Arundel (66 page)

“Here,” he said, “I want you to do something about this!”

“About what?”

“Why, it’s a shame and disgrace the way this red wench of yours has taken up with a common soldier—one of those damned Virginians, too! When I go to talk to her she treats me like the dirt under her feet and clings to that damned clod-hopping Virginian as if he were a gentleman!”

“I know nothing about it,” I said. “She’s no wench of mine, and I won’t stick my nose into what doesn’t concern me. I’ve seen too much of that in Arundel.”

“Well,” he said, “you take an interest in what she does, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I take an interest, but I won’t try to regulate her. The law of the Abenakis says an Abenaki woman does as she pleases. If she wishes to marry a man, she goes to his bed and there’s an end of it. If she wishes to divorce him, she leaves his bed and there’s an end of
that.
That’s one reason why our white poeple can never live in friendship with Indians. They can live with no one they can’t regulate.”

“Well, it’s a shame and disgrace,” Burr insisted. “If you wished, you could persuade her to go to headquarters with your friend Phoebe to help with the cooking.”

“It seems to me no more shameful or disgraceful,” I said, “than if she should travel to Quebec with you.”

“Pah!” said Burr. “That’s entirely different! What can this common soldier do for her?”

To this there were many answers in my mind, but it seemed wiser to withhold them. I growled a little, as Maine folk do when not wishful of answering, and set off again to look for Goodrich’s company.

Phoebe had attached herself to Noah Cluff. “Look here,” I told her, “go straight to the kitchen of whatever house Arnold takes as headquarters, and take Jacataqua with you.”

“And have this little pickerel Burr darting around our feet day and night? I won’t do it, Steven!”

“Now here!” I said. “I want none of this foolishness! You can do as you like about Jacataqua, of course; but I want you to waste no time getting to the kitchen.”

“No,” she said, “I’m not going to do it! Noah says he’ll die if I leave him, so I’ll stay with him. Then you won’t worry about having me on your hands.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” I said. “This is the most damnable thing I ever heard!”

“No,” she said, “I don’t choose you should have me on your hands.”

“You
won’t
be on my hands! Not as much as though you stayed with Noah. Noah indeed, the damned old fool!”

“Was you speaking about me?” asked Noah, yawning.

“Well, I won’t be on your hands, and that’s all there is to it,” Phoebe said. “That’s what you were afraid of when we left. Anyway, you’ve got another woman to think of now.”

“Who?” I asked, thick-witted from the cold.

“Why,” said Phoebe, speaking so mealy-mouthed as to sicken me, “why, somewhere I’ve had the thought there was someone in Quebec you had to save from a dreadful, dreadful fate!”

I looked at her sternly, but she returned my glance with such a steady long look of mockery that all I could do, it seemed, was turn from her disgustedly and go my ways.

A little before dawn Arnold and Morgan, followed by the riflemen and the rest of us, set off across the Plains of Abraham; and in the gray of the early morning we came up to a large manor house with workmen’s cottages and barns and sheds, all forming a pile five times the size of our garrison house at Arundel, and all belonging, the officers said, to Major Henry Caldwell, commanding the British militia in Quebec.

When we surrounded the buildings and moved in on them, we found eight or ten servants loading food and furniture and pictures and rugs into teams, everything ready to hand. Yet we couldn’t make free with these belongings, since Colonel Arnold ordered them to be taken into the house again. We dispersed in search of quarters, and I found myself with a part of Captain Goodrich’s company in a small building beside the manor house, most of the rooms in the manor house having been seized by Morgan’s riflemen.

I would have wasted no time in falling asleep had not Natanis come into the room and signaled to me to come out. He pointed to the roof of the manor house and on it I saw Cap Huff crouched with a stupendous armful of material. He threw it down to us, and we took it quickly to our quarters.

When Cap came in he wiped his sweaty face on a corner of the silk comforter in which his spoils were wrapped, and said he had been obliged to work like lightning to get ahead of Morgan’s riflemen.

“Gosh!” he said angrily. “Those men don’t think of
anything
but stealing! All I could do was clean out a closet and throw it into this comforter.”

“What did you get?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t have time to look, but it was clothes, and we can trade clothes for
anything.”

We untied the comforter and found a number of garments belonging to the lady of the manor, among them some lace-trimmed inexpressibles, a haircloth bustle, a pair of stays, and two dresses of sprigged muslin. There were three pairs of breeches, but they were for a boy half the size of Phoebe, as were two roundabout jackets and three frilled shirts.

I expected Cap to burst into profanity that would set fire to the buildings; but the disappointment must have been too great. He rolled the things in the stays, made for a woman the size of a haystack, took them to where Phoebe was lying wrapped in her blanket beside Noah Cluff, and kicked the soles of her feet until she roused up and looked at him, her chopped-off hair sticking out from her head like that of a small boy. Still preserving an outraged silence, Cap hurled his bundle at her, so that it struck her on the chest. Then he swathed himself in the comforter and crawled in between Natanis and me.

It was late in the morning when I awoke. Cap was gone. The warmth of the room and the ceiling over my head—two unaccustomed luxuries—fuddled me completely. I though I was in Arundel and wiggled my nose for a whiff of Malary’s coffee and bacon. Then it came to me that we were lying outside the walls of Quebec; that within those walls was Mary Mallinson, waiting to be taken from her captors and back to her own people.

We had wheat cakes and freshly killed pork from Phoebe, who told us proudly she could make good use of the garments Cap had given her. All she needed now, she added, with a sidelong glance at me, was some sort of fur garment, so she could clothe herself decently and play the spy in order to find out for me how my friends were progressing in the city.

Uneasy at her talk, I took Natanis and set off for the city walls, along the ridge at whose extremity lies Quebec.

If I had come as a farmer, looking for land to cultivate, I would have held this country in esteem; for the fields were smooth and rolling, well situated to attract summer rains and deep snows, which lend fertility to any soil. They fell away on our left into an enormous shallow valley; and at its far rim stood a long, long range of mountains, so there was a spaciousness to our surroundings that I had thought could only be found on the shore of the ocean.

Yet it was not as a farmer that I looked at it, but as one who had come to wrest it from its owners; so I could see little about it that was good. There was meager cover on those high plains; and I knew the wind and snows from the north would sweep down from the distant mountains and across that broad valley, piercing our poor rags as easily as newly sharpened scalping knives. Also if ever a place defied the devil himself to take it, it was this city of Quebec, built on a towering rock thrust out like a wedge to separate the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles rivers.

In the distance we could see the long, low line of the walls, with the spires and gables of the upper town rising above it; and between us and the walls three clusters of houses—to the left the suburb of St. Roque; in the center the suburb of St. John; and far over toward the right, the suburb of St. Louis. These suburbs were built around the city gates—St. Roque outside Palace Gate; St. John outside St. John’s Gate; and St. Louis outside St. Louis’s Gate.

On the extreme right the wall rose up to a high bastion on the peak of Cape Diamond; and because we had seen it from the far side of the river we knew it was perched on top of a perpendicular cliff towering three hundred feet above the St. Lawrence—though to us it seemed to rise from a rolling field. On the extreme left, too, where the wall ended at Palace Gate, we knew the land fell away to the St. Charles River. If, therefore, the wall was unscalable, there was only one method of attack: to go down to the shore of one of the two rivers, towering cliffs on one side and water on the other, and scramble all the way around the damned rock in the hope of finding a passageway from the lower town at the water’s edge to the upper town, high up on the headland.

When we came closer to the wall we saw it was built of blocks of dirty gray stone. There were ports in it with the muzzles of cannon showing through; nor was there anything but wall to be seen, for its height cut off our sight of everything behind it.

We went close to the suburb of St. John, made up of neat small houses on rolling ground, with thickets of trees among them. While we debated whether we should go closer, there came a burst of shouts and a violent snarling from a thicket near the western edge of the suburb. We could see men struggling in the thicket. Almost at once a man ran toward the stragglers from trees far to their left, while another man started toward them from behind a hillock far to their right. These were our men, I could see. It came to me suddenly they were pickets, running toward another of our pickets who had been captured.

Ahead of us, among the houses of the suburb, there was incessant shouting and snarling. As we ran forward, we saw six men hurrying a seventh through the snow toward the wall. At their heels, snarling and slashing at them, was Jacataqua’s yellow-faced dog, while closing in on them and being struck and thrown off again, was Jacataqua herself.

At this I knew that the captured man must be Jacataqua’s new friend—George Merchant, the Virginia rifleman.

I stopped, primed my musket, and fired, but the distance was too great for accuracy. Heads showed along the top of the wall, and a faint noise of cheering came to us. Other riflemen came up, cursing, and wasted shots.

From the distant group a pistol was fired at the yellow-faced dog. He ran in a circle, biting at his tail. St. John’s Gate swung open before the struggling men. All seven of them scurried through; and as they went, one of them struck Jacataqua and threw her into the snow beside the gate, which swung shut behind them.

Jacataqua picked herself up, went to the gate and beat against it with her fists, then turned to her dog. When he followed her, holding his rump gingerly, we saw the pistol ball had broken his tail near the base.

Natanis led me to the tracks of the seven men.

“Here is something to think about,” he said, touching one footprint with his finger and then another. I failed to get his meaning.

He laughed. “You forget your lessons! Do you remember how Paul Higgins said to us that Treeworgy, like Hook, walked on the inside of his heels with his toes turned out, taking no grip on the ground?”

I looked again at the footprints. The marks of the heels were deep at the inner edge; those of the toes were shallow.

Jacataqua borrowed a knife from a rifleman and sliced off her dog’s tail at the wound, so that he had less than an inch to wag.

She was quiet, showing no rage, only a little moodiness, such as a girl might show at dropping grease on a new ribbon; but from the way she hefted the knife in her right hand, I knew there was more than moodiness in her heart.