Arundel (78 page)

“Good idea!” Cap said. He removed his own, carrying the two of them from the room.

Shivering and cowering in the bed, Mary burst into a flux of French. She sobbed and snuffled and poured out French at me. Her blue eyes, peering out over the edge of the silken coverlet, never once moved from my face.

“Mary,” I said, “I don’t know a word you say. “I’m Steven Nason from Arundel. The other is Cap Huff, who threw Guerlac into the mud when we were children. We’ll do you no harm if you’re honest with us. You’ll have to speak English.”

Again she rattled at me in French, emphatic and indignant.

I could tell she was insisting that her name was De Sabrevois—insisting, too, that I should leave the house.

Cap came back with his brandy bottle and wandered around the room, picking up small silver articles from tables, examining them carefully, and peering into drawers.

“Cap,” I said, “she doesn’t remember any English.”

Cap took a small leather case from the back of a drawer and opened it. “Don’t be a damned fool! She stopped screaming, didn’t she?”

Her glance traveled from Cap to me. Cap tossed the leather case into the drawer and turned sharply on her. “Hark, little lady! Do you think we dodged bullets and cannon balls and climbed into this lousy city to have you make a fool of us with your damned frog-eating French?”

She watched him without speaking.

Cap snapped his fingers impatiently. “Speak up!” Seemingly as an afterthought he laughed and added, “Sister!”

“What do you want?” she asked faintly.

I was stonied by the suddenness of the question, and racked my brains for a reply. Cap spoke up again. “I want something to eat. That’s what I want and it’s what you want, too, Stevie.”

“Yes,” I said, “I do. So does Mary. We broke in on her breakfast. She can get dressed while we’re in the kitchen.”

“She can get dressed while we’re right here,” Cap said, pulling out another drawer and rummaging among its contents. “She’s too tricky to suit me.”

I protested we couldn’t shame her so.

“Shame her be damned! Let her dress under the bedclothes if she thinks we want to peep at her. I’d rather shame her than be caught like a rat because of her trickiness.”

He picked delicate garments from a chair, peered at them curiously, sniffed loudly at them, expelled his breath in a noisy, ecstatic sigh, and pitched them onto the bed. “Get into those!”

“You great beast!” Mary said. “I’ll touch nothing you’ve had in your hands.”

“Oh, ho!” Cap said. “You’ve got finicky since you used to go barelegged and wear blue cotton in Arundel. Put ’em on, or I’ll put ’em on you myself.” Again he paused, adding “Sister!” in a mincing tone.

“Cap,” I said, “I don’t like the way you talk! It’s no way to talk to—to—it’s no way to talk to Mary.”

“No, it ain’t, and that’s a fact; not to Mary.” He took a silver-backed brush from a dresser and attacked his hair with it. “That’s a nice brush,” he said, looking at it admiringly “H. G. deS. Those your initials, Sister?”

Mary was under the bedclothes and couldn’t answer.

“Cap,” I said, “I won’t have it. You’ve got to stop.”

Cap pulled me out in the hall, leaving the door open so he could keep an eye on Mary and her squirming beneath the coverlets. “Listen, Stevie,” he whispered hoarsely. “We can’t get out of this house till dark, if we get out at all. We might have to stay in here all day! God knows how we’ll get out, in that case, or who may come while we’re here. Guerlac might, for one, unless he’s dead, and I’ll bet he ain’t. Now don’t go getting soft about this Mary of yours until you know she won’t stick a knife in your back if she gets a chance. She ain’t our kind of folks any more, Stevie. She’s a lady, and we’re nasty, terrible people.”

“No,” I said. “She’s frightened, poor thing.”

“That won’t hurt her none!” Cap growled, going back into the bedroom.

She was dressed by now in a gown of heavy blue stuff that clung to her. It had a collar that turned back from her white neck, and sleeves that came down over the backs of her hands. I had never seen a dress so fine or a face so beautiful as Mary’s. There was a fragile, disdainful look to her: a look as though the labor of smiling would be more than she cared to undertake, and one that might crack her face into the bargain. There was a golden dust beneath her eyes, the dust that had caused the Frenchman Sharl to call her a Lily of France when he told me of her; and the braids of her hair seemed as golden and heavy as the loops of golden candy my sister Cynthy makes from molasses at Christmas time and pulls over an iron hook with butter on her hands. Yet I couldn’t keep from thinking what would have become of this hair and this soft white skin in the swamps of Lake Megantic.

I stood looking at her. Truth to say, I stared and stared like an owl, and had no more to say than an owl. For, grown man as I was, I was like a boy who has a long daydream broken into suddenly. That was the case of it with me, in true fact; but the boyhood daydream had lasted within me over years. How many thousand times had I pictured my meeting with Mary when I should come to rescue her, what I should say to her and what she should say to me. And now the meeting had come to pass at last; but here was no Mary Mallinson at all before me. Here was a fine lady, Frenchified and delicate; and it was in her eyes that she thought of me just what she would have thought of an oversized, wet, and grotesque black bear out of the shaggy woods, if such a creature had come blundering into this exquisite bedchamber.

So I looked and looked at her and tried to speak, but instead I swallowed; and then, to find at last the makings of some sort of sound to make easier a kind of misery within my chest, I coughed several times as heartily as I could.

“Well—” I said, coughing again. “Well—” And saying no more I went to the front of the house and stood there.

After a little I turned into a room at the left of the corridor, and found Natanis peering out through a peephole in the closed shutter. There was an iron stove in this room, and fur rugs on the floor and paintings on the wall. Hanging from the ceiling, in glittering festoons, was a candleholder, made all of pieces of glass.

“The snow has let up,” Natanis said, “but I think it will storm again. There has been no man on the street. This house is strong. There’s an iron shutter on each window, and two doors, both iron.”

I went to the door and unbolted it. It was as Natanis said. The first door opened inward; and three feet beyond it was the outer door, also of iron, opening outward. I showed Natanis that I was unbolting the outer door and leaving the inner door fastened.

“If any man comes, call me. Then open, and hide yourself behind the door as he enters. Between us we’ll have no trouble. Keep watch. Soon there’ll be food. I think we’ll come well out of this.”

I went into the kitchen. Hobomok sat against the back door, watchful; and in the middle of the room there was Mary sitting in a chair, looking straight at the wall. Cap, standing before her, was in no pleasant mood.

“Damn hert” he said. “She swears to God she don’t know how to cook, and I’m beginning to believe her. It’s a disgrace to the town of Arundel and the whole damned province of Maine, if you ask me! Can’t cook! Gosh! I never expected to live to see the day a Maine woman couldn’t cook!”

Mary never looked at him, nor at me, but she spoke in a husky voice. “Maine woman? I? You take me for a filthy Bostonnais?”

Cap’s jaw dropped. He put a hand on each knee, squatting, open-mouthed, to stare at her the more strickenly. “Filthy who?”

“Mind your own business!” I told him. “There’s plenty of women in Maine that can’t cook, either, not any more than a chipmunk can, though they call it cooking. Why don’t you cook your own breakfast?”

“Well, mebbe I better,” Cap said, straightening up. “Us filthy Bostonnais have got to have our food.”

“What can we have?” I asked.

“Why,” said Cap, in some surprise, “there ain’t nuthin’ left in the world but pork, is there? Pork and wine wouldn’t be bad for breakfast, Stevie: a little pork and a lot of wine.” He turned to Mary, and the tone in which he addressed her was more polite than his words. “Where’s the pork, Sister?”

“Where are my servants?” Mary asked.

“Everything’s in the cellar,” I told Cap. “You know it well enough. Bring up two dozen eggs and some of that Beaune if there is any.”

Cap went down into the cellar with a candle, and there was a sound of squealing from below as he went. At this Mary turned her eyes on mine so that I was fair sickened by the uncomfortableness that her glance put upon me, but made shift to answer what seemed to be a scornful question in her look.

“The womenfolk are down there, but they’ll come to no harm,” I told her gruffly. Then, with what I knew to be a loutish awkwardness, and most lamely, while her eyes still remained upon me, I tried to say some of the things I had so many, many times dreamed I should say to her some day. But I failed, of course. I stammered, and was not able to conclude a sentence, so that my speech, like my presence of mind, was all fragments.

“I—I followed you with my father, but—” I said. “We tried to rescue—we tried—and after that every year I thought that I could—
I always meant to come—I never forgot—”

She broke in on me with a cold little laugh. “There’s one thing I know,” she said, sliding her eyes toward me in a way that had stayed in my heart for many years, “and that is that this man wouldn’t be where he is if the Bostonnais had captured the city.” She meant Hobomok and his watching at the door with his musket between his knees.

“Mary,” I stammered, “of course I always meant to come some day—on account of my promise—”

“Promise? You made a promise?”

“Why, I mean the promise after we’d had the lobsters in the dunes—when you—you kissed me and made me promise to marry you.”

She had a wisp of a handkerchief in her hand. She dabbed at her lips with it. Her eyes sank until they rested on my feet. Then she lifted them and looked at my hands as though they weren’t clean, though I think they were because of the deal of snow that had melted on them since I had started out of the barracks into the storm.

I swallowed again. “I think we can find some way of getting you out of the city, Cap and I, if so be you’ll come. We can go back to Arundel. I’ve always expected to take you back to Arundel.”

She raised her eyes to mine again. They were as blue as my mother’s teacups that Captain Callendar brought her from England; as blue and as hard.

“Arundel! That stinking nest of log huts among the fish bones?”

“What!” I said, gaping at her. “Is that what you think of it?”

“You!” she cried suddenly and loudly, hurling the word out of her throat with such a fury of disgust in it that I almost staggered back from her. “You—you peasant! You innkeeper!”

“Well, for God’s sake! What are you talking about!”

“Look around you!” she bade me fiercely. “Are you such a fool that you cannot see what this house is? There’s no finer house in all Quebec! Do you know who comes to it? The governor comes to it! There’s no man in Canada who is not honored to come to this house and eat at my table! Do you know how many men would give their souls to kiss this slipper?” Almost to my horror she thrust out at me her little foot in gilded leather, with a high red heel. “And do you know who they are, and do you know their quality? The highest here! Officers and gentlemen! And you talk to me of going back to your fisherman’s cesspool! You boor, with your dirty, smelly clothes and your nasty rough face! You’d never be allowed in this house unless you came like a thief, you and your gaol-bird companions!”

“Good God!” I muttered. “Good God!”

There was a clatter behind me. Cap dropped the trapdoor with a bang and stowed an armful of meat and eggs and bottles on the table. “Gosh!” he said, walking over to Mary and staring hard at her face. “I heard what she just said, Stevie; and now I know who she reminds me of! It’s her father, Stevie! He never said a sensible word in his life, and she’s inherited it from him!”

He poked the fire and reached for a saucepan, when Natanis opened the door and spoke quickly in Abenaki.

“Take care of her, Cap,” I said. “No noise!”

With that I went out after Natanis. He had said that Guerlac was coming to the house, alone.

I went close to the front door with Natanis and stood there. We could hear a fumbling at the outer latch, and catch the faint whine of hinges. There was a metallic banging at our very ears. My heart leaped as Natanis drew the bolt and opened the door. It folded back and hid the two of us in that dim corridor. Guerlac stepped jauntily past us, tugging at his sash and his blanket coat.