“Leave the child be,” her father said. But his tone suggested it would take some convincing to bring him around.
“What kind of a creature are you raising?” her mother wanted to know. “Dragging her down to the wharf. Stripping her half naked at the lake. What are people to think if they see you stealing her off through the country in her petticoat?”
“People? What people are you concerned with?”
“By all that is sacred, Garfield Izakiah Jure, I will not allow you to carry Cassandra off into the woods.”
“You won’t allow it?”
“No,” she said. “I will not. That’s no place for a girl.”
Her father nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed,” he said. He looked at his daughter who was sitting quietly while events took their course and then he looked back at his wife. “I quite agree,” he said. And he left the house without a word.
Cassie stared down at her shoes, studying the polished buckles. Her mother paced the floor. It was as if they had come to an impasse in an argument they’d been carrying on with each other. It was clear there was more to come. They were both expectant, apprehensive.
Half an hour later Cassie’s father came through the door carrying a pair of men’s trousers, stockings, a hat and a short Spencer coat. “We shall need a name for you,” he said to his daughter.
“Now, Izakiah,” her mother said.
“Try these on,” he said. “We’ll have to make some adjustments.”
“Where on earth did you get these clothes?”
“From the smallest gentleman I could find next door. Cost me a bottle and a half of Jamaican rum. Something regal would be in order, something with the ring of royalty about it. What do you think of Henry as a name, Cassie? Or Charles, I’ve always fancied Charles. That’s what we’d have called you if you were a lad.”
The stockings were full of holes and filthy and the rank smell of them filled the room. Her mother stood helplessly in the centre of the floor. There was so much wrong with what was happening that she couldn’t focus on the order in which she should be objecting to things. Finally she said, “She will not wear an item of those clothes until they have been washed.”
It was a small concession to make and conceded so much to them in its turn that Cassie and her father immediately agreed to it.
They set out an hour before light, a week later. Her mother watching from the open doorway, her silhouette in the dim light of a candle behind her, her shadow cast on the dirt path. “You bring her home in one piece,” she shouted to her husband when they were almost out of earshot. Cassie turned and looked back down the hill as the door closed, cancelling out the square of light.
The first three miles beyond the town they walked a wide, well-travelled road to a place called Tilt House, making good time. The sun was well up by then. Cassie could feel the itch of new blisters already forming on the heels of her feet.
“It gets much worse from here, young Charles,” her father said. He tipped the costril of spruce beer to his lips and then replaced the cork. He took out a small jar of pork fat. He used two fingers to scoop a dollop from the jar and offered it to Cassie as he began liberally applying the white grease to his forehead, face and neck. He nodded ahead to the broken path of tree stumps and shallow bog. “Nippers,” he said.
Cassie nodded and began applying the grease in the same manner her father had.
They travelled another three miles to Twenty Mile Pond, following a trail used mostly in winter to reach the lake. It was rutted and studded with tree stumps and stones and crossed by running streams of water. The mosquitoes hung about their heads in shaggy halos so thick and active they had to cover their mouths with their hands when they spoke. There were stretches of marsh spotted with deep, black-water flashes. Where the trail was most sodden, rocks or logs were lain at intervals for travellers but even these had begun to disappear into the muck. Cassie ’s shoes were slightly too big for her feet and she lost them both on separate occasions, rescuing them from the dark sucking mud with her hands.
At Twenty Mile Pond they stopped to rinse their shoes and stockings in the water and to eat a meal of cheese and bread. There was a strong breeze in the clearing that kept the insects down and dried their clothes as they sat at the water’s edge. She lay back on the stones with bread still in her hand and fell asleep.