Arundel (8 page)

She was froward, and given to asking impertinent questions and to laughing inaptly at statements of her elders. She also had a vile habit of applauding her own quips with prolonged and hoydenish tittering; so that often I wondered her father had not preferred to leave his scalp and his life in the swamps of Lake George, rather than come home to such a daughter.

She jumped up and down and hugged herself in telling how she had run screaming to the spot where Mary had disappeared, and how she had seen one Indian vanishing through the trees while two others, stationed to guard the escape of the party, rose from bushes on either side of the path, closed in behind him, and vanished also.

The two guards, she said, had painted faces, a green splotch in the center of each cheek, surrounded by an irregular yellow star whose points crossed the eyelids above and ran down onto the neck below, offensively unattractive.

Of the man who had taken Mary she saw nothing, she said, nor of Mary either; so she ran to give the alarm.

I could find no fault with her tale, for she had taken note of what she had seen, which is something that few of our people are able to do. Thus they are ever speaking of armies of Indians when only small bands are on the warpath, and of packs of wolves when any woodsman knows that wolves run in families rather than in packs.

Furthermore, she told only what she had seen, whereas most of our white people wag their tongues in all directions in order to impress their hearers with their knowledge of affairs, all afeared to admit they don’t know, even when they know nothing. Because of this I long ago learned it is wiser to seek information from an Indian or from a black slave, if the exact truth is desired, than to accept it from a white man.

It was Phoebe’s manner of telling her tale that I misliked. It seemed to me she took pleasure in the stealing of Mary, and somehow assumed an air of superior righteousness and importance in being the discoverer of the theft instead of its victim.

My father looked at old Mogg Chabonoke when Phoebe had finished, and when Mogg approved her tale with a nod my father tweaked her hair and told her she was a good girl; whereupon, laughing her shrill laugh and pulling at his thumb so hard that he slapped at her, she danced out of sight around the house.

The sachem told my father there had been eight Indians and the white man in the party. Two guards had been stationed as Phoebe had said, and the stationing of guards was the manner of retreat used by French officers who had fought in Acadia two years previous.

The manner of cheek-painting that Phoebe described, old Mogg said, was peculiar to autumn war parties of St. Francis Indians, who are the Abenakis who live under the protection of the French on the St. Francis River near Quebec; and the arrangement of green and yellow paint on their faces made it possible for them to lie behind a leafy shrub and look full into the eyes of their quarry without being observed, so closely did their painted countenances resemble the colors of the autumn leaves.

“A French officer, he might be,” my father said, “gathering information on the colonies for Vaudreuil in Quebec. A damned spy, belike, striving to stir up dissension, as we saw last night, and too much of an aristocrat to conceal his brain. How will he go back, my friend?”

Old Mogg scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I would go up the Connecticut and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec.”

“You’re growing old, Brother,” my father said. “You’d go up the Connecticut and down the St. Lawrence because the way is easy.”

“I would be carrying a white girl.”

My father shook his head. “Jeffrey Amherst is before Quebec on the west, and that madman Wolfe is still attempting it on the lower side. God knows what they’re doing; but with Wolfe’s fevered brain at work on the siege, they’re up to some wild feat or other.

“This Frenchman is young and strong and full of the devil. Knowing Quebec may be in danger, he’ll go neither around by the back door, through Amherst’s men, nor around to the front door, by sea and up the St. Lawrence through Wolfe’s fleet. He’ll go straight to his goal, I think, by the side door, and damn the obstacles and damn the white girl and damn the Indians. They’ll do the work and he’ll drive ’em, Cousin, by way of the Kennebec. If hell was quicker, he’d go by way of hell.”

“Easier that way than up the Kennebec,” Mogg said. He smiled affectionately at my father.

“Maybe,” my father said, “but am I right?”

“You are a wise man, Steven,” old Mogg said. He turned from my father and touched the shoulder of young Mogg, who was asleep beside me.

Being in distress from thinking of Mary, I took old Mogg by his leggin and asked, in a voice I strove to make casual: “Where will they carry Mary?”

Old Mogg stared at me for the space of time that it took young Mogg to dig the sleep out of his eyes; then shrugged his shoulders.

“Quebec,” he said. His glance flickered over my shoulder. I turned and saw that Phoebe Marvin had come around the house. She was sitting close beside me, looking as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

When he turned away, old Mogg touched my forehead with his forefinger to wish me luck, as did young Mogg; but I was doubtful whether old Mogg was speaking to me or to Phoebe when he added, over his shoulder, “Quebec is good place for girls.”

If he was speaking to Phoebe, I would have had him mention a more distant and unsavory locality than Quebec; for when I rose to join my father I found the brat had made fast my hunting shirt to a nail in the side of the house, leaving me to bob at my moorings like a lobster buoy.

At this she set up one of her shrill cackles of laughter, for which I could have killed her with few qualms, and pretended to busy herself in freeing me, though she worked an unconscionable time at it. She had done at last with her fumbling and cackling, whereat I ran off after my father without a word to her, but loathing her profoundly.

When we reached Mitchell’s garrison house, where four women were milking under the eye of militiamen who had come across the river at the news of Mallinson’s death, Phoebe was waiting for us, having run through the woods to head us off. For a time I ignored her cries of “Stevie! Oh, Stevie!” but at length, thinking she had repented of her spitefulness, I looked up to bid her a neighborly farewell, whereat she leaped up and down with delight and screamed after me: “Stevie likes Mary! Stevie likes Mary!”

At that there was no evil out of hell I wouldn’t have wished on this female monster; but she was not through. “See you in Quebec, Stevie!” she squealed hideously, and once more gave herself applause of heinous laughter. As I padded after my father along the pine-scented path which leads toward the Saco Road and the Indian country to the eastward, I thought how true it was that whenever the Indians captured white children they took only the paragons and passed over the pestiferous creatures who could most easily have been spared.

It was one o’clock in the morning when we came along the Neck and into the town of Falmouth, now called Portland for some mysterious reason. Despite the lateness we were well content, having done thirty miles, in the dark, heavily burdened with muskets and packs, in something over seven hours.

I have done it more quickly since, but I had less on my shoulders and was older. Now that I look back on it, I was as small and wet, then, as a newly born bear cub. I wonder I did it at all until I remember my determination to come up with Mary and take her back to Arundel with me.

My father led me down Queen Street, past Love Lane and Meeting House Lane to Fiddle Lane and thence into Turkey Lane which leads off Fiddle Lane and runs into King Street; and while I gawked at the houses, he pounded on the door at the sign of the Red Cow until Jane Woodbury, its owner, poked her angular face out of the window above our heads, calling, “Who’s there at such an hour?”

“Steven Nason of Arundel,” my father said.

“Law! Why couldn’t you say so?” protested Mistress Woodbury, leaving us to feel we had been at fault in permitting her to ask.

Five minutes later we were tucked into a warm bed and I was listening in drowsy wonderment to the noises of a great town—the cry of the watch, the kicking of a horse against the side of his stall, the footsteps of two people passing on unknown business, the mournful wails of argumentative cats: a tumult that would have kept me long awake in Arundel.

We were up at dawn, and so, too, was Mistress Woodbury, not only to see us fed but to learn our business; for she was a gossip with a reputation to sustain. When my father told her of the killing of Mallinson and the theft of Mary, she made with her tongue a sound like a dog walking rapidly through sticky mud.

“How’ll you find this Frenchman,” she asked, “when you know nothing about him?”

“I think we’ll find him,” my father said grimly.

Mistress Woodbury placed her hands on her fat knees and rolled her eyes upward, as if to find assistance on her eyebrows.

“There came here last night,” she said, “a trader, Britt, just down from the Plymouth Company lands. His speech was full of petrified giant moose, and salmons as big as poplar logs, and sea serpents, and God knows what other Abenaki tales, so I paid mighty little attention to him, knowing he’d spoken to nobody for months except squaws. You know what that does to ’em when they come out to a big town like this!” With her tongue she briefly walked a dog through the mud. “Seems to me, though,” she added, “he had something to say about a Frenchman who struck the Kennebec yesterday with some Northern Abenakis. Maybe I’d better get him down here.”

She sailed upstairs, and her knocks and cries filled the house. She brought back a gangling, sheepish-looking man with a bristly mustache which, when he was in thought, he constantly forced down with his forefinger, caught lightly and almost voluptuously with his outthrust lower teeth, and immediately released, so that it snapped back into place. He pulled up a chair, cut the flaky crust of the apple pie that Mistress Woodbury placed before him, and plunged into his tale.

“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” he said, sucking at his mustache. “I come down from Merrymeeting Bay over the trail last night with two Assagunticooks. There was a moon, and me thinking of nothing, only some good Christian food when I got into Falmouth instead of bear fat and hominy, when a young feller stepped out of the brush into the middle of the trail, not three feet away.”

He looked quickly over his shoulder at the fly-specked wall. Mistress Woodbury walked her dog through the mud. Britt laughed sheepishly, catching his mustache with his lower teeth and releasing it slowly.

“Give me a start!” he said. “Thinks I, it’s Pamola, the evil one that comes in the night, or Pulowech, or one of those men that pop out of rocks, like the Abenakis always talk about.” He bit ferociously at his apple pie.

“Did he have eyes like coals of fire?” my father yawned.

“Hell,” Britt said, flicking pie crumbs from his mustache, “he had something better’n that. He had a watch with diamond initials on it.”

“What were they?” my father demanded.

“Couldn’t see ’em, only the last one. There was two letters; then ‘de S.’ This Pamola the Abenakis talk about: he never carried a watch.”

“No, it probably wasn’t Pamola.”

“Probly not,” Britt agreed. “He was a thin young feller with a pale face and his chin in the air, and kind of a mean way of talking. Had some Abenakis with him. They spoke to my Assagunticooks. French Indians. St. Francis. They had a white girl with ’em. You could have knocked me over with a pine needle!”

“That’s the man,” said my father. “What did he want?”

“News. Nothing but news. He wanted news of a man who’d went up the Kennebec ahead of him.”

“What man?”

Britt didn’t know, and my father couldn’t guess what could lead a Frenchman to appear from nowhere, pursuing a man up the river, toward Wolfe, instead of down the river, away from Wolfe.

“Well,” my father said at length, “it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he’s on the Kennebec. We’ll have news of him at Swan Island or Norridgewock. If we don’t get a crack at him after all this, I’m a Frenchman!”

He began to strap on his pack, as did I. Britt said: “If you ain’t following a trail, you’d best take a whaleboat express from Preble’s Wharf at seven o’clock this morning. One goes across Casco Bay into Maquoit Bay in two hours if the wind’s right. You walk up to Brunswick over the Twelve Rod Road in an hour.”

Grateful for this information, which would save us a day’s tramp over the evil trails northward from Falmouth, we bade farewell to Mistress Woodbury, who waved aside my father’s demand for a reckoning, declaring she would seek payment in kind at our inn when she traveled to Boston for fripperies.