The dirty weather worsened as night fell and the doorway was closed up with caribou skins. The noise of the wind in the trees and the hail and sleet against the sides of the mamateek made it conceivable that a party of any number could steal upon the shelter without being heard and Buchan divided the men into two watches to sit under arms through the night. Peyton was a member of the first watch and he and his group sat spaced around the circular floor with only the sullen light of the fire to see by. No one spoke.
The morning he started out from his father’s winter house, Peyton had stuffed a small parcel tied up in a piece of muslin cloth into his knapsack and he took it out now, unwrapping a sheaf of papers written over by hand. It was too dark to read and he flipped through them blindly, running the tips of his fingers across the pages.
Reilly was sitting nearest him and leaned forward to peer. “What’s that you got there?” he said.
Peyton shook his head.
“Cassie,” Reilly whispered and Peyton nodded without looking up from the pages.
John Senior had left Peyton behind at the winter house during his first year in Newfoundland to watch over Cassie, though he’d begged to be taken trapping. Near midnight on Christmas Eve, Cassie had come to Peyton’s room and shaken him awake. She was fully dressed and had already pulled on a heavy overcoat.
“What’s wrong?” Peyton asked.
“Get up,” she said. “It’s nearly time.”
When he came into the kitchen she was standing at the door with the musket his father had left them. She was tamping powder into the barrel.
“The time,” she said.
“What are you doing?”
“The time, John Peyton.”
He pulled out the new gold pocket watch given to him by his father before he left for the traplines and turned the face to the light of the candle on the table. “Three of twelve.”
“Get your coat on now. Hurry.”
She stepped out the door and he followed behind her as quickly as he could. They stood just outside the house, the clearing at the door banked on both sides by drifts of snow piled above their heads. There was no wind. She lifted the rifle to her shoulder and cocked her head to one side. They stood that way a few moments more. Her lips were moving and Peyton leaned forward to hear her slowly counting down under her breath.
He looked up at the stars and shook his head. Then he heard them. Gunshots, two, three, maybe more. The few inhabitants up and down the shore standing outside their tilts and firing into the night to mark the day’s arrival. Cassie pulled the trigger, the roar of the rifle deafening, the flash of powder deepening the dark that followed.
Inside she poured them each a glass of rum. Then Cassie brought out the small package wrapped in muslin and tied with a length of twine. She placed it in his lap and went back to her seat. Peyton stared at the package without speaking. The rum shimmered in his belly like a sun-gall. He looked up at her.
“Open it,” she said.
He smiled stupidly as he tried the knots and unwrapped the cloth. “What is it?” he asked. He lifted the sheaf of papers clear and laid it flat on his lap. “Cassie?”
She brought the candle from the table so he could see more clearly. The top sheet was printed over in a loose, sloping hand. He leaned closer to read it. “‘The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice,’” he read aloud. He flipped through the pages, dozens of them, each written out in the same hand. Beneath Othello was a handwritten copy of The Tempest. Peyton was mystified. He had seen in her trunk all nine volumes of Nicholas Rowe’s stage edition of Shakespeare’s plays.
“It was a way to pass the time,” Cassie said, “when my mother was ill. Near the end she slept most of the day and night and I was too tired to just read. I thought you might like to have them.”
Peyton stared at her, his mouth opening and closing uselessly. He stood up and placed the papers in her lap. “I have something for you,” he said. She heard his feet hammering the stairs, a scuffling noise from his room overhead. When he came back into the kitchen he held one hand behind his back. “Close your eyes,” he told her. “Put out your hand.” He placed a small leather pouch in her palm.
Cassie emptied the bag in her lap and held each item in turn in the light. The carved antler. The bird skulls. The fire stone. “Where did you get these?”
“Out on Swan Island. John Senior found the pouch in a cave along the shore.”
“They’re beautiful, John Peyton.”
He nodded and blushed, embarrassed to be the object of her gratitude. Besides which, he had told her so little of the truth of the gift’s origins that he felt he had somehow lied to her.