River Thieves (40 page)

John Senior had fired hurriedly, before he had pulled the rifle clear of Taylor’s arms, and it had recoiled into his face, smashing his nose and knocking him onto his backside, and he sat there in a daze. Peyton continued to hold the Beothuk woman’s face against his chest as she sobbed and tried to struggle free of him. No one else moved but the wounded man, still inching away from the party on the ice.

It was Joseph Reilly finally who walked out away from the cluster of dark-coated white men, past the body whose failing
heat rose into the still air, across the span of clear ice. Up close he could see that the Beothuk struggling to remain upright on his hands and knees was no older than himself when he was a thief among the crowds at Tyburn. He crouched beside him. Dark plugs of blood showed through the back of his cassock, blood poured from his mouth like water from a spigot. The Irishman stood and placed the muzzle of his rifle against the boy’s skull. He turned to look back at the silent group staring across at him like an audience in a theatre and then he pulled the trigger.

Cassie stood with her back to the fire while Peyton spoke. She placed a hand against her abdomen, clutching the fabric of her blouse, then releasing it, as if there was a thread of pain woven into her belly that she was trying to work free.

She said, “All along you’ve been lying.”

Peyton covered his eyes. “A story is never told for its own sake,” he said. “True or false.”

“You bastard, John Peyton.”

“I blame myself,” he said. “They wouldn’t have come down off the shore to meet us if I hadn’t waved that handkerchief.”

Cassie watched him, shaking her head. She said, “I wouldn’t have guessed John Senior to be such a coward to ask you to lie for him.”

He nodded. “Father wouldn’t have suggested such a thing, you’re right.”

Cassie strode across the room and leaned with both hands on the back of a chair. “Tell me then. What am I not seeing?”

“Sit down a minute.”

He took out his pipe and lit it with a coal from the fire as she
settled at the table. He puffed slowly, drawing the smoke into his lungs, trying to calm his breathing. There was a threat implicit in her questions, a willingness to switch allegiances that he wouldn’t have guessed at.

“I’m waiting,” she said.

He nodded. “We never spoke much of it coming down the river, what to do about it all. There was going to have to be some sort of report, Governor Hamilton would want an account of what went on. A grand jury, I figured, just as it happened. We could argue self-defence in Richmond’s case clear enough, and even though it looked dark for John Senior, there was some chance he could plead his condition, given the beating he’d taken. The young one had an axe tucked into his belt besides. He might have got off as it was and he’d have taken his chances if that was all there was to it. But there was Reilly to think about.”

“What about him?”

“When he was a lad in London he was a thief. Caught picking pockets and sentenced to hang. You’ve seen those scars on his hand.”

Cassie nodded.

“They branded him a thief, you see, sent him across to Newfoundland.”

“I don’t follow what you’re telling me.”

“He killed the Indian.”

“That was an act of mercy.”

“A fine distinction, and not one our Captain Buchan and those like him would be interested in making. He was sentenced to hang once already, Cassie. He altered the mark on his hand. Not Jesus Christ himself could have saved the man from the noose a second time.”

Cassie leaned forward on the table. Her lazy eye drew down nearly closed, as if she was sighting down a rifle barrel. “You couldn’t have told it as it happened and left Joseph Reilly out of it?”

He opened his mouth to speak and hesitated a moment. “He’s my father, Cassie. And you —”

“What?” she said. “And I what?”

He lifted his hand, a dismissive gesture, an admission of helplessness.

She got up from her seat and walked three steps away before turning back to face him, shaking her head furiously, as if it was suddenly clear to her. “It was
me
you were protecting,” she said.

He shifted in his chair so she couldn’t see his face. “I wanted to spare you knowing if I could.”

She covered her mouth with her hand and walked to the doorway. She turned then and was on him, knocking his chair over backwards to the floor. He grabbed for her arms as she beat him about the head and face. She cuffed an ear and set his head ringing. “Cassie,” he said. She struck him across the bridge of the nose and he was nearly blinded by the shock of it, his eyes watering. Blood ran onto his lips and into his mouth.

Cassie was crying as she swung her arms, and when he finally corralled them and pinned them to her sides, he held onto her until the jag of broken sobs subsided. Her strength was a surprise to him. He hadn’t had occasion to take note of it since their first year on the shore, when she took to the ice to gaff seals. He thought if she’d had a poker or a stick of wood in her hands, she would have killed him there on the kitchen floor. When he let her go she stood up and walked across to the door.

She stopped there but kept her back turned to the room. She said, “I’ll stay here until Mary is brought back up the river.”

Peyton was on his knees on the floor. He wiped the blood away from his upper lip with the sleeve of his shirt. “You know she might die before the freeze-up.”

“Then I’ll stay until she dies.”

Peyton picked his chair up from where it lay on its side and moved it along the table, still trying to catch his breath. He sat sideways to hold his hands in the light of the candle so their shadows moved on the near wall. He brought the two together to form the outline of a rabbit’s head, then a dog. The shadow-dog’s mouth opened and closed on the wall and Peyton made a low barking sound in time to the motion, then howled quietly.

When he was eleven years old, he stole two pence from the pocket of his father’s short-cut spencer where it lay across a chair in the room they shared during the winter months. After school he ran straight to the waterfront and stood in line, the coins clutched so tightly in his palm that the outline was scored into the flesh long after he paid at the door. The room held close to one hundred men and boys and the girl was stood upon a tabletop at one end. People craned their necks and hollered for a better view, for the Indian to speak or dance. There was a gauzy drift of light through opaque windows, the room smelled of rain and tobacco. Someone had tied a feather in her hair and put three stripes of white on each cheek. Her dress was made of rough calico. There was a wooden doll in her hand that she gripped against her chest and she seemed to
have no idea why she was there or what interest the assembly of white men might have in her. After five minutes of the crowd’s restless shouting and surging towards the table where she stood, the girl turned her head up and howled with all the force of helplessness a child her age could manage. She was the loneliest-looking creature he ever laid eyes on.

Peyton leaned to the floor and picked up the journal, placing it on the table. He used a finger to turn it in slow circles, flipped it end over end between his hands. He riffled the pages back to front and back again, until he found the blur of words at the edge of a page, the only place in the journal anything had been scribbled outside the careful margins. The words were smudged where the book had been closed before the ink was fully dry, but he recognized the expansive slant of the hand, the tilted looping letters of her handwriting.

There was a child. Before I ended it, David. I was pregnant.

Peyton lifted a hand to his forehead. His first thought was that Cassie had cheated on his father somehow. He left the journal open on the table and walked out of the kitchen, across the hall to the door of Cassie’s room, raised a fist to hammer at it. Held his hand motionless in the air then as it became clear to him finally. Blood still trickled at the back of his throat.

He placed his palm flat against the door, moving it back and forth across the rough grain. He waited there until he thought he might fall with shaking and then ran from the house, down the worn path towards the stage. He stumbled across the stone beach of the cove and sloshed into the frigid ocean water, until the cold stopped his breath, and he stared blindly out across the dark as the chill knifed into his skin. He could feel his intestines quivering. She had never been his father’s lover, though
she let him go on believing it. All these years it was her who held him away. Cassandra.

“I have to admit,” Buchan said, “I came to this investigation with a number of preconceptions.”

He was sitting in the Peytons’ kitchen, a long ways beyond three parts drunk. He had arrived in the cutter that morning, coming straight across from his interview with Noel Young on Tommy’s Arm River, and no one seemed that much surprised to see him. The day was passed in distant pleasantries and Buchan had the marines assist in taking down the cutting room and salt house to protect them from the ice that would rake the coast come spring. The supper was a staid event with little conversation and both Mary and Cassie excused themselves as soon as they had eaten. Rowsell had been with them for the meal as well but left to lie in with the other marines just before nine. Peyton and his father stayed at the table with the officer as the dark settled and a harsh autumn frost reached for them where they sat. Peyton laid more wood in the fire than any sober person would consider sensible and he kept it roaring through the evening. None of them had seen the bottom of their glass in a while.

“Blindness,” Buchan went on, “to refuse to see what’s before your eyes because you have already decided on the
truth of a matter. I have been half-asleep this whole time.”

Peyton raised his glass. “Welcome back to the land of the living, sir.” He felt giddy with misery.

Buchan slammed the table with the open palm of his hand. “I feel a little as if someone has pulled the rug from beneath my feet.”

John Senior said, “That’s just the rum.”

“I admire you, sir,” Buchan said to the older man. “I have said so on a number of occasions to a number of people, your son being one of them.”

John Senior drank off half his glass. “I could give a good Goddamn what you think of me,” he said. “Sir,” he added.

They all three burst into laughter and they went on longer than the thin joke warranted, until their guts ached from the effort and tears streamed down their faces.

Buchan cleared his throat, trying to stifle a last giggle. “I will be taking Mr. Reilly into St. John’s to be tried when the
Grasshopper
returns,” he said. He was still wiping away the moisture from his cheeks.

John Senior looked across at his son and then at the officer. “The hell you will,” he said.

He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Fidelity to the law, Mr. Peyton. I have no choice.”

“You promised a good word if ever it was needed.”

“Concerning past offences, yes. This is another case altogether. Mr. Reilly will hang, I’m afraid.”

John Senior said, “T’was me what killed him. I was the shooter.”

“Shut up now,” Peyton told him.

Buchan looked at the old man and then at his son. A squib
of drunken uncertainty crossed his face. “An honourable gesture, sir. I expected nothing less from you.”

Peyton held up a hand to keep his father in his seat. “Mind,” he said. He refilled the round of glasses and sipped at the rum. “You have concluded your investigation, Captain Buchan.”

He gave a non-committal shrug. “I believe I have,” he answered.

“We are pleased and relieved to hear it,” Peyton said. He turned to his father. “I’ll need a few moments alone with the Captain.”

The old man looked to his son quickly, about to argue with him, but said nothing. In the few months since they’d gone down to the lake John Senior seemed to have lost his place in the world, everything around him had shifted, breaking up like ice rotten with spring heat. The nightmares he suffered off and on for years had become increasingly frequent and violent. He seemed sure of nothing any more. “I was just on my way to bed,” he said furiously. He got up from the table and he took his full glass with him up the stairs.

Peyton watched Buchan from across the table. He imagined the small room where they sat suddenly in motion, the two of them in an open boat with a heavy sea running. The sickening rise on a wave’s crest, the sudden plunging descent. He got up from his seat and walking unsteadily to the daybed, bending to reach into the chill underneath. Back at the table he placed the journal between them. “I understand you misplaced this a number of days ago.”

Buchan reached for the book. He held it in his hand and hefted it, as if guessing its weight. “I could have you flogged
for this,” he said. He shook the journal at his host. “I could have you
hanged.”
He tried to sound more sure of himself than he felt. He let out a long breath of air. “But I suspect there was nothing much of use to you among the contents. And if I’m not mistaken, the actual thief is halfway to the gallows already.”

“There are a number of things,” Peyton said, “which I had preconceptions about myself when all of this got started.”

He still had not taken his seat and he reached a hand across the table and held it there until Buchan reluctantly passed the journal back to him. He felt a tight corkscrew of disgust spiral through his stomach but couldn’t identify the exact source of it, his father or Buchan, Cassie. Himself. He felt the bow of the tiny craft crest a whitecap and come down hard, the force of the impact shuddering through the entire vessel like a spasm of nausea.

He flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for and he laid the book sideways before the officer. He pulled the candle closer. “You didn’t know about the child,” he said. “Did you, Captain.”

Buchan looked up from Cassie’s words in the journal and Peyton could see reflected in the officer’s face a moment of sickening recognition, of bottomless panic. Dark sea pouring over the gunnels. Every seam leaking water.