Heralds of Empire | Page 8

WITCHCRAFT
That interrupted lesson with Rebecca finished my schooling. I was set to learning the mysteries of accounts in Eli Kirke's warehouse.
"How goes the keeping of accounts, Ramsay?" he questioned soon after I had been in tutelage.
I had always intended to try my fortune in the English court when I came of age, and the air of the counting-house ill suited a royalist's health.
"Why, sir," I made answer, picking my words not to trip his displeasure, "I get as much as I can--and I give as little as I can; and those be all the accounts that ever I intend to keep."
Aunt Ruth looked up from her spinning-wheel in a way that had become an alarm signal. Eli Kirke glanced dubiously to the blasphemy box, as though my words were actionable. There was no sound but the drone of the loom till I slipped from the room. Then they both began to talk. Soon after came transfer from the counting-house to the fur trade. That took me through the shadowy forests from town to town, and when I returned my old comrades seemed shot of a sudden from youth to manhood.
There was Ben Gillam, a giff-gaffing blade home from the north sea, so topful of spray that salt water spilled over at every word.
"Split me fore and aft," exclaims Ben, "if I sail not a ship of my own next year! I'll take the boat without commission. Stocking and my father have made an offer," he hinted darkly. "I'll go without commission!"
"And risk being strangled for't, if the French governor catch you."
"Body o' me!" flouts Ben, ripping out a peck of oaths that had cost dear and meant a day in the stocks if the elders heard, "who's going to inform when my father sails the only other ship in the bay? Devil sink my soul to the bottom of the sea if I don't take a boat to Hudson Bay under the French governor's nose!"
"A boat of your own," I laughed. "What for, Ben?"
"For the same as your Prince Rupert, Prince Robber, took his. Go out light as a cork, come back loaded with Spanish gold to the water-line." Ben paused to take a pinch of snuff and display his new embroidered waist-coat.
"Look you at the wealth in the beaver trade," he added. "M. Radisson went home with George Carteret not worth a curse, formed the Fur Company, and came back from Hudson Bay with pelts packed to the quarter-deck. Devil sink me! but they say, after the fur sale, the gentlemen adventurers had to haul the gold through London streets with carts! Bread o' grace, Ramsay, have half an eye for your own purse!" he urged. "There is a life for a man o' spirit! Why don't you join the beaver trade, Ramsay?"
Why not, indeed? 'Twas that or turn cut-purse and road-lifter for a youth of birth without means in those days.
Of Jack Battle I saw less. He shipped with the fishing boats in the summer and cruised with any vagrant craft for the winter. When he came ashore he was as small and eel-like and shy and awkward as ever, with the same dumb fidelity in his eyes.
And what a snowy maid had Rebecca become! Sitting behind her spinning-wheel, with her dainty fingers darting in the sunlight, she seemed the pink and whitest thing that ever grew, with a look on her face of apple-blossoms in June; but the sly wench had grown mighty demure with me. When I laughed over that ending to our last lesson, she must affect an air of injury. 'Twas neither her fault nor mine, I declare, coaxing back her good-humour; 'twas the fault of the face. I wanted to see where the white began and the pink ended. Then Rebecca, with cheeks a-bloom under the hiding of her bonnet, quickens steps to the meeting-house; but as a matter of course we walk home together, for behind march the older folk, staidly discoursing of doctrine.
"Rebecca," I say, "you did not take your eyes off the preacher for one minute."
"How do you know, Ramsay?" retorts Rebecca, turning her face away with a dimple trembling in her chin, albeit it was the Sabbath.
"That preacher is too handsome to be sound in his doctrine, Rebecca."
Then she grows so mighty prim she must ask which heading of the sermon pleases me best.
"I liked the last," I declare; and with that, we are at the turnstile.
Hortense became a vision of something lost, a type of what I had known when great ladies came to our country hall. M. Picot himself took her on the grand tour of the Continent. How much we had been hoping to see more of her I did not realize till she came back and we saw less.
Once I encountered M. Picot and his