River Thieves (26 page)

In the eyes of the British Crown at the time, the island of Newfoundland wasn’t considered a proper colony, but a sort of floating fishing station and training ground for naval recruits, a country that existed only during the summer months. Most of the planters and fishermen returned to England for the winter, as did the governor himself. According to the stories Richmond and Taylor gathered while wandering the settlement, the current representative of the Crown was a minor functionary related distantly to royalty who was offered the position as a kind of punishment for profligate living. In England he had become so fearful of creditors that he awoke before dawn and stayed away from his house until dark. He accepted the governorship of Newfoundland first and foremost as a way to temporarily escape his debts.

The reward Richmond was seeking had been offered by a previous administration and before the arrival of the men who stood before him the governor had never heard of it. He listened to Richmond’s story of finding the child wandering alone on the bird islands without comment or even much in the way of expression.

“What does she have in her hand there?” he asked afterwards.

“A doll, Your Honour,” Richmond said. “It was all she had when I discovered her.”

“She hardly looks like an Indian to my eye.”

“We have done our best with the little we have to civilize
the child,” John Senior said. “The paint was scrubbed off her face and we cut her hair and provided some sensible clothes.”

The girl stood between her captors and the sickly looking gentleman in his chair who continually passed a palm across the thinning hair on his head. Mud covered her shoes and her legs to her knees. She placed her chin on the head of the doll and held it there.

“Have her speak something in her native tongue.”

John Senior cleared his throat. “She haven’t uttered a word since she’s been with us, sir.”

The governor gave a long, weary sigh. “Gentlemen,” he said, “however you may have come into possession of this Indian, if indeed an Indian she is” — he looked at the men a moment to communicate his doubts on the matter — “she is of no use to the Crown whatsoever.”

Richmond said, “We’ve come a long ways with this child here.”

The governor was already on his feet. “And I wish you a pleasant return trip. Your petition for the Crown’s reward is denied.”

The three men went straight from their meeting to a public house. They felt foolish and unfairly used and it took them most of the evening to disguise those feelings with drink. The Indian girl stood beside them, her eyes just above the tabletop staring at the candle’s flicker, a block of hard taffy in her hand. Eventually Richmond placed her in the straw along the wall and he took off his coat and tucked it around her where she lay clutching her doll.

John Senior left for Poole in the morning. Richmond and
Taylor took the sloop back to the northeast shore. Without ever discussing the possibility, both men expected that Siobhan would take the girl in and raise her as her own when they returned to the Bay of Exploits. They carried her up there as soon as they shipped in from St. John’s and they sat in the kitchen together, the girl fidgeting quietly with her doll in Siobhan’s lap. A mix of snow and rain whipped around in a contrary wind outside and the gusts roared in the chimney.

Tom Taylor said, “Perhaps it was God’s way of giving us a bairn, Siobhan.”

Siobhan lifted the girl from her lap and stood her on the floor. She had cared for the child for months now and in a barely conscious way had come to cherish her. But something fragile in the woman came apart then and she refused what a day earlier she would have admitted to calling love. Her voice shook slightly when she spoke. “God never intended me to raise a dumb savage in place of my own child, Tom Taylor.” She turned to her brother. “You’ll take her with you when you go.” She left the room then, the girl pointing after her as she walked away.

An elderly couple from Poole who had been on the shore a decade and were about to retire back to England on a late crossing out of St. John’s agreed to take the girl and raise her as a servant. To cover the cost of her passage and board in England, she was exhibited to crowds of curious onlookers in a warehouse on the waterfront in Poole. Admission at the door was two pence.

Richmond was staring blindly at the fire as these things came back to him, the brittle fingers of scrag flaring and then curling in the heat like creatures helplessly trying to protect
themselves from the flame. By the time the kettle boiled he was too unsettled to make himself a mug of tea. He sat wrapped in a blanket while steam rose into the air over the fire. The same scalding commotion working in his belly.

Peyton and his men breached the head of the lake in the late afternoon of the following day, March 6, after walking without rest since dawn and they crouched out of sight among a thick blind of spruce trees on the shoreline. Several miles across the ice a cluster of winter shelters stood in a clearing, loose braids of smoke rising into the glare of the day’s end. They backtracked along the River Exploits as the sun fell behind a dark blind of trees at the crest of the valley, and circled into a gully where a small rattling brook met the river. They tramped a piece of ground firm before unlacing the Indian rackets from their boots and standing them up in the thigh-deep snow. They cut spruce limbs from the near trees and set the largest against cross-logs for a windbreak and settled the rest over the places where they intended to sleep. By then it was night with a fair breeze of wind brought up but Peyton refused to allow a fire to be kindled for fear it might give them away. He set three watches and the group settled to wait out the stars. No one managed to so much as doze off in the bitter cold, but the night was edgeless and surreal as a dream and each of the men felt lost in it.

Before first light they roused themselves and packed up the camp. They gnawed on cakes of hard tack to quiet their bellies and then shook out the old priming of their muskets, pricked the touch holes and fresh primed. Most of the party’s ammunition consisted of slugs or quarter shot or drop shot, but Tom Taylor
and Richmond and John Senior loaded their pieces with balls. After they’d laced on their rackets Peyton reminded them that no one was to fire on any account without his permission. Richmond allowed he was just a hired man, but thought it an awful thing to be ordering your father about in such a fashion. John Senior said, “He knows my mind well enough,” and Peyton repeated his order to wait on his word. They tramped single file out of the gully, turning south on the bank of the river towards the point of land that intersected the lake.

The forest along the shoreline was dense with underbrush and they were forced to skirt the edge, but stayed as close to the trees as they could. Loose snow had drifted heavy against the shore and they struggled forward two and a half hours before stopping a hundred yards shy of the clearing where the shelters stood. They hunkered among a stand of trees on a small finger of land pushed out into the lake. John Senior was breathing in short laboured whiffs beside Peyton. He shook his head. “Panking like the devil,” he said. “Haven’t got neither bit of wind like I used to.”

Peyton glanced across at his father. His own feet were galled, his knees and ankles were swollen and stiff with the cold and exertion, and it was painful just to crouch there. He’d been worried about his father’s stamina before they set out, but John Senior had been the first from his blankets each morning and urged the men on past dark. Peyton shook his head and turned back to the clearing.

Two of the mamateeks were shingled with sheaves of birch-bark stitched together with spruce root or sinews. The third was wrapped with a canvas sail that had been stained with a mixture of red ochre and grease. Richmond lifted his bearded
chin towards it and said, “She’d be ours, I imagine.”

John Senior nodded. “Won’t be more than fifteen or so to a wigwam,” he said, “so fifty at the outside.” He looked across at Peyton who had pulled out his pocket Dollard and was squinting through it to study the clearing. “Well?” he said.

He closed the glass and shook his head. “Nothing doing.” He could feel the intensity of anticipation around him, the hum of it in the air like the noisy heat of green wood laid on a fire. Joseph Reilly touched his shoulder then and pointed where a figure had just stood clear of one of the shelters. He lifted the glass back to his eye.

Richmond offered they should get a move on before any more of the Indians started the day and there was a general mutter of agreement that Peyton ignored. He stood up and walked out of the trees towards the clearing. Several of the party followed up behind him and he waved them back into the woods. There was still only the one figure moving outside the mamateeks, and there was such an immense quiet in the valley and across the frozen surface of the lake that Peyton imagined for a moment the woman was alone in this place but for him. Through the telescope he had seen the well-kept sheen of her black hair, her face darkened with the same red stain they had used to mark the stolen sail.

He lifted his arm. “Haloo,” he shouted.

His voice echoed back to him from the trees as the Indian woman turned to stare across at the point where he stood. Before the sound of her first alarm reached his ears he could hear John Senior cursing behind him and his party burst out of the woods at a trot.

By the time they’d snowshoed halfway across the cove the
camp of Beothuk was in flight, most of them clearing the mama-teeks and taking to the bush while a smaller group set off south across the frozen lake. Some of them were only half-dressed and they carried nothing away in their hands but infants. Peyton shouted at his men to hold their fire as he ran. The large Indian rackets they wore were awkward and nearly useless on the hard-packed snow and ice on the cove and they slipped and slid towards the shoreline beneath the camp.

“What’s in the bush is gone,” Richmond shouted when they stopped there.

Across the ice the smaller party was still in sight, a cluster of bodies in the lead and one straggler losing ground. Peyton tore his feet free of the rackets and set off in their direction, shrugging off his pack and powder horn and the bulk of his greatcoat as he went. He ran with a panicked, superstitious urgency, as if he felt disaster could only be averted if he was the first of his party to touch a Red Indian, to speak his name aloud to their ears.

It was well into morning by this time and the snow and ice shimmered in the sunlight like a mirage, the figures ahead of him distorted in the brightness so that it sometimes seemed they were hovering several feet above the surface and sometimes as if they had no legs at all. The straggler was the woman he had called out to and as she fell further behind he could make out the flap of her caribou cassock and its thickly furred collar. One of the lead group came back to her and gathered up a package from her arms, but she continued to struggle and Peyton quickly closed the distance between them. “Haloo,” he shouted after her. He was close enough to see that her leggings were stitched with spruce root, bald white thread against the
red-ochre stain. There were bone pendants and a bright red bird claw attached to the outside seams that rattled as she ran. “Haloo,” he shouted again.

Ten yards in front of him, unable to run any further, she dropped heavily to her knees and Peyton came to a stop behind her to keep the distance. Her breath was ragged and uneven and she choked and coughed as the rest of her party disappeared around the point of land in the distance. She turned where she knelt to face the stranger, loosening the belt and lifting her cassock over her head to reveal her breasts in an appeal for mercy, the nipples barely visible beneath the red paint that covered her torso. Peyton looked away from her, breathing heavily to stop his body from shaking. The frost in the air had galled his throat and lungs and the dark peaty taste of blood flooded his mouth.

He set his flintlock rifle on the ground and kicked it away, then he removed his pistol from its harness and threw it to the side so that it skittered over the ice for twenty feet, the metal barrel flaring in the sunlight. “All right,” he said, looking across at her. He held his hands out at his sides. The first of his party were making their way towards them and the woman on the ice looked past him to the approaching men. “All right now,” he said and stepped towards her.

She looked over her shoulder to the point where she had last seen her companions, then covered herself with the leather cassock and stood to meet him. He nodded his head and smiled towards her, “John Peyton,” he said, thumping his chest with the open palm of his hand, “John Peyton.” She was still crying but nodded her head and smiled helplessly as she came up to this man with her hands extended and Peyton was struck by
the evenness and uncorrupted white of her teeth.

Michael Sharpe was the first to reach them. He stood and stared at the Indian woman with the same look of wonder and mistrust he would have turned on a tree that had uprooted itself from the shore and walked towards him across the ice. Peyton held her arm gently above the elbow and named the man for her and she took his hand and nodded and spoke her words to him as she had to Peyton. When the rest of his party arrived carrying Peyton’s greatcoat and other supplies, she greeted them as well. John Senior walked off to collect Peyton’s guns.

Peyton explained how the other Indians had disappeared around the point of land ahead and when they turned to look in that direction they saw three figures standing at the shoreline to watch them. One of the distant figures gesticulated as if to gain their attention.

“All right,” John Senior said then, and he removed a heavy leather mitten to reach inside his coat, taking out a long linen handkerchief that he shook free in the sunlight. The cloth snapped in the cold air. “Here,” the old man said, and he handed the handkerchief to his son.

Peyton nodded and took the handkerchief and turning towards the three figures on the point of land ahead he waved the white cloth over his head.

“Her hands!” John Senior snapped at him. “What a goddamn fool,” he said. The old man retrieved his handkerchief and grabbed the woman’s arm to turn her back towards him. She looked to John Peyton as her hands were knotted behind her back and he nodded and did his best to indicate everything would be all right.