When she was left on her own during the winter, she came down to this spot once or twice a month to hunt or just to sit by a fire for an afternoon. There was something stripped and pitiless about the land that she envied. The wind in the spruce trees, the surf muttering on the beach were hypnotic, so empty of meaning they could be mistaken for silence. A scatter of islands teetering on the ocean’s horizon. The sea a blue just this side of darkness, the colour of the sky when the first evening star appears. Out of sight of the winter house she could imagine the entire coastline was uninhabited but for her, and she found some comfort in that notion.
She reached for that feeling now, but couldn’t move past the anxiety she’d been trying to ignore since starting out. She turned away from it and away from it, like the partridge moving in wide overlapping arcs, and each time came back to that sullen heaviness. She leaned closer to the heat and turned the bird on its stick. Fat dripped into the fire, the smell of it darkening the air like a bruise.
All that day, the two men travelled along the bank of the River Exploits without speaking of more than the conditions of the snow or the temperature. Peyton stood to the back of the sled and worked it over bald patches of rock, holding it upright over angled layers of beach ice. He was happy for the physical labour of it, the steady immersion into fatigue that released some of the tension in his body, but it wasn’t enough to keep him from going over his conversation with Cassie in his head. The candles like an afterthought or was she playing her feelings as close as he was? The light good for needlework and whether that meant anything like he hoped. How quickly she turned away then and her saying, “I always do,” when he spoke of his father. It seemed to Peyton there was a note almost of defiance in her voice as she said it.
John Senior stayed beside the bitch most of the day, using a hand in the harness to help haul or steady the animal when needed. Where the path or stretch of beach was too narrow to allow them to walk abreast, he travelled ahead and the dog adjusted her pace to keep close to his heels. She nearly bowled him over as they came into sight of Ship Cove, John Senior stopping suddenly in the dusk of late afternoon. The dog sat on her haunches behind him and whined.
Peyton said, “What is it, now?”
John Senior pointed with his mittened hand. “There she is,” he said.
The HMS Adonis was a bulk of shadow in the distance. They couldn’t see the chains about her waist that secured the vessel to the shoreline, but it was clear the sails and all the rigging had been taken down for the winter, the bare masts rising over the ship like a row of crucifixes atop the spires of a church.
“Never been a navy man on the shore this late in the season,” John Senior said. “Not in all my years.”
Peyton couldn’t discern the drift of those words, whether they were wistful or angry or fearful. All that summer they had heard stories of the commander of the Adonis, a Lieutenant Buchan, travelling across the northeast shore in a cutter. Mapping the coastline was the explanation that had come to them, a notion John Senior was suspicious of almost out of habit. When word reached the Peytons that the vessel was going to winter-over, it was like a confirmation of the worst, though nothing said between them acknowledged any specific concern.
“What is it this Buchan is after?” Peyton asked.
John Senior shook his head. He was squinting into the light of the sun as it fell into the forest. “Leave me worry about the navy man. You worry about keeping your powder dry. And minding the ice.”
Peyton nodded and they pushed on towards Ship Cove as the darkness seemed to rise out of the countryside around them, the sky turning black overhead by imperceptible degrees. They didn’t speak of the Adonis or Lieutenant Buchan again, although in his head Peyton was already running through the possibilities. He had another full day’s travel to face in the morning. And he could see, exhausted as he was, he had little chance of sleeping through the night again.