The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (25 page)

“Perhaps I saw only my reflection,” Abigail ventures.

“I must hope so.”

Charlotte begins to turn from the window, and in the same instant she sees the torch. A second torch flickers.

“Go tell the young men to come in here now,” she says, her tone flat.

“What is it?” Albert Plumnell croaks from his chair. “In faith, I believe some fit has come upon me, madam. Can you not help me?”

The back door opens and Janet Murdoch and her brood enter, their arms bristling with tools from the garden and barn. Charlotte puts a finger to her lips.

“I shall be obliged if you can remain quiet and calm,” she says, careful to keep her own voice so. “There are persons approaching from the woods to the east.”

“Oh Lord!” Janet Murdoch holds her hand to her mouth. Several of the children begin to cry. She muffles their mouths with her hand.

“Mat.” Charlotte turns to the nine-year-old Murdoch boy, who stands dry-eyed among his sisters. “The men have not returned. Go quickly to the shore and tell them. Quickly now!”

“James? Douglas? Do you have your pistols?”

“Here they are.” The young men put two pistols on the table, with their powder, balls and tamping rods. Douglas picks up John’s musket.

“I believe this to be charged already,” he says.

The door opens and Murdoch, Henderson and Wishart follow Mat into the room with four muskets and two hempen sacks. Behind them come a wide-eyed Mary and her young husband, John Malcolm. They shut the door quietly.

“We have seen them,” William Wishart growls.

Doone rushes to help with the weapons. “How many are there?”

“I canna tell. They have no doubt seen the house and extinguished their torches.”

“What shall we do, John?” his wife begs, her arms about two of her children.

“ ’Tis of little consequence,” Wishart says. “They know we are here withal.”

“Aye, they do,” agrees Murdoch. He peeks from the east window.

“Who are they?” asks Doone.

“Indians,” Murdoch says simply.

“Could they not be rebel privateers?”

“Nay. Privateers would have come by ship lest they had need of a hasty retreat. They have sent these savages in their place, as is the fashion now among them.”

“John, hear me if you would.” William Wishart has finished laying out the weapons on the table. “We must see these weapons are loaded and devise a plan. We shall be taken otherwise.”

“By God, we shall not be taken,” says Murdoch. “We shall defend this house with our lives.”

Wishart shakes his head slowly.

“We can choose only between defence and attack,” Wishart says, looking around at the whole company. “The house is indefensible, so we must attack.”

“What, man?” Murdoch’s urgency seems about to translate to anger. “Leave our women and children and attack a band of savages with but six men and as many muskets? I cannot condone it.”

“Aye, you’re right, John.” Wishart nods. “But consider that they are likely to be but few themselves, coming alone along the river and picking off undefended places. Alex saw them at Buchanan’s mill just hours ago. If they are many, we are without hope, but John, we must believe they are few.”

“But how shall we attack them?”

“Let two men go separately toward the river, and two or three more climb through the garden above the house, and one stay here with the women.” He makes no reference to Plumnell, who now stares mournfully from his chair.

Charlotte watches Wishart while he speaks. He takes easy control of the room as he sets out his plan. She could not help but wonder how her own fierce John Blake might have conducted himself in these circumstances. Certainly without fear, she thinks, and equally without caution.

John Murdoch speaks, “Agreed then, Douglas, you and James go out the back with my son-in-law, John. Keep low and enter the woods above the house where you may hear us. Alex, you and”—he hesitates, turns to Wishart—“Shall I stay here, William, or you?”

“You will protect your home best, John,” says Wishart.

The four men go to the table and load the muskets carefully, each providing himself with his shot bag and powder. Then they steal out into the night.

“We have these.” Janet indicates to her husband the forks and axes against the wall.

“God grant that we shall have no need of them,” Murdoch says. “But take them and the children up.”

“Take Elizabeth too, Janet,” says Charlotte, “and little John.” She carries the cradle to Abigail.

“Will you be coming up?” Janet asks. Charlotte looks at her directly. For all their kinship of circumstance, she has never liked the woman much. But in that moment she sees past the brittle manner to the mother and wife that Janet is. I shall not go to my death, she thought, burdened with casual contempt for another.

“Not yet.” She says. “I shall stay here awhile, Janet.”

“Charlotte?” Murdoch is by the table. “Have you fired a pistol?”

“I have had no need, John.”

“You have need now.”

He shows her the quantity to pour in at the muzzle as a charge. He wraps a ball in its cloth and tamps it home with the rod. He slides back the cover of the flash pan and trickles a small quantity of powder into it. He shows her how she should draw back the flint arm to cock the mechanism. For the moment, he releases it gently with his hand and lets it rest against the steel strike plate.

“Have you understood?”

“I believe I have.”

“Aye, ’tis loaded now and deadly. You need only cock it, aim it and pull the trigger. Now do this other for yourself.”

“This smaller one?”

“Aye. Use the larger as we have planned. But discharge this smaller one only at the end, if your enemy is upon you. Do not
hope to strike him from across the room. You will have time for but one shot.”

She loads the second pistol with care, then takes her place by the east window, both pistols in her lap. She looks out—all is dark.

Murdoch goes to the bottom of the ladder. “Mat?” he calls softly.

“Nothing. Nothing.” It was the voice of his wife, calm now.

“Keep watch from the south window also. And light no candle.”

He moves silently from window to window. Upstairs the children fall quiet. There is no sound except the steady pulse of the crickets.

Plumnell whimpers softly from the chair where he sits, head back, eyes closed.

“Mr. Plumnell?” Charlotte whispers.

He stirs. “A terrible bad spell,” he says quietly but clearly.

“Never fear, Mr. Plumnell,” she whispers again. “We shall all be well. Take heart.”

They wait. The crickets stop.

Mat’s small, urgent voice comes from the top of the ladder.

“Papa! Abigail saw a light!”

“Where is it?”

“Abigail! Was it where you saw it before?”

A pause.

“Yes.” Her voice trembles with fear. “But closer, by the broken oak.”

“By the oak?” her father asks.

Then Charlotte sees the torch. It flares and she sees the naked arm of the man who holds it. Immediately it dims. She gets up, pistols in her hands, the hair erect on her neck.

“John! They are there! I have seen them!”

Murdoch steps to the door.

“Now then! Now!”

Charlotte rushes out the door behind him. As she does, Murdoch lifts his head back and emits a terrible bellow.

“Kill them!”

“Fire!” Charlotte cries out as harshly and deeply as she can.

Murdoch discharges his first musket. He knows where in the dark the broken oak stands. Immediately the other muskets begin to fire, not in a uniform volley but with a slow, steady rhythm—one, two, three, four and another, then again.

Charlotte steps forward and shouts again with all the force she can project. She raises the big pistol with two hands. Even as she does, a torch flares again and she hears a voice cry out from the woods, then another. She holds the weapon and looks along its top to the torch, which still flickers visibly. She fires and the force almost throws the pistol from her hands.

“Stay!” Murdoch shouts. “Stay.”

Charlotte, too, can hear it—the sound of running in the dark woods, stumbling through the brush beyond the cleared area. Nearby, ahead and to her right, she hears Wishart’s and Henderson’s shouts. They are well advanced into the woods.

Murdoch goes back into his house to fetch three pitch torches. He holds one to the embers of the fire until it begins to burn. He lights the others from it and walks out the door.

“Papa?” Mat calls from the stair.

“Stay, Mat,” his father says. He hands a torch to Charlotte and they walk through the clearing. She holds a pistol, Murdoch his musket. By the light of the torches, they see Doone, Malcolm, Rose, Wishart and Henderson. As they advance into the wood, they can see the faint glow of the torch where it lies in
the brush. A fire has started in the leaves around it. The man who had held the torch lies beside it on his back. His bow is still slung on his shoulder. He wears a vest of buckskin that’s soaked by the blood that pulses from the hole in his right breast where the ball had entered. They gather around him in silence. From the house, a procession advances with Janet at its front, a candle lantern in each hand.

Charlotte looks at the man on the ground as the others stamp out the fire around the torch. He is her own age, a year or two younger perhaps. His smooth complexion is daubed with paint, his strong arms circled with bracelets of beads.

“Is it a real Indian?” Mat asks.

“It is,” his father says.

“Where are the others?”

“They’re gone, Mat. They thought us too many, as indeed we might have been.”

“We are fortunate that these were too poor to possess proper weapons,” Alexander Henderson says. “It might have turned out differently, had it been otherwise.”

“Aye,” the others agree.

“Come, children,” says Murdoch. “Return to the house with your mother.”

Charlotte Blake sinks to her knees. She sees the boy’s eyes are open just a little and glinting at her in the light of the torches. She touches his shoulder and her heart breaks.

“What’s the matter with Mrs. Blake, Papa?”

No one speaks; Charlotte’s weeping is the only sound.

“She has been brave, Mat, as have you all. Very brave. That is all. Come, Charlotte.”

They walk all together back to the house and after much talk the children settle down and the men stop peering from the
windows. Albert Plumnell avows he is much better, thank you, ’twas but a spell such as he was accustomed to. Doone and Rose keep watch and the others find places in beds or on the floor and let sleep claim them. Later John Murdoch and William Wishart go to the woods, then row to midstream and set the body to drift on the Miramichi.

In the morning, when Janet goes out to milk, she finds both cows and a calf on the straw on the stable floor. Their throats had been cut.

A
WEEK LATER,
the Davidson migration deepens the dread and melancholy. Murdoch and the older children continue to tend their field, Janet Murdoch continues to tend the house, Charlotte, home again at Blake Brook, tends her babies. William and his brother Alex bid Charlotte farewell and leave the river for Halifax as they said they would do. The sun rises. It sets again. But when the line of Davidson boats passes, with the tall
Miramichi
at the fore, the meaning is clear enough.

“Who am I,” John Murdoch asks aloud from the bank of the river, “to keep a family here when a man as shrewd as Davidson takes all he owns and the thirty souls he supports and moves the lot of them to the Saint John River?”

“All his animals are killed,” Janet Murdoch says.

“Aye. He’s no farmer, so the loss is not so great, but warning enough, I warrant.”

“Shall we go too, then?”

Three of their children look from the passing flotilla to their parents’ faces and back again.

If William Davidson was no settler in the sense understood by men like Blake and Murdoch, if he had no taste for the plough and claimed the smell of manure disagreed with his
digestion, the Davidson-Cort establishment at the forks was still the undoubted heart of the Miramichi. Davidson had arrived from Scotland first—and Cort had followed—to found a salmon fishery and they’d calmly taken receipt of one hundred thousand acres including the old fort built by the Frenchman Nicholas Denys. But by the time John Blake was beginning his house, Davidson and Cort were constructing their
Miramichi
, three hundred tonnes and the first seaworthy keel put on the river. It was loaded with salted salmon and furs that first season, but long straight pines for the masts of the British navy had made their fortune.

The
Miramichi
passes sombrely that day, The week that follows passes sombrely as well. There is no further news of attacks and no word from Blake.

She watches the river every day seeking a familiar sail, burdened by images that play on the back of her eyelids.

“It will be the Indians who will kill us, of course,” John Murdoch had said the morning after the dreadful attack. “Indeed, it will. Their memories are not so short, Charlotte.”

His words turn her mind to the sandy shelter, the icy water of the Baie de Chaleur, the blue of that winter sky. “We fought them and we killed them,” Wioche had said. “My father, Amoq’t, killed many in Chebucto and Canso. I, too, have killed.”

From there her thoughts drift to Walker, and she fights to keep them and their burden of sadness at a distance. How curious that she should retain so little affection or remembrance for the settings of her childhood, but had come by degrees to think of Nepisiguit—a wilderness outpost, a place of commerce filled with frank uncouthness, a stretch of water, a little hill, an encampment of tribal people—as her home, her refuge.