A marine entered the room and stood at attention at the end of the table. “The jury is returning,” he said.
In the days after John Peyton left to testify at the courthouse in St. John’s, Mary stayed as close to Cassie as she could. Mary had looked to the younger Peyton as her protector and advocate in the house since her arrival and she refused to take direction from or spend time alone in the company of anyone but him. He did his best to explain before he left that he would return from St. John’s as quickly as possible, but no one was sure how much of this she understood. She greeted Cassie each morning with the same question. “John Peyton?”
“John Peyton will come home soon,” Cassie told her.
She nodded her head although it was clear from her expression that the word “soon” meant little to her and did nothing to alleviate her anxiety.
For the first time, Mary took on a share of household chores as a way of keeping near to Cassie. It seemed to Cassie she wanted to avoid being alone with John Senior. She left the room when he entered or, if this wasn’t possible, moved off as far as the limits of the room allowed. They repelled one another like the negative poles of two magnets.
As they went about their work together, Cassie made efforts to improve the Indian woman’s grasp of the English language. She would point to objects Mary was unfamiliar with or for which she had yet to learn the English word and repeat the syllables until Mary had mastered them. Boat. Stagehead. Chamber pot. Needle, thread, cloth. Brook. Stars. Moon. Sun. Plate. Tinder. Pillow. Mary was naturally curious and retained the names of everything after the first hearing and she understood simple instructions. But she seemed uninterested or unable to progress much beyond the noun in her own speech, managing only the simplest declarations. “Mary hungry,” she would say. “Mary thirsty.” “Mary tired.” Cassie thought of this as a limitation of the Red Indian mind and language. But there were moments when it seemed a deliberate strategy, a protest of some sort. A refusal to enter their world any further than was necessary for her survival.
Mary had been given her own room in the winter house after she arrived, with John Peyton sleeping in the hired men’s quarters. As far as Cassie could tell, the Indian woman had never used the bed, preferring to lie with a blanket on the wooden floor. She slept late each morning and Cassie would find her curled in a corner when she went in to wake her. Mary wore an old muslin dress given to her by Cassie, but she kept the leather clothes she’d been wearing when she was taken from the lake with her at all times, carrying them around in a cloth bundle, tying it across her back while she worked or sitting it on her lap.
John Senior found this habit of Mary’s particularly trying and he never ceased to complain about it, as if Mary was persisting in it simply to annoy him. On the day of the trial in St. John’s he came up to the house from the shore where he and Richmond and Taylor and Michael Sharpe had spent the morning resurrecting the stagehead and cutting room for the coming season. It was a surprisingly muggy day with the threat of rain in the air. Before he and the hired men had taken their places at the table for their dinner he said, “I can’t stand the smell of that dirty leather she carts around.”
“It would make a fine bit of burning,” Richmond said.
Cassie gave him a look and he seated himself without another word. Mary took herself off into the pantry where she would stay until the men made their way back down to their work.
“The stink of it is enough to ruin my appetite,” John Senior said.
Cassie smiled at him. “In all the years I’ve known you,” she said, “I’ve yet to come across anything that could ruin your appetite.”
The old man stared at her a moment and then shook his head. He turned to Tom Taylor. “The lip on her,” he said. “Why do I put up with it?”
Taylor smiled stupidly, as if to say he could guess why, but modesty wouldn’t permit him to speak it aloud.
“Eat your dinner,” Cassie said.
John Senior said, “I guess they’re all but done in St. John’s by now.”
The three hired men nodded soberly and bent their heads to their plates.
After she had set out all they would need, Cassie left the men to sit with Mary in the pantry. They did not speak or even acknowledge one another at first. Mary’s breathing was short and ragged, as if she had just come in from a long sprint. Sitting this close, Cassie could make out the smoke and old sweat smell of Mary’s clothes that John Senior complained about. It was something she would forever afterwards associate with fear. When the rain began a few minutes later, striking at the single pane of glass, Cassie pointed out the tiny window. “Rain,” she said.
Mary nodded but said nothing. A long, low rumble of thunder carried across the bay.
“Thunder,” Cassie said.
Mary looked at her. She had a tortured expression on her face and seemed to want to ask a question of Cassie. She said, “Baroodisick.”