Chapter Forty
The months slide by and winter turns gradually and haltingly to spring.
The ice on the Churchill River breaks into jagged blue-white floes, pitched and gabled like the roofs of a demolished village, which heap together and then are pushed, grinding and groaning, downstream into the Bay, while on the land about the Factory, gray snow gives way to bare rocks, yellow moss, and rough new growth of salt grass, borage, and chamomile.
As the natural world renews itself and starts to show its colors, Magnus Norton’s health, already poor, begins inexorably to worsen.
Besides the persistent and disabling headaches, he starts to suffer also from gallstones, fevers, and an occasional loss of feeling in his hands and feet.
By Eastertide, he is often too weak and out of sorts to rise from his bed in the morning, and at the beginning of May he suffers the first of several apoplectic seizures that render him speechless and half paralyzed.
When it becomes clear to everyone, even Hutchins, that Norton is unlikely ever to recover his senses, for the sake of convenience Hearn has him moved into a room on the top floor of the men’s house and takes over the apartments for his own use.
As the chief factor’s natural proxy, Hearn becomes responsible for supervising the daily business of the Fort, giving out instructions and reprimands, hearing embassies, and resolving problems both small and large, and he discharges these new duties easily and cheerfully, reassured that Norton’s decline means that any chance, however small, that the truth of what happened on the Barrens might be exposed has now disappeared for good.
So safe and secure does he feel in his new position that one bright morning soon after the start of the busiest trading season, he takes a horse from the stable and, with the excuse of visiting Twelve Mile Point to check on the goose-hunting party, rides out west following the river’s northern shore until he reaches a place where the shallow bank briefly thickens and then rises up to form a ten-foot sandstone cliff.
He dismounts and looks about for a while, then ties the horse’s reins to the roots of a tree and, starting from an egg-shaped boulder, counts a hundred paces north, then stops.
The tree with the symbol carved into the bark is exactly where it should be.
There are leaves and ferns now, where before there was nothing except gray thatch and bare branches, but aside from that, he thinks, nothing important is changed.
There are no tracks or traces or signs of disturbance; no one has been here but me.
He finds the right spot, bends down, pushes away one stone and then another, then drops onto his knees.
The sack smells of damp earth, and is speckled with grubs and stained by mold, but when he unties the neck and reaches inside, the crushed gold is still as it was, pure and untainted.
Now I am ready, he thinks. Now I have everything I need.
He walks back to where the horse is tethered, lays the sack down on a flat rock, and sits beside it to smoke a pipe.
He notices a school of white whales twenty or thirty strong feeding on herring a little way upstream, the bare bend of their backs like the curl of shepherds’ crooks breaking the surface, then sinking down again with patternless irregularity.
How strange and wonderful this place will look when remembered from the safety and fastness of England, he thinks.
It will seem more like something dreamed of, I suppose, or written about in a book of wonders.
Yet here it is laid out before me now, as real and particular as I am.
When the pipe is finished, he eats the rye bread and cheese he’s brought with him, then stands, lays the sack across the horse’s withers, and remounts.
It is nearly dusk when he arrives back at the Fort.
He finds Haycock asleep in the gatehouse and, once dismounted, wakes him to tell him to take the horse back to the stables and make sure it is fed and watered.
Haycock glances at the sack as he takes the reins and Hearn prepares himself for a question, but Haycock, thinking it no business of his what the chief brings back, doesn’t ask, just rubs the horse’s broad brown flank with the flat of his hand and tells it that supper is ready.
Two minutes later, having spoken to no one else besides the maid, Hearn is back inside the apartments and the gold is safely locked away in his battered old sea chest at the foot of the bed.
Now the time of danger and struggling is passed, he thinks as he slips the key into his waistcoat pocket, and the time of patience and waiting has begun.
If I remain as I am just a little while longer and keep a cool head, then when winter comes again this place will be all behind me, a wide ocean away, and the old Tom Hearn, the one who flailed and suffered, will be gone for good and all.
Magnus Norton dies suddenly, but not unexpectedly, of a brain fever in early July and is buried in the small graveyard by the eastern wall in a brief and somber ceremony.
Hearn, as his successor, reads out the funeral liturgy and leads the prayers, and once the grave is filled, Norton’s resting place is marked by a heavy iron cross of simple but elegant design fashioned especially by Silas Groves the armorer.
Although the death of a Company man so long-serving and highly esteemed is felt as a sea change by all the inhabitants of the Fort, they have little time to dwell on their loss, because the summer season is already hard upon them and large parties of Indians are arriving from the interior almost weekly now, either on foot or in canoes, with great bundles of furs and skins to trade.
Hearn especially is too busy for any show of mourning, since the rituals of the trade are fixed and long-established, and it is his duty now as governor to ensure that they are followed exactly so no offense may be given or received.
Always, on the first day after their arrival, the native trading captains and their lieutenants are welcomed into the trading room and, once the calumet has been passed about and formal greetings have been exchanged, welcoming gifts are offered—colorful new suits of clothing made of worsted and lace, rundlets of brandy, glass beads, and tobacco.
After the Indians have given formal thanks and are dressed up in their new finery, the party decamps to the yard and arranges itself into a procession led by drummer boys clad in scarlet livery and ensigns carrying halberds and spontoons.
Arrayed in order of importance, they march out of the Fort to the Indian campgrounds, where they reassemble inside the trading captain’s tent and, once the proffered gifts have been fairly distributed among the band, repeat for the pleasure and edification of the other Indians another version of the rituals previously enacted within.
The next morning, after this long and ceremonious preamble, the more mundane and sometimes trying business of exchanging furs for trade goods commences and lasts for several days.
Hearn, as is customary, allows Hutchins, his newly appointed deputy, to conduct most of the bargaining on his behalf, trusting him to be firm or lenient as required, and intervening only if serious disagreements occur or some special dispensation is asked for.
Although, in truth, he cares very little about the success or failure of this or any other season’s trading, Hearn thinks it simpler and safer to play the expected part and appear, as far as possible, to be an assiduous and faithful chief.
Once the exchanges are complete, he makes a show of personally noting each one down in the ledger, and also, as the weeks go by, is sure to maintain, as Magnus Norton always did, a careful running tally of the number of made beaver skins received and the precise value and description of all trade goods given out.
Edward Hutchins has always suspected that a special understanding existed between Norton and Hearn that explained the latter’s sudden promotion to deputy.
He can’t say for certain what inspired it—no one can—but the general belief in the men’s house has always been that something happened on that journey northward, most likely involving the untimely deaths of Shaw and Walker, that Hearn witnessed the occurrence, whatever it was, and that Norton wanted to make sure it stayed a secret.
Maybe Shaw lost his temper one day and killed Abel Walker—so the rumors usually went—or Walker went mad one day and killed John Shaw, or Hearn himself for reasons unknown felt it necessary to kill one or both of them together.
It was all a pregnant mystery, a puzzle, and no one knew the truth, but when the news of Shaw’s replacement was first announced, almost everyone, especially the other officers who saw with Hearn’s unexpected elevation their own more reasonable ambitions cruelly flouted, was happy to speculate.
There was much resentment to start with, and many sharp and insulting comments were made behind Hearn’s back.
Yet as time went on, even those who had been most suspicious and mistrustful came to see that, however questionable the reasons for his ascent and however unremarkable his pedigree, Tom Hearn had rather more about him than they had realized, and he was, in fact, when placed next to John Shaw, whom everyone knew to be a thorough rogue and a bully, in most ways a pleasing improvement.
The rumors about what might have happened on the Barrens and Hearn’s part in it didn’t disappear completely, but they became less frequent and less fervent and tended when aired to be met as often with indifference as encouragement.