Turncoat

by Don Gutteridge

  “Under those trees is prime farmland, rich soil, good drainage, a sugar maple woodlot, shade to protect the cattle …”

  “You couldn’t afford to buy it? Not even the part of it that includes the creek on this side?” Marc’s eyes followed what he could now see would be the unalterable survey line that made every farm a rectangle, or set of contiguous rectangles, regardless of topographical caprice or nuance of Nature. The bow in Crawford Creek took it away from the straight boundary line that marked the western limit of the Smallman farm, when the curve of the creek itself cried out to be the natural border between the adjacent properties, assuring each a precious share of the creek’s water.

  “We couldn’t buy it,” Beth said, “even if we had the money.”

  Before he asked why, Marc had to suppress the unsettling thought that Joshua Smallman had been a wealthy man by provincial standards, having established his lucrative business on “fashionable” King Street and paid off his son’s mortgage, and that his daughter-in-law, so recently restored to his affection, would surely inherit whatever remained.

  “What you see over there,” Beth said, “and all along this side of the creek, is a lot owned by the Crown. If and when the government ever decides to sell it, the proceeds will go to the clergy.”

  Light dawned. Inwardly Marc winced at his own obtuseness, his failure to see how Beth Smallman had been leading him patiently towards this conclusion. The Clergy Reserves had topped every list of grievances headlined in Mackenzie’s Colonial Advocate . This was a phrase flung like a goad against the worthies of the province and the governor’s appointed Legislative Council.

  “Ah. . . yes. Every seventh lot to be reserved for the use and maintenance of the Anglican clergy,” Marc said, the legalese slipping easily off the tongue. “But surely the assignment of such lots is not random and self-defeating. Surely both parties, the Church of England and the farmers, stand to gain by the rational allotment and sale of such reserve lands.”

  “The surveyors laid out these lots ten years ago and applied the grid plan they’d been given by the Executive Council. It’s the same for every township in the province. The disposition of lots is decided in advance. What’s actually on them or not on them is irrelevant.”

  “That’s preposterous!”

  “Mr. Mackenzie himself used that very word.”

  “Even so, can no one buy that lot over there?”

  “Clergy Reserve lots are bought and sold all the time. Archdeacon Strachan and his cronies in the Council trade them—like marbles. But only when the value’s been raised or it appears convenient or necessary to their interests. That one over there will be sold when all the property ’round it is cleared and improved and a concession road cut out to the north of it. It’ll be worth ten times what it is now—to someone. Our farm and it would make a natural and very profitable pair.”

  “But couldn’t you and your husband have run your tile down to the creek and set up some irrigation pipes in the interim? You could’ve put a squatter’s shack on that piece by the bank, for God’s sake!”

  “We could have. But what’s to stop the leaders of the Anglican Church with influence in the governor’s Executive Council from suddenly decidin’ to sell that lot to one of their friends, and that friend then comin’ in and rippin’ up our tile—leavin’ us high and dry like we were in the first place? Not a thing.”

  “They don’t have to sell at public auction?”

  “Not if it doesn’t please them. And don’t forget, Jess and me were Reformers through and through.”

  Recalling Joshua Smallman’s friendship with Sir John Colborne, Marc said, “But perhaps your father-in-law could have petitioned the Executive Council on your behalf?”

  “He didn’t believe in that kind of shady dealing,” she replied, with more pride than regret. “He was too honourable.”

  “But you’re not suggesting that the government would let politics influence the conduct of its responsibilities?”

  The ingenuousness of the question surprised and amused Beth Smallman, but she suppressed a laugh.

  “All this has been set out in the Report on Grievances that Mackenzie sent across to Lord Glenelg?” Marc continued.

  “The Seventh Report on Grievances.”

  They walked slowly back towards the barn, Beth ahead, Marc behind. At the point where the path dipped south towards the mill property (that, as chance would have it, straddled the creek down its full length), Marc prepared to take his leave. He took Beth’s hand and brought her mittened fingers to his lips, a gesture ingrained by long habit and prompted now by something more than courtesy.

  “Thank you for being so candid and forthcoming,” he said formally. “And good day to you.”

  She left her fingers where they lay for a second or two after Marc released them, and she looked steadily at him, as if he were one of her father’s books that might possibly deserve reading.

  “I intend to find out what happened to Joshua,” he said.

  “I believe you will.”

  He watched her until she had passed the barn and disappeared into the summer kitchen attached to the rear of the house. Then he turned to make his way to Hatch’s house, but a banging noise brought him up short. He stopped to listen. Somewhere a door was flapping freely in the light breeze. He checked the barn, then swung his attention to Elijah’s cabin near it. The old goat had left his door unlatched and, if the wind picked up even slightly, it would soon blow off its leather hinges. Reluctantly, for he did not wish the pleasant afterglow of the interview with Beth to be disturbed, Marc walked down towards the cabin.

  He grasped the plank door by the knob, but before fastening it, he decided to have a look inside, in case the wretched fellow had fallen or taken ill. In the grainy light that illuminated the interior, Marc could just make out the unmade and unoccupied bed, an empty chair, and a makeshift desk cluttered with papers. Marc stepped back outside and peered around for any sign of Elijah. A movement up beyond the house caught his attention: someone was trundling across the road and into the woods on the far side, where the path led up to Squire Child’s estate—Elijah What’s-his-name scuttling, quick as a dog in heat, over to call upon his lady friend, Ruby Marsden.

  Marc latched the door and turned to leave, then suddenly wrenched it open again and stepped boldly inside. He moved swiftly over to the desk and sat down on the rickety chair in front of it. The desk was a mass of jumbled newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides, speckled with ash and shards from cracked pipe bowls. For a man reputed to be illiterate, Elijah had chosen some unusual recreational materials. One by one Marc held these up to the dim light that fell through the window. On every item, passages had been underlined or crudely circled with charcoal. The subject of each marked passage was instantly clear: political statements, whether they were in the reports of the minutes of the House of Assembly, a manifesto in broadside or tract, or a hyperbolic claim in the capitalized line of a poster. And each of them bilious with the rhetoric of the left—the bombast of the radicals. Among this detritus lay a single leather-bound book, the Holy Bible.

  Gently Marc opened it, and he peered at the fly-leaf. A name was scrawled there, faded but legible. The word “Elijah” was readily decipherable, but the letters of the last name were tangled and blurred. After some minutes, Marc deciphered them as: c - h - o - w - n.

  Elijah Chown.

  So, Elijah had secrets to keep. He was a furtive reader and a closet Reformer. Little wonder, then, that he had been so protective of the Smallmans. But why the secrecy? Beth herself did not know he could read—or else she had lied about it yesterday when she had implied that only she among the New Year’s guests was literate, a conclusion he now rejected out of hand. And what else might he have to hide? Somehow, Marc thought, he was going to have to find a way of interrogating the prickly old misanthrope. He needed to know much more about what was really going through the mind of Joshua Smallman in the weeks before his death. And he needed to hear it, unfortunatel
y, from someone less partisan than his daughter-in-law.

  At any rate, the hired hand would bear watching.

  SEVEN

  Just as Marc rounded the north silo and turned towards the miller’s barn, he heard a high-pitched squawk that rose to a terrified shriek, then stopped, as if an organ-pipe had been throttled with a vengeful thumb. Before he could even hazard a guess as to the tortured source of the sound, the elongated and fully engaged figure of Winnifred Hatch emerged from between the barn and the chicken coop. In the vise of her left hand, the silenced but thrashing body of a bulb-eyed, dusty-feathered capon struggled futilely against the inevitable. In her right hand, she clutched a hatchet. The miller’s daughter—garbed in sweater and skirt and an intimidating leather butcher’s apron—marched to a stump near Marc, one that had been set firmly in the ground for her purpose. She plopped the lolling head of the doomed creature upon it and brought the hatchet blade down with the zeal of a Vandal. Blood burst everywhere. Marc leapt back, then stared down at the crimson spatter on his boots and the gaudy petit point etched suddenly in the snow. As Winnifred jerked the decapitated fowl up by its feet to let the blood drip out, she noticed the spectator for the first time.

  “Around here we do our own killing,” she said. Then she wheeled about and strode into the barn. At the base of the stump, the creature’s dead eye was wide open.

  Marc scrubbed his boots in the snow and carried on. At the door to the back shed, he noted the probable cause of Winnifred’s scorn, if that’s what it was. Standing just inside, obscured by shadow, Mary Huggan was twisting a cotton hanky in her fingers and doing her best to hold back her tears.

  “It’s all right now, Mary,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing tone. “You can go on over there. Beth’s expecting you.”

  Mary sped away, carefully skirting the blood-drenched path beside the coop.

  AFTER A MIDDAY MEAL OF CHEESE, cold ham, and bread, Marc and Erastus Hatch walked down to the barn, where Hatch asked Thomas Goodall to saddle their horses. They continued on to the mill and sat smoking in the tiny office the miller kept there, more as a sanctuary than a place of business.

  “I could go out there on my own,” Marc said.

  “I’m sure you could, son. But this ain’t England, you know. That tunic of yours is more likely to raise the bull’s hackles than to instill fear, or even generate a modicum of respect.” He was chuckling but nonetheless serious.

  “I do know that,” Marc said. A mere eight months in the colony had taught him to disregard the graces and rules of the society he had been raised in. In Great Britain there were dozens of offences for which a man who forgot his place in the unchangeable scheme of things might be hanged—and frequently was. Here in Upper Canada, you had to murder a man in front of ten unimpeachable witnesses before the scaffold was brought into play. And dressing down an insubordinate or an offending citizen was just as likely to get you a string of retaliatory oaths as a cap-tugging apology. Even women who professed to be ladies smoked pipes in public and were known to utter a curse or two when provoked. It was only at Government House and at the few mixed gatherings of the officers’ mess that his scarlet tunic and brass set tender hearts aflutter or elicited respect amongst the enlisted men and servants. That he had been the son of a gamekeeper was neither here nor there, especially if no one were ever to find out.

  “I’ll just ride on out ahead of you,” Hatch said, “and let Wicks and Hislop know you’re coming, and why. Then I’ll leave you to them.”

  “That’s extremely kind of you.”

  “Still, even if they accept you as an advance man for the quartermaster, I don’t quite see how you’re likely to bring the conversation around to a death almost everybody in the township believes to be an accident.”

  “I don’t rightly know myself,” Marc said. “But I think I’ve learned enough to improvise something. It shouldn’t be hard to start a discussion of Joshua’s accident: there’s certain to have been lots of gossip and speculation about it. All I need is a cue to ask whether or not these people ever knew or met him. I might suggest that I knew him a bit back in Toronto. None of these men will know precisely when I came here or how long I’ve been in the garrison at Fort York.”

  “You could even mention you’re going to make an offer for the two hogs Elijah is fattening up for the spring.”

  “Am I?” said Marc.

  “I’m sure your quartermaster would approve,” Hatch said, laughing.

  HALF AN HOUR LATER THE TWO men were riding up the Farley Sideroad towards a group of farms locally dubbed “Buffaloville.” Hatch had just suggested that Marc pull his horse into the protection of some cedars while he went on up to the Stebbins place to prepare for Marc’s arrival and secure his cover story, when onto the road in front of them swung a two-horse team and cutter. Moments later, the vehicle went whizzing past them at full trot. A curt wave from the fur-clad driver was all the greeting they got as he raced down the concession line.

  “Azel Stebbins,” Hatch said. “Prime suspect.”

  “Where would he be going in such a hurry at one in the afternoon?”

  “By the looks of that harquebus sticking up behind the seat, I’d say he was going hunting. Some deer were spotted up that way yesterday.”

  “Is everyone around here armed?”

  “Well, they all hunt.”

  “I take it we can write off Stebbins for the day?”

  “Unless you’d like to spend the afternoon watching young Lydia Stebbins bat her big eyelashes at you.”

  AS GOOD AS HIS WORD, HATCH did go on ahead to the farm of Israel Wicks to prepare the ground for an official visit from the regimental quartermaster’s emissary. When Marc rode up the lane alongside a windbreak of pines, he spotted a tall, bearded fellow sporting an orange tuque waiting for him in front of a low but extensive square-log cabin, onto which a number of ells and sheds had been added over time. Behind it stood an impressive barnboard structure, several smaller coops and hutches, and a split-rail corral where a pair of matched Percherons idled in the cold sunshine.

  Wicks held out a friendly hand when Marc dismounted, and led him into the house. “Erastus says you’re from the garrison in Toronto, scoutin’ for grain and pork.”

  “That’s right,” Marc said. “I’m authorized only to line up potential supplies, to save Major Jenkin time when he makes the rounds of the eastern counties next month.”

  “We’ll have some coffee and a shot of somethin’ stronger before we talk business,” Wicks said, pulling off his coat and scarf. He hollered towards the partitioned area at the rear of the house, “Moe, come out here. We got company!”

  Wicks appeared to be about forty-five years of age. He had a grizzled beard, grooved brow, and deep-set eyes that revealed the confidence and the anxiety that comes from prolonged experience of life’s vicissitudes. He took Marc’s greatcoat and draped it carefully over a chair beside the fire blazing in the hearth, above which a brace of Kentucky shooting guns were on display.

  “Ah, Maureen.”

  Marc turned to be introduced to Mrs. Wicks, a spare, fretting little woman who reminded him of a nervous songbird that’s forgotten to migrate and seems perpetually puzzled by the consequences. She stopped abruptly when she sighted him, as if bedazzled by the blast of scarlet before her.

  “Say hello to Ensign Edwards, Moe.”

  “Ma’am,” Marc said, but his bow was missed by the averted eyes of his hostess.

  “We don’t get much company out here—in the winter,” Wicks said.

  “I’ll fetch us some coffee,” his wife said. She scuttled back into the safety of her kitchen, and the clatter of kettles on an iron stove was soon heard.

  “You’ve no children?” Marc said.

  “Two lads,” Wicks said, in a voice strong and rich enough to grace a podium or the hustings in the heat of a campaign. The vigorous health that is the gift of an outdoor life shone through his movements and ease of bearing. Marc suffered a pang of envy a
nd felt suddenly ashamed of his deception. “They’re both out doing road duty for a couple of days.”

  Maureen Wicks flitted in with a tray of coffee and biscuits and flitted back out again. Wicks tipped a generous dollop of whisky into the mugs, and the two men drank and ate.

  “I’ve got about fifty bags of wheat in storage at Hatch’s mill,” Wicks said and, looking closely at Marc, added, “but then you already know that.”

  Marc finished chewing his biscuit before replying. “Erastus hasn’t written down the amounts for me yet, but he’s suggested I see men like yourself because he knows you may be interested in any offers.”

  This answer seemed to satisfy Wicks. “I’d be willin’ to sell half of that, as grain or flour when the mill starts up again. Hatch can vouch for the quality.”

  “Any livestock?”

  “Half a dozen hogs fat enough by April, if that’s okay. Do you need to see them?”

  “The state of your buildings and the neatness of your house tell me all I need to know about the fastidiousness of your farming,” Marc said, hoping he was not overplaying the flattery card, “and, of course, what Hatch has already told me about you.”

  They chatted informally about potential prices, the prospects for a good spring, and the severity of the past two winters before Marc said casually, “Hatch tells me the winter’s been hard on his neighbour.”

  “Mrs. Smallman,” Wicks said, eyeing him closely.

  “Something about her father-in-law getting killed in a freak accident.”

  “A tree fell on him. New Year’s Eve.”

  “What kind of fool is out cutting trees on New Year’s Eve?” Marc said, feigning incredulity.

  Wicks eyed his guest carefully, then said, “Joshua Smallman was no fool.”

  “You knew the man?”

  “Just to see him,” Wicks said with calculated offhandedness. “I knew his son Jesse a while back. The father was a merchant from your town—an old Tory, I’m told, but a good man all the same.”