Chapter Thirty-Nine
Edward Hutchins’s mustard plaster has no appreciable effect, and Magnus Norton passes an uncomfortable night beset by savage headaches and heartburn so severe it feels at moments as though his chest is being pried apart from the inside with a handspike.
The next morning, his already sour mood is soured even further when he learns over breakfast that contrary to the assurances he received the previous evening, not only has the first native visitor succumbed as expected to his injuries, but the second one, the one whom he was preparing himself to flatter and cajole, has mysteriously died in his sleep.
Hutchins, who is the bearer of these bad tidings, confesses right away that he has no convincing explanation for what’s happened.
“The skull bone was fully intact when I examined it. I’m sure of that,” he says. “I can only imagine that Haycock’s blow caused some inner disturbance or rupture invisible from the outside and not immediately disabling but deadly in its eventual effects.”
“You imagine,” Norton snaps. “Is that what we are reduced to now? Guesswork and make-believe?”
“Medicine is an art as much as it’s a science, Mr. Norton,” Hutchins answers calmly. “The body is not a country that can be so easily mapped or known. It keeps its deepest mysteries hidden sometimes, even from the most fervent and learned explorer.”
“You speak very nicely, Hutchins. You have a skillful tongue. Would you were equally adept at keeping your patients alive.”
Hutchins colors at this insult but, recognizing that the chief is in no mood to be disagreed with, makes no further response beyond a small bow and a clearing of his throat.
“And what about you?” Norton says fiercely, turning to Hearn, who is standing beside the surgeon with his hands clasped in front of him and a serious and downcast look on his face.
“I noticed nothing unusual,” he says. “He didn’t call out in the night or show any visible sign of distress. I assumed he was sleeping quite normally until I tried to wake him and he made no response.”
Norton drains his coffee cup in one go and drops it back onto the saucer with a clatter.
“This is a fine affair you two leave me with,” he says. “A very fine affair indeed. What am I supposed to do with two dead Indians? And how am I supposed to ensure that the news of this calamity doesn’t spread abroad and scare off every trading party between here and the Great Slave Lake?”
“With respect,” Hearn offers, “although the second death is to be regretted, it may make our task of protecting the trade rather easier than it otherwise would have been, since there’s now no witness to what happened except Haycock and me.
If Oule-Eye had lived, even if you’d lavished gifts on him as you planned to, he might still have slandered us to his friends, but this way the secret is ours and no one else need know. ”
“Do you forget that people tend to gossip, Hearn, and that exchanges between us and the natives are frequent? The home guard Indians are often abroad, for example, as are the wooding and goose-hunting parties. Word of this will spread soon enough, you mark my words.”
“Then we must let it be known to everyone in the Fort that Oule-Eye and Mackachy were arguing with each other and that’s how they incurred their fatal injuries. It’s a plausible tale and no one now alive can refute it.”
Despite his weariness and the cloud of irritation that still envelops him, Norton can recognize that Hearn’s proposition has merit.
If the two men killed each other in a drunken brawl, which, although unlikely, is far from impossible, he thinks, then no blame can be fairly attached to the Company and so the trade should, in theory at least, continue undisturbed.
“We will have to talk to Haycock right away,” Norton says, “and make sure he keeps the details of what really happened to himself. Who else saw you bring the Indians inside the men’s house last evening? There must have been witnesses.”
“Bellew the carpenter was there when we brought them in, and Peter Wilkinson too, but all they saw were the effects of the fight, not who was involved in it.”
“Make sure you speak to them anyway, to clear up any doubts, and we’ll have to burn the bodies. The ground’s too hard-frozen for burial, and I don’t want them lying around the place all winter to be looked at or puzzled over.”
“I’ll see that the cremation is done today,” Hearn says, “and I’ll speak to Bellew and Wilkinson immediately to be sure there’s no misunderstanding on their parts.”
“And none of the home guard Indians saw anything at all last night, you’re sure of that?”
“I don’t believe so. I think we would have noticed if they’d been about.”
Nantouche the maid places a bowl of porridge on the table with a folded napkin beside it and Norton asks her for more coffee, then mixes a spoonful of molasses and a pinch of salt into the porridge and starts to eat.
“If we escape from this with the trade unharmed, it’ll be a piece of good fortune,” he says between mouthfuls.
“But if we all stick to the same story and don’t waver, I suppose it just might succeed.
I trust we can rely on your discretion too, Hutchins.
If anyone asks you, you’ll say the men were squabbling and that’s how the injuries came about. ”
“Of course. If that’s what you wish me to say.”
Norton scrapes the bowl, sucks the last morsels of porridge from the spoon, then runs his tongue pensively around his gumline before speaking again.
“Your mustard plaster did me no good at all, by the way,” he says to Hutchins. “I was up half the night with a swingeing migraine, and this morning my guts are in turmoil.”
“You felt no beneficial effect from it at all? No easing of the pain?”
“Not a thing.”
“Then if that’s the case, I must strongly recommend another bleeding. It’s been a fortnight since the last time, and it would certainly help cool the brain. I can get my instruments now if you’d like.”
Norton sighs and with an evident lack of enthusiasm tells Hutchins to fetch his lancet and bowl.
“I swear I’ve been tapped more times than a bunter’s snatch,” he confides to Hearn once they are alone, “and it’s done me precious little good so far, but Hutchins swears by it.”
“This winter weather is a great strain on the constitution,” Hearn says. “Any ailment, however minor, is always made much worse by the cold.”
“It’s not the weather that’s the cause of my present maladies.
I’ve lived through my share of winters here with nary a chilblain.
It’s losing John Shaw and the chance of that gold that’s lowered my animal spirits and made me so sickly.
I can’t explain all that to Hutchins, of course, and even if I did, he’d offer no better remedy than the one he’s offering now. ”
“You suspect that grief is the true cause of your sickness?”
“I’m certain it plays some part. If John had lived, I might have accepted the loss of that treasure with good grace, but as it is, to have both taken away together is a difficult thing to endure. In the daytime, I can keep such thoughts at bay, but at night they rise up like the devil to haunt me.”
“You still have your position here at the Fort,” Hearn reminds him. “The business is good, and you are very much admired and respected.”
“Perhaps that’s so, but without a good friend to share it with, the pleasure of command feels much diminished.”
Norton dabs his mouth with his napkin and then rubs his nose and wipes both eyes.
Hearn, as he stands there witnessing this surprising display of emotion, recalls again the moment in the rushing river when he cut through the rope and let John Shaw drown, and he wonders what Norton would say if he told him the whole truth.
How easily and thoroughly I have bested him, he thinks, keeping his face a careful blank despite the pleasure he feels within.
He’s a grizzled old goat, full of guile and trickery, yet he looks upon me with the innocent and trusting eyes of a child.
He imagines that he knows all that I am and all that I can do, but the truth is, he has not the faintest notion.
Later on that day, outside the walls by the northeast bastion, as he lights the Indians’ funeral pyre and watches and listens as the bright flames crackle and climb, twisting and turning like sparking yellow vines through the dark latticework of stacked lumber, it occurs to Hearn that since his actions of last night, he has stepped into a different world, one that looks just the same as it did before, that contains all the same people and places, but whose meaning is utterly changed.
I have breached a law that I thought was impossible to breach without the most terrible consequences, he thinks, and yet here I am, free and unharmed with danger averted and all my plans intact.
Rather than being the object or the vehicle of another’s ambitions, I’ve become at a stroke the inventor of my own destiny, the willer, not the willed.
To be at liberty to act and to alter, to overcome resistances and create what did not exist before: what freedom there is in that, and what a rare sense of power and possibility.
When I saw John Shaw’s body laid out pale as ivory on the bend of the river with the bag of gold still tied impossibly about his neck, that was the beginning, the moment I knew that nothing was fixed anymore, and that true change was possible.
After so long sunk in a mire of doubt and indecision, I had almost forgotten what the pulse of desire and ambition can feel like, but at that moment I remembered, and ever since then, I’ve sensed it growing and deepening within me.
If Stephen Cowper were alive, God bless his soul, I believe he would applaud me and wish me well.
I have mourned him so long and held his memory sacred, but now, now at last, through this congeries of strange and barely credible events, I am poised to put my mourning weeds aside and live again as he would wish me to: a freed man, self-justified, unchained by fear, and fully, astoundingly, alive.