Turncoat

by Don Gutteridge

  “And neither Joshua Smallman nor his daughter have been involved with Orangemen, Yankee extremists, or secret societies. Surely that is the point of all this speculation,” Barnaby added.

  “Lookin’ back over the past months,” Durfee said, “the only thing I can truly say is that my boyhood chum attended a number of meetings and public rallies connected with the Grievances Report. And since everybody ’round here knew he was a loyalist and a Tory supporter at the polls, they realized he only went along to escort Beth. After all, she was a widow, she couldn’t very well run off to a public gathering by herself. Who else was there to go with her? Elijah? The crippled lad?”

  “Surely Joshua’s duty was to persuade her not to debase her character by attending the kind of meetings God intended for men,” Child said.

  “He could’ve tied her to a chair, I suppose,” Barnaby said.

  “With a second rope for her tongue,” Durfee added, and laughed.

  “You’re all forgetting,” Hatch said, “that Beth was carrying on the efforts that Jesse had made in regard to the Grievances before he got so depressed and … did what he did.”

  “It is conceivable, then,” Barnaby said carefully, without looking at Durfee, “that in an attempt to understand his son and perhaps even to comprehend the reasons for his taking his own life, Joshua did begin to become enamoured of the Reform position.”

  “Even so,” Child said, “and I’m not granting your premise for a moment, that is no cause for the man to be murdered. Turning your coat in political matters may lose you a friend or some custom, but not your life.”

  “I have to agree, Your Honour.” Barnaby smiled.

  Only Durfee did not laugh. The brandy-whetted scarlet of his cheeks had suddenly paled.

  “Are you all right, James?” Barnaby asked.

  “I’ve just had a frightenin’ thought,” Durfee said. “Suppose some people did think that Joshua’s goin’ to all them meetings and rallies was in earnest, whether it was or not. And suppose someone or other at the rallies got the notion into his head that Joshua was pretendin’ to be a convert—because of Jesse’s grievances and so on—but was actually an informer.”

  Marc held his breath, and his peace.

  “Preposterous,” Child said, circulating the cigar box and serving with his own hand a generous round of brandy. He gave the slumbering fire an aristocratic poke with one of the irons.

  Hatch became animated. “Not so, Squire. It makes a kind of sense, especially if you were a member of one of the fanatical fringe groups in the Reform party—a Clear Grit or whatever. Think of it from that point of view: a retired dry goods merchant comes into the district, a known Tory and occasional associate of the lieutenant-governor. Suddenly he starts showing up at Reform political dos everywhere with his daughter-in-law, a known sympathizer. Jesse campaigned over in Lennox for Perry, remember, and wrote up a petition that went to Mackenzie and the grievances committee in the Assembly.”

  “Aye, that’s quite plausible,” Barnaby conceded, and even Squire Child nodded meditatively.

  Marc was buoyed by the drift of the conversation. Here was the one motive for murder he found to be the most compelling and for which he had inside knowledge he could not reveal. And now he would not have to. He tried to appear only casually interested.

  “I see your point,” he said, fingering his brandy glass.

  “Nevertheless,” Barnaby said, and he paused at the deflationary effect of that word. “Nevertheless, we are still faced with the same sort of question as before. What information would an informer—Joshua in this case—be able to gather, from ordinary political meetings and speeches, that would be seditious enough to pose a threat to some treasonous cause or specific persons espousing it?”

  “Exactly,” Child said. He turned to Marc like a wigged justice about to lecture the novice petitioner before his bench. “All you need to do is scan one issue of the Colonial Advocate or the Cobourg Star to realize that no rally, camp meeting, hustings debate, or underground pamphleteering goes unreported for any longer than it takes to set the type. One side inflates the rhetoric with hyperbole and bombast, the other edits and distorts at will—but no one’s opinion, view, prejudice, or bigotry remains private for more than a day in this fishbowl of a province.”

  “True,” Barnaby said. “There’s a lot of bush out there, but not a single tree that would hide you for an hour.”

  “What we’re saying,” Hatch added, “is that the information would have to be truly seditious—like facts about proposed actions—not the empty-headed threats we see in the press every week.”

  For a minute or so the weight of this conclusion silenced the group, and fresh cigars were clipped and lit.

  Barnaby spoke first. “I think we’re agreed that truly treasonous information would not likely bubble up at the meetings Joshua and Beth attended last summer and fall. But what if those meetings were not the source?”

  “What else could be?” Durfee said.

  “You said yourself that Jesse Smallman was treading dangerous waters near the end.”

  “I only meant he was flailin’ about—angry, in despair—at what was happenin’ to him because of the Clergy Reserves. And how he kept repeatin’ that there didn’t seem to be any political party capable of gettin’ anythin’ done.”

  “Is it possible, conceivable even,” Barnaby continued, “that Jesse joined or thought of joining one of the annexationist groups, one of the secret societies, and that he might have been privy to treasonable information?”

  “Now we’re really grasping at straws,” Hatch said.

  “The man’s also been dead for twelve months,” Child said.

  Barnaby, who was beginning to enjoy himself wholeheartedly, persisted. “What if Joshua discovered this information? Among his son’s effects, for example? And was thought to be an agent as well?”

  “You’ve got a surfeit of ‘what ifs’ in that hypothesis,” Child said.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Durfee said. “Only one person is left who can shed any light on Joshua or Jesse.”

  “You’re not suggesting Beth might be involved in anything unsavoury?” Hatch said sharply.

  “I think he’s merely implying that some of the answers to our questions lie in the Smallman household,” Barnaby said. “For the sake of the reputations of two men no longer able to defend themselves, I think it behooves us to engage in some hard questioning, indelicate as that might prove.”

  They all turned to gaze, with expectation and much relief, at Ensign Edwards.

  The arrival of Coggins with a tray of cheeses and sweetmeats and decanters of wine stinted the flow of serious conversation for some minutes. However, as soon as the sighs of satisfaction had abated, Philander Child picked up a thread of the previous dialogue.

  “While I concur that we must press Mrs. Smallman as forcefully as her delicate circumstances permit in order to eliminate any possibility that Joshua Smallman might have been an informer or that Jesse was anything other than a misguided Reformer, I would advise young Marc here to aim his investigation in more obvious directions.”

  “To those in the county already known to be fanatics,” Marc said.

  The squire smiled patiently. “My years on the bench compel me to consider facts before hypotheses. Someone has to ascertain, among the living, whether there was any actual contact or real acquaintance between Joshua and known extremists. We need facts, dates, notarized statements, sworn information or affidavits. No one gets himself murdered—and even that assumption is still conjecture, remember—without coming into contact, in some discernible way, with his assassin.”

  “So, I need to find out whether any such extremists knew Smallman or were seen with him over the past twelve months.”

  “And I can suggest two or three likely candidates,” Child said.

  Marc smiled. “Azel Stebbins, Israel Wicks, and Orville Hislop,” he said, recalling these names from Sir John’s notes.

  �
�Sir John has been well briefed,” Child said.

  “When will you begin, then?” Durfee said.

  Marc smiled. “I already have.”

  JAMES DURFEE AND CHARLES BARNABY LEFT together shortly after ten o’clock, because the doctor was tired after nine hours in his Cobourg surgery and Durfee wished to help Emma clear up after the chaos of the afternoon stage stop and the brisk evening trade of local elbow-benders.

  As the remaining three were finishing their nightcaps, Hatch happened to mention to Child that Marc had manhandled a couple of Yankee peddlers on his way to Crawford’s Corners.

  “You are a soldier, young man.” Child laughed appreciatively. “And a damn good one.”

  “Marc has reason to think they were involved in smuggling rum,” Hatch said.

  “What puzzles me,” Marc said, “is why anybody, peddler or freebooter, would bring tariffed spirits into a province where whisky itself is duty-free and there seem to be more local distilleries than gristmills. Grog’s a penny a cup at every wayside shebeen.”

  “A fair question,” Child said, nodding towards Hatch. “But these smugglers are ‘importing’ high-quality spirits and wines: rum from the West Indies, bourbon from the Carolinas, Bordeaux and Champagne from France, port from Iberia—and all of it, you can be sure, pirated or hijacked at some point along the way. They peddle it only around the garrison towns—Kingston, Toronto, London, Sandwich, Newark—to establishments that cater to a higher class of citizenry and that, in addition to cut-price vintage spirits, offer the further comfort of a warm bed and willing flesh.” The squire, long a widower, shook his head sorrowfully, as a man who has seen much folly and never quite accustomed himself to it.

  “But that means tuns, barrels, packing cases,” Marc said.

  “Oh, the peddlers don’t do the actual smuggling,” Hatch said. “They’re just petty advance men, order-takers, messengers, and the like. Peddling door to door is a perfect cover for the work. The county is crawling with them, summer and winter.”

  “Erastus and I apprehended one of the blackguards a while back,” Child said. “What was his name now?”

  “Isaac Duffy,” Hatch said, and his face lit up with pleasure at the memory. “Caught him trying to sell a bottle of His Majesty’s finest sherry to Emma Durfee, an item he’d most likely pilfered from some smuggler’s drop he knew about.”

  “He’s in irons down in Kingston,” Child said, “but before we shipped him off, he gave us a lead to two scoundrels in the area we’d long suspected of actually hauling the stuff across the lake on the ice.”

  “Jefferson and Nathaniel Boyle,” Hatch said. “Brothers who operated two so-called farms out past Mad Annie’s swamp.”

  “Hatch and I hopped on our horses and rode right out there like a pair of avenging angels.” Child laughed, and Marc did too, at the image of Magistrate Child’s two hundred and fifty pounds of pampered flesh astride and agallop.

  “Without a sheriff or constables?” Marc asked above Hatch’s chortling.

  “I’d been after them Yankee cattle thieves for years,” Child said with sudden vehemence. “I had a pistol tucked in each side of my waistcoat, and Hatch here had his fowling piece. My God, I can still remember every moment of that ride.”

  “By the time we got there,” Hatch said, “they’d already skedaddled, as they say in the Republic.”

  “Those sewer rats can smell authority a mile away.” The squire sighed. “I hate smugglers of every stripe. They undermine the fragile economy here, flout the King’s law, and offer incentives to others to do the same. And when they’re Yankees to boot, I detest them as much as I do a traitor or a turncoat.”

  “All we found were two abandoned wives, just skin and bone, and a dozen half-starved youngsters,” Hatch said sadly.

  “Well, they haven’t been seen since,” Child said with some satisfaction.

  “And when I took Winnifred out there with some food and clothes at Christmas,” Hatch said, “the women and children had packed up and gone. The whole lot of ’em.”

  Marc had witnessed the effects of grinding poverty on the streets of London and never become inured to it, or to the callow disregard shown towards its victims by the prosperous and the morally blinkered. The thought of Winnifred’s charity warmed him in ways the brandy, cigars, and stimulating company had failed to.

  Philander Child wished Marc well in his efforts on Sir John’s behalf, complimented him on his good manners, and offered his assistance if it should be required. Walking back to the mill, grateful for Hatch’s companionable silence, Marc went over the evening’s conversation. He concluded that he had been told much that had been intended and some that had not.

  Coming up to the house, Marc suddenly said, “Who is Mad Annie?”

  Hatch snorted. “You really don’t want to know that long, sad story.” He placed a fatherly hand on Marc’s shoulder and said with mock solemnity, “I’ll give you the gory details in the morning.”

  MARC LAY AWAKE FOR A LONG while that night, mulling over what had been said or not said. What was really keeping him from sleep was the dread of interrogating Beth Smallman about two men whom she loved and who had been taken from her in the most horrific manner imaginable. At the same time, he was not prepared to discount any suspect, even an attractive and vulnerable one, in advance of the facts. But he was happy that the four gentlemen with whom he had just spent a most pleasant evening had themselves been together during the critical hours of New Year’s Eve. He was just about to drift off upon this comforting thought when he heard a door open and a familiar footstep in the hall outside his room.

  He waited several seconds before easing himself out of bed, slipping the door ajar, and peering down the dark hallway. This time he caught a glimpse of white nightdress and a fleeting image of the female form undulating within it before the door to the back section of the house shut it out of sight. Then came the same giggle he had heard the previous night, the only difference being that the figure he’d just seen animating the nightdress was a head taller and a good deal more Junoesque than Mary Huggan’s. It was undoubtedly the handsome Miss Hatch.

  SIX

  Well, lad, what did you learn of value last night?” Hatch said to Marc, stabbing a sausage.

  The question startled Marc, not because it was impertinent or sudden but because he had been absorbed in close observation of Thomas Goodall and his mistress, Winnifred Hatch. That they were lovers, and by all the evidence frequently and consensually so, could not have been inferred from the cool and formal intercourse between them over the Thursday morning breakfast table. Winnifred moved briskly about, neither smiling nor unsmiling, until the three men had been served, then sat down next to Marc across from her father and began her own meal. Mary Huggan soon joined her, and the two women exchanged pleasantries. Goodall, as was his custom, kept his eyes locked on his food, which he consumed rapidly but mechanically, as if eating were a duty. Like the miller’s, his hands were large, roughened by cold and searing sun, and shaped to the plough and axe-handle.

  Was it possible that the proud Miss Hatch was ashamed to admit her attachment to such a plain and taciturn man? Or had it more to do with a sense of obligation to her father? Marc had begun to realize that he had much to learn about the ways of these country folk, and that such knowledge might be necessary to unravelling the mystery of Joshua Smallman’s death.

  “Did we give you anything useful?” Hatch asked again, and he nodded towards the two women as if to say, “Keep it general.”

  “Yes,” Marc managed to say. “Yes, you did. You gave me something definite to ask the gentlemen whose farms I plan to visit today.”

  “That’s good, then.” Hatch reached across the table and, with Mary Huggan’s consent, tipped her uneaten egg and sausage onto his own plate.

  “Thank you, Mary,” Hatch said, and the girl blushed to the roots of her pale hair. Winnifred gave her a sharp look, and she blushed anew.

  “We’ll have to get that blush of yours r
epaired one of these days,” Hatch said impishly.

  “Leave the lass alone,” Winnifred said, and before her father could recover from the rebuke, she turned to Marc and said, “You’re likely to find most of the surplus grain among the farms on the Pringle Sideroad north of the second concession.”

  Marc suddenly found her face, with its strong bones and dark, perceptive eyes, no more than a foot from his own, and he could hear the whisper of her breathing beneath the taut bib of her apron. Across the table, Thomas uttered a satisfying belch and pushed his chair back.

  “Oh, why is that?” Marc said.

  “They’re good Tories, of course,” Winnifred said, and Hatch let out an approving chuckle. “The Reformers on the Farley Sideroad,” she continued, “are too busy organizing petitions to get a decent crop in, or keep it from the thistles when they do.”

  “Winnifred keeps all the accounts here,” Hatch beamed. “She knows the worth of every farmer in the district to the nearest shilling.”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” Winnifred said, nudging Mary Huggan, who jumped up gratefully and began clearing away some of the plates. Goodall had already stumped out to his chores, unremarked by anyone.

  “I’ll take your advice to heart,” Marc said gallantly.

  “It would be more useful in the head, I believe.”

  Mary knocked over a cup; Hatch reached out, caught it, and handed it back to the girl.

  “Go put some more water on,” Winnifred said firmly to Mary. “I’ll finish up here.” She rose and began stacking the dishes. There wasn’t an ounce of self-consciousness anywhere in her body. “I wish you good hunting, Ensign Edwards,” she said with cool solicitude as she went back into the kitchen.

  “Don’t mind her none,” Hatch said. “She’s a bit set in her ways.”

  And her straightforward, no-nonsense ways were certainly not those of the young ladies Marc had encountered at the mess parties and the soirees of Government House, ladies whose “aristocratic” breeding and overwrought manners seemed barely able to tolerate the indignities of mud-rutted streets, slatternly servants, uppity tradesmen, and stiff-fingered seamstresses.