“Those are not normal creatures,” he said. He leaned up on an elbow to blow out the candle.
The girl woke crying in the middle of the night and Siobhan went to her, nearly dragging her still-sleeping husband from the bed by his foot when she pushed the door open. She spent the early hours of the morning at the child’s side, offering what little comfort she could in the dark.
By noon the next day the two men were on their way to Peyton’s summer house on Burnt Island with the Beothuk girl in tow. After conferring with John Senior, it was decided she should spend the rest of the season with Siobhan and Tom Taylor. They would carry her into St. John’s when they brought the cured salmon to market and hope to catch the governor before he’d scuttled back to England for the winter.
They requested a meeting as soon as they made St. John’s harbour, but had to wait three days for an audience. John Senior spent much of that time attending to business, leaving Richmond and Taylor to occupy the girl in some fashion. They carried her around the stores on Upper and Lower Path and shop owners offered her cubes of sugar to suck on or small sour green apples. Respectable women who would have otherwise passed the men by without so much as a nod stopped and spoke in singsong voices to the child and asked her name and age. Richmond tried once or twice to say honestly who the girl was, but the confusion this created led him to fashion a story that would better suit the questioners, telling them the girl was his sister’s child, that she was dumb and had not spoken a word since she was born. He became increasingly comfortable with the fiction the more he repeated it and he added details as he went, giving the child a name (Rowena, after her grandmother), an elder sister who had been stillborn, a love of old Welsh songs. Tom Taylor watched in disbelief as the tale grew in length and complexity, but never contradicted his friend until Richmond explained to one inquirer that the child was a bit unknown and had an unusual predilection for eating grass as an infant, which some now blamed for her inability to speak.
“Dick Richmond, that is the biggest load of gurry,” he said.
Richmond looked hurt. “It’s not my opinion neither,” he said, bristling. “I only said that some thought it so.”
He began referring to himself in her presence as Uncle Richard and each day bought her a block of hard taffy to occupy her during the evening. The streets near the harbour were ground to mud by carts and animals and the hundreds of people who came to St. John’s from across the island looking for winter passage back to England. Richmond was afraid she would fall or that he might lose sight of her in the crowds and eventually he sat the girl on his shoulders and left her there much of the time.
In the eyes of the British Crown at the time, the island of Newfoundland wasn’t considered a proper colony, but a sort of floating fishing station and training ground for naval recruits, a country that existed only during the summer months. Most of the planters and fishermen returned to England for the winter, as did the governor himself. According to the stories Richmond and Taylor gathered while wandering the settlement, the current representative of the Crown was a minor functionary related distantly to royalty who was offered the position as a kind of punishment for profligate living. In England he had become so fearful of creditors that he awoke before dawn and stayed away from his house until dark. He accepted the governorship of Newfoundland first and foremost as a way to temporarily escape his debts.
The reward Richmond was seeking had been offered by a previous administration and before the arrival of the men who stood before him the governor had never heard of it. He listened to Richmond’s story of finding the child wandering alone on the bird islands without comment or even much in the way of expression.
“What does she have in her hand there?” he asked afterwards.
“A doll, Your Honour,” Richmond said. “It was all she had when I discovered her.”
“She hardly looks like an Indian to my eye.”
“We have done our best with the little we have to civilize the child,” John Senior said. “The paint was scrubbed off her face and we cut her hair and provided some sensible clothes.”
The girl stood between her captors and the sickly looking gentleman in his chair who continually passed a palm across the thinning hair on his head. Mud covered her shoes and her legs to her knees. She placed her chin on the head of the doll and held it there.
“Have her speak something in her native tongue.”
John Senior cleared his throat. “She haven’t uttered a word since she’s been with us, sir.”
The governor gave a long, weary sigh. “Gentlemen,” he said, “however you may have come into possession of this Indian, if indeed an Indian she is” — he looked at the men a moment to communicate his doubts on the matter — “she is of no use to the Crown whatsoever.”