River Thieves (33 page)

“Captain, please,” Cassie said.

“These are necessary questions, Miss Jure. I apologize if you feel they are an affront to your employers. Mary,” he said.

The two women exchanged a look and Cassie nodded finally to encourage her. Mary shook her head no, although she was clearly uncertain what the exact nature of the question was.

The officer bent to his notebook. When he looked up from the page he said, “The man who was killed, Mary, who was he?”

She hesitated and turned to Cassie.

“Dead man,” Cassie said softly. “Dead man on the ice, on the lake.”

Mary nodded.

Cassie pointed to the Indian woman. “Your father?”

“No,” she said. “No father.”

Buchan broke in. “Brother, Mary? Husband? Uncle?”

Mary nodded. “Yes,” she said.

Buchan sat forward. “Which one,” he said. “Husband?”

“Yes,” Mary said again.

He nodded and looked down to write the word
husband
in his notebook.

“Captain.”

He looked up to see Cassie staring at Mary. The Indian woman’s face was tortured and expectant. She was waiting for something more.

“What is it?” he asked.

Cassie felt a cold trickle at the back of her neck. She leaned forward.
“Dead man on the ice,” she said. “Your brother, Mary?”

“Yes,” she said.

Buchan slumped back in his chair. He made small disgusted motions across the face of the page with his pen. “I have a feeling this will be of very little use, I’m afraid,” he said.

The two women were watching one another. Cassie could hear the wet labour of Mary’s breathing. Her hands were folded over her bundle of clothing. Cassie said, “Captain, how many Red Indian men came down to meet John Peyton’s party on the lake.”

“Two,” he said. “The man who was killed and the second man who ran off once the struggle ensued —”

“Husband
and
brother,” Cassie said to Mary, raising her fingers in a
V.
“Two men. Two men dead.”

Mary saw the growing expressions of consternation on their faces and she opened her mouth without speaking.

“Both shot,” Buchan said, and he mimed holding a rifle to his shoulder. “Bang,” he said. “Bang.” He was sitting on the edge of his seat, incredulous. The notebook had fallen from his lap and lay face down on the floor like a wounded bird.

Mary had begun to cry and lifted her bundle of clothing to hide her face.

After Cassie settled Mary in her room she came back down the stairs and leaned in the doorway to the kitchen. Buchan had retrieved the fallen notebook from the floor and was sitting at the kitchen table, making notes and nodding furiously as he wrote.

“Why would they hide that?” she said. “Why admit killing
one man and not another?”

“Obviously they felt the one reported could be justified before the courts. The second, quite clearly, could not.”

“Perhaps she is lying.”

“I have it on good authority our witness is a poor liar. And there is no profit to her in telling such a story.”

Cassie shook her head. “Poor John Peyton.”

He slapped the pen on the table. “I’m not convinced your sympathies are properly placed in this instance, Miss Jure.”

She regarded Buchan with a puzzled expression. He had been clipped and professional in questioning Mary, cold, even obtuse. Not the same man to whom she’d confessed her father was a feckless drunk. “Do you think Mary is pretty?” she asked him.

He looked at Cassie and then quickly around the kitchen, as if the question had come from some invisible source.

“Do you find her attractive? As a woman?”

“Of course not,” he said. “No, I retract that statement. What could it possibly have to do with anything of consequence?”

“I was simply curious.” She shrugged. “What do you hope to see come out of all this, Captain?”

“Two men have been killed. Lies have been presented as fact. I want justice done.”

Cassie looked behind her and up the stairway and then directly at the man across the room.

He said, “It perplexes me, Cassie, why you see fit to protect these men, seeing what they’ve been party to.”

“It has never been my business,” she said quietly, “to see what they have been party to.”

Buchan shook his head. “Don’t tell me you don’t know the
truth of what these men have done in their day.”

Cassie bowed her head and whispered something he was unable to make out.

“What? What are you saying?”

“You are such a simpleton about the truth,” she said. “You think there is never anything to fear from it.”

The officer worked his jaw silently a moment.

“Tell me, does your wife deserve to know the truth, Captain Buchan?”

“I love my wife,” he said.

“But that’s only part of the story, isn’t it?”

He stood from his chair. “I must ask you not to report the substance of our conversation with Mary to anyone. It would be best for the investigation if those involved believe their subterfuge remains intact. May I count on you in this regard?”

She shook her head slowly. “I will not promise that, no.”

“So help me, I will use every means at my disposal to ensure that anyone undermining this investigation receives due attention.”

She looked at her hands and raked absently beneath the fingernails. Buchan’s belief in justice was so evangelical that at times it seemed completely irrational. Stories of the “Winter of the Rals” after the 1817 fires in St. John’s had come to them on the northeast shore. Dozens of desperate men were arrested for stealing, for muggings, for disorderly conduct. The sentence for a first offence was thirty-six lashes, offenders stripped to the waist in the courtyard of Fort Townshend and tied on their knees to a four-foot post. Buchan was always present, overseeing the administration of punishment.

One Irishman in particular they’d been told of, a frosty-haired,
pug-nosed father of seven, went straight back to robbing on the streets of St. John’s after his release. The wounds of his first whipping were still open and raw when his shirt was stripped away from him in the courtyard. At the fifteenth lash, Buchan ordered a bucket of water thrown across the swollen, pulpy mess of his back. When the punishment resumed the frozen flesh came away in long raw strips and the Irishman eventually fainted, then fell into convulsions. The attending surgeon had to order the punishment stopped at the twenty-third stroke. John Senior related these details to Cassie with a kind of satisfied contempt. “Mr. Christian charity himself,” he’d said.

Cassie looked up from her hands at Buchan. She saw his face as it had been when she knelt before him years before, the pale vulnerability of it, as if he was suffering through a fever of hallucination. The head tossing from side to side, the lips dry and parted slightly. She couldn’t reconcile the conflicting pictures of him in her head.

“I am perfectly aware,” she said, “of how seriously you take your office, Captain.”

He took a step across the room. “There is a certain latitude I will allow you, Miss Jure, in light of the circumstances that briefly existed between us —”

“But?” Cassie said.

He couldn’t bring himself to complete the threat and turned away from her, pulling the front door open roughly.

Through the window Cassie saw him walk away towards the landwash, past Corporal Rowsell who had been sitting on a hump of rock until the door opened and now stood at attention, his hands held at the small of his back. The officer’s
journal sat beside an inkwell on the table. She moved across the room and touched the pale calfskin cover. She opened it and flipped back and forth through the pages of closely written script without reading. From upstairs she could hear Mary coughing — long ripping convulsions like someone tearing sheets. She turned away suddenly and walked across the kitchen to her room, closing the door behind her.

Thirty seconds later she was back at the table. She dipped the pen in the inkwell, turned the journal sideways and began writing in the margin on a page chosen at random.
There was a child
, she wrote.
Before I ended it, David. I was pregnant.

She set the pen down and looked up from the journal where the ink was slowly drying. John Peyton stood outside the window, watching her. She slapped the book shut and went immediately through the door. She walked up to Rowsell who was still standing at attention, his hands behind his back. “Captain Buchan forgot his journal,” she said. Behind her she could hear the door open and close as Peyton went inside.

“Thank you, miss,” Rowsell said. “I’ll see he gets it.”

Over the next three weeks John Peyton accompanied Buchan and a crew of marines in a cutter and gig, travelling through the Bay of Exploits with Mary in hopes of locating and surprising a camp of Beothuk they might safely leave her with. The weather was fair and seasonable, but Mary wore flannel underclothes beneath her dress and a heavy cloak as well. Peyton and Buchan consulted her on likely locations of Indian encampments, but her ill health and lethargy dampened everyone’s hope for a successful outcome. They rowed forty
miles west of Fortune Harbour to Badger Bay and a constant watch was kept to the shoreline for signs of fresh-cut paths that would indicate recent habitation by the Beothuk. On the evening of September 8, as they made way through a heavy thunder squall, a canoe was spotted a mile to the windward. The cutter gave chase, rounding a point of land beyond which the canoe had disappeared but there was no further sign of it. Buchan gave the order to come ashore where he guessed the Indians must have landed. He and Peyton and several marines spent more than an hour in pursuit through the bush. The marines grew increasingly sullen and uncomfortable the further they travelled inland from the cutter and Buchan finally relented and turned back. When they reached the shoreline they found Mary seated under a piece of canvas rigged up against the weather and showing no interest in the outcome of the chase.

The cutter was next taken up the River Exploits, rowed with muffled oars on a night guard almost twenty-five miles into the interior. Buchan and Peyton went into the woods with three marines, spending a full day in search of Indians. The only habitations they encountered had been abandoned since the previous summer. Mary remained at the camp and again gave no sign of wishing to join the search. They left the river that evening, rowing night guard all the way to the coast.

They camped near the mouth of Charles Brook and Buchan sat with Peyton after they had eaten. “That leaves us the area around Boyd’s Cove to look into,” he said.

“My guess is they’ve all begun moving up the river for the caribou hunt by this time.”

“Another winter trek up the Exploits then,” Buchan said
brightly, as if he looked forward to the opportunity.

Peyton looked across to where Mary was bundled in a blanket on the opposite side of the fire. “If our girl lasts through to the freeze-up.”

Both men sat quietly for a few minutes. “This is one of your rivers,” Buchan said then.

Peyton nodded.

“Who’s on this one?”

“Joseph Reilly.”

“Anyone else near here?”

Peyton spat between his boots and kicked at the ground. The nights were coming on cold suddenly and he had his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his coat. “Richmond has a weir a little ways west of here on Little Rattle River. He has a green man up there with him, Michael Sharpe. Everyone else is a day’s travel at least.”

Buchan nodded. As far as he knew, Cassie had said nothing to Peyton about their conversation with Mary, but he couldn’t be certain. “I wouldn’t mind taking a side trip to look in on Mr. Richmond while we’re about. Perhaps we could impose on Mr. Reilly and give the marines a day’s rest here tomorrow.”

“Burnt Island is no more than a couple hours’ haul from here. We could give your men a roof over their heads for the night at our place.”

Buchan shook his head. “The change of scenery would be good for the men,” he said.

Peyton chuckled. He was about to say the scenery on Charles Brook was no different from the country they’d been picking through the last two weeks. But instead he said, “As
you like, sir.”

On the shoreline of Little Rattle River, Richmond and young Michael Sharpe were preparing the kit for winter trapping when the cutter first rounded a bend in the brook, making for the weir.

“Hello now,” Richmond said.

Michael Sharpe looked up at Richmond and followed his gaze downriver. The colour went out of his face.

Richmond gave him an angry look. He pointed a finger. “Not a word to him, you hear me? I’m going up to the tilt. You send him on up when he gets here. Not a word or I’ll cut your throat myself.”

Michael Sharpe nodded and as Richmond snuck away up the bank he made an effort to look engrossed in the work lying about him.

When the cutter made the weir, Buchan stepped ashore and walked across to the young man. There were half a dozen traps on the ground, a large cauldron of water was boiling over a fire. The traps had been left out in weather to accumulate an even coat of rust and Michael Sharpe was using a wire brush to scrape down to the bare metal. Several freshly scraped traps were immersed in the kettle to boil clean.

“Michael Sharpe?” Buchan said to him.

The boy looked up at the officer. His face was reddened and raw across the cheeks, as if he had only recently begun shaving. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground with a trap in his lap. “Yes sir,” he answered.

“I am Captain David Buchan of the HMS
Grasshopper.”

“I know who you are, sir.”

Buchan crouched beside him. “And you know why I am here as well, I imagine.”

The youngster nodded.

“I wonder could I ask you a few questions —”

“You’d best go on up to talk to Mr. Richmond, sir.”

Buchan smiled at him. “You realize you could hang for your part in all this.”

Michael Sharpe nodded again and burnished furiously at the trap. His hands were stained with a mixture of rust and sweat. He said, “Mr. Richmond is up at the tilt, sir.”

Buchan waited a few moments longer, staring at the boy. Then he got to his feet and walked up the path to the tilt. He left the four marines outside the door to avoid offering any hint of fear or uncertainty on his part and stepped alone into the near dark. He could make out a rough table and chair in the foreground, a wood box piled high with junks of split spruce. A fire muttered to itself in the stone fireplace. There was a single window in the back wall that glowed with light. A voice from underneath it said, “You’ll be closing the door behind you, if you don’t mind.”