Peyton cleared his throat and tipped his chair onto its back legs, rocking gently there for a moment. “What does the surgeon give for her chances, Captain?”
“He thinks a goodly number of people would have long ago been carried off by a consumption such as hers.” He stopped what he was saying and stared at the man beside him. They listened a while to the wet seethe of Mary’s breathing. Buchan shook his head and raised his mug to his chin to blow onto the steaming liquid. “We have taken the tragedy of an entire race of people, Mr. Peyton, and cheapened it with our own sordid little melodrama.”
Peyton had to stifle an astonished grin. There was something pathetic in the officer’s earnestness, he thought, and it surprised him to see this. He nodded slowly. He said, “I think perhaps that is the English way.”
“I,” Buchan whispered, “am not English.” He sipped at his tea and made a face. After a minute of silence he said, “That girl you saw in Poole, the little Red Indian, do you remember?”
Peyton nodded.
“Do you know how she wound up there?”
“Richmond was the one got hold to her, I believe. Says he found her wandering alone out on one of the bird islands.”
Buchan shook his head. “He found her. A child. Thirteen leagues out on the Atlantic.”
“So he says.”
“He must have killed the rest of her family to get her, I expect.”
Peyton raised his shoulders. No one had ever said as much before, though everyone believed it to be true. “I expect he must have,” he said.
Buchan nodded slowly and then looked across at Peyton. “Whatever became of her, I wonder?”
He cleared his throat again. “She died, sir. There was a write-up in the paper within the year. Scarlet fever, if I recall.”
The following week continued unusually warm, and it was decided that even if weather conditions became immediately more favourable, they couldn’t hope to leave in less than a fortnight. Peyton and his father made preparations to head back to their winter house and Buchan said he would send for them as soon as it looked likely the expedition could set out. Peyton stopped in to see Mary the morning they left and she held his hand and made him promise to return, even though he had never suggested he would do otherwise.
“You get well now,” he said to her and she nodded emphatically, and they contented themselves with these small fictions they offered one another like a ritual exchange of gifts.
The two men walked slowly in the lee of the woods towards the winter house, along wide stretches of beach and through poorly marked forest trails where sheer cliffs or sharply rafted pans of ballycatter made shore travel impossible. Twice through the day they stopped to boil a kettle of water and smoke pipes while gulls skirled overhead.
John Senior said, “When do you think we’ll be heading back there?”
“You say that,” Peyton answered in a Scottish brogue, “as if you cared one way or another.”
“The little prick.”
Peyton shrugged. “He left us alone.”
John Senior said, “So he did.” He had never asked his son what arrangement had been made, what leverage used, what information dangled as bait or blackmail to make Buchan return to St. John’s and state publicly that their party was fully justified under all circumstances in acting as they did. That no charges or additional investigation into the incident were warranted. He seemed to prefer not knowing.
Snow came down as they started out on the final leg of the journey. “The old woman is picking her goose now,” John Senior said. The thick windless fall muffled the sound of the ocean to one side and the forest to the other. They strapped on the Indian rackets they carried with them and trudged into the near silence. By dusk they were within sight of the house. The animals in the closed shed whimpered to them as they walked by.
They pushed through the door into the bone-cold chill and Peyton called, as if Cassie might simply be napping in another room. He walked to the foot of the stairs and sang out to her again. Her trunk in the parlour was carefully packed full of her books and clothes, waiting, Peyton assumed, to be sent for. A rifle had been taken and a pair of Indian rackets, along with a pack and old winter clothing belonging to John Senior. The old man started the makings of a fire and Peyton sat on the daybed in his boots and coat. “She’s gone,” he said.
“I can see that,” John Senior said. He knelt at the fireplace. He said, “There’s no telling what all else she made off with or how long she’s been gone. Perhaps you should go look in on the animals.”
They spent the next weeks wandering around the house and property with the aimlessness of icebergs adrift among the islands. They propped up a length of fence at the back of the property, cleaned out the stalls in the animal’s shed, went into the woods for lumber that could be planed to barrel staves, but there was no narrative to their days. The house fit them awkwardly, like familiar clothes put on after a long wasting illness. John Senior started drinking earlier each day until he’d begun having a shot of rum as soon as he came downstairs from his bed in the mornings. Every night he woke in the grip of his nightmare, yelling Stop it, would you, for the love of Christ, stop it.
Peyton took to reading through half the afternoon and in the evenings by candlelight as well, a habit he hadn’t indulged in since he was a teenager. He dug through Cassie’s trunk to look for books she’d treasured, Gray’s Poems, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. He realized early on there was no comfort to be found in the exercise, but he persisted in it as a kind of penance.
Near the bottom of the trunk he discovered the handwritten copies of Othello and The Tempest she had given him. He lifted the sheaf of papers onto his lap. They were stored in his room the last time he’d laid eyes on them. Cassie obviously intended to take them away with her.
He carried the plays to the table and began leafing through the pages, studying the handwriting rather than the words themselves, the lines sloping slightly across the unlined paper. On the back of the title page of The Tempest he found a rough sketch of the Bay of Exploits, the winter and summer houses pencilled in. It reminded him of the map Mary had drawn for Buchan. As in that map, a stick figure stood beside the summer house on Burnt Island. There was a line of strange words in Cassie’s handwriting down one side of the page. Adenishit. Baroodisick. Gidyeathuk. Mamasheek. Messiliget-hook. John Senior glanced at it briefly when Peyton asked about it, but claimed never to have seen it before or to know why it was drawn or what the words might mean.
He came back to it often, studying the particular features. Was that a fence of some sort drawn in at Charles Brook? Did Cassie ask Mary to draw this? Had she done it herself? The map and its details were clues, he thought, but the story they hinted at evaded him.
One night John Senior, from his chair next to the fire, broke a fathom’s length of silence by saying, “Maybe it’s about time you found yourself a wife, John Peyton.”
Peyton looked up from the circumference of candlelight on the table, his hands on the edges of the map. “Perhaps you’re right about that,” he said.
On December 14, Joseph Reilly arrived at Salmon Arm from Charles Brook. “Hello the house!” he shouted as he came up from the landwash.
Peyton and his father came outside in their shirtsleeves to greet him. The pinover across his face was wreathed with ice where the steam of his breath had frozen in the open air. He seemed surprised to see them. “God bless the mark,” he said, shaking their hands. They got him inside and out of his coat at the fire and they plied him with rum and a plate of salt fish and brewis drenched in pork fat.
“How is your house now,” John Senior asked. “How is Annie Boss?”
“Expecting again is how she is. We can’t keep clear of it long enough to catch a breath.”
They gave him another full plate of food. When he was satisfied and sat back in his chair he said, “I heard you had gone down the river with Mary. I come to look in on Cassie, help her clean the byre.”
Peyton said,
“The Exploits is open seven miles into the country. We’ll need a good spurt of cold before anyone gets to the lake this year. Buchan is going to send for us when the weather turns.”
The mention of the officer had them both nodding into their laps.
“Your man now,” Reilly said. “Has he had much to say about it all?”
“Not a word, Joseph.”
“I owe you a debt then.”
Peyton turned to look at his father who was dropping off in his chair, a glass of rum tipping in his lap. “I would say we’ve more or less straightened our accounts at this point.”
After he got John Senior up to his bed, Peyton stoked the fire and refilled Reilly’s glass, then his own. They sat in silence a while. The house timbers ticked and creaked in the wind.
“You haven’t asked after her,” Peyton said finally.
He looked up, startled. “After who?”
There was no one Reilly could have heard news of the expedition from besides Cassie. He said, “She sent you to look in on the animals, Joseph.”
Reilly looked down at his hands in his lap. The scars hidden under the palm of the opposite hand. “No,” he said. “No, she came by.” He nodded. “A fortnight past or nearly, I was on the line. She stayed two nights with Annie. We haven’t heard talk of her since. I thought she might have come back to the house here.”
“She carried off a sledge, a full kit of materials.”
“I don’t know more than what I’m saying. She was always one to keep her counsel.” He stared across at Peyton. “You know how she is.”
He nodded slowly. “You won’t be lying to me now, Joseph.”
Reilly turned his face to the fire. He said, “Leave her go, John Peyton.”
“Is she at your place?”
Reilly shot him a wide-eyed stare and just as quickly looked away, shaking his head.
“You maggoty little mick,” Peyton said.
The Irishman stood up from his chair. He touched his hips and belly briefly, as if he was expecting to find pockets he could shove his hands into. “My oldest is near big enough to take a share of work these days,” he said. “I’ve been thinking to go on the plant for myself next season, have Annie and the boy do the shore work.”
Peyton refused to look at him.
“You’ll need to be finding another head man is what I’m telling you, John Peyton.” He tapped his palm three times against his thigh. He cast aimlessly around the room a moment and then settled on Peyton in his chair. “I’ll be off for home first thing,” he said. “You tell Mary that Annie and me were asking.”
At two minutes to midnight on Christmas Eve, Peyton stepped outside the doorway with a rifle. He raised the musket to his shoulder and counted calmly backwards from one hundred, firing into the night sky as if he was shooting at the stars and then stood waiting for the replies along the coast. Sharp pops followed by a softer chorus of echoes. He closed his eyes as if trying to discern a particular voice among a crowd of voices.
By Christmas morning the temperature had plummeted to twenty-five degrees below zero. Peyton woke to a beard of frost on the blankets near his mouth. The water in his wash basin, even the piss in the honey bucket under his bed, had frozen solid. He shook the stiffness out of his pants and shivered into a shirt and thick sweater. Downstairs a fire was already laid and spitting in the fireplace, a kettle of water on to boil above it. Peyton called to his father and then went to the windows to look for him.
John Senior was walking up from the animal shed, an axe in one hand, a goose held by its webbed feet hanging from the other. A steady spray of blood from the bird’s neck unspoolled like a thread being left to mark the path up to the house. Outside the door the old man placed the axe upright against the house and then knelt to pluck the down free of the warm carcass. He didn’t see his son at the window. His hands were bare and red with the cold.
Fifteen minutes later he came into the house with the naked goose. He blew snot into the palm of his hand and wiped it across his pantleg. “A week of this,” he said, “and we’ll be getting word from Ship Cove.”
Peyton could smell rum on his breath, a sharp sour twist in the cold air of the kitchen. He said, “You’ll have to stay behind to watch the animals when I go.”
The dead goose hung limply from John Senior’s hand. The last drops of blood from the neck spattered the wooden floor. He looked slowly about the kitchen, as if the thought of an extended period alone in this place had never occurred to him before. “I suppose you’re right,” he said.
The weather continued clear and very cold into the new year and near dusk on January 8 Corporal Rowsell arrived with two Blue Jackets to inform them the expedition would be departing from Ship Cove on or about the twelfth if all went well.
“How is Mary?” Peyton asked.
Rowsell was still standing near the doorway, his hands clasped at the small of his back. He shrugged. “Some days worse than others. She seemed fair to middling when last I spoke with Captain Buchan.”
John Senior said, “Let them in out of the door at least, John Peyton.”
“Of course, of course.” He ushered them closer to the fire and they removed gloves and hats and slapped the frost from the sleeves of their coats. John Senior had already moved off into the pantry for more glasses.
Rowsell said, “We would do well to get off early tomorrow if that’s convenient. In case of weather.”
“Of course,” Peyton said again.
The corporal nodded and looked around. “I would be happy to offer a report on Mary’s health to Miss Jure if she’s about.”
“She is no longer with us,” Peyton said as he passed a glass of rum.
They left before light the following morning. John Senior came outside to help them pack the single sledge and see them off. He shuffled around the tight circle of men without speaking.
“Well,” Peyton said when they were ready.
John Senior walked up close to his son. He fumbled off a glove and began rooting in the pocket of his greatcoat. “Give this to her,” he said, passing over the empty case of the watch they’d retrieved from the Indian camp on the lake.
Peyton looked at the gleam of silver in his hand, surprised. “To who?” he asked.
John Senior grimaced and turned his face away. He seemed in a foul mood altogether. “I got no more use for it,” he said.
TWO
It was well on the way to dark and Mary’s room was lit with candles when they arrived. The fire in the stove had been extinguished that afternoon so the chill would slow the process of putrefaction. The coffin was constructed of neat deal and covered in a handsome red cloth decorated with copper fittings and breastplate.
“She was taken with a kind of suffocation about 2 p.m. yesterday afternoon and I was called to see her,” Buchan said. “I sat with her while the surgeon attended. Within half an hour she had recovered to all appearances.”
Rowsell said, “Poor creature.”
“She was dead by the time I came to her the second time. According to the marine attending, she was asking for you before she expired.”
Peyton was still wearing his hat and coat. He said, “May I see her, Captain?”
The officer motioned to a marine standing at attention against the wall and he walked across to remove the cover and the coffin’s lid. Peyton stepped forward then, taking his hat from his head and folding it between his hands. The light in the room was dim and undulated like a web of shadow in dark weather. Mary’s arms had been folded on her chest, two bright coppers covered her eyes. But the details of her features, whether her expression was serene or troubled or indifferent, Peyton could not say. He reached to touch her face: the skin was already cold as candle wax and had the same peculiarly oily feel. It made him want to wipe the fingers clean on his sleeve. He said, “What does this mean for the expedition, Captain?”
“I was to return her to her people.” Buchan raised himself slightly on the balls of his feet. “I see no reason to alter that
plan.”
“I would still like to accompany you, if I may.”
Buchan nodded. He said, “We did everything we could.”
“I understand,” Peyton said. His voice broke slightly and he cleared his throat. He felt embarrassed to be standing there suffering his mild fever of grief. For the first time it seemed true to him that what happened to this woman touched something larger than his life, the fate of the few people he cared for. Without turning to the officer, Peyton said, “I feel I owe you an apology, Captain.”
“At this juncture,” Buchan said, “apologies would seem to be beside the point.” He motioned again to the marine to come forward and the coffin lid was closed, then covered with the finely decorated red cloth.
A warm shift in the weather delayed their departure another ten days and conditions on the river were still less than favourable when the decision was finally taken to set out. On January 21, a party of fifty marines, hauling twelve sledges of provisions sufficient for forty days’ travel, a neat-deal coffin and a number of gifts meant for any Red Indians they might encounter, turned their faces to a cold easterly wind and crossed the harbour towards Little Peter’s Point. They were accompanied by an auxiliary party of ten Blue Jackets and an officer who were to assist in the initial twenty-five miles of the journey, as far as the first great waterfall, and then return to Ship Cove.
Much of the River Exploits continued to run open and the ice along its banks was broken and unpredictable and the party was able to cover no more than four miles on the first day of the journey. The second day they managed only three more, with damage to a number of the sledges and several members of the expedition soaking their feet through to the skin. By early afternoon it was apparent to Buchan that they would soon have to make a stop for the night.
Peyton said, “We’re not an hour from Reilly’s old trapping tilt. It’s been abandoned years now, but it might serve for the ones that have gotten themselves wet.”
River Thieves Page 33