Canadian Houses
of Romance

by

IX

A STREET OF OLD HOUSES


1

I SAW it on a bright spring morning when most of its inhabitants seemed to be making their gardens. There was a smell of smoke and young grass and dead leaves perfuming the air. Lovely, in this early sunshine, the grassy ramparts of Fort Anne: bastions, ravelins, embankments, and sally ports, all unused, and probably forgetful of the days of their youth when they saw the first ships built on this continent unfolding their sails. The Fort was a possession quarrelled over hotly, before Quebec was founded and long before the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock. Today there is merely a serene picture of hills, water and sky, grass on the tended ramparts and children perambulating the ancient earthworks.
     The old officers’ quarters, built by order of the Duke of Kent, near this last fortification erected at Port Royal during the French occupation, is now a museum. It is a quaint wooden building with three tall chimneys, and a fireplace in every room in the house. These rooms are small and low-ceilinged, and there are four little staircases leading up to separate suites, so perfectly built and planned that not a sound carries from one to the other. It is the first apartment house on the continent. In the [page 63] lower rooms one finds the history of Port Royal in charts and prints and fire arms, and furniture and brocades. It looks less a museum than a residence, so skillfully are its treasures set out.
     There is a small library where Cromwellian armour is placed over the fireplace, against crimson burlap, and andirons carry out the dark note of the room. There are ancient bookshelves and a little square-paned window hung with old red damask curtains, through which you see the spires of a century-old English church. Mr. L. M. Fortier, the superintendent of St. Anne, gives his life to the small precious house. He told me that he had traced one of the andirons—a beautiful little figure of Ceres which was found buried near the earth works—to a piece designed and made in 1760 by the Carron Iron Works of England. “And the other day,” he added, “the same firm made us a mate to their design of over a century and a half ago!”
     In contrast to this is the clear blue and white of a transplanted cottage room, full of the furniture and simple personal effects of French-Canadian peasants of two hundred years ago, before the days of the banishment from beloved Acadia.
     In the village of Annapolis Royal everything seems to fit gently into surroundings that are undisturbed by the passing of time. It is modern only under protest. In the little Roman Catholic Church on George Street one sees the first missal used in Acadia. Its edges are the pink of a fading [page 64] rose, and the lettering and musical notation are exquisite. It was carried from village to village by the first priests. Here also is a tablet “Erected as memorial of the baptism at Port Royal on St. John the Baptist’s day, June 24th, 1610, of Henri Memberton, chief of the Micmac Indians and his family, first fruits of the Catholic missions, and the beginning of Christianity in Canada.” Exquisite small pictures of the Stations of the Cross by Gabriel Pippett, the English artist, conceived and carried out after the primitive Early Flemish style, have been set in frames of apple-wood made by Micmac Indians. [page 65]

     But all this is only setting for a street of old houses, or rather ghosts of houses that remember the little garrison town of Port Royal in that phase of its life when it was removed to the peaceful harbour of Fort Anne. The first desperate fight for mere existence was over, and it had arrived at a social as well as a military existence.
     Then, as now, St. George was the residential street. Many of the houses were occupied by French officers and their wives, brilliant women who must have found a piquant as well as terrifying contrast between past, and present: the intense cold, and the heat of summer; the lonely outpost; the hovering Indians; [page 68] and the black slaves who were their servants. Every house of importance in Port Royal had its wine cellar and its slave room; and, speaking of things social, it is said that the Indians invariably sneered at the slaves, and the slaves at the Indians.
     Miss Charlotte I. Perkins, in a published paper giving the history of the street, says: “the houses were never pretentious. Many were a storey and a half; low, sloping roof, with or without dormer windows. A door in the centre and two windows [page 69] on each side of it. As for verandahs they were scarcely thought of. Set in a garden of old-fashioned flowers, the centre path leading from a whitewashed paling fence, there was a charm about them that was very real.”
     Nevertheless, these toy houses were well built, many of them with walls set with clay and rushes of one foot thickness, and having enormous chimneys and large fireplaces. The interior finishing was of pine—dark brown boards that shone like glass—the narrow, crooked stairways were paneled, the walls sheathed with it. In the front rooms were hand-carved mouldings, and deep seats on either side of the windows.
     There was Hall’s Hotel, opposite the old ferry Slip, dating from 1760. In the old coach days, we are told, it was one of the famous stopping places for the tally-ho as it drove through from Halifax. On entering the town the driver blew his bugle, the signal for people to flock out and get the news of the world.
     The Bailey House, built earlier than the hotel, is not much changed. It was the town’s aristocratic boarding-house, and it was “Sam Slick” who gave it the name of “Marm Bailey’s.” The Duke of Kent danced here, and afterwards sent his compliments to Marm Bailey, who was an excellent cook. Her moose muffle soup was heard of in England. The Misses Bailey were popular young ladies, and naturally came in the way of meeting many admirers [page 70] of whom legend relates that the celebrated “Sam Slick” was one. “Miss Sarah” was the object of his affections, “but she would have none of him, as her heart was given to another.”
     It seems that Judge Haliburton (“Sam Slick”) who then lived in Annapolis, used sometimes to take the Maid of the Mist, a boat that ran between here and Saint John and landed opposite the Bailey House. On departing he was sometimes assisted by [page 71] Rose Fortune, the notorious coloured baggage-smasher with her “Come along, Jedge, come along!”—he, handing her a shilling, with “Goodbye, my black Venus.”
     There was the old white house of the widow Cooper about which a ghost story clings. Its owner had eloped with an English army officer who deserted her. In 1812 she wrote a romantic letter about the gleaming lights of English cities and how she could never return to the dark streets of little Annapolis. But she did return, according to an epitaph in the old cemetery, and a story which persists through the generations. It originated from two friends who declared that, as the widow lay dying, she asked them for a glass of water. At the same moment, a negress, wearing a turban and rings in her ears, glided over to the bed carrying a glass of water on a tray, and then disappeared. Her friends were terrified but, ignoring the vision, they brought water to the dying woman when she replied, calling by name an old slave whom she had owned years ago, “—has just brought it, on my silver tray.”
     The street is full of ghosts. One story has to do with the Williams house, birthplace of Sir William Fenwick Williams, the “hero of Kars.” His special ghost was a soldier with a bleeding arm whose name may, or may not, have been one, John Kennedy. The present occupant declares that he still roams the house in the early hours, evidently searching for his own identity. There is indeed the plot of a bestseller [page 72] involved in the mystery of the tall, magnificent spook, who appeared and re-appeared to inmates and guests of the Williams’ house. The modern sequel, which I quote from Miss Perkins, is that when part of the home was removed in 1872, and they were digging a cellar for the Royal Bank building, they found a skeleton, not in a closet, but in a drain pipe! A lady looking out of her window [page 73] at the time saw a man lift a plank, and then run as if for his life. The first person in the quickly gathering crowd, one of the old Ritchie family, exclaimed, “My God! It is John Kennedy!”…Now the strange thing is that John Kennedy was a native of a nearby village who had long ago disappeared, but this man was evidently a soldier from the brass buttons, and the copper on his boots…It baffled the imagination of the oldest inhabitant…One young lady carried off the skull, and the boots were for years in the Judge’s office.
     In contrast to the ghost who tramped this house, there is a brilliant Spanish figure out of real life, Gregoria Remona Antonia, the wife of “Major” Norman who once leased the old place. She must have mightily intrigued the ghost if they ever met. She was a favourite of the Duke of Wellington, who had married her to Norman and sent her to this far-away place with a very decent pension for life. Dressed in bright colours, a turban wound about her head, and leading a string of pet dogs—four white French poodles named Jacobena, Puppet, Malta Ray, and Tabby—whom she industriously fed on tender young rabbits—what a note she must have made among the blacks and the Indians, the French and the English of Annapolis Royal! She liked to talk of “my dear Duka” to the ladies of the garrison, but her husband, of whom she was not so proud, she addressed as “Normana! Bruta Beasta!” [page 74]
     The home of Peter Bonnett, High Sheriff, built on the foundations of an old French cellar, has been pitifully changed from the first design showing delightful Gothic windows with shutters and a railing around the top of the roof. This latter was overlaid with copper and had a stairway leading to it. The house was beautifully furnished with old mahogany, china and silver, which, on the death of the Bonnetts, became scattered about the neighbourhood. Among the silver was a coffee pot belonging to Mrs. Bonnett’s grandfather, a Colonel de Lancey—one in which his female slave made coffee and poisoned him, from the effects of which he died in 1804. “He had foolishly promised her her freedom at the time of his death.”
     This house had a high hawthorn hedge, and a pretty garden about which rumor lurked, for it came to be looked upon by some people as a treasure place. History relates that at various times digging used to go on around the trees.
     Port Royal changed hands six times, between the French and the English, before General Francis Nicholson’s forces from New England finally took possession. Then the name became Annapolis Royal, in honour of Queen Anne.
     If I lived on this quiet street, and were making a garden here, I should always be watching for skulls and cannon balls as I dug my early lettuce beds! Looking up from my work I should probably see [page 75] strange shadows passing by, especially at twilight. The more celebrated ghosts of Port Royal would not interest me nearly so much as a girl in a Spanish shawl leading a string of poodles, and perhaps the unfortunate Narmana…I should hope to see Rose Fortune…And a phantom priest might pass me by carrying his missal, just as I was planting a peony…Old Peoples’ Places, indeed! [page 76]

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