“What have you got here for food?” he asked her.
“Partridge, beaver. I had flour for bread until the new year came in.”
“We have men behind us that are wet and frozen,” Rowsell said.
She nodded. “They’re welcome.”
“I’ll take the news back to Captain Buchan,” he said.
Peyton and Cassie shaded their eyes against the glare of sunlight reflected off snow that flooded in as Rowsell stepped outside. He pulled the door to behind him, shuttering the room into blackness.
“How many will need a place inside tonight?” Cassie asked.
“There’s three men have got their feet in a bad way already.”
She got up and began shifting her few pieces of furniture in the dark. Peyton cleared his throat. He wasn’t surprised to see her, he realized. He had an urge to touch her, to place a hand to her shoulder, to hold the sleeve of her clothes between his thumb and forefinger. But she held herself off, as she always had, maintaining an old, familiar distance, and he found himself suddenly furious with her.
“It was Buchan you were with,” he said then. “Buchan was the father.”
Cassie gave a sad laugh. “That little man,” she said.
“All along I thought —”
“I know what you thought, John Peyton.”
He’d known the truth for weeks now and still it cut him to hear it, to have her state it so plainly. He sat still, regretting having flushed it into the open, wishing it back into the dark of his own head. Across the room Cassie’s figure emerged slowly from the shadows as his eyes adjusted to the absence of light and he noticed her limp as she moved, how the lack of detail emphasized it, made it seem almost a new thing to him. He gestured at her and said as lightly as he could, “You never once told me about your leg, Cassie.”
She stood with her hands on her hips a moment, staring at him, a furious crease to her mouth. Peyton put his hands to his knees and looked down at the packed dirt floor. “I was just asking,” he said.
Cassie nodded. “My father,” she said, but she stopped herself. He could hear the sound of her breathing from the other side of the room, the ocean rhythm of it, the jagged edges where it reefed and broke. She said, “I’ve never told anyone the truth of this.”
“All right.”
“My mother threw me down a flight of stairs when I was a girl. When I was twelve years old.”
Peyton stared at her.
“I told her a story about my father. About the walking trip we took to Portugal Cove. We stopped by a lake to eat on the way back to St. John’s and he took out his compass and his little brass container. He showed me why my mother fell in love with him.” She paused there and they could hear the stiff needles of spruce branches scraping against the walls of the tilt. She said, “I thought my mother would protect me.”
Peyton nodded in the near dark and he went on nodding for a long time.
“You wanted to know,” she said finally.
There was a silence between them as Cassie carried on aimlessly shifting chairs. She straightened suddenly and turned to him. “I have stopped bleeding,” she said. “My monthly,” she clarified. “I haven’t bled in years.”
Peyton, the two officers and those men most in danger of frostbite spent that night inside the tilt. It was the first time Peyton had ever slept in the same room as Cassie and he lay awake through hours of darkness, trying to disentangle the delicate skein of her breathing from the sounds of the others, the raw snoring, the discontented sighs as they shifted positions. In the morning Cassie dressed in the winter clothes she had taken from the Peyton house and walked down to the river with the men.
Buchan had tried to reason with her, but stopped short of refusing her permission to join them. “You understand,” he said, “that we do not have the resources to offer assistance even should you require it.”
Peyton said, “I’ll watch out for her.”
“I’ll be fine,” Cassie said.
It took four more days to reach the waterfall and convey the sledges and their contents up the Indian path, then across the marsh to the riverbank. Four men carried the coffin, which had been carefully wrapped in canvas to prevent damage during the trip. Each man stepped upward individually to find footing among the loose stone and ice, like a cat gingerly picking a way through fresh snow.