The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (27 page)

“Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Ross calls out. “You know among us Americans, no one can eat until all are seated. Come! Come! Let us now drink good rum and make good talk!”

There is a short exchange between Renew and the braves in their own language. After some hesitation, all are seated. That’s the signal Blake is waiting for. Murdoch, who had stood by the aft ladder, moves to the main deck. Then a voice, a simple statement and Blake’s heart turns to ice.

“You were on Bartibog Island.”

Blake looks down the table to see who speaks. It is a middle-aged man who wears an elaborately beaded shirt and vest. He is looking directly at Ross, his eyes narrow. The other Mi’kmaq stop eating to look at this man, at Ross, then at Renew.

“Ah, Bartibog Island,” Ross says. “What do
we
call that?”

“Yes. We saw you there,” Blake interrupts. “Who are you, sir?”

“I am named Étienne Bamaly. You had a small boat then.”

“That is so,” Blake says. He avoids exchanging any glances with Ross. “But now we have a bigger boat.”

“You are an Englishman at Perce,” says an older Indian to Ross.

Jean Renew addresses the man sharply in his own language, the tone urgent. A palpable pulse of alarm passes around the table. Blake rises slowly from his chair.

As quick as a blink a dozen young Mi’kmaq are on their feet, their knives drawn. Joseph pulls his pistol from under his shirt. He waves it wildly and it discharges, filling the space with smoke and bringing every other man to his feet.

“Prepare to secure the hatches,” Blake bellows.

A marine fires his musket from the third step. A young brave who had risen at the end of the table falls, and in the same moment Ross races to join Blake at the aft hatch. Johnson, the second marine, trapped among the natives, stumbles backward, his pistol in one hand. Two Indian youth fall on him and wrest it from his hand.

“Help me, sir!” Johnson cries. Blake draws two swords from behind the coiled rope where he had earlier secreted them. He turns to pass the second sword to the other captain, but the Indian who had seized the pistol fires it. Ross cries out, grasping at his right arm with his left, blood welling up through his fingers. Blake tries to reach him, but the giant Pierre Martin is almost upon him, a steel hunting blade in his enormous fist. The first slash of Blake’s sword is short, though the end of the blade catches the man’s arm below the shoulder and cuts to the bone. Martin seems not to feel the cut. He shouts in his own language and lunges forward. Blake holds the longer weapon, but he steps back involuntarily. Immediately behind him, as other men haul Ross to safety,
the two marines reappear in the aft hatch and fire simultaneously. The hold, darker now with the forward hatch shut, fills with smoke. Martin seems to hesitate and Blake, still off-balance, strikes again, cutting the man deeply across the chest but missing the thrust that would have pierced the vitals below the ribs.

“Captain! Sir!” a marine calls from behind him.

A musket barrel drops down across his right shoulder and fires. Blake turns to follow the marine up the ladder. Two Henderson boys lift him bodily onto the deck. Joseph had gone before him. It is too late to save Johnson. He lies on the planks with a knife through his neck.

“Close the hatch!” Blake orders.

As the cover goes down, it bursts open again and a bloody Pierre Martin explodes from the hatch, another brave just behind him, a knife in one hand, a table fork in the other. A dozen marines instantly pull them down to the planks. Two seize Martin and struggle to clap irons on his huge arms. He is suddenly subdued, still, almost limp. The irons clatter. The marines turn on the other brave, overcome him and truss his hands and feet.

“Shut the damned hatch,” Blake hollers again. Those trapped below begin to ram the hatch cover upward. Alex Henderson, his face a mask of desperate alarm, runs to stand upon it. The others do the same at both the fore and aft hatches.

Without warning Pierre Martin’s arms shoot up and his hands close like bear traps on the necks of the men who hold the shackles and flails them to the deck. Other marines stab at him with their bayonets as he and his victims writhe and twist in a widening splatter of the giant’s blood. Twenty men surround him, thrusting at him from the distance of a pace. The settlers beyond them have muskets at the ready. Martin struggles to his feet again.

“Shoot him!” Blake orders.

The men look at him in desperation. All have fixed their bayonets in the muzzles of their weapons.

“Stand back that we may shoot!” John Murdoch cries.

Several marines struggle to withdraw their bayonets, but in that moment, Martin grasps one of the blades in his bare hand and pulls it from its weapon. Before the owner can react, Martin tosses it, misses and buries the point in the main mast. Two others thrust their bayonets into the Indian’s body. He falls lifeless to the deck.

Blake turns to Ross, who sits against the rail, John Malcolm at his side.

“Daniel, where are you shot?”

Before Ross can answer and when all eyes are elsewhere, the corpse of Martin springs to life. He shrieks and looks about wildly. Every man starts and steps back. Then, eyes still bright and bulging in his bloody face, he wheels to look down on the other brave, who lies on his back on the deck, bound and bleeding. Marines rush forward as Martin falls to his knees and fixes his hands around the neck of the captive man, who only has time to emit the first part of a scream. Martin loudly chants a rhythmic song rocking back and forth, his legs straddling his hapless comrade. The Irish marine Robert Beck drives his bayonet through Martin’s back just behind his heart. The man’s rage ends in a final spurt of blood.

“God save us,” says Beck, still panting with his exertions. “He was the very devil himself.”

The deck is crowded and noisy with men. Beneath their feet, the captured warriors rage like damned souls.

“Lay out the mainsail!” Blake calls. “Mr. Smith to the wheel, please.”

He stops. The forward deck moves—not the movement of the sea, but another, less familiar movement. It moves again, lifting an inch. There could be no doubt that beneath him, a score of men or more are contriving in the darkness to raise the planking above them.

“John! Alex! Stand here with the boys!” He turns to his bo’s’n. “Jack.”

“Sir.”

“Have the men drag both anchors here and bring all chain forward. The deck seems not so secure as it should be.”

“Aye, sir!”

Blake goes back to where Ross remains at the rail. The wounded man looks up and attempts a smile.

“Mr. Malcolm here has stopped the bleeding, John. ’Tis nothing I cannot withstand.”

Blake stoops and examines the arm as best he can without removing the bandage of cotton that binds the wound.

“The surgeon on the
Viper
will determine that, Dan. For now, we’ll make you a proper place to lie.”

The foredeck shakes again and the howls of the men trapped between the decks carries above the sound of water and wind.

“From the noise of it, you might think we’d caged a whole tribe below,” John Murdoch calls, not without some awe in his voice. “Perhaps the savage is tamed on the Miramichi.”

Blake looks past the bow. They are making near to eight knots. He could expect to rendezvous with the
Viper
before dark.

“Aye,” he says. “We do appear to have caught his many heads in a single basket.”

L
E
V
AIRON SAILS
the next day about noon for the upper banks of the Miramichi River. The
Viper
and the
Lafayette
sail for
Quebec. The captives are in due course transferred in irons to Halifax and imprisonment. Only six ever find their way back to the Miramichi. Louis Goneishe is not among them.

T
HE MORNING
had been dense with fog and now it rolls sluggishly along the river throughout the limp, breezeless day, not troubling itself to lift entirely even when the nearly invisible sun is high at midday.

From the clearing comes the sharp crack of the axe as Charlotte cuts and stacks her firewood and the soft thwack as she splits the cedar kindling. From the house comes Elizabeth’s cooing and chuckling as she sits by little John’s cradle. Yet the day carries a sense of poignant, shrouded isolation and this, she thinks, is what unsettles her. She walks again and again to the water’s edge and stares at the patches of fog. She had observed John Murdoch board an American gun ketch. Heard the sounds of muskets and men’s voices raised on the river. Events are everywhere obscured.

’Tis the fog only, Charlotte thinks.

Within a week, the work of harvest and storage must get underway. She, like the squirrels, must begin the gathering, the drying, the burying. Each task she contemplates returns her thoughts to Blake and then to the melancholy fact of his absence. Blake would be a settler, he had said, not a sailor. I’m impatient perhaps, she thinks, but she cannot subdue quicksilver flashes of anger when she takes account of the dangers she faces with their children. Meanwhile he betook himself—where? The fat Plumnell had doubted the West Indies. Where then? Her heart sinks again to think of what might have befallen him and she scolds herself silently for the petty reproaches she administers him in her imagination. For if he remains a stranger in some respects—a man both swift and clumsy, eloquent and mute, strong and weak, open
and closed—and if his unfounded starts and fears that she might turn her attention elsewhere had caused them both needless misery—she had witnessed John Blake strive to make of himself a proper husband and provider. He had cut wood and fished fish and hoed the ground for her plantings. He’d sat awake all night in May when the bears had come. And when he’d departed three weeks ago, he’d held her as she’d always hoped he would—as a man should hold a woman—tenderly but strongly—and promised he would hurry back to her. He is her husband and she has given him something more—or perhaps something other—than her heart: she has given him her life’s devotion.

And these are in large part the very thoughts she has as she stands by the river in the waning afternoon. A soft breeze springs up and blows the rest of the fog down the river. She sees the far bank of the Miramichi and then a flight of geese and then a big fish leaps. Then a sail appears to the east in midstream and John Blake comes home.

H
E ROWS TO SHORE
in a small boat alone.
Le Vairon
sets its sails and tacks across the river in the direction of the Henderson homestead. She watches him from a distance. And is suddenly furious. He shoulders his pack and walks to where she waits. She’s so angry now she can hardly spit the words from her mouth. “The
Vairon
… you’ve come on the
Vairon
… were the winds so fortunate, John, that you could sail to the West Indies on the small
Vairon
and return in but three weeks?”

“No,” he says. “I was never bound for the West Indies. I’ve had business in these waters.”

“And am I, your wife, not to have knowledge of your whereabouts these many weeks?” She picks up both speed and voice now with her diatribe.

“Am I to cut your wood, tend your hearth, raise your children while you … sail about these waters with your friends on the
Vairon
… which belongs in the Gaspé … on the Baie de Chaleur. Is that where you’ve been, John Blake?”

He’s flabbergasted. “Charlotte, come here to me. I have much to tell you. There’s been a bloody battle with the savages.”

She stands before him, her fists still pummelling her thighs, the heels of her boots still stomping the ground around them when he begins to tell her the story. He hadn’t known whether the battle would take place so near their lot or even if it would happen this soon. But yes, he says he’s been piloting ships these many weeks but as a lookout for the British navy more than as a river merchant. And yes, there has been a mighty confrontation with the Indians; one that was planned these last weeks since the series of attacks on the settlers around them.

It’s Charlotte’s turn to be surprised. And although she knows full well it would be better to hold her tongue, she blurts out her first concern. “The People from the Baie, were they involved in this fracas?”

“Why wouldn’t they be?” he says sharply and turns toward the cabin, asking, “The children, are they well?”

Around the hearth that night she tries to explain her turmoil to her husband. “It is clear that your bravery saved many lives on these banks, John Blake, but I must share with you my utter perplexity about the actions you describe versus the people I lived with at the Baie. They are not warmongering people. They have been invaded themselves by those who came to these shores from away. They are a gentle folk; they treat their children with limitless tenderness and their elders with utmost respect. Even their method of nourishment is a testament to their values. They share what they have—even with a stranger like me. They
give thanks to Mother Earth for everything from the fish in the sea to the rain from the sky. How can these people you call savages be the same ones who sheltered me with such goodness?”

He has nothing to say, but there are other unspoken facts for each of them to consider that night. Their cabin has not been attacked as others had been. Charlotte’s laundry blows in the breeze untouched while the Murdoch’s goods are stolen, burned or torn to shreds.

It’s Charlotte who finally breaks the silence between them.

“So you’ve been busy at war, John Blake.”

“I’ve wanted only to defend us.”

“Ah. And are we defended?”

“By God’s grace, we may be the better for it.”

“The rebels are gone?”

“No. Far from that. But their Indian friends are quieted.”

“Have you killed some Indians then, John?”

“I
have killed none, though they might have killed me—and our children too.”

She sits still a long while.

“I
may have killed an Indian,” she finally says. “Though his death has broken my heart, however it came to be.”