River Thieves (28 page)

“I’d been made aware of some such possibility.”

Hamilton said, “As soon as this matter is cleared up, we will make it official.” He raised his glass from the table. “Shall we drink to that?”

When he was called to the witness stand the following morning, Peyton asked the court’s permission to read into evidence the letter he’d sent to Governor Hamilton the first week of April. “‘I beg leave to lay before Your Excellency,’” he began. He coughed into his fist. “‘I beg leave to lay before Your Excellency the circumstances surrounding a recent expedition undertaken by my father and myself and six of our men into the heart of Red Indian country, after obtaining Your Excellency’s permission to follow property lost to thievery. We left from our house on March 1, 1819, with a most anxious desire, as stated to Your Excellency, to lay hold of some of the Red Indians and through them open a friendly communication with the rest of the tribe. In this spirit, everyone was ordered by me not on any account to commence hostilities without my positive orders.

“‘On the sixth of March, having made the Indian’s lake and cresting a point of land, I discovered one Indian coming towards us and three more walking in the opposite direction. I could not as yet determine whether the Indian approaching was male or female. I showed myself on the point openly and when the Indian discovered me she screamed out and ran off. I immediately pursued her but did not gain on her until I removed my rackets and jacket when I came up with her fast, she kept looking back at me over her shoulder. I then dropped my gun on the snow and held up my hands to show I had no gun, and on my pointing to my gun, which was then some distance behind me,
she stopped. I did the same and endeavoured to convince her I would not hurt her. I then advanced and gave her my hand, she gave hers to me and to all my party as they came up.

“‘Shortly afterwards, the three Indians I had seen moving in the opposite direction appeared, and two of these men advanced upon us. Having observed something concealed under the cassock of one of these, I ordered one of my men to investigate and he found there a hatchet which he took from the Indian. The two Indians came and took hold of me by the arms, endeavouring to force me away. I cleared myself as well as I could, still having the woman in my hand. The Indian from whom the hatchet was taken attempted to lay hold of three different guns, but without effect. He at last succeeded in laying hold of my father’s gun and tried to wrest it from him. He grabbed my father by the throat, at which point I called for one of my men to strike him. He relented briefly and my father extricated himself and retreated, the Indian still forcing upon him with a savage grin. With no other option I ordered a defence of my father, and several shots followed so close together that I did not know until some time afterwards that more than one gun was fired. The other Indians fled immediately on the fall of the unfortunate one. Could we have intimidated or persuaded him to leave us, we would have been most happy to have spared using violence. Nor should I have held to the original plan, as it was laid out before and granted Your Excellency’s permission, to carry the Indian woman into our midst if we had wantonly put an end to the unfortunate man’s existence.

“‘My object was and still is to endeavour to be on good terms with the Indians for the protection of my property and
the rescuing of that tribe of our fellow creatures from the misery and persecution they are exposed to in the interior from the Micmac and on the exterior by Whites.’” He looked up then at the audience assembled at the back of the courtroom. Light slanted into his eyes through the windows and hid their faces. He couldn’t begin to guess what their expressions might be. “‘I have the honour to be,’” he said without looking down at the paper, “‘Your Excellency’s very obedient and humble servant.’”

Hamilton took Peyton across to the governor’s house at Fort Townshend to join him for lunch while the jury deliberated. They ate bread and cold meats and tea in the dining room while Lady Hamilton outlined her plans for establishing a school in St. John’s, as Hamilton warned him she would. The lack of any formal education for the children of the fishermen was abhorrent to her, she said. It was negligent, almost criminal. She hardly touched her food, which helped to disguise how little Peyton himself was able to stomach. “You must eat something, dear,” Hamilton told her. She said the language spoken by the lower orders was nearly incomprehensible, that without education their state was little above that of savages. Hamilton turned to Peyton. He said, “I should have known better than to marry a reformer.”

She was much younger than the governor and not what Peyton would call a plain woman but she was clearly most remarkable for her energy and enthusiasms. He could see that her gestures were carefully corseted, muffled by a cultivated restraint. “Now you, Mr. Peyton, would understand my argument. You have obviously benefited from an education. This was in Poole, was it?”

“Partly,” he told her. “For a number of years I was also under the instruction of a woman employed by my father. She was raised here in St. John’s, a Miss Cassie Jure.”

A brief flicker crossed Lady Hamilton’s face.

Her husband said, “Yes, her father died fighting one of those dreadful fires last year.”

There was a pause. “I’m aware he was a drunkard,” Peyton said then. “It’s not a secret.”

“Of course,” Hamilton said. He and his wife briefly stared into their plates. “A bad business that was,” he said.

“Which, sir?”

He looked up. “The fires, Mr. Peyton.”

A marine entered the room and stood at attention at the end of the table. “The jury is returning,” he said.

In the days after John Peyton left to testify at the courthouse in St. John’s, Mary stayed as close to Cassie as she could. Mary had looked to the younger Peyton as her protector and advocate in the house since her arrival and she refused to take direction from or spend time alone in the company of anyone but him. He did his best to explain before he left that he would return from St. John’s as quickly as possible, but no one was sure how much of this she understood. She greeted Cassie each morning with the same question. “John Peyton?”

“John Peyton will come home soon,” Cassie told her.

She nodded her head although it was clear from her expression that the word “soon” meant little to her and did nothing to alleviate her anxiety.

For the first time, Mary took on a share of household chores as a way of keeping near to Cassie. It seemed to Cassie she wanted to avoid being alone with John Senior. She left the room when he entered or, if this wasn’t possible, moved off as far as the limits of the room allowed. They repelled one another like the negative poles of two magnets.

As they went about their work together, Cassie made efforts to improve the Indian woman’s grasp of the English language. She would point to objects Mary was unfamiliar with or for which she had yet to learn the English word and repeat the syllables until Mary had mastered them.
Boat. Stagehead. Chamber pot. Needle, thread, cloth. Brook. Stars. Moon. Sun. Plate. Tinder. Pillow.
Mary was naturally curious and retained the names of everything after the first hearing and she understood simple instructions. But she seemed uninterested or unable to progress much beyond the noun in her own speech, managing only the simplest declarations. “Mary hungry,” she would say. “Mary thirsty.” “Mary tired.” Cassie thought of this as a limitation of the Red Indian mind and language. But there were moments when it seemed a deliberate strategy, a protest of some sort. A refusal to enter their world any further than was necessary for her survival.

Mary had been given her own room in the winter house after she arrived, with John Peyton sleeping in the hired men’s quarters. As far as Cassie could tell, the Indian woman had never used the bed, preferring to lie with a blanket on the wooden floor. She slept late each morning and Cassie would find her curled in a corner when she went in to wake her. Mary wore an old muslin dress given to her by Cassie, but she kept the leather clothes she’d been wearing when she was taken from the lake
with her at all times, carrying them around in a cloth bundle, tying it across her back while she worked or sitting it on her lap.

John Senior found this habit of Mary’s particularly trying and he never ceased to complain about it, as if Mary was persisting in it simply to annoy him. On the day of the trial in St. John’s he came up to the house from the shore where he and Richmond and Taylor and Michael Sharpe had spent the morning resurrecting the stagehead and cutting room for the coming season. It was a surprisingly muggy day with the threat of rain in the air. Before he and the hired men had taken their places at the table for their dinner he said, “I can’t stand the smell of that dirty leather she carts around.”

“It would make a fine bit of burning,” Richmond said.

Cassie gave him a look and he seated himself without another word. Mary took herself off into the pantry where she would stay until the men made their way back down to their work.

“The stink of it is enough to ruin my appetite,” John Senior said.

Cassie smiled at him. “In all the years I’ve known you,” she said, “I’ve yet to come across anything that could ruin your appetite.”

The old man stared at her a moment and then shook his head. He turned to Tom Taylor. “The lip on her,” he said. “Why do I put up with it?”

Taylor smiled stupidly, as if to say he could guess why, but modesty wouldn’t permit him to speak it aloud.

“Eat your dinner,” Cassie said.

John Senior said, “I guess they’re all but done in St. John’s by now.”

The three hired men nodded soberly and bent their heads to their plates.

After she had set out all they would need, Cassie left the men to sit with Mary in the pantry. They did not speak or even acknowledge one another at first. Mary’s breathing was short and ragged, as if she had just come in from a long sprint. Sitting this close, Cassie could make out the smoke and old sweat smell of Mary’s clothes that John Senior complained about. It was something she would forever afterwards associate with fear. When the rain began a few minutes later, striking at the single pane of glass, Cassie pointed out the tiny window. “Rain,” she said.

Mary nodded but said nothing. A long, low rumble of thunder carried across the bay.

“Thunder,” Cassie said.

Mary looked at her. She had a tortured expression on her face and seemed to want to ask a question of Cassie. She said,
“Baroodisick.”

Cassie cocked her head to one side.

Mary pointed at the ceiling with her finger, thunder clapping overhead again, closer this time.
“Baroodisick,”
she said.

“Ba-rude …”

“Baroodisick.”

“Baroodisick.
Thunder?”

Mary nodded. “Thunder.
Baroodisick.”

Cassie raised her hand, hesitating a moment. She could feel a flush rising through her cheeks. She reached to touch a button at the front of Mary’s dress. “What is this, Mary?” she whispered.

“Agamet.”

“Agamet,”
Cassie repeated. “Button?”

The Indian woman nodded. Then she said, “Mary go.” She turned and stared directly into Cassie ’s face. “Mary go home,” she said. Her first English sentence.

The jury foreman was a man named Newman Hoyles, a short, portly St. John’s merchant. He was nearly bald, his forehead permanently creased by the band of his hat. He stood from his chair and pulled at the cuffs of his jacket to bring the sleeves down to his wrists. He held a single sheet of paper. There was an obvious tremor in his hands that shook the paper as he read and Peyton could not tell if it was habitual or a result of the task he was undertaking. He felt the tremor all the way across the room. That slight unsettling motion in his gut.

Hoyles said, “‘The Grand Jury beg leave to state to the Court that they have as far as possible investigated the unfortunate circumstances which occasioned the loss of life to one of the Red Indian Tribe near the River of Exploits, in a late rencontre which took place between the deceased and John Peyton Senior and John Peyton Junior; in the presence of a party of their own men to the number of eight in all and in sight of several of the Indians of the same tribe. The Grand Jury are of opinion that no malice preceded the transaction, and that there was no intention on the part of the Peyton party to get possession of any of the Red Indians by such violence as would occasion bloodshed. And, further, that the obstinance of the deceased warranted the Peytons acting on the defensive.’”

There was a glass of water on the rail of the jury box and Hoyles paused to wet his lips. He looked quickly across the room at Peyton and then again at the paper he held. “‘At the
same time as the Grand Jury declare these opinions arising from the only testimony brought before them, they cannot but regret the want of other evidence to corroborate the foregoing, viewing it as they do a matter of the first importance, and which calls for the most complete establishment of innocence on the part of the Peytons and their men. The Grand Jury therefore recommend that four of the party be brought round at the end of the fishing season for that purpose, or that a magistrate within His Majesty’s Royal Navy be assigned to travel to the Bay of Exploits to collect what evidence may bring a more satisfactory resolution to these circumstances.’”

As Hoyles took his seat a murmur buckled through the public gallery and the presiding judge knocked his gavel, calling for order. Peyton crossed and uncrossed his legs. He didn’t hear anything that followed of the judge’s comments and didn’t move from his seat even after everyone else in the room rose and began shuffling towards the exit. Governor Hamilton came across to him and laid a hand on his arm. There was a pained, conciliatory expression on his face. “I suppose,” he said, “we shall have to delay your appointment a while longer.”

He ate by himself at the London Tavern that evening and spent several hours after his meal drinking alone. The governor had apologized repeatedly for the jury’s odd request that afternoon. “Completely unforeseen,” he said quietly. There was an air of uncertain concern about him, as if he wasn’t sure any longer where it was safest to place his sympathies. He said, “I don’t believe there’s anything binding in such a verdict. My guess is it will simply languish and we ’ll hear no more of it.”