Death of a Patriot

by Don Gutteridge

  • • •

  “They’re not going blame you for it, I hope?” Beth asked anxiously.

  “No, darling, there’s no chance of that. The whole sad business was prearranged between Thorpe and the colonel at the Court House. A message was sent to Chepstow to alert the women. I was merely the facilitator.”

  “But the magistrate used you—”

  “He knew, alas, that I still had more of the soldier left in me than I myself realized,” Marc replied. “Anyway, no one, including the magistrate and the governor, wanted to see our Pelee Island Patriot dangling from a gibbet in the Court House square.”

  They were snuggled deep into the goose-feather duvet, relying upon it, the fading ripple of the warming pan, and their own shared body heat to keep out the chill of the room. It was after eleven, but neither was in the mood for sleep.

  Hoping to banish that ghastly image, Marc said, “Tell me about the celebration at the Baldwins’.”

  Beth gave him the highlights, then added, “I got a chance to talk with Celia Langford too.”

  “Oh, good. I’m just surprised the great man let her out of his sight.”

  “It’s more than that now. She told me her uncle’s decided to send her to Miss Tyson’s Academy to continue the schooling that was interrupted when they had to leave New York.”

  “Splendid. I was, frankly, very concerned about her being stuck in that house day and night with a man like Dougherty.”

  “You don’t have to dance around it for my sake, love. I’m not a schoolgirl.”

  “Well, then, let’s say I’m glad she’s going to get out into the world and have the opportunity to meet some of the young men and women her so-called uncle seems to be keeping her from.”

  “Sometimes an uncle can be as good as a father,” Beth said softly.

  Marc leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Thank you, I deserved that.” How easily he had forgotten that his own late Uncle Jabez had served lovingly as his adoptive father for all the years he could remember. And that outward appearances can be misleading.

  “And you don’t have to worry about Mr. Dougherty pestering her.”

  “How would you know about that?” Marc said quickly, startled at his own prudery.

  “Celia told me, in so many words, that her uncle preferred the other sex.”

  Marc tried to take this in, astonished that Beth would have the least inkling of such sordid social taboos and even more that Celia Langford would confide them to a perfect stranger. However, he had more than once underestimated Beth’s uncanny ability to gain the trust of others and more than once sworn never to repeat the error.

  He recovered sufficiently to reply, “Well, then, that may explain his being drummed out of New York society and the legal fraternity. The sin was too horrible to air in public, so instead of disbarring him, they just put him and his belongings on a donkey cart and pushed it towards the border.”

  “And the way Brodie Langford was ogling the Baldwins’ maid, I don’t think you need worry there either.”

  The moonlight, playing with a set of fickle clouds, shimmered and shied on the coverlet. Though sufficiently warm by now, Marc and Beth made no move to separate.

  After a while, Beth asked, “So the murder of Coltrane had nothing to do with adultery?”

  Marc’s thoughts had likewise returned to the courtroom drama and its enigmatic central players. “Not directly. The truth turned out to be a lot less romantic. Stanhope had spent most of his sparse capital outfitting himself with uniforms and expensive horses and subsidizing the regiment he had created in order to feed his vanity. The Commercial Bank was threatening to call his loans, so that not only his four warehouses but Chepstow itself was at risk. Broderick Langford gave us the gist of this over the noon hour. Together with the decoded ‘love letter,’ it pointed straight to Stanhope’s desperate need of cash to stave off bankruptcy and carry on soldiering.”

  “But how did he actually convince Almeda to write to Coltrane saying she loved him?”

  “I’m guessing here, but when Coltrane’s offer of money was agreed to by the colonel, he needed a safe way to confirm the transaction. The map itself was vague enough unless you knew the context. Billy, for example, thought it was a battle plan when he saw it. But I suspect that while the colonel was pondering this problem, Almeda received Coltrane’s letter to her.”

  “And she had problems of her own.”

  “Four to be exact. One, her three-day fling back in May had apparently prompted Caleb into declaring his lifelong commitment. Two, he was drawing her into his treasonous conspiracies. Three, he had already approached her husband with a scheme that sounded like extortion. And four, Caleb claimed her husband already knew of their affair. I’m sure she went straight to him, partly because she knew Caleb had a letter or two from her that could be interpreted as confirming her adultery, and partly because she is a strong and intelligent woman who realized her best bet was to try to limit any damage already done.”

  “Confess to a little indiscretion before it starts to grow hairs?”

  “Precisely. Now when the colonel sees that letter, he realizes he must explain the nature of the ‘proposal’ mentioned by Caleb. He can’t confess to his having agreed to treason and doesn’t want to admit his desperate need for money. But he knows that if he agrees with his wife that nothing more than a flirtation has taken place in May, then he can play the hero—his favourite role—by pretending to reject what he tells her was a blackmail threat, not a treasonous deal for arms.”

  Beth said, “And she was happy enough to copy that code letter and go along with his plan to supposedly expose Caleb.”

  “I don’t know how much each of them knew or guessed about the other’s dissembling, but they carried it off just the same.”

  “But then she goes and tucks Caleb’s letter away as a keepsake.”

  “And Caleb hangs on to the coded letter and the map, for later use.”

  “The message hidden in it is the one thing in the whole wide world the colonel had to keep secret.”

  “At any cost,” Marc agreed. “Alas, Stanhope was no match for his adversary, even though later he was the jailer and Coltrane the prisoner. The threat of his treason’s being exposed must have left Stanhope in a panic. At the same time, he was compelled by his own boasting about protocol and courtesy to appear totally in control and regimentally dignified at all times.

  “What about the duel? Do you think the colonel hoped Billy would kill Coltrane?”

  “I don’t think so, but Bostwick is such a hopeless drunk he could have set up those pistols either way. We’ll never know. It’s even conceivable that Stanhope hoped Billy would be killed.”

  “Why?”

  “I think he was so paranoid by that time that he might have misread Billy’s melancholy as having to do with Billy’s possible perusal of the letter or sudden insight into the meaning of the sketch he found in Coltrane’s kit near the fort. I don’t want to believe that, but I do think that Stanhope’s behaviour in the days before the murder can only be understood by focusing on his obsession—bordering on madness—with his appearance at the Twelfth Night Ball. Despite the increasing demands of his cunning captive and the people marching on Hospital Street to protest the colonel’s mollycoddling, he wanted Coltrane alive at least until his honours were bestowed that Saturday night.”

  “But in spite of all that, he poisoned him anyway. Do you think he was telling the truth about the escape business on Wednesday evening?”

  “I’m certain of only two serious lies he told on the witness stand. One was his seeing Billy put his hand in one of those coat pockets on the hall tree, as we know Billy did no such thing and Stanhope had given me a different version when I first interviewed him.”

  “I guess he figured now that Coltrane was dead and the coded letter hadn’t shown up, he needed to make sure Billy was convicted instead of himself. That’s what I can’t forgive in the man.” Beth sighed.

  “There’
s a good reason for that, my dear, because the other lie he told was a whopper. He did not poison Caleb Coltrane.”

  Beth sat up, allowing the chilly air back into the bed. “What do you mean?”

  “He did not kill Coltrane, and he was pretty certain for a long while that Billy did do it. By lying about the packet, perhaps he assumed that he was merely helping to expedite matters.”

  “But Billy didn’t do it!”

  “No, no, of course he didn’t. It was—”

  “Mrs. Jones!”

  “Yes. Though I can’t prove it, and I doubt if anyone but God gives a damn.”

  “But we don’t know who she is.”

  “Hell hath no fury . . .” Marc prompted quietly.

  “Almeda,” Beth breathed, scarcely countenancing the word she had just uttered. “Jilted for her own daughter.”

  “Something like that. It was, in the end, a crime of passion and love rejected. I think she had fallen deeply in love with Caleb a second time. But it was more than physical desire. Consider her situation. She was over forty and married to a vain, shallow, and controlling man who had suddenly entered a crisis of his own. His obsession with the militia must have come close to destroying any intimacy they had left, and he was risking bankruptcy and even their home for his own selfish ends. Then along comes a swashbuckling freebooter in the guise of her girlhood lover. She is still a beautiful woman, and he appears happy to rekindle their former passion.”

  “Aren’t you laying this on a bit thick?”

  “I think not. Remember, she kept that letter in her ball gown, a letter that, however indirectly, alluded to treason and openly to their renewed love, going so far as to suggest that she shared her lover’s republican ideals. She kept it, even though it was a bomb waiting to explode. And then, when he is fortuitously imprisoned in the same house with her, one floor below her sitting room, he spurns her and seduces her daughter—laughing at them both as he does so.”

  “How awful. But do you really think she would have run off with him?”

  “No. I think she was committed to her home and her daughter. She knew what Coltrane was. But there was a hidden part of her—like the letter she prized—that believed she was still worthy of being loved with his kind of passion. It was this illusion that he shattered by seducing Patricia.”

  “So she knew.”

  “There is no doubt she did. And given Patricia’s age and Coltrane’s predatory zeal, she must have considered it an act of rape.”

  Beth’s breathing had quickened. “But wait,” she said. “Almeda couldn’t have done it without the butler’s help.”

  “Right. Shad had to be involved. It might even have been he who administered the poison. Remember that impassioned speech he made in the courtroom? He owes his life to Almeda. I’m sure he would die for her. Their opportunity came on Thursday morning. Bostwick had left Wednesday evening and the colonel was off to his tailor. It was then or never. A disguise would allow for an unscheduled visit from a stranger, a meeting that would provide cover for any voices the other servants might hear. If Coltrane had died earlier, Shad could tell the police that a mysterious woman from Streetsville had been the last person in there. Unfortunately for Billy, the poison took effect while he was with Coltrane and there were two policemen in the house. Shad knew which coat was Billy’s—he’d taken our coats at the door—and used the confusion in the vestibule to slip the seeded packet into Billy’s pocket, possibly as he left to fetch the doctor.”

  “I see all that, love, but it doesn’t make any more sense, really, than the colonel’s confession. Why would the colonel confess when it was Billy who was likely to be convicted?”

  “I need to tell you more about the colonel and why I began to doubt what I and everyone else in the court believed at the time to be true. When Gideon Stanhope walked into his study to kill himself, the pistol went off no later than ten seconds after he entered that room.”

  “He must’ve had it loaded and ready to go off.”

  “Exactly. The police confiscated his duelling pistols, but this one was a Derringer, a small lady’s pistol, easily hidden. That’s what got me to thinking. I’m convinced that Stanhope was prepared to commit suicide at a moment’s notice, ever since Coltrane threatened him with the coded letter. He realized that Coltrane was unmanageable, a viper in his own nest, but he couldn’t kill him before the ball, as everything he had done for the past ten months pointed to a single night of triumph.

  “But on the Wednesday, Coltrane says he needs to escape before that.”

  “Yes, and we’ll never know whether Stanhope would have tried to kill his tormentor during an arranged escape or kill himself instead. He certainly knew that Coltrane was wilier and more ruthless than he, and might easily foil any attempt to shoot him in the back. And besides, the poor devil still did not know where the letter was or who might be prepared to use it against him.”

  “So you’re saying he was still dithering when Almeda and Shad did Coltrane in?”

  “Yes. I could never accept the notion that Stanhope would plant the poison the night before, risking the involvement of his daughter. It was one thing to have her infatuated with the monster but another to have her implicated in his murder. And even though he confessed to planting the empty packet, would he really have kept it in his tunic while sitting with the chief constable waiting for the poison to take effect downstairs? And if he did, he had little chance to plant it with the women screaming all about him and Cobb beside the hall tree.”

  “But I still don’t see why he confessed in open court to a murder he didn’t commit.”

  “It happened like this. On the stand this afternoon Stanhope learned that we had dug up the very coded letter he has spent five weeks trying to find and destroy. He also learned from Dougherty that Almeda’s involvement in its composition has been put on the record earlier that day when she admitted it was her handwriting. Suddenly the nightmare was real. He was compelled to read aloud what is tantamount to a confession and his own death warrant. His treason had been exposed in the most horrific way imaginable: before the very people who have bestowed upon him the honours he so relentlessly coveted. His life was effectively over. Taking it himself—before the state could—was the only route left to him, if he could just get to the Derringer in his study.

  “But suddenly there was an even more overriding concern. Dougherty was accusing his wife of treason or complicity in treason. Stanhope knew that Dougherty and the judge had seen Caleb’s letter alluding to the proposal put to her husband, as if she already knew what it was, and to her putative sympathy with the Hunters’ cause. Therefore, Dougherty was not necessarily bluffing. Almeda Stanhope might well be in serious trouble, even mortal danger.”

  “But you told me earlier that he seemed completely crushed when his own treason came out like that.”

  “True, but then I watched Stanhope pause, stiffen his resolve, raise his head, and look about for someone in the courtroom. He found Almeda. I felt at the time that in that mutual gaze, something critical was exchanged between them. Perhaps, after hearing the testimony against Billy challenged by Dougherty on Friday and Saturday, he had begun to suspect that if it wasn’t Billy, that it had to be Almeda. Even if he didn’t, I believe he decided then and there that the only way to keep his wife from being part of a treason trial or herself charged after his suicide, was to confess to the more immediate crime. Even if he never got to the Derringer, he knew he would be convicted and hanged within a month—hence the quick and detailed confession—after which no one would care to pursue the treason charge with its principal malefactor dead. In addition, there was the matter of his protégé’s wrongful conviction, for he had certainly perjured himself and sealed Billy’s fate with his definitive statement about the lad’s hand in that coat pocket.”

  Beth sighed against her husband. “All those people dead because of one man’s vanity: Lieutenant Muttlebury, Melvin Curry, three soldiers at the fort, Caleb Coltrane, and the colonel himself.�
�

  “True. But he tried to make up for some of it in the end, didn’t he? In taking the blame for the murder, he performed a truly selfless and noble act.”

  Beth smiled. “There’s still love in the world, isn’t there?”

  EPILOGUE

  The matched pair of Belgians from Frank’s livery stable stood patiently in the snow a few yards from Cobb’s residence, while Delia and Fabian reached down from the four-seater to help their mother hoist her considerable avoirdupois up onto the sleigh. Three suitcases and a small steamer trunk were already safely stowed in the luggage compartment under the driver’s bench. Dora landed with a sigh beside Delia, the sleigh rocked amiably, and the horses sensed it was almost time to go. Dora was as excited as the children, though her eight years as a midwife had led her to temper any extreme emotions, joyous or otherwise. Babies often came out kicking and squalling for their rights, only to expire an hour later of indeterminable causes.

  “Are we really going to stay in an inn?” Fabian asked for the fourth time.

  “It’s too far away fer us to get there in one day, luv.”

  “I do hope they got my letter,” Delia said. “It’d be awful if we got there and they didn’t know we were coming.”

  “I don’t suppose they’d mind either way, dear.”

  At last the front door opened and closed, and Cobb trundled down the path towards the sleigh. Without saying a word, he put one boot on the footboard and pulled himself up onto the driver’s bench with his good right hand.

  “Ya took yer time,” Dora said.

  Cobb stared straight ahead, as Fabian clambered up beside him. “Time’s what I seem to have plenty of,” he complained. “But I’m here, ain’t I?”

  “Can I drive the horses?” Fabian asked.

  Cobb handed the reins to his son.

  “Giddyup, you fiery-footed steeds!” the boy cried with unsuppressed delight.

  And off they sped towards Woodstock, to see a dying man who loved Shakespeare.

  DON GUTTERIDGE is the author of forty books: fiction, poetry, and scholarly works. He taught high school for seven years and then joined the Faculty of Education at Western University as a professor of English methods. He is now professor emeritus and lives in London, Ontario.