“It’s all bull you’re talking,” the boy said.
“Beaver or bull, I could care less about,” Corporal Bouthland interrupted. “But who here has seen one of these Red Indians we’re after?”
It was the first time since they’d left Peter’s Arm that anyone had deliberately pointed in the direction they were heading. Buchan had been sitting with a pipe, making notes in his journal by the light of the fire as he did at the end of each day’s travel. He seemed not to be following the conversation, but sat suddenly forward. He tucked the journal into a satchel. “Yes,” he said. “How about it?”
Peyton glanced across at Reilly. The Irishman was staring into the fire, but seemed to sense Peyton’s look and he shook his head slightly without taking his eyes from the flames. The others fidgeted where they sat.
Buchan said, “John Peyton?”
Peyton cleared his throat. He said that before he came across to Newfoundland he’d seen a young girl put on display in Poole who was said to be a Red Indian. She was outfitted in a dress and shoes and looked nothing much more than an English girl, though someone had painted her face and tied a feather in her hair.
Tom Taylor was stroking his blond beard with both hands and he jumped in then to say that according to what he knew the Reds were a race of giants by and large, and that many of the Indians he ’d heard spoken of by others were said to be over seven feet tall.
Reilly said it was only an idiot that believed all he was told, which Richmond took exception to. He said, “A Papist should be one to mock believing what’s told us, I’m sure.” He and Taylor had worked with Reilly on John Senior’s rivers twenty years and more, but there was no love lost between the three. The fact that Reilly was Irish Catholic was enough to make him a target of Richmond’s hostility. Reilly’s marriage to Annie Boss was more fuel for the steady fire. Richmond stared at Reilly as he spoke now, daring him to contradict or interrupt him. “I have had occasion to come upon old gravesites of the Indians,” he said, “and once or twice to satisfy my own curiosity on the matter I have held a shank bone against my own. Now I am no small man by most measures and I was but a lad to the frame of those Indians.”
There was a round of murmuring in the camp, a scatter of dismissive laughter. Reilly shook his head but said nothing.
“Mr. Cull,” Buchan said. “I understand you carried one into St. John’s, didn’t you?”
“I did sir, yes. Nigh on ten year ago now, as I recall, it was a young woman out in a canoe by herself and heading for a bird island in Gander Bay.” Cull pulled his coat up around his shoulders as if it was about to slip down his back. He had hardly a tooth left in his mouth and his face had a concave, half-starved look about it. “The governor in those days had offered fifty pound to bring one in friendly-like and it seemed as she was alone there’d be little trouble to do so. Took her up in the fall and they made a bloody great fuss over her, the merchants and their wives tripping over themselves to cultivate her good graces. In all the years I been going into St. John’s I was never so much as offered a barelegged cup of tea by the quality and they brought my savage into the shops on the waterfront and let her walk off with whatever caught her fancy. Mostly ironwork she wanted, pots and kettles and such, I can see her now waddling under the weight of it all in her arms and a bloody great pot on her head to boot. I tried to help her carry some of it, but she seemed to think I wanted to steal it away and wouldn’t allow me to touch an item.
“They put on a dance for her one evening and invited all the quality in town to have a view of her. There was music which I remember she seemed fond of but she could not be prevailed upon to dance. She was a modest creature and very sensible to the presence of children as I recall and as long as she was in the company of women she seemed not to mind being where she was. I was the only man she’d permit to hang nearby. I s’pose as I had taken her, she allowed as I would watch out for her or some such thing. The governor paid me my fee and I was told to bring her back with her pots and set her loose.”
Corporal Bouthland spoke up again. He was among the oldest marines who had volunteered for the mission, about his middle thirties. The pate of his head was nearly bald but he wore a pigtail stiffened with grease and flour at the back. He had a mole on his right cheekbone that sprouted a cluster of stiff hairs like the feelers of some blind insect. He said, “What did this one look like?”
“She was tolerable fair for an Indian,” Cull said, then he looked across at Reilly and said, “No offence now, Joseph. But she was only middle size, this one. She dressed all in deerskins and was covered from head to toe in that red paint they wear and there was no way to persuade her to wash. And eyes as dark as hell’s flames.”
“What was her name?” Buchan asked.