Death of a Patriot

by Don Gutteridge

  Billy didn’t bother waiting for the obvious order, and it did not come. He sprinted across the creek ice with bayonet bristling, and Mel and the others simply followed suit.

  Two shots suddenly erupted from the bush ahead. Billy heard a bullet whiz past his left ear. Someone behind him yelped, but Billy kept on going. The time to attack, the colonel insisted, was during the moment of greatest confusion among the enemy, before they could regroup and inflict serious damage. Casualties could be expected, of course, but they would be within the “perimeter of tolerance.” Billy did not have time to think that he could be one of them. The adrenaline pumping through him had either anaesthetized fear or been its manifestation. With a war cry that would have impressed Tecumseh, Sergeant Billy McNair leapt up onto the low bank and plunged into the evergreens.

  There would be no more shots. Three men lay dead, sprawled grotesquely in various postures of flight as the volley had roared in upon them. A fourth lay moaning on his back, his Kentucky rifle still clutched in one hand and smoking.

  “It’s all right, lads,” Billy called back to his advancing troop. “We’ve wiped them out.”

  Mel was already busy examining the bloody corpses. “Only one of these muskets has been fired,” he said to Billy.

  Billy nodded and then knelt beside the dying soldier. His eyes were blinking furiously and his lips trembled in a parody of speech. Billy leaned down farther, and the whispered words rose up to greet him.

  “Tell my daddy I got shot in the gut, will ya?”

  “You were the bravest of this lot,” Billy said, feeling suddenly sick. The soldier was no older than he was. “But why didn’t ya shoot at us sooner?”

  Through a bubble of blood between his lips, the soldier said in what Billy afterward remembered as a kind of laugh, “We ain’t got no bullets. None of us. That’s why we run.”

  Captain Muttlebury had come up to survey the scene. “We need to get this man back to the village,” he said. “We can make a stretcher outta them cedar boughs, eh, Sergeant? Chalmers has got a busted arm, but he can walk okay.”

  “Too late, sir. This fella’s a goner.”

  • • •

  The trail of the remaining fugitives through the bush—treacherous with sudden swamps, breakaway ice, and waterlogged deadfalls—was not hard to follow. At least one of the Yankees had been wounded and was conveniently depositing droplets of blood as vivid as Hansel’s bread crumbs. But the pursuit was arduous and demoralizingly slow. They were about half an hour into the bush, heading due west and probably no more than a mile from the river, when Billy whispered to Mel beside him, “Don’t this terrain seem awfully familiar to you?”

  Mel paused, glanced around, and said with a chuckle, “Every tree’s been lookin’ the same to me fer the last hour—mean and ugly.”

  But before Billy could respond, he, Mel and the captain had stepped out into a broad clearing, a beaver meadow, in the middle of which stood an impediment that was neither tree nor swamp. And suddenly they knew precisely where they were.

  “My God,” Mel breathed, “it’s the old sod fort.”

  It was indeed the abandoned earthwork redoubt that they had visited less than two weeks before, on the last day of Indian summer, to remove the stashed powder, rifles, and ammo. They had, of course, then approached it from the main road that lay due west.

  “It’s a good thing we got that ammo out of there when we did,” Mel said, but Billy, who had assumed the role of scout without being assigned it, was already crouched behind a small cedar with his hand raised for silence.

  A minute later he came back to his captain and said, “I don’t see no movement of any kind from behind the walls, but their tracks are pointin’ towards the fort as far as I can tell. There’s too much sunlight on the snow fer me to be sure. But the bastards’ve put up a Stars and Stripes to let us know they been there.”

  “They wouldn’t sit in there with no powder or shot, would they?” Mel asked.

  Jonathan Muttlebury, hardware merchant–cum–militia captain, did not, as might have been expected in the circumstances, seriously entertain the question. Billy’s reference to the impertinence of running up a Yankee flag on their own fortification—however devalued—had the effect of a red hanky flung across the bull’s nose. “Lads, I’m sick and tired of this goddamn cat-and-mouse game,” he cried, and brandished his sabre like a paladin of old. “Follow me!”

  Billy knew he should have grabbed his commander by the arm and pulled him back towards common sense, and he would regret his indecision for the rest of his life. Instead, he waved the men behind him forward. With bayonets glittering in the mid-morning sun, Company C of the Windsor Regiment sped across the clearing towards the crumbling redoubt. While Billy was braced for a sudden assault from the still-silent ruin ahead of him (he was not ready to believe utterly that the Yankees had no bullets left), neither he nor any of the others was prepared for the abrupt and devastating ambuscade that roared out at them from the woods on the right.

  Billy felt bullets zinging past him, one of them grazing his right thigh. He dropped to his knees, his head spinning and his ears deafened. A second later he was almost blinded by a wave of gun smoke that rolled over him on the northwest breeze.

  Relying entirely upon instinct, he twisted around to discover the source of the ambush, fully expecting a second and more lethal volley. In the woods thirty yards away he could see men shuffling about and branches swaying. Somewhere in the numbness of his terror, his brain was telling him that a bayonet assault was imminent, that he had to get back onto his feet and prepare for hand-to-hand combat, as he had been trained to do. But as the smoke cleared, he could detect no one moving out of the woods or in it. Groans, curses, and sobs sullied the air behind him.

  Abruptly, Billy’s terror was transmuted into a consuming rage. They had been taken for suckers! Those Yankee pickets had been deliberately left behind to sacrifice themselves for their fellows and to perpetrate the ruse that the fugitives were without ammunition. That officer with the dangling arm was both brave and diabolical! And he was about to escape scot-free. Billy found himself galloping towards the ambushers with his coattails flying and his Brown Bess clutched carelessly in one hand, with no thought but to run down this mad adversary who had crossed the border to inflict unjustified mayhem upon his peaceful neighbours. Breathless and spent, Billy staggered into the bush and prepared to fight to the death.

  But there was no one to take up the challenge. Paper cartridges littered the ground, grim evidence of the murderous volley just unleashed, but not one of the enemy had remained to deliver a final, fatal blow or pick off the wounded as they struggled to their feet in the clearing. Nor had any of Billy’s troop followed him on his foolish, suicidal sprint. He was alone, and his rage was soon deflated.

  Just as he turned to face the horrors that he knew must lie on that bloodied meadow, he heard a low sigh. And spied a boot sticking out from behind a rotting stump a few feet away. Cautiously he eased over to it, gave it a gentle kick, assured himself that the body attached to it was unconscious or dead, and stepped around the stump, bayonet poised.

  It was the officer he had first seen in the orchard. Of what rank he could not tell because the blue and yellow tunic, though ostentatiously draped with insignia of several kinds, was homemade. His old-fashioned tricornered hat had fallen off his head and lay beside him where he had apparently attempted to rest against the stump and then tipped sideways into a thick tussock of desiccated grass. The head seemed too large for the body, though the shaggy mane of yellow hair, a high forehead, rugged goatee, and aquiline features may have given the illusion of size and grandeur. With his dirt-spattered uniform and wind-blown hair, his sharply hooked nose and thin, near-invisible lips, he resembled nothing so much as an American eagle shot out of the sky in the fullness of flight.

  A tiny cough tremored through the thin lips. The man was alive. Billy could now see that the left arm was indeed useless: it hung at an eccentric angle an
d a dark stain oozed out at the elbow. The fellow had organized the retreat of his men and effected their escape with one arm and a suppurating wound. And from the evidence here, it appeared that his last command had been an order for them to leave him to his fate. Without thinking, Billy pulled out the kerchief that Dolly had given him as a good-luck talisman, knelt beside the enemy, and after slitting open the sleeve of his tunic with a jackknife, fashioned a tourniquet above the wound. The fellow moaned weakly but did not open his eyes.

  It was at this moment that Billy realized the significance of capturing such an officer and, in all probability, having saved him from bleeding to death. Taken back to Colonel Stanhope, he could be interrogated and vital information elicited. If he were in fact a major or a colonel, he might even be carrying sensitive papers. Billy leant down, opened the fellow’s leather kit, and drew out four sheets of heavy rag paper.

  On the first sheet he saw what were obviously military orders, from Brigadier-General Lucius V. Bierce to Major Caleb Coltrane. Billy was unable to decipher much of the tactical lingo, but he was certain that the colonel would have no trouble doing so. The second sheet contained a sketch of some sort, composed of arrows, lines, and strategic X’s—a plan of attack, no doubt, and probably linked to the orders on the previous page. The third sheet was a printed “Proclamation to be read aloud to the enslaved peoples of British Canada”—likely the one already declaimed by Bierce in the village square at Windsor. The fourth was quite another matter. It was written in a hand entirely different from the others, on a fine vellum paper. Billy skimmed through its contents:

  November 1, 1838

  My dearest C:

  Come soon or I’ll be driven to find my own route

  to your heart, with all the risks and fretful dangers to

  our secret. And when you do, tucked in your strong arms

  and safe in your embrace, I promise faithfully to supply

  you with enough kisses to keep you forever attached

  to me and our mutual goal. And should our reward

  be in Heaven only, I’ll treasure those blessings received

  already. But I must go—he’s had me watched since Saturday!

  Ever yours,

  D

  A love letter from the fellow’s mistress. Well, whatever assignation they had hoped for would not happen. “Major” Coltrane was destined for jail and a rope necklace. Billy put the other three items safely into his own pouch, but something compelled him to fold the billet-doux, unfasten the top buttons of Coltrane’s tunic, and slip the letter under his blouse, next to his heart.

  • • •

  The first thing Billy saw when he stepped out of the woods was a lone soldier running across the killing ground towards him. There were no bodies prone and lifeless on the icy turf and no moaning from the wounded and maimed. For a moment he thought he must be in the middle of a cruel and improbable dream. But the soldier’s voice and the look of shock and horror on his unlined face were all too real. It was Lévesque, a farm boy from Belle River.

  “Where is everyone?” Billy said.

  “We’re all in the fort, sir. We’ve moved the injured men inside.”

  “That’s good. The Yankees have skedaddled, but we’ve got their ringleader.”

  “Sir, you must come and see what we’ve found in the fort. Right away.” Lévesque’s eyes were as round as the buttons on his overcoat.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We know where they got the powder and bullets from.”

  “From the fort? But—”

  “We found two crates busted open and looted. They must’ve dug ’em outta the wall somewheres.”

  “That can’t be,” Billy said, as they raced back towards the crumbling redoubt. “Captain Muttlebury removed them all last month.”

  “He must’ve missed out two boxes.”

  Bill stopped. “Jesus, Lévesque, they’ll court-martial him!”

  “I don’t think so, sir. The captain’s dead.”

  They had propped Muttlebury up against one of the walls, where he had died. Someone had had the courtesy to close his eyes. Sitting there with his hands folded in his lap and his chin resting peacefully on his chest, the captain looked as if he were taking an afternoon snooze at the back of his shop—with a blood-red carnation in the left lapel of his suit coat. And next to him, similarly propped, was another soldier: an avenging bullet had ripped the perpetual grin from his boy’s face.

  Billy’s knees gave way. He sank to the ground. His stomach heaved. He put both hands flat upon the earth to stop it from spinning. But it didn’t.

  THREE

  Marc Edwards, Esquire, closed the cow gate and stared back fondly over the spacious grounds of Osgoode Hall, still pastoral despite the wind-chiselled drifts of snow covering them and the leaf-shorn maples standing sentry here and there around them. A mere two months ago, the lads from up-country had been kicking a pig’s bladder across the greensward and in their animal exuberance, uttering very unbarrister-like whoops of joy. As the training centre for the province’s attorneys, Osgoode could not have been more removed from the urban hurly-burly of London’s Inns of Court had it been bivouacked on the moon. Summer or winter, the handsome three-storey brick edifice, not yet nine years old, was lapped in silence, save for birdsong in one season and the whine of arctic wind around its cornices in another. The grand colonnaded library on the second floor was as quiet and serious as the thousand tomes that sat in mute expectancy on its shelves.

  It was here that Marc had spent much of his time during the thrice-weekly visits he made to the home of the Law Society of Upper Canada, ever since Robert Baldwin, MLA and son of the famous Dr. William Warren Baldwin of Spadina, had agreed to serve as his principal and convinced his fellow Law Society benchers that his newest apprentice needed no entrance examination to test his mettle or determine his suitability for the most learned of professions. The benchers themselves provided the periodic lectures held in Lawyers’ Hall but otherwise left the students to their own devices. And a motley lot they were, though Marc no longer found himself shocked or even surprised to find himself elbow to elbow with the sons of farmers, physicians, greengrocers, bankers, surveyors, mill owners—a polyglot mix that would have made any self-regarding squire dyspeptic. But in this strange new world, anyone who could find thirty-seven pounds for a year’s room and board and pass the qualifying entrance exam was free to try his hand at lawyering. And if you happened to live in Toronto, as eight thousand people now did, or have a maiden aunt with a spare room on Peter Street, then so much the better.

  When he was not studying or attending lectures at Osgoode, Marc would go down to the law offices of Baldwin and Sullivan on the northeast corner of Front and Bay. This splendid brick building, designed by the multigifted Dr. Baldwin, with its Doric columns and elaborate portico, served the Baldwin family as town residence and place of business. Here, in the four rooms to the right of the entrance hall, Marc had spent dozens of pleasant hours observing the work of Robert, Clement Peachey—a junior barrister and solicitor—their clerk, and three copyists. One of Marc’s more frequent tasks was to look up references in the Osgoode library pertaining to ongoing briefs, laboriously transcribing salient points and disentangling granny knots of legalese. A welcome change occurred whenever Robert or Clement Peachey was scheduled to plead a serious case in the Court of Queen’s Bench at the fall assizes.

  Alas, such cases, outside of civil suits in the newly formed Court of Chancery, had been few and far between this past autumn, not because there were no murders, assaults, or treasons to prosecute—the aftermath of the rebellion had provided more than enough of these—but rather because Governor George Arthur had ordered the trials of the several dozen captured invaders and border raiders to be courts-martial, with most of them taking place in London, Niagara, or Kingston. Hence, the opportunity to see such cases play out in criminal court had been lost, not to speak of the healthy fees associated with same. It appeared that the actua
l military threat, however ineffectual or farcical, was now over. But the trials had been constant, with consequent public hangings, incarceration, transportation to Van Diemen’s Land, and the occasional acquittal. In some quarters, independent extralegal reprisals were still being carried out with stealth and undiminished venom.

  Just three days ago in London, the first captives of the Battle of Windsor to be tried and found guilty had been hanged in the town square. And even though the majority of citizens, whatever their political stripe or country of origin, longed for peace and stability, such violent public events invariably stirred up emotions. Yesterday there had been a noisy demonstration and march to Government House, organized by Boynton Tierney, Toronto alderman and newly appointed leader of the Loyal Orange Lodge in York County. With penny whistles asquealing, thunderous drums and raggedy swagger, the Orangemen demanded the expulsion of all United States immigrants, severe restrictions on naturalized Americans, and a declaration of war upon the apostate nation to the south of God’s chosen country. Governor Arthur had listened politely before retreating to the sanctuary of his official residence.

  This would not be the last of such disruptive and potentially ruinous demonstrations. There were a dozen trials still scheduled or under way in London. And closer to home, one case loomed large and portentous. While Lucius Bierce, commander of the incursion force at Windsor in December, had escaped, Major Caleb Coltrane had been captured by a unit under the direction of a staunch Tory, Lieutenant-Colonel Gideon Stanhope. The latter, while not immediately present at the capture, had adroitly taken credit for the coup. With his local reputation as the Pelee Island Patriot already established and a fresh (flesh) wound sustained at Windsor during hand-to-hand combat with bowie knife and bayonet, who was to deny him the pleasure of being lionized by his civilian neighbours and grateful townsfolk? A parade in his honour had already taken place on Yonge Street the week before Christmas, and the squirearchy of the capital was all abuzz about next week’s Twelfth Night Charity Ball at Somerset House, where the colonel would receive official civic and military recognition.