“He may have run, yes. But he was shot and killed as he did so. Without provocation. In cold blood. And I promise you, Mr. Richmond, someone will pay for that.”
Richmond stood from his seat.
“You have an opportunity now to save yourself from the gallows.”
“I have a fair bit of work to do before dark,” Richmond said. “I trust you enjoyed your tea.” He took the still half-full mug from where it sat in front of the officer and emptied the contents onto the floor, then made his way out the door into the piercing afternoon light.
Richmond strode past the marines outside the tilt and made his way to the shoreline where Michael Sharpe was lifting traps from the cauldron with a metal hook. He was in a fury and cursed at his green man and pulled the hook from his hands. “You’ll only make a shag of this,” he muttered. “Watch out now.” There was a large wooden bucket of water with a layer of beeswax floating on the surface beside the kettle. Richmond plunged the steaming trap into the bucket and waited a moment for it to cool, then lifted it slowly through the wax so it would take on an even coat.
Buchan and the marines came down to the cutter and pushed off into the water and they left without a word to the men on the beach. Michael Sharpe looked across at Richmond for some sign of what had gone on behind the tilt’s closed door, but the older man refused to catch his eye as he went about his work. Richmond hung the freshly coated trap from a nail in the seine-gallows and went to the kettle for another.
He had never talked much of his time on the French Shore, of being burnt out by the navy, not even to Tom Taylor. He’d told the story to Buchan intending to get under the officer’s skin, and was surprised to find how savagely it burred at him as well. When they were released from the navy vessel in St. John’s, the two families booked passage on a ship bound for London. Mrs. Taylor attended Richmond’s mother when she delivered a stillborn child halfway across the Atlantic. Richmond hadn’t seen England in years and the filth and the noise he had taken no notice of at the time were terrifying. The families shared two small rooms near the Thames. All night an unruly tide of traffic and shouting roared in the streets below their windows. The crowds of people and animals roaming free and the slop in the street made his skin crawl. Even the Thames was slubby and clouded and stank like a bog pond.
In the mornings, Richmond and Taylor accompanied their fathers to the dockyards where the men sometimes took a day’s wages unloading a vessel arriving from Africa or the Caribbean. When there was no work the men took their sons to the skittles grounds where they gambled away bits of the precious little money they had, or sat with them in alehouses and drank it away instead.
In late November, Richmond’s mother secured a position as a wet nurse and housekeeper for a well-to-do family and he rarely saw her in the months that followed. Her youngest was still breast-feeding and the infant was nursed by Mrs. Taylor. Even if Richmond was awake when she arrived home, she barely acknowledged him or her husband, stripping down to her small clothes in the dark and falling immediately to sleep. In the morning she was gone before he woke.
She used to sing her children to sleep at night — old Welsh songs of a beauty that made his toes curl — but that winter the songs he’d grown up with disappeared for good, though the change went practically unnoticed in the flood of changes that overcame them in England. Once it was decided they would head back to Newfoundland in the spring, Richmond expected things to return to normal and much about their lives did. But the Welsh songs that his mother had carried from her own childhood seemed to have died inside her like the daughter delivered on the Atlantic and buried now at sea. Richmond had never learned to speak but a few words of her native tongue and could bring to mind only the thinnest scraps of the melody or lyrics, though the sensation of hearing them never left him. And like the dead child, those songs came to occupy a hollow place in Richmond’s life, faceless and nameless and lost as they were.
TEN
John Senior came to himself in the dark, shaken awake by his own shouting, by the stifled thrashing of his arms. He stared into the blackness, his body roked in sweat, breath ragging in his throat like a branch of thorns. He could hear his heart’s panic, like the manic barking of a dog behind a closed door. The rasp of the ocean’s surf through the open window. It always surprised him how dry a sound it was, like someone kicking through dead leaves in the fall. He turned to the window, hoping for the barest glim of light that might justify his getting out of bed.
He heard footsteps underneath his bedroom, muffled activity in the kitchen. Cassie up and starting the fire. He dressed in the dark, then felt his way downstairs to the kitchen where Cassie was kneeling at the hearth, nursing the new fire.