Don Gutteridge - Dubious Allegiance

Reluctantly, Marc hailed Sergeant Ogletree. Then he and five infantrymen followed Marc up the street towards the house indicated by Captain Riddell. Two of the men carried pitch-torches. The air was foul with acrid, greasy smoke. The spit and sizzle of flame bedazzled the eye, making the stark silhouettes of the buildings even starker.

There was a meagre bit of light shining through one window of the log house as they came up to it: someone had been brave or naive enough to remain there.

“Somebody’s at home,” Marc whispered, and held up his hand. The men halted behind him. “Sergeant, take two men and watch the rear of the place. I’m going in, carefully. We all know what happens when we corner a rat.”

“We could just fire a volley through the window and order them out,” Ogletree said. “Then set the thing ablaze.”

“We could do that,” Marc said. “But we could also kill innocent civilians.”

Veteran cynic that he had become, Ogletree grunted as if to say that few civilians in a civil conflict could be called innocent. But he obeyed.

Marc rapped at the stout door and called out in French: “Open up, please. No-one is going to hurt you. We require your house as a temporary billet for some of the troops. You will be paid for any food we consume.” He winced at the lie but told himself it was better than needlessly risking lives.

There was no response from inside. Marc could hear Ogletree’s group deploying behind the house. The flickering light in the window near the door was definitely that of a candle or lantern. Was it being kept alight to aid an ambush? Surely not. The town was totally in possession of the troops: any armed resistance would be suicidal. Still. .

Marc pushed at the door. It was unlatched and swung open.

“I’m Lieutenant Edwards. I am commandeering these premises as a billet. I have not drawn a weapon.” With that, he stepped into the room, his sabre in its scabbard and his pistol, primed and ready to fire, tucked lightly in his belt.

The interior was more brightly lit than he had anticipated. To his right several candles were burning, illuminating a kitchen area with a crude deal table and two log chairs, both occupied by women. Mother and daughter, perhaps, each with handsome Gallic features and lustrous, dark hair. But it was the eyes that caught Marc’s attention and held it: black and smouldering, with a malevolence he did not think possible in a woman.

Marc tried to smile, touched his cap, and said hesitantly in his best French, “Good evening. I must ask you to leave. I noticed a shed out back. You could take some blankets out there for the night, or perhaps you have friends or relatives nearby.”

The women remained as still as a pair of gargoyles. The room seemed colder than the night outside. It was the younger one, who would in any other circumstances have been thought beautiful in the first blooming of her womanhood, whose eyes moved first. It was a furtive glance only, but it brought Marc’s gaze around to its object. To his left and in among the shadows, there appeared to be a large clothes-cupboard, its thick door half open. Or opening.

Marc reached for his pistol just as the form of a young man unfolded from the maw of the cupboard.

“No!” one of the women screamed.

The young man’s right hand seemed to explode, and Marc felt something strike him in the thigh and spin him sideways. Just as a second pistol was being raised into the light, Marc fired. The gunman grunted, and sank slowly to his knees. Both of his weapons clattered to the floor. His hands lifted themselves up to his throat, where Marc could see a grotesque, dark splotch spreading.

I’ve killed a man, was his first thought, just before his own pain struck and he reached out in a futile attempt to keep himself from falling. As he lay, numb and bleeding in the sawdust on the floor, the last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was a pair of black, feral eyes wishing him dead.

Horatio Cobb, charter member of the five-person Toronto constabulary, was a worried man. And what worried him the most, perhaps, was his being worried at all. Cobb, as he was known far and wide across the reaches of the capital city, prided himself on keeping his life simple and uncluttered. But living where, and when, he did was making it nigh impossible to do so.

True, he continued to rise at seven each morning, except on the Sabbath, and checked to see if Missus Cobb was still beside him. This latter gesture was made less difficult by the fact that Dora, as the neighbours called her, was as round and pink-fleshed as nearly three hundred pounds can accomplish. Her work as midwife to the easternmost half of the city, the “old town,” often took her out at all hours of the day or night, and her absence was palpable. But a hot breakfast never failed to appear on the kitchen table, either at the instigation of his goodly wife or that of his ten-year-old daughter, Delia. After which he invariably waved Delia and her brother Fabian off to school, kissed Missus Cobb or her image, then made his way along King Street into the heart of the city, nodding to familiars, scowling at ragamuffin boys contemplating mischief, and raking every brick and inch of his domain with a policeman’s practiced eye. How much more at home he had felt here among the bustle and hurly-burly of the province’s metropolis than he ever had on his father’s farm. It was his own considered opinion-an opinion he valued highly-that he was a man in his element.

His element included his regular patrol, an area bounded by King Street on the north and the lakeshore on the south and stretching from Parliament Street on the east to Bay on the west. Within that precinct he was the law or its visible representative. His helmet, blue tunic, and belted truncheon, in combination with his stealthy swagger, were enough to keep the hooligans, roustabouts, and inebriates in suitable awe of his authority. And when that failed to impress, there were his powerful arms and hands with the tenacity of manacles, and as a last resort a persuasive fist or two. Each morning, after checking in with Sarge, the chief constable, at the police quarters in the Court House on King between Church and Toronto Streets, he would be released for the day to do as he saw fit in maintaining the Queen’s peace. As luck would have it, there were a dozen taverns and grog-shops situated within his patrol, and, believing in that proverbial ounce of prevention, Cobb made his presence felt in such trouble-spots as often as his thirst and capacities would permit. It was here, too, that he picked up-by subtle threat, beery bribe, or appeal to good citizenship-those tidbits of information that aided him and his colleagues in their ceaseless quest for law and order in Victoria’s peaceable kingdom. His network of snitches had become legendary.

That was now the problem, and the source of his uncharacteristic anxiousness. For despite the leisurely and self-regulated pace of most of his days-a lingering luncheon in the Blue Ox or the Crooked Anchor, a pleasant supper with Missus Cobb and the children, and the stimulation of an evening spent clearing the streets of belligerent drunks or assisting the bailiffs in serving warrants on sundry miscreants-he found himself, at the end of a twelve-hour day, dyspeptic and out of sorts. And politics was the efficient cause, first and last. The antics of William Lyon Mackenzie and his fellow radicals over the summer had put the whole province on edge. Rumours of an armed uprising were as frequent, and about as reliable, as the number of bent elbows over a bar on Saturday night. Such matters ought to be the business of the governor and his agents, not the local constabulary. But then not many governors other than Sir Francis Bond Head would have shipped every last redcoat in Upper Canada off to Quebec to fight the Frenchies, leaving Fort York deserted and Government House unprotected. And with the nearest militia across the lake in Hamilton, only five policemen and Sheriff William Jarvis of York County stood between the Queen’s surrogate and a bullet from a radical’s musket.