“So help me, I will use every means at my disposal to ensure that anyone undermining this investigation receives due attention.”
She looked at her hands and raked absently beneath the fingernails. Buchan’s belief in justice was so evangelical that at times it seemed completely irrational. Stories of the “Winter of the Rals” after the 1817 fires in St. John’s had come to them on the northeast shore. Dozens of desperate men were arrested for stealing, for muggings, for disorderly conduct. The sentence for a first offence was thirty-six lashes, offenders stripped to the waist in the courtyard of Fort Townshend and tied on their knees to a four-foot post. Buchan was always present, overseeing the administration of punishment.
One Irishman in particular they’d been told of, a frosty-haired, pug-nosed father of seven, went straight back to robbing on the streets of St. John’s after his release. The wounds of his first whipping were still open and raw when his shirt was stripped away from him in the courtyard. At the fifteenth lash, Buchan ordered a bucket of water thrown across the swollen, pulpy mess of his back. When the punishment resumed the frozen flesh came away in long raw strips and the Irishman eventually fainted, then fell into convulsions. The attending surgeon had to order the punishment stopped at the twenty-third stroke. John Senior related these details to Cassie with a kind of satisfied contempt. “Mr. Christian charity himself,” he’d said.
Cassie looked up from her hands at Buchan. She saw his face as it had been when she knelt before him years before, the pale vulnerability of it, as if he was suffering through a fever of hallucination. The head tossing from side to side, the lips dry and parted slightly. She couldn’t reconcile the conflicting pictures of him in her head.
“I am perfectly aware,” she said, “of how seriously you take your office, Captain.”
He took a step across the room. “There is a certain latitude I will allow you, Miss Jure, in light of the circumstances that briefly existed between us —”
“But?” Cassie said.
He couldn’t bring himself to complete the threat and turned away from her, pulling the front door open roughly.
Through the window Cassie saw him walk away towards the landwash, past Corporal Rowsell who had been sitting on a hump of rock until the door opened and now stood at attention, his hands held at the small of his back. The officer’s journal sat beside an inkwell on the table. She moved across the room and touched the pale calfskin cover. She opened it and flipped back and forth through the pages of closely written script without reading. From upstairs she could hear Mary coughing — long ripping convulsions like someone tearing sheets. She turned away suddenly and walked across the kitchen to her room, closing the door behind her.
Thirty seconds later she was back at the table. She dipped the pen in the inkwell, turned the journal sideways and began writing in the margin on a page chosen at random. There was a child, she wrote. Before I ended it, David. I was pregnant.
She set the pen down and looked up from the journal where the ink was slowly drying. John Peyton stood outside the window, watching her. She slapped the book shut and went immediately through the door. She walked up to Rowsell who was still standing at attention, his hands behind his back. “Captain Buchan forgot his journal,” she said. Behind her she could hear the door open and close as Peyton went inside.
“Thank you, miss,” Rowsell said. “I’ll see he gets it.”