River Thieves (16 page)

She brought the candle from the table so he could see more clearly. The top sheet was printed over in a loose, sloping hand. He leaned closer to read it. “‘The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice,’” he read aloud. He flipped through the pages, dozens of them, each written out in the same hand. Beneath
Othello
was a handwritten copy of
The Tempest.
Peyton was mystified. He had seen in her trunk all nine volumes of Nicholas Rowe’s stage edition of Shakespeare’s plays.

“It was a way to pass the time,” Cassie said, “when my mother was ill. Near the end she slept most of the day and night and I was too tired to just read. I thought you might like to have them.”

Peyton stared at her, his mouth opening and closing uselessly. He stood up and placed the papers in her lap. “I have something for you,” he said. She heard his feet hammering the stairs, a scuffling noise from his room overhead. When he came back into the kitchen he held one hand behind his back. “Close your eyes,” he told her. “Put out your hand.” He
placed a small leather pouch in her palm.

Cassie emptied the bag in her lap and held each item in turn in the light. The carved antler. The bird skulls. The fire stone. “Where did you get these?”

“Out on Swan Island. John Senior found the pouch in a cave along the shore.”

“They’re beautiful, John Peyton.”

He nodded and blushed, embarrassed to be the object of her gratitude. Besides which, he had told her so little of the truth of the gift’s origins that he felt he had somehow lied to her.

She had cajoled him into reading through
Othello
with her, and they took on parts as necessary to play off the lead characters, their heads leaning together over a candle. Peyton read tentatively and Cassie prompted him by touching a finger to his forearm, whispering the pronunciation of each word that brought him up short. She seemed to have the play memorized and sometimes recited lines with her eyes closed. He never imagined people could speak so nakedly from the heart. When Cassie said,
That I did love the Moor to live with him, my downright violence and storm of fortunes may trumpet to the world
, he could not find his place on the page. And that same lost feeling came to him in the Indian shelter now as he fingered the pages in the near dark.

The sleet and snow continued into the next morning. Buchan had his men divide the blankets and shirts and tin pots they had carried up from the sledge camp among the mamateeks and they set out across the ice in the direction the Indian had pointed the day before. He ran ahead of the group in a zigzag pattern as if
tracing a path that no one else could see and sometimes looked behind to the white men to motion to the distant shoreline. Before they had travelled a mile onto the ice the Indian edged to his right a ways and stopped still for several moments. Without looking back then he fled across the lake. “Jesus, Jesus,” William Cull said, and the party picked up its pace in the face of the gale until they reached the spot where the Indian had paused.

The bodies were about a hundred yards apart, stripped naked and lain on their bellies. The heads of both marines had been cut from the torsos and carried off. The flesh at their necks was flayed ragged as if a blunt blade had been used to behead them and loose scarves of blood draped the snow above the mutilation. Their backs were pierced by arrows. The group stood over the scene in a stunned silence until one of the Blue Jackets in the party turned away from the bodies and vomited. The sound of his retching unleashed a string of curses and several of the men, including Peyton, dropped to their knees and threw up into the snow as well.

They covered the bodies with spruce branches and secured the branches with stones dug from underneath the snow on the nearest point of land which they named Bloody Point. Buchan read from his prayer book and those that knew the words joined him in repeating the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer. Then the men turned away and began walking towards the headwaters of the river.

Richmond and Taylor had threatened biblical revenge over the mutilated corpses of their companions and in some measure had recruited the remaining marines and Matthew
Hughster to their cause, but Buchan had insisted on an immediate retreat. Only three men had their rifles with them and there was likely to be larger numbers of Indians on the lake than they had seen in the single camp. It was possible that a party of them had already been dispatched to ambush the eight men left behind with the sledges and this thought alone made Buchan anxious to get back to them. At the headwaters of the river the men stopped to eat bread and refresh themselves with rum. A column was organized and those with rifles stood at the front and rear while those with only pistols or cutlasses travelled between. They walked single file back to the camp where the rest of the party waited for them.

The rapid thaw that followed the sleet storm made the trip down the river more treacherous than it had been coming up. The ice had come away from the banks below the sledge camp and the men packed their knapsacks with as much provision as they could carry and left the sleighs behind. They constantly fell through the jagged ice and soaked themselves and scraped their shins raw. Occasionally pans broke loose and carried men into open water and they had to be rescued with extended walking sticks or ropes thrown from the shore. In the stretches where the ice was still solid, the rush of water from the river above and a steady rain had covered it in several inches of water that numbed the men’s feet and galled away the skin still clinging to their ankles and heels. They reached the camp they’d struck on the twenty-first well past dark, completing a journey of thirty-two miles in a single day.

Each of the next three days the party travelled eighteen miles or more, often walking knee-deep in freezing water or stumbling through rotten ice that sliced at their clothing and skin. There
was near total silence among them but for the encouragement shouted by Buchan and they moved forward with the somnambulant expressions of sleepwalkers. Partway through each day’s march Peyton lost all feeling in his legs and feet and watched them moving as if they belonged to another man’s body. Even Richmond seemed to have exhausted his reserves and plodded stupidly ahead, sometimes falling to his hands and knees. At night most of the group complained of swollen legs and Buchan had them rub their calves with a mixture of rum and pork grease, which offered some relief. Each night one or more of the party started awake from a dream of Butler’s perfectly blond head on a stake, of Bouthland’s eyes as dead and sightless as the mole on his cheek. Some tried desperately to stay awake then for fear of where their dreams would take them, but exhaustion always pulled them under. In the morning Buchan roused each man personally and he worried at their heels throughout the day to keep them out of the river and moving towards the coast.

On the last leg of the trip, when they were in sight of Little Peter’s Point and only a few hours’ heavy slogging from the
Adonis
, a peculiar elation came over the group. The men shouted encouragement back and forth to one another and laughed when they stumbled and spoke incessantly of the food they would eat and the hours they would sleep when they gained the ship, as if all they had been through on the river was a nightmare they’d suddenly woken from together. Even the wrenching guilt of abandoning the marines naked and beheaded on the lake left them briefly.

Already the men had begun remembering the expedition as a series of distinct episodes, the words for the tales they wanted to tell beginning to form in their minds. It was knowing they
would live to recount them to others that made them giddy and filled them with a strangely inarticulate hope those last hours on the River Exploits. Like everyone else around him, Peyton felt drained and perfectly clear, bleached of everything but the urge to speak. All the way across the Arm with the
Adonis
in sight, he thought only of seeing Cassie, of looking her in the face and saying, “Listen to me now. I have a story to tell you.”

The governor leafed through the report as Buchan ate his meal. He had returned from wintering in England only days before and was still trying to digest the news that awaited him. He sipped distractedly at a glass of brandy but hadn’t bothered to order food himself. He had no appetite.

“I blame myself for this,” Duckworth said. He lifted the papers he was reading from and shook them gently.

Buchan set his fork and knife across the plate and placed his forearms on the table. He bowed his head slightly. “It was bad luck,” he said. “Bad luck all around.”

Duckworth nodded at the papers again.

“They were afraid, Your Worship. They acted out of fear.”

The governor said, “I blame myself for this.”

“I will not allow you —”

“Don’t patronize me, Lieutenant.” Duckworth lifted his
brandy to his mouth and held the glass under his nose. “David,” he said softly. “Marie is keeping well, I hope.”

“Fine, yes.”

“And the girl?”

“Couldn’t be better, by the last correspondence I received. I hope to have them join me if I’m to be posted here longer than another year.”

Duckworth set his glass back on the table. He drummed his fingers against the wood. He wondered how much longer he was likely to be here himself. “Would you like to stay?”

Buchan was wiping his mouth with a napkin. He looked at the governor. “What I would like,” he said, “is to have the opportunity to return to the Red Indian’s lake.”

“Out of the question.” Duckworth pressed a hand to his stomach as if he’d suffered a sudden stab of pain. “It is plainly too dangerous.”

“Those men died in the course of duty.”

“They died in the course of a reckless expedition undertaken to satisfy my own personal whims.”

Buchan smiled across the table. “You do yourself a disservice, Governor. Which I understand completely, but will not condone.”

“Lieutenant.”

“We have always known that risk accompanies the righteous course.”

“Goddamn it man,” Duckworth shouted and then caught himself. “Goddamn it,” he said again, barely above a whisper. He pointed a finger across the table. “You cannot have stood over those men lying headless on that lake —
headless
, Lieutenant — you cannot have witnessed that and be
so sanguine.”

“The most sensible way I can think to honour the memory of my marines, Governor, is to carry on in this endeavour until we are successful.”

Duckworth shook his head and turned away, as if he was trying to avoid an unwanted kiss. “You are still a young man in these things, I see.”

Buchan picked up his knife and fork. “Now it is you who patronize me.”

“There will not be another expedition to the winter camps. It is too dangerous.” Duckworth sighed. “My constitution will simply not survive it,” he said.

“For now, I will accept that. But I want permission to return this summer, to try again to make contact with the smaller bands on the coast. I think it would be prudent to have a presence among the settlers besides. In case any among them are planning to exact their own measure of revenge.”

The governor helped himself to a huge mouthful of brandy. “This job will be the death of me,” he said.

Buchan nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

“Don’t thank me,” Duckworth said. “Don’t you dare.” He raised his hand in the air. “More brandy,” he shouted angrily.

The following summer, Buchan returned to the Bay of Exploits as a surrogate magistrate, and when not holding court or seeing to other duties, he carried out extensive searches of the mainland coast and the islands along the northeast shore. He visited occasionally with the Peytons on Burnt Island and shared a meal while gleaning all he could of their recent sightings
of Beothuk. He took notes in his journal, drew free-hand maps to fix locations in his mind. Peyton had seen a recently abandoned camp at the mouth of this or that river. One of the hired men caught sight of a canoe rounding a point of land in one bay or another.

There was a quiet, almost elegiac tone to the discussions, as if they were discussing creatures who had all but disappeared from the earth, ghosts, spirits who drifted occasionally to this side of darkness.

Peyton offered all the information he had on hand and made suggestions for likely areas to search. John Senior sat by quietly, responding to direct questions but mostly keeping to himself. When the officer left he ridiculed the whole undertaking. “How he could leave two men dead on the lake and act like this is beyond me,” he said. He spoke softly, with a note of pained surprise in his voice. “If it had been someone from the shore been killed, there’d be hell to pay and proper goddamn thing.”

“I know what your ideas of the proper thing are,” Peyton said. He found everything the man said these days disagreeable, and he made a point of making sure his father knew it.

John Senior shook his head. “Richmond and Taylor are all for going back down the river come the winter and I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment.” He spat into the idle fireplace. He said, “If it had
been you
was killed, John Peyton.”

A picture of his father in Cassie’s bed came to Peyton and he got up from his seat and went to the window to drive it out. It was infuriating how they carried on around him as if nothing was happening between them. He said, “Lieutenant Buchan knows well enough what’s right.”

“He’ll wind up with his head ordained for an ornament in
some wigwam on the lake. That’s how much he knows of what’s right.”

John Senior’s pessimism only served to goad his son into a state of blind enthusiasm for Buchan’s attempts at reconciliation. He collected stories from other men on the shore to pass on during the officer’s next visit, gathered artifacts from his own travel on the salmon rivers. On several occasions he abandoned his work to hired men in order to accompany Buchan to areas of the coast the officer was unfamiliar with.

“If I didn’t know any better,” John Senior said when he returned from one excursion, “I’d think you was after a Red bride.”

They argued then, standing inches from one another and spraying each other’s faces with spittle. Cassie came out to them, drawn by the shouting, and she put a hand to each of their shoulders. Both men took a step backward, embarrassed to have been seen in such a naked state of fury. Peyton walked off to the house and shut himself up in his room. He found it disturbing, Cassie’s touch obliquely connecting him and his father that way, and he wondered if he was the only one of the three of them to be bothered by it.