Peyton took to reading through half the afternoon and in the evenings by candlelight as well, a habit he hadn’t indulged in since he was a teenager. He dug through Cassie’s trunk to look for books she’d treasured, Gray’s Poems, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. He realized early on there was no comfort to be found in the exercise, but he persisted in it as a kind of penance.
Near the bottom of the trunk he discovered the handwritten copies of Othello and The Tempest she had given him. He lifted the sheaf of papers onto his lap. They were stored in his room the last time he’d laid eyes on them. Cassie obviously intended to take them away with her.
He carried the plays to the table and began leafing through the pages, studying the handwriting rather than the words themselves, the lines sloping slightly across the unlined paper. On the back of the title page of The Tempest he found a rough sketch of the Bay of Exploits, the winter and summer houses pencilled in. It reminded him of the map Mary had drawn for Buchan. As in that map, a stick figure stood beside the summer house on Burnt Island. There was a line of strange words in Cassie’s handwriting down one side of the page. Adenishit. Baroodisick. Gidyeathuk. Mamasheek. Messiliget-hook. John Senior glanced at it briefly when Peyton asked about it, but claimed never to have seen it before or to know why it was drawn or what the words might mean.
He came back to it often, studying the particular features. Was that a fence of some sort drawn in at Charles Brook? Did Cassie ask Mary to draw this? Had she done it herself? The map and its details were clues, he thought, but the story they hinted at evaded him.
One night John Senior, from his chair next to the fire, broke a fathom’s length of silence by saying, “Maybe it’s about time you found yourself a wife, John Peyton.”
Peyton looked up from the circumference of candlelight on the table, his hands on the edges of the map. “Perhaps you’re right about that,” he said.
On December 14, Joseph Reilly arrived at Salmon Arm from Charles Brook. “Hello the house!” he shouted as he came up from the landwash.
Peyton and his father came outside in their shirtsleeves to greet him. The pinover across his face was wreathed with ice where the steam of his breath had frozen in the open air. He seemed surprised to see them. “God bless the mark,” he said, shaking their hands. They got him inside and out of his coat at the fire and they plied him with rum and a plate of salt fish and brewis drenched in pork fat.
“How is your house now,” John Senior asked. “How is Annie Boss?”
“Expecting again is how she is. We can’t keep clear of it long enough to catch a breath.”
They gave him another full plate of food. When he was satisfied and sat back in his chair he said, “I heard you had gone down the river with Mary. I come to look in on Cassie, help her clean the byre.”
Peyton said, “The Exploits is open seven miles into the country. We’ll need a good spurt of cold before anyone gets to the lake this year. Buchan is going to send for us when the weather turns.”
The mention of the officer had them both nodding into their laps.
“Your man now,” Reilly said. “Has he had much to say about it all?”
“Not a word, Joseph.”
“I owe you a debt then.”
Peyton turned to look at his father who was dropping off in his chair, a glass of rum tipping in his lap. “I would say we’ve more or less straightened our accounts at this point.”
After he got John Senior up to his bed, Peyton stoked the fire and refilled Reilly’s glass, then his own. They sat in silence a while. The house timbers ticked and creaked in the wind.
“You haven’t asked after her,” Peyton said finally.
He looked up, startled. “After who?”
There was no one Reilly could have heard news of the expedition from besides Cassie. He said, “She sent you to look in on the animals, Joseph.”
Reilly looked down at his hands in his lap. The scars hidden under the palm of the opposite hand. “No,” he said. “No, she came by.” He nodded. “A fortnight past or nearly, I was on the line. She stayed two nights with Annie. We haven’t heard talk of her since. I thought she might have come back to the house here.”
“She carried off a sledge, a full kit of materials.”
“I don’t know more than what I’m saying. She was always one to keep her counsel.” He stared across at Peyton. “You know how she is.”
He nodded slowly. “You won’t be lying to me now, Joseph.”
Reilly turned his face to the fire. He said, “Leave her go, John Peyton.”
“Is she at your place?”
Reilly shot him a wide-eyed stare and just as quickly looked away, shaking his head.
“You maggoty little mick,” Peyton said.
The Irishman stood up from his chair. He touched his hips and belly briefly, as if he was expecting to find pockets he could shove his hands into. “My oldest is near big enough to take a share of work these days,” he said. “I’ve been thinking to go on the plant for myself next season, have Annie and the boy do the shore work.”