The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (33 page)

I
T’S ALMOST DUSK
when they pull the toboggan up to the cabin. Wioche stays only long enough to surprise the children with candy he has found for them in Frederick Town. In the swarm of hugs and stories that greet her, Charlotte feels the grave eyes of her oldest son on her. Surely he can’t realize … no, for John Junior, it’s the thought of the Indian in the house that unsettles him. Still, she knows Wioche is wise to go, and soon.

And so she suggests that the children walk with her down to the river to wave goodbye. “Wioche has done us a service that none of you should ever forget. Because of him, we have secured our land.” But she is the last to linger on the bank, watching his silhouette until it disappears around the bend of the river.

W
HO SHOULD FIRST LIGHT
bring to her cabin door the next day but William Wishart. He smiles when he sees her, as he always does: she can think of no other of the settler men who seems to appreciate her for who she is, and not who she was married to, or for the lots the Widow Blake might now own. He tells her that he and his brother had been away in Halifax and returned just a few days ago and he wants to know how he can help. Over a steaming cup of tea, she tells him of her trek to see the governor in Frederick Town and the letter she has procured.

“Charlotte, you amaze me,” William says. “I think you have no match in these parts for intrepid undertakings. You put even the men to shame.”

She shrugs off his praise and is uncomfortable for a moment under his gaze. She hadn’t been the intrepid one. But she does need his help.

“William, we have enough stores to last until the ice melts, I’m sure, and enough seed for next summer’s crops, but the planting … I don’t know how I’ll manage it. The children are awfully little, and only Jimmy really has the strength to be much help. Also …” She hasn’t confided John Blake’s temporary resting place to anyone save the Murdochs, and she is really not sure how to manage the interval between when the snow starts to melt and the ice breaks up on the river, making it possible to carry her husband safely to the burial ground. She doesn’t know why talking about it makes her so uncomfortable: everyone on the river has had to deal with such harsh realities. But it’s the one thing in her settler’s life she feels unequal to manage.

Hearing her out, William quickly reassures her. “No reason to worry yourself, lass. I’ll make a coffin for John’s remains, and I’ll take you and the wee children to the cemetery at Wilson’s
Point for the burial. My brother and I have our sailboat, big enough to carry all of you, and John’s coffin.”

That matter well settled, he then shifts the conversation to spring planting. He and his brother have to clear more of their acreage, but he should be able to spare enough time to be of assistance to her.

William visits almost every day, and she has to confess she begins to look forward to seeing him. With his thoughtfulness and good humour, he is an antidote to cabin fever, another adult with whom she can discuss the challenges her little clan faces. Sometimes he is the welcome excuse to sit a while and drink tea; without Blake to help her, the days are a brutal round of endless chores.

In late March, they get a stretch of warmish weather—the maple sap is running and Charlotte has the children busy carrying brimming buckets from her short tap line to a kettle bubbling over a fire in the clearing. True to his word, William snowshoes across the river to their landing, dragging a fresh spruce coffin on sled runners. The children, who’ve been greedily dipping a ladle into the boiling kettle and tossing the syrup onto the snow, where it hardens into delicious candy, fall silent as they watch him struggle, sweating up the bank with his burden. Although they have never seen a coffin, they realize its purpose. Handing the big stirring stick to Elizabeth, Charlotte wipes her hands on her apron and tells the children to carry on with their task. “You, too, Jimmy,” she says. The boy is clearly relieved. She just wishes she herself could stay by the fire.

A
FTER THE USUAL HEAVING
and threatening, the ice rises with an explosive roar one April day and is sucked down the river to the sea. The next morning, the brothers Wishart,
William and Alexander both, sail across the river to attend to Blake’s coffin and his mourners. Once at Wilson’s Point they quickly set to work with shovels, breaking through the thick crust of thawing topsoil, then switching to pickaxes to dig deeper. When the job is done, and the coffin lowered, rather jerkily, though Jimmy and Charlotte lend a hand as best they can with the ropes, the brothers leave her briefly with the children by the mound of fresh brown earth, a stain on the pure white snow.

It is so silent here, she thinks, so peaceful, a small clearing with a view to the river and forever. God’s land. “Farewell, John Blake,” she says softly. “I’ll mind your children and tell them often of your deeds on this river. They will grow to know you. I will never forget you.”

All of them help to fill in the grave, Charlotte urging them to hurry as dusk creeps in, mindful of the time it will take them to sail back safely to Blake Brook.

I
N THE FOLLOWING WEEKS,
the river is a veritable byway of passing boats bringing supplies to the ever-increasing number of settlers gobbling up the lots along the shore. The demand—and the competition—is fierce. Charlotte has few coins and nothing much to barter with; Blake traded their last cut timber for winter supplies. “Negotiating for supplies without any lumber to trade will see us starve to death by fall,” Charlotte grumbles to Jimmy as they work together to clear the winter debris out of the cabin and off her cleared garden plots. “All that will be left to us is to freeze to death come winter.”

Once again William Wishart comes to the rescue, and though Charlotte chastises him for ignoring his own interests in favour of hers, she is grateful when he arrives at her landing
with axe and saw in his little grey dory. By the end of a week, he’s cut five cord of wood, and become a fixture at her table. “You can trade some of the wood for seedlings and chickens—and maybe a cow to replace that tired old goat of yours,” he teases her.

The next week, news comes that Delesdernier has failed to deliver the petition from the settlers. Apparently, he was waylaid by the demands of settlers with larger claims along the Saint John River. A new man, a Loyalist named Benjamin Marston, who was expelled from his native Massachusetts by the rebels, has been appointed by Governor Carleton as surveyor general of the King’s woods. William has heard that he plans to come to the Miramichi to bring order to what he sees as an uncivilized collection of boors.

She trudges through the woods with William to a meeting of the old settlers called by John Murdoch. They decide to send yet another petition to the province, and Charlotte, who has not mentioned her hard-won letter, votes in favour. William abstains. As he accompanies her back to her cabin, he confides that he trusts none of these men to represent his interests—not Delesdernier, not Marston, maybe not even Murdoch, who has acquired more land in what William describes as “a questionable bargain with a devil not known to us.” Charlotte has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s an odd man, she thinks, thoughtful, hard-working and honest, comfortably chatty with her, but often dead silent in public. His brother, Alexander, is the charmer of the pair, heavy-set, brown-eyed, balding, delivering his lengthy commentaries in a bubbling Scottish brogue. Not William. He keeps his own counsel, always watching, listening, calculating.

When he shows up the next day at her door, he doesn’t talk of trading wood but of marriage. “You need a husband, lass, and
I need a wife,” he says, and Charlotte realizes she is not the least bit surprised. She scans his face just the once, gazing for a time into his dark blue eyes, and replies just as matter-of-factly, “You make good sense.”

There’s no minister or even Justice of the Peace in the vicinity, but this is not an impediment. The next day, in the presence of Alexander Wishart and the Murdochs, the Murdoch children and her own, Charlotte and William pronounce themselves husband and wife. And he moves into the crowded cabin in time to start the serious business of spring.

R
EALIZING THAT
in their long friendship he’s never volunteered much about his past, she urges her new husband to talk about his family as she mends the children’s clothes by lamplight. He starts with his ancestor, George Wishart, who was burned at the stake at St. Andrews as a heretic more than two hundred and thirty years ago. “He was preaching God’s word,” William says. “The papists feared his power to convert the Scots to his church. They plotted against him.”

With history like that swirling around in his memory, she thinks, it’s small wonder that one of her husband’s passions is to see a Presbyterian church built on the river—in which they can be married in the eyes of God as well as man. When he moved in, she soon discovered that William possessed the only copy of a Bible she has seen since leaving Britain. He even quotes from the Book of Job from time to time when trials with the land, the logs or the Loyalists test his patience.

By summer, the river is swarming with more Loyalists, disbanded soldiers and newly arriving immigrants from Britain. Brides are snatched up at Simeon Perkins’s wharf as quickly as they step off the ships. Rumour mongers spread scintillating
chatter about lineage and legitimacy, which turns the river into a veritable trading post of accusations, innuendo and plotting. The fighting between the old and the new settlers is as frequent as the battles had been with the Indians and privateers, but without the fatal consequences.

“It’s the marshlands they’re after,” Charlotte says. “We all need those lands to survive—they are the only place where you can grow a crop without having to clear the trees first.” Indeed, the marshlands are like meadows, full of wild strawberries and raspberries, where the ducks and geese land in great flocks, making them easy prey for hungry settlers. One stretch of marsh is located at the forks, and the other near the Murdochs’. Between them, there isn’t nearly enough to provide for a population that has increased four-fold in twenty-four months.

William sails often across the shoals to the bay and beyond to Liverpool, looking for British buyers for his cured salmon and trading the cords of wood he cuts. Unlike Blake who was gone for weeks at a time, William is rarely away for long. He keeps the cabin well tacked together and is pleasing in the marriage bed; the children, even John Junior, are growing fond of him, though they are still restive during his nightly Bible reading. She has confided the contents of her letter to her father to William, and each of his voyages to Simeon Perkins’s wharf fuels her hope that a parcel from home may be waiting there.

I
N THE MEANTIME,
men like Marston make it clear that their version of the New World has no place for a woman such as Charlotte. Though William does his best to protect her from the name-calling and rumours that swirl around her—the story of her winter jaunt to Frederick Town in company with a native man is the least of her transgressions—she knows that in the
eyes of the newcomers on the river she is “that woman”: guilty of conduct unbecoming to an Englishwoman.

Marston had posted a notice that he’d reply to settlers’ questions at a meeting to be held by the dock at the marshlands on the last Sunday in July. William and Charlotte can hear his staccato voice before they’ve even got their dory tied up. Marston’s career has been spotty at best, at least to this point. Here on the Miramichi, he’s determined to maintain the integrity of the Empire. That’s what he’s on about—the Empire—when he notices Charlotte and William joining the crowd. Hardly skipping a beat, he announces, “Gentlemen, we have a woman in our midst.”

Charlotte shoots back. “How fortunate for our deliberations.”

Marston irks Charlotte on sight, with his condescension and constant fidgeting. The feeling is reciprocated.

“A married woman is the responsibility of her husband,” Marston tells William Wishart, pointedly ignoring his wife.

“Away with ye,” William scoffs.

“It is one thing for the Widow Blake to claim ownership of the land but quite another for a married woman to carry on as though she has the same rights as men,” Marston intones.

Charlotte is steaming, and resentful that Marston is talking about her in the third person, too cowardly to address her directly. “According to you, I am expected to give up my land, my ambitions and my rights, indeed anything that I own to my present husband,” she bristles. “I have secured my lots in my own stead for my children. Mr. Wishart has no issue with this. He knows as well as I how difficult and uncertain the future can be.”

“But, Mrs. Wishart, as a married woman, you have no economic or legal power. Your husband is your representative and voice in public,” he pronounces.

“So,” she says, trying to suppress a grin, “William, my husband of only a few months, is responsible for my behaviour. Even John Blake was not responsible for my behaviour. It is ten years since that assignment has been in any person’s hands but my own.”