Arundel (52 page)

He moved his shoulders, as if loosening them in his clothes. “I see no good reason why I should close my ears to the things Treeworgy told me, or open them to every windy utterance of yours. And if it’s of interest to you, I can tell you Treeworgy was of service to me long before this expedition started! He’s no new acquaintance!”

“Sir,” I repeated, my thoughts moving slowly in a circle, like a rabbit before a hound, “Treeworgy’s a liar. He’s a liar! Bring us together and see whether he makes these charges.” Even as I said it I had the sickening feeling that Treeworgy, with his sour, pious face, would lie about me more convincingly than I could tell the truth about myself.

“I sent Treeworgy across to the St. Francis River, and down it, to carry a message to General Schuyler,” Arnold snapped. “If I hadn’t, I’d not trouble to question what he tells me about your treachery where Natanis is concerned. You admit it’s the truth!”

“Sir,” I said, “it’s
not
treachery! Natanis is no spy. He’ll spend his life in our cause as readily as any man!”

Arnold shook his head, and there was, it seemed to me, a pitying look on his face. “Can’t you see you’re either an idiot or a bought spy to persist in such statements? He admits himself he’s a spy, because he said so to Conkey. Treeworgy knows it, and my advices from Quebec have said it.” He shook his clenched fist at me with an air of finality. “Treeworgy must have been right about this, as he was right about the rest of it. You must have taken money, and you must be a spy!”

“Sir, for God’s sake!” I said. “I tell you I’m no such thing, but willing to go anywhere and do anything under your command. It’s a terrible black lie! Even if Treeworgy should run for shelter into heaven and hide himself under God’s footstool, I’ll hunt him out and kill him for the spy and snake he is!”

Arnold stared at me curiously. “Under God’s footstool! Why, there’s another true thing Treeworgy said. He said I’d get no satisfaction if I confronted you with this, only violent words and blasphemy.”

“Did he say ‘blasphemy’?” I asked, raging inwardly because my words and thoughts were dammed up in my head, with only small and useless things breaking loose.

“‘Coward, spy, and blasphemer’ was what he called you.”

“Hook!” I exclaimed. “I knew he was Hook!”

“Hook or no Hook, he made no mistakes about you!”

“I tell you he lied!” I said. “I’m no more a spy than Steele is, or Morgan, or you yourself!”

Arnold’s face was terrible, black and lumpy. He walked the earthen floor of the cabin like a caged wolf, sliding bitter looks at me as he walked. “Nason,” he said, “I’d like to believe you; but this Natanis business is more than I can stomach. There’s a chance you may be honest according to your lights. In your heart you may not be guilty. I’m not sure about you, and so I sha’n’t have you shot. Yet I’m sure of this: I have an army in my care. That being so, I take no further chances with you. You’re done and finished!”

I scarce heard what he said for the welter of thoughts in my head—thoughts that had to do, most of them, with Mary Mallinson. Little pictures rose in my mind, like wavelets in a cove on a rising tide, each lapping over the other until my mind was full of pictures: of Mary on her knees before me; of the last look she had given me as she vanished into the forest; of our pursuit of her; of Guerlac’s braves rising and falling as they drove their canoe toward my watery hiding place; of Natanis, sick on his bed of spruce tips, telling me how Mary’s dress was made of scraps of blankets; of the two Frenchmen in their plum-colored coats smiling at Phoebe Marvin and telling me of the White Lily that had returned from France as Marie de Sabrevois; of Arnold’s visit to the convent, and the slender, gray-clad girl he had found there. I thought of the times I had been on the verge of setting out to bring her back to Arundel; and here was the end of it—the end of it! Accused, in a dirty hut in the wilderness, of aiding a spy and being a spy myself.

“I’ll have you with us no longer,” Arnold went on, his face as hard as a rock in the firelight. “And don’t think, when I leave at dawn to get food for the others, that you can join them. I’ll send back word so they’ll know what you’ve done. Go on into the forests with this red spy, Natanis, and see what he can do for you—provided he’s able to dodge the bullets of the riflemen!”

He glared at me. As I stared silently back at him there was a clinking in the pile of baggage behind him. He whirled to look; then went and prodded at it. Seeing nothing, he brushed by me, threw up the blanket over the doorway, and motioned me out. He looked behind the wigwam, and I heard him call for Oswald; so I moved back toward the heavy undergrowth, feeling gone inside, not from hunger, though I had eaten nothing but a flour cake since morning, but from despair.

I had no heart to brave the stares of Church and Steele and Oswald again, or risk words with them so long as they took me for a spy; yet Hobomok lay offshore, still, in our canoe. Nor did I know how I could reach Natanis; though I knew I must try, for the night was black and bitter cold, and ice was forming where there was water.

While I stood and pondered and took my bearings from the stars, I felt a body near me: a breath or a silent movement, something living. When I crouched and faced it I heard a voice I knew, a rough, coarse whisper, saying: “Stevie! All right, Stevie! It’s me!”

“Cap!” I said. I went deeper into the brush and got him by the shoulders.

I felt his hard barrel of a chest and his stubbly beard and his huge upper arms, muscled like a horse’s thigh, and sniffed at the reek of perspiration mixed with the buckskin smell of his shirt. He had his pack with him, and his musket, though I gave no thought to this strange circumstance at the time.

“Thank God it’s you, Cap! I never needed a friend the way I do now.” I must have been sick, because my eyes were wet, and I felt weak, the way I’ve sometimes felt when my dory barely rises to a breaker over the ledges.

“You big damned fool,” Cap said, clapping me on the back, “you certainly went and done it!”

“Cap, I swear I’m not what he said!”

Cap growled and dragged me deeper into the thicket. The smell of pine was soft in my nostrils.

“It was all a pack of lies, Cap! They hit me like a sledge-hammer, they came so quick.”

“Gosh all hemlock!” Cap whispered hoarsely, “why didn’t you speak up to him, then, instead of yawping around like an old nanny goat, just bawing and not getting nowhere? Hell, he gave you a chance to talk! Anybody that gets a chance to talk ought to be able to wiggle out of anything!”

“Where were you?” I asked.

“I was around, but that ain’t neither here nor there! What gets me is why you went and did something that got him sore as hell. Why didn’t you let that misbegotten Natanis alone?”

He stopped suddenly and looked over his shoulder. Both of us held our breaths to listen, turning our heads and looking sideways, so to see better in the gloom.

“Anyone here?” I asked.

“Natawammet!” said a familiar voice close beside us.

My heart grew measurably lighter. “Where did you come from?”

“I built this cabin,” he said. “Paul Higgins left me here to watch. I’ve been here five days.”

“Where’s Paul?”

“To the west of the high meadow at the head of Seven Mile Stream.”

“Listen, Natawammet,” I said. “I’ve been put out of the army in disgrace because a bad man spoke lies about me. You knew him—Hook, the holy man, who wished your tribe to worship his God.”

“I remember,” Natawammet said.

“When you see him, kill him. Because of him they say I’m a spy, and Natanis too.

“Now listen to me, Natawammet. Natanis is a mile below here, where we landed at dusk. Hobomok sits in a canoe before the cabin. Can you lead me a mile along the shore, in this darkness, and find some way of sending Hobomok down as well?”

“We’ll go above the camp and call him,” Natawammet said. “There’s good land there.”

“Cap,” I said, “I’ll leave you. Tell the others I’m not what Arnold thinks. I hope some day they’ll know it.”

“They’ll find it out, Stevie,” said Cap reassuringly. “Go ahead. I’ll go along with you a ways.”

“You’ll get lost.”

“No,” Cap said, “I guess I’ll stay along with you.”

“You can’t do that! It’s desertion.”

“No,” Cap said, “it’s getting lost. Anyway, it just came to me I can’t go back.”

“Why not, for God’s sake?”

“I just remembered,” Cap whispered hoarsely. “They’ll find my footprints in the snow, where I listened.”

“What of it?”

“Well,” Cap said, “while the colonel was busy with you I got to feeling under the edges of the cabin, and I came across a couple of bottles in one of the bags.”

Natawammet stopped us and went forward to the edge of the lake. We heard his signals to Hobomok: an irregular succession of the squashy squawks of a night heron.

“What was in the bottles?” I asked.

There was a thump and a sound of breaking glass, followed by a faint gurgling noise. The gurgling stopped, and Cap exhaled gaspingly.

“Brandy! I was afraid it was ink!”

He pushed the bottle into my hands. I tilted back my head and poured my mouth as full as I could without touching the broken neck. It was not only brandy, but good brandy: the first drink I had swallowed since leaving Fort Western.

“We don’t want to give none of that to Indians,” Cap said, taking the bottle from me. “They don’t know how to handle the stuff.” Again the bottle gurgled melodiously and, it seemed to me, interminably. At length it was put back in my hands. “Finish it up,” Cap said with a racking hiccup.

A canoe grated on the shore and Natawammet returned to us. I could hear him sniffing, though he had no need to sniff. I have no doubt our breaths could be smelled halfway to Quebec. I explained as well as I could, because of my hiccuping, that Cap had given me medical treatment. We paddled out around the camp, putting inshore where we had left Natanis.

We found him waiting by a small fire. This we recklessly made large, in the white man’s way, pooling our few remaining provisions, so to fend off the cold as best we might. Cap pooled his second bottle of brandy along with our flour and the trouts Natanis had caught. “When you divide a bottle of brandy into five parts,” he declared mournfully, “there ain’t enough to hurt a pee-wit, let alone an Indian.”

We sucked at the sumach leaves in Hobomok’s pipe, and I told Natanis how we had been branded as spies and how I had been thrown out of the army.

Natanis covered his nose with his blanket and studied for a time. “That’s bad,” he said at length, “but it might be worse. We are none of us sick or wounded. We can go now to Quebec if you wish it, arriving before the white chief Arnold.”

“And what’ll we do when we get there?” I asked. “Join the British in Quebec, as Arnold thinks we mean to do?”

“We could join ’em for a time,” Cap said, “until we get rested up. Gosh almighty, Stevie, it seems as if I hadn’t slept warm enough or long enough since the year of the earthquake!”

“No,” I said, “I must stay with this army, and that’s where you stay, too, so you won’t get fat and die young.”

“Well,” Cap said, seemingly resigned to his fate, “anything’s better than working for Church and Steele. Those two men are hellions! When we started chopping, Steele said that if anyone lost his axe he’d have to chew down the trees with his teeth.”

He grumbled and growled to himself while I spoke further with Natanis.

“Will the army have trouble in marching, now it has crossed the Height of Land?” I asked.

“Much trouble,” he said. “In all the marches they have had and will have, there is nothing so terrible as the swamps below the meadow we passed to-day, the meadow that was the birthplace of the great lord Glooskap.”

“Then we must go back to the meadow and do what we can to help them. Why are the swamps above the lake so terrible?”

Natanis gathered his meager possessions. “There is no time for talk. Paul Higgins is watching the army, and to-morrow it may start to come down out of the meadow. We must find Paul and hold a council, and to do this we must paddle to Seven Mile Stream and up it, to-night, until we come to dry land. Then to-morrow we can get to Paul before he escapes us.”

Cap and I rolled our blankets. “Here is another thing,” Natanis said. “To-morrow morning, you have said, the white chief Arnold leaves the bark house to go down the Chaudière. This bark house we built for men lost in the swamps. Therefore we must leave Cap and Natawammet here. When the white chief and his men have left in the morning the two of them must go to the wigwam and keep a fire both day and night, so that those in the bogs may see either the smoke or the fire. Cap can keep the fire and Natawammet can stock the cabin with food.”