by Ann Birch
“You have found my favourite place.” The Colonel had come up behind her. He took secaturs from a bench and cut a bouquet of pink and crimson buds, which he presented to her with a flourish.
“You have no idea how much I have missed English roses,” she said, breathing in their fragrance.
“I brought cuttings myself from England when I was there three years ago. They have done well. Let us rest here awhile and enjoy them.” They sat down on a pretty seat under a tree. “I often come here to meditate.”
She took a good look at him as they sat side by side. He was, she knew, about sixty-five years of age, though he did not look as much, and still handsome. His dress was rustic: buckskin breeches, sturdy boots, and a loose shirt tied with a string at the neck. Yet no one would mistake him for anything but a gentleman. There was the accent, the air, the deportment, the something that stamped him as such.
He seemed anxious to talk about the people they both knew in Toronto. Her dear Colonel Fitzgibbon was “an Irish peasant with no small measure of courage”. Mrs. Powell was “a biddy of immeasurable ignorance”. Archdeacon Strachan had “the nerve to criticize me for taking two hundred acres of land for every fifty that I assign to settlers”. And as for the new Superintendent of Indian Affairs, “I have heard about the infamous duel. And I remember his father, William Jarvis, whom I had the misfortune to know when I first came here with the Simcoes in 1792. He was a wastrel and an incompetent. But what is your opinion of the son, Mrs. Jameson?”
“I like him, sir. He has proven to be a kind and generous friend.”
“Well, I’m out of touch with modern views. I have not yet learned to like a murderer.”
“And if I may say so, sir, you have not yet learned to forgive one’s trespasses.”
The Colonel’s face looked for a minute like that of the fearsome cougar. Then he said, “Touché,” got up, pruned a rose bush or two and reseated himself.
A bell from the roof of the main building sounded at that moment, and the Colonel laughed. “My courtiers summon us. We dine early.” As they walked towards the house, he continued, “I say courtiers because I am sovereign here. I have twenty-eight townships, six hundred and fifty thousand acres of land, of which one hundred thousand are cleared and cultivated. I think I have worked as hard as any monarch of the realm. Or harder.”
Anna’s host arranged the roses himself in a green and white earthenware pitcher and set them in the middle of the dining room table. He took a place at the end of the table and motioned Jennings to seat Anna beside him. Mrs. Jennings brought in green pea soup. “Everything is fresh,” the Colonel said as he ladled the steaming contents of the tureen into bowls. “You cannot imagine how I longed for a garden and a poultry shed when I first came back to Upper Canada in 1802. But for five years, I had only a blanket-coat and an axe. I slept upon the bare earth, cooked raccoons and rabbits, squirrels if we could get them, for twenty working men, and cleaned my own boots.” He finished off two bowls of soup and wiped his mouth. “And now let us see what Mrs. Jennings has prepared next.”
Surprise. A roasted, stuffed hen and a basket of cornbread. But it was savoury and good. And there was a perfect dessert: fresh raspberries and thick cream.
Over the meal, the Colonel had finished a second bottle of wine. His speech was slower now but still coherent. “What do you think of the temperance movement in this province?” he asked as he uncorked a third bottle. Then, without waiting for her answer, “Damn cold water drinking societies.”
“Many people would agree with you.” Not the time to give her own opinion on the prevalence of drunkenness in Upper Canada. “It has been an excellent meal, thank you. I am grateful that squirrels did not become a permanent item on your menu.”
“Squirrels were a favourite item at Mrs. Simcoe’s dinner parties in Niagara. Just like lamb, she used to say, and she did use a good deal of mint sauce to season the carcasses.”
“A remarkable lady, from all I hear. They say she adapted so well to life in the wilderness that she was broken-hearted when she went back to England.” “There was no place for the Simcoes to stay when they came to Upper Canada forty-five years ago. They had brought with them a tent that they purchased from Captain Cook’s estate. I was a youth of twenty-one, the Governor’s private secretary as you perhaps know, and I lived with them in that canvas home.”
“Close quarters, I imagine.”
“Well, it was not an average tent, I assure you. It had room for their bedchamber, a dining and reception area, and a small corner for me. But I knew everything that went on in those quarters. I was closer to that dear lady than to any other being on this earth.”
The Colonel downed a glassful of wine from the third bottle. He wiped his forehead, which had become flushed. “The Governor was often absent on official business, and he left me to look after her. I arranged her dinner parties at Navy Hall, I paddled her back and forth across the river to Fort Niagara in the sunlight and the moonlight, I rode with her in rainstorms and gave her my cloak to keep her dry, I held her in my arms when her baby died...”
“You were fond of her.”
“I loved her. But she never knew. I never told her.” He sat, silent, staring at the tablecloth. “I wish now, oh how I wish that I had said something. But I used to hear her say to others, ‘Dear Mr. Talbot provided these sandwiches for tea,’ or ‘Dear Mr. Talbot made sassafras tea for me when I had the ague,’ or ‘Dear Mr. Talbot is such a comfort to me.’ I made myself believe that she would not have said these things so freely if I had been more to her than an upper servant.”
He leaned toward Anna, and took her hand in an iron grasp. “You must never repeat this to anyone.”
“And this is why you have never married?”
“I have never loved, nor could even tolerate, another woman. Though I have enjoyed your company, Mrs. Jameson. Indeed, you are the first lady to cross my threshold in a quarter of a century.”
“Perhaps you have accomplished in your lifetime what you could never have achieved with the cares and burdens of a wife and large family. You have planted civilization in this brave new world, and that must make you happy.”
“Why, yes, I’m happy here,” and then the old man sighed and reached again for the wine bottle.
“He is not really happy being alone,” she said to Mrs. Jennings the next morning, as she ate her solitary breakfast of poached eggs, hot milk and cornbread. Her host, as usual, was busy with his interviews of the “land-pirates”.
“Perhaps not, ma’am, but he has made his choice.”
“He has honour, power, obedience, but where are the troops of friends, the love which should also accompany old age?”
“I’m thankful, ma’am, I don’t have to make cornbread for the troops.”
No newspapers came to the chateau during her six-day visit, but Anna found plenty to do when her host was occupied. She revised her book about Toronto. She had decided to call it Winter Studies, and now she got started on the first chapters of its sequel, Summer Rambles.
And she explored the Colonel’s vast acreage. One morning she looked over the high cliff on the east side of the house and saw a precipitous descent through a wild ravine, along the bottom of which was a stream that led into the lake. It would be a wonderful place to sketch, but how would she get down?
“I have an idea,” Mrs. Jennings said when Anna broached the problem to her. “Come with me.”
They went into the covered porch where the fearsome cougar reigned. The housekeeper threw aside a pile of farm implements to find an ancient chest. It had once been covered with fine leather, and the Colonel’s family crest was still discernible under its lock.
Mrs. Jennings rummaged for a minute or two. “Here we are.” She produced from its depths a pair of short trousers in the style of thirty or forty years ago, gaiters and shoes, a crumpled smock.
“Perfect,” Anna said, and thought of Mrs. Sykes’s same comment on the ballgown she had worn on the fateful night that
had freed her from Robert and launched her into a new life. “Perfect,” she repeated.
In her host’s old clothes and with her hair tucked up into a low-crowned hat belonging to Jennings, she was ready. A satchel over her shoulders, she made her way down into the ravine, clutching at small branches to keep herself from sliding.
Soon she was on the lakeshore, where she found trunks and roots of trees half buried in the sand. She sat down on one of the trunks and took out her sketchbook and graphite pencils.
The most surprising object in her landscape was a huge tree that had fallen headlong over the cliff. Its long roots remained attached to the cliff above, so that its position was reversed. The top hung downwards, dead, bare of leaves, but the upturned roots formed a platform on which new earth had accumulated, and new vegetation sprang forth. Tall green shoots flourished, fresh and leafy.
If Heaven can do so much for a dead tree, what can it do for the human heart? I will not be like Talbot, she vowed. I will not live a solitary, blighted life. I have plenty of work, but I want love, too. And why should I not have it? Why should I ever despair? If I have a chance at love, I’ll take it. Carpe diem.
She ate the cornbread, cheese curds and peas in pods that the housekeeper had put in her satchel. She did her sketches. She waved at the Indians who paddled by her on the calm waters of the lake. It was mid-afternoon when she scrambled up the ravine again, dirty and dishevelled from grabbing at small tree trunks to hoist herself upwards.
The next morning, the Colonel put her trunk into the back of the vehicle he had ordered and introduced her to her Irish driver and guide. As the cart began the long ride down the hill, she waved goodbye to her host. They turned into the main road, and she looked up again to see Mrs. Jennings and “the brat” waving at her from another part of the cliff.
As she waved back, a wayward line strayed into her mind. “I have measured out my life with cornmeal cakes,” she murmured. It sounded like the line of a poem, but she’d leave someone else to write it. At the moment, she needed to ready herself for the road ahead.
THIRTY-ONE
Sam and Sir Francis had left the steamer at Kempenfeldt Bay in Lake Simcoe. There they piled Sir Francis’s belongings into an oxcart for the journey to the barracks at Penetanguishene, where they would embark in a canoe for Manitoulin Island.
“Oh, my god, my god.” The Governor held his hands to his head. His once-perfect curls were messed and greasy. “How much longer, Jarvis, how much longer?”
Sam gritted his teeth. He had heard these phrases, five hundred? a thousand times? since they had disembarked six hours earlier. And that didn’t include a count of the moans and groans on the stagecoach between Toronto and the Holland Landing. Or the cries of anguish and the pukings into a pail on the steamship from the Landing across Lake Simcoe.
“Easy, man,” Sam said to the stocky, red-faced driver as the oxen sank into another rut, and the occupants of the wagon struggled to keep from being thrown out and crushed by the wheels.
“Oh, my god, my—”
“Here, Papa, have a chocolate.” Henry Bond Head pushed a tinselled box towards his father. “There’s one of those ginger-filled ones you like so much. You always say ginger is good for the digestion.”
Sam had at first thought the boy might be a copy of his father. He certainly looked like him, though at fourteen he still had teeth that had not become brown from cigar smoking. To Sam’s surprise, the lad had actually been a great help. On the steamer, for example, he had provided a diversion just at the point when Sam had seriously contemplated throwing His Majesty’s representative overboard.
“Look, look, Papa,” Henry had said. “The Lake Monster has just leapt from the water. You can still see the ripples from his tail if you look hard. It’s something you can put in your memoirs.” And while “Papa” left off gagging into the bucket and ran to the stern of the steamer, Henry had actually winked at Sam.
Sir Francis popped two of the chocolates into his mouth as the driver negotiated their passage over a bridge of logs that covered a narrow riverbed. “Bit of a wrong’un, that Gov of yours,” the man said to Sam, who perched on the box beside him. Fortunately, his words drowned in the snorts of the oxen as they heaved their burden up a small incline.
“How much longer, Jarvis?”
“Hang on, sir. I believe that we’re about—yes, look!” Sam pointed to a low stone building just visible through a partly cleared grove of pine trees. “It’s the Officers’ Quarters.”
They lurched to the front door, the bundles of luggage heaving perilously forward as the driver pulled the team to a halt. A British captain rushed out to help Sir Francis down from the cart. “Bring on the brandy, I think every bone in my body is broken,” the Governor said, falling forward into the officer’s outstretched arms. He had unbuttoned his fancy waistcoat during the journey, and his thick cravat—the size of a small tablecloth—had come loose. Supported and held upright by the captain, he made for the front door of the building. Over his shoulder, he said, “See to my luggage, Jarvis, and get those savages and frogs of yours busy. We’ll embark as soon as I can get my aching back and my digestion in order.”
A couple of hours without the complaints. Hallelujah. But there was plenty to do. Sam noted with pleasure that behind the Officers’ Quarters, two long birchbark canoes were pulled up onto the sand, ready for loading. Jacob Snake and a band of voyageurs stood on the pier. He had asked Jacob to hire them. Some of them were smoking, and the others seemed to be enjoying a joke.
Sam was always a bit wary of voyageurs. They were usually half-breeds, and they had their own language, a mixture of Chippewa and French dialects. They also had their own kingdom, the expanse of Lake Huron glimmering in the early afternoon sunshine. Once the canoes got under way, they would be masters of their universe. As Sam strode onto the pier, his Indian friend moved forward to greet him. “Jacob,” Sam said, “I’m so glad to see you again.”
“And I to meet you, Nehkik.” Jacob pressed Sam’s hand with his strong fingers. His long black hair was tied back with a red cotton kerchief. His face had filled out since Sam had seen him in the maple bush in early spring.
“You have been well, Jacob?”
“Yes. I marry again, Nehkik. My new wife is a good woman. My children like her. She likes them. And we plant corn again on Snake Island. Good harvest means food for the winter.” He pulled from his skin vest a small corncob pipe and a deerskin packet of tobacco. “For you,” he said.
“I need that, my friend.” He and Jacob sat on the edge of the pier and inhaled the fragrant smoke while they basked in the sunshine. It was lovely to be silent for a few blessed moments.
“And now, Jacob, to work.” Sam called out to the other men. “Lend a hand here.”
It took six voyageurs along with Jacob to unload the baggage from the oxcart. The Governor had brought a cumbersome walnut travelling stand with a tin-lined compartment to hold water for his daily ablutions. There was a wine cooler set on four sturdy mahogany legs, and with it, a block of ice, for which they’d made a stop at a Kempenfeldt Bay ice-house. There were three dozen bottles of champagne and cases of assorted brandies and sherry. There was a set of Duesbury Derby china, each piece of which had been wrapped separately in velvet. And a huge epergne in silver, “to impress any savage chieftains we may have to entertain at table,” Sir Francis had told Sam on the steamer from the Holland Landing.
Finally, Jacob wrestled from the bottom of the cart a huge sloping circle of tin, painted a delicate sky blue, with a small round indenture in its middle. “What is this, Nekhik?” he asked as he struggled to pull it from the cart.
“A bathtub. You see them sometimes in a white man’s house, usually in the bedchamber. A servant will carry hot water upstairs and pour it into the middle, then the master will sit on the edge of the tub and put his feet into the water.”
Jacob shrugged and laughed. “Why would white man wash in a blue dish when there is a whole blue lake to wash in?�
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“Good question, for which I have no rational answer.” Sam grabbed one side of the bathtub; Jacob took the other, and the two of them struggled with it to the luggage canoe. The craft was already full. And they would still have to find room to wedge in eight paddlers, a bowsman and a steersman. “Absolutely no way we can get this thing into that space,” Sam said. “Let me be the one to tell Sir Francis. It will give me pleasure.”
Sam put his portmanteau and fishing equipment into the canoe on top of the Governor’s belongings, then checked out the willow poles, rifles and tents that were stowed in the bow. Everything was in readiness.
Their job done, Jacob and the voyageurs drifted off for a snooze in the shade of a huge oak tree. Sam left the tin tub on the sand beside the baggage canoe and sat down again on the pier.
Out in Georgian Bay, a heavy-built schooner had stopped, probably becalmed. A bateau manned by five rowers moved toward shore, perhaps to pick up some wine or other provisions from the Officers’ Mess.
He watched Henry Bond Head run up and down the beach with one of the Indians, a swarthy man, more than six feet tall, with a red and green embroidered band tied round his head, the ends falling in two exactly matched swaths down his back.
They had started an impromptu lacrosse match. Henry had obviously not played the game before, and the Indian was showing him how to pass the cedar ball by means of a stick made of green wood with a deerskin web just big enough to catch the ball from either side.
“Come, play with us, Jarvis!” Henry called to him. “It’s a ripping game! What do you call it?” he asked. And seeing the Indian did not understand, Henry pointed to the ball and stick and tried again. “What is it?”
“Baggataway.”
Sam had always fancied that he was pretty good at lacrosse, but when the Indian flipped the ball from his stick towards him, he managed to catch it only half the time. When it fell on the sand near Henry, the man scooped it into his web and tossed it to the boy, who lunged at it and missed. Finally, with a shrug and a muttered comment in his own language, the Indian ran off to join the voyageurs under the oak tree.