The dead man still clutched his shirtfront in both hands, as if he was trying to tear it from his body.
The firebreaks preserved the last 150 yards of buildings on the north and south sides of Water Street, but an additional 240 homes and businesses were lost in the second fire of the winter. One in three residents was left homeless and impoverished during one of the harshest winters ever recorded in the colony. Even those people with money had little or no access to food or other supplies, most of which had been burnt to cinders. During the course of the following months the most vulnerable starved or died of exposure in the pathetic temporary structures the governor could not prevent the homeless from cobbling together. The cemetery ground was hard as flint and the dead were salted with chopped ice in their coffins and kept in a storage room at the fort until graves could be dug in the spring.
Vice Admiral Francis Pickmore became the first governor of Newfoundland to die in office. He was already suffering longstanding and nagging illnesses when he took up residence at Fort Townshend in October. The severe conditions of the winter, the turmoil in the aftermath of the fires, the constant damp and cold of the governor’s residence overtook him like a predator running down a wounded animal. He died on February 24 of complications arising from bronchial congestion.
The constant frost of that year had sealed the coast in a solid band of ice from the early days of December. In order to return the governor’s body to England, Buchan pressed three hundred shoremen into service beside crewmen from the Drake, Egeria and the Fly to carve a passage clear of the harbour. Close to shore the ice was as much as five feet thick and the men used axes and ice-saws and simple stubbornness to make their way through it. Three weeks after the work began, the HMS Fly left St. John’s with the earthly remains of Governor Pickmore preserved in a large puncheon of rum. Buchan was present when the body was lowered into the murky bath of alcohol. The face darkened under the sepia surface, the features bearing an expression of beatific indifference. A drowned man, Buchan thought as the cover was nailed into place.
The channel the workers had muscled through to open water on the Atlantic was 2,856 yards in length. Within a week the relentlessly cold weather had closed it over again and the harbour remained inaccessible to shipping until May.
To everyone’s amazement no lives were lost in the fires themselves. The man who died of what was assumed to be a heart attack while tearing down the firebreak houses on Water Street was the only fatality recorded during those two disastrous nights. The body was laid out for viewing before the burial in one of the few taverns not lost to the fire, a single-room affair owned and operated by the man with the eye patch. He introduced himself as Harrow when Buchan arrived to pay his respects.
“I was a navy man meself,” he said. “Years ago this was. Till I lost the eye.” He gestured at his head.
Buchan nodded.
The coffin was set up on the bar and there was a row of drunken fishermen standing beside it. It was built of plain board and the dead man inside it was dressed in a black suit several sizes too large for him and thirty years out of fashion.
“The suit was my own,” Harrow told the officer. He wore a slop smock tied at his waist that draped almost to the floor. “Haven’t put it on my back since my first year out of the navy. And he didn’t have a proper fit-out for burying, poor bugger.”
“Was he a relation of yours?”
“No sir, a business partner at one time. Before his wife died. He sold his share in the establishment afterwards and then drank away the works.”
Several men near them at the bar toasted the corpse’s legendary exploits as a drinker.
“When is the funeral?”
“Tomorrow noon.” Harrow shook his head. “I’m surprised the Church would have him. He never set foot inside one in all the years I knew him.”
“Is that a fact?”
“And so it is. He was a queer stick, I’ll grant you. Had a daughter, a clever girl. He dressed her up in men’s clothes one August and they traipsed off to Portugal Cove before there was a road. And I’ve heard stranger things that the presence of his remains prevent me from speaking of.”
Another round of salutes from the mourners.
Buchan looked around the dimly lit room. “Where is his daughter now?”
“She left twenty-odd year ago. She was in the employ of a northern man, one Peyton, owns half the country up there. No saying where she is these days. Would you take a complimentary beverage, Lieutenant?” Harrow had gone around the bar and was out of sight behind the coffin.
“No,” Buchan said. “Thank you. I just wanted to offer my condolences.”