Rowsell nodded. “No miss,” he admitted, “that’s true enough. But there is a surgeon aboard the Grasshopper might offer her some relief.”
Cassie looked at the marine. He had been present or in the wings during all the events of recent months and she had taken no notice of him. A head of dark frizzy hair, deep-set eyes under a large brow that disguised their clear blue colour. He stood with his hands clasped behind him and she had never seen him stand in any other posture. He had a look of resigned dignity about him, as if the hands were actually tied behind his back and he was perpetually making the best of circumstances beyond his control. She said, “Promise me she’ll be properly looked after.”
He nodded again. “I promise to do what I can to ensure it.”
John Senior accompanied Rowsell and the two other marines to Ship Cove. From there he would head inland to bring John Peyton down from his trapline for the expedition to the lake. The men outfitted a sledge with fur blankets to carry Mary across to Buchan’s vessel and they waited outside then while Cassie prepared the Beothuk woman for the trip.
Mary was so exhausted by her illness that she was unable to comprehend why she had to get up out of bed and where exactly she was going. Cassie helped her into a sitting position, lifting her legs over the side of the bed, and even this effort brought on a fit of wet hacking that ripped at her like an oiled blade ragging through lumber. Cassie sat beside her with an arm across her shoulders and held a cloth filthy with dried and drying blood to her mouth. She could feel the woman’s bones through her skin, their effort to hold together under the barrage of convulsive coughing. Cassie recalled the grip of Mary’s hand on her wrist that first afternoon in the Peytons’ kitchen, the fierceness of it and the wild look in her eye that Cassie had thought of as Indianness, when it had been nothing more or less than terror, the desperate kernel of a will to live when it seemed certain she would not. All that energy was bled from her now. The fear. The resolution.
In the kitchen Cassie helped Mary into her coat and boots and handed her the cloth package of leather clothes she had been wearing when Peyton and his party tracked her down on the lake-ice the previous March. She had folded the sixteen pairs of blue moccasins among the clothes before tying the package shut. John Senior came to the door to help her down the path and she reached for his arm. When she saw the white men waiting with the sledge she turned to Cassie. She said, “Mary go home.”
Cassie nodded. “Goodbye Mary,” she said.
There was a week’s interval between John Senior leaving Mary in the hands of Buchan at the Grasshopper and bringing his son down from the trapline to Ship Cove. By the time they returned, Mary had been set up in a large room aboard ship with a buzaglo stove for heat. To Buchan’s eye, she was genuinely delighted to see Peyton when he was shown into her room and the two talked quietly together. Her English was stunted but surprisingly effective, pared to its blunt essentials — subject-verb-object, the relentlessly present tense. Buchan set about boiling water for tea and exchanging occasional words with John Senior, whose English, he thought unkindly, was stunted in a much less obvious fashion. Mary fell asleep as he passed mugs to the men and they carried their chairs to the furthest corner of the room to avoid disturbing her.
The weather, which earlier in the season promised a harsh fall, had turned surprisingly temperate. Peyton told Buchan that the River Exploits was open almost the entire distance they had just come down, with only the thinnest runners of ice at the banks that would be treacherous for sledges.
“We’ll have to wait until the frost comes on,” Buchan said.
John Senior shook his head. “That one is thin as the rames of mercy.” He nodded towards the bed where the Beothuk woman lay. “No way she’ll make it through to the lake alive.”
Buchan said, “You say that almost as if you cared one way or another.”
John Senior gave his curious half-choked bark of laughter, placed his mug on the floor and then walked across to the door. His huge stooped figure disappeared in the rush of light as he opened it and walked outside.
Peyton cleared his throat and tipped his chair onto its back legs, rocking gently there for a moment. “What does the surgeon give for her chances, Captain?”
“He thinks a goodly number of people would have long ago been carried off by a consumption such as hers.” He stopped what he was saying and stared at the man beside him. They listened a while to the wet seethe of Mary’s breathing. Buchan shook his head and raised his mug to his chin to blow onto the steaming liquid. “We have taken the tragedy of an entire race of people, Mr. Peyton, and cheapened it with our own sordid little melodrama.”