Peyton seemed not to hear his father speaking or even register where he was. Cassie thought he seemed exhausted by grief or desperation more than simple exertion. She said, “You look gallied, John Peyton.” He made a dismissive gesture with his hand but didn’t offer anything more in response.
John Senior said the Indian woman was brazen and not to be trusted, that she had twice tried to sneak away from the party while they slept. The second time she was bound hand and foot and had crawled into the bush on her knees. She’d worked the leather cassock over her head and used it as a muffle beneath her, crawling away from the guttering fire and the circle of sleeping men a foot at a time, the leather obscuring the marks of her passage behind her as she went. She was three hundred yards into the bush when they caught up to her.
She could not be convinced to take a chair.
Cassie said, “What’s to be done with her?” She was boiling kettles of water to fill a wooden tub in front of the fire.
“I’ll ask that of the governor, I suppose,” Peyton said. He rubbed at his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. “There was some shooting on the lake. Some bloodshed that’ll have to be explained.”
Cassie turned to them from the fireplace. “What happened?”
“We had to deal with the savages is what happened,” John Senior said.
“Mind now,” Peyton said to his father and he looked across at Cassie. “I’ll tell you by and by.” He gestured towards the Indian woman with his chin. He said, “Is that water hot enough yet to wash this one up?”
Investigations
1819
SEVEN
The courtroom was high-ceilinged and cold, despite the fair weather and the forty spectators crammed into the tiny public gallery near the entrance. There was a simple table at the front that the presiding judge sat behind and a row of chairs along one wall for the jurors, a long polished rail in front of them. Most everyone in the room wore their dark coats during the proceedings, and when the jury left to begin its deliberations, people wandered outside to smoke and walk in the watery sunlight of late May.
Peyton had come alone to St. John’s on a packet boat, refusing his father’s offer to accompany him. He alone had been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury and there was no need, he said, to complicate matters by having his father or anyone else from the expedition there to testify as well. On his second night in town, the governor met him at the London Tavern which had risen from the ashes of the 1817 fires. “An unfortunate business, all this,” Hamilton said. “But mostly a formality.” He had a full head of silver hair, a highly formal manner that came naturally to him and that most people found appealing as a result. He talked with his hands folded beneath his chin. “You understand I had no choice but to take this route.”
Peyton nodded. “Did you bring the letter I sent Your Worship?”
The governor reached into a pocket to retrieve it. He smiled across at the younger man. “I think this should be sufficient for the court’s inquiries. Now as to the Indian woman in your care.”
“We are at your disposal in that regard.” Peyton scanned the pages briefly, as if trying to identify the handwriting. “Our housekeeper has been teaching her to speak and she should be a serviceable translator by the next freeze-up if you choose to send an expedition inland to the lake.”
Hamilton frowned briefly. “Would the matter at hand be of any concern in such an undertaking?”
“I’m not sure I follow you, sir.”
“A man was killed,” Hamilton said. “Perhaps returning with the woman would simply make matters worse.”
Peyton said, “We’ll have our treatment of the woman in hand to speak for us by then.”
“Fair enough,” Hamilton said smiling. “A discussion for another day perhaps. What about the meantime?”
“We would maintain her at our place on Burnt Island if that meets with your approval.”
“Of course,” Hamilton said. “Now on to other business. My predecessor, Governor Pickmore, was intending you should become a Justice of the Peace on the northeast shore.”
“I’d been made aware of some such possibility.”
Hamilton said, “As soon as this matter is cleared up, we will make it official.” He raised his glass from the table. “Shall we drink to that?”