the People in their camp, and maybe one lonely hermit. It’s a place they can settle their entire family and start anew.

  Philip’s expression is sober as he listens to her. “It’s not that the prospect is unappealing, Charlotte,” he says. “And it may be what we turn our minds to achieving. But we cannot quit this land until the deeds are signed to us, or all that we’ve worked so hard to accumulate will be lost.”

  She knows he is right.

  But in the meantime, she lures him on an adventure to find this Tabisintack. “If William told me right, the journey there and back will take a day, the weather being fine.” Though Philip can be a hard man, he knows that now is not the time to deny a woman with so many children a little hope.

  On a fine day in May, they leave their brood with Elizabeth and set out for what Philip has jokingly started to call the promised land. Going by canoe means they don’t have to fear a keel getting caught in the sandbars of the shoals; they slip across them with ease and paddle along to the north side of the bay without incident. The voyage through the open water thrills Charlotte, though they stay close to shore, avoiding the swell of the sea.

  JUST AFTER MIDDAY, they spot the opening to the Tabisintack River, just as William had described it. There are half a dozen islands, separated by deep water, layering the entrance to the river. Long sand dunes lick into the sea and dense seagrass covers the islands. Coves and creeks along the banks beg for exploring and fish swim
in massive schools just under the surface of the water. Flocks of ducks and geese dot a huge salt marsh.

  As soon as she lays her eyes on this land, Charlotte knows it is the place they must settle. She also knows, as though she’s been here a hundred times before, exactly where the house will stand. The setting is magnificent: a point surrounded by water on three sides, the site for the house a half-acre back from the water, safely away from the rising tides and with a clear view to the meadow behind it and the wide-open salt marsh.

  “A two-storey house,” she tells Philip as he paddles them in to shore, “with proper rooms up the ladder for the children and, on the lower floor, a place to cook and sit by the hearth, and our own bedchamber.” So anxious is she to put her feet on this land, she’s out of the canoe too soon, sloshing in knee-deep water, nearly losing her balance.

  They wander up and down the river’s edge, cross the marshland to the woods, measure out the lots they will need for each of the children when they are grown. She thinks she sees sign of the Indian camp on the other side of the river but isn’t certain, though the acrid scent of old fire mixes with the sharp whiff of brine in the air.

  A soft wind blows low to the ground, which turns her thoughts to William. How reverently he spoke of this place. She looks out over the water and wonders if he’s out there watching over her, and could possibly be happy that she’s here.

  Philip interrupts her reverie. “If we leave this minute, Charlotte, we can make it back to Black Brook before dark.”

  “It’s Blake Brook,” she corrects, for the thousandth time, as she reluctantly follows him back to their boat.

  THE YEAR 1795 turns out to be a watershed for Charlotte. On April 15, she writes in her diary:

  I’ll be forty years old this month. Hard to believe I’ve been here for twenty years. From wilderness to settlement, from isolation to community, from a girl to a mother of nine children and already a grandmother. And at last the new Elections Act says land-holding women can vote so I will cast my ballot with the men after all.