When he was called to the witness stand the following morning, Peyton asked the court’s permission to read into evidence the letter he’d sent to Governor Hamilton the first week of April. “‘I beg leave to lay before Your Excellency,’” he began. He coughed into his fist. “‘I beg leave to lay before Your Excellency the circumstances surrounding a recent expedition undertaken by my father and myself and six of our men into the heart of Red Indian country, after obtaining Your Excellency’s permission to follow property lost to thievery. We left from our house on March 1, 1819, with a most anxious desire, as stated to Your Excellency, to lay hold of some of the Red Indians and through them open a friendly communication with the rest of the tribe. In this spirit, everyone was ordered by me not on any account to commence hostilities without my positive orders.
“‘On the sixth of March, having made the Indian’s lake and cresting a point of land, I discovered one Indian coming towards us and three more walking in the opposite direction. I could not as yet determine whether the Indian approaching was male or female. I showed myself on the point openly and when the Indian discovered me she screamed out and ran off. I immediately pursued her but did not gain on her until I removed my rackets and jacket when I came up with her fast, she kept looking back at me over her shoulder. I then dropped my gun on the snow and held up my hands to show I had no gun, and on my pointing to my gun, which was then some distance behind me, she stopped. I did the same and endeavoured to convince her I would not hurt her. I then advanced and gave her my hand, she gave hers to me and to all my party as they came up.
“‘Shortly afterwards, the three Indians I had seen moving in the opposite direction appeared, and two of these men advanced upon us. Having observed something concealed under the cassock of one of these, I ordered one of my men to investigate and he found there a hatchet which he took from the Indian. The two Indians came and took hold of me by the arms, endeavouring to force me away. I cleared myself as well as I could, still having the woman in my hand. The Indian from whom the hatchet was taken attempted to lay hold of three different guns, but without effect. He at last succeeded in laying hold of my father’s gun and tried to wrest it from him. He grabbed my father by the throat, at which point I called for one of my men to strike him. He relented briefly and my father extricated himself and retreated, the Indian still forcing upon him with a savage grin. With no other option I ordered a defence of my father, and several shots followed so close together that I did not know until some time afterwards that more than one gun was fired. The other Indians fled immediately on the fall of the unfortunate one. Could we have intimidated or persuaded him to leave us, we would have been most happy to have spared using violence. Nor should I have held to the original plan, as it was laid out before and granted Your Excellency’s permission, to carry the Indian woman into our midst if we had wantonly put an end to the unfortunate man’s existence.
“‘My object was and still is to endeavour to be on good terms with the Indians for the protection of my property and the rescuing of that tribe of our fellow creatures from the misery and persecution they are exposed to in the interior from the Micmac and on the exterior by Whites.’” He looked up then at the audience assembled at the back of the courtroom. Light slanted into his eyes through the windows and hid their faces. He couldn’t begin to guess what their expressions might be. “‘I have the honour to be,’” he said without looking down at the paper, “‘Your Excellency’s very obedient and humble servant.’”
Hamilton took Peyton across to the governor’s house at Fort Townshend to join him for lunch while the jury deliberated. They ate bread and cold meats and tea in the dining room while Lady Hamilton outlined her plans for establishing a school in St. John’s, as Hamilton warned him she would. The lack of any formal education for the children of the fishermen was abhorrent to her, she said. It was negligent, almost criminal. She hardly touched her food, which helped to disguise how little Peyton himself was able to stomach. “You must eat something, dear,” Hamilton told her. She said the language spoken by the lower orders was nearly incomprehensible, that without education their state was little above that of savages. Hamilton turned to Peyton. He said, “I should have known better than to marry a reformer.”
She was much younger than the governor and not what Peyton would call a plain woman but she was clearly most remarkable for her energy and enthusiasms. He could see that her gestures were carefully corseted, muffled by a cultivated restraint. “Now you, Mr. Peyton, would understand my argument. You have obviously benefited from an education. This was in Poole, was it?”
“Partly,” he told her. “For a number of years I was also under the instruction of a woman employed by my father. She was raised here in St. John’s, a Miss Cassie Jure.”
A brief flicker crossed Lady Hamilton’s face.
Her husband said, “Yes, her father died fighting one of those dreadful fires last year.”
There was a pause. “I’m aware he was a drunkard,” Peyton said then. “It’s not a secret.”
“Of course,” Hamilton said. He and his wife briefly stared into their plates. “A bad business that was,” he said.
“Which, sir?”
He looked up. “The fires, Mr. Peyton.”