With four children to feed and another expected in the New Year, William Wishart decides he cannot depend on curing salmon to support this family. It’s no secret that William Davidson is amassing a fortune up at the forks with his trade in tall timbers for ship masts. The white pines preferred for such masts flourish all over the lot he and Charlotte live on, and all through the summer he brings them down, strips their bark and loads as many as his boat will carry for sale in Liverpool. He can’t resist bringing home a few things for his new family, though his nature is to salt the proceeds securely away. A cauldron for cooking, a highly prized salamander—the long-handled pan with feet that can sit right over the fire. Cloth and skeins of wool, even shoes for the children and a pair of ladies’ boots for Charlotte that lace halfway up her calf. The first European footwear she’s owned for a decade.
She’d bargained a cow from the Murdochs, as well as a pregnant sow, both now grazing on the partially cleared lot to the west. William has built a proper shed for the goat—rather, goats. Charlotte has also procured a mate for the loyal little milk producer. They are sharing space with chickens and laying hens as well as with Jimmy, who increasingly wants to go with William to the woods and down the river to do what he calls “man’s work.” On the still-disputed marshlands, she has staked a piece that is producing a bountiful crop of hay that she cuts and carries in the dory for the animals.
Evenings are spent patching and sewing their clothes. This night, she takes stock of the family around her while she snips and stitches, patches and darns. The children have been spared the worst of the diseases that have swept down the river, and Charlotte likes to think it is because of the herbal remedies she learned during her first winter in the Indian camp at the bay. Not to mention her obsession with scrubbing the utensils as well as the children with soap and hot water. They’ve had their share of croup and influenza; measles swept through the family one winter. But for the most part, she counts her blessings for the sturdy health of her children.
She keeps Elizabeth by her side when she prepares meals, teaching her how to season the food with the precious spices John Blake brought from the West Indies, to be frugal, how to set the fire for baking, boiling or frying. When Elizabeth asks what the salamander is for, Charlotte decides to teach her how to make a favourite dish from her own childhood.
“When I was a girl your age, Cook used to make a wonderful Welsh rabbit for the family on a Sunday using just such a pan as this.” Charlotte sees from the amazed look on her daughter’s face that the idea of “Cook” is as mythical as the idea of angels and fairy dust. “Come, I’ll show you—it has nothing whatsoever to do with rabbits. It won’t be the same as Cook’s. But we can make do.”
She instructs Elizabeth to carry the salamander to the fire and nestle its legs right into the coals. “It needs to be red hot to make a good rabbit: the feet keep the pan high enough just to clear the flames.” Elizabeth’s next job is to cut the cheese in fine, even pieces so it will melt nicely as Charlotte toasts square-cut chunks of bread over the fire. “It’s a tedious task, but it has to be done right. You must hold it at enough distance from the fire so that it will dry all the way through before turning slightly brown.”
They mix the cheese slivers with egg, some beer from John Blake’s cask and spices. “It cannot be too runny—it must stick to the toast,” Charlotte instructs.
When the toast is ready, they slather the mixture over each piece and slide them onto the salamander. She tells Elizabeth to hold the end of the long handle so that she’ll be a comfortable distance away from the heat. “That’s the good of a salamander,” she says. “You don’t have to have your head over the fire.” Charlotte has tender pride for this nine-year-old child whose temperament is so pleasing. Her curly black hair frames her face and her tawny-coloured skin lights up her big brown eyes as she holds the handle, concentrating intently on her job.
When the Welsh rabbit is ready, the family gathers and Charlotte makes a speech about the chef. “This fine dinner, from an old recipe straight from Cook’s kitchen, was prepared in New Brunswick by the prettiest girl on the Miramichi for the pleasure of William, John, Polly, Robert and Jimmy.”
When the apples are ripe, she promises her daughter, she will show her how to make a dessert that will make her the most famous cook on the river, and Elizabeth blushes. There’s high spirits that night in this house full of children, all of whom are expected to learn, to survive, and take care of one another.
BY SEPTEMBER, Charlotte is distinctly showing, and Janet Murdoch teases her, “Maybe you’ll have two babies this time.” She suffers not the least nausea, the skin on her face is glowing and her hair is thick and shiny. Instead of plaiting it, as most of the women do, she leaves it loose, though sometimes it becomes so tangled and windblown she needs to rub grease through the locks to untie the knots. Her life has taken on a pattern that suits her, not withstanding the land battles she is engaged in with Marston and his crowd.
The birds begin flocking early, and she comments to William that they should expect an early winter. This prospect doesn’t bother her as much as it would have even a year ago. The one benefit of the influx of settlers is that they are less isolated. There is now a store by the shoal that intends to stay open with a stock of winter essentials. Survival is a test she feels better equipped to take.
Then one day the sound of screaming carries on the river, sending all of them rushing to rescue a family whose house has burst into flames. The outcome is devastating. An infant child dead, an entire family burned out.
That night Charlotte takes time to write in her diary:
Tragedy has struck a family who only arrived a few weeks ago. They must have been looking for a new life, instead they lost one. Theirs is the real story of this river. Babies are born, fathers drown, children succumb to the pox, new settlers arrive. The coming and going is like the tide, tenacious, relentless, merciless, sorrowfully predictable in a manner that can wizen your heart.
William says they were likely in some sort of trouble and came here to escape it. Who hasn’t come to this place to escape where they were? I fear for the woman, Rose. Her blurting out the truth like that—that her husband was hiding gunpowder in the cabin—will do her no good with her man. He steered her away from me so quickly, I’m certain he didn’t want her to say anything more. I see her yet, sitting so straight in the boat, the keening sound coming from her was heartbreaking. I wish we could have been able to help them, authors of their own tragedy or not. But there’s no place to gather or to shelter a family in need. We need so much here—a doctor, a school, a church. Rose’s words—“Get me away from this evil place”—still sting, though it was her grief speaking.
This place is hard, yes, but it is spiritual at the same time, surrounded as we are by what was here before we came. The birds find the river every spring, the trees guard the banks winter or summer. The stars light the night sky and the flowers bloom despite the late frost and the driving rain. There is a rhythm of reaping and sowing to this life, a struggle to survive—but taught by the seasons and mindful of the animals that stalk the forest around us, there is abundance here as well as sorrow.
THE NEXT DAY, Charlotte takes Elizabeth with her to visit the Indian camp. They bring what they can—medicines to treat white man’s diseases, knitted mitts and stockings her family can spare. They’re greeted warmly, particularly by the woman who’d given birth to the upside-down baby. Her name is Booktawit, which means ladybird, and she had called her baby Mimegech-k, which means butterfly. Charlotte is about to tell Elizabeth that the name “Wioche” means pouch of skin, the sign of the courier who brings news and medicines, but scruples suddenly about mentioning his name. If she firmly doesn’t think of him, she misses him less.
While the settlers quarrel among themselves and mostly prosper, the People suffer increasing poverty and discontent. They have no immunity to fight the diseases the settlers bring and are dying off in frightful numbers.
Booktawit asks her if it is true that the Indians are going to be corralled into one part of the province, forced to leave the land they have been roaming for thousands of years. She has not heard this rumour, she says, but in her heart she knows it very well might be true. Looking around at the crowded, disorderly camp, she feels a pang of guilt about scheming to get the land for herself and arguing about how white women should have the vote when an entire nation of people are losing all they have known.
The women invite her and her daughter to drink tea by the fire, and for a time they trade stories about children and gossip along the river. The women don’t complain, though it’s clear that many of their men now are more interested in rum than in hunting, alcohol being even more noxious an influence here than in the settlers’ tilts and cabins along the river. “Children go hungry and women cower when the men get crazed with the rum,” Charlotte says, but none of the women do more than nod.
They invite her to examine the pregnant women. She tries to protest but then decides that given the fact there is no one else to help, there is maybe some knowledge she can share. For a time, the ever-attentive Elizabeth takes it all in, her round-bellied mother in intense consultation with a succession of other women in the same condition, then finds girls her age to play with.
On the way home, she asks her mother why the Indians live off by themselves. It’s a question Charlotte doesn’t have a ready answer for.
When they get back to the cabin, William tells her that Robert Reid, the owner of the store by the shoals, has been appointed coroner. “It’s a start,” she says, wondering if a newly named coroner will ask the tough questions about the fatal fire and the matter of the gunpowder.
A FEW DAYS before Christmas, Charlotte is kneading the flour for bread when her water breaks, running down her legs and forming a puddle on the floor. The last two days it felt like the baby had turned to press hard on her spine, and now for a bleak minute she remembers Robert’s difficult birth.
She calls for William, as she stoops to wipe up the floor. “It’s time,” she says and a look of panic fleetingly crosses his features. “By my calculations I’m early,” she says. “I’m hoping our baby is strong enough.” She sends him to fetch Janet Murdoch and asks Elizabeth to help her gather the things she will need—clean linens, a bowl, a knife that she lays in the fire so it will be sterilized and ready to cut the cord. She hides a stash of rum in the bedclothes.
Elizabeth feels like a frightened little girl and a grown-up all at the same time as she tends her mother at Janet’s side. Thankfully the birth is quick and relatively easy. The children and William are still at the supper table when the infant slides into the world. He’s a tiny little morsel with a thatch of black hair and the quizzical look of the newborn. Janet summons the three other children, and William, who stands at his wife’s bedside, slightly in awe, not knowing whether to reach for the child or simply gaze from a distance. “A fine laddie,” he pronounces,
“at least from what I can see.” Charlotte laughs and hands him the swaddled bundle. “William, meet William,” she says.
On Christmas Day, Charlotte leads the family in their annual rendition of “Adeste Fideles” and, holding her new baby in her arms, tells her rapt children the Christmas story. A week later, she marks 1786 on the wall just beneath her inscription of William Wishart’s birth. She allows herself to spare a thought for Wioche—their trip to Frederick Town and back seems as if it exists in a whole other lifetime—and briefly wonders if his voyages this winter will bring him by the cabin. A tiny wail comes from the cradle by her bedside, young William demanding to be fed. And she is once again swept up into all-consuming motherhood, the children playing noisily around her rocking chair.
JIMMY USED TO BE her right-hand man, and he still helps with chores and is like an older brother to the children, but most days now he’s back in the bush, helping William or the other men with the logging. Elizabeth has become the de facto chatelaine of this small house. On a brisk winter afternoon, with all the pomp and flourish a ten-year-old can muster, she announces the arrival of Mr. William Davidson and offers up his new title: “Northumberland County Representative to the General Assembly of New Brunswick.”
Davidson has stopped by to talk to Charlotte and William about his plans for the Miramichi. But first he catches them up on news from his enterprise up past the forks. His land grant had been cut from 100,000 acres to a mere 14,450 acres in June the year before. Davidson says losing it was a blessing. Since establishing lasting ownership is predicated on clearing the land, planting a crop and settling people on it, Davidson says he’s actually relieved to be free of such extensive acreage. He can now concentrate on delivering white pines for ship masts to very eager buyers from England, and work on behalf of the future of the whole region, which needs much effort if all their livelihoods are to be secure.
“The Miramichi is the most forgotten piece of land in the entire new province,” he says. “The hardest life is right here on the river. And we have none of the help that has been given to the other settlements, because we’re out of sight and out of mind. I mean to change that.” The postwar prosperity on the river has attracted drunks, cheats and unscrupulous opportunists as well as hard-working settlers; this is not news, as Davidson well knows. Charlotte and William often sit by their fire at night, lamenting the future. Charlotte still mulls the gunpowder fire, aware that vagabonds are contributing to a new lawlessness despite there being a sheriff and a new coroner. With so many men looking to fill their pockets with profits, even the fishery is in danger of collapse. “They net out the river for fish so some are cut off entirely,” Davidson exclaims. “And they take such a quantity there soon will be no fish at all.”
Charlotte has always had time for Davidson, even when the others were critical of him, and in return he has always liked Charlotte’s spunk. He grins as she rants about everything from the perfidies of Loyalists to the lobbying to strip women of voting rights in future elections. “The Acadians, the Micmac and I are to be left out of the vote,” she complains. “I swear I will be back on that trail to Frederick Town to quarrel about this, even if I have to carry my new baby on my back.”
“You have my vote, Mrs. Wishart,” Davidson says, smiling at her so that his cheeks furrow in tributaries of wrinkles. “But one situation that concerns us all has eased, I am glad to report. The quarrel over who can use the marshland near the forks has been settled for the time being. The lands will be shared among the old settlers.”
William and Charlotte are happily surprised. “I’ve been wondering if these petitions we send have any persuasive power at all,” Charlotte says. “The ones I sign are not acted on. I refused to sign the one about the marshlands, fed up as I am with waiting. And now you tell me the meadow plot I took for myself is mine in law.”
This gives Davidson the opening he needs to raise a delicate matter. He tells them that a petition was sent to Governor Carleton, dated January 13, protesting the old settlers’ use of the marshlands and also claiming that they were usurping all the fishing on the river. The signatories described themselves as the new settlers, and among those whose names were attached were John Murdoch and Charlotte Blake.
“Are you now calling yourself a new settler, Charlotte?”
She is furious. “I did not fix my signature to that petition, Mr. Davidson. Nor did I know of its existence.”
Davidson hushes her. “I can’t imagine you would have, Charlotte, but you need to know how your name is being used in some quarters.”
After he’s gone, Charlotte tries to figure out who would forge her signature on a petition so contrary to her interests.
“I fear we now live with liars and cheats, William.”
He gives her his wariest dark-eyed glance. “Maybe it’s time to leave this place and find somewhere else to settle.”
To leave Blake Brook? Truly that is an option Charlotte has never considered.
IN SPRING, as soon as the trail through the woods is passable, she hikes to the Indian camp with baby William tethered to her back. She hasn’t been there since freeze-up. To her great surprise, she finds Wioche standing by the fire pit at the centre of the camp, as though he has been waiting for her through the four seasons that have separated them. Everyone crowds around to have a look at the boy baby—“ulbadooses,” the women murmur. Charlotte finds she can’t yet lift her eyes to meet his.
“Welain?” he asks.
“Yes, I am well,” she replies and finally meets his glance. After the ritual tea and visit with the women, Wioche suggests they walk with the baby to the river’s edge.
SETTLED ON THE BANK in a grove of scraggy pines, Wioche builds a small fire from sweetgrass and waits for the smoke to billow into smudges. She knows what will happen next and unwraps her little boy from his bunting as they sit in the sun, leaning to kiss his fat little thighs as he kicks. Wioche smiles down at the boy, then leans down to pick him up. He holds an eagle feather aloft in one hand, as he cradles the baby in the crook of his other arm, and begins the chant she knows from the bay, the same one Chief Julian sent up after Elizabeth was born. Wioche calls on the North, the East, the South and West winds, on Mother Earth and the Great Spirit to bless this child. The familiarity of the chant is comforting, but there’s melancholy too, a reminder to Charlotte that the guileless days at the bay are long gone, for the Mi’kmaq, for Wioche and for the young woman who once stayed there and is now a wife, two times over, and a mother of five.
On her way back to the cabin, she’s lost in reverie, the wafts of sweet-grass smoke clinging to William and her own tresses, the sound of the river gurgling in the patches of open ice near the shore. If the Great Spirit is watching over her as well, perhaps the ships arriving come spring will bring with them a response from her father.
WILLIAM HAS BEEN AWAY for an unusually long time. When he returns late one afternoon, she and Elizabeth are carrying supper to the table. She’s glad to see him, and very curious about what he’s been up to. But he shushes her questions. “Let’s eat, my lass, and I’ll tell you all about it after the children are tucked up in their beds.”
True to his word, when everyone but them is safely sleeping, he stokes the fire and settles beside Charlotte in front of the hearth. “There is a place called Tabisintack,” he begins. “I found it by sailing along the north side of the bay on the other side of the shoals and carrying on north where the bay runs into the ocean. You pass a collection of islands and coves that separate Tabisintack from the sea, and you think there are two rivers there, but there is only one. Funnily enough, Charlotte, the Indians call it the Taboosimgeg River, which means ‘two are here.’ It’s an easy shore to land a boat on, and there’s a point of land there that contains great marshlands for farming.” He tells her the sea is teeming with fish, great sturgeons as long as six feet, and on the meadows, geese and ducks flock in such numbers they turn the earth the colour of their feathers. “I’ve never told you this, but I have been there two or three times now. The wind blows softly, low to the land. It’s a fair place, Charlotte, away from the quarrels we know on the Miramichi.”
“I’ve heard of this place, called Taboosimgeg … don’t the Micmac have a camp there?”
“Yes, but there’s no white men there, save for a character named Robert Beck. He once was an Irish marine, who it’s said lives wild like the Indians. A story is told that he once cracked the head of an Indian, killed him on board the Viper.”
“John Blake was on the Viper that day and he recounted that tale to me himself.”
They sit on by the fire, dreaming aloud about what it would be like to settle on their own in such a place and end up discussing the troubles on the Miramichi, so brutally compounded by rum. It’s used as wages for men’s work, to trade, to warm one’s innards in the cold and to bolster bravado. Charlotte wonders if she’s the only woman on the river who has used it to ease birth pains. She has seen plenty of it at the Indian camp. Some men begin to crave it daily; others binge drink, even arriving inebriated at the meetings the settlers hold, making no sense at all when they speak. Fisticuffs are common now, largely due to rum-filled men acting out their anger and frustration.
Such talk leads to mention of one of the new settlers in particular, Philip Hierlihy, who is often in the middle of the fighting. Charlotte has met him at meetings, an abrasive man with intense brown eyes, a permanently furrowed brow and the bearing of a soldier. “He’s not so bad when he hasn’t been drinking,” William says, “but rum does light a flame to him.” Hierlihy is always raging about the unfair treatment that soldiers loyal to England got when they came to the Miramichi after the war. He resents the fact that the old settlers were granted lots with a half-mile frontage on the river, while the likes of Hierlihy have to settle for two-hundred-acre lots with sixty rod of frontage, about half the size. Then there is the issue of the marshlands—supposedly settled. But the new settlers are still determined to get their share of it.
More than two hundred souls are living along the river now. Whether rum-induced or not, the battle for the land is intensifying. Charlotte hopes Davidson was sincere when he said his task as representative was to bring order to the river. And the place called Tabisintack begins to play like music in her mind.
SHE’S IMAGINING the vast marshland and its bordering dark forest the next night as she sits by lamplight sewing. For weeks she’s been cutting and stitching together pants for the boys and William and skirts for the girls and herself. Tonight she snips pieces of embroidered cloth from her worn-out bodices and unravels wool from ragged vests to knit new ones. The children gather around and listen to the stories she tells about what ladies in London wear and how some of them turned up on the river still wearing their fancy clothes. What a sight they made.
“Old Mrs. Cort used to dress in her best silks with beautiful plumed hats and a dainty parasol,” Charlotte recounts. “Then she’d sit herself in a canoe and instruct the Indian man who worked for her family to paddle her out to meet an arriving ship.” The children howl with delight at the image. “Mrs. Murdoch, our neighbour, arrived with velvet gowns, riding habits and plumed hats as well, but she soon learned it was best to leave such fine things in her trunks.”
The children ask her how she used to dress before she came to the Miramichi. “Women were so painted and hidden behind all manner of costume for every occasion, Parliament finally passed a law against vanity,” she tells her avid audience. “They made their skin whiter than white with powdered lead, and put red paint on their lips, and used lampblack to darken their eyelashes. Don’t look at me that way, young Elizabeth. I was only fifteen years old at the time and wore no paint at all. Nanny made me write out the law into my schoolbook. Here, I’ll prove it.” She rises to retrieve the old notebook from her precious stack of reading materials.
“‘All women whatever age, range, profession, whether virgins, maids, or widows,’” she reads aloud, “‘that shall from and after such an Act, impose upon, seduce, betray into matrimony, any of His Majesty’s subjects by scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes, bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and like misdemeanours and that the marriage, upon conviction shall stand null and void.’” The children laugh themselves silly while their usually stern mother prances about the room mimicking the ladies of London, swooshing imaginary hoops.
At bedtime, they beg for another story—their favourite tale—of Gluskap and the Boy in the Birchbark Box. “Tell us about the magic arrow,” John Junior asks pleadingly. Settling them all around her chair by the fire, she begins.
“A long, long time ago, Gluskap found a couple weeping in the woods. He asked what was wrong, and they told him their disobedient son had run away because he didn’t like their rules. He was only twelve winters old, and they didn’t know in which direction he’d gone and were worried sick that he would meet a wild animal or other dangers and be hurt or killed. Taking pity on them, Gluskap drew a magic arrow from his quiver, nocked it to the bow, aimed it skyward and let it fly. He knew that the direction in which it fell would be the way the boy fled. For seven days, he followed the arrow, sending it skyward again and again, until he sensed he was getting close to the missing boy.”
She goes on to recount the wiles of a wicked sorcerer, the moans of a pitiable old crone, the threat of a giant horned serpent and, of course, the rescue by Gluskap. Then it is time for bed. With Robert pretending to be a wicked sorcerer and Polly slithering into bed like a snake, they frighten baby William, who starts howling his little lungs out. It’s another hour before the storyteller finds quiet by the hearth. And then it’s her turn to ask for a story.
“William, tell me more about Tabisintack.”
CHARLOTTE HAS BEEN HOPING in vain that a teacher will come to start a school on the Miramichi. When one does not materialize by the fall, she invites some of the children from nearby lots to join her own four and Jimmy in her makeshift home classroom. The older children copy sonnets and poems onto slates William has fetched from Liverpool. The younger ones learn their letters and numbers. She teaches them mostly by way of story, telling about the history of the river. And Mi’kmaq tales find their way into the mix. “You wouldn’t find words such as bear, moose or Gluskap in my old nanny’s school books,” she quips to her husband. Even in snowstorms the settler children trek to the Wishart place on Blake Brook, and in such a manner the whole family staves off cabin fever that long winter.
In mid-May the next year, William sails away with a heavy load of logs destined for the sawmill started up by Benjamin Stymiest at Bettvin on the other side of the shoals. He likes the man, who came from New York with his wife and five children, chased out by the rebels. He’s one of the few Loyalists William has time for. “He wants to get a grant for his land and he won’t start the mill as a proper business until he’s guaranteed ownership of the lot. But nonetheless he saws wood for many men.” After William drops the load intended for lumber, he plans to take the prized white pines he cut during the winter on to Liverpool to sell to the shipbuilders.
A week goes by and William hasn’t returned. Charlotte finds herself glancing up the river several times a day waiting to see him sail into sight. But there’s no sign of him.
After ten days, she asks out loud, several times an hour, “Where could he be?” And soon she grows angry. “Why does he go off like this without telling me when he’s coming back?” She contemplates a dozen reasons why he might be delayed, and tries them out on Jimmy, who has his own reasons to be upset with William Wishart—he wanted to go with him, not stay back with the women and children. “He’s likely found a business opportunity. Or he’s waiting for a ship to arrive with a special cargo—perhaps a spinning wheel, such as the one John Murdoch brought for Janet. Or maybe he’s met up with his fellows from the Quebec campaign in Liverpool and they’ve lost track of time with their reminiscing. Or maybe he’s gone up again to Tabisintack. What do you think, Jimmy?”
Jimmy doesn’t know what to think, or how to answer his mistress.
When the two-week mark passes, her thoughts turn dark. “He’s fallen sick and is unable to sail. Or maybe he’s just run off, wanting respite from this crowded cabin. Maybe the ship is in need of repair and I worry needlessly.”
She’s relieved when Janet Murdoch asks her to come with her to visit the Indian camp, and on the walk there and back, Janet enumerates all the likely good reasons for the delay.
But when May turns into June, she knows something has gone terribly wrong. The children have become anxious, clinging to her as though tangled in the vibrations that are seeping out of her bones. The entire household has one eye on the river from morning to night. Polly cries in her sleep and comes into bed with her. Elizabeth tiptoes around the house as though a noise might cause them to miss the welcome sound of his return.
It is John Murdoch who finally comes to the cabin. When Charlotte opens the door to find him standing there, the crushing feeling in her chest tells her before he speaks that all the wishing and hoping and praying for the safe return of William Wishart has been for naught.
“I went myself over the shoal to Bettvin,” he begins. “William had been there to the sawmill and dropped off his timber. He was last seen sailing up the north side of the bay toward open water.”
She thinks, “He really was going to Tabisintack.”
Murdoch continues, in his softest voice. “But he did not deliver his pine to Liverpool. For these last many weeks, the boys on the ships have been keeping an eye out for him. There’s been no sign. Charlotte, we can only conclude that William is lost at sea.”
He reaches for her hands, pats them, lets go. “Charlotte, I won’t stop now. You see to the children, and I’ll look in on you tomorrow, with Janet.”
She watches his sturdy back as he strides across the clearing and into the trees. She’s shocked, surely, but didn’t she know this? William was not John, gone wandering for months at a time. Likely he wanted to revisit the place they had been talking about obsessively, to make sure it was a safe place to settle. He was probably going to bring her home some evidence that the fantasy was attainable, and became lost somehow on the way.
She closes her door and goes to sit by the fire. The younger children tug on her hands, trying to haul her up, asking that she go find William herself. The older ones remember all too vividly the last time this happened. She can see it in their faces, the scars of losing their provider for the second time in the space of two years. She gathers them around her and once again promises she will take care of them, that together the family will survive. But in her heart she protests: this can’t be true.
That night, she lies tossing in the dark. Finally she wanders out into the main room and leans to light a taper in the fire. Then she picks up her diary:
Surely we are cursed. I can’t bear thinking about what became of William. Did he struggle? Was it drowning? Did he cling to the remains of his ship hoping for rescue and die of exposure? Did he find the shore only to die of hunger or is he wandering yet? No, I have to believe he would have found his way. I hope it is the distant place of Tabisintack that he was seeking on his fateful journey and that his spirit will abide over the land that he sought.
All around me brothers, fathers and sons go to sea, some never to return. Other men are killed in the felling of a tree, or suffer the mean fate of John Blake, who died for lack of a doctor. And now it is William.
THREE MEN DEAD, twice widowed, Charlotte now has five children, two lots of land and the determination of Job to survive her latest calamity.
William Davidson comes to the cabin as soon as he hears the terrible news. “Aye, Charlotte, ’Tis a trial you live. It’s another husband you’ll be needing and many a man on this river who’d be lucky to have ye.” The thickened brogue brings the commodore to mind; this is the nearest thing to sympathy she has known and as close as a riverman can get to kindness.
But kindness won’t feed her family. The very next day, Charlotte packs her husband’s coins into her pocket and canoes herself up the river to the tilt of John Humphrys to buy Lot Fifty-three from him, assuring herself in such manner that she’ll have enough hay to feed the livestock come winter. Then she goes home to sort out her life as a widow once again.
While people all around her assume that Charlotte is as strong and sensible as she looks—and that since widows with property are a prize possession in the colony, she’ll soon have a new husband—the fact that William’s body hasn’t been found haunts her. And many evenings she walks down to the water to watch for his return, even though she knows he is not coming back.
AT A MEETING later that season called by Marston to try to bring peace between the Miramichi belligerents, Charlotte listens impatiently to Philip Hierlihy complaining again about the size of the lots granted to the old settlers. He’s an annoying bulldog, she reckons, and with a reputation for laying about with his fists while under the influence, so that no one is willing to take him down a peg. The Widow Wishart-once-Blake feels no such compunction and tears into him. “First it’s the entire river you want, Philip Hierlihy, and to be rid of us who were here first, so you puffed-up soldiers can take what you think is owed you. Now it’s the size of your plots that has got you steaming. Why didn’t you go to Antigonish with that brother of yours? You have no hold here. Spare me your British loyalty, your sense of entitlement and your high-handed attitude.”
The other men in the room exchange amused glances while Charlotte upbraids the noisy Hierlihy. The man himself is so astounded he shuts up entirely. He’s never heard a woman talk to anyone like this, much less to a former sergeant in the Prince of Wales American Regiment. Just as Charlotte had heard of him and his ways, he has heard of her, the widow who was the first woman to settle here and who by the age of thirty-two is the mother of five children from three fathers, all dead. He doesn’t really know what he was expecting of “that woman,” but this red-haired beauty with the trim body of a girl and the language of a logger mesmerizes him. Though he fights back, of course. It’s his nature.
“What, you think you deserve these oversized lots on the river and that we should be satisfied with a grant half your size? How will the place prosper if it begins with injustice?”
The reference to justice catches her off guard and for a time she just glares at him. But it is the beginning of a conversation that carries on and off for the rest of the meeting, and indeed, when he says he will see her safely home, all during the trek back to Lot Eight from the meeting point at the marshlands.
“I don’t need a man to be safe,” she replied curtly but walks along the path with him anyway.
He returns to visit the next day, and she invites him for tea. As much as he irritates her, she is always fascinated by the details of a person’s life, the events that influence a man’s behaviour. And soon she finds herself putting the kettle on again and asking for his story.
As she guesses from his accent, he was born in Ireland and immigrated to Middletown, Connecticut, as a youngster with his family in 1753. He says they were descendants of Dermot O’Hurley, the archbishop of Cashel, who was tortured and hanged by the neck in Dublin in 1584 for refusing to embrace the Queen’s religion. Charlotte contemplates the parallels in the lives of William’s and Philip Hierlihy’s ancestors. “Mr. Wishart’s ancestor was martyred by a Scottish Queen for being Protestant,” she says, “and yours was murdered by an English Queen for being Catholic, less than forty years apart. It’s not unlike the turning tides of the Indians, the Acadians, the Loyalists and the old settlers over the last three decades right here in New Brunswick. Longevity seems very much attached to point of view.”
And Hierlihy actually laughs with her, enjoying the interesting twists of her mind, if not the comparison with the family history of her dead husband.
She discovers he’s descended from Milesian Irish Celts who, over time, altered the name O’Hurley to several variations that ultimately became Hierlihy. Their Catholic faith was altered as well. His father, Cornelius, was a lieutenant in the British Regiment when they came to Connecticut, and just two years after arriving in the New World he was killed in a battle with the French not far from this very place. Philip’s older brother, Timothy, became the family patriarch, and when he married a woman from the Church of England, the entire family abandoned the Catholic faith and became Anglicans.
His stories of life in Connecticut paint a picture of a prosperous, thriving colony that dissolved into a violent crucible between those who favoured the King of England and those who wanted to become masters of their own fate. When war became unavoidable, he followed Timothy into battle with the Prince of Wales American Regiment.
He then treats her to some of the most gruesome accounts of battle she has ever heard, as if her attention has released something in him. Hiding in the woods to escape the rebels, some of the men starved, others froze to death, and their lingering cries for help still torment him. When they attacked with muskets and bayonets, sometimes they were unable to strike a killing blow. “The moaning and shrieking, the bleeding and emptying of bowels, the puking and choking—that’s what men did to men. We marched and attacked and retreated and marched again week after week, year after year. The innards of men—friends and foes—stains upon your person and squelching under your boot is a sight that stays with me.”
His hatred for the men who chased his family from their homestead in Connecticut is palpable. And Charlotte begins to understand his festering resentment of the sour welcome he received when he arrived on the Miramichi as a soldier who felt he had saved the land from marauding privateers.
“Your brother is said to have started a settlement in Nova Scotia. Why did you not go with him there?” Charlotte asks.
“Most of the men in the disbanded regiment were granted lots of land near Frederick Town, but my brother knew about this parcel of land in Nova Scotia and asked for the grant especially. I went with him for a time. It’s a good place he has in Antigonish. But a lad I served with, Daniel Menton, knew of this Miramichi River, and said he would lay up logs for a tilt and we would prosper from the fish and the timber. I decided to come with him.”
As he says his goodbyes that evening, having stayed past tea, and through all the preparations for supper, and sat down at the table with her children, she thought, No wonder he’s dangerous with the rum on him. That is one lonely, and wounded, soul.
He doesn’t settle for one visit, but comes the next day and the next and the one after that, till she starts assigning him chores in the garden as she can’t sit still and humour his conversation.
And inside two weeks—though she knows full well that part of her attraction for Hierlihy are the lots that she owns—when he asks her to marry him, she says yes.
In early September, they stand together with Pad’s daughter Elizabeth, John’s children, John, Polly and Robert, and little William Wishart in front of James Horton, Justice of the Quorum for Northumberland County in the newly named Parish of Newcastle, and are duly married according to law.
When they return to the cabin, Charlotte slips the legal document in with her treasured books and marks the date on the wall. Married to Philip Hierlihy, September 11, 1787.
PHILIP’S FIRST TASK as her husband is to build another addition. A bedchamber for the girls is tacked on, making the place look like an old man’s squashed top hat. New beds are built, without mattresses but laden with furs to cushion the boards and warm the children on them.
By October 1787, she is pregnant again, and the New Year is hardly begun when she discovers John Humphrys is claiming ownership of Lot Fifty-three, the very lot she bought from him just seven months earlier. She threatens to harm the man if he doesn’t quit the property, and when he defies her, she sends a memorial to John O’Dell, the provincial secretary in Frederick Town, dated January 7, 1788, demanding retribution.
She capitalizes the words she wishes to emphasize, penning her blunt demand in flourishing letters that make the page look more like a work of art than an accusation. She reads it aloud to Philip before dispatching it. “I shall sign my name as Charlotte Blake since that is the name under which I made the purchase,” she says.
Honourable Sir,
You have Desired me to send a Certificate of what cleared land was on No. 53 South side of the river but the man will not sign it for me as he means to try to get located for it himself after the Selling of it and Giving a Deed which Sir you have in your office which is Drawn by Mr. Ledwiny and Signed by John Wilson Esquire.
Honourable Sir I hope you will see me testifyed in this affair and have me Registrate for said Lot as it seems to me that he have a mind to try to cut me out of it after I buying of and paying for it.
Charlotte Blake
N.B. The man is John Humphrys
She’s still waiting for a reply when the first Hierlihy child arrives in the midst of a howling nor’easter in June. She names him Philip, after his father, who behaves as though this is the first child who has ever been born, despite the evidence to the contrary all around him.
Jimmy, now a strapping young man, announces that he’s leaving them for a job in Frederick Town the same week as Philip gets himself appointed assessor of rates and surveyor of roads for Northumberland County Middle District. Philip makes so much fuss of his new station in life that she feels like she’s barely had a moment to acknowledge that Jimmy is leaving them. The morning he sets off, though, Charlotte makes him a gift of William Wishart’s winter boots, and his great coat. And for a time he hugs her like the colt of a boy he once was.
Soon after, Philip is sworn in by the grand jury in the newly established premises for the Court of General Session up by the forks. Watching him, Charlotte’s pride is somewhat tempered by the fact that he appears to like his new title overmuch, the status it confers more than the duty. She’s been keeping him off the rum, but she can’t deny that his bad temper and brawling style in public threaten the position that is so clearly dear to him.
Barely a year after Philip’s birth, the second Hierlihy child arrives. Eleanor Helene raises the tally to three children under the age of four and five over the age of eight. Philip wears his large family like a badge of honour, the beginnings of his empire.
That same winter William Davidson dies from the effects of exposure after falling through the ice in the river. It’s a painful loss for Charlotte. She trusted him, enjoyed his company and found comfort in the fact that he clearly approved of her nonconformist behaviour. Not so her husband, who has begun to remind her incessantly that she should behave more like the wife of a man with a position in the government.
Although Philip disapproves, she continues to go with Elizabeth, and sometimes Janet Murdoch, to the Indian camp to help the women and children. It’s on the way back from the camp one spring day, with baby Eleanor tied to her mother’s back—Charlotte, a little short of breath as she is pregnant again—that Elizabeth mentions that she wants to stop at Duncan Robertson’s lot to deliver a parcel.
“A parcel of what?” Charlotte wants to know.
She’s taken aback when Elizabeth confesses that she’s made strawberry tarts for the handsome young man on Lot Five, who came to the river after serving with the 42nd Black Watch regiment in the American War. He’d recently been appointed by the government to act as the attorney on the river. Elizabeth’s cheeks turn crimson when her surprised mother asks what such a gift is meant to convey to Duncan Robertson.
Charlotte can’t imagine how the girl has managed to make strawberry tarts without anyone noticing. But remembering the moments she stole with Pad as a girl, she knows that a young couple can and will find a way. And here she thought fifteen-year-old Elizabeth had just been slipping away from the cabin because she wanted a rest from incessant child care. Unlike her rambunctious sister Polly, Elizabeth is shy; she’s sweet with the younger children and is always an adoring daughter. It never occurred to Charlotte that she could be seeking the company of a man.
Elizabeth looks at the ground, shuffles her feet in the pine needles and says in a barely audible voice, “I want to marry Duncan.” Charlotte whirls around to face her so fast, little Eleanor almost swings right out of the sling.
“Marry? You really want to marry this man?”
Charlotte stands on the bank of the river, as still as the trees all around her, confronting her first-born child, the daughter who was conceived in England and born in Nepisiguit and has been by her side for almost sixteen years. Other local girls Elizabeth’s age have become wives, she knows, but she is utterly perplexed that she has missed the cues that her girl was even interested in men. Elizabeth is looking stricken and so guilty that Charlotte, finally, simply has to laugh and give her blessing. She is the last person on Earth to want to stand in the way of love, knowing how short a season it is in bloom.
The day before the nuptials, Charlotte calls her daughter to her bedchamber so they can be alone, and she twists two strands of silver into a bracelet around her delicate wrist.
“This was your father’s. He wore it with the pride of a man who dared to dream of a larger future. I saved these strands for you to wear at your wedding. When you look at them, spare a thought for the father who would have smiled on your sweet face and loved you just as much as I do.”
On September 22, 1791, a very pregnant Charlotte, her husband, Philip, and their brood of seven children travel to Bettvin, known to some as Bay du Vin, to witness the ceremony, performed by James Horton Esquire, now a Justice of the Peace. Charlotte’s heart lurches only a little when he pronounces that “Elizabeth Willisams and Duncan Robertson, both residents of the Parish of Newcastle, are married by law.”
The wall at the back of the cabin is now marked with births, deaths, and the marriage day of her first-born child.