John Senior turned and pushed himself to his hands and knees, his face mottled scarlet and purple. His hat was off his head and sweaty strands of grey hair hung away from the pale scalp, as dank and listless as seaweed. Everyone else stood about in the very spots where they had been when the Beothuk man began speaking, as still as the trees on the shore.
John Senior coughed and pounded the ice with his fist as the cold air galled his throat. When he looked up from where he knelt he saw the second Beothuk man, still frozen in place like the white men around him. They stared at one another a moment, and without coming to his feet John Senior scravelled towards his rifle. He sat and aimed as the Beothuk man finally turned to run but the gun missed fire. He recocked and missed fire again. He threw down the rifle and rushed to Tom Taylor to haul his musket from his hands. The Beothuk had made barely twenty-five yards when the shot took him in the back and he crumpled forward onto the ice. He tried to stand but was unable and he began crawling awkwardly and inefficiently towards the shoreline on his hands and knees.
John Senior had fired hurriedly, before he had pulled the rifle clear of Taylor’s arms, and it had recoiled into his face, smashing his nose and knocking him onto his backside, and he sat there in a daze. Peyton continued to hold the Beothuk woman’s face against his chest as she sobbed and tried to struggle free of him. No one else moved but the wounded man, still inching away from the party on the ice.
It was Joseph Reilly finally who walked out away from the cluster of dark-coated white men, past the body whose failing heat rose into the still air, across the span of clear ice. Up close he could see that the Beothuk struggling to remain upright on his hands and knees was no older than himself when he was a thief among the crowds at Tyburn. He crouched beside him. Dark plugs of blood showed through the back of his cassock, blood poured from his mouth like water from a spigot. The Irishman stood and placed the muzzle of his rifle against the boy’s skull. He turned to look back at the silent group staring across at him like an audience in a theatre and then he pulled the trigger.
Cassie stood with her back to the fire while Peyton spoke. She placed a hand against her abdomen, clutching the fabric of her blouse, then releasing it, as if there was a thread of pain woven into her belly that she was trying to work free.
She said, “All along you’ve been lying.”
Peyton covered his eyes. “A story is never told for its own sake,” he said. “True or false.”
“You bastard, John Peyton.”
“I blame myself,” he said. “They wouldn’t have come down off the shore to meet us if I hadn’t waved that handkerchief.”
Cassie watched him, shaking her head. She said, “I wouldn’t have guessed John Senior to be such a coward to ask you to lie for him.”
He nodded. “Father wouldn’t have suggested such a thing, you’re right.”
Cassie strode across the room and leaned with both hands on the back of a chair. “Tell me then. What am I not seeing?”
“Sit down a minute.”
He took out his pipe and lit it with a coal from the fire as she settled at the table. He puffed slowly, drawing the smoke into his lungs, trying to calm his breathing. There was a threat implicit in her questions, a willingness to switch allegiances that he wouldn’t have guessed at.
“I’m waiting,” she said.
He nodded. “We never spoke much of it coming down the river, what to do about it all. There was going to have to be some sort of report, Governor Hamilton would want an account of what went on. A grand jury, I figured, just as it happened. We could argue self-defence in Richmond’s case clear enough, and even though it looked dark for John Senior, there was some chance he could plead his condition, given the beating he’d taken. The young one had an axe tucked into his belt besides. He might have got off as it was and he’d have taken his chances if that was all there was to it. But there was Reilly to think about.”
“What about him?”
“When he was a lad in London he was a thief. Caught picking pockets and sentenced to hang. You’ve seen those scars on his hand.”
Cassie nodded.
“They branded him a thief, you see, sent him across to Newfoundland.”
“I don’t follow what you’re telling me.”
“He killed the Indian.”
“That was an act of mercy.”
“A fine distinction, and not one our Captain Buchan and those like him would be interested in making. He was sentenced to hang once already, Cassie. He altered the mark on his hand. Not Jesus Christ himself could have saved the man from the noose a second time.”
Cassie leaned forward on the table. Her lazy eye drew down nearly closed, as if she was sighting down a rifle barrel. “You couldn’t have told it as it happened and left Joseph Reilly out of it?”
He opened his mouth to speak and hesitated a moment. “He’s my father, Cassie. And you —”
“What?” she said. “And I what?”
He lifted his hand, a dismissive gesture, an admission of helplessness.