Don Gutteridge - Dubious Allegiance

“No sign of any ambuscade out there,” Pritchard puffed, smacking his gloves together. “Powder’d freeze in the pan anyway!”

“Where’s Lambert?” Sedgewick asked.

“Oh, he decided the scenery on the other side of the road was more conducive to, to you know what,” Pritchard said. He gave Adelaide a sidelong glance through the open door.

“Here he comes now,” Sedgewick said. “Safe, thank God.”

“And much relieved,” Adelaide said, to the astonishment of the English gentleman nearest her.

Lambert came towards them from the river side of the bush, not far from where Marc himself had emerged. He seemed to be trying to run, but the depth of the snow merely caused him to stagger.

“What the deuce has happened?” Pritchard blurted.

Brookner and Gander Todd turned their way.

Lambert stopped to catch his breath at the edge of the road. His black eyes were alive with a curious blend of fright and excitement. “I think I saw the ambushers! Heading towards the river. I heard a gunshot.”

“Are you sure?” Sedgewick asked.

“I’m not positive. It was snowing pretty thick in there. But there were shadows of some kind moving ahead of me, of that I’m sure.”

“Could have been deer,” Sedgewick offered, ever the practical man.

“Did you see or hear anything over that way?” Pritchard turned to Marc.

“I thought I heard footsteps in the snow, towards the river,” Marc said.

“It has to be the scoundrels who put these trees in our way, then scuttled off like cowards,” Pritchard said with evident satisfaction. “We call them highwaymen at home, and a sad lot of ne’er-do-wells they are.”

Brookner strutted up, looking smug. “Both of you are no doubt right,” he said with a nod to Marc and Lambert, who was still trying to catch his breath. “While we were away from the coach, the army courier from Montreal to Kingston came riding through. He stopped long enough to inform Todd that a gang of French rebels were seen by several local people working their way up the shoreline. He himself had been shot at three miles back. He suggested we make our way to Cornwall as quickly as possible.”

“This is outrageous!” Pritchard fumed, in part to conceal his fear.

“I agree, sir,” Brookner said. “But the good news is that it was the Frenchies and not our own so-called rebels. We’re well inside Upper Canada now, and the French traitors are no doubt skedaddlling back to their own territory.”

They all got into the coach without further discussion. Gander Todd leapt up to his position, and they skittered off towards the safety of Cornwall, the next civilized town. A proper meal and a rest-stop for passengers and horses would have to wait until then.

“Mr. Sedgewick tells me that you operate a hardware store,” Ainslie Pritchard said to Brookner when they were well away from the place of ambush and the silence in the coach had grown as intolerable as it was ungentlemanly.

“Indeed, I do, sir,” Brookner replied with the sort of gruff affability of manner he had recently decided to affect. “My premises are on the main street and constructed of quarrystone-built to last, I tell my customers to amuse them.”

“And I am given to understand that your partner in life assists you in the family enterprise.”

Brookner glared sideways at Sedgewick, who was dozing, and then smiled thinly across at Pritchard. “Adelaide helps out from time to time and, if I may boast, does an excellent job.”

“For a woman,” Adelaide said in a barely audible voice. Her veil had come down again.

Brookner threw his wife a warning glance of some kind, but before he could say anything, Marc said, “My fiancée and her aunt run a business entirely on their own in Toronto.”

“Do they?” Pritchard said with ill-suppressed surprise.

“What sort of shop?” Brookner asked.

Marc noticed that the captain had put his greatcoat on before leaving the coach earlier and had kept it on. Even in the pale light of the coach’s interior, it gleamed a garish green and, with its wearer’s stiff posture, could have passed for a mannequin in a haberdasher’s display-window. Oddly, he was not wearing a black armband.

“Millinery,” Marc said. “With a dressmaker’s workroom in back.” He did not think it wise to mention their recent troubles and subsequent flight.

“Aah,” Pritchard and Brookner said together, with a dismissive sigh.

“She operated a farm before that-on her own, after her first husband died.”

“I’m told the women out here get up to the damnedest things.” Pritchard sighed, more ruefully this time. “But surely she will not carry on once she becomes the wife of an infantry officer.”

“I believe she will, one way or another.”

“But what will happen when the children start coming?”

“I’ve learned to take life one week at a time out here,” Marc said. “You must remember that we are not yet fully civilized.”

“Now there you speak the gospel truth, sir.”

“You have no children, then?” Marc asked Brookner.

“No, I have not, sir. To my deep regret. Mrs. Brookner and I have been happily wed for almost fifteen years, but the Lord has not seen fit to bless us with children.”

“Then it has been most generous of you, Captain, to allow Mrs. Brookner to participate in your commercial affairs.”

“Adelaide does the accounts,” Sedgewick said without opening his eyes.

“Whenever I myself am too busy to do so,” Brookner said quickly. “Is that not so, my dear?”

Whether his good wife was about to answer or demur was not known, because Sedgewick answered on her behalf.

“Addie was very clever in school,” he said, smiling reminiscently across at the veiled countenance of his sister. “Especially in sums. Her other brothers and Marion and me only finished common school: Addie was sent into Kingston to Miss Carswell’s Academy for Ladies.”

For a moment that remark, aggressive and affectionate, seemed to stop the easy flow of conversation. However, silence being anathema to the English merchant, he soon started it up again, in a fresh direction.

“If you are going on to Cobourg, Mr. Lambert, then we shall be travelling together for several more days.”

Charles Lambert, who appeared to have been somewhat shaken out of his earlier trance by his fright in the woods, nodded courteously, but did not speak.

“Cobourg, I was told in Montreal, is a bustling new town on the big lake-Ontario, I believe it’s called.”

“It is an incorporated village,” Lambert said, and for the first time a lawyerly precision of voice and cadence could be discerned. “And barely that. But we hope for more.”

“You are newly set up in practice there?”

Lambert paused, as if considering whether or not he had said too much already, but eventually said, “We arrived there four months ago.”

“Then you may have met my good friend, Dr. Charles Barnaby, a retired army surgeon who has a part-time clinic on King Street,” Marc said, suddenly interested in a man who had resided in Cobourg for the past few months and who, being no more than five miles from Crawford’s Corners, might well have information about the rebellion and its aftermath in the region.

Lambert looked momentarily puzzled by the question, but like a good solicitor in training, he recovered quickly and said, “No, I don’t believe I’ve yet had the privilege. I’m an extraordinarily healthy man.”

“It’s the bracing country air!” Pritchard said, eager to draw the conversation back to himself.

“Then you and your wife must get out to Throop’s Emporium quite often. It’s been honoured with the quaintness award for the province, I’ve been told,” Marc said lightly.