by Stef Penney
Nesbit leans back from his desk with a grimace, unkinking the hunch in his back. He yawns hugely, revealing blackened molars. ‘Fucking accounts. Bane of my life. Well, one of them. Used to have an accountant here once–Archie Murray. Funny little chap–mousy sort of fellow. But since he went I’ve had to do it myself, and it’s not my forte, I don’t mind telling you. Not my forte at all.’
Donald toys with the idea of offering his help, but decides he isn’t feeling that vigorous.
‘Not that we’ve got such a huge turnover to deal with. More outgoing than incoming, if you know what I mean. How’s tricks at your place?’
‘Fairly good, I suppose. But then we are more of a way-station than a source. I suppose once–years ago, before there were so many men–the whole country was full of furs.’
‘I’m not sure that there was ever much of anything round here.’ Nesbit looks gloomy. ‘Do you know what the natives call this neck of the woods? Starvation Country. Even the bloody foxes can’t find anything to eat–and they’re all red, of course. Time for a drink.’
From his slumped sitting position, Nesbit lurches past Donald and pulls a bottle of malt whisky from behind some ledgers. ‘Come on.’
Donald follows Nesbit into his sitting room–the small, bare room next to his office that contains a couple of overstuffed armchairs and some pictorial relief of a questionable nature.
‘Where is Mr Stewart this evening?’ Donald asks, as he accepts a large glass of malt. Fortunately it is of a better quality than the rum at Fort Edgar. Donald wonders fleetingly how it is that–at the back of beyond, when decent food and housekeeping seem beyond them–the inhabitants of Hanover House drink like kings.
‘Oh, round and about,’ Nesbit says vaguely. ‘Round and about. You know …’ he leans forward in his chair, staring at Donald with disconcerting intensity, ‘that man … That man is a saint. An absolute saint.’
‘Mm,’ says Donald, carefully.
‘Running this place is a thankless task, believe me, but he never complains. You never hear him grumble about it, unlike yours truly. And he’s a man who could have done anything; the highest calibre. The very highest.’
‘Yes, he seems very able,’ Donald says, a little stiffly.
Nesbit gives him a calculating look. ‘I dare say you may think that anyone who gets sent out to a hellhole like this must be second-rate, and it may be true in my case, but not in his.’
Donald inclines–and then shakes–his head politely, hoping his agreement and disagreement will be attributed to the right things.
‘The natives love him. They don’t think much of yours truly, and it’s mutual so that’s fair enough, but him … they treat him as a sort of minor deity. He’s out there now, talking to them. For a moment, when he came back with the news about Nepapanees, I thought things might turn ugly, but he went out there and had them eating out of his hand in two shakes.’
‘Ah. Mm. Admirable,’ murmurs Donald, wondering whether Jacob would ever eat out of anyone’s hand. It seems unlikely. He also pictures–vividly–the widow left in the snow as Stewart and Nesbit walked inside. But strangely enough, although Donald prides himself on having the independence of mind to take such a eulogy with a pinch of salt, it is only too easy to believe that Stewart inspires devotion. He finds himself drawn to Stewart almost as much as he is repelled by Nesbit.
‘I know I am second-rate. I may not know much, but I know that.’ Nesbit stares into the amber lights in his glass. Donald wonders if he is a little unhinged; for a moment he has a horrible suspicion that Nesbit is about to cry. But then he smiles instead, the bitter, cynical expression that has become familiar. ‘How about you, Moody, where do you fit into the scheme of things?’
‘I’m not sure that I understand you.’
‘I mean, are you second-rate? Or are you first-rate?’
Donald laughs uneasily.
‘Or perhaps you don’t know yet.’
‘I er … I’m not sure that I agree that it is a helpful distinction.’
‘I didn’t say that it was helpful. But it is self-evident. That is, if you have the courage to see it.’
‘I don’t think so. You may claim that it is courageous to accept your assessment of yourself, but I could suggest that to do so is a way of abdicating the responsibilities of life. Such cynicism gives you a licence to give up and make no effort. All failures are excused in advance.’
Nesbit smiles unpleasantly. Donald could enjoy this sort of half-serious discussion, which he has come across before–usually at the back end of a long winter evening–but his wound is starting to throb.
‘You think I am a failure?’
Donald has a sudden, disturbing image of Nesbit clamped in Norah’s mahogany embrace, and feels guilty at his knowledge of the other man. Almost at the same moment, Susannah’s face crystallises in his mind in sharp and wonderful clarity; after all this time grasping at fog, each element slots into place and there she is: whole, precise, lovely. And at the same instant, he realises with a shock of detachment that his feelings for her are finite, and comprise mainly admiration and awe. He experiences a strong urge to rush back to his room and finish the letter to Maria. Subtle, unpredictable Maria. How strange. How strange and yet freeing, this realisation. How wonderful! He suppresses a smile at the thought.
‘I said, do you?’
Donald has to make a momentary intense effort to remember what the question was.
‘No, not at all. But I can imagine the frustrations of a place like this. I am sure I would feel the same. A man needs company, and variety. I know how long the winters become, and I have only experienced one so far. One companion is not enough, however first-rate.’
‘Bravo. I say, did you hear something?’ Nesbit drains his glass and pauses in the act of refilling it, head cocked to one side. Donald listens, assuming it was footsteps in the corridor, but as usual, there is no one there. Nesbit shakes his head and sloshes more whisky into Donald’s glass, although he has not yet finished.
‘You are a capital fellow, Moody. I wish we had you here. You might even be able to unravel the accounts that I have been scrambling into a knot of Gordian proportions for the last two years.’ Nesbit smiles broadly, his bitterness mysteriously vanished.
‘I saw one of your fellows outside earlier,’ Donald says, apropos of not much. ‘He clearly hasn’t gone with the search party, but then he seemed so inebriated I dare say he would have been more hindrance than help.’
‘Ah.’ A faraway look overcomes Nesbit. ‘Yes. That is a problem we have in winter, as I am sure you know only too well.’
‘Is he a voyageur?’ Donald wants to ask right out who it is, but feels that would be too blunt.
‘I’ve no idea to whom you’re referring, old chap. As far as I know all the men, except Olivier, have gone upriver. Maybe it was him you saw.’
‘No, no, it was definitely an older man. Heavier, you know. And long-haired.’
‘This dim light can play tricks on you. Why, I once looked out of the window–it was last winter and I was sitting at my desk next door–and nearly had a heart attack. There was a moose standing right outside–seven feet tall if it was an inch–staring at me. I gave a frightful bellow and ran out of the door, but when I got to the yard, there was no sign of it. And no footprints. Of course there was no way it could have got in over the palisade, but I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that it was there. Imagine that!’
You were probably drunk, Donald thinks sourly. Donald knows perfectly well that the man in the courtyard wasn’t Olivier, and is increasingly aware–really, it is as though his brain has been asleep for the last couple of days–that an unidentified man should be of some interest to them.
So much so that he makes an excuse to slip out when he can, some time later, to investigate the snow outside his window. Which is when he finds that for some reason standards of housekeeping have suddenly been raised, and the yard has been swept clear of snow.
Sault St Mari
e is a very different kettle of fish from Caulfield. It is a place of many meetings–the confluence of two lakes; one crowding into the other between stubborn rocks; the joining of roads from north-west and east; and the border of two countries. Boat routes congregate here from the north, from the east, and from deep in the States, from Chicago and Milwaukee, places more foreign and depraved than the wildest outpost. But the ostensible reason for coming here is the Grand Western Opera House, which the Knoxes visited last night to see a much talked-about production of The Marriage of Figaro. The chief draw was that the part of Cherubino was sung by Delilah Hammer, and the concept of a Mohawk woman singing Mozart had been exercising certain newspaper columnists for several months. To see her was the done thing. And so Mrs Knox bought steamer tickets and they braved the winter waters to do so.
To Maria, who has no ear for music, the singer seemed charming and rather fey, especially in her boy’s costume, with her hair bound up under a floppy cap. She had a gamine face with huge dark eyes accentuated by make-up, and a large mouth with very white teeth. She was rather more striking than the other female singers, who tended to corpulence, and Maria wondered whether Miss Hammer would have preferred to sing one of the feminine roles. The audience–a mixture of opera lovers who had dressed up for the occasion and solitary types who were simply looking for diversion–roared its appreciation, which in a place like this, probably wasn’t very hard to come by. Her father grumbled about the singer’s unsuitability for the role (by which he meant her voice rather than her race) and he and her mother had an argument about the conducting. For a while, he was like his old self.
Mrs Knox has been worried about her husband. Bad enough that he should be disgraced–or forcibly retired; no one is quite sure–but worse that he should sit hour after hour in his study doing, apparently, nothing; his fine mind idling, and, she is sure, silting up, atrophying. When they argued, she felt a small loosening of tension. All in all, the visit appeared to be worth the trouble.
By morning, however, he has relapsed into uncommunicative detachment. And Maria has found her mind wandering back to the code.
After her visit to Sturrock, Maria shut herself in her room with her copy of the markings, and managed to forget the state of her family while she puzzled over its contents. First she tried breaking down the lines into groups as they seemed to arrange themselves–though this assumed Sturrock had copied them down accurately in the first place. From an article in the Edinburgh Review, and from her own sense, she was from the beginning aware that each mark or group of marks might not stand for a letter in the Roman alphabet, but might represent a word, or a sound. After she had arranged and rearranged the clusters and substituted numbers of sounds and letters, all of which produced meaningless jumbles of sounds (da-ya-no-ji-te! ba-lo-re-ya-no?) she put it aside with rather less hope than she had started with. There were no grounds at all for expecting Maria Knox to be able to solve their riddles; an uneducated country girl with a few journal subscriptions and just one article on deciphering the Rosetta stone as a starting point. But the little angular marks swirled round her head, invaded her dreams, taunting her with a meaning which they dangled just out of her reach. She had an unhealthy desire to see the original tablet, and her mind turned to the north, where Francis, possibly, and Mr Moody as well, held the key.
She pushes the remains of her breakfast around the plate. Congealed egg and the juices of a steak make a bilious abstract on the willow pattern.
‘If you don’t mind …’ she scrapes her chair getting up ‘… I’d like to take a bit of a walk.’
Mrs Knox frowns at her eldest daughter. ‘All right. Be careful, won’t you?’
‘Yes Mother.’ Maria is already halfway to the door. It is really quite comical how her mother thinks that anywhere outside Caulfield is a den of iniquity, crawling with white slavers. She’ll have to get used to the idea if Maria is to move to Toronto, which she is definitely going to do, she has decided, next summer.
Outside the hotel, Maria takes a right, towards the waterfront. Straggled along the shore of the lake is a sprawl of wharves and warehouses, gathering points for goods from all over the north. It’s exciting, the thrum of commerce, of business; dirty and loud and somehow real in a way that Caulfield and John Scott’s store are not. She has been warned away from just this part of town, which is part of its attraction. Men walk past her, keeping urgent appointments with steamer arrivals, stock prices, labour meetings. To a sheltered country girl it feels like being in the heart of things.
There are some hotels and boarding houses in this end of town too; less salubrious than the Victoria and Albert, further removed from the opera house. She sees a man and woman come out of one and watches them idly for a moment before realising, with a sudden quiver of shock, that the man is Angus Ross, the farmer from Dove River. Francis’s father. When he turns his head she gets a clear sight of his face; the blunt profile, the sandy hair. The shock is because the woman he is with is not Mrs Ross. Mrs Ross has not been seen for weeks. Maria feels herself flush with a shame that is not hers. There is something not quite right, even though Mr Ross and the woman are only walking across the street. He has not seen her, and she instinctively shrinks back and turns to study the window of the shop nearest her. It displays nothing but a list of things that make no sense in her confusion.
She waits until the pair are safely out of sight. She has never seen an impropriety before, but she is somehow sure that is what it was. And where, after all, is Mrs Ross? They have only her husband’s word that she set off after her son. It suddenly occurs to Maria, who has read some lurid novels along with the improving ones, that perhaps Mr Ross has done away with his wife. And what about Francis? Mr Moody and his friend went haring off after him, but perhaps never found him. Perhaps that is why they have not returned. Perhaps Mr Ross killed Mr Jammet as well …
Maria reins herself in here, telling herself that she is not prey to wild fancies. But still, she feels shaken. Perhaps she should have finished her breakfast after all. Perhaps–she looks round, to see if anyone is watching her–perhaps, due to exceptional circumstances, she will go and have A Drink.
Buoyed up with daring, Maria chooses a quiet-looking bar set back from the waterfront and goes inside. She takes a deep breath, but there is no one here other than the barkeep and a man sitting at one of the tables, eating, with his back to the door.
She orders a glass of sherry and a piece of salmonberry pie, and sits at a table near the back, just in case anyone she knows should happen by. Like Mr Ross. Her heart beats faster at the thought. She has never had a reason to either especially like or dislike Mrs Ross before–the woman is rather distant–but now she feels sorry for her. It occurs to her that of all people, she and Mrs Ross might have things in common.
Her order arrives and, to give her eyes something to do, she takes out the papers with her attempts to break the code. She is aware that the other customer has noticed her, and worries that he might try and join her. She sees what she did not notice before: that he is an Indian of rather disreputable appearance, and resolves not to look in his direction again. Soon she has taken out a pencil and begun annotating her efforts, which consist of a long line of nonsense words and syllables. She becomes so absorbed that she does not notice the barkeep standing beside her until he clears his throat.
‘Excuse me, ma’am. Would you like another?’ He holds the sherry bottle in his hand.
‘Oh. Thank you, yes. The pie was very good.’ To her surprise, it had been.
‘Thank you. Are you doing a puzzle?’
‘In a way.’ He has nice eyes, the barkeep, and very long, drooping brown whiskers. He has an unexpected air of intelligence. ‘I am trying to understand a code. But it is hopeless, I think, as I do not know which language it is written in.’
‘You mean like French, or Italian?’
‘Yes … although I think it is an Indian language, and there are so many.’
‘Ah. Then you need some help.’
‘Ma’am, if I may make a suggestion? You see the gentleman sitting over there? He knows many Indian languages. If you like, I could introduce you.’
He sees her doubtful glance at the hunched shoulder and greasy hair curling over the collar. ‘He is perfectly … pleasant.’ He smiles, as though he hasn’t managed quite the right word, but decides it will have to do. Maria feels a blush threatening. This is what comes of walking into disreputable establishments; she is impaled on the sword of her own daring. She looks at her papers and feels like a silly schoolgirl.
‘Of course, you would rather not. Forget I said it. It was impertinent.’
Maria draws herself upright. If she is to be a scholar, a thinker, she cannot shirk from the path of knowledge because of a greasy collar.
‘No, that would be very … nice. Thank you. If he doesn’t mind the bother, that is.’
The barkeep goes over to the other table and speaks to the man. Maria catches a glimpse of bloodshot eyes and has second and third thoughts about her decision. But he gets up and comes over to her table, carrying his glass. She smiles at him briefly; professionally, she hopes.
‘Hello. I’m Miss Knox. You are Mr …?’
He sits down. ‘Joe.’
‘Ah. Yes. Thank you for …’
‘Fredo says you want someone who knows Indian tongues.’
‘Yes, I have here part of a code, and, um, a friend of mine thinks it might be for an Indian language. I have been trying to decipher it, but since I don’t know what language it represents …’
She smiles too much, giving a slight shrug, even more scared now they are face to face. The man is older than she first thought, with streaks of grey in his hair. The skin below his eyes is pouchy, the cheeks slack. There are red threads in the whites of his eyes. He smells of rum.
