River Thieves (29 page)

Peyton refused his invitation to dinner. In the morning he would take a coach to Portugal Cove and from there a packet boat to the northeast shore. In the meantime, he made a determined effort to drink himself into a stupor that might lead to something resembling sleep. By half past eleven, that possibility seemed as unlikely as it had at the start of the evening. He settled his bill and went out the door into the dark. There was a new softness in the air, the first unequivocally warm night of spring, no hint of frost in the wind. Lanterns bobbed along the length of Water Street as pedestrians walked from one tavern to another or made their way home.

He headed west, drunk and stumbling often on the rough path in the blackness. He stopped men carrying lanterns and made inquiries and continued along the street until he was directed a little ways north up a dead-end laneway. The door of the tavern was propped open and the noise of it spilled out into the night. A narrow two-storey building stood beside it, the windows unlit. Inside the pub he sat at the only table with a free chair, beside a man who had fallen asleep on his folded arms. Three men stood together singing near the front of the room. Only one of them seemed to know the words of the song and the other two filled out the fragments they could recall with nonsense, half-words, syllables emptied of consonants.

There was something illicit to his being there, to have come through a door forbidden to Cassie. Peyton lifted a hand to signal the bartender, an old man wearing an eye patch. He paid for an entire bottle and sat slowly filling and emptying his tumbler until the singers had all passed out in the straw laid against the wall.

The two or three girls of the class Cassie spoke of walked from table to table, trying to engage the patrons in conversation. They left in the company of a man periodically, sometimes ushered out in a drunken rush, sometimes lugging the weight of a companion to keep him on his feet. Fifteen minutes later, an hour later, they came back alone and began their rounds again. He watched the movement of their hips under their skirts, appalled and aroused by the thought of what he vaguely knew they’d been engaged in only moments before.

Women like these often worked the taverns he and John Senior frequented when they brought the season’s catch into St. John’s, and his father always turned away from them with a seriousness that Peyton at first thought was disgust. But there was something closer to embarrassment in the dismissal, he decided, an old shame. The same embarrassment that made him keep his relationship to Cassie a secret all these years. The thought of John Senior made Peyton furious.
The maggoty fucker
, he thought. Then he said it aloud to himself.

Each of the women had come to his table through the course of the night and he had turned them away each time. He was so drunk now that he couldn’t distinguish one from the other. They smelled of lavender. For some unknown reason they called him Jimmy. “D’you like some company, Jimmy?” “Want a little time alone with a girl, Jimmy?”

He had his arm across her shoulder and she was keeping him on his feet as they went through the door. He was trying to ask her name but the words would not come out right, they seemed to have no bones or cartilage to them and they flopped around uselessly. The girl led him down an alley between the tavern and the two-storey house beside it, already working at
the spair of his trousers with her free hand. “That’s lovely, Jimmy,” the girl said. “That’s lovely.” Everything solid in him seemed to have dissolved but for what was concentrated where she touched him. He didn’t want it and didn’t want it and she pulled him to her where she leaned against the wall, wrapping a bare leg about his waist, his face awash in the sickening smell of lavender. He pumped his cock inside her with furious little motions, grunting into her hair, until his body shook with spasms and then there was nothing at all to hold him up. She let him fall back onto the ground and stood a moment straightening her skirt. In the pitch dark he couldn’t see her, only heard the motion of clothes rustling into place. He tried again to ask her name as she knelt beside him.

“You got something for me, Jimmy?” she asked softly.

She helped him raise his pants around his hips after he slipped several coins into her palm and she left him lying there with the slick oil of her and the soggy mess of his semen turning rank in the tight curls of his pubic hair. He rolled onto his side on the rough ground and held himself until the night finally overtook him and he passed out in the dark.

The officer seated himself at the plain board table and flipped through his notebook until he’d opened it to a blank page. He was
impeccably dressed and his manner was creased and pressed in the same fashion as his uniform. His hair was carefully oiled and combed back from his forehead. Peyton thought it had thinned considerably, and there was a leaner, more severe look about the man than he remembered. He had been promoted since anyone in the household had last seen him. It was only the Indian woman, who had never met the man and whose English consisted of a few words and pidgin phrases, who didn’t find the change awkward and somehow foreboding.
Captain
David Buchan.

Buchan dipped his pen and tapped it primly at the edge of the inkwell. He stared across the table, as if he was about to sketch them all — John Peyton in the chair opposite, John Senior behind him on the daybed and looking away out the window, Cassie and the Indian woman sitting side by side near the pantry. Mary wore one of Cassie’s muslin dresses and an apron and she held a tied bundle in her lap.

Buchan cleared his throat. He said, “You and your party undertook the unfortunate expedition to Red Indian Lake in March of this year. Is that correct?”

“As I testified in St. John’s, yes, that is correct.”

“There were eight men in your party.”

Peyton nodded a moment and turned to look to his father who was lying back on an elbow. John Senior spoke to Cassie then about starting supper and she and Mary rose from their seats and disappeared into the pantry.

Buchan sat back in his chair and set the pen in the inkwell. He pulled at the hem of his jacket. “I am speaking to you now,” he said, “as a gentleman and a friend.”

Peyton smiled severely. “You are welcome on this floor as always, Captain,” he said. “And if you and your man
Rowsell” — he nodded to the corporal who stood handy to Buchan’s chair — “wish to stay to a bit of supper and spend the night, there’s food and a bed for you. But there’s nothing you can write in your little book that will change what happened on that lake, sir. It was told the way I felt it ought to be told when I testified before the grand jury in St. John’s.”

Buchan sighed and templed his fingertips, considering. He reached for the notebook and buttoned it away in a pocket. “Supper,” he said, “would be welcome.” And he motioned Rowsell to take a seat with them at the table.

The men sat to a meal of salt pork with boiled spuds, cabbage, turnip and greens. Their plates were spooned with food and then ladled with the salty liquor from the pot that the meat and vegetables had been boiled in. John Senior took up a mugful of the liquor and sipped at it through his supper. Cassie fussed about the table as they ate and carried empty platters away into the pantry. The Beothuk woman sat at the back of the room, working a square of leather with an awl fashioned from an iron fishing hook. Cassie had tried to teach her to use a needle and thread when she’d first been brought to the house in March, but she’d pushed the materials away impatiently and Peyton had to tell Cassie to leave her be. Her bundle of belongings sat beside her on the floor.

“She’s being employed as a servant,” Buchan said.

Peyton shrugged. “We made an effort to give her a few regular duties in the household, which she did not take kindly to. As long as she isn’t ordered about she seems happy enough to help out.”

“She don’t mind minding our business is what I find,” John Senior said. “And don’t think she’s not listening to us over there. Or that she don’t know we’re talking about her.”

Buchan and the marine peered over the shoulders of their hosts. Mary stared at her work with the blank expression of someone hypnotized by the fluid motion of a fire. There was a clotted undertone to her breathing they could all hear, as if each lungful of air was being filtered through a wet cloth. In the months since the trial, she had begun showing unmistakable signs of a congestive illness.

“She’s into everything not her own besides, and I would keep close account of my materials if I was you,” John Senior went on. “She could sneak a schooner’s anchor off in that bundle she carts around.”

Buchan looked to Peyton who was tapping his fork impatiently against the table. “Has she been stealing from the household?”

“There was the one occasion, yes.”

Cassie interrupted. “It was not thieving as commonly understood, Captain.”

“Uncommon thievery,” the officer said lightly. “I’m intrigued.”

“I missed a bolt of cloth from the cupboard and turned the house upside down looking for it. In the course of these investigations I asked Mary if she had seen it.” Cassie smiled across at the Indian woman. “She is a poor liar.” Mary didn’t look up from the work in her lap. “I went to her room and began looking through her drawers. She followed me up there and was none too pleased with my presumption, but she didn’t try to stop me, only sat on her trunk in the corner and complained.”

“And of course the trunk was the location of the missing material,” Buchan said.

“I had to remove her forcibly from her seat and at that point she began trying to convince me that John Peyton had given her the material, so I called him up to join us, which ended that line of argument. She ran off before we opened the trunk. When we did we found, well, not the bolt of cloth exactly.”

“Miss Jure, I am in the greatest suspense,” Buchan said in mock anguish. “Please.”

“It has always been her custom to go up to her bed early. But she was sleeping less than we believed. We found sixteen pairs of blue moccasins, all of different sizes and with the finest needlework.”

Peyton said, “The wigwam where we stayed that night on the lake. There were, as best we can recall, seventeen or eighteen sleeping pits around the fire.”

There was a pause around the table.

“She will of course be returned to her people,” Buchan said.

Peyton nodded. “I’m not averse to the idea.”

“We’ve yet to see any of the governor’s reward for our trouble,” John Senior said.

Buchan said, “In the event that Mary’s return to the Red Indians leads to improved relations, the money will be forthcoming.” He sounded as if he was reading a public proclamation he found personally distasteful.

Cassie brought a full jug of water to the table and refilled glasses all around.

“There’s a few weeks yet we might hope to find some of the Indians around the bay,” Peyton offered. “Otherwise we’ll have to wait till the freeze-up and carry her to the lake.”

“We, Mr. Peyton?”

“I feel some responsibility for her well-being given the circumstances under which she came to us. I’m at your disposal if you’ll have me.”

John Senior forked into his plate of food and chewed fiercely, but said nothing.

Buchan nodded. “You would be welcome.”

After the meal was cleared away and the dishes done, Mary was brought to the table and sat in a chair beside Buchan. He used a blank page in his journal to trace a rough map of the Bay of Exploits. He drew a boat manned by marines and a figure he pointed to with the tip of the pencil and then touched Mary’s chest with his finger. On a point of land, Buchan roughed in triangular shelters and a fire to indicate their being inhabited. Mary leant over the table, the weight of her breasts pressed into the tied kerchief of clothing in her lap. She looked from the paper to the face of the artist and back again, as if she might be able to somehow influence what he would draw there. Buchan drew the boat along a dotted line to the point of land and placed Mary on the shore. Then he showed the boat travelling away without her.

“No, no,” she said. She waved her hands before her face. “No good for Mary.”

Buchan looked around the table at the others, but no one offered assistance. “Why not, Mary? What is no good for Mary?”

She continued shaking her head.

“I don’t understand,” Buchan said. Finally he relented and placed the abandoned figure back among the crew of the boat.

“Yes, yes,” she said. The relief she felt was obvious but listless, enervated.

Peyton said there was no telling who they would happen upon in the bay, if they managed to find anyone at all. It was possible she wanted to be returned only to the group she was found with at the lake.

“Very well,” Buchan said. He roughed in a sketch of the river and the northernmost section of the lake and the boat appeared there as if by magic.

John Senior protested. “There’s no way on God’s green earth to get a boat from the bay past the falls on that river.”

Buchan looked up at him. “It’s just a symbol,” he said. “A mode of transportation. This isn’t meant to be literal.”

“And you see her following your meaning in all this?”

Buchan stared at the old man for a moment, but turned back to the map before he said anything. Mary continued to stare at the paper. “Mary?” he said. “Good for Mary?”

She nodded.

He placed her figure on the shore, watching furtively for signs of how she would react to this. She placed her hand to her mouth. Buchan began drawing a dotted line to indicate the boat leaving the lake and Mary immediately sat back in her chair.

“No,” she said. “No no no no no.” Her expression was pained, helpless. She covered her mouth with her hands.

“We are meant to bring you back to your people,” Buchan said, but she continued offering her one word repudiation through her cupped hands.

John Senior made a noise somewhere between disgust and satisfaction.

Cassie said, “Let her do it.”

“I’m sorry?” Buchan said, looking up quickly.

“Let her draw what she would like.”

“Can she draw?”