River Thieves (19 page)

The governor pursed his lips and nodded. “Agreed,” he said. He interrupted himself to cough a dark plug of phlegm into the white silk handkerchief he held in his left hand at all times. “It hardly seems creditable,” he said, “that a house could be built to hold the cold as this one does.” He got up from his seat and walked across to the fireplace where he placed two junks of wood onto the flames and reached for a third. He stood staring blankly at the flaring light.

Buchan said, “Is there anything further, sir?”

Pickmore turned with the junk of wood in his hand. He looked almost as if he was about to burst into tears. He said, “You don’t hold a very high opinion of me, do you, Lieutenant.”

Buchan disliked the man, it was true. He’d made attempts to interest the governor in the plight of the Red Indians without much success. “I have other things to worry about,” Pickmore had said, shaking his handkerchief like a man engaged in an act of perpetual surrender. It seemed to Buchan he worried mostly about himself. Pickmore’s endless complaints, his nagging sickliness, gave him the air of a spoiled child. He had said so to Marie on a number of occasions and considered saying something to that effect
now. But in the end he said, “I have a position, Your Worship. Not opinions.”

During what remained of the afternoon Buchan toured the burned-over area above the harbour. The jet-black of char still showing through the snow that had fallen in the days since the fire. Along Water Street, men picked through the ruins of the warehouses and stores with sticks, hoping to turn up bits of burnt fish or salt beef to feed their families. Three women in long skirts and kerchiefs sat in an alcove where the remains of two walls still formed a corner, their arms around a handful of children between the ages of two and ten. Towards the east end, along Hill o’Chips, a row of recently erected shanties stood shoulder to shoulder, tiny shacks of scavenged wood and canvas not high enough to allow even a man of his modest height to stand upright inside.

Somewhere an infant was crying inconsolably. The sun was falling behind the western hills and the piercing, disembodied wail of the child seemed to Buchan to be the sound of the sun’s descent. Long winter shadows seeped across the harbour, dragging dusk in their wake. He turned away from the waterfront and started back up the steep hill towards the fort.

He found the navy patrol as they prepared for their evening’s tour of duty and he repeated his orders to use any force necessary to protect the citizenry from the gangs roaming the streets. “You are permitted five minutes on the hour to shelter inside out of the cold, not a minute more,” he told them. “Am I understood?”

He marched across to the mess where supper was just being
served. He stood behind an empty chair and placed both hands on the wooden rungs until the room had fallen silent. Three hundred marines and Blue Jackets turned to watch him. A piece of cutlery clattered to the floor. Someone asked, “Are you joining us, Lieutenant?”

“Corporal Rowsell,” Buchan said.

The man jumped to his feet, nearly knocking his chair over behind him. “Sir,” he said.

“In the morning, you will take a patrol of eighty men to the Hill o’Chips and remove, by force if necessary, all men, women and children residing in temporary shelters built since the fire.”

“Sir.”

“The shelters will be torn down. The people will be moved to the church hall most amenable to their faith. If necessary, tents will be erected in the churchyards to accommodate the numbers.”

“Yes sir.”

Buchan took a breath. He had deliberately avoided raising his voice and he could feel the men in the room leaning towards him, straining to hear. He said, “As of this evening, all members of His Majesty’s Service will be put on half rations.”

Rowsell cleared his throat. “Yes sir,” he said again.

Buchan turned his attention away from the corporal then and spoke into the centre of the room. “The extra rations will be distributed evenly through the churches to those people residing within their doors.” He looked back to Rowsell. “Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear, sir,” Rowsell said.

He stood there a moment longer looking at the faces of the
men, all of them staring straight ahead now or into their plates. “Thank you, Corporal,” he said. He pulled the chair away from the table and took a seat. “I would be pleased to join you.”

It was nearly eight o’clock by the time he made his way back to the apartment he shared with his wife and four-year-old daughter within the walls of the fort. The child was already asleep. Marie was sitting near the fire under a thick layer of blankets and shawls. She was pregnant a third time and expecting the birth within days or weeks. Her belly distended the flow of material around her and her exposed head looked comically tiny atop the mound in the chair. Yellow ringlets in her hair. A small delicate nose, a high red blush in her cheeks as if she’d spent hours running outside. It was still the face of the girl he ’d met when she was fifteen and barely conversant in the English language.

“Your supper is ruined,” she told him without turning from the fire.

“I ate with the men at the mess,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“You are always sorry, yes?”

He pulled a chair next to hers and smiled across at her.

“Do not smile,” she said. She shifted uncomfortably, unable to find a position where the baby did not press against her ribs or her spine. She took quick, delicate breaths to avoid the painful stitches that folded through her stomach, across her back. “You ’ave no idea what it is to live in this condition. I cook for you in this condition and you eat with the men in the mess.”

“You have a perfectly capable servant to cook for you.”

“She is useless, the Irish ’ave no ideas what is cooking. They are worse even than the English.”

Buchan shifted his chair again and lifted her right foot into his lap, removing the heavy leather slipper and rubbing his thumb firmly along the length of the sole. Her head lolled backwards. He said, “
Pardonnez moi, cheri. Tu es tout pour moi.”

She sat up straight and pulled her foot from his hands. “I must share you with the men in the mess, this is your idea of marriage? I must share you? And your French is terrible,” she said.

He smiled and reached for her left foot. His French was not good, it was true. But at times he went out of his way to speak it poorly, to tease her. He said,
“C’est vrai?”

After the seventh month of her pregnancies, his wife endured constant discomfort and the petulance her discomfort provoked was astonishing. Buchan’s resolutely good humour in the face of her anger occasionally needled her into a more furious state of mind, but on the whole it was one of the few things that made the last eight weeks of carrying a child bearable. She winced a smile back at him.
“Oui,”
she said.
“C’est vrai.”

They sat without speaking while Buchan massaged her swollen feet, and before she dozed off in her chair, Marie said,
“Pardonnez moi, cheri. Tu es tout pour moi.”
She spoke the words with a flawless imitation of her husband’s Scots burr.

“Go to sleep now,” he said.

“You love me, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You love only me,
c’est vrai?”

“Oui,”
he said.
“C’est vrai.”

Buchan watched her sleeping. She had left their oldest
daughter at a boarding school in England the past three years in order to be with him in Newfoundland. And even here he was away for weeks, sometimes months at a time. If he added the absences together, they accounted for several years of their marriage.

With the exception of the last two months of her pregnancies, Marie never complained or asked for anything different from him. It still surprised him to see the strength of her will once she committed herself. Her face was the only childlike thing about her any more, that and her devotion to him which he felt less and less worthy of. He had to make a conscious effort not to respond to it with the cloying attention of a delinquent parent. He massaged his thumb the length of the tendon that stretched from her big toe almost to her heel. It was the only thing that gave her any relief now.

At the time Buchan and Marie first met, England and France were about to go to war after a brief cessation of hostilities. He made a half-hearted attempt to talk her out of marrying him. On the HMS
Nettby
he had seen men disembowelled by round shot, arms shattered by flying debris. The wounded were carted to the surgeon on the orlop deck where they were laid in a row and treated strictly in turn, regardless of rank or the severity of the injury. Many bled to death while they waited. Limbs were amputated with only a mouthful of rum for anaesthetic, a leather gag forced between the injured man’s teeth. On the gun decks, the dead and those men wounded beyond hope were pitched through the gun ports to make way for replacements.

None of these things Buchan felt proper to tell a girl of Marie’s age, but he did his best to imply what marriage to a navy man could mean. Through the years that followed, he
thought of himself as an appendage his wife would have to make do without if necessary — a finger, an ear, a foot. He was a soldier after all, he’d managed to find something menacingly erotic in the risking of such things. And he comforted himself with the thought that she had made her decision to marry him in full knowledge of the possibility. But the notion he might have to learn to live his life without Marie had never occurred to him before the last child.

The birth had been a harrowing, nearly fatal experience. Thirty-six hours of labour, a breech, their second daughter born feet first. For a while, the midwife thought she would lose them both. When she passed the afterbirth, Marie bled so much the bed sheets and towels, even the mattress, were beyond recovering and had to be burned. Buchan was cloistered away in another room while the women dealt with these things. He heard the story after the fact, knowing it had been abbreviated, censored in the interest of delicacy. Less than what it signified, he knew, not as horrific as the event itself.

Her constitution never quite recovered from the extremities of that labour and she had fallen into a more and more delicate state of health through this latest pregnancy. It was clear to them both, though it had never been spoken aloud, that the approaching birth could kill her. An increasingly familiar twinge of regret hammered at him, like the heel of a tiny foot kicking at his ribs from the inside.

He worked her slipper carefully over her foot and placed it gently on the floor. He stoked the fire and added more wood, then went to the bedroom where he pissed into the chamber pot. He lifted a hand-stitched quilt from the bed and carried it back to the hearth where he lay down beside his wife’s chair
and fell asleep.

At half past three that morning, the twenty-first of November, the watch on one of His Majesty’s ships in St. John’s harbour observed long curtains of flame billowing through the windows of a property owned by Messrs. Huie & Reed on Water Street, near Adelaide. The ship’s cannon was fired to alert the town and in the early morning stillness the report echoed back and forth between the surrounding hills, throwing the entire village into a bleary state of confusion and panic, as if the settlement were suddenly under siege. Thousands of people rushed from their houses into the winter night, barefoot and wearing only their nightshirts, many of them carrying crying children and infants into the bitter cold.

There was no wind, but the fire travelled quickly through the closely packed rows of wooden buildings and stores of dry-goods. By the time Buchan reached Water Street, everything east of Adelaide to the boundary of the previous fire was burning and beyond help. He marshalled a group of marines and fishermen and led them west beyond Huie & Reed’s premises. The few remaining fish flakes over the path he ordered torn down. On the roofs of the buildings along the street men had climbed ladders to lay wet blankets or carpets on the shingles. They scrambled back and forth with brooms to sweep away the drifting flankers as they pitched on the roofs. They had no chance, Buchan could see, of saving their homes and businesses. What was needed was a firebreak, an open space the fire wouldn’t be able to cross on a night without wind.

He ordered marines into two houses facing each other
across the narrow street, telling them to clear the rooms of anyone still inside. Men with axes and saws severed the main wooden support beams of the building on the south side of the street and a Blue Jacket was sent up a ladder with a hawser, which he secured to the opposite eave. A crowd of several hundred had gathered by then and Buchan ordered as many men as could get a hand in to stand along the free end of the hawser. They lined diagonally down Water Street, almost a hundred strong. Buchan shouted against the roar of the approaching fire as the men came back on the rope. The two-storey structure creaked, tilted sideways like a drunk man trying to rise from a chair, then stumbled into the street, collapsing in a cloud of dust. There was a cheer from the men on the line and from the people watching along the street.

Before the dust had settled a woman came at Buchan, using both her fists to pummel his chest and slap at his face. She was still in her nightclothes, her head covered with a nightcap. A marine ran up behind her and grabbed at her arms. She was yelling incomprehensibly as she struck Buchan and it took several minutes to restrain her. She looked up at the officer from the ground where the marine sat beneath her, pinning her arms to her side. “That was my house, you bastard,” she shouted. “That was my house.”

“I tried to keep hold of her, sir,” the marine explained. “She’s strong as a mule.”

“Get her out of here,” Buchan said.

The hawser was already attached to the second residence and the men were lined along the rope, waiting for the order to heave. The heat of the fire was building in the street behind them, the noise too loud to be heard over. Buchan took a handkerchief
from his pocket and held it in the air as if to signal the start of a race. Three times he raised and lowered it as the volunteers leaned back against the weight of the rope, but the house did not budge. More men came forward to grab the hawser after each failure.