“Sometimes on a warm summer's night when all hands'd be abed, Ned and me'd go out around the point in boat. Just easin' in near the shoals, everythin' still and the moon shinin' on the water. Sometimes he'd tell me things. Sometimes he'd sing—sea songs and old rhymes he learned in the streets when he were a boy. Had a nice voice Ned did.…” The old woman rocks and smiles, “Vinnie used ta say Ned were a fair miracle. He were that—a fair miracle!”
Thinking Nan is going to cry, Rachel reaches out and takes her hand. “After you was married I s'pose ye got to be friends, you and great-grandfather's sister?”
“That we didn't! For all they got more easy with me after I married, there wasn't one woman in the place I'da gone to for anythin'. After I started makin' up cures I found the difference. Wasn't something I looked to do, just come to me. Had a knack for mixin' up tonics, poultices for snow blindness and salve to cure sore hands—anythin' like that. 'Tis in the blood—you got it, too,” Mary tells her great-granddaughter.
Over the years, tales of the old woman's healing skills have become legends along the shore. Rachel has heard of the time Mary sewed Young Joe Vincent's finger back on, of the many women Mary nursed through difficult births, of how her Nan can put away warts, cure scurvy, stop bleeding. The young woman has noted that there is more awe than love in these stories—which often end with a recounting of Mary's monumental rages, of her ambition and acquisitiveness.
“My mother never was a woman you'd cuddle up to,” Rachel has heard her Aunt Tessa say, and she wonders if anyone but Ned ever loved Mary.
“Bit by bit the women got used to me—but I can't say they got close ta me—not even Vinnie. No, maid, Vinnie'n me never got ta be friends, not 'til long years after. The truth is all hands thought I were greedy—covetous, Meg used to call it. Seemingly every trouble in the world started with greed and covetousness—accordin' to Meg 'twas what sent the devil down to hell. I s'pects me and him'd make a grand pair—seems to me, though, 'tis only natural to want stuff.”
“Take that summer Frank Norris come to the Cape and started buildin' his house. I know now I weren't the only one envious! Green we was, all of us!”
“Frank had coloured glass put in the front door and proper stairs built, had everythin' moved in before his wife and young Rose set foot in the place. Set the rooms out just so—rockers and chairs, lamps made out of glass and everythin' accordin' to.”
“I can see us now, me and Meg and Sarah, helpin', the day Frank papered them bedroom walls, lovely stuff with roses all over. If I coulda' got that house by pushin' Frank Norris off the wharf I'da done it in a minute, hell or no hell.”
“In the end 'twas all for nothin'. Never a peaceful night did he have in that house. His wife Ida turned out to be crazy as a loon—let goats in downstairs, locked herself upstairs, screeched and bawled and scraped paper off the walls 'til her fingernails bled. Years after, when she died, they burnt the place down—only thing to do. Young Rose Norris kept the four little squares of glass, two red and two blue. When she married Meg's Willie they built on the very same spot and that glass is the same what's in their door to this day.”
“Apart from Ned there was only one person I could pass the time of day with. 'Twarn't nobody you'd guess. None of them ever guessed either!” Mary Bundle cackled as if she had played a wonderful trick on the people who had treated her so coolly.
“You can mark this down—'tis nothing Vinnie woulda knowed about,” she says, considering how best to begin.
Mary admitted that the Vincents had done more for her than anyone else. It was Sarah who had taken her and Fanny in when Thomas Hutchings wanted nothing to do with them, and it was Sarah who had first showed her how to make cures out of weeds and roots.
Josh and Sarah Vincent were good people, but Mary maintained there was something strange about the way they treated their middle son, Peter.
“Sarah was always talkin' about changelings and I wondered sometimes if Peter wasn't one of them. Different as night and day from the rest of the Vincents. People didn't take to Peter. He were about nine or ten when I come and I remembers noticin' how Sarah'd always be after him for somethin' he done—or didn't do. Scowlin' little bugger and fidgety as a blue-assed fly. Never settled. One minute he'd be there, gone the next—right in the middle of eatin' or doin' some job. Say all hands be hove to haulin' up a boat or nailin' down a roof—halfway through the job Peter'd vanish.”
Josh and Sarah had four children. Charlie, the youngest and the first baby born on Cape Random, was sickly. More sooky than sickly, Mary said. “Spoiled by all hands just like his grandson nuisance-face,” she tells Rachel.
Even Lavinia, when she started teaching the children, favoured Charlie. It was no wonder the boy learned to read so fast, much faster than Ned and Mary's three sons—Lavinia spent more time with Charlie than with all her other students put together.
Young Joe, the oldest Vincent boy, was the face and eyes of his father. Joe had stowed away aboard the
Tern
, given Sarah a year of misery and she never said a cross word to him after. He came home, went fishing with Josh, and a few years later settled down with Meg and Ben's daughter Lizzie.
Annie, the Vincent daughter, was what they called a “home girl.” Good around the house and never seen outdoors without someone's baby on her hip. After her father died, Annie surprised everyone by going on the water with Young Joe. And Sarah never said one word against it, although it should have been Peter who got the place in his father's boat. Dressed in oilskins, Annie had, and fished with her brother for years and years—until Ida Norris died. The day after the mad woman died, Annie Vincent put on a dress and married Frank Norris.
After the great row on the day he chopped Young Joe's finger off, Peter became more and more aloof. The ugly bite the dog had made on his cheek did not help. When the youngsters teased him about the purple mark he began going off by himself. While he was still a boy he would go in the country, travel for weeks with a few cakes of hard tack, a piece of canvas and Thomas Hutchings' old gun.
“Many's the winter 'twas fresh meat Peter brought home kept us from perishin'. He'd be gone for a month—sometimes more—then one day he'd open your door and toss in a leg of caribou, a brace of rabbits, a wild duck or goose. No matter to Sarah—she still favoured t'other three.”
“When every mortal soul in the place knew Annie was sleepin' with Frank Norris—who had a wife, mad as a hatter but alive as you or me—Sarah would still be tormentin' Peter, prayin' for him to join the church like Annie, naggin' at him to cut his hair like Young Joe or learn to read as good as Charlie. And she were forever after him to tell her when he was comin' and goin'. I never done that with mine—never made chalk of one and cheese of t'other,” says Mary who has long since forgotten how little attention, good or bad, she bestowed upon her children.
Through all these years Mary had hardly spoken to Peter Vincent. He was just a boy—one of the crowd that tagged after Lavinia Andrews—and Mary was a woman. Sometimes, when she was out searching the countryside for an ingredient to use in her cures, Mary would see him. They would nod to each other, no more, then go silently about their business. Until one day, years after the finger chopping incident, when she found Peter in the woods with a deep cut in his leg.
It was the same year he started building a house. Without telling anyone his plans, all alone, the young man cobbled together some kind of foundation and uprights on the hill overlooking the Cape, an odd, mysterious structure looking as if it would be one room wide and three high—if he ever decided to add walls and a roof. Peter was a young man by then but he had no sweetheart, so everyone wondered why he was building a house. Or maybe it was a lighthouse or a lookout of some kind, or just a place to get away from his family.
“Ever notice how people only asks questions about things they knows? Seems to me when people don't have one blessed idea about a thing, they're afraid of what they might find out. That's how it were with Peter Vincent's house. Anyone else'd be harrished with questions 'bout them big tall posts stuck up against the sky—but no one said a word to Peter—apart from Sarah, and I doubts even she ever come right out and asked. No one offered to help him either, for all everyone helped his brother Joe when he'n Lizzie built their house.”
The day Mary got to know Peter Vincent, his foot had gone down into a boghole and a pointed branch had scraped a deep cut up his leg. Mary told him to go on home and get the cut cleaned before it got infected but he shook his head. He had only just started out and wasn't going back until he'd made it around his six mile circuit, checking traps and rebaiting them with bits of seal meat. “Got somethin' to tie it up with?” he asked.
Mary squatted down, rooted in her gunny-sack. She, too, had just started out so there was not much to choose from. She poured lukewarm tea over the cut and stopped the bleeding with moss.
“I knows one or two things about you, Mary Bundle,” Peter said quietly.
Mary was wrapping his leg in a bit of cloth ripped from her petticoat. She kept her face down, took her time knotting the ends of cotton carefully together, and hoped he could not tell how afraid she was.
For years she had expected this. Every spring when ships started to come in to the Cape the same chilling thought had whispered through Mary's head—someday, someone will walk off some vessel demanding that she go back to face those magistrates Tim Toop had said were looking for her. A thousand times she had imagined Ned's face as he watched her being dragged away. She would be taken to St. John's, thrown in jail, whipped perhaps—the very thought made her sick—or transported back to England.
The fear had not disappeared but in later years it had grown dim. Her new name, the births of her children, the circle of people who knew her, whom she knew, the work, and most of all, life with Ned, had made her feel safe.
“More fool me,” she thought as she yanked at the strip of dingy cloth. “Must be soft, thinkin' there's a safe place for the likes of me.”
Mary decided she would not say a word. Would not give Peter anything to hold over her. She rocked back on her haunches, looked the bearded young man in the eye and waited to hear what he wanted in exchange for silence.
“Know a feller by the name of Matt Escott?” Peter asked.
Mary did not move. The two stared at each other, so still that from a distance you would have thought they were wild animals hunkering there among the brown, fall brush.
“Ever hear tell of somethin' they calls surrogate court?”
She stayed silent and after a few minutes he began to talk. “A month or so ago, around late August, I were up by the Red Hills in back of Pond Island and I had a mind ta go down and spend the night with some of Pap's people. Uncle Ezra Vincent maybe, or one of the cousins,” Peter said.
“But I never got to Pond Island. I dodged down, in no hurry, goin' along nice and easy, keepin' me eye out for the odd bird or rabbit. I was right down handy to the gardens when I come upon this stranger sittin' on top of an old cellar. Looking out over the place, he was. Seemed I shoulda knowed him. But I couldn't put a name to him 'till he told me he'd been in Cape Random plenty of times—sailed for years on Gosse vessels under Captain Brennan,” Peter paused in his singsong recital and studied Mary.
“Said his name was Matt Escott—asked if I knowed a Mary Bundle. When I asks what Mary Bundle was to him that he should be askin' after her, he just smiles, cocksure of hisself, and points off to this friggin' big man-o-war hove to, way off shore. ‘See her?’ he says. And 'course I did—pretty hard to miss. So I nods and he tells me she's the H.M.S.
Valiant
—the Governor's very own flagship.”
“Think o' dat!' Escott says, tryin' to impress me—and I thinks about it. Still do. Some English shagger havin' a great bloody flagship ta tout about in while us people barely keeps body and soul together.”
Peter paused, shook his head and pulled a plug of tobacco out of his pocket. He cut a lump, popped it into his mouth and held the tobacco and knife out to Mary as if she were a man. When she shook her head he returned the tobacco to his pocket and continued.
Escott told Peter Vincent that Governor Cochrane had sent the
Valiant
out under Captain Upshall on a three month tour of the northeast coast with the task of bringing British justice to the outharbours. Captain Upshall had been made Surrogate Judge for the duration of the voyage. He had power to take complaints, arrest, examine, sentence, and punish by whipping if necessary.
The Captain had also been furnished with the names and descriptions of rogues who had committed a variety of crimes, ranging from murder to the theft of an eiderdown valued at tenpence. These fugitives were thought to be hiding out in lawless fishing communities and the Captain was instructed to bring them back to St. John's for trial.
“Seems him—Escott—were toady for the Captain. Clerk, he called hisself, s'posed to go round the different places, find out about lawbreakin' and nose out anyone they'd hidden away. Their three months was about up and they'd only found two people to whip—some old man and wife who'd been brewin' sprits up in Fox Cove. And they had one old feller in the hold for jumpin' ship in Bonavist'. Escott was that put out! Criminals were bein' hid, he said. Said 'twas a pure scandal the lack of respect we'um bay people had for the Governor. Been promised a bounty, this Escott had, for catchin' them with names on the list—and here they were almost ready to turn back for St. John's without a one!”
“Brightened right up when he seen me—pulled this paper outta his pocket and read out the lot. But the one he was most particular about was this Mary Bundle—who he said were really Mary Sprig—he had a lot of stuff about her.”
“What?” It was the first word Mary had uttered since they squatted down. Cold bog water had oozed into her boots, her knees were cramped and her back ached. She wondered how Peter could look so comfortable.
“I'll read it to ya,” he said and pulled a dirty piece of folded paper out of his shirt pocket: “Mary Sprig—A small, dark complexioned female servant. Escaped service without working out her passage, has maliciously destroyed her master's property, stolen food and household goods including gold candlesticks and a watch, valued at a hundred pounds each. May be armed. Dangerous and a thief, Mary Sprig is thought to be hiding in one of the outharbours near St. John's.”