The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (35 page)

Elizabeth feels like a frightened little girl and a grown-up all at the same time as she tends her mother at Janet’s side. Thankfully the birth is quick and relatively easy. The children and William are still at the supper table when the infant slides into the world. He’s a tiny little morsel with a thatch of black hair and the quizzical look of the newborn. Janet summons the three other children, and William, who stands at his wife’s bedside, slightly in awe, not knowing whether to reach for the child or simply gaze from a distance. “A fine laddie,” he pronounces,

“at least from what I can see.” Charlotte laughs and hands him the swaddled bundle. “William, meet William,” she says.

On Christmas Day, Charlotte leads the family in their annual rendition of “Adeste Fideles” and, holding her new baby in her arms, tells her rapt children the Christmas story. A week later, she marks 1786 on the wall just beneath her inscription of William Wishart’s birth. She allows herself to spare a thought for Wioche—their trip to Frederick Town and back seems as if it exists in a whole other lifetime—and briefly wonders if his voyages this winter will bring him by the cabin. A tiny wail comes from the cradle by her bedside, young William demanding to be fed. And she is once again swept up into all-consuming motherhood, the children playing noisily around her rocking chair.

J
IMMY USED TO BE
her right-hand man, and he still helps with chores and is like an older brother to the children, but most days now he’s back in the bush, helping William or the other men with the logging. Elizabeth has become the de facto chatelaine of this small house. On a brisk winter afternoon, with all the pomp and flourish a ten-year-old can muster, she announces the arrival of Mr. William Davidson and offers up his new title: “Northumberland County Representative to the General Assembly of New Brunswick.”

Davidson has stopped by to talk to Charlotte and William about his plans for the Miramichi. But first he catches them up on news from his enterprise up past the forks. His land grant had been cut from 100,000 acres to a mere 14,450 acres in June the year before. Davidson says losing it was a blessing. Since establishing lasting ownership is predicated on clearing the land, planting a crop and settling people on it, Davidson says he’s actually relieved to be free of such extensive acreage. He can now
concentrate on delivering white pines for ship masts to very eager buyers from England, and work on behalf of the future of the whole region, which needs much effort if all their livelihoods are to be secure.

“The Miramichi is the most forgotten piece of land in the entire new province,” he says. “The hardest life is right here on the river. And we have none of the help that has been given to the other settlements, because we’re out of sight and out of mind. I mean to change that.” The postwar prosperity on the river has attracted drunks, cheats and unscrupulous opportunists as well as hard-working settlers; this is not news, as Davidson well knows. Charlotte and William often sit by their fire at night, lamenting the future. Charlotte still mulls the gunpowder fire, aware that vagabonds are contributing to a new lawlessness despite there being a sheriff and a new coroner. With so many men looking to fill their pockets with profits, even the fishery is in danger of collapse. “They net out the river for fish so some are cut off entirely,” Davidson exclaims. “And they take such a quantity there soon will be no fish at all.”

Charlotte has always had time for Davidson, even when the others were critical of him, and in return he has always liked Charlotte’s spunk. He grins as she rants about everything from the perfidies of Loyalists to the lobbying to strip women of voting rights in future elections. “The Acadians, the Micmac and I are to be left out of the vote,” she complains. “I swear I will be back on that trail to Frederick Town to quarrel about this, even if I have to carry my new baby on my back.”

“You have my vote, Mrs. Wishart,” Davidson says, smiling at her so that his cheeks furrow in tributaries of wrinkles. “But one situation that concerns us all has eased, I am glad to report. The quarrel over who can use the marshland near the forks has
been settled for the time being. The lands will be shared among the old settlers.”

William and Charlotte are happily surprised. “I’ve been wondering if these petitions we send have any persuasive power at all,” Charlotte says. “The ones I sign are not acted on. I refused to sign the one about the marshlands, fed up as I am with waiting. And now you tell me the meadow plot I took for myself is mine in law.”

This gives Davidson the opening he needs to raise a delicate matter. He tells them that a petition was sent to Governor Carleton, dated January 13, protesting the old settlers’ use of the marshlands and also claiming that they were usurping all the fishing on the river. The signatories described themselves as the new settlers, and among those whose names were attached were John Murdoch and Charlotte Blake.

“Are you now calling yourself a new settler, Charlotte?”

She is furious. “I did not fix my signature to that petition, Mr. Davidson. Nor did I know of its existence.”

Davidson hushes her. “I can’t imagine you would have, Charlotte, but you need to know how your name is being used in some quarters.”

After he’s gone, Charlotte tries to figure out who would forge her signature on a petition so contrary to her interests.

“I fear we now live with liars and cheats, William.”

He gives her his wariest dark-eyed glance. “Maybe it’s time to leave this place and find somewhere else to settle.”

To leave Blake Brook? Truly that is an option Charlotte has never considered.

I
N SPRING
, as soon as the trail through the woods is passable, she hikes to the Indian camp with baby William tethered to her
back. She hasn’t been there since freeze-up. To her great surprise, she finds Wioche standing by the fire pit at the centre of the camp, as though he has been waiting for her through the four seasons that have separated them. Everyone crowds around to have a look at the boy baby—“ulbadooses,” the women murmur. Charlotte finds she can’t yet lift her eyes to meet his.

“Welain?” he asks.

“Yes, I am well,” she replies and finally meets his glance. After the ritual tea and visit with the women, Wioche suggests they walk with the baby to the river’s edge.

S
ETTLED ON THE BANK
in a grove of scraggy pines, Wioche builds a small fire from sweetgrass and waits for the smoke to billow into smudges. She knows what will happen next and unwraps her little boy from his bunting as they sit in the sun, leaning to kiss his fat little thighs as he kicks. Wioche smiles down at the boy, then leans down to pick him up. He holds an eagle feather aloft in one hand, as he cradles the baby in the crook of his other arm, and begins the chant she knows from the bay, the same one Chief Julian sent up after Elizabeth was born. Wioche calls on the North, the East, the South and West winds, on Mother Earth and the Great Spirit to bless this child. The familiarity of the chant is comforting, but there’s melancholy too, a reminder to Charlotte that the guileless days at the bay are long gone, for the Mi’kmaq, for Wioche and for the young woman who once stayed there and is now a wife, two times over, and a mother of five.

On her way back to the cabin, she’s lost in reverie, the wafts of sweet-grass smoke clinging to William and her own tresses, the sound of the river gurgling in the patches of open ice near the shore. If the Great Spirit is watching over her as
well, perhaps the ships arriving come spring will bring with them a response from her father.

W
ILLIAM HAS BEEN AWAY
for an unusually long time. When he returns late one afternoon, she and Elizabeth are carrying supper to the table. She’s glad to see him, and very curious about what he’s been up to. But he shushes her questions. “Let’s eat, my lass, and I’ll tell you all about it after the children are tucked up in their beds.”

True to his word, when everyone but them is safely sleeping, he stokes the fire and settles beside Charlotte in front of the hearth. “There is a place called Tabisintack,” he begins. “I found it by sailing along the north side of the bay on the other side of the shoals and carrying on north where the bay runs into the ocean. You pass a collection of islands and coves that separate Tabisintack from the sea, and you think there are two rivers there, but there is only one. Funnily enough, Charlotte, the Indians call it the Taboosimgeg River, which means ‘two are here.’ It’s an easy shore to land a boat on, and there’s a point of land there that contains great marshlands for farming.” He tells her the sea is teeming with fish, great sturgeons as long as six feet, and on the meadows, geese and ducks flock in such numbers they turn the earth the colour of their feathers. “I’ve never told you this, but I have been there two or three times now. The wind blows softly, low to the land. It’s a fair place, Charlotte, away from the quarrels we know on the Miramichi.”

“I’ve heard of this place, called Taboosimgeg … don’t the Micmac have a camp there?”

“Yes, but there’s no white men there, save for a character named Robert Beck. He once was an Irish marine, who it’s said
lives wild like the Indians. A story is told that he once cracked the head of an Indian, killed him on board the
Viper.”

“John Blake was on the
Viper
that day and he recounted that tale to me himself.”

They sit on by the fire, dreaming aloud about what it would be like to settle on their own in such a place and end up discussing the troubles on the Miramichi, so brutally compounded by rum. It’s used as wages for men’s work, to trade, to warm one’s innards in the cold and to bolster bravado. Charlotte wonders if she’s the only woman on the river who has used it to ease birth pains. She has seen plenty of it at the Indian camp. Some men begin to crave it daily; others binge drink, even arriving inebriated at the meetings the settlers hold, making no sense at all when they speak. Fisticuffs are common now, largely due to rum-filled men acting out their anger and frustration.

Such talk leads to mention of one of the new settlers in particular, Philip Hierlihy, who is often in the middle of the fighting. Charlotte has met him at meetings, an abrasive man with intense brown eyes, a permanently furrowed brow and the bearing of a soldier. “He’s not so bad when he hasn’t been drinking,” William says, “but rum does light a flame to him.” Hierlihy is always raging about the unfair treatment that soldiers loyal to England got when they came to the Miramichi after the war. He resents the fact that the old settlers were granted lots with a half-mile frontage on the river, while the likes of Hierlihy have to settle for two-hundred-acre lots with sixty rod of frontage, about half the size. Then there is the issue of the marshlands—supposedly settled. But the new settlers are still determined to get their share of it.

More than two hundred souls are living along the river now. Whether rum-induced or not, the battle for the land is
intensifying. Charlotte hopes Davidson was sincere when he said his task as representative was to bring order to the river. And the place called Tabisintack begins to play like music in her mind.

S
HE’S IMAGINING
the vast marshland and its bordering dark forest the next night as she sits by lamplight sewing. For weeks she’s been cutting and stitching together pants for the boys and William and skirts for the girls and herself. Tonight she snips pieces of embroidered cloth from her worn-out bodices and unravels wool from ragged vests to knit new ones. The children gather around and listen to the stories she tells about what ladies in London wear and how some of them turned up on the river still wearing their fancy clothes. What a sight they made.

“Old Mrs. Cort used to dress in her best silks with beautiful plumed hats and a dainty parasol,” Charlotte recounts. “Then she’d sit herself in a canoe and instruct the Indian man who worked for her family to paddle her out to meet an arriving ship.” The children howl with delight at the image. “Mrs. Murdoch, our neighbour, arrived with velvet gowns, riding habits and plumed hats as well, but she soon learned it was best to leave such fine things in her trunks.”

The children ask her how she used to dress before she came to the Miramichi. “Women were so painted and hidden behind all manner of costume for every occasion, Parliament finally passed a law against vanity,” she tells her avid audience. “They made their skin whiter than white with powdered lead, and put red paint on their lips, and used lampblack to darken their eyelashes. Don’t look at me that way, young Elizabeth. I was only fifteen years old at the time and wore no paint at all. Nanny made me write out the law into my schoolbook. Here, I’ll prove
it.” She rises to retrieve the old notebook from her precious stack of reading materials.

“‘All women whatever age, range, profession, whether virgins, maids, or widows,’” she reads aloud, “‘that shall from and after such an Act, impose upon, seduce, betray into matrimony, any of His Majesty’s subjects by scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanours and that the marriage, upon conviction shall stand null and void.’” The children laugh themselves silly while their usually stern mother prances about the room mimicking the ladies of London, swooshing imaginary hoops.

At bedtime, they beg for another story—their favourite tale—of Gluskap and the Boy in the Birchbark Box. “Tell us about the magic arrow,” John Junior asks pleadingly. Settling them all around her chair by the fire, she begins.

“A long, long time ago, Gluskap found a couple weeping in the woods. He asked what was wrong, and they told him their disobedient son had run away because he didn’t like their rules. He was only twelve winters old, and they didn’t know in which direction he’d gone and were worried sick that he would meet a wild animal or other dangers and be hurt or killed. Taking pity on them, Gluskap drew a magic arrow from his quiver, nocked it to the bow, aimed it skyward and let it fly. He knew that the direction in which it fell would be the way the boy fled. For seven days, he followed the arrow, sending it skyward again and again, until he sensed he was getting close to the missing boy.”