Returning along the edge of the icepack towards Greenland, the two ships sailed into a gale. Buchan was tipped out of his bunk by the extreme pitch and roll. He dressed and clawed his way onto the bridge. The storm was so furious they had no choice but to run before it into the Arctic ice. “The impact,” Buchan said. He slapped a fist into the open palm of the opposite hand. “Every man was taken off his feet, the timbers roaring. I don’t know what kept the masts from snapping at the base.” He used his forearm to demonstrate the severe angle they had somehow recovered from. “The ship’s bell tolling in the wind after we’d been brought up solid.” He shook his head. “I made my peace with God,” he said. “Rather quickly,” he added.
Before the laughter died away Cassie rose and took her leave of the men and went to her bed. She lay awake listening to the murmur of surf drifting in through the open window and the louder tide of talk from the kitchen. She waited until she heard the scrape of chairs and the men dispersing to their rooms, John Senior going out the door with Rowsell to a bed in the hired men’s quarters, insisting Buchan sleep in his room. She waited longer still, until the tide had almost turned and the sound of one furtive set of footsteps descended the stairs above her. They sounded, she thought, like the steps of a man come to steal away valuables, to lift jewellery, silverware, hidden caches of sterling coins.
She found him sitting on the daybed beside the fireplace. He’d lit a single candle and the acrid smell of the wick hung in the air.
“No need for a fire tonight, I suppose,” she said.
“I wasn’t sure you would join me.”
“Nor was I, truth be told.”
Buchan nodded and took a breath. “To be honest, I would have felt some relief if you had not.”
She watched him a moment and then turned to go back to her room.
“No, please,” he said and he rose to get a chair and set it in front of himself, motioning for her to sit.
They stared a while. Cassie was forty-one years old and Buchan had seen that age in her face earlier in the day — crow’s feet fanning at the corners of her eyes, a tautness gone from the skin of her neck. In the near dark of the single candle those changes were imperceptible, but there was a more fundamental difference he could sense, something in her manner that had altered. The subtle disregard for station that could be mistaken for arrogance was still with her, but the ease of it was gone. There had always been an air of caution about her, though when he first met Cassie it was furtive, subterranean. It had come to the surface now, as if she was too exhausted to camouflage it any longer. The woman sitting before him had the intense, diffuse look of a person in the midst of a lengthy fast.
Cassie crossed her legs and shifted her nightdress on her thighs. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “Don’t you think we ought to have something to say to one another?”
For the second time that evening Buchan felt himself blush.
The first time the sound of the officer’s movement on the stairs had broken Cassie’s sleep was in October of 1810. The front door pushed roughly open and closed, the house giving a brief audible sigh as the plug of wind rushed in. She’d looked through the frosted pane of her window, but there was no sign of morning in the sky. She wondered if Buchan had for some reason gone to look in on his marines who were sleeping in makeshift bunks in an outbuilding used by hired men. Under the flapping sheets of wind there was the tortured barking sound of someone vomiting into the snow outside her window. She got out of bed and went to the kitchen to stoke up a fire to make tea to settle his stomach. “I was lying awake anyway,” she told him.
The harsh weather continued into the next day and kept Buchan at the winter house a second day and night. That morning, he ’d sat across from her with his hands in his lap, listening as if he expected her to tell her life story. As if he’d paid to be entertained. She didn’t fully understand what came over her to have leaned forward and lifted her dress, to show him the scar on her leg. He was a stranger to everyone on the northeast shore. He was a stranger to her and his transience meant he would remain so, whatever she told him of herself. “There’s no sense in standing on ceremony from here,” he had said. She chattered away to him like wind in the chimney.
And he went to the kitchen again that night, having crept down the stairs an hour after he and John Senior went to their beds. She pulled the shawl around her shoulders and walked out into the hall, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He was sitting on the daybed, a fire already burning. He was dressed a little more formally than he’d been the night before.
“Are you feeling all right, Lieutenant?”
He smiled up at her. “Perfectly all right, thank you,” he said. “I poured.”
“Is it tea you’re wanting, Mr. Buchan?” she asked him.
“If that’s what’s on offer,” he said softly.
Cassie looked at him a long moment and then went to the fireplace, lifting the kettle onto the crane over the heat. “You mustn’t think much of me, Lieutenant, is all’s I can say.”