Pritchard was goggle-eyed at all this, Marc pretended to doze, Adelaide stared out at the snow beginning to fall again, Lambert appeared to be listening but showed no particular reaction, and Sedgewick grunted and mumbled throughout but not loud enough to steer Brookner’s fanciful tale off course.
“My brother-in-law’s allegiance has been disturbed, shaken even, by the recent tragic events,” Brookner said to Pritchard in response to Sedgewick’s last snort of disapproval.
“Farmers fightin’ farmers,” Sedgewick said. “What’s the good of it?”
“Quite right,” Pritchard said amiably. “There’s nothing civil about a civil war. It’s like a family feud.”
Sedgewick gave him a half smile but did not add to the sentiment.
“There’ll be a few hangings and then folks’ll begin to see things straight again,” Brookner said loftily. “You mark my words. And a little war—quick and precise—isn’t a bad thing every once in a while. Like a belt on a delinquent’s backside.”
This aphorism seemed to stall the conversation, and the sudden arrival of snow fluttering past the windows in mesmerizing wavelets drew attention to the outdoors for a few minutes.
“I am not in the least concerned that these woods are crowded with vigilantes or foreign invaders,” Brookner said, staring up at the ceiling where a larger and more discriminating audience might lurk. “Why, when my grandfather and grandmother trekked five hundred miles from Virginia through forests like these in 1783—as their home burned behind them and they paid for their loyalty to King George with everything but their lives—these woods were infested with Indians: Senecas and Osage, as primitive and vicious as they come.”
“Mohawks and Onondagas,” Adelaide responded, to the astonishment of all. “And up here, Algonquins—Ottawa and Montagnais. And most of them were running, too.”
No-one could think of anything to say to such a mild but authoritative interjection. Marc saw Brookner’s body stiffen and his lower lip quiver.
“Addie was tops in her class,” Sedgewick said, ostensibly to Pritchard sitting opposite him. “Always.”
Brookner ignored the remark and said patronizingly, “That may well be, my dear—you are often correct about such minutiae—but what does it matter in terms of the point I was making? One savage is like another.”
“Oh, I trust, sir, that any of those remaining in the province are somewhat civilized by now,” Pritchard said with such obvious anxiety and sincerity that the conversation was brought, mercifully, back to more immediate and practical matters.
“Your scalp is safe here,” Marc said, looking out at the snow to hide his smile.
“Rest-stop up ahead!” Gander Todd called out.
And this time, as if to demonstrate how secure these woods were, Brookner did not approach the half-log grog-shop with his sword flashing.
Two hours later, without further incident or much meaningful chatter, the coach pulled up at an inn that sat on the river side of the road about a quarter of a mile from the village of Prescott. Marc got out of the carriage and surveyed the establishment, reputed to be the finest hostelry in these parts.
The Georgian Arms was a sprawling, two-storey clapboard edifice with a pillared verandah and false balcony above it and seven or eight chimney-pots, all of them issuing smoke. Barns and stables were set back discreetly in the rear. The village itself, on a clear day, would have been visible as there were working farms on either side of the road, dozing now under tender pillows of January snow. Just behind the outbuildings Marc could see, in blurred outline, a copse of evergreens and the telltale shadow where the banks of a creek meandered. Beyond the rim of the bush to the southwest, he knew, the St. Lawrence would be pouring blue and frigid underneath its carapace of ice.
“Well, this is more like it,” Pritchard said approvingly.
The interior offered little to change the Englishman’s mind. There was a spacious reception chamber that rose two storeys to a vaulted and timbered ceiling. All the guest-rooms apparently were on the second floor of the two-storey, in the rear section of the inn. Off the foyer, left and right, there were five or six good-sized rooms that served variously as smoker, waiting lounge for the coach service, public and private dining areas, and a taproom for travellers and local tipplers. Beneath the guest-rooms were the kitchen and probably the office and living quarters of the owner. Two strapping youths took their luggage and lugged it through the hall on the left and up a narrow set of stairs, while the honoured guests themselves were greeted effusively by the proprietor, Murdo Dingman.
Dingman looked as if he had been press-ganged into his clothes. Bulges of neck and waist leaked out at cuff and collar, accenting even more his globular head and a glowing pink scalp barely rescued from baldness by two grey tufts of hair standing above his ears like undotted exclamation marks. His berry-brown eyes were beady and hyperactive between beetle brow and bursting cheek, the only quick-moving parts of an otherwise phlegmatic physique. What he lacked in sprightliness, however, he compensated for by his enthusiastic patter.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” he enthused, tumbling his fists like a baker kneading dough. “Your approach has been presaged by the governor’s courier, and hence we have made estimable preparations for your comfort and pleasure. We will brook no efforts to make your stay with us a memorial one.” He thrust out his chubby fingers and shook the hand of each of the gentlemen, catching and recording their names. He gave the captain an extra pump and, being informed that Marc was also a military officer, returned and pumped it again. So excited was he that he almost seized the lady’s hand in a male embrace, caught himself in time, and made a bow so curt he threatened to topple over and crush her.
“Barker!” he shrieked at a wretched lad struggling towards the stairs with Marc’s big trunk. “Be careful! Use both the hands God gave you!”
It being only two hours till supper-time at six, the party decided to go to their rooms, perform their ablutions (there was a bathroom at the far end of the upstairs hall and tons of hot water to be fetched at a whim), and then drift down for a pre-meal sherry in the plush chairs of the lounge. “Where you will be unperturbed till dinner be serviced,” their host confided, with a trumpeting chortle that had no evident purpose.
Still aware that he must act prudently, Marc lingered behind the others a little to survey the layout. As he stood in the cavernous foyer looking towards the rear of the inn, the lounge or smoker lay to his left, and to his right was a tavern, abuzz with local barflies. Straight ahead and running underneath the second storey, where the guest-rooms were, was a long hallway ending in a rear exit. Off this hall were doors left and right, leading, Marc assumed, to various parts of the proprietor’s living quarters or those of his hirelings, and next to the exit itself Murdo Dingman’s office. Just to Marc’s left, around the corner from the lounge, a short hall brought one to the stairs leading up to the rooms above or, alternatively, to a side exit on the ground floor. Over to the right, below the arching beams strung with coloured candle-lamps, was the open dining-room set with generous round tables draped in white linen cloth. A clattering of pans somewhere beyond it suggested an adjoining kitchen.
Marc started for the hallway to his left and the stairs to his room. But Murdo Dingman came trundelling up the hall from his office and across the foyer, waving a letter in one hand. Marc stopped and waited politely for his arrival. Dingman came to a rolling stop in front of him, glanced warily over at the open tavern-door, slipped the letter into Marc’s hand with a deft gesture, and said, “Private communicado for your eyes only. From the currier at twelve hundred hours.” And he scuttled furtively back towards his office.
It was another note from Owen Jenkin in Montreal.
Dear Marc:
More disquieting news. One of Sir John Colborne’s spies has supplied information that Charles Lambert is actually Sharles Lam-bear (French pronunciation for both words), born in St. Denis but raised in Vermont across the border. Many relatives still in the
area. Spent the past two weeks near the village, but his purpose is not yet known. His wife is English-speaking and, we believe, still in Cobourg. Watch your back. More news as it comes to me.
Owen
Well, old friend, Marc thought, I can’t look forward and backward at the same time. But Monsieur Lambert would soon receive a face-to-face surprise, for Marc could not afford to wait much longer. Still, though it was possible that Lambert had taken a shot at him back near Cornwall—and now seemed to have a motive for assassinating him—Marc was inclined to think it had not been him. That didn’t mean that Lambert wasn’t looking for such an opportunity. It just meant that there could be more than one person out to kill him. And why would Lambert bother with a death-threat against Brookner? True, Brookner was a Tory bigot and a miles gloriosus, but he hadn’t been involved in the carnage at St. Denis or St. Eustache. His principal offense, beyond his swaggering arrogance, had been against the Scanlon brothers, one of whom could well be stalking him.
Marc decided that the coming night would be critical for any assassin, for by this time tomorrow the Brookner party could be in Kingston, where it would break up, leaving Brookner on home ground and Marc, Pritchard, and Lambert to arrange their own unpredictable schedules. He walked slowly and pensively up to his room.
Supper was delayed fifteen minutes while the group waited, somewhat anxiously, for Captain Brookner to return from his obligatory walkabout, in full military regalia “Daring young Miles Scanlon to make him a martyr,” Sedgewick muttered for all to hear.
Murdo Dingman, too, was beside himself with worry: the roast chickens were cooling and the gravy with kidneys congealing on the table. But Brookner did arrive unmartyred, stamping the snow off his boots at the side exit in clear view of the diners seated across the foyer around a single, large table. He came across to them, pulling at the sleeve of his magnificent greatcoat. He was flushed and excited.
“I saw the bugger!” he cried. Then to his lady, “Pardon my French.”
“Scanlon?” Sedgewick asked, wide-eyed.
“I couldn’t be sure. But it was the shadow of a man—not a big man—moving through the trees to my left as I strolled along a little path beside the creek back there. I was admiring the scenery, especially a spring with the dark water bubbling up through the ice.”
It was obvious that the captain was enjoying himself.
Dingman broke into the narrative: “Were you insulted, sir?”
“No, I was not. At the first flick of movement, I opened my coat and surprised the the miscreant by flourishing my sword.”
Which would certainly have frightened an assassin with a pistol, Marc mused.
“Do you not think you are taking the threat from this Scanlon chap a bit too lightly, Captain?” Pritchard asked with some hesitation.
“I would turn your question around, sir: Miles Scanlon may well be taking me too lightly. At any rate, no Scanlon shall prevent me from executing my morning walk or enjoying the local scenery.”
“Hear! Hear!” Pritchard cried, then blushed when he realized he was alone in the sentiment. Marc was sure he heard Adelaide utter “Fool!” under her breath. If Brookner heard, he did not let on nor allow it to modify the pose of lofty valour he had assumed and then maintained throughout an awkward, jittery supper.
It had occurred to Marc that the shadowy figure Brookner claimed to have seen—if it had been real and not imagined for dramatic effect—was just as likely to have been stalking him as the captain. After all, there had been two actual attempts on his own life and a mere threatening note to Brookner who, in his vainglory, may have concocted it himself. Reluctantly, for he was once more extremely fatigued, Marc took out the pumpkin and set up the dummy-form in his bed. Then he rigged several noisy objects against the unlocked door. There was no wardrobe in his room to curl up inside, but a dressing-screen set in front of an improvised bedroll against a far wall provided a suitable vantage-point. He loaded the pistol and laid it on his chest. He kept his clothes and boots on, prepared for pursuit and capture if need be. He was just about to blow out the candle when the first sounds of argument in the room next to him made him pause.
It was the Brookners. Though muffled by the plaster-lath wall between Marc and them, their angry words were decipherable. It appeared that they were well into the altercation, the tone and temper of which had been steadily rising.
“—didn’t even have the decency to wear a mourning band!”
“At least I didn’t make a spectacle of myself weeping and wailing over the coffin!”
“Keep your voice down! Do you want the whole house to hear?”
The next exchange, though vehement, was conducted in tones too low for Marc to determine the tenor or topic. But soon the voices rose again in pitch and volume.
“Don’t you ever—ever, you hear—contradict me in public one more time. I won’t have it!”
“Don’t you know what a strutting peacock you’re making of yourself? For God’s sake, Randolph, you were once such a proud man, such an intelligent—”
“Shut your mouth this instant! I won’t stand for much more of this! When are you going to start acting like a proper wife?”
“When you stop playing the fool!”
“Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!”
Marc got up, lamp in hand. He was waiting for the slap or the woman’s cry.
“Take your hands off me!”
Marc eased his booby-trap aside, cursing himself as he did so, and slipped into the dark hallway that ran along the width of the upper floor. He had lost a precious minute, was not even sure what he was about to do, but he reached the Brookners’ door out of breath but reasonably alert. He put an ear against it. Silence. There had been no slap, no outcry or gasp of pain at a hurtful male grip. He could hear nothing for a while, then, finally, a sequence of what sounded like snores: the deep-throated kind that interrupt themselves. Brookner had apparently fallen asleep. Marc continued to listen for another minute. The snores subsided. The swishing of sheets or clothing suggested that Adelaide was slipping quietly and safely into bed. She may have been weeping.
Marc made his way back to his room, re-established the booby-trap, poked at the dying fire, re-arranged himself in his place of observation, and prepared to watch and wait for his assassin.
Outside the rear window, the snow continued to fall softly and persistently. In the peaceful quiet of the room, Marc’s thoughts turned to the revelations about Lambert. Beyond the remote possibility that Lambert might be gunning for him, Marc considered the larger question of who he was and what he had been up to for the past several weeks. It seemed doubtful he had ever visited Cobourg, even though his wife was reputed to be there waiting for him, let alone lived in the town for four months. Was the Cobourg story he told merely a cover for secretive and seditious actions he had been carrying out for some time now? Perhaps he was a close aide of Papineau or Nelson, who had tried to establish an English identity (or had one) for some nefarious purpose. Was he possibly en route to Toronto to execute mayhem of some kind or to Buffalo to rendezvous with Mackenzie and the Patriots, as the exiles threatening invasion liked to call themselves? Whatever was going on, Marc was determined that he would get to the bottom of it before they reached Cobourg.
As he lay thinking thus, he began to realize that the element of excitement and danger, which had beset him since his miraculous awakening in the hospital, was actually helping his rehabilitation by constantly bringing him back to his senses, to a quickness of thought and decision that could easily have mouldered under the strain of coping with Rick’s death, facing his own precarious mortality, worrying about Beth and whether there was any future for them, or raging futilely against the inordinate injustices he detected everywhere about him in the world. Then a more profound thought asserted itself: Could a visceral revulsion against such grim realities have been part of the reason that Rick Hilliard had courted danger all his brief adult life? Did it explain Rick’s willingness to step into the path of
a bullet meant for somebody else?
The answers did not come before Marc fell asleep.
* * *
Marc was not unhappy to be wakened. He had been dreaming that he and Beth were rumbling over a dusty, grasshopper-ridden prairie in a Conestoga wagon towards some Yankee paradise named after a decimated Indian tribe, and Beth was saying, “But I don’t see any millinery shops!” just before a typhoon of some sort came wriggling out of the endless horizon like a rabid black cobra. He recognized it as a nightmare even before he was fully awake.
But it was not the morning sun he felt on his right cheek. In fact it felt more like snow. The pistol lay where he had placed it, on his chest, except that it was now covered with fine, white flakes. His hair was ruffled by a tiny, chill breeze.
He sat up quickly, knocking the dressing-screen over against the fireless stove. His eye went immediately to the door. The booby-trap was intact. He sighed with relief. He had not counted on the extent of his fatigue and the consequent depth of his sleep: even if someone had forced the door open, he was unlikely to have heard the intruder, who would have had plenty of time to murder both the dummy and its creator.
He turned now to the source of the draft and the snow. The lone window—overlooking the woods behind the inn—was ajar. If there had been much wind, it would have been blown completely open. With growing dread he turned slowly and made himself look at the bed. The night-capped pumpkin was still in its place, but the bedclothes had been knocked askew. He went over and examined his “head.” There was a two-inch incision just below the “chin.” In the deep of the night, someone had crept in through the window, stabbed him through what should have been his throat, and crawled back out—undetected by the great investigator.
Dubious Allegiance Page 16
