River Thieves (30 page)

Cassie leaned forward to examine the crude figures Buchan had sketched on the paper. “I’d say she would be able to meet the rigorous standard set by His Majesty’s Royal Navy.”

Buchan felt himself beginning to flush. It was such an unusual sensation that his visible embarrassment compounded itself, until he had turned nearly the colour of his tunic. He held the pencil towards the Indian woman without taking his eyes from Cassie. The men around the table were doing a half-hearted job of suppressing their amusement. Mary looked back and forth between Cassie and the officer and would not touch the pencil for fear of seeming to take sides.

“It’s all right, Mary,” Cassie prodded.

Buchan smiled at her finally. “Please,” he said.

She nodded and accepted the pencil. She turned the journal on the table several ways until it was arranged as she wished and she began fixing the drawing of the River Exploits. Her picture was minute and detailed, with a cluster of small concave strokes indicating prominent rapids on the river and a billow of vapour where each of the waterfalls was located. She dotted portage paths around each of these obstructions. She added a third mamateek to the two figures drawn by Buchan at the lake. She paused a moment and raised her head to the group of faces around her.

“Go ahead,” Buchan said quietly.

She drew something near the figure of herself on the shore, something the figure was holding at the level of her waist.

“What’s that?” John Senior asked. “Is that the bundle of clothes she drags around?”

“A child,” Cassie said. “A baby, Mary?”

“Yes, yes. Baby.”

“She has a child?” Buchan asked. He looked up at the men across the table.

“That seems to be the gist of what she’s suggesting,” Peyton said flatly.

“Did you know this?”

“There wasn’t what you would call a proper round of introductions made at the time,” John Senior told him.

“Mary’s baby,” Mary said.

“You would like to go home to your child,” Buchan said, but she didn’t understand him and simply stared. He took the pencil from her and again indicated the boat leaving the lake. Again she protested. “All right,” he said, “all right.” He returned the pencil to her and pointed to the page. “Show me what you want,” he told her.

Mary moved the figure with the child in her arms from the shoreline beside the mamateeks back into the waiting boat. Then she drew a line up the river, across the portages at both waterfalls and around rapids into the Bay of Exploits. She drew Burnt Island and then a square house on the stretch of beach where they were sitting around the table and placed herself and her child beside it. “Good,” she said obstinately, though her stubbornness seemed somehow infected with her illness, drained of energy and confidence. She placed the pencil beside the journal. “Good for Mary.”

Mary went to her room shortly after drawing her map. Cassie finished clearing up the supper dishes and then took a seat with
the men who had settled into a bottle of rum. For six months in 1818 Buchan had been part of an expedition to the Arctic, attempting to reach the Pole by ship, and he was giving an account of his travels. He was in command of the
Dorothea
, accompanied by Lieutenant John Frankland in the
Trent.
They sailed out of Spitzbergen on June 7 and passed easily beyond the northwest boundary of the island. Near Red Bay they were icebound for thirteen days and then took shelter in Fair Haven. On July 6, they again headed out, reaching 80° 34’ North before they were forced to turn back due to the ice conditions. The weather was so cold and inclement at times that the ship’s canvas and rigging was encased in ice. Cauldrons of water were boiled and the steam used to free knots sufficiently to allow sails to be set. Men chopped the bows and decks free of thick galls of ice with axes and cutlasses.

Cassie watched him from her chair across the room. His face seemed to be lit from within as he talked, like a man recounting an encounter with God. He used his hands to indicate the position of ships, the angle of rafted ice, the distance from ship to land. Their constant motion added to the distractedly busy air that rarely left him in the company of other men. The Peytons and Corporal Rowsell leaned forward on their thighs to get as close to the story as they could manage, as if they were drawing heat from a fire.

Returning along the edge of the icepack towards Greenland, the two ships sailed into a gale. Buchan was tipped out of his bunk by the extreme pitch and roll. He dressed and clawed his way onto the bridge. The storm was so furious they had no choice but to run before it into the Arctic ice. “The impact,” Buchan said. He slapped a fist into the open palm of the opposite
hand. “Every man was taken off his feet, the timbers roaring. I don’t know what kept the masts from snapping at the base.” He used his forearm to demonstrate the severe angle they had somehow recovered from. “The ship’s bell tolling in the wind after we’d been brought up solid.” He shook his head. “I made my peace with God,” he said. “Rather quickly,” he added.

Before the laughter died away Cassie rose and took her leave of the men and went to her bed. She lay awake listening to the murmur of surf drifting in through the open window and the louder tide of talk from the kitchen. She waited until she heard the scrape of chairs and the men dispersing to their rooms, John Senior going out the door with Rowsell to a bed in the hired men’s quarters, insisting Buchan sleep in his room. She waited longer still, until the tide had almost turned and the sound of one furtive set of footsteps descended the stairs above her. They sounded, she thought, like the steps of a man come to steal away valuables, to lift jewellery, silverware, hidden caches of sterling coins.

She found him sitting on the daybed beside the fireplace. He’d lit a single candle and the acrid smell of the wick hung in the air.

“No need for a fire tonight, I suppose,” she said.

“I wasn’t sure you would join me.”

“Nor was I, truth be told.”

Buchan nodded and took a breath. “To be honest, I would have felt some relief if you had not.”

She watched him a moment and then turned to go back to her room.

“No, please,” he said and he rose to get a chair and set it in front of himself, motioning for her to sit.

They stared a while. Cassie was forty-one years old and Buchan had seen that age in her face earlier in the day — crow’s feet fanning at the corners of her eyes, a tautness gone from the skin of her neck. In the near dark of the single candle those changes were imperceptible, but there was a more fundamental difference he could sense, something in her manner that had altered. The subtle disregard for station that could be mistaken for arrogance was still with her, but the ease of it was gone. There had always been an air of caution about her, though when he first met Cassie it was furtive, subterranean. It had come to the surface now, as if she was too exhausted to camouflage it any longer. The woman sitting before him had the intense, diffuse look of a person in the midst of a lengthy fast.

Cassie crossed her legs and shifted her nightdress on her thighs. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “Don’t you think we ought to have something to say to one another?”

For the second time that evening Buchan felt himself blush.

The first time the sound of the officer’s movement on the stairs had broken Cassie’s sleep was in October of 1810. The front door pushed roughly open and closed, the house giving a brief audible sigh as the plug of wind rushed in. She’d looked through the frosted pane of her window, but there was no sign of morning in the sky. She wondered if Buchan had for some reason gone to look in on his marines who were sleeping in makeshift bunks in an outbuilding used by hired men. Under the flapping sheets of wind there was the tortured barking sound of someone vomiting into the snow outside her window. She got out of bed and went to the kitchen to stoke up a fire to
make tea to settle his stomach. “I was lying awake anyway,” she told him.

The harsh weather continued into the next day and kept Buchan at the winter house a second day and night. That morning, he ’d sat across from her with his hands in his lap, listening as if he expected her to tell her life story. As if he’d paid to be entertained. She didn’t fully understand what came over her to have leaned forward and lifted her dress, to show him the scar on her leg. He was a stranger to everyone on the northeast shore. He was a stranger to her and his transience meant he would remain so, whatever she told him of herself. “There’s no sense in standing on ceremony from here,” he had said. She chattered away to him like wind in the chimney.

And he went to the kitchen again that night, having crept down the stairs an hour after he and John Senior went to their beds. She pulled the shawl around her shoulders and walked out into the hall, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He was sitting on the daybed, a fire already burning. He was dressed a little more formally than he’d been the night before.

“Are you feeling all right, Lieutenant?”

He smiled up at her. “Perfectly all right, thank you,” he said. “I poured.”

“Is it tea you’re wanting, Mr. Buchan?” she asked him.

“If that’s what’s on offer,” he said softly.

Cassie looked at him a long moment and then went to the fireplace, lifting the kettle onto the crane over the heat. “You mustn’t think much of me, Lieutenant, is all’s I can say.”

“On the contrary,” he said. But he didn’t say anything more.

She pulled a chair from the table across the floor to her spot beside the fireplace, determined this time to keep her mouth
shut. He could sense this or something like it about her, and after they both settled with mugs of tea Buchan talked to her about his childhood in Scotland. He told her about his father who was a navy officer himself and had died of a simple cut to the hand when it turned black with infection and the subsequent fever brought him down. His mother had remarried within the year and he could see now it was a practical decision and he had forgiven her for what at the time he thought of as callousness or indiscretion. He had joined the navy as a cabin boy then, to punish her, and she was unable to refuse permission having so recently disappointed him by taking a new husband. She ’d wept for days before he left. He said he had yet to forgive himself for that selfishness.

“You were a child,” Cassie said.

“It was cruelty, nonetheless. I knew what I was about, and make no mistake, I wanted to cause her the same pain she’d caused me. Simple revenge. And it was something I quickly came to regret.”

He was employed as a servant for the Warrant Officer, a James Richardson, who was quartered in a canvas-sided cabin along the wall of the lower deck with his wife. The rest of the low-ceilinged room was occupied by two hundred men and boys who slept in hammocks strung above the cast-iron cannon. The only light entered through the gun ports, which were sealed in rough weather. The sailors rarely bathed. Their clothes were washed every other month in a bucket of sea water after being bleached in urine collected in a barrel. The stench of dry rot and bilge and human waste fogged the air.

Buchan and the other ship’s boys were quartered with the midshipmen in the cockpit of the orlop deck below the
waterline. Many of these officers-in-training were not much above Buchan’s age, eleven and twelve years old, and they tormented and bullied one another and the other boys aboard ship. Because Buchan was Scots and among the youngest in service, he was a favourite object of their attention. They cut his hammock down while he slept, stole his clothes and his food, set upon him in groups of two and three and roughed him up. Buchan was beside himself with frustration and rage. He had bargained away his half rations of beer and grog in return for some peace, but to little effect.

It was Mrs. Richardson, who had been going to sea with her husband for years, who set him straight on the steps he needed to take. She procured a starter for him, a length of knotted rope used to rouse men from their bunks in the morning. Together they decided on a midshipman named Marryat, not the worst of his tormentors but a boy about his size who was rumoured to suck his thumb in his sleep. Buchan made his way to the orlop deck just before dinner when most of the midshipmen were at table. He walked directly to Marryat and pulled him backwards onto the floor, then proceeded to beat him with the starter. The other midshipmen gathered around them, shouting wildly, but they offered their companion no assistance. When it became clear Marryat was incapable of defending himself, they shifted their allegiance to Buchan and cheered him on. The rope raised welts on the boy’s face and forearms and Buchan pulled his shirt over his head to mark his back and chest, the knots drawing blood where they struck. Only when two of the older midshipmen decided Marryat was in danger of permanent injury did they pull him clear. Buchan was caned and then mastheaded for the attack, lashed to the
cross-trees of the topmast for the better part of a day, but the worst of the persecution he suffered came to an end.

“How old were you, Lieutenant?” Cassie asked him.

“I was ten. And I doubt I would ever have gone back to sea if not for Mrs. Richardson,” Buchan said.

“I find it difficult to imagine that a mother with any feeling for her child would have allowed you to return to such disgraceful conditions.”

He smiled at the strength of the emotion in her voice. She seemed genuinely affronted. He said, “Of course my mother heard nothing of this.”

“I see,” Cassie said. “Of course.” After a moment she looked up from her lap. She asked if his mother ever forgave him for leaving the way he did.

Buchan shook his head. “We never spoke of it before she died,” he said. “I feel sometimes as if I’m father to the memory of my mother as I now hold it, a woman abandoned first by her husband and then by her son. The thought of her clings to me like an unhappy child.” He looked up at the ceiling. “When the dead have been wronged they never leave you quite, even if you might eventually wish it.”

Cassie turned her head away and then stared into her mug.

“I’m sorry,” Buchan said. “I didn’t intend to upset you.”