River Thieves

by Michael Crummey

  Cassie crossed her legs and shifted her nightdress on her thighs. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “Don’t you think we ought to have something to say to one another?”

  For the second time that evening Buchan felt himself blush.

  The first time the sound of the officer’s movement on the stairs had broken Cassie’s sleep was in October of 1810. The front door pushed roughly open and closed, the house giving a brief audible sigh as the plug of wind rushed in. She’d looked through the frosted pane of her window, but there was no sign of morning in the sky. She wondered if Buchan had for some reason gone to look in on his marines who were sleeping in makeshift bunks in an outbuilding used by hired men. Under the flapping sheets of wind there was the tortured barking sound of someone vomiting into the snow outside her window. She got out of bed and went to the kitchen to stoke up a fire to make tea to settle his stomach. “I was lying awake anyway,” she told him.

  The harsh weather continued into the next day and kept Buchan at the winter house a second day and night. That morning, he ’d sat across from her with his hands in his lap, listening as if he expected her to tell her life story. As if he’d paid to be entertained. She didn’t fully understand what came over her to have leaned forward and lifted her dress, to show him the scar on her leg. He was a stranger to everyone on the northeast shore. He was a stranger to her and his transience meant he would remain so, whatever she told him of herself. “There’s no sense in standing on ceremony from here,” he had said. She chattered away to him like wind in the chimney.

  And he went to the kitchen again that night, having crept down the stairs an hour after he and John Senior went to their beds. She pulled the shawl around her shoulders and walked out into the hall, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He was sitting on the daybed, a fire already burning. He was dressed a little more formally than he’d been the night before.

  “Are you feeling all right, Lieutenant?”

  He smiled up at her. “Perfectly all right, thank you,” he said. “I poured.”

  “Is it tea you’re wanting, Mr. Buchan?” she asked him.

  “If that’s what’s on offer,” he said softly.

  Cassie looked at him a long moment and then went to the fireplace, lifting the kettle onto the crane over the heat. “You mustn’t think much of me, Lieutenant, is all’s I can say.”

  “On the contrary,” he said. But he didn’t say anything more.

  She pulled a chair from the table across the floor to her spot beside the fireplace, determined this time to keep her mouth shut. He could sense this or something like it about her, and after they both settled with mugs of tea Buchan talked to her about his childhood in Scotland. He told her about his father who was a navy officer himself and had died of a simple cut to the hand when it turned black with infection and the subsequent fever brought him down. His mother had remarried within the year and he could see now it was a practical decision and he had forgiven her for what at the time he thought of as callousness or indiscretion. He had joined the navy as a cabin boy then, to punish her, and she was unable to refuse permission having so recently disappointed him by taking a new husband. She ’d wept for days before he left. He said he had yet to forgive himself for that selfishness.

  “You were a child,” Cassie said.

  “It was cruelty, nonetheless. I knew what I was about, and make no mistake, I wanted to cause her the same pain she’d caused me. Simple revenge. And it was something I quickly came to regret.”

  He was employed as a servant for the Warrant Officer, a James Richardson, who was quartered in a canvas-sided cabin along the wall of the lower deck with his wife. The rest of the low-ceilinged room was occupied by two hundred men and boys who slept in hammocks strung above the cast-iron cannon. The only light entered through the gun ports, which were sealed in rough weather. The sailors rarely bathed. Their clothes were washed every other month in a bucket of sea water after being bleached in urine collected in a barrel. The stench of dry rot and bilge and human waste fogged the air.

  Buchan and the other ship’s boys were quartered with the midshipmen in the cockpit of the orlop deck below the waterline. Many of these officers-in-training were not much above Buchan’s age, eleven and twelve years old, and they tormented and bullied one another and the other boys aboard ship. Because Buchan was Scots and among the youngest in service, he was a favourite object of their attention. They cut his hammock down while he slept, stole his clothes and his food, set upon him in groups of two and three and roughed him up. Buchan was beside himself with frustration and rage. He had bargained away his half rations of beer and grog in return for some peace, but to little effect.

  It was Mrs. Richardson, who had been going to sea with her husband for years, who set him straight on the steps he needed to take. She procured a starter for him, a length of knotted rope used to rouse men from their bunks in the morning. Together they decided on a midshipman named Marryat, not the worst of his tormentors but a boy about his size who was rumoured to suck his thumb in his sleep. Buchan made his way to the orlop deck just before dinner when most of the midshipmen were at table. He walked directly to Marryat and pulled him backwards onto the floor, then proceeded to beat him with the starter. The other midshipmen gathered around them, shouting wildly, but they offered their companion no assistance. When it became clear Marryat was incapable of defending himself, they shifted their allegiance to Buchan and cheered him on. The rope raised welts on the boy’s face and forearms and Buchan pulled his shirt over his head to mark his back and chest, the knots drawing blood where they struck. Only when two of the older midshipmen decided Marryat was in danger of permanent injury did they pull him clear. Buchan was caned and then mastheaded for the attack, lashed to the cross-trees of the topmast for the better part of a day, but the worst of the persecution he suffered came to an end.

  “How old were you, Lieutenant?” Cassie asked him.

  “I was ten. And I doubt I would ever have gone back to sea if not for Mrs. Richardson,” Buchan said.

  “I find it difficult to imagine that a mother with any feeling for her child would have allowed you to return to such disgraceful conditions.”

  He smiled at the strength of the emotion in her voice. She seemed genuinely affronted. He said, “Of course my mother heard nothing of this.”

  “I see,” Cassie said. “Of course.” After a moment she looked up from her lap. She asked if his mother ever forgave him for leaving the way he did.

  Buchan shook his head. “We never spoke of it before she died,” he said. “I feel sometimes as if I’m father to the memory of my mother as I now hold it, a woman abandoned first by her husband and then by her son. The thought of her clings to me like an unhappy child.” He looked up at the ceiling. “When the dead have been wronged they never leave you quite, even if you might eventually wish it.”

  Cassie turned her head away and then stared into her mug.

  “I’m sorry,” Buchan said. “I didn’t intend to upset you.”

  She shook her head, her mouth set into a thin, furious line. “A fine story, Lieutenant. A story to move an audience to tears. I’m sure it’s a particularly fine tale to tell,” she said, “if you’re looking to weasel your way into a woman’s bed.”

  The officer tapped a finger thoughtfully against the bridge of his nose. “It seems to be you who doesn’t think much of me, Miss Jure.”

  She looked across at the man with a sorry expression. She said, “Perhaps we are alike in many ways.”

  “And perhaps it would be best if I take to my bed.” He stood up from his seat. “I thank you for your company. And the tea.”

  After he left she sat in the kitchen for a long time while the fire embered to coals and the gale endlessly tried the windows and the latch of the door. She drank the last cold mouthful of her tea and then carried her shawl out to her room in the dark.

  Two weeks later Buchan returned to John Senior’s house to discuss plans for the expedition to the Re
d Indian’s lake. At some early hour of the morning she heard him make his way downstairs and pass by her room. She lay in her bed for a time and tried to talk herself into staying there.

  He asked if she would care to join him in a drink rather than tea. She turned to fetch glasses and the bottle, and they sipped at the liquor in silence a while.

  Buchan said, “You never did answer my first question to you.”

  She creased her brow.

  “Weeks ago,” he said, “I asked your view on this matter of the Red Indians.”

  “Ah,” she said. There was the tiniest note of disappointment in her voice. “It’s a province of the menfolk more than myself.”

  “It seems to me that would hardly prevent you from holding an opinion.”

  She smiled. “To be honest I know next to nothing of them. They used to make quite a nuisance of themselves around here from the stories I’ve heard. But mostly they just seem lost.”

  “Exactly,” Buchan said, pointing with the glass in his hand. “Exactly how they seem to me. They’re like children who’ve been abandoned by their parents.”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “No. They just seem lost. As if they don’t recognize the country they live in any more.”

  He stared, not understanding what she had said. He placed his glass on the floor between his feet and folded his arms across his chest. “Have you ever been in love, Miss Jure?”

  Her eyebrows pursed, the lazy eye drawing down suspiciously. “It’s not something I’ve chosen for myself, no.”

  Buchan offered a troubled look. “And you believe this is a matter in which we have a choice?”

  “I do,” she said. “Yes. How long have you been married?” she asked him.

  “Some years now.” He looked to the rafters, counting. “Nine years June past.”

  “And how long have you been unhappily married?” Cassie asked him.

  He said, “I am very much in love with Marie.”

  “You confuse me, sir, I must say. Perhaps you need a little more practice pouring.”

  Buchan sat forward and stared at the floor. He said, “Perhaps I too believe this is a matter in which we have some choice. Cassie.” He paused over her name. “Cassie, I promise I will never speak to you about love.” He looked up at her. “I will never talk about taking you away from this place.”

  She turned her face away from him. “I have no reason to trust you.”

  “Nor I you,” he said. “And yet here we are.”

  She thought it was laughable how cautiously they approached one other. Like children testing the water on an unfamiliar shore. As if they both suspected a trap, the fatal rip of an undertow beneath the calm surface. It was a sad truth about the world, Cassie decided, that only a sense of mutual vulnerability promised any shelter at all.

  Buchan and Cassie slept together on three separate occasions during his visits to John Senior’s household, without once being completely naked in each other’s presence. Her first orgasm was so unexpected and intense that she broke out into embarrassed laughter even as it shook through her. At all other times they fucked in a silence so complete and so charged with the effort of suppressing the sound of pleasure that they seemed to be moving under water. Cassie straddled Buchan’s naked thighs, gripping the fabric of his shirt. Her hair fell loose around her face, so that even her expression was hidden from him. She pressed the bone of her pubis into him and rocked until she fell across his body, breathing as if she had just surfaced for air.

  When he rolled from beneath her, Cassie lay on her belly and he pushed slowly into her from behind. She could barely feel him inside her after she came, but she liked the weight of him across her back, the blind heat of his body drawn to her like a plant pitched towards sunlight. She liked not being able to see his face when he finally went rigid and pressed his open mouth into her neck. It made their connection seem both more impersonal and more intimate somehow.

  He fell asleep there while his cock went flaccid and slipped from her almost imperceptibly. She reached a hand behind herself, touching his face with the tips of her fingers until the sensation woke him and they shifted their bodies to lay side by side. They allowed themselves to kiss then, with the shyness of a fugitive affection they couldn’t acknowledge or entirely expel from their time together.

  Before he left her bed, Cassie would ask Buchan to tell her something about Marie, where she had grown up, how she wore her hair the first time he saw her, if she read or attended concerts. She could see his resistance to talking about her. His answers were hesitant, defensive, apologetic. But Cassie insisted on hearing the details of their courtship, the wedding, the first years of their marriage, and he wasn’t able to refuse, seeing that she took some strange comfort from it. He told her about Marie’s habit of scenting her letters with rosewater, the colours she chose for their apartment (light green damask in the parlour, distemper fine blue for the bedchamber), her oddly accented pronunciation of his name which the years in England hadn’t changed, Da-veed. Cassie kept her forehead against his chest, nodding at each new detail, as if she was making a list in her head. He spoke of Marie’s shyness about her body, how even after years of marriage she wouldn’t allow herself to be naked in his presence except in darkness. He had never spoken so intimately about her to anyone.

  “How did you propose to her?” Cassie asked him.

  “Not very romantic, I’m afraid. I met her by chance to begin with. She and her aunt were on a French vessel forced into Portsmouth by the Royal Navy and they spent a year waiting for an opportunity to return to France. She was just fifteen years old at the time. Marie and her aunt were invited to social events held by officers of the navy, as a show of hospitality. She didn’t like England much, the weather or the food or the people. The first time we spoke, she had just learned that among the vulgar classes some men auction their wives at market like chattel if they wish to be rid of them. With a halter about their necks. I’ve not seen her so furious since. She said, ‘Explain please, this, this English way.’”

  “And how did you explain it?”

  “I told her, ‘I am not English.’ Perhaps that is what endeared me to her.”

  Cassie shifted against him. “And the proposal?”

  “Yes. That was during the Peace of Lunéville, in 1801. It was the first opportunity for the two women to return to France. By then Marie and I had spent some time in each other’s company. She made it clear to me that she did not wish to leave.”

  “So she proposed to you.”

  “A proposal was implied. There was nothing else about England she would have been sorry to leave behind.”

  “Her parents allowed this?”

  “The aunt returned without her. The peace lasted only a few months, which meant her parents couldn’t leave the continent to retrieve her even if they objected.”

  “There was no dowry.”

  “No,” he said. “There was not. After we married Marie renounced her allegiance to France.”

  Cassie said, “She gave up everything for you.”

  “A great deal,” Buchan allowed. “I suppose so, yes. Why do you want to know these things?” he asked her.

  She raised her head to look at him. She said, “It’s time you should go to your room, Lieutenant.”

  After each encounter with Buchan, a shifting current of emotion coursed through Cassie as she lay alone in her bed, the force of it like a winter river capped under ice. She turned on her side with a hand pressed firmly between her thighs until she came a second time, a muted, nebulous climax that somehow made it possible for her to cry. Only then was she able to begin a slow descent into sleep.

  In the morning she cooked breakfast for John Senior and his guest. She called him Lieutenant. He referred to her as Miss Jure. The old man slathered his gandies with molasses and recounted the pleasure of yet another night of uninterrupted slumber.

  The last time they slept together was in January of 1811, just weeks after her trip to see Annie on
the River Exploits when the child had been bled from her belly like a lanced boil, three days before Buchan’s expedition was due to leave Ship Cove for the Red Indian’s lake.

  She was still weak and unsettled at the time, and her ability to stomach food and spirits was unpredictable. She fell into an exhausted sleep as soon as she left the men at the table and looked in on John Senior a last time for the night. Peyton had given his room to the lieutenant and slept in the hired men’s quarters with the surgeon. She would have missed Buchan’s trip to the kitchen altogether if the nausea hadn’t forced her awake. She climbed from her bed and knelt over the acidic stench of the honey bucket and heaved her supper into it.

  Buchan knocked gently at her door and let himself in. He stood over her with a hand to her back. “This is a bit of a turnabout,” he said.

  He helped her up and walked her into the kitchen where she sat on the daybed.

  “I feel much better,” she told him.

  He went back into her room to fetch her shawl and set about making tea. They sat side by side as she sipped at the sweet dark drink, Buchan with his arm across her back, rocking her gently side to side. He pushed her hair back across her ear and kissed the side of her face.

  “Much better,” Cassie said. She placed her hand on his leg and squeezed.

  They sat for a long time in that position. Buchan spoke to her about preparations for the expedition and the gear they would pack along, the inventory of presents for the Red Indians, the trials they could expect on the journey. There was something of the ten-year-old still in him, Cassie thought, in his perverse single-mindedness, in his fixation on lists as if enough of them could contain all that was important in the world, in his naked enthusiasm for peril. She was unsure why some men seemed never to outgrow these things or why in some it was so unaccountably attractive. She saw then that in this way he was just like her father. She rested her head on his shoulder as he spoke, regretting ever having sat alone with him in this room.