The officer seated himself at the plain board table and flipped through his notebook until he’d opened it to a blank page. He was impeccably dressed and his manner was creased and pressed in the same fashion as his uniform. His hair was carefully oiled and combed back from his forehead. Peyton thought it had thinned considerably, and there was a leaner, more severe look about the man than he remembered. He had been promoted since anyone in the household had last seen him. It was only the Indian woman, who had never met the man and whose English consisted of a few words and pidgin phrases, who didn’t find the change awkward and somehow foreboding. Captain David Buchan.
Buchan dipped his pen and tapped it primly at the edge of the inkwell. He stared across the table, as if he was about to sketch them all — John Peyton in the chair opposite, John Senior behind him on the daybed and looking away out the window, Cassie and the Indian woman sitting side by side near the pantry. Mary wore one of Cassie’s muslin dresses and an apron and she held a tied bundle in her lap.
Buchan cleared his throat. He said, “You and your party undertook the unfortunate expedition to Red Indian Lake in March of this year. Is that correct?”
“As I testified in St. John’s, yes, that is correct.”
“There were eight men in your party.”
Peyton nodded a moment and turned to look to his father who was lying back on an elbow. John Senior spoke to Cassie then about starting supper and she and Mary rose from their seats and disappeared into the pantry.
Buchan sat back in his chair and set the pen in the inkwell. He pulled at the hem of his jacket. “I am speaking to you now,” he said, “as a gentleman and a friend.”
Peyton smiled severely. “You are welcome on this floor as always, Captain,” he said. “And if you and your man Rowsell” — he nodded to the corporal who stood handy to Buchan’s chair — “wish to stay to a bit of supper and spend the night, there’s food and a bed for you. But there’s nothing you can write in your little book that will change what happened on that lake, sir. It was told the way I felt it ought to be told when I testified before the grand jury in St. John’s.”
Buchan sighed and templed his fingertips, considering. He reached for the notebook and buttoned it away in a pocket. “Supper,” he said, “would be welcome.” And he motioned Rowsell to take a seat with them at the table.
The men sat to a meal of salt pork with boiled spuds, cabbage, turnip and greens. Their plates were spooned with food and then ladled with the salty liquor from the pot that the meat and vegetables had been boiled in. John Senior took up a mugful of the liquor and sipped at it through his supper. Cassie fussed about the table as they ate and carried empty platters away into the pantry. The Beothuk woman sat at the back of the room, working a square of leather with an awl fashioned from an iron fishing hook. Cassie had tried to teach her to use a needle and thread when she’d first been brought to the house in March, but she’d pushed the materials away impatiently and Peyton had to tell Cassie to leave her be. Her bundle of belongings sat beside her on the floor.
“She’s being employed as a servant,” Buchan said.
Peyton shrugged. “We made an effort to give her a few regular duties in the household, which she did not take kindly to. As long as she isn’t ordered about she seems happy enough to help out.”
“She don’t mind minding our business is what I find,” John Senior said. “And don’t think she’s not listening to us over there. Or that she don’t know we’re talking about her.”
Buchan and the marine peered over the shoulders of their hosts. Mary stared at her work with the blank expression of someone hypnotized by the fluid motion of a fire. There was a clotted undertone to her breathing they could all hear, as if each lungful of air was being filtered through a wet cloth. In the months since the trial, she had begun showing unmistakable signs of a congestive illness.
“She’s into everything not her own besides, and I would keep close account of my materials if I was you,” John Senior went on. “She could sneak a schooner’s anchor off in that bundle she carts around.”
Buchan looked to Peyton who was tapping his fork impatiently against the table. “Has she been stealing from the household?”
“There was the one occasion, yes.”
Cassie interrupted. “It was not thieving as commonly understood, Captain.”
“Uncommon thievery,” the officer said lightly. “I’m intrigued.”
“I missed a bolt of cloth from the cupboard and turned the house upside down looking for it. In the course of these investigations I asked Mary if she had seen it.” Cassie smiled across at the Indian woman. “She is a poor liar.” Mary didn’t look up from the work in her lap. “I went to her room and began looking through her drawers. She followed me up there and was none too pleased with my presumption, but she didn’t try to stop me, only sat on her trunk in the corner and complained.”
“And of course the trunk was the location of the missing material,” Buchan said.
“I had to remove her forcibly from her seat and at that point she began trying to convince me that John Peyton had given her the material, so I called him up to join us, which ended that line of argument. She ran off before we opened the trunk. When we did we found, well, not the bolt of cloth exactly.”