“Terrible,” Cassie said.
Peyton didn’t know whether she saw herself stretched out in chains and helpless on that rock, or if she intended he should see himself there, or whether it was just a story the fire brought to her mind and nothing more. He swallowed against the ache in his throat and looked up at the blur of stars that were being slowly extinguished by the first light of the morning. “Cassie,” he said.
But she had already drifted back to sleep.
He decided to let her rest as long as she needed and even managed to doze off himself as the sun rose. A chill woke him where he sat and he stood to stretch the cold from his legs and then stirred the coals and blew on them while he held a dry branch of pine needles to their billowing heat. He had tea ready for her when she woke and more of the broth she could hardly stomach the night before.
“I can walk today,” she told him and he shrugged and said that was fair enough by him, although he doubted how far she might be able to travel. He stripped the leather thongs from the stretcher and they packed their things and started back into the bush. He broke the path, moving as slowly as he could and stopping frequently to adjust the bindings on his rackets or to examine partridge tracks so as not to get too far ahead of her. They came out on the bay five miles down from the winter house and walked the shoreline as the dark of early evening descended. As far as they could see ahead of them there wasn’t a single light on the shore.
The air in the building was sharp with three days’ frost and Peyton laid a fire and lit candles and then filled the wood box while Cassie sat and leaned her weight onto the table, gathering each breath into her lungs as if she was trying to carry water with her hands. He knelt to pull Cassie’s boots from her feet and helped her out of her jacket and waistcoat. He crutched her to the daybed and covered her with flannel quilts. Then he made himself tea, pouring the mug half full with rum, and sat tending the fire and watching her sleep.
His father would be back from White Bay within a few days. He knew she would ask him to leave before then and that she’d go on as if nothing had happened on the river. When he came in off the traplines in January she would act as if they hadn’t seen one another since the early fall and he expected he would do the same. He had a long established habit of accommodating the wishes of others even if he couldn’t settle in his own mind what was right.
Peyton had just turned sixteen when John Senior announced that his son would leave Poole come April to work in Newfoundland. The family was sitting over the remnants of a boiled leg of pork that had been served with green peas and gravy and there was a moment of dead stillness among them then, as if they were all waiting for a clock to chime the hour. The sound of John Senior’s spoon clinked against his cup as he stirred.
His mother pushed her chair back from the table and leaned across to take the spoon from her husband’s hand before he’d finished stirring his tea.
“What’s that now?” John Senior said.
She was almost too furious to form words. “Not,” she said.
“Sit down, would you? What are you saying?”
“You will not,” she told him. She placed the spoon carefully on her plate and took it away from the table.
John Senior was astounded by his wife’s disapproval of something he regarded as a foregone conclusion. It had been years since he’d thought of the woman as a person with opinions, with influence, and he never recovered sufficiently from his surprise to respond to her objections in any sensible way. He sat in a restless silence while she spent one evening after the next insisting her son would not leave England before he had finished his schooling and only then if he chose to do so.
Peyton was as disconcerted as his father. He had always assumed he would leave some day for Newfoundland. But he had never in his life done anything against the word or advice of his mother and the strength of her feeling on the matter made him feel strangely fearful.
One evening near the beginning of April, after delivering another variation of the near-monologue harangue that left her feeling exhausted and powerless, Peyton’s mother retreated to her bedroom. John Senior stayed on in the parlour, nursing a pipe. Peyton and his sister had spent the time in the kitchen, avoiding the argument as much as was possible in the cramped quarters of the apartment. Susan was three years younger than her brother, but already the more practical and shrewder of the two. Peyton had his mother’s light blue eyes and an almost perpetually astonished expression that made him look defenceless. Susan’s eyes were grey like her father’s. She had a settled, disinterested stare that invested even her most innocuous statement with weight and portent.
“You’ll have to choose,” she told him.
“Choose what?” He could smell the sweet drift of pipe smoke from the parlour.