Turncoat

by Don Gutteridge

  “It’s J. Smallman again,” Hatch prompted, with evident satisfaction. “And it’s been crossed out—real faint, mind you, but crossed out just the same. We saw it there in December, but with Jesse dead a year, I paid it no heed.”

  When Marc continued to pore silently over the document, Hatch decided to press on unaided. “Don’t you see, lad? Jesse was definitely up to his ears in this sordid business. And Joshua found out! There’s the connection we’ve been looking for, eh?”

  Marc was staring, transfixed, at the heading under which “J. Smallman, Crawford’s Cnrs.—6 casks” had been set and then very lightly crossed out: “Hunting Sherry.” The word “hunting” had been underlined. And the two names just below it were Nathaniel Boyle and Jefferson Boyle, the Yankee smugglers Hatch and Child had driven from the county. Were they all connected to the Hunters’ Lodges? Surely the reference was no coincidence.

  Every ounce of blood drained from Marc’s face. “My God,” he whispered. “This is the second list I’ve seen with J. Smallman on it. I’ve had it wrong from the beginning.”

  “Had what wrong?” Hatch said.

  Marc didn’t reply, but climbed slowly onto his horse as if in a trance.

  “Where’re you off to?” the bewildered miller asked.

  “To flush out a murderer,” Marc said.

  FOURTEEN

  Marc’s first stop was Elijah’s cabin. He knew that he would not find the hired man in it, now or ever. He also had a pretty good idea where the old devil would turn up. But for the moment, it was the contents of the cabin itself he needed to examine, something he should have done long before this.

  The door opened easily enough. The signs of a hasty departure were everywhere, and it was such haste that Marc was counting on. The table had been cleared of the incriminating newspapers with their religiously underlined accounts of the radical activities in the Cobourg area and beyond. Marc now knew the real reason why they had been singled out, and again chastised himself for having missed the obvious on his first visit here. But the clutter of spilled tobacco, broken quill pens, and pieces of clay pipe remained just as he had noticed them earlier in the week. In less than a minute he had found what he was looking for.

  Not wishing to disturb Beth again (it didn’t appear she would be riding into Cobourg to church with the Durfees), Marc walked the horse back to the path beside the creek, rode down to the mill and then across the road into the bush that surrounded Deer Park estate. He would have to walk the last few yards, as he intended to approach the grand house from the rear. It was the magistrate’s cook he had to see next.

  MARC LEFT RUBY MARSDEN IN TEARS, but Philander Child’s servant had told him what he needed to know, breaking down rapidly under his quick and intimidating interrogation. He walked around the stone house from the servants’ quarters to the porticoed entrance at the front with the confident stride of a man who has the truth in his pocket.

  Squire Child’s cutter stood beside the porch. As Marc strode up to it, the great man himself came down the steps and boomed a hearty “Good morning” to the sleigh’s driver.

  “Off to church, are you?” Marc said, coming up.

  “Ensign Edwards,” Child greeted him, unconcerned and friendly as ever. “Do you wish to ride with me?”

  “I wish to talk to you in the privacy of your study, sir, about a matter of some importance.”

  “Indeed?” Child showed only mild suspicion. “But you can see, young fellow, I am about to set off for St. Peter’s.”

  “The service will have to wait, then.”

  Child, who had taken one step up into the cutter, halted. He turned a severe face towards the rudeness offered him, the kind he had occasion to practice often on the bench and at the quarter sessions, where his unappealable decisions could make or break a man and his family. “I beg your pardon?” The driver had dropped the reins and was looking on with amazed interest.

  “I wish to speak to you, alone and immediately, about the death of Joshua Smallman. I know who killed him.”

  Child blinked once. “Well, then, we had better find a warm place to sit.”

  COGGINS WAS HALED FROM HIS MIDMORNING nap to stir the fire and coax coffee out of a distraught cook. When he closed the door of the study discreetly behind him, Child poured out two snifters of brandy next to the coffee cups and raised his glass to Marc.

  “To the truth,” he said. Then, “Well, don’t give me a long rigmarole about it, tell me what it is you have to say to me about poor Joshua’s accident that’s important enough to keep me from the Reverend Sinclair’s sermon.”

  “Murder, sir. Joshua Smallman, like his son, was murdered.”

  “Yes, Hatch told me about Connors’s confession. Puzzling business, that, but I’ve sat on the bench for twenty years and I still can’t fathom the serpentine convolutions of the criminal mind.”

  “Jesse was murdered in a dispute with smugglers. Joshua was murdered,” Marc paused, eyeing Child intently, “by you.”

  Child’s coffee cup slowed almost imperceptibly, then continued up to his lips. He sipped contemplatively. His brows arched as he said, “By me? Well, then, it’s quite a tale you have to tell.” He eased his bulk back into the leather folds of his chair. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here and listen. It’s one of the things I do best.”

  Marc was somewhat nonplussed at the magistrate’s calm response, but then he realized he had not laid out any of the pieces of the puzzle that, with Ruby’s admission and what he had found in Elijah’s cabin, now formed a complete pattern in his mind.

  “The tale, as you call it, begins with motive. I surmised long before I arrived here that I would have to discover the motive for Joshua’s murder before anything else could come clear. I have already explained to you, on Wednesday evening, how I thought the killing took place that night—”

  “And a plausible bit of deduction that was. Though highly improbable. But I interrupt—please continue.”

  “You decided that Joshua must be killed because you concluded he was a turncoat and because his death would be personally convenient and profitable to you.”

  Child smiled. “The man was a Tory. When he cut himself he bled blue.”

  “Quite so. When he came back to Crawford’s Corners, you took him into the Georgian Club. You attended the same church. You became his solicitor. More than that, you had already taken an interest in the property of his son and daughter-in-law. You arranged a mortgage on their farm for them so they could build a barn, buy cattle, and diversify, likely using your contacts with the Bank of Upper Canada, which routinely refuses loans to impecunious farmers.”

  “You’ve learned a lot about us in eight short months.”

  “Not enough, I fear. But I suspect you coveted Jess’s farm because it borders on the Clergy Reserves section. Given your status and influence with those in high places, you planned to purchase that protected property, a very valuable piece of real estate that would eventually yield a handsome profit.”

  “It is not against the law to make a profit.”

  “But you knew that Jesse Smallman was not likely to make a go of his farm.”

  “Then why would I be foolish enough to bail him out with a mortgage?”

  “You had to get him in deep enough to ensure his complete financial failure, and to have the land revert to you as the mortgage holder. You must have been pleased when he took his own life, as you and everyone else thought at the time.”

  “It wasn’t I who manufactured the drought. Nor did I sit in the Legislature that enacted the Clergy Reserves statute. Even so, I fail to see what this putative bit of melodrama has to do with Jesse’s father or cold-blooded murder.”

  “Following Jesse’s death, Joshua Smallman surprised himself and you by packing up and leaving Toronto to come to the aid of his daughter-in-law. He paid off the mortgage, thwarting your designs on the property. Still, with the drought and no government action on the Clergy Reserves, the farm remained a doubtful prospect for t
he Smallmans. I believe you befriended Joshua not only because he was a conservative businessman but because you hoped you might persuade him to give up the farm as a losing proposition and take his in-laws back to Toronto or over to Cobourg.”

  “You are employing a surfeit of ‘suspectings’ and ‘believings,’ are you not?”

  Child appeared to be enjoying himself. Certainly Marc could see no sign that his mounting assault was having any disquieting impact on the magistrate.

  “I also suspect,” Child continued with a smile, “that you will have to eliminate me as murderer because I happened to have spent New Year’s Eve from eight o’clock till two in the morning in this very room with a score of the district’s most law-abiding citizens. But do continue. I’m eager to hear how I killed a man I admired while I was several miles from the site.”

  Marc took a deep breath. “I believe you watched with growing unease as Joshua Smallman began to attend Reform rallies with his daughter-in-law, ostensibly as her chaperone. Every Wednesday evening you and your Tory acquaintances talked a bit of politics between bouts of whist, and it became apparent that the Reform propaganda was having a serious effect on Joshua. I imagine he nodded his head in assent less and less as the summer wore on. I’ll wager he began to stay on after the others had left to voice his concerns to a man of some power and authority in the district, and indirectly in the councils of the Family Compact in the capital. He would have been discreet at first, ambivalent even, not knowing himself what was happening to him. I think he found it nearly impossible to accept the dawning truth that the Tories themselves were ultimately responsible for the economic mess the province was falling into, and not the rebellious farmers with their legitimate grievances.”

  “You can’t be a true believer without periods of doubt,” Child said.

  “But was Joshua Smallman still a true believer? That was the question that tormented you. Beth has told me that her father-in-law started missing the Wednesday soirees in the fall. By early December you two had had a serious falling out. All your subtle attempts to persuade him to sell the farm had failed. Moreover, Joshua’s increasing sympathy for the Reform cause seemed to guarantee that he would never sell his son’s land—as a matter of principle. I suggest that you quarrelled openly after the others had gone one evening. He may have hinted to you that his own son might have been driven to break the law, and later to take his own life, by the injustices inflicted upon him. However he worded his withdrawal on that day, he left you with the shattering conclusion that he had turned Reformer.”

  “Good reason for losing a friend, I should think, but hardly provocation for murder.” Child poured himself another brandy. The man seemed to be pleased that this droll young ensign had provided him with a ready excuse to miss the tedium of an Anglican sermon.

  “Agreed. But it is one thing to turn one’s political colours—many gentlemen have done so in the Mother Parliament—and quite another when those colours belong to a nation.”

  “As our own United Empire Loyalists did in the eyes of the American revolutionaries?”

  “I’m talking about treasonous activity, sedition, casting your lot in with your own country’s enemies.”

  “You are not implying that Joshua Smallman was a traitor, a turncoat?”

  “No, but I know for a fact that you yourself thought so.”

  “Indeed. Do you read minds in addition to your military duties?”

  “Just before Christmas, Constable Hatch apprehended a peddler named Isaac Duffy and brought him promptly to you. You soon discovered he was up to his Yankee eyebrows in rum-running. On the document Hatch had removed from him, you caught sight of the names of a couple of notorious villains you’d been trying for years to get evidence against: Jefferson and Nathaniel Boyle. The two of you rode straight out to their farms, but they’d already fled back to the States or gone into deep hiding.”

  “I fail to see where this is going,” Child said, but he made no move to rise.

  “You took special note of their names, but you also took note of the name just below the Boyles’ on that incriminating document: J. Smallman. A very faint line had been drawn through it, so faint that Hatch only noticed it this morning upon close examination. Since the list seemed to be a current one, you assumed that the ‘J’ referred to Joshua. Hatch assumed it was Jesse and ignored it: what good would it do to speak ill of the dead? But you were so shocked you said nothing. Instead, you went along with Hatch in search of the Boyles. But you couldn’t get it out of your mind that Joshua Smallman’s name was listed under the words ‘Hunting Sherry.’ You likely knew from your own sources at Government House that there were serious allegations being made concerning the existence and operations of the Hunters’ Lodges—even though you showed only nominal interest in the subject on Wednesday evening. Connors and O’Hurley used ‘hunting’ as a code word for the local insurrectionists they were enlisting. Given what you had observed of Joshua’s leanings over the preceding months, it all fit.”

  Marc leaned forward in his chair. “I submit, sir, that by Christmas Day you had reached the sad conclusion that Joshua Smallman, in his grief over his son’s horrific death and the bitterness he felt at the collapse of his lifelong beliefs, had gone over to the enemy and that, using the smuggling operation as a cover, he was actively supporting the Hunters.” Marc practically hissed the next sentence. “And you yourself said to me in this very room that the people you despised most in the world were smugglers and traitors.”

  “It sounds as though you’re well into the second act of this tawdry little tragicomedy,” Child said affably. “Or should it be called a fairy tale?”

  Marc ignored the jibe. “When you gave that heartfelt speech in front of Mr. Mackenzie last night, I realized just how fanatically you felt about loyalty and about playing by the rules. Your family has served eight or nine kings through thick and thin, dispensing justice and upholding laws even when they didn’t agree with them. You can’t be half a patriot any more than you can be half human.”

  “This is not even news, let alone evidence.”

  “I also got a glimpse into the depth and vindictiveness of your temper when, after tolerating the peccadilloes of Mad Annie for years, you incited a herd of vigilantes to burn her out. It’s also possible that you got wind of Connors and O’Hurley operating hereabouts again. It wouldn’t do to have one of them blabbing on about Joshua’s involvement in smuggling—raising questions you wanted left alone—so you decided to eradicate the whole lot of them at one fell swoop, despite the dubious legality of the operation.”

  Child looked abruptly up at Marc, held his eye, and said, “I imagine murder might be viewed in some circles as legally dubious.”

  “Yes, surely. But not when it comes to the treatment of seditionists or spies, not in circumstances where authority feels itself besieged or in a state of apprehended insurrection. The unobtrusive removal of a dangerous turncoat becomes a kind of noble service to the state, to be sanctioned—lauded even—after the event, should it ever become public knowledge. And when that ‘noble’ act eliminated a man who stood in the way of your gaining his property, then it was doubly serendipitous.”

  “You seem to have forgotten that Mrs. Smallman would inherit her father-in-law’s estate. If so, why would she sell, eh?”

  “But I have not forgotten that you were the man’s solicitor. You knew he had no will, and that there were possibly relatives in the States with a claim on the estate.”

  “The chances of finding them would be slim.”

  “True, but as a lawyer, you knew you could delay the probate until Beth Smallman was forced to sell her farm—to you.”

  Child smiled cryptically, poured himself another brandy, and said, “Why did you ever abandon the bar, young man?”

  “Words are no substitute for action.”

  “Agreed. Well, you’ve established a plausible motive for me, but I must say that I’m still unable to envision my leading a friend-turned-enemy into a deadfal
l trap while sitting in this chair sipping brandy, much as I am now. Did I have a three-mile-long piece of string to trigger the trap or a siren song only poor Joshua could hear?”

  Like the accomplished barristers he had seen in high flight at the Old Bailey, Marc decided it was time to prick the complacency of the witness in the box by playing the first of his trump cards. “I have just come from interviewing Miss Marsden. It didn’t take long for her to break down and admit that she had lied to the sheriff when she swore that Elijah Chown spent the whole of New Year’s Eve with her.”

  A corner of Child’s left eye twitched once—that was all. “You had no authority to trespass on my property and intimidate my servant,” he said, but it seemed more a pro forma objection than righteous umbrage.

  “I have Sir John’s warrant authorizing this investigation, along with his detailed memorandum of instructions,” Marc said, tapping the pocket of his frock coat. “And when Miss Marsden saw the governor’s seal, she soon decided to tell me the truth.”

  “If that is so, then I advise you to interrogate Elijah, not me. I fail to perceive what motive that deranged soul might have had to waylay and murder the man he worked for, whose daughter-in-law he protected as if she were his own child. In any case, Elijah is no concern of mine.”

  “Ah, but he is. He is in every way your man. It was you who brought him here from Toronto, ostensibly to help Jesse and Beth to survive on their farm.”

  “Indeed it was. He was the relative of a friend in the capital, addled but good-hearted, and knowledgeable in farming here. It was an arrangement that suited everyone involved.”

  “And I have no doubt that your motives were less than altruistic. You needed someone you could control close to that scene, and such a gesture would be sure to disguise your true motive. And if need be, Elijah could be persuaded to be unhelpful.”

  “You are inordinately cynical for so young and inexperienced a gentleman. But remember, when Jesse couldn’t pay Elijah’s wages, I did so,” Child said with serene detachment. “That is, until Beth found out. When Joshua came, she was able to pay the man properly.”