“No,” she said. “I’m sure you don’t.”
Buchan sat a while, drunkenly considering the woman across from him and what he knew of her station. It seemed a lonely life for a woman too young to be a spinster to be leading and he said as much to her.
She tipped her head side to side, as if she wanted to dispute the assertion but in all honesty could not. “There are worse things in life,” she said, “than loneliness.” And before Buchan could respond to this, she stood and placed the chair back in its place beside the table. “Can you make the stairs on your own?”
He raised the mug again, as if to demonstrate the extent of his sobriety.
“Just leave the shawl there when you go.”
She turned to leave the room, but he stopped her. “Miss Jure,” he said. “I would be in your debt if you didn’t make a story of this.” He motioned helplessly about himself.
Cassie folded her arms beneath her breasts and smiled. “Why is it that men are more afraid of being seen as a fool than they are of behaving like one?”
Buchan nodded. “I can see,” he said, “why so many men have talked of taking you away from here.”
The heavy weather continued through the next day, which kept Buchan and his men from leaving for Ship Cove as he’d planned. He was still feeling rough from the previous evening’s exercises and was happy enough to stay put. John Senior occupied himself with the officer as long as he could stand to sit about idly and then dressed to look in on the animals. Buchan offered to accompany him but John Senior motioned him back into his seat. “Pay no mind,” he said. “Cassie,” he shouted into the pantry. “Make the lieutenant some tea.”
Buchan watched her with a shy, apologetic look as she set out the mugs at the kitchen table.
“Are you feeling yourself today?” she asked him. There was no sympathy in her voice, but she wasn’t simply making fun of him either.
“Better,” he said. “Thank you.”
They spoke for a while about the violence of the weather and what it promised for the winter ahead. When they had exhausted the topic there was an awkward silence between them. Finally Cassie said, “How long will you be with us, Lieutenant?”
“We’ll be leaving for Ship Cove as soon as the weather moderates, I expect.”
She shook her head, but didn’t look at him. “I mean on the northeast shore.”
“Oh. Of course. Just until the spring breakup. We’ll make for St. John’s as soon as we’re clear of the ice.”
Cassie nodded. “You’ll be coming back this way again? This is your station?”
“No,” he said. “This trip was a special assignment only. Barring any unforeseen events, I doubt I’ll be back.”
Cassie continued nodding her head but said nothing, and they fell back into silence. Buchan slapped his knees with his hands. He said, “Did you say yesternight that John Senior is hag-ridden?”
“Aren’t we all on occasion, Lieutenant?”
“You said we would hear him if it happened.”
“I’ve heard him come to himself upstairs in the middle of the night, shouting at something or other. My father had the Old Hag a time or two.”
There was a defensive tone to her voice he wasn’t willing to test and he said, “I couldn’t help noticing your library.” He lifted a book that was sitting on the table. There were books scattered throughout the rooms of the house. “I have rarely seen a private library as large.”
“Most of them were procured by my mother,” she said. Her mother was the daughter of a clergyman and a woman of some learning. She was hired by St. John’s merchants, in the absence of schools in the community, to tutor their children in reading and writing and she was paid with books imported from England on the merchant ships.
“I understand from John Senior that you are a woman of unusual learning as well, Miss Jure.”
“This surprises you, Lieutenant?”
“You do strike me as being somewhat” — he shifted in his chair slightly — “somewhat unlikely, shall we say. How did you come to live here?” He held his arms wide, as if to say she could interpret the word “here” as broadly as she liked.
“The short answer to your question is that John Senior hired me to tutor John Peyton when he first came across from England, and to act as housekeeper.”
“And the long answer?” He let the pause go on a moment and then said, “There hardly seems a point to standing on ceremony from here, Miss Jure.”
She smiled and cleared her throat. She grew up, she told him, in St. John’s. Her mother was born and raised in Nova Scotia, but she married against her parents’ wishes and then moved to Newfoundland with her husband to live beyond the constant light of their disapproval. Cassie looked about the room and then at her hands. “I’m not usually given to telling stories,” she said.