by Ann Birch
“The madeira has helped to warm me,” she said, pulling him towards her, “but I am still cold.”
“Lie down beside me, my dear Anna.” He encircled her waist— that waist he had dreamed of all day—and kissed her neck.
She laughed, a gurgle of sound in the darkness of their small enclosed world. “If you are my brave, you must get out of those clothes. Then we can be redskin to redskin.”
He began to laugh too. He pulled off his shirt, kicked off the knee-high moccasins he wore in the canoe, and threw his trousers aside. His body snuggled into hers, his prick stiff in the hollow between her legs.
“I am prepared for this moment,” she whispered. She moved on top of him. “Love me, love me.” Used to Mary’s reticence, he responded as he had never done before, thrusting himself inside her and abandoning himself to the moment.
“Now,” she said, as she rolled away from him, “it is my turn.” She pulled his hand towards her body. She smelled of lavender and her nipples were hard. Between her legs was a wetness that drove him onwards.
He wakened just as the darkness of the tent was changing to the shadowy light of pre-dawn. Anna was still asleep. He kissed her ear gently. She stirred. “Goodbye, love,” he said, and moved towards the opening of her tent. He looked out cautiously. All was still, and the only sound was the hoot of an owl in a pine nearby. He crept back to his own canvas home. Later, on his way down to the encampment, he picked a bunch of wild roses, still covered with raindrops, and laid them just inside the flap of her tent.
THIRTY-NINE
Breakfast that morning was a hasty affair, taken on a dining table of wet rock overlooking the lake. The voyageurs were anxious to get into the water and make up for the time lost by the rainstorm of the previous afternoon.
Anna arrived late, yawning as she arranged wayward strands of hair. She seemed to avoid Sam’s gaze. He went to the campfire and piled her tin plate with food. Their fingers touched as she took it from him.
She looked down on the tangle of grey strands fried in pork grease. “What is it?”
“Wa, ac,” Jacob said.
“Tripe de roche,” LeDuc said.
“A species of lichen pulled off this very rock,” Sam said.
“Well, I am hungry, and since there is nothing else, I’ll eat it.”
“Try a pinch of salt.” Sam passed a small shaker to her.
As they travelled, she lolled back in her seat. Instead of sketching and writing, she drifted into slumber, awakening only at midday when they came to the Bear Islands, so called, Jacob told her, because of the number of those animals found upon them. Along the shoreline of one island, the Indians had stuck a bear’s head on the bough of a dead pine.
“An offering to the Great Spirit,” Jacob said.
“Resurrection and new life,” Anna said.
“Am I missing something?” Sam asked.
“The bear emerges from the hibernation of winter into the warmth of spring and summer.”
“Sometimes I wish I’d paid more attention to the good Reverend Strachan when he tried to teach me literature.”
“You know enough about resurrection, dear sir, without the formal training.”
Sam blushed.
They paddled onward, and the sun rose high in the sky.
“On next island,” Jacob said, “we make lop stick for Mrs. Jameson.”
“What on earth is a lop stick? Some kind of new treat like this morning’s grey moss?”
“A rare honour,” Sam said, “given only to special people.” He added in a low voice so that only she heard him, “like you, my dear Anna.”
They came to a small island on which was a tall pine on a promontory near the water’s edge. Everyone studied it, the voyageurs back-paddling with their oars. “Perfect,” they agreed after several moments, and in an instant, they had anchored the canoes offshore with a long rope.
Sam and the men splashed through the shallow water to the rocky shoreline. Anna followed. They ran up the slope to the pine they had looked on so intently.
But before Anna caught up, the youngest crew member, Louis, was already halfway up it, an axe strapped to his back. At the top of the tree he left a tuft of green intact, then he came down slowly, lopping off all the branches as he descended.
“So now you understand what a lop stick is?” Sam asked.
“But what is its purpose?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. Let’s move up close and see what Jacob is carving on the trunk.”
She leaned in to look at the letters. WA-SAH—“It’s my Chippewa name! But why—”
“Because ever after,” Jacob said, bowing, “this island will be called Island of the Lady of the Bright Foam.”
“Wa, sah, ge, wah, no, qua’s Island,” all the men shouted. Then they discharged their rifles and shouted again, “Wah, sah, ge, wah, no, qua’s Island!”
As she made a quick sketch of the naked tree with its green chapeau, Anna said to Sam, “My own island. Truly, this is an honour I could not have imagined in my wildest dreams.”
They stopped just before sundown on a small island to the east of Christian Island. In the clefts and hollows of the rock were quantities of gooseberries and raspberries which the men set about picking as a special treat on this, the last night of their voyage.
Anna found a rock a few yards away from the encampment. She had some notes to make while the light was still good enough. What a book this would be, she reflected. It was sure to find a London publisher. Everyone wanted to know about the new land. As she sat on her rock, the fresh, scented breeze penetrated the mosquito netting around her face and cooled her cheeks. To the west was a sunset whose beauty even Turner or Canaletto would be challenged to capture. Yes, what a book this would be. More than an account of a physical journey, it was the chronicle of her move from death into life. An insensitive male critic might dismiss it as “female picaresque”, or some such term, but the reality would remain. This journey had been her renaissance.
Would she name names in it? No. She would say what she had to say, but she would not betray her husband, Mrs. Powell or the other biddies of Toronto society, or—Sam. Dear, dear Sam. Perhaps sometime, somewhere, she would tell Ottilie about him. In the book, she would speak only of his kindness.
And now, she thought, tucking her quill and inkwell away, I’ll wander about a bit, find a quiet pool to wash in, perhaps pick an herb or two for the cooks. And wait for the night to come.
To atone for the breakfast of lichen, the men were preparing an excellent meal: fried bass and a couple of dozen eggs which they had found in nests on the rocks. While Anna wandered off into the bush, Sam stayed near the fire and watched LeDuc crack the eggs into an iron skillet. Knowing that the men would sometimes eat eggs so nearly hatched that they could almost hear the chicks peep, he was relieved to see that these eggs had not been long in their nests. He hoped Anna would not inquire too closely into the source of this unexpected treat.
She came back in half an hour with some wild mint for the cook. “Eggs, what a delicious surprise.”
“I’m sure there’s some important symbolism I’m missing here?” Sam whispered, leaning towards her.
“Let’s just enjoy them on the culinary level. And think about the fact that there are far too many gulls in this world.”
So it was a happy meal. Sam brought out the bottles of wine he had removed from the government shed at Manitoulin and stowed away for this special occasion. He did not worry about the crew’s consumption of alcohol. The Department of Indian Affairs paid them well, they wanted the money, and they were smart enough to regulate their intake. As the men washed the plates in the lake afterwards, there was a bird’s cry over their heads. High above, a hawk hovered on the wind currents. Then down it came and perched on the bottom branch of a pine tree near where they were cleaning up.
“By god, I think it’s the hawk that broke loose,” Sam said. Jacob handed him a pair of deerskin gloves, and he donned them and walked
slowly towards it. It made no attempt to take flight, so he put his hands gently around its wings and returned it to the basket with its companion. “I can’t believe it,” he said to Anna, “it’s kept its mate in sight all the way. And now they are together again. Who would have thought a bird could have this commitment?”
The usual campfire songs began. Anna taught Jacob some chords on the Spanish guitar, and LeDuc marked the beat with tin spoons. Voices were loud—no doubt the influence of the wine— but everyone sang in tune.
“I’d better get to bed,” Anna said finally. “So much to be readied for tomorrow.” She spoke one soft word to Sam as she left the fireside. “Later.”
He was careful to stay with the voyageurs. It was well past midnight when they put the guitar and spoons away, stoked up the campfire to keep the mosquitoes off, and tipped the canoes over for shelter. He climbed to his tent, waited a half-hour, then looked out. All was quiet on the shore. The paddlers were fast asleep.
He went to Anna’s tent. She stirred when he pulled back the flap and sat up. They embraced, and he inhaled the lavender fragrance of her naked body.
“It’s the last time, love.”
“I know. You will go back to your nest with Mary and your fledglings, and I shall return to my brood in England. It must be so. But we have this night.”
So he did his best to pleasure her, but all the while he felt as he had on that far-off evening when the sheriff and his men marched him past the palisade of spiked poles and through the iron doors of the King Street jail. When their love-making was over, Anna tucked her body into his, and he held her close until her breathing deepened. Then he went to his solitary bed.
FORTY
The crew broke camp at dawn, and the canoes were afloat by six o’clock. At nine they sighted Penetanguishene—“place of falling sand”, as the Indians called it. When Sam had set out from here—in another life, it seemed— it had been the launching-place for all things possible. He had come a great distance since then, but now, as the canoes approached the settlement, he knew that there on the high sandbanks the fragile structure of his happiness would collapse. He had soared for a few days. Now he must return to his family and his debts.
He doubted that Crimshaw would find a sympathetic ear with the courts, if he pushed for revenge. But he’d taken money from the Indian funds. How long would it be before someone demanded a tally? He could still put it back. Perhaps he could sell Hazelburn and the rest of his extensive property. Toronto was booming now, and there were sure to be buyers.
His immediate concern was to dispatch a sergeant to find Anna accommodation in the town. The men at the barracks would expect him to stay with them. Then on the morrow, several of them would make their way to Coldwater, and thence by oxcart sixteen miles across the forest to the head of Lake Simcoe, by steamer to the Holland Landing, and from there by wagon to Toronto. He and Anna would not be alone together again.
He stood by as the voyageurs unloaded the luggage onto the quay. Anna was among them, giving out the portraits she had completed during the voyage. There was much laughter as the men passed the drawings from one to the other.
Now she handed Jacob his likeness. It was Sam’s favourite. Her other sketches were in pencil, but Jacob’s was in watercolours. It showed him standing in the stern of the canoe holding his long paddle, a beaded scarlet sash on his doeskin breeches, and his long black hair tied back with a twisted handkerchief.
While Sam watched, Jacob suddenly grasped Anna by the waist, hoisted her aloft in his strong brown arms, and swung her round and round as if she were a small child. Then he set her gently down on the wooden planks.
As all this unfolded, Anna noticed him watching her and came towards him breathless and laughing. “Farewell, best of my cavaliers,” she said, and she thrust into his hand one last sheet of paper.
He looked down at a portrait in charcoal of himself with the hawk in his hands. He’d had no idea... She must have done it last night while he waited on the shore to come to her. She had drawn him dressed in his knee-high moccasins and the buckskin shirt he wore when he travelled with Jacob. And at the bottom of the sketch she had written “Nehkik”.
“It’s the grown-up equivalent of the portrait Berczy did of me all those years ago,” he said, trying to hold back his tears. “I’ll frame it and put it on the wall beside the other.”
Then he noticed that she’d written something below “Nehkik”. He turned his back to the sun to see better. “What are these words?” he asked, and then... “Surely not, surely not...” He laughed. “Yes. Yes. You’ve written ‘Carpe diem’.”
It was his turn now. He pulled a pair of beaded moccasins from the sling that he wore over his shirt. He’d bought them from an Indian woman on the day when Anna had come ashore on Manitoulin Island. They would fit, he knew. He had memorized the shape and size of those feet when Camudwa carried her out of the water after the canoe race. The woman who had made them had sewn a water-lily in white beads on each toe.
Anna sat down then and there on the quay to put them on. She removed the ones she had worn during her voyage, rubbed and damp from her splashings through the water. As she started to pull the left one on, she stopped. “Something in the foot,” she said and reached in to extract a small piece of birchbark.
“There’s a message I cut into it with my knife,” Sam said. “Read it.”
“Carpe diem.” It was her turn now to laugh.
“The only Latin phrase I could remember from my school days.”
And those were his final words to her. He wanted so much to say something eloquent, something she might remember for the rest of her life, but his heart was too full. He could not force out the fine phrases.
So he looked down at her bright face for the last time. Then he turned away in the direction of the barracks.
AFTERWORD
Anna Jameson returned to England in 1837 and never came back to Canada. To support her needy family, she churned out popular books on art and literary criticism. She also lectured on women's rights and the need for hospital reform.
She had a large circle of prominent friends, including Lady Byron and Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Friends obtained for her a small pension from Queen Victoria, but she was always short of money. She died in 1860. Her Canadian memoir is still in print.
Robert Jameson sold the “pleasant little house” he built for himself and Anna and speculated in land in the west end of Toronto. Jameson Avenue commemorates his name. After retirement from public office in the late 1840s, he stopped paying the yearly settlement to Anna.
He died in 1854 of consumption or alcoholism, leaving his estate to two Toronto friends. Anna did not contest the will.
Samuel Jarvis struggled with debts to the end of his life. He eventually retired in disgrace from the Indian Department, accused of defrauding the government of money. But in his insouciant way, he continued to enjoy hunting and fishing and his active social life with Mary. Eventually he subdivided Hazelburn in an attempt to settle his debts. A major Toronto thoroughfare, Jarvis Street, recalls his presence. He died in 1857.
The “viper” William Lyon Mackenzie, always popular with ordinary folk, led an unsuccessful rebellion in December of 1837. He lived in exile in the States until his return to Canada in 1849. He died peacefully in 1861, his funeral cortege stretching a half mile behind the hearse.
Sir Francis Bond Head was recalled to England following the thwarted Mackenzie rebellion and never again held public office.
First Nations communities continue to struggle against racism and indifference.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I spent years researching this novel. Most characters are historical figures, and some of the events and situations are found in history books. I have, however, invented scenes and situations to bring characters to life. Because nobody appears to know why Anna Jameson and her husband were estranged, for example, I have made him a closet homosexual.
I thank the ghost of Anna for her 1838
memoir, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles. I also thank Clara Thomas for her biography Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. It allowed me to put Anna’s brief time in Toronto into the larger context of her rich and colourful life.
Three books in particular gave insight into Sam Jarvis. Chris Raible’s Muddy York Mud: Scandal & Scurrility in Upper Canada provided wonderful accounts of the duel and the Types Riot and trial. Katherine M. J. McKenna’s A Life of Propriety described the stifling social life of early Toronto. Austin Seton Thompson’s Jarvis Street outlined Sam’s tenure as Superintendent of Indian Affairs and even provided the drawing of little Sam in his Indian garb.
At the Peterborough Canoe Museum, I bought Grace Lee Nute’s book The Voyageur and got the inside story of life in a birchbark canoe.
When I moved from writing nonfiction to fiction, I needed help. Particularly I thank Richard Scrimger for his witty lessons and Barbara Kyle for her gentle insights into opening chapters. Gail Anderson-Dargatz offered rigorous commentary. And what would I have done without the support of my West Coast writers’ group? Thanks so much to Laurel Hislop, Annette Yourk and Carolyn Gleeson for their helpful critiques of the book over many months.
I am grateful to Carolyn Thompson who gave information on period fashions, did an extensive copy edit and helped in a hundred ways.
Finally, my experience with Sylvia McConnell, Allister Thompson and Emma Dolan has shown me what a first-rate publishing house is all about.
Ann Birch has worked for a decade in Toronto’s finest old houses as an historical interpreter. These places have given her a wide knowledge of nineteenth century domestic, social and political life. What she enjoys most is research into the journals and letters of early immigrants to Upper Canada. An award-winning educator, she was head of English at several Toronto high schools and an associate professor at York University and the University of Toronto.