The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (36 page)

She goes on to recount the wiles of a wicked sorcerer, the moans of a pitiable old crone, the threat of a giant horned serpent and, of course, the rescue by Gluskap. Then it is time for
bed. With Robert pretending to be a wicked sorcerer and Polly slithering into bed like a snake, they frighten baby William, who starts howling his little lungs out. It’s another hour before the storyteller finds quiet by the hearth. And then it’s her turn to ask for a story.

“William, tell me more about Tabisintack.”

C
HARLOTTE HAS BEEN HOPING
in vain that a teacher will come to start a school on the Miramichi. When one does not materialize by the fall, she invites some of the children from nearby lots to join her own four and Jimmy in her makeshift home classroom. The older children copy sonnets and poems onto slates William has fetched from Liverpool. The younger ones learn their letters and numbers. She teaches them mostly by way of story, telling about the history of the river. And Mi’kmaq tales find their way into the mix. “You wouldn’t find words such as bear, moose or Gluskap in my old nanny’s school books,” she quips to her husband. Even in snowstorms the settler children trek to the Wishart place on Blake Brook, and in such a manner the whole family staves off cabin fever that long winter.

In mid-May the next year, William sails away with a heavy load of logs destined for the sawmill started up by Benjamin Stymiest at Bettvin on the other side of the shoals. He likes the man, who came from New York with his wife and five children, chased out by the rebels. He’s one of the few Loyalists William has time for. “He wants to get a grant for his land and he won’t start the mill as a proper business until he’s guaranteed ownership of the lot. But nonetheless he saws wood for many men.” After William drops the load intended for lumber, he plans to take the prized white pines he cut during the winter on to Liverpool to sell to the shipbuilders.

A week goes by and William hasn’t returned. Charlotte finds herself glancing up the river several times a day waiting to see him sail into sight. But there’s no sign of him.

After ten days, she asks out loud, several times an hour, “Where could he be?” And soon she grows angry. “Why does he go off like this without telling me when he’s coming back?” She contemplates a dozen reasons why he might be delayed, and tries them out on Jimmy, who has his own reasons to be upset with William Wishart—he wanted to go with him, not stay back with the women and children. “He’s likely found a business opportunity. Or he’s waiting for a ship to arrive with a special cargo—perhaps a spinning wheel, such as the one John Murdoch brought for Janet. Or maybe he’s met up with his fellows from the Quebec campaign in Liverpool and they’ve lost track of time with their reminiscing. Or maybe he’s gone up again to Tabisintack. What do you think, Jimmy?”

Jimmy doesn’t know what to think, or how to answer his mistress.

When the two-week mark passes, her thoughts turn dark. “He’s fallen sick and is unable to sail. Or maybe he’s just run off, wanting respite from this crowded cabin. Maybe the ship is in need of repair and I worry needlessly.”

She’s relieved when Janet Murdoch asks her to come with her to visit the Indian camp, and on the walk there and back, Janet enumerates all the likely good reasons for the delay.

But when May turns into June, she knows something has gone terribly wrong. The children have become anxious, clinging to her as though tangled in the vibrations that are seeping out of her bones. The entire household has one eye on the river from morning to night. Polly cries in her sleep and comes into bed with her. Elizabeth tiptoes around the house as
though a noise might cause them to miss the welcome sound of his return.

It is John Murdoch who finally comes to the cabin. When Charlotte opens the door to find him standing there, the crushing feeling in her chest tells her before he speaks that all the wishing and hoping and praying for the safe return of William Wishart has been for naught.

“I went myself over the shoal to Bettvin,” he begins. “William had been there to the sawmill and dropped off his timber. He was last seen sailing up the north side of the bay toward open water.”

She thinks, “He really was going to Tabisintack.”

Murdoch continues, in his softest voice. “But he did not deliver his pine to Liverpool. For these last many weeks, the boys on the ships have been keeping an eye out for him. There’s been no sign. Charlotte, we can only conclude that William is lost at sea.”

He reaches for her hands, pats them, lets go. “Charlotte, I won’t stop now. You see to the children, and I’ll look in on you tomorrow, with Janet.”

She watches his sturdy back as he strides across the clearing and into the trees. She’s shocked, surely, but didn’t she know this? William was not John, gone wandering for months at a time. Likely he wanted to revisit the place they had been talking about obsessively, to make sure it was a safe place to settle. He was probably going to bring her home some evidence that the fantasy was attainable, and became lost somehow on the way.

She closes her door and goes to sit by the fire. The younger children tug on her hands, trying to haul her up, asking that she go find William herself. The older ones remember all too vividly
the last time this happened. She can see it in their faces, the scars of losing their provider for the second time in the space of two years. She gathers them around her and once again promises she will take care of them, that together the family will survive. But in her heart she protests: this can’t be true.

That night, she lies tossing in the dark. Finally she wanders out into the main room and leans to light a taper in the fire. Then she picks up her diary:

T
HREE MEN DEAD,
twice widowed, Charlotte now has five children, two lots of land and the determination of Job to survive her latest calamity.

William Davidson comes to the cabin as soon as he hears the terrible news. “Aye, Charlotte, ’Tis a trial you live. It’s another husband you’ll be needing and many a man on this river who’d be lucky to have ye.” The thickened brogue brings the commodore to mind; this is the nearest thing to sympathy she has known and as close as a riverman can get to kindness.

But kindness won’t feed her family. The very next day, Charlotte packs her husband’s coins into her pocket and canoes herself up the river to the tilt of John Humphrys to buy Lot Fifty-three from him, assuring herself in such manner that she’ll have enough hay to feed the livestock come winter. Then she goes home to sort out her life as a widow once again.

While people all around her assume that Charlotte is as strong and sensible as she looks—and that since widows with property are a prize possession in the colony, she’ll soon have a new husband—the fact that William’s body hasn’t been found haunts her. And many evenings she walks down to the water to watch for his return, even though she knows he is not coming back.

A
T A MEETING
later that season called by Marston to try to bring peace between the Miramichi belligerents, Charlotte listens impatiently to Philip Hierlihy complaining again about the size of the lots granted to the old settlers. He’s an annoying bulldog, she reckons, and with a reputation for laying about with his fists while under the influence, so that no one is willing to take him down a peg. The Widow Wishart-once-Blake feels no such compunction and tears into him. “First it’s the entire river you want, Philip Hierlihy, and to be rid of us who were here first, so you puffed-up soldiers can take what you think is owed you. Now it’s the size of your plots that has got you steaming. Why didn’t you go to Antigonish with that brother of yours? You have no hold here. Spare me your British loyalty, your sense of entitlement and your high-handed attitude.”

The other men in the room exchange amused glances while Charlotte upbraids the noisy Hierlihy. The man himself is so astounded he shuts up entirely. He’s never heard a woman talk
to anyone like this, much less to a former sergeant in the Prince of Wales American Regiment. Just as Charlotte had heard of him and his ways, he has heard of her, the widow who was the first woman to settle here and who by the age of thirty-two is the mother of five children from three fathers, all dead. He doesn’t really know what he was expecting of “that woman,” but this red-haired beauty with the trim body of a girl and the language of a logger mesmerizes him. Though he fights back, of course. It’s his nature.

“What, you think you deserve these oversized lots on the river and that we should be satisfied with a grant half your size? How will the place prosper if it begins with injustice?”

The reference to justice catches her off guard and for a time she just glares at him. But it is the beginning of a conversation that carries on and off for the rest of the meeting, and indeed, when he says he will see her safely home, all during the trek back to Lot Eight from the meeting point at the marshlands.

“I don’t need a man to be safe,” she replied curtly but walks along the path with him anyway.

He returns to visit the next day, and she invites him for tea. As much as he irritates her, she is always fascinated by the details of a person’s life, the events that influence a man’s behaviour. And soon she finds herself putting the kettle on again and asking for his story.

As she guesses from his accent, he was born in Ireland and immigrated to Middletown, Connecticut, as a youngster with his family in 1753. He says they were descendants of Dermot O’Hurley, the archbishop of Cashel, who was tortured and hanged by the neck in Dublin in 1584 for refusing to embrace the Queen’s religion. Charlotte contemplates the parallels in the lives of William’s and Philip Hierlihy’s ancestors. “Mr. Wishart’s
ancestor was martyred by a Scottish Queen for being Protestant,” she says, “and yours was murdered by an English Queen for being Catholic, less than forty years apart. It’s not unlike the turning tides of the Indians, the Acadians, the Loyalists and the old settlers over the last three decades right here in New Brunswick. Longevity seems very much attached to point of view.”

And Hierlihy actually laughs with her, enjoying the interesting twists of her mind, if not the comparison with the family history of her dead husband.

She discovers he’s descended from Milesian Irish Celts who, over time, altered the name O’Hurley to several variations that ultimately became Hierlihy. Their Catholic faith was altered as well. His father, Cornelius, was a lieutenant in the British Regiment when they came to Connecticut, and just two years after arriving in the New World he was killed in a battle with the French not far from this very place. Philip’s older brother, Timothy, became the family patriarch, and when he married a woman from the Church of England, the entire family abandoned the Catholic faith and became Anglicans.

His stories of life in Connecticut paint a picture of a prosperous, thriving colony that dissolved into a violent crucible between those who favoured the King of England and those who wanted to become masters of their own fate. When war became unavoidable, he followed Timothy into battle with the Prince of Wales American Regiment.

He then treats her to some of the most gruesome accounts of battle she has ever heard, as if her attention has released something in him. Hiding in the woods to escape the rebels, some of the men starved, others froze to death, and their lingering cries for help still torment him. When they attacked with muskets and bayonets, sometimes they were unable to strike a
killing blow. “The moaning and shrieking, the bleeding and emptying of bowels, the puking and choking—that’s what men did to men. We marched and attacked and retreated and marched again week after week, year after year. The innards of men—friends and foes—stains upon your person and squelching under your boot is a sight that stays with me.”

His hatred for the men who chased his family from their homestead in Connecticut is palpable. And Charlotte begins to understand his festering resentment of the sour welcome he received when he arrived on the Miramichi as a soldier who felt he had saved the land from marauding privateers.

“Your brother is said to have started a settlement in Nova Scotia. Why did you not go with him there?” Charlotte asks.

“Most of the men in the disbanded regiment were granted lots of land near Frederick Town, but my brother knew about this parcel of land in Nova Scotia and asked for the grant especially. I went with him for a time. It’s a good place he has in Antigonish. But a lad I served with, Daniel Menton, knew of this Miramichi River, and said he would lay up logs for a tilt and we would prosper from the fish and the timber. I decided to come with him.”

As he says his goodbyes that evening, having stayed past tea, and through all the preparations for supper, and sat down at the table with her children, she thought, No wonder he’s dangerous with the rum on him. That is one lonely, and wounded, soul.

He doesn’t settle for one visit, but comes the next day and the next and the one after that, till she starts assigning him chores in the garden as she can’t sit still and humour his conversation.

And inside two weeks—though she knows full well that part of her attraction for Hierlihy are the lots that she owns—when he asks her to marry him, she says yes.

In early September, they stand together with Pad’s daughter Elizabeth, John’s children, John, Polly and Robert, and little William Wishart in front of James Horton, Justice of the Quorum for Northumberland County in the newly named Parish of Newcastle, and are duly married according to law.