Richmond said, “We’ve come a long ways with this child here.”
The governor was already on his feet. “And I wish you a pleasant return trip. Your petition for the Crown’s reward is denied.”
The three men went straight from their meeting to a public house. They felt foolish and unfairly used and it took them most of the evening to disguise those feelings with drink. The Indian girl stood beside them, her eyes just above the tabletop staring at the candle’s flicker, a block of hard taffy in her hand. Eventually Richmond placed her in the straw along the wall and he took off his coat and tucked it around her where she lay clutching her doll.
John Senior left for Poole in the morning. Richmond and Taylor took the sloop back to the northeast shore. Without ever discussing the possibility, both men expected that Siobhan would take the girl in and raise her as her own when they returned to the Bay of Exploits. They carried her up there as soon as they shipped in from St. John’s and they sat in the kitchen together, the girl fidgeting quietly with her doll in Siobhan’s lap. A mix of snow and rain whipped around in a contrary wind outside and the gusts roared in the chimney.
Tom Taylor said, “Perhaps it was God’s way of giving us a bairn, Siobhan.”
Siobhan lifted the girl from her lap and stood her on the floor. She had cared for the child for months now and in a barely conscious way had come to cherish her. But something fragile in the woman came apart then and she refused what a day earlier she would have admitted to calling love. Her voice shook slightly when she spoke. “God never intended me to raise a dumb savage in place of my own child, Tom Taylor.” She turned to her brother. “You’ll take her with you when you go.” She left the room then, the girl pointing after her as she walked away.
An elderly couple from Poole who had been on the shore a decade and were about to retire back to England on a late crossing out of St. John’s agreed to take the girl and raise her as a servant. To cover the cost of her passage and board in England, she was exhibited to crowds of curious onlookers in a warehouse on the waterfront in Poole. Admission at the door was two pence.
Richmond was staring blindly at the fire as these things came back to him, the brittle fingers of scrag flaring and then curling in the heat like creatures helplessly trying to protect themselves from the flame. By the time the kettle boiled he was too unsettled to make himself a mug of tea. He sat wrapped in a blanket while steam rose into the air over the fire. The same scalding commotion working in his belly.
Peyton and his men breached the head of the lake in the late afternoon of the following day, March 6, after walking without rest since dawn and they crouched out of sight among a thick blind of spruce trees on the shoreline. Several miles across the ice a cluster of winter shelters stood in a clearing, loose braids of smoke rising into the glare of the day’s end. They backtracked along the River Exploits as the sun fell behind a dark blind of trees at the crest of the valley, and circled into a gully where a small rattling brook met the river. They tramped a piece of ground firm before unlacing the Indian rackets from their boots and standing them up in the thigh-deep snow. They cut spruce limbs from the near trees and set the largest against cross-logs for a windbreak and settled the rest over the places where they intended to sleep. By then it was night with a fair breeze of wind brought up but Peyton refused to allow a fire to be kindled for fear it might give them away. He set three watches and the group settled to wait out the stars. No one managed to so much as doze off in the bitter cold, but the night was edgeless and surreal as a dream and each of the men felt lost in it.