River Thieves (41 page)

There had been an early fall of snow in St. John’s by the time Buchan returned from the Bay of Exploits. Near the chimneys of the governor’s house meltwater pooled and drained and dripped into strategically placed pots in the upstairs rooms throughout their meal.

Marie Buchan was feeling unwell before she arrived and was forced to retire to the parlour before the meal was completed, apologizing repeatedly in her formal English. The governor’s wife, Lady Hamilton, excused herself to attend to her. The two men finished their food and then moved into the living room where they sat with snifters of brandy. It was
mid-September. Buchan had already presented his report to the governor and the Supreme Court. He swirled his glass of alcohol distractedly. His head ached. The persistent damp smell of the house made it seem older and colder than it actually was.

“I’ve read your report,” Hamilton said and then stopped. “You look peaked, old man. Are you coming down with something?”

“A little tired is the extent of it, I believe.”

“Quite unlike you,” Hamilton said. The governor’s head of thick, carefully kempt silver hair was the envy of many men in positions of authority. He looked at once serious and solicitous, benevolent but stern. “Perhaps,” he offered, “Marie has been overenthusiastic in her welcome?” Even his peculiarly adolescent sense of humour maintained something like an air of dignity in the shadow of his magnificent coiffure.

Buchan managed a smile, but couldn’t sustain it. “She has not been well enough to offer the … that kind of welcome.”

“Yes, well,” Hamilton said. “I see,” he said. “I’ve read your report, Captain Buchan.” He cleared his throat. “I must admit to feeling some relief.”

Buchan had lobbied Hamilton for weeks to be permitted to conduct the investigation the grand jury requested. Left to himself, the governor, as he suggested to Peyton, would simply have allowed the jury’s verdict to stand and the questions surrounding it to decay a little further each season, until they had disappeared altogether. Sending a naval magistrate to interrogate other members of Peyton’s party would likely be seen in some quarters as a provocation. And if convictions resulted — Hamilton shook his head. It all added up to the
kind of political trouble he preferred to live without in his first year as governor.

Buchan won him over with his typical talk of justice and integrity, and in a calculated political move he made his impassioned speeches in the presence of the reformer, Lady Hamilton, whenever an opportunity presented itself. He shamed the governor into taking his side. “It’s what makes you so damned infuriating,” Hamilton told the officer. “And, I suppose I must add, so invaluable. Go, investigate.” He waved his hand towards the door. “Bring justice to the Indians or whatever it is you intend. Bring down the whole bloody Empire if you must.”

“History will remember you kindly for this,” Buchan had said.

It was that kind of fervour Hamilton associated with him: the belief that even in this unremarkable and casually overlooked corner of the Empire he was acting at the centre of the world’s events. The man he sat beside now was a different person, although the change was too subtle for him to place. Water dripped relentlessly into the containers laid out upstairs. For years there had been attempts to locate and fix the leaks in the slate roof, all without any significant degree of success. Buchan seemed to be struggling with the same kind of fundamental, insidiously irreparable damage.

“There is no shame,” Hamilton said softly, “in proving the innocence of your countrymen. However much you might have believed it would turn out otherwise.”

Buchan stood and walked across to the fireplace. He lifted the snifter to his mouth and emptied it.

“Forgive me for so bold a question,” Hamilton said, “but is everything all right between you and Mrs. Buchan?”

He made a motion with the hand holding the glass.

“She seems delighted to have you back before the onset of winter.”

“She isn’t well, Governor. Has not been, as you know, for a number of years. And I’ll likely be gone again within a fortnight.” He paused. “I once promised her, as all husbands do, no doubt, that nothing would ever come between us. I have not always been as faithful to that promise as I might wish.”

“The life of a navy man, Captain Buchan. Unlike a governor, you cannot carry her to your every port of call.”

Buchan turned towards him. “May I have another glass of brandy?”

Hamilton motioned towards the decanter. “By all means.” When Buchan returned with a full glass he said, “Now what of our charge? This Indian woman?”

“Mary.”

“Quite, Mary, yes. You will be in charge of the expedition to take her up the River Exploits?”

Buchan nodded. “I’m not at all convinced it is something she wants, but I can think of no better course of action. I’ll have to return before the freeze-up, as early as mid-October depending on the weather. The Peytons have offered what assistance they can afford in terms of mounting the expedition and acting as guides and whatnot.”

“Good of them, I suppose, given the nature of recent interactions.”

Buchan nodded carefully. He stared into his brandy. “I tried to ascertain from Mary the state of the tribe at this time, an estimate of numbers, the general level of health among her people, locations of their camps, that sort of thing. The little
she had to say was not encouraging. Only a fool would wager on there being a hundred left alive.”

“A
hundred?
In total?”

“I would guess that to be ridiculously optimistic.”

“Dear me,” Hamilton whispered.

The two men sat in silence a moment, listening to the steady tick of water dripping into the half-filled containers above them.

“I suppose it would now be safe,” Hamilton said, “to send a letter of appointment with you for young Mister Peyton to take up the duties of Justice of the Peace.”

Buchan got up from his seat and walked across to the decanter of brandy.

“I don’t remember you having such a fondness for drink, David.”

There was a barely discernible note of reproach in Hamilton’s voice that Buchan would have ignored if he’d registered it. “In my time on the northeast shore,” he said, “I seem to have acquired a taste for it.”

The HMS
Grasshopper
arrived back in Ship Cove on October 18 and Buchan immediately set about preparing the vessel for wintering over in the Bay of Exploits. The sails were dried and taken in and then folded and stored below. Chains fastened the ship securely to the shore. Marines were sent into the woods to cut trees for lumber and for fuel.

News of his arrival meandered among the residents of the islands and bays, although he made no effort to visit anyone outside Ship Cove. The few people who travelled in to call on
him found a man less gregarious and energetic than they remembered him being only weeks previously, though he was as professional and courteous as ever. He attended his duties and supervised those of others with a meticulous and curiously distant attention to detail. He spent each evening alone in his cabin without company. In mid-November he sent Corporal Rowsell to the Peytons’ winter home to request they send Mary down to the
Grasshopper
in preparation for the trek inland to the lake.

After the exertions of travelling along the coast in the last weeks of August, Mary had enjoyed a brief period of relatively good health on Burnt Island. But by the time the move had been made to the winter house her illness worsened to the point that she spent most of each day in her bed and could not make her way to the outdoor privy or even use her chamber pot without assistance. Cassie fed her weak broths and tea and sat at her bedside when her work allowed it, as she’d sat for months beside her dying mother, a book open in her lap.

When the order from Buchan arrived, Cassie argued with Corporal Rowsell and with John Senior about the wisdom or necessity of moving the sick woman to Ship Cove while she was in such a condition. “She’ll not be making a trip up any river,” she said.

Rowsell nodded. “No miss,” he admitted, “that’s true enough. But there is a surgeon aboard the
Grasshopper
might offer her some relief.”

Cassie looked at the marine. He had been present or in the wings during all the events of recent months and she had taken no notice of him. A head of dark frizzy hair, deep-set eyes
under a large brow that disguised their clear blue colour. He stood with his hands clasped behind him and she had never seen him stand in any other posture. He had a look of resigned dignity about him, as if the hands were actually tied behind his back and he was perpetually making the best of circumstances beyond his control. She said, “Promise me she’ll be properly looked after.”

He nodded again. “I promise to do what I can to ensure it.”

John Senior accompanied Rowsell and the two other marines to Ship Cove. From there he would head inland to bring John Peyton down from his trapline for the expedition to the lake. The men outfitted a sledge with fur blankets to carry Mary across to Buchan’s vessel and they waited outside then while Cassie prepared the Beothuk woman for the trip.

Mary was so exhausted by her illness that she was unable to comprehend why she had to get up out of bed and where exactly she was going. Cassie helped her into a sitting position, lifting her legs over the side of the bed, and even this effort brought on a fit of wet hacking that ripped at her like an oiled blade ragging through lumber. Cassie sat beside her with an arm across her shoulders and held a cloth filthy with dried and drying blood to her mouth. She could feel the woman’s bones through her skin, their effort to hold together under the barrage of convulsive coughing. Cassie recalled the grip of Mary’s hand on her wrist that first afternoon in the Peytons’ kitchen, the fierceness of it and the wild look in her eye that Cassie had thought of as
Indianness
, when it had been nothing more or less than terror, the desperate kernel of a will to live when it seemed certain she would not. All that energy was bled from her now. The fear. The resolution.

In the kitchen Cassie helped Mary into her coat and boots and handed her the cloth package of leather clothes she had been wearing when Peyton and his party tracked her down on the lake-ice the previous March. She had folded the sixteen pairs of blue moccasins among the clothes before tying the package shut. John Senior came to the door to help her down the path and she reached for his arm. When she saw the white men waiting with the sledge she turned to Cassie. She said, “Mary go home.”

Cassie nodded. “Goodbye Mary,” she said.

There was a week’s interval between John Senior leaving Mary in the hands of Buchan at the
Grasshopper
and bringing his son down from the trapline to Ship Cove. By the time they returned, Mary had been set up in a large room aboard ship with a buzaglo stove for heat. To Buchan’s eye, she was genuinely delighted to see Peyton when he was shown into her room and the two talked quietly together. Her English was stunted but surprisingly effective, pared to its blunt essentials — subject-verb-object, the relentlessly present tense. Buchan set about boiling water for tea and exchanging occasional words with John Senior, whose English, he thought unkindly, was stunted in a much less obvious fashion. Mary fell asleep as he passed mugs to the men and they carried their chairs to the furthest corner of the room to avoid disturbing her.

The weather, which earlier in the season promised a harsh fall, had turned surprisingly temperate. Peyton told Buchan that the River Exploits was open almost the entire distance
they had just come down, with only the thinnest runners of ice at the banks that would be treacherous for sledges.

“We’ll have to wait until the frost comes on,” Buchan said.

John Senior shook his head. “That one is thin as the rames of mercy.” He nodded towards the bed where the Beothuk woman lay. “No way she’ll make it through to the lake alive.”

Buchan said, “You say that almost as if you cared one way or another.”

John Senior gave his curious half-choked bark of laughter, placed his mug on the floor and then walked across to the door. His huge stooped figure disappeared in the rush of light as he opened it and walked outside.

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.