The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (16 page)

“So it is in Will’s hands—on its way to England.”

Charlotte gasps. “That never occurred to me. What exactly had you written to my father, George? It’s my inheritance I need and now you can understand why. The letter you wrote, can it support my position about gaining my inheritance?”

“My God, woman, you confound me with your presumptions. I am certain Mr. MacCulloch has schemes for this letter that will not serve you or me. I am just as certain that neither of us has heard the end of it.”

He meets her eyes now, a suitor with a case to state. “I have the means to support you and the child. I can offer you a life here, if this is what you choose, but we could also live in England, or in Scotland. I have a house in Edinburgh, a fine house.” She looks at him, sorry for him, wanting to give him the respect of serious consideration.

“George, I think you’ve had a little too much to drink tonight. Is it not better that we should speak of this tomorrow?”

“No!” He stands suddenly, swaying. “By God, Charlotte, must you persist in folly?”

Charlotte stands. “We shall speak tomorrow, George.” And the commodore bows to her once and leaves the room.

In the morning, before he is awake, Charlotte slips into her boots and treks back to the Indian encampment, where no one pretended to know her mind better than she did herself.

H
ER LIFE IS CONSUMED
thereafter with preparing for the coming winter. It is already so cold at night, she keeps a fire
going and sleeps under bearskins, staying as close to the embers as she dares. The birds are flocking up—flying in V formations and landing in the marshes in great migratory herds, preparing to leave for warmer climes. It is a sign she’ll forever associate with the laying down of food for winter.

Her back aches, her feet swell, the child in her womb is moving constantly now. She has already marked November on the earthen patch she uses to keep track of the months; she is heavy with child and calculates a mid-December birthing. The women in the camp seem to take special pride in their mental and physical toughness in labour. She knows almost nothing about delivering a baby and wonders daily if she has the courage for the birthing.

A
SOFT MORNING LIGHT
fills her hut. Charlotte holds her hands out above the bearskins and studies them, roughened by labour and raw weather, the painful blisters on her palms now calloused. Calluses, she had learned, are what a body needs. Her whole spirit is becoming just a little calloused, as she feels it must if she is to survive.

She had added wood to the fire at dawn and crawled back beneath both her furs. She is in no hurry to rise but is content to lie in the cot marvelling at the child stirring in her belly. The wind outside the hut is rising. By her best calculation, it is the first day of December. The last arrows of geese had vanished over the southern horizon some weeks earlier. The women had finished filling their pits with onions and roots and had hung to dry ropes of wild grapes, sarsaparilla, spruce roots and balsam buds. By day Charlotte had smoked and salted meat and fish with Marie.

“How can we ever prepare enough to last us through the
winter?” she had asked as they had rubbed salt into the split bodies of a half-dozen enormous codfish.

“We don’t have to preserve all we need. The men will hunt moose and deer, and will fish through holes in the ice too.”

“There are fish below the ice?”

Marie smiled. “Where else would the fish go? The water is their home.”

“So you are sure we shall have enough to eat.”

“Yes.” Marie stopped work to meet Charlotte’s eyes. “But sometimes the hunt is bad and sometimes the fish punish us and they refuse to bite. So we need to do all we can now.”

“Of course.”

“But the hunt is good here and we can stay in our village all winter.” Her face was lit in the broad, easy smile that is her most striking feature. “I don’t like to move.”

Charlotte sucked her finger where the salt had invaded a cut. “Sometimes a body must move from an old home to a new,” she said. “It may not be altogether a terrible thing.”

Marie smiled again. “Charlotte, you left your home for love. But to move because you must eat is not the same thing.” She resumed salting the cod.

T
HE FIRE IS CRACKLING
well now, though she notices a chink in her chimney where the glow of the fire shows through. She would have to ask Marie for advice on how to repair it, or perhaps Wioche. Her breath blossoms above her in the still-cold air. She had returned to her hut from Marie’s wigwam—when was that? Was it a week before—the moon, she remembered, had been a thin crescent in the west. She had returned to find a mountain of spruce boughs piled against the outside walls to buffer them against the wind. Moss had been stuffed into the
cracks in the walls and roof. A moose hide had been stretched over the floor and the walls inside lined with more boughs.

It had been Wioche’s work, Marie confirmed it.

“That is how he speaks to you,” Marie had said.

Charlotte’s comfort is that, if she becomes too cold, or too alone or too alarmed by the sounds in the forest that stand like a dark wall only yards from the back of the hut, she can join Marie’s family in their wigwam. There, twelve souls—Marie and André, their children, Marie’s sister with her husband and children—twelve warm bodies—are a refuge she could scarcely have imagined not long before but had sought with gratitude on three occasions so far.

At last she can put off the day no longer. Rising, she wraps more layers of shawl around her and then shrugs into the fur coat the commodore had given her. She opens the door and goes out into the grey morning.

The rivers that flow into the Baie de Chaleur are frozen now, though the tide on the bay still rises and falls each day. Towers of ice stand stranded on the flats and dwarf the Salmon men who venture out in search of fish. It begins to snow, gently at first, dusting the trees and leaving patterns of white on the pine-needle paths. She lets the snow fall on her face, feels the lightness of the flakes and marvels at their shapes. Marie is carrying wood to her wigwam.

“Hello, Charlotte!” she calls. “Are you well?”

“Oh yes. I wished very much to call upon you, Marie, but your house was quiet.”

“Josef had a fever last night, and he is still sleeping. Don’t worry, the fever has broken—he’ll be okay by tomorrow.”

“Well, Marie, I’ve decided these winters of yours are not so impossibly bad. It’s not as cold as I thought it would be.”

Marie regards her without the usual smile. Even as they stand together, there is a rustle in the treetops overhead. Both women look up. The pines on the ridge to the east make a sound between whispering and whistling that carries toward them.

“Three days,” says Wioche, who appears as he usually does—out of nowhere. “A storm for three days,” he says. “From the northeast.”

Charlotte remembers the wind that had almost blown the
Achilles
to its destruction. Behind Wioche stands the frail thing that is her house, branches piled around it but little of the snow the Mi’kmaq said would protect her from the winter winds.

“Charlotte,” Marie says. “Gather as much of your wood inside as you can and quickly, before the snow makes it wet. See that your other wood is covered by skins well secured with stones. And come to our wigwam when you have need.”

She hurries away, but Wioche lingers. “The hawks have stopped flying,” he says. “Rabbits and squirrels will soon disappear into their holes. We’ll do the same.”

“I’ve seen storms before,” Charlotte insists.

“This will be the first storm of winter.”

“I shall manage,” she says. She drops her eyes as she passes him on the way back to her cabin.

By midday, the cloud cover is so low it seems to skim the tall trees. The snow is falling faster now. She’s fascinated that something as white as snow can produce so dark a day. Every now and then she opens the door of her hut to watch the swirling snow, now falling like blankets tumbling to earth and being whipped into drifts by the wind. She can make out the shadowy figures moving from one wigwam to another.

The heat from her fire is warming the room and although puffs of cold wind still penetrate the walls, Charlotte is comfortable
enough that she settles down with her diary. She notices after a few paragraphs, that her entry is almost all about Wioche—the way he turns up when something is wrong, his attentive explanations about food, shelter and the traditions of the Mi’kmaq, the walks she and Marie take with him—and writes,
I must pay less attention to this man, lest I offend his family
.

As the hours pass and the snow mounts against her front wall, a glance outside confirms that she can’t even see the camp. She feels trapped inside. Late in the afternoon, the wind takes on a sinister howl. Smoke blows down her chimney in gusts and snow sizzles in the fire itself. She stokes it higher. By evening, the woodpile is already diminishing and she curses herself, thinking, You have hardly enough for one night, never mind three days.

She wants to go to Marie’s house, but Marie had been the one to warn her never to venture outside in a snowstorm at night, even a few feet from your door, because you might never find your way back. She untwists the cords that hold the door tight and allows it to open a few inches. Instantly, snow sweeps into the room, and the door is forced open wider. She holds on to its frail frame for a moment, mesmerized by the storm. A roiling world of white lit a lurid orange by the light of her lamp and fire pushes its way into the hut. Charlotte pushes back, but the force against her increases. She struggles hard, slowly edging the door closed against the wall of snow, then twists the cords to hold it shut.

T
HE WALLS GRIND
and groan around her. She is unbearably cold. Bending to the dwindling fire, she feeds kindling to the embers until they catch, then piles on more wood. Now, by the light of the flames, she can see snow has drifted into the corners. The hut shakes around her with each new gust, and more snow finds its way into her shelter.

Only the hearth itself is dry. I really must go to Marie, she thinks. A particularly vicious blast of wind tears into the roof above the door. The thatching makes no sound as it is sucked up into the night. The opening between the logs is six inches wide at that point and a yard in length. The blizzard bellows into the room.

“Help me!” she shouts, but can barely hear the sound of her own voice. She stares at the break, her eyes stinging in the smoky darkness. The bearskins. She snatches one from the cot and stands on tiptoes to push it into the gaping hole. The funnel of wind abates and the snow settles in the room, until the next gust sends the pelt and more snow crashing on top of her. The fire is hissing. She scrambles from under the bearskin and stumbles to the hearth before the snow puts the fire out. Drifting snow is everywhere. She piles wood on the blaze, it burns fiercely. Smoke quickly collects along the underside of the roof and fights past the snow to escape through the gaping opening. More thatching soars into the night as the wind gets fresh purchase on the gash.

She heaves the last piece of wood on the fire and sits down on the cot exhausted. Wonderful heat radiates from the old stones and warms her where she sits. She lets her eyes close a moment. I am warm, Charlotte thinks and stares dully at the fire. Like beads of rubies, each with its own sun inside, little flames rise up the length of the chimney. It’s beautiful, she imagines. The fire will melt the snow. She looks at the brilliant flickers where the chimney pierces the roof and watches their progress along the underside of the thatching around the chimney. Then as if waking from a stupor, she screams, “My God, the house is on fire!
The fire cannot stop the snow, and the snow cannot stop the fire. I cannot fly this place. I cannot stay!”
The chimney now
glows its whole length, a bright crimson tracery visible through every seam and crack. The flames fight to escape from their nest and make their way under the blanket of snow. Frantic, Charlotte grabs the basket from the wall, scoops snow from the floor and throws it at the flames that ring the chimney at the roof. The snow falls back in her face. She refills the basket, and once again throws snow at the flames. The flames crackle fiercely in the thatching. “I have to get out of here,” she cries. But the roofing has collapsed in front of the doorway, blocking her escape.

Wioche takes off his left snowshoe and uses it to dig through the drift against the front wall of the hut. When he is halfway down, he kicks at the door.

He drives his foot at the door again and again and when the ropes break he and the storm both tumble in. Charlotte Taylor lies on the floor before him, her hands over her eyes.

“I am sorry,” she says.

S
HE AWAKES TO CALM
, the comforting arch of the wigwam poles overhead, and intense sunlight slanting through openings in the birch bark making patterns on her furs. For quite a long time she lies there, listening to sounds outside. She hears the cawing of crows first, then the laughter of children, then the voices of women as they go about their work, muffled it seems in a great softness.

Marie appears in the doorway carrying a steaming bowl. Charlotte smells squash soup and sits up so eagerly Marie smiles.

Charlotte takes the extended bowl, with thanks, and props it on the ledge of her belly.

She ladles the soup into her mouth voraciously; never had anything tasted so delicious.

“You’ve been asleep for most of two days,” Marie says. “Through the rest of the storm. No wonder you are hungry.”

Charlotte lowers the bowl. “I’m sorry, Marie,” she says.

“Why are you sorry?”

“For everything. For the destruction of the house you gave me.”

“Your house is still there,” Marie says. “But I believe you should not stay in it.”

“It didn’t burn?”

“The men put out the fire.”

“Wioche?”

“He got you out and carried you here—this is his wigwam. Don’t worry,” Marie says, seeing Charlotte’s face. “He is staying with another family.”