“Between them.”
“Susan,” he said. He had till that moment believed it would somehow be possible to satisfy them both.
After a period of bruised silence John Senior called him into the room. He knocked his pipe into the fireplace and refilled the bowl, tamping the tobacco with his thumb. There was a small coal fire hissing in the grate.
“I’ll only ask you the once,” he said. “Do you want to come across with me this year?”
“Yes,” Peyton whispered.
When they sailed out of Poole there was a steady breeze of wind on the open water and a sea running that rolled the vessel heavily port and starboard, the motion as eerily steady as a metronome. By nine in the morning Peyton was vomiting over the rail. John Senior stood beside him, holding his son upright against the rocking of the ship while he dry-heaved and bawled helplessly.
“You said this was what you wanted,” John Senior shouted.
Peyton managed to nod his head. But he knew he would have said just the opposite if his mother had asked him the same question first. He didn’t know what to call this tendency of his but cowardice.
The new fire roared in the chimney draught as it took hold, the sound of it steady and subterranean, like a waterfall thrumming in the distance. Peyton poured his mug full this time with rum and drank it straight. Cassie turned on the daybed and spoke meaningless syllables in her sleep and then settled again. He could hardly blame her for the choice she made, wrong-headed and impossible as it was. It was pity he felt for her then though he wished it could be otherwise. Even his willingness to forgive her seemed cowardly and he swallowed a mouthful of rum to choke it back.
The River Exploits
1811
FIVE
Besides himself, John Senior committed Reilly, Tom Taylor and Dick Richmond to Buchan’s expedition. John Peyton was to be left to watch over the winter house with Cassie. But shortly before Old Christmas Day a cold that had nagged at him the better part of December deteriorated into something more serious. John Senior slept fitfully through a burning fever and suffered hallucinations while awake. Cassie changed the sweat-soaked sheets and heated beach stones to warm the bed when John Senior was taken with a fit of the shakes. He mumbled and moaned and spoke at length to his dead mother and to Harry Miller who had been killed some fifteen years before. At the height of his fever he thrashed wildly about the bed, swearing and weeping uncontrollably, and Cassie was forced to straddle his stomach and hold his arms to keep him from injuring himself while he carried on urging helplessly against the weight of her and cursing her for his father.
Shortly before John Senior’s father died, he had invested all the family’s little money in a fledgling cod and salmon fishery on the northeast shore of Newfoundland. His partner, Harry Miller, was a man he’d established a nodding acquaintance with at one of the local brothels in Poole and they occasionally drank together after their entertainment. Without intending to, Miller talked the man into joining his enterprise. “Land for the taking,” he had said. “Salmon galore and they’re fat as a whore’s leg.” He fingered the crotch of his trousers, making awkward adjustments, as if the thought of the money to be made across the Atlantic stirred up an immediate erection. He said, “I’ll have to have another go-round here this afternoon, I can see that.” Miller wasn’t looking for a partner and considered he was just being sociable.
John Senior’s father owned a horse and cart and made a living selling coal from house to house, and he had never considered any other work. But his wife had recently begun sleeping in her daughters’ room and barely spoke to him any more, and the thought of living across the Atlantic half the year had an unexpectedly powerful appeal. He sold the animal, the property and business, and handed over almost every cent to Miller.