Arundel

  “What have you done with your leather belt?” I asked, for I could feel it was no longer there.

  “It near froze me, Steven, so I left it off.”

  “Yes,” I said, at a loss to know why I was so put out at her, for it was pleasant to have her by me again, “yes, and not content with freezing and starving and God knows what all, you must come pushing your way into this place. What is it you want? What have you come here for?”

  “I came to find you.”

  “Well,” I said, “it wouldn’t have hurt you to wait. It was in my mind to look for you to-night.”

  “To-night might have been too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  She plucked at the matted snow on the skirt of my blanket coat. “Did you know Montgomery sent a letter to Carleton asking for the surrender of the city? That Carleton won’t receive any message, or let any man come near the gates, even under a white flag?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I heard so. There’s no secrets in this army!”

  “Steven, I think I can carry a message to Carleton. Will you give me the horse and cariole that you brought to Pointe-aux-Trembles?”

  The thought fair graveled me. “How can you get in with such a message, when nobody else can?”

  “Why,” she said, “if I wear the fur coat you gave me, and a skirt, and drive up to the gate in a lather, early in the morning, with men running and shouting behind me, they’ll never think of stopping me. If I say I have important information for Carleton, they’ll let me in at once.”

  She was right: no doubt of that; yet I didn’t want Phoebe mixed up in any such matter. Already there were too many people on the inside of Quebec, out of my reach, but weighing perpetually on my mind—Mary Mallinson, Guerlac, Ezekiel Hook.

  I was gruff with her. “Let me hear no more of this! You might get into the city; but you’d be thrown into jail; maybe shot for a spy, even.”

  “Now, Steven,” she said, in the same coaxing way she used when she went at me to buy the sloop, long ago, “you know the British won’t shoot a woman. They won’t even fire their cannon at the nunnery, though we’re living in it. If they put me in gaol they’d soon let me out, for I’m no spy, and they know it; and they have too little food for themselves to feed another without need.”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s other ways of getting this letter to Carleton without having you carry it.”

  “What other ways?”

  “Why, any God’s quantity of ways. They could shoot the message over the walls with arrows in the night. They could send Mrs. Grier or Mrs. Warner with it, if you’re so set on having a woman do it.”

  “Yes, and if they shot it over on arrows they might find it when the snow melts in the spring; or if they did find it, Carleton wouldn’t take it, any more than he will now. As for Mrs. Grier and Mrs. Warner, they have husbands; and besides, Steven, they don’t have a look that would incline the sentries toward letting them pass.”

  “Ho!” I said, annoyed at her assurance, “since when have people been taking you for a duchess or the governor’s lady?”

  “If you had eyes in your head and knew how to use them you’d know there are worse-looking women than I!”

  “Belike.”

  She turned a little from me and did something to her hair and dress; then turned back again. “Look, Steven. Haven’t you seen worse?” She laid hold of my arms, so that I had to look up at the triangle of creamy skin at her throat, and the pointed chin above it, and so to the rest of her: the oval cheeks, with the red blood close under them; the velvety brown of her eyes, and the thin black eyebrows that seemed traced with a quill; the peak of hair that came down low on her forehead, so her whole face was shaped like the hearts that Arundel boys carve on the old beech tree across the creek when waiting for their sweethearts.

  “Haven’t you?” she said, and shook me, and smiled a little on one side of her mouth. At this, for no reason I could understand, there came into my mind all of Arundel and the things I loved—blue sea and golden sunlight: brown reefs, and the white breakers tumbling toward the gray sand: the sweet, warm odors of the marsh; the fresh salt wind from over the water; the cricking of crickets on hot nights, and my mother’s face, and Cynthy leaning against me to watch me eat a late supper; Ranger, with his ears cocked up and his lip curled in a grin, inviting me to take him for a hunt; the suck of the falling tide in the river, and the sweet perfume of young willow leaves in the spring.

  “Haven’t you?” Phoebe asked once more, while I sat and stared at her, with the rifles of the Virginians cracking on one side of us and then on the other, and the outrageous thudding of British cannon shaking the ruined wall against which we leaned.

  I dropped my eyes and said, “Your nose is red.” She only laughed.

  “Here,” I said, resolved to stop her nonsense once and for all, “such a thing as you propose is not what a woman should do: not a good woman.”

  “I didn’t think of that,” she said in a small voice. “What is a good woman, Steven?”

  “You know as well as I do. A good woman doesn’t go gallivanting off. She stays home and behaves herself.”

  “But, Steven, do you think I’m a bad woman?”

  “Why, damn it,” I said, not wishing to hurt her feelings, “not yet you aren’t, but I don’t want you to go hurroaring and hurrooing into Quebec. It wouldn’t be decorum.”

  “You don’t think ill of me for coming away with James?”

  “No.”

  “Nor for continuing with Noah and Nathaniel and Jethro after James died?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure, Steven, you wouldn’t think better of me if I stayed home always, instead of sailing the sloop, and lived in the kitchen, speaking ill of all my neighbors and growing to hate the faces I saw every day, like other good women in Arundel?”

  “Now,” I said, “all this argument is getting us nowhere! I don’t propose to sit here and yawp all day. I don’t think you should go, and there’s an end of it. Why is it you want to do it, Phoebe?” “Why? Why? Well, Steven, it seems to me things aren’t right in the company. Goodrich and Hanchet are together all the time, talking in corners. Hubbard too. He’s with them. Hanchet hates Arnold.”

  “That’s no news!”

  “I know, but he hates him worse than ever. Arnold ordered him to move into St. John with his company, and he wouldn’t. Claimed it was too dangerous. Arnold said terrible things to him.”

  “He’d ought to shot him.”

  “No,” Phoebe said; “he did better. He shamed him. He sent Topham and Thayer in his place, and they went. There was never anybody hated Arnold the way Hanchet does. He says he won’t fight under him. Goodrich and Hubbard, they sit and listen to him, and drink brandy, and agree with everything he says.”

  “What else?”

  “Steven, I think the men have caught it. Their enlistment is up the first of January. They want to go home. Some of them say they won’t fight. Asa Hutchins says he won’t. Noah and Nathaniel will, but there’s a lot that won’t.”

  She took a deep breath. “I want to be some use, instead of a burden on everyone’s hands! If James could have come here and fought, then I’d have been some use. Maybe if I did something the men would be shamed into fighting. I can’t sit and do nothing, Steven! I can’t! I can’t!”

  She looked down at her hands. I saw they were clenched. The triangle of skin at her throat was as red as a maple leaf after a frost.

  “Well,” I said, feeling choked, “cover up your neck. I guess you can have the horse and cariole.”

  I drove out to St. Foy’s with her that afternoon in the cariole, fair mazed by the figure she made. She had on a hat of sealskin, one that pulled close down onto her head. Cap Huff, she said, had got it from one of Morgan’s men, paying a whole bottle of brandy for it. With it she wore the sable coat over a dress of gray wool begged from the nuns. On her feet were enormous winter boots, made of sealskin with the fur inside, such as Quebec ladie
s wear when they go in carioles.

  I felt like a coachman, hunched down beside her in my dirty white blanket coat, my face bristly with beard; and I was shamed, stealing a look at her as she sat staring down at her mittened hands, to think I had spoken of her red nose, though God knows it was red, albeit not unpleasantly so.

  She looked up at me as we went along, and caught me gawking at her; and though I had meant to speak to her of many things, I forgot them.

  They had her to dinner at headquarters that night, while I ate pork and dumplings with the men in the kitchen. Once, when the door stood open, I heard the general speaking to her about her necklace of cat’s eyes, and caught her reply, delivered straight and pleasant, Colonel Arnold and Burr and Ogden and Bigelow and the rest of them having fallen silent to hear her.

  “Indeed,” she said, “I didn’t know it had so great a value; but I knew I wanted it; and what we New Englanders want is apt to have a high value. If we can avoid it, we never pay full value in money for what we want, though it may be we pay in other ways. You might say this necklace cost me a piece of rope; yet in the end it amounted to more than that. I had spliced a rope to make a running noose, back in my younger days, when I was captain of a vessel in the coasting trade—”

  She waited for the shout of laughter to go down; then went on: “An Indian came aboard my sloop and hankered for the rope, so I traded it to him for a snake-skin case holding three needles made from mink bones. In Portsmouth I traded these to a lady who wished them for the running of ribbons through her fripperies; and in return I took a pistol with a brass knob on the end of the butt, big enough for knocking in the heads of molasses barrels. The pistol I traded for a parrot with a sailor from the Sugar Islands; and the parrot went to the captain of a Newburyport brig in return for two stone hatchets and a magnifying glass. The hatchets near wore holes in me before I came across the mate of a brig from Ceylon who was needful of them and the glass. He traded these cat’s eyes for them; yet it may be the time and thought I put on the matter had a value, so that I didn’t get the necklace for nothing.”

  They made much of her for this speech, though it seemed to me no more worthy of remark than many I had heard her make. In more ways than one they found her diverting, as I discovered from Captain Oswald coming into the kitchen to lean against the wall and take several deep breaths.

  “Holy cats!” he said, when he saw me, “I never hoped to see that!”

  “See what?”

  “Why!” he said, “that young lady of yours was showing them the bauble on her wrist, that little leather-covered bauble, and Burr picked up her arm with both hands, pretty as you please, as if to help them see it.” He wagged his head admiringly and moaned, as at a pleasant recollection.

  “Where did it hit him?”

  “She looked up in his face as innocent as a baby,” Oswald continued. “Oh, dear! It was lovely! It just tapped his nose, by accidentlike, and he’s out in front, putting snow on it, to stop the bleeding.”

  We drove over to the Sillery Road, the one that leads into St. Louis Gate, before dawn the next morning, taking a few men with us. When it grew light we moved forward to where the straight road begins.

  “Steven,” she said, when I got out of the cariole, “couldn’t you find an extra coat and wear a pair of them if you have to go back to lie in that awful place again.”

  “Don’t you worry about me,” I said, low in spirit to think I lacked the firmness to forbid her going. “All you have to do is finish your business and get back here where you belong.”

  “No message you want taken to anybody, is there?” she asked. For the life of me I couldn’t think what she was getting at. While I gawked at her she whipped up the horse and went tearing around the bend onto the straight road, the rest of us pelting after and letting off our muskets.

  Heads popped into sight on the bastions that flanked the gate, and we heard faint cheering. Still we ran on, shooting and whooping, while the cariole drew farther and farther away from us, and closer and closer to the gate. When we saw puffs of smoke along the top of the wall we came to a halt and had the pleasure of seeing the gate swing slowly open. Phoebe, plying her whip, dashed through and out of sight. We plodded slowly back, followed by the distant jeers of the city’s brave defenders.

  Each day, after that, I walked to headquarters to see whether word had come from Carleton in reply to the general’s message, or whether Phoebe had returned; and it was such a time as comes now and again to every man—a time when everything happens except what ought to happen.

  Our men had built a five-gun battery in the snow near the suburb of St. John; and the path to headquarters from our turkey-shooting post in the ruins of La Friponne led behind this battery. It was a poor thing, not only because of the small bore of the cannons, but also because the ground was hard as rock, so that the battery walls were made of snow on which water had been thrown. When, therefore, our battery began to play, the British opened on it with every cannon and mortar on the walls. There was a steady whanging and banging from the city, and shells and grape-shot racketing past at all hours, and a hellish and inconvenient bursting of bombs where they were not expected. The walk to headquarters was no pleasure at all, what with diving into the snow every few yards to escape something that could not be escaped, if so be it was bound for you.

  I have heard wiseacres in New England say knowingly, when the air is sharp and biting, that it’s too cold to snow; but I have seen snow aplenty fall outside the walls of Quebec when we dared not open our mouths for fear our tongues would freeze.

  Along with the increase in cannon balls we had another foot of snow, and then we had a cold snap that made the preceding cold seem like a gentle, harmless spell of weather.

  With these things came sicknesses among the men, mostly lung troubles that drove them out of their heads and set them to babbling of their homes and of maids they had known in other days. On top of everything came smallpox, bowling over five men here and three men there and half a dozen in another quarter. We took turns piling them into carioles and driving them out to Sillery and putting them into empty summer houses, to die or get well.

  Thus there was much happening; but day after day went by with no sign of Phoebe, until four days before Christmas. On that day, along about noon, which was the hour when the cannonading grew slack and the turkey-shooting, as our men called their popping at British sentries, was lightest, there was a prolonged rolling of drums behind St. John’s Gate—a rolling so noisy that it brought our men running to St. John from every part of the Plains of Abraham, thinking the British must be sallying on us.

  From the sound, every drum in the city had been gathered in one spot. There were heads showing above the walls, all facing inward, watching what went on within.

  After a deal of drumming the gates swung open and a motley throng of drummers poured out, to form a line on each side of the entranceway. When their drums were rattling and rolling with renewed violence, a small figure came marching out between those massive doors: a lonely figure, like a little boat running on a vast sea before a wall of towering thunderheads. It was Phoebe, walking stiffly erect, even proudly, and looking neither to right nor left.

  We could hear the folk on the walls jeering at her; and through it all ran the beating of the drums, rolling and thudding in time to her steps.

  It’s no pretty sight to see any person drummed out of a city; and I cursed the British for lousy knaves as I ran down the road to meet this small and lonely figure.

  News travels fast in an army, and it must be there was knowledge of who she was and what she’d done; for as she drew nearer, our men came out toward her from the houses of St. John, cheering and waving their hats. Yet we never reached her; for a cariole slid past with a scattering of snow wads from the horse’s hoofs—a cariole with Burr in it. It dashed out to her, whirled around, and picked her up in less time than it takes to shell a pea pod. So back she came in it, riding proud and straight; and the shouting and hat-waving g
rew violent as they came up to the houses of St. John.

  I thought she wouldn’t see me; for Burr was so busy being polite to her that he might have been a puppy snuffling at a wall after a woodchuck. But as she passed me Phoebe leaned back and called, “Come to the nunnery for supper!” With that she was gone.

  The general hospital for the city of Quebec, which was also a nunnery, was a long stone building overlooking the winding course of the St. Charles. It was a mile from the city walls, and on the road running past the ruins of La Friponne and through the suburb of St. Roque, where the Virginians lived. I was on my way to it before dark, decently shaved and my head cropped by a proper barber for the first time in three months, so that I felt as slick as a mackerel.

  It had a dank and sour smell, that hospital and nunnery; and it was in my mind, as I prowled along the corridor, peering into room after room to find Goodrich’s company, that there was smallpox in the very air, and that I wouldn’t like to have Phoebe broke out with this horrible sickness, which leaves a person scarred forever if he lays a finger to the sores that craze him with their itching.

  I found her with Jacataqua and Noah Cluff and others from the company in the big room that lets off from the kitchen. She had gone back into her gray blanket coat with its gay red sash and her blanket breeches stuffed into moccasins. She was in no amiable humor with those about her, though pleasant enough with me, bringing me a dish of meat boiled with potatoes, and a stick of French bread, log-shaped and hard; less fitted for eating purposes than for shooting from a five-inch cannon.

  She took me into a corner with Jacataqua, turning her back on the rest of the company. I thought she had become haughty from dining with generals and going about with beautiful aides.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose you’re glad to see me back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah,” she said insolently, “if I’d known you were suffering as much as all that, I’d have come out sooner.”