Peyton had to stifle an astonished grin. There was something pathetic in the officer’s earnestness, he thought, and it surprised him to see this. He nodded slowly. He said, “I think perhaps that is the English way.”
“I,” Buchan whispered, “am not English.” He sipped at his tea and made a face. After a minute of silence he said, “That girl you saw in Poole, the little Red Indian, do you remember?”
Peyton nodded.
“Do you know how she wound up there?”
“Richmond was the one got hold to her, I believe. Says he found her wandering alone out on one of the bird islands.”
Buchan shook his head. “He found her. A child. Thirteen leagues out on the Atlantic.”
“So he says.”
“He must have killed the rest of her family to get her, I expect.”
Peyton raised his shoulders. No one had ever said as much before, though everyone believed it to be true. “I expect he must have,” he said.
Buchan nodded slowly and then looked across at Peyton. “Whatever became of her, I wonder?”
He cleared his throat again. “She died, sir. There was a write-up in the paper within the year. Scarlet fever, if I recall.”
The following week continued unusually warm, and it was decided that even if weather conditions became immediately more favourable, they couldn’t hope to leave in less than a fortnight. Peyton and his father made preparations to head back to their winter house and Buchan said he would send for them as soon as it looked likely the expedition could set out. Peyton stopped in to see Mary the morning they left and she held his hand and made him promise to return, even though he had never suggested he would do otherwise.
“You get well now,” he said to her and she nodded emphatically, and they contented themselves with these small fictions they offered one another like a ritual exchange of gifts.
The two men walked slowly in the lee of the woods towards the winter house, along wide stretches of beach and through poorly marked forest trails where sheer cliffs or sharply rafted pans of ballycatter made shore travel impossible. Twice through the day they stopped to boil a kettle of water and smoke pipes while gulls skirled overhead.
John Senior said, “When do you think we’ll be heading back there?”
“You say that,” Peyton answered in a Scottish brogue, “as if you cared one way or another.”
“The little prick.”
Peyton shrugged. “He left us alone.”
John Senior said, “So he did.” He had never asked his son what arrangement had been made, what leverage used, what information dangled as bait or blackmail to make Buchan return to St. John’s and state publicly that their party was fully justified under all circumstances in acting as they did. That no charges or additional investigation into the incident were warranted. He seemed to prefer not knowing.
Snow came down as they started out on the final leg of the journey. “The old woman is picking her goose now,” John Senior said. The thick windless fall muffled the sound of the ocean to one side and the forest to the other. They strapped on the Indian rackets they carried with them and trudged into the near silence. By dusk they were within sight of the house. The animals in the closed shed whimpered to them as they walked by.
They pushed through the door into the bone-cold chill and Peyton called, as if Cassie might simply be napping in another room. He walked to the foot of the stairs and sang out to her again. Her trunk in the parlour was carefully packed full of her books and clothes, waiting, Peyton assumed, to be sent for. A rifle had been taken and a pair of Indian rackets, along with a pack and old winter clothing belonging to John Senior. The old man started the makings of a fire and Peyton sat on the daybed in his boots and coat. “She’s gone,” he said.
“I can see that,” John Senior said. He knelt at the fireplace. He said, “There’s no telling what all else she made off with or how long she’s been gone. Perhaps you should go look in on the animals.”
They spent the next weeks wandering around the house and property with the aimlessness of icebergs adrift among the islands. They propped up a length of fence at the back of the property, cleaned out the stalls in the animal’s shed, went into the woods for lumber that could be planed to barrel staves, but there was no narrative to their days. The house fit them awkwardly, like familiar clothes put on after a long wasting illness. John Senior started drinking earlier each day until he’d begun having a shot of rum as soon as he came downstairs from his bed in the mornings. Every night he woke in the grip of his nightmare, yelling Stop it, would you, for the love of Christ, stop it.