The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (11 page)

I
T’S MID-MORNING
when Charlotte sees the Indians approaching. Eight maybe ten, walking down the long path that leads from the forest on the hillside to Alston Point. They are carrying something—furs perhaps, piled on a tarpaulin that’s slung over two poles. She’s anxious to be present when the commodore goes out to greet them, but a residual fear still lingers so she waits
and spies on them from a distance. One speaks to the commodore in English. They want to trade the goods they carry for the molasses and rum he brought on the schooner. There’s a lot of talking, must be the way they make the trade, she thinks. At last, the exchange is made. She has lost her chance to speak to an Indian and sulks about it when the commodore returns to the house. He tells her that he has to go to the camp to meet with their leader, Chief Francis Julian, later in the afternoon and that she can go with him if she likes.

He has no special instructions for her while they walk the short distance to the camp except to say the Indians are known as the People of the Salmon and are respected for their medicinal remedies. The camp is situated at the top of a hill that overlooks the harbour on one side and the bay on the other. Walker explains, “It’s a fine location for a camp, high enough to be dry but close enough to the water below to have easy access to the canoes and a fresh-water lagoon that empties into the harbour immediately below the camp.”

Closer now, she can see that the camp is surrounded by trees—spruce, poplar and an abundance of birch. The black-water murky lagoon separating them from the hill they need to climb to the camp necessitates a tricky crossing over a collection of logs. Near the top of the hill she gets her first glimpse inside the camp and calculates a dozen tents in a clearing and one long, low log house set apart from the rest. There are a few cabins, shacks really, nearer the woods. An enormous fire pit in the middle of the camp is where all the action is—animal skins are fastened to frames by the fire—to dry, she supposes—women are cleaning fish and dogs are hungrily lapping up the refuse the women toss to the ground. All at once the visitors are noticed.

People come from all directions—little ones, old men,
young girls and their mothers and grandmothers and the yapping dogs gather by the fire looking toward them.

Walker tells her the man coming toward them is Chief Francis Julian. The hearty greeting the two men exchange makes it obvious that they have known each other for some time. Charlotte is transfixed. The frightening tales she has heard of savages—scalping, raiding, stealing, pillaging—are suspended when Chief Julian tells her she is welcome at the camp.

W
IOCHE IS NOT AMONG
the people who gather around the fire. He’s carefully concealed, watching the English commodore and this strange woman by his side. He rubs Atilq’s head to sooth his own anger when he hears the English words. He knows Chief Julian speaks the commodore’s language because it’s good for trade with the English, who rarely learned the language of any other. But it rankles—this deferring to the foreign men. As the chief’s appointed traveller, his job is not to trade the pelt of the beaver or the hide of a moose. He trades information for the chief from camp to camp in the Mi’kmaq region, information that increasingly concerns the white man standing in this camp. Wioche had long known the language of the French as the French had been the powerful strangers in the time of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather. The Salmon People spoke in their own language to the French, whose little brothers
les Acadiens
had lived in these woods and fished these waters so long. Wioche reluctantly learned to speak the English white man’s language as well.

M
ARIE STANDS
by the fire with Josef, who is three, and Marc, who is four, and watches the English arriving in the camp. Chief Julian comes forward to give greetings. He knew well enough
how to be a friend to strangers and draw advantage from them. The old commodore was no exception, though he is less a stranger than most English.

Marie does not wish to offend the woman who appears to belong to the commodore, and she is careful not to allow her inspection to become a stare. But it was impossible not to marvel at so strange a shape. The woman is an odd creature. How had she grown so tall? And though the skins of the English were often pale—paler even than that of her Acadian husband, André—they were never in Marie’s experience as pale as this, and the hair colour was—it was unnatural.

Yet for all that, the woman behaves just as women among the People were expected to behave. In the presence of Chief Julian, she speaks not a word, though her voice had echoed up the gully as she’d approached. Now the commodore and the chief walk aside to speak alone, and the red-haired woman stands among a crowd of strangers. Marie stoops to stoke the fire for tea and drops her berries and leaves in the kettle propped on stones in its midst. She probes the sand with a stick to check if her bannock is ready.

A
bois brule
—married to a white man—she prides herself on baking better bannock than her sisters. Not that
les Acadiens
had eaten the bannock, of course. The Scots—a kind of English—had passed that good food to the People many years before. Indeed, her own grandmother had baked bannock. But it was a white man’s food nonetheless, and André Landry was a white man and that made her bannock better. She straightens up to call at Josef, who was about to plunge himself straight into the fire.

“Get back!” she says. “Or you will burn up like the devil!”

She speaks in Mi’kmaq. The children understand French well, but it had come to her with difficulty and more so because André spoke the language of the People. Since they had hid
les
Acadiens
from the British soldiers for twenty years, many of the People who did not speak French before now spoke it well. This was the wisdom of Chief Julian, who had seen that the French would return some day in numbers. Already there were signs that this was so. There were no English here in the land of the People, only some Scots and French from across the water and a few of the old
Acadiens
returned. And the commodore, of course, and his men. But they were not ordinary English.

The red-haired woman waits awkwardly and Marie glances at her belly. Was this the way with such long English women, that their bellies stood out a little beneath their dresses? Or could she be with child, the commodore’s child perhaps? Who would know about this? Marie wondered.

“Here,” she says to the woman, her voice low, as it always was when she spoke French. “Here is food.” She begins to poke at the ashes with a burnt stick.

The English woman draws close. “Do you speak French?” she asks in that language but also softly.

“A little, from my husband,” says Marie. “And you? Do you speak French too?”

“Yes, a little.”

“Josef!” she calls. “Come back or I will tie you!”

“Are these your children?” the red-haired woman asks.

“Yes. And my husband is
un Acadien.”

“How beautiful they are! You married a man who was not one of your own.”

Marie smiles shyly. “I married the man I loved.”

“Yes,” says the white woman. “Yes.”

Marie uses two sticks to pluck the bannock from the coals and shakes the sand from the flattened bread. She gives a piece to each of her children, and a piece to the woman.

They chew a minute in silence while Marie wrestles with the propriety of her thoughts.

“May I touch your hair?” she finally whispers.

“Of course.”

“It’s real?” asks Marie.

“Yes, of course it is.” She leans forward to let Marie touch her hair and asks, “What’s your name?”

“Marie Landry. What is yours?”

“Charlotte,” she answers, her eyes as blue as the sky. “Charlotte Taylor.”

F
RANCIS
J
ULIAN
is in his fifty-third year and his hair is long, almost to his waist, and the black is shot through with grey. His skin is the colour of buckwheat honey, but this is a matter of no note, since this was the colour of the skin of all the Salmon People. His nose is high and arched, and his dark eyes are veiled by their upper lids. This, too, is unexceptional. In summer, he wears a wolfskin draped over his otherwise bare shoulders and his trousers are baggy and woollen, courtesy of the white traders his people had come to know. His moccasins are made of deerskin, soft and carefully beaded. These, too, are as they should be. Francis Julian is in every way unexceptional except in respect to his mind, which is uncommonly clear.

At thirty he had seen the extension of English power when even the proud French generals could not assess its true nature. The learning of English had been the greatest challenge of his life. “I have killed the mother bear,” he would often say, “but I did not fear then as I feared the shifting face of the language of the English.”

His prescience has had its reward, and the Salmon People knew greater prosperity than they had known in the memory of
the oldest man among them. And had there been no other Englishman, his friendship with George Walker would still have bettered the lives of every one of the People.

Except for the rum. Francis Julian knew the English goods for what they were—easements of life’s burdens. The rum, too, had come disguised as a blessing. But it had stolen the souls of his best. What could he do now about the rum and the men who brought it? This was a friendship to preserve. After he and the commodore had spoken at length, they part again as friends. What had the upstart Americans who were rebelling in the colonies to offer that was better than this?

The English start back down the path and the commodore sees Wioche, alone on the ridge above them. Charlotte walks beside Walker as the entourage descends from the camp.

They pick their way down the path without speaking until Charlotte sees the lone figure on the outcropping above and to their right.

“Who is that?” she asks.

Even from fifty yards, he is a striking figure, taller and more muscular than the other men of the Salmon. His sleek black hair flutters in the breeze as he turns to watch them pass below him. He makes no gesture, but Charlotte feels the force of his gaze fall directly upon her.

Walker looks up briefly.

“Wioche, the chief’s favoured man, he’s called the traveller,” he says. “Something of a dark horse.”

“I’m most intrigued, commodore, with this encampment and these people,” Charlotte begins. “Can you tell me how they live there? Do they live all together in that great hut, or in the little cottages and tents? Does every Indian have many wives, as I have heard?”

Walker stops in his tracks. “Charlotte, I beg you. Allow me to give some consideration to the news I have just heard.”

He starts down again. Scolded, she falls silent, but keeps pace with him, her newly adopted boots making her sure-footed on the rough forest trail. After the experiences of the ship, she could not conceive of any cause for less than complete candour between them.

Finally he stops and turns to her. “Charlotte, the outpost may come under attack by American rebels. That is the simple fact. That is the news.”

“What will you do, if I may ask?”

“What I
must
do, is to depart for Quebec. I’ll consult there with others in His Majesty’s service about this matter. I can only say, Charlotte, that I repent mightily that I may have put you in danger. And I thank God for your imminent departure.”

B
ACK AT
A
LSTON
P
OINT,
a canoe had arrived from Restigouche across the bay bearing news. Walker is huddled with his men in the main house and Charlotte is not intended to be party to any of it. She walks out to the water and surveys her new surroundings.

Alston Point is almost entirely a dune of sand. It juts into a channel to create a large harbour off the Baie de Chaleur. Its stands of white pine carpet the earth beneath them with softly scented needles, and the sands by the water are dotted with shards of white clam and indigo oyster shells like quarter moons. Charlotte is drawn to the peculiar nature of the tides in the place, tides so extreme they leave swaths of the bay uncovered in their retreat, as is now the case. The gulls are landing in their hundreds, prancing and pecking furiously
into holes on the sandy, rippled flats and snatching up creatures, a savage spectacle. As she walks, she considers the dizzying flow of events. She had entertained the idea of remaining with Walker here for some time, long enough at least to consider her plight more carefully and arrive at a course of action not wholly determined by others. But if he is to leave for Quebec by canoe—and she knew he could not be persuaded to allow her to accompany him on such an adventure—how could she remain here without his patronage and protection?

Back in her own chamber, she loosens the stays of her dress and feels a considerable relief. Her pregnancy has remained her secret, but—she calculates the time—it is late-August and the quickening has begun, wondrous and foreboding at once. Her midriff has thickened and her breasts are swelling. Soon she would have to let the stays out.

There are fourteen men gathered in the dining room that evening, and a palpable air of excitement pervades the room. When Charlotte enters, the entire group—ship’s officers, trading-post roustabouts and leathery canoeists just off the water—rise in courtesy.

“I shall never again be one woman among so many men,” Charlotte says as she takes her chair.

“Or half-men,” a grizzled fellow mutters from the table’s end to polite guffaws.

It is a comfortable dining room, with some respectable English furniture and even several French pieces. When Charlotte points these out, Walker smiles cryptically. To the victor has gone the spoils, apparently. These were living cheek by jowl with an assortment of animal-skin carpets, aboriginal pottery and religious symbols such as heavy silver crosses.

On this occasion, the first course consists of clawed monsters called lobster, boiled and served broken in pieces on platters. They strike Charlotte as a most unnatural food, but she is coming to terms with extracting the white meat from the bony shell as well as the thick grainy bread, a taste, too, that she is bent on acquiring. The men are drinking rum as always, but this libation is not extended to the woman among them. The commodore’s sense of what is appropriate seems at least in part to be determined by the company he keeps.