Turncoat

by Don Gutteridge

  Hatch had spent the afternoon in Cobourg, where he had given Sheriff MacLachlan the names and description of the Yankee peddlers. As agreed beforehand, he had mentioned Marc’s presence without revealing the real purpose of his visit, as, after all, the sheriff had supported the magistrate’s finding of death by misadventure. Hatch told Marc that no one had admitted seeing the Irishmen since the autumn. Hatch himself, on his way home, had stopped at several of the taverns that Connors was known to frequent on his sojourns in the district and had learned nothing of importance.

  “I think it’s safe to say that your assumption about Connors and O’Hurley hightailing it across the nearest ice to the home state was the right one,” Hatch said as they swung a little to the south towards several columns of smoke visible above the treetops. Marc had raised a chuckle earlier when he’d described the pot-rattling donkey skittering up the Kingston Road towards Toronto. “That pair of weasels won’t linger a minute longer on the King’s ground than they have to,” Hatch continued. “The roll of banknotes, though—that may be of real interest to Sir John or his successor. I don’t like the smell of foreign money.”

  “At the moment I consider it merely a distraction,” Marc said. “It’s hard to make any connection between a couple of scoundrels like that and Smallman’s misadventure.”

  When Marc finally felt constrained to mention his standoff with Elijah, Hatch found the episode more amusing than suspicious.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “you won’t have to put the screws to him. I questioned him very carefully myself, and MacLachlan had a run at him as well. After a lot of coaxing and a little threatening, he admitted that he had not been with his employer to do the rounds that evening, nor had he seen him since supper at six, because right after he’d eaten he’d beetled off to raise a glass with Ruby Marsden, the squire’s cook. Ruby backs him up. And, of course, everybody in the township knows the old codger slips up there every chance he can get. Why do you think this path is so easy on the feet?”

  “So Smallman was out of the house and alone for at least half an hour before he came back in with the news that he had been called out, as it were?”

  “I’m afraid so, with no way for anyone to find out who he might’ve seen or talked to.”

  “None of the guests coming to the New Year’s gathering saw or heard anything?”

  “We questioned them all before the inquest. Nothing. And Emma Durfee didn’t arrive until well after he’d ridden off.”

  “Well, we know for certain he got a message from someone,” Marc said, with an effort to hide his disappointment.

  Hatch stopped. He placed an avuncular hand on Marc’s shoulder. “You have to remember, lad, we’ve only got Beth’s word on that.”

  MARC HAD SEEN NOTHING IN UPPER Canada to match the opulence of Deer Park—not at Government House, nor even in his illicit glimpses, from anterooms and vestibules, of Family Compact residences in Toronto like Beverley House, Osgoode Hall, or the Grange. Dozens of trees had been hacked down to allow those entering the estate by carriage to appreciate the Georgian proportions and Italianate façade of the manor house itself. Even now, in midwinter, the terraced gardens and housebroken shrubberies undulated elegantly beneath the snowdrifts. In the foyer, lit by an ornate candelabrum, Marc thought, for a sinking moment, that he was back in the entrance hall of Hartfield Downs in Kent, or that he had merely dreamed his secondment to North America and was just now waking up. When a pretty parlour maid took his hat and curtsied, another, more stabbing memory intruded. He quickly suppressed it.

  “Maybe you should’ve stuck to the law,” Hatch said, chuckling at Marc’s open-mouthed amazement, just as Philander Child, King’s Counsel, trundled forward to greet them with a great welcoming guffaw.

  Hatch had prepped his new young friend for the evening at hand. Only charter members of the Georgian Club would be present on this occasion, at Hatch’s request: he and Marc would be joined by their host, Philander Child, and by Major Charles Barnaby and James Durfee. Joshua Smallman had been among this number, though, understandably, his attendance had been irregular during the harvest season. Occasionally associate members or invitees were added to make up two whist tables or, when ladies were included, to enliven the card games and provide a pretext for music and dancing.

  Winnifred Hatch, brushing Marc’s freshly steamed frock coat earlier that evening, had winced at her father’s reference to lancers and galops, prompting Hatch to add, “You’d think you’d never kicked up a heel or hopped to a jig, girl, but I know better, don’t I?” Then he’d winked at Marc.

  “You spend too much time living in the past,” Winnifred had snapped with more impatience than anger.

  “Well, all I know is a person shouldn’t spend all their days doing good deeds.”

  “Like taking care of them who can’t help themselves?” She paused, then shot him a telling look.

  When she pulled Marc’s coattails down, it was with a brusque, dismissive gesture: he felt the steel in her touch, the merest hint of contempt.

  “She’ll never find a husband,” Hatch had said as soon as they’d left the house. “God knows there’ve been many who’ve tried.”

  “I’m surprised,” Marc said graciously. “Your daughter is a handsome and … efficient young woman.”

  Hatch glanced warily, hopefully, at Marc. “That she is,” he said.

  That hers was also a cold beauty did not need to be uttered.

  “You’d be alone, would you not, if she were to marry?” Marc said, probing gently.

  “I’m afraid that’s how she looks at the matter.” Hatch sighed. “But then, I’ve been alone since Isobel died.”

  PHILANDER CHILD WAS AN ENGLISHMAN WHO had arrived in Upper Canada as a youth of eighteen, and in his subsequent thirty years in the colony had not permitted a whit of his God-given Englishness to be weathered away. His prosperity was evident in the layers and folds of his corpulence, and though he had grown fat upon the land, his mind had not forgone its lean and hungry motive. Having reaped a modest but irritatingly slow profit from farming (more accurately, from instructing others how to farm for him), he had turned to the law. The reliable flow of conveyancing fees bestowed by grateful associates and confederates of the ruling clique and the magic of compound interest had made him rich. Finally, appointment to the Legislative Council by the former lieutenant-governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, yeoman’s service to the fledgling Bank of Upper Canada, and eventual retirement to Deer Park as magistrate for Northumberland County and superintendent of its quarter sessions had secured him a well-earned and affluent old age.

  This much Marc had concluded by the time the ceremonial cigars had been smoked, the first snifter of brandy consumed, and the blaze in the magnificent fieldstone fireplace had died down to a warm, conspiratorial glow. Coggins, the footman-cum-butler, poured each of the guests a second glass from a crystal decanter, bowed in the direction of a portrait of Squire Child in his hungrier days, and discreetly left the room.

  “So, young man, Sir John was not entirely impressed with my report of the inquest into dear Joshua’s death?” Child said, still en rôle as the affable jurist, the epitome of good breeding, exemplary manners, and moral probity. And not, Marc thought, unlike his guardian Uncle Jabez, or their more illustrious neighbour in Kent, Sir Joseph Trelawney of Hartfield Downs.

  “He asked me merely to double-check the evidence,” Marc said diplomatically. “Smallman was a man he knew well and admired much.”

  “Certainly, certainly,” Child said. “A gentleman could do no less, and Sir John Colborne is every inch a gentleman.”

  “Sir John intends to leave you here in the province, then?” asked Major Barnaby, retired army surgeon, who had sawed the limbs off many a brave man on the killing grounds of the Spanish Peninsula. His Scots burr was a faint echo of the speech he had heard but little since leaving home at age eleven. His big-boned ruggedness was somewhat offset by deep-browed eyes that twinkled with humour yet gave away litt
le of the thought and feeling stored up behind them.

  “Like most young men,” Marc said, “I joined the military to fight under the Union Jack.”

  “So you think there will be insurrection in Quebec,” Child said, catching Marc’s unhappiness at Barnaby’s assumption.

  “I have been led to believe so.”

  “And what is your assessment of the situation in this province?” Child asked Marc, opening a silver snuffbox.

  “I don’t really know, sir. I’m just a junior officer.”

  “Surely in the seven or eight months you’ve been here—in the confidence of Sir John himself, Hatch tells me—you’ve formed some opinion of the hurly-burly of our politics?”

  “I was hoping to learn more about that this evening,” Marc said, waving off the offer of snuff.

  “It looks as though Sir John thinks there may be a political motive behind Joshua’s … death,” Hatch said helpfully.

  Child smiled indulgently at Marc. “All three of us were there,” he said. “No one preceded us. Charles examined the body carefully, on the scene and back in his surgery.”

  “Died of a massive skull fracture,” Barnaby said. “Knocked insensible, but could’ve lingered for some while, alas. Rigor had just passed off, delayed by the cold. My best guess is he died sometime between nine and midnight.”

  “Which jibes with Beth’s account,” Hatch said, looking at Marc.

  “There were no other injuries, no torn clothing, and no note or paper was found among his effects,” Child said.

  “And with no witness to corroborate Mrs. Smallman’s suspicion that he had received a message sometime after seven o’clock, and no sign around the scene itself of any other disturbance or presence, we had no other choice than to make the finding we did.” The magistrate spoke without the least note of defensiveness. His was the kind of dispassion Marc had come to respect among the barristers and judges of the Old Bailey, whose precincts he had haunted as a twenty-year-old articling clerk playing truant from his firm of lowly London solicitors.

  “However,” Barnaby said in his more humoured, laconic style, “Durfee here informs me you have a detail or two to add to our investigation.”

  James Durfee, who had followed the dialogue closely with an encouraging nod from time to time (while managing to devote a good deal of attention to his brandy and cigar), smiled sagely.

  “Erastus gave me a quick account of your trip out there yesterday afternoon,” Child said, “but we’d all appreciate hearing you yourself describe it for us.”

  Marc could detect nothing but curiosity in the faces of the four men whose attention was now fully focused upon him. He sensed that the next few minutes were critical to any success he might have in his mission. Without the wholehearted co-operation of these influential figures, he had no hope of proceeding one step farther. Moreover, to complicate matters, Sir John would not condone any unnecessary ruffling of feathers among the friends of the government. Why, then, had he—novice and interloper—been chosen? Suppressing any inadequacies he might feel, Marc plunged ahead. As he related the events in the exact sequence in which they had occurred, Marc found the energy he’d experienced the previous day returning, and with it the confidence—conviction even—he had felt in winning Hatch over to his theories.

  “And so you see, gentlemen, one is compelled to face the incredible coincidence of two men being in that peculiar vicinity on discrete errands, along with the cogent question of why a respectable gentleman like Joshua Smallman would, on a whim as it were, ride out there in a snowstorm while the New Year’s Eve party he was hosting was about to start.”

  For a full minute no one spoke.

  It was Barnaby who broke the silence. “Well, in the least you’ve added to the number of questions we haven’t been able to answer,” he said dryly.

  “Ensign Edwards thinks that we must try to discover the motive for any possible foul play, and work backwards from there,” Hatch said.

  Durfee turned a concerned and pained face to Marc. “We four have spent a good deal of the past two weeks going over and over that question in our minds. Joshua was a generous, likeable man. He had no enemies. He was a loyalist more than he was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative like us. I’ve heard many a professed Reformer in my pub speak respectfully of him when they would rather have cursed him for his views.”

  “It was suggested a while ago, Mr. Edwards, that Sir John thought politics might be at issue here,” Child said. “Joshua Smallman was not directly involved in politics. That he voted Tory puts him in league with hundreds of others in the county, many of whom have been more vociferous and a lot less tolerant. Why was it not one of us lured out there in his stead?”

  “Sir John does feel politics might be involved,” Marc said. “He told me he had good reason for thinking so, but, alas, he was not at liberty to give me chapter and verse.”

  “What did he think you could discover here on your own, then?” Barnaby asked, not unkindly.

  “I guess he thought we could help,” Hatch offered.

  Marc paused, then plunged ahead. “I didn’t press Mrs. Smallman on the matter, but I understand that her father-in-law accompanied her to a number of Reform rallies following his return here.”

  “Mrs. Smallman, I am sorry to say, having produced no children in three years of marriage, seemed unable to find anything else useful to occupy her time,” Child said. “She spouted the contemptible opinions of Willy Mackenzie in public places in the most unseemly manner.”

  “And she is a Congregationalist to boot,” Barnaby added.

  “Never set foot in St. Peter’s after the nuptials,” the squire huffed. “The poor devil of a husband would drop her off at that tumbledown hutch they call holy and then drive alone to his father’s church.”

  “Well, I blame him in a way,” Durfee said, ignoring the glare of his fellow Georgians. “I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but Jesse Smallman was dabblin’ in dangerous waters near the end, if you ask me.”

  “That was a year ago,” Hatch said. “As far as I can tell, Beth was involved in trying to get redress for the same grievances her husband and a thousand other farmers are pressing for—through the appropriate channels.”

  Child turned to Marc, adjusted his girth into its most magisterial posture, and said, “You’ve no doubt heard all the nonsense about these so-called grievances: the Clergy Reserves, the Alien Act, the evil monopoly of the Bank of Upper Canada, the stubbornness of the Legislative Council and the Executive, who rightly refuse to yield to the demands of the mob. And so on.”

  “I’m hoping to learn more about them as I go,” Marc said.

  “Well, son, the first thing to remember is that ninety per cent of what you hear, on both sides, is hot air, bombast, and rabble-rousing rhetoric. As long as the levers of power and the will to rule remain safely entrenched, as they are now, we can tolerate a great deal of invective and vituperation. I’ve been here for thirty years and have an intimate knowledge of Northumberland County and the province as a whole. Most of the populace is British to the core, and now that Sir John has almost doubled the population with needy immigrants from the motherland, the brief threat of American outcasts overwhelming us has abated. We are confident also that the next election will see a Tory majority in the Assembly.”

  “You’ll get a chance to hear some of the rant for yourself,” Durfee said.

  “That’s right,” Hatch added. “Mackenzie and Peter Perry and all that gang will be in Cobourg for a Reform rally on Saturday afternoon.”

  “We’re expectin’ fireworks,” Durfee said with a boyish grin.

  “Only if the Orangemen arrive with them,” Hatch said.

  Looking mischievously at Barnaby, Durfee said, “Fanatic monarchists of the likes of Ogle Gowan and his anti-Catholic Orange Lodge make Mackenzie’s lot look like schoolboy debaters.”

  Barnaby snorted. “I let go of that monarchist nonsense years ago. It doesn’t sit well on a Scot’s stomach, even though
they do claim to defend the Crown and the integrity of the Empire.” He paused and added, “I defended them in my own way.”

  “These are men, I’ve been told, who will resort to violence to further their cause,” Marc said.

  “Head-bashing in a donnybrook, tar-and-feathering a Papist or two,” Hatch said, “but not, I think, a cold-blooded assassination.”

  “Quite so,” Child said. “Though that gang is quite capable of leaving a man to die in the snow—if it served their purpose.”

  “What can you tell me about the Hunters’ Lodges?” Marc asked, shifting the subject slightly.

  Again, the room went unnaturally quiet, and one by one the members of the Georgian Club scrutinized the young officer, as if they might have overlooked something critical.

  Child answered for his associates. “They are a secret society, organized very recently in New York and Pennsylvania, whose members, we presume from the little hard evidence we possess, swear an oath that they will help overthrow the British government of Upper Canada and link up with resident dissidents, republicans, and annexationists, with a view to forming a new, liberated republic. Most of them appear to be malcontents from the Loco Foco Democrats of Buffalo, with a few Irish incendiaries tossed in for leavening.”

  “I’m told that Mr. Mackenzie has for some years now promoted republican and annexationist doctrines in the Colonial Advocate,” Marc said.

  “Indeed he has,” Child said. “Yet he was elected the first mayor of your city, takes his seat in the Assembly, and continues to swear the oath of allegiance. His infamous and dastardly Seventh Report on Grievances, which, as you know, helped unseat your own Sir John, was legally enough drawn up and, though sent by an unorthodox and clandestine route to Lord Glenelg in London, was nonetheless a powerful indication that, outside of his blather and rant, Mackenzie is still willing to work within the very system that has nurtured and tolerated his kind of dissent—often to its own detriment.”