Vital Secrets

by Don Gutteridge

  “I met dear, sweet Mary that same summer,” Jenkin said, more warmly than sadly. “She couldn’t have been much more than fifteen. A regular sprite, she was, a lively woodland nymph, racing over the hills between your place and the great Trelawney estate like a leggy colt just out of the chute. All blond tresses and freckles.” Jenkin squeezed his eyes shut with a slight wince of both cheeks. “I can see her limber and wholesome, as if she were here before me at this very moment.”

  Marc did not interrupt the major’s reverie for several minutes. Then he said, “She died before I was born, or so I was led to believe. Uncle Jabez would never tell me much about her, even when I grew old enough to be more than curious about a young woman who might well have been a surrogate mother to me, as Jabez was my father. All I’ve ever known for certain is that she went up to school in London and died there suddenly and tragically.”

  “Would you like to know more, lad?”

  “You know what really happened?”

  Jenkin nodded.

  Marc said, “Please. Tell me about Aunt Mary.”

  “Well, lad, I got the story in bits and pieces from Fred over the years we served together. Mary grew up on the estate under the easy but kindly care of her father, while her brother Jabez sought his fortune in the law courts of London and, a little later, Frederick went off to Sandhurst and glory. When old man Edwards, many years a widower, died, Mary was alone there and, as I understand it, lived with the Trelawneys next door for a while, until Jabez finally decided to sell his share in the London firm and occupy the Edwards farm, modest as it was. While Fred was too discreet to say so openly, I gathered that Mary had become—how shall I say it delicately?—a free spirit.”

  “Somewhat wild, you mean?” Marc said. “She seems to have had little adult supervision or discipline.”

  “Spoken like a genuine trooper.” Jenkin chuckled. “But true, nonetheless, and alas. However, Jabez soon took her under his wing and—of this I am certain—formed a powerful filial bond with the sister he hadn’t really seen much of in recent years.”

  “That is what I’ve always assumed to be the reason behind his inability to speak of her to me or anyone. Even the inadvertent mention of her name could stun him into silence and, occasionally, tears.”

  “So when she was seventeen,” Jenkin continued, “he persuaded her to go up to London to Madame Rénaud’s finishing school. She was an exceptionally bright girl, and he felt that three years of music, French, and the domestic arts would make a lady out of her. There were, I believe, even hopes that she might prove a suitable match for one of the Trelawney tribe next door.”

  Marc shuddered: his teenage affair with the young ward of Sir Joseph Trelawney had ended disastrously, and was an emotional wound not yet completely healed. “How did Aunt Mary take to the business of being ‘finished’?” he asked.

  “Like an unbroken yearling to the bit and bridle,” Jenkin said, with evident approval. “But she stuck it out for almost two years, according to Fred, though by this time—it had to have been about 1809 or ’10—we were both in Portugal and dancing a jig or two with the Iron Duke.”

  “Until…”

  Jenkin sighed, a heaving belly of a sigh. “Until word came to Jabez from Madame Rénaud herself that, just days before the end of the winter term, Mary Edwards had fallen gravely ill with a fever and the bloody flux.”

  “Yes: Uncle Jabez told me that much, once. He said he’d had no warning, and when he rushed up to London by express coach the next morning, she was already dead.”

  “Well, if it’s any consolation, Frederick insists that she was still breathing when Jabez arrived. She died within the hour, in his arms.”

  “It’s no wonder he doesn’t want to remember. But surely he had words with Madame Rénaud; he was a lawyer after all,” Marc said.

  “I’m sure he did, lad. Fred says that Jabez was torn between anger and remorse. Your uncle Frederick had many letters from him during the subsequent year. They moved him so deeply he could barely bring himself to open them. He burned each of them immediately afterwards.”

  “I’m glad I wasn’t alive to see Uncle Jabez in such a state. By the time I was old enough to be aware of him and who he was, I found him the gentlest soul on the face of this earth.”

  “I’m sure he came to accept her death eventually. Apparently he did try to sue the school, but his heart wasn’t in it after the initial rage had subsided and simple grief had taken over. The old lady must have known the seriousness of Mary’s illness long before she wrote to Jabez. But what could he do, really?”

  “Just bring her home for burial,” Marc replied.

  Jenkin sighed again. “The poor man was not able to make even that small gesture. There was suspicion she’d died of typhus, and the authorities apparently compelled him to have her interred in that great stinking maw of a graveyard in central London.”

  “But, sir, I saw her grave-marker in our garden every time I headed up into the west woods.” And even now he could picture that slim, white tablet with the tersest possible inscription: “Mary Ann Edwards, 1789–1810”—as if Uncle Jabez could not bear to add one syllable more.

  “Aye, lad. The marker is hers all right. But she’s not under it.”

  As they rode into the clearing that presaged the hamlet of Port Hope, Marc said, “Thank you for telling me all this, sir. It fills in a lot of the gaps in the story of my adoptive family. In a strange sort of way, I now feel as if I actually had an aunt. Perhaps someday soon I can persuade Uncle Frederick to give me more details. After all, he was closer in age to his sister than Uncle Jabez, and they must have played together often as children.”

  “But you won’t tell Jabez about … what I’ve just told you?”

  Marc smiled. “No, sir, I shan’t. The last thing in this world I want to do is bring pain to my uncle.”

  They rode in silence for a while, and Marc reflected on the strange and surprising story he had just been told. He wished he could have known Aunt Mary, wished Uncle Jabez had been more forthcoming. That he was related to such a determined and unfettered spirit both alarmed and intrigued him.

  BY THE TIME THEY DREW NEAR to Crawford’s Corners, a winter moon hung like a silver saucer above the tree line in the southeast and cast a swath of shimmering light across the roadway ahead. The cold black sky around it was studded with stars as bright as a newborn’s eyes. Neither had spoken for the past hour and now, in the mysterious calm of evening, it seemed almost profane to do so.

  Fourteen months before, en route to his first investigation, Marc had travelled this very road in the dark of a winter night. Memories of that time flooded in. As they approached the crossroads that marked the centre of Crawford’s Corners, Marc could feel the presence of the houses and cabins he knew were camouflaged by the bush and the darkness.

  “That must be the light from Durfee’s Inn,” Marc said quietly.

  It was a warm, orange glow on the right, no more than twenty yards away.

  “We’ll be made most welcome there,” Marc said. “James and Emma Durfee are good people, salt of the earth.”

  “They’ll be surprised to see you back here,” Jenkin said. Then, without warning, he brought his mount to a halt in the middle of the intersection. “And that light over there,” he said, “must be from Erastus Hatch’s place. I can see the outline of the mill just behind the house.”

  Hatch had helped Marc with his first investigation, and had become a friend. Just to the north of the miller’s land lay the farm of Beth Smallman, leased now to Thomas Good-all and his wife, the former Miss Winnifred Hatch. Beth’s house, which Marc knew well, could not be seen from this vantage-point, but he knew Beth was there, nursing her brother Aaron.

  Marc urged his mount straight ahead. The quartermaster’s hand on his elbow stopped him. “I will go on into Durfee’s,” he said gently to Marc. “You are to turn left and make your way up Miller Sideroad.”

  “I don’t understand,” Marc said.

 
; “I will carry on to Kingston, and then work my way slowly back westward, doing business with the farmers en route, as I normally do. I should be back in Cobourg in about a week. If you find yourself at leisure here, feel free to make any arrangements with the locals as you see fit, and I’ll endorse them when I get here. But should you find more pressing and pleasant things to do, I will cover this region on my return.”

  “But I assumed you brought me along so we might work as a team,” Marc said, genuinely puzzled, though a bizarre and not unsettling notion was now suggesting itself to him. “I still have things to learn from you.”

  “I will do nicely on my own, lad.”

  “Sir, I must protest—”

  “Marc, my boy, you have unfinished business here in Crawford’s Corners, not a hundred yards from where we are presently stalled.”

  My God, Marc thought, was there anyone left in Toronto who did not know about his on-again, off-again romance with Beth Smallman?

  “If the lady’s answer is no,” Jenkin continued, “you can always catch me up.”

  “Is that an order, sir?”

  “It’s the true reason I asked you along. Now go.”

  With that curt command, the major wheeled his horse to the right and trotted off towards Durfee’s Inn, leaving Marc alone in the intersection.

  Very slowly he made his way north along Miller Sideroad.

  TWO

  Marc realized that he dare not arrive unannounced at Beth Smallman’s door at seven o’clock in the evening, when the entire household would be present: Beth and her brother Aaron, Winnifred, and Thomas Goodall, her tenants, and probably a servant girl. He found himself quite relieved at the thought. Although he had been mulling over in his mind how he might arrange matters so that a brief encounter with Beth would be both possible and plausible (to Major Jenkin), the quartermaster had preempted him most unexpectedly and, incredible as it seemed, with a generosity of spirit that now left Marc feeling almost ashamed. The major had given him a week, free of any commitment or duty, to put his personal affairs in order, to “woo the lady” as the amateur thespians among his fellow officers might have put it.

  But he was no Galahad and Beth was certainly no fawning princess. She and her late husband had hacked a farm out of this unforgiving bush, working side by side in the fields and in the barn. She had suffered the violent deaths of two men she adored: husband and father-in-law. She had taken an active part in local politics as a staunch Reformer, and after her husband’s death had become more radical and more vocal, risking her status as a “respectable” woman and widow in a society where men were likely to see her more as a threat than as a suffering soul in need of understanding and sympathy.

  Unable to run the farm on her own, and with an inheritance from her father-in-law, she had pulled up stakes and moved to Toronto to start a new life as proprietress of a millinery shop on King Street. She had been joined in that venture by her aunt Catherine from the United States. In fact, ever since Beth’s rejection of him last June, Aunt Catherine had been his ally, lobbying on his behalf and sending him encouraging notes from time to time during the fall.

  Marc dismounted and led the mare up the lane to the miller’s house, planning to put the horse in Erastus Hatch’s barn and settle her down for the night before approaching the back door. But that door suddenly swung open, and Erastus himself emerged, coatless and excited.

  “By the Lord, it is you!” he cried, striding through the drifts in his slippers. “I saw you turn into the lane, and when I recognized the uniform, I said to Mary, ‘There’s only one soldier I know who’s six feet tall and walks like a duke!’”

  Marc reached out and grasped the hand of his friend, who had been so helpful in the Cobourg investigation and had put in more than one good word for him with Beth Smallman. “Yes, it is me, sir, and I’ve come to stay for a few days, if you’ve got room for me.”

  “You shan’t get past the doorway, Marc, unless you quit calling me ‘sir.’ I’m Rastus to my friends, and I number you among them.”

  “Rastus it is, then.”

  “What’s brought you all the way out here?” Hatch said, clutching his loose sweater more tightly about him. It was a straightforward question with no hint of suspicion or concern, but that was typical of the man.

  “I’ll explain the whole thing as soon as I’ve bedded down the mare here for the night. And if you don’t get back inside, you’ll catch your death.”

  “Well, son, you know your way about in the barn, eh? There’s enough moonlight to work by if you use one of the stalls on the south wall. Meantime, I’ll go tell Mary to put the kettle on and rouse Susie and the little one.”

  “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

  “By the Christ, but it’s good to see you!” Hatch cried, then began to brush the snow off his slippers, gave up with a chuckle, and turned back towards the house. “And I’m not the only one who’ll think so!”

  The miller glanced to the north, towards the log house of Beth Smallman.

  MARC AND ERASTUS HATCH SAT IN the two padded chairs before the fieldstone fireplace and a blaze whose roaring had just begun to die down to a steady, amiable murmur. Two tendrils of pipe-smoke rose drowsily and intermittently into the warm ambience of the miller’s parlour. It was nearly ten o’clock. Mary Hatch—who, as Mary Huggan, had served the miller as cook and housekeeper long before she married him—had cobbled together a supper for their guest of cold beef, bacon, eggs, and fried potatoes. Her sister Susie, a carbon copy of her older sibling (red hair, translucent Irish skin, freckles, a wisp of a figure), then brought tiny Eustace Hatch out of the nursery to be admired and cooed at. Marc, of course, said all the appropriate things, but inside he felt an uncharacteristic pang of envy and a sudden intimation of the inexorable passing of time. Then, with the babe returned to its slumber and Mary excusing herself, the two men settled into their port and pipes.

  Although considered by the local farmers he served to be a “merchant,” Hatch still helped his hired hands with every aspect of the mill’s functioning and the working of the land surrounding it. His large, peasant fingers were callused, his face had the red, raw look of the active yeoman, and his modest paunch was well muscled. For a while they traded harmless bits of gossip about their different locales, reminisced about Marc’s investigation here fourteen months earlier, then lapsed into a silence that was not uncomfortable.

  “So you’ve given up being a supernumerary constable,” Marc said. a

  “That was not a hard decision in the least. After what happened here last winter, I kind of soured on the law. I try now to mind my own business, do an honest day’s work, and treat my customers fairly. Of course, with Mary and the little one, all that’s been made much easier.”

  “You look like a man blessed.”

  “That I am, though I’d be hard-pressed to say why the Lord’s chosen me,” Hatch said solemnly, then added quickly, “But I’m not fool enough to keep on asking Him why!”

  “Wisely said.”

  “But I’ll tell you truthfully, Marc, I’m one of the few souls in this county who is happy.”

  “It’s been a grim year everywhere in the province,” Marc said. “Bad weather, lean crops, falling prices, paper money losing value by the month, the banks reeling. Made all the worse, I suspect, because so much was expected after the Tory victory in the election last spring and the governor’s promise to bring about real change.”

  “I’ve given up on that, too.” Hatch turned and looked directly at Marc.

  “Being a Tory?”

  “Not quite as blunt as that, but something close to it.” He leaned back again and spoke between hefty puffs on the pipe. “I’ve given up on politics, at least for the time being, and I used to make all the right noises whenever asked to, as you know.”

  “Noises in favor of the governor, you mean?”

  “Exactly. I believed in the rule of law and I still do. But what has happened around here since last June is downright frightenin
g.”

  “How so?”

  “The ordinary folk—who are suffering the most, as they always have since the beginning of things—have begun to give up on the political process, too. Myself, I’ve decided to do what I can in my own bailiwick. I’ve extended credit where I shouldn’t, ground grain for free when there was no other remedy, and doled out my own flour so some of the kids in the township won’t starve. But many of the others, with no resources to fall back on, are growing desperate. And to make matters worse, many of my Tory acquaintances, who wouldn’t ordinarily tip their hat to an Orangeman, are starting to spout their fanatic heresies. Both sides have hardened their positions since the election. It’s almost impossible to stand anywhere in the middle, or be nonpartisan or even a simple, caring Christian.”

  “Sir Francis has much to answer for, I’m afraid. Instead of using his majority in the assembly to redress the complaints of the farmers and work towards reconciliation, he has ruthlessly pursued his own agenda.”

  “You were wise to get as far away from him as possible.” Hatch looked at Marc, put his pipe down, and added, “Nobody hereabouts was surprised to learn about your resignation as his aide-de-camp. We knew what kind of man you were.”

  Marc tried not to look affected by this kind remark. “Then why don’t the conservatives repudiate the governor?”

  Hatch laughed. “Believe it or not, they blame the actions of Willie Mackenzie’s radicals for making Governor Head the way he now is: erratic and spiteful.”

  “And have there been actions?”

  Hatch paused, drew noisily on his dead pipe, glanced at it balefully, and said, “I’m afraid there have. People aren’t just ranting and raving anymore: they’re organizing and holding secret meetings. There’s been talk—right here in Hamilton township—of arms about to be smuggled across the border, of trunkloads of American dollars and coinage on their way—to be used for God knows what dastardly purpose.”

  “But we heard that sort of fear-mongering gossip last year, remember?”