Turncoat

by Don Gutteridge

  Although still windless, the evening had grown much colder, and the soft, drifting snow gave only an illusion of coziness. Beth drew the buffalo robe off her shoulders and then did likewise with Marc’s. She lifted the separate furs that were shielding their thighs and legs and looped them over one another. Then she leaned in against Marc—shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip—and arranged the upper robes to form a continuous, cozy canopy.

  “It’s called bundlin’,” she explained. “You’re allowed,” she said, “even if your intentions aren’t honourable.” She placed her fur-capped head on his shoulder. He could feel her breathing.

  “You’d still need money to buy a commission, wouldn’t you?” she murmured.

  “Uncle Frederick helped. He also wrote to Sir John Colborne on my behalf, and paid my passage to Montreal.”

  “It must be nice to have friends in high places.”

  “I’ve been lucky all my life,” Marc said, sliding his right arm around her shoulder and drawing her closer. There was no resistance.

  “I haven’t told you everythin’ about Father,” she said after a while, moving only her lips. “I did accept from the very first that you were in earnest and that you could probably be trusted to keep anythin’ I told you to yourself. Still, I couldn’t tell you all of it, not then. But when I saw what you did back there at the hall, the last of my doubts vanished.”

  Marc wanted to speak, but he kept very quiet, and very still.

  “So much of what you needed to know was painful to me. I save my weepin’ for the dead of night, but it still comes and it still hurts. But so does the not knowing. It’s so much like the grief I felt for Jess: not knowing why—really, really why—he went out there and hanged himself for me to find him. Why didn’t he give me a chance to talk him out of it? I felt alone and betrayed. My love was not enough. And because I didn’t really know, I couldn’t grieve the way other widows do—and there’re plenty of them around here. What was worse, my grieving didn’t seem to have any end to it. Every reminder of Jess brought all that pain back instantly. If Joshua hadn’t come, if Mr. Child hadn’t given us a mortgage, if Elijah hadn’t taken on so much of the daily burden, and if dear, sweet Aaron didn’t need me to survive, I’d never have made it through the summer.”

  “You don’t have to tell me all this,” Marc whispered, brushing her hair below her hat with his lips.

  “Then Father was killed. And again I had the not knowing. No one at the inquest believed there ever was a mysterious note calling him away. But, of course, I knew things I couldn’t say to them, that I will tell you now. Joshua was obsessed with Jess’s death. Every ounce of energy left over from helpin’ us save the farm was given over to quizzin’ me—oh, ever so gently, for he was a kind, kind man—about Jess’s last days. He rummaged through every note and letter Jess ever wrote and searched the house and barn for more. After a while I could tell he’d finally quit blaming me. After that we became truly fond of each other, and then we both needed to know why. So he went along to the Reform rallies with me to hear and see for himself what his son had seen and heard the year before. He knew first hand from the drought last July what the Clergy Reserves fight was all about, what’d made his son mad and drove him to choose death over disloyalty. Then, by the end of October, a strange thing had happened.”

  Marc withdrew his lips.

  “Father began to understand and feel the way his son had, and then he began to believe in the cause itself. Tory though he was, through and through, he came slowly to see that the injustices were unthinkingly or callously caused—and by the very people he so looked up to and revered as the pillars and mainstays of the province. And that they could be cured without the collapse of the state and the ruination of the worthies in the capital.”

  “He must have felt the conflict terribly.”

  “He did. He started neglecting his friends. Then he started skipping Wednesdays at the Georgian Club. The day before Christmas he walked over and told Mr. Child he couldn’t come anymore.”

  She had finished. Marc drew her face up to his. She pulled away, reluctantly—or so it seemed to him.

  Durfee was about to point the horses north onto the Miller Sideroad when instead he drew them to a sudden halt. “Christ,” he said, “the door to the inn’s wide open!”

  Marc and Durfee leapt from the cutter and rushed into the saloon area of the inn. The door to the inner office hung by one hinge. Durfee found a match, lit a candle, and the two men went in cautiously. The unbreakable safe lay sideways in the middle of the room. Axe marks and dents from a sledge marred every inch of it, the rage and frustration of the perpetrator appallingly evident. In a final fit of frenzy, he had taken his axe to Durfee’s desk and cupboard and chopped them to pieces. Papers and spilled ink were everywhere.

  “What kinda madman would do a thing like this?” Durfee sighed, leaning against the wall to steady himself.

  “Only you, me, and Hatch knew the money was here,” said Marc, “as did Connors and O’Hurley.”

  Durfee knelt down to open the safe, and moments later he withdrew a wad of American banknotes. “Well, they didn’t get it, did they?” He riffled through it with some satisfaction.

  A slip of paper, not a banknote, fluttered out.

  Durfee held the candle while Marc examined the paper. It was about four by five inches and, judging from the torn edges, had been ripped from a larger document.

  “Are you all right, James?” It was Emma, in the taproom.

  “Stay out there, ladies. We’ll be right out.”

  “It looks like a list of their customers,” Marc said.

  “For tinware, or somethin’ more potable?”

  “Can’t tell. All we got here is a list of names. The rest of the sheet is missing.”

  “That paper looks awfully old.”

  “True. But the writing is similar to that on a whisky list Hatch and I found out at the cave by Bass Cove.”

  “Ya don’t say. Then it’s rum-runnin’ we’re lookin’ at for sure.”

  Marc did not hear this remark. He was staring at a name near the bottom of the list.

  “What is it?” Durfee said.

  “There’s a J. Smallman listed here. And the name’s been crossed out.”

  “An old list for sure, then. You think young Jesse was involved in this business?”

  “I don’t know, James. But there is one thing I do know for certain. Everything about the death of his father points to smugglers and their doings. It’s been about rum-running all along. I should have seen that before now.”

  “The keg of liquor Hatch said you found in Jesse’s barn?”

  “Yes. And there’s only one place a fugitive rum-runner could hide without fear of discovery.”

  “Mad Annie’s.”

  “I’ve got to get there and find Connors before the sheriff and his posse flush him out. And when I find him, I’ll thrash the answers out of him.”

  “You can’t go out there into the bush in that costume,” Beth said to Marc in the taproom as the men prepared for their mission.

  “The lass is right,” Emma said. “They’ll see you comin’ for miles.”

  “And there may be shootin’,” Beth said.

  “I’ll pick up my pistol and sabre at the mill,” Marc said.

  “Come to my place first, then. Jess’s clothes’ll fit you fine.”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER MARC AND Durfee were on their way up Crawford Creek in the cutter. A fresh team borrowed from Barnaby’s place next door moved in sprightly fashion over the powdered snow on the creek ice. Marc was dressed in a coonskin cap, grey ribbed wool sweater, plaid mackinaw, corduroy breeches, and woodcutter’s boots.

  Marc thought that, with luck, they might arrive at the junction of the two creeks before the magistrate and his deputies. What exactly they would do after that Marc had not worked out yet. But Connors held the key to Joshua’s death. Marc recalled with a shudder the viciousness of the blow that had been meant to send him to his Maker l
ast Monday night. Connors had even said to O’Hurley, “It’s your turn.” How naive, and arrogant, he had been in dismissing out of hand a pair of would-be murderers and boasting of where they could find their saddlebag if they had the gumption to come and get it! Well, if he didn’t unearth Connors, he’d ride thirty miles to Perry’s Corners and have a run at O’Hurley.

  “They’ve beat us to the trough!” Durfee cried.

  Four sleighs loomed out of the light snow that still descended peacefully, indifferently upon the countryside.

  “Welcome to the show, lads!” MacLachlan boomed as they pulled up.

  Philander Child was standing beside him on the driver’s bench. “All right, gentlemen. Mr. Collins here, who knows these woods well, is going to lead us through to Mad Annie’s. The strategy is to fan out and surround the place. Fire your pistols only in the air. I want no one shot. If they are armed and fire back, well, that will be another story. But I doubt that will happen. At heart, these hooligans are cowards and turncoats. They’ll run like rabbits into our trap and then fall over each other trying to play innocent and cast blame anywhere but on themselves. They are the dregs of civilization. Let’s clean ’em out!”

  The deputized lawmen jumped down and began snowshoeing into the woods behind the energetic stepping of Philander Child and his man, John Collins. Durfee and Hatch walked with Marc, offering earnest but contradictory bits of advice on the subtle art of manipulating raquettes. Twenty minutes later, they chuffed up behind the vanguard and peered into the clearing that separated the posse and the wretched cabins of Mad Annie’s menagerie.

  Marc and Durfee were instructed to follow the sheriff and several constables to the right, while the others shuffled to the left. They stuck close to the verge of the woods for cover, but little activity was visible in the main cabin ahead or the half dozen huts teetering around it. A pathetic droop of smoke from its chimney indicated a near-dead fire. If the Pringles were expecting trouble, or were wide awake anguishing over the capture of their matriarch, they were doing so quietly. By the same token, no constable or magistrate had ever before come within two hundred yards of the main cabin: the booby-trapped swamp and a general public indifference had kept the Pringles secure for a generation. And, Marc was thinking, what safer haven for a murderer on the run?

  The vigilantes spread out silently, then crouched down, awaiting the signal. Five minutes later, John Collins fired his pistol into the air, and each man strode determinedly forward. The only escape route for the besieged would be the frozen swamp to the southeast, and in the dark its leg-hold traps would be as deadly as a bullet in the back.

  Several more shots were fired, but the first one had produced the effect the magistrate was hoping for. Half-dressed or nude figures spilled out of every door and hatch of the several hovels—at first shrieking in blind terror, then scrambling in bewilderment and shock as the ring of armed men marched closer and cried out for their surrender.

  In front of Marc a naked male Pringle dropped abjectly to his knees in the snow and proceeded to grovel. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he wailed in the singsong chant of a petrified child. Behind him, a girl was darting about in ever-smaller circles, her shift shredded by her own hand, her bare feet pounding the snow, her shrieks piteous and animal-like. It was clear that the Pringles thought they had awakened in the middle of a collective nightmare, with no mother to comfort them.

  One of the constables stepped up to the girl and cuffed her smartly on the neck. He grabbed her frail arm and dragged her like a carcass to the periphery, then returned for another victim.

  Marc felt sick to his stomach. He found himself kneeling beside the fellow who had dropped into the snow before him. He might have been fifteen or forty, it was impossible to tell. He was skin and bone, his stare goitred, and his face crawling with scabs and pustules. Fear had turned his pleas into babble. Marc lifted him tenderly up and carried him towards a coop of some sort. He glanced around. It was chaos everywhere: shouts, wails, frantic dashing and collision, sporadic gunfire. Marc opened the hatch to the coop. Animal heat radiated from within.

  “Slip in there,” he said, “and don’t make a sound. You’ll be all right.”

  As he swung back towards the woods, Marc noticed two things: several torches had been lit on the far side of the enclosing circle, and a fully clothed male had just popped out of one of the huts. Agnes came tumbling out naked in his wake. Hatch was beside Agnes in a wink, but Marc was already plodding madly after Connors.

  Despite his uncertainty on raquettes, Marc easily gained on Connors, who sank to his knees at every step and quickly exhausted himself. A few feet into the woods, he gasped like a spent horse and slumped down.

  A triumphant huzzah rose behind them, and Marc arched around to see what it was all about. One of the chicken coops—not the one concealing the wretch Marc had pardoned—had been set ablaze. The inquisitors were virtuously cheering the conflagration. But something stopped the celebration in its tracks. Even Connors, panting and searching for a curse to fling at the ungrateful gods, looked on, speechless. A dozen hens scrabbled and tottered and attempted flight out of the fireball of their roost, their feathers in flames. Then one by one they fluttered, faltered, and expired, like crepe-paper baubles. The snow hissed at their demise.

  The vigilantes stared, awed by the consequence of their own righteousness. Without a word or sign they doused their torches. There would be no more burning. To men for whom the erection even of a log cabin in the bush represented the triumph of the will over a cruel and dispassionate Nature, the deliberate destruction of any beast nurtured by his care and sweat was deeply reprehensible. Philander Child did nothing to urge them further. Three or four of the better-fed Pringles took advantage of the lull and slipped into the bush.

  Connors had gotten back to his feet but was still too weary to skulk anywhere. His face was obscenely bloated. He was hatless. His flies flopped open. All the bravado had gone out of him. He stared at the pistol in Marc’s belt and the sabre in its scabbard, then looked directly into Marc’s eyes. Suddenly he paled and threw both hands in the air.

  “Don’t shoot me,” he rasped. “I wasn’t gonna kill ya, honest.”

  “Your partner was in Stebbins’s barn, wasn’t he?” Marc said, one hand on the pistol butt.

  “We only took the horse’s shoe off, I swear to God! He stepped on that nail by himself. Stebbins didn’t want ya trackin’ us here.” Connors took one step towards Marc, bringing his hands down slowly as he did so but holding them well away from his body, as if readying them for the manacles.

  So, Connors, O’Hurley, and Stebbins had conspired to keep him from leaving the farm that night. And Lydia had ensured that he was nicely distracted for the duration. What an ass he had made of himself!

  “I’m taking you in to jail,” Marc said with deep satisfaction.

  There was a sharp report and Connors’s face widened with astonishment. He opened his mouth to speak, but a bubble of blood flicked out. Then he pitched forward into the snow.

  “Jesus!” Hatch cried just behind Marc.

  They both turned to see John Collins, pale as a ghost, standing a few yards away at the edge of the woods with a smoking pistol in his right hand.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him,” he stammered. “I thought he was pointin’ a gun at you.”

  “It’s all right, John,” Hatch said. “You probably saved us the cost of a rope.”

  Marc had already turned Connors over. Blood was leaping out of a hole in his chest. His eyes were still open. They stared up at Marc in mute appeal. “Father, give me the sacrament … please.”

  “I’m not a priest,” Marc said, pressing his fur cap uselessly into the spouting wound.

  “I’ve a confession to make.” Connors’s voice was a desperate whisper. “Please. I can’t go out like this.”

  Marc leaned closer. “I’m not your confessor, Mr. Connors.”

  “I killed a man.”

  Hatch was now at Marc�
�s side.

  Blood surged out of Connors’s mouth. He choked, coughed, gasped in pain.

  “Who did you kill?” Marc said, willing the villain to speak.

  The voice was less than a whisper now. “Smallman.”

  Marc’s heart jumped in his chest. He tried to quell the foolish elation, the almost childish sense of triumph rippling through him.

  “Joshua?” he said, and waited.

  The final two syllables uttered by Ninian T. Connors in this life were crystal clear:

  “Jes-se.”

  THIRTEEN

  Marc showed Erastus Hatch the list of names on the slip of paper he had found among the American bills in Durfee’s safe. Both men were exhausted, but too much had happened for either of them to entertain the possibility of sleep. The miller’s house at midnight was quiet and growing cold. The women were home and safely in bed. Mad Annie and five of her offspring were gracing the cells of the district jail. The cadaver of Ninian T. Connors had been wrapped in a horse blanket and carted off to the morgue in Cobourg.

  “I’ve seen plenty of lists like this over the years,” Hatch said. “Could be customers or potential retailers for the rum. This is definitely an old list: Jesse’s name must’ve been crossed off after he was … murdered.” Hatch stifled a yawn. “Still, I’d feel a lot better if we had the missing half of this paper. A string of names isn’t much in the way of proof.”

  Marc sighed. “True. Which leaves us with a confessed murderer but no clear or provable motive.”

  “We have to figure it had something to do with a falling-out over the smuggling business.”

  “Whatever the exact motive, it’s conceivable that Joshua found something among Jesse’s papers, either about the rum-running or perhaps even the apparent suicide, and tried to confront Connors or one of his cronies.”