Don Gutteridge - Dubious Allegiance

Marc had produced the money to cover the exorbitant charge.

“Well, I guess I can take ya. Them militia fellas has been pesterin’ me to death about rebels runnin’ this way an’ that. They even threatened to put me in jail if I was to take one of ’em across.”

“Well, Mr. Cooper, I am more than a militiaman. And I am vouching for these people.”

“You got a name?”

Marc realized he had been wise not to underestimate Clark Cooper.

“Lieutenant Marc Edwards, 24th Light Infantry, Fort York. If there’s any trouble, you just refer the matter to me.”

Marc helped the Hatch sisters and the baby into the skiff while Cooper fiddled with the ropes holding it to shore.

Thomas looked up, shook his head, and whispered to Marc, “All I ever wanted to do was be a good farmer an’ tend to my own business.”

Winnifred asked only that Marc report their flight to her father and to Beth, then became too overwhelmed to say anything more. She waved farewell as the sail caught the breeze and the ice-sled skittered out onto the black ice, shorn of snow and buffed ebony by the constant wind. It seemed to Marc as if they were sailing off the edge of some soulless moon. He might never see them again, and his heart clenched at the thought. Oddly enough, it never occurred to him that he had just assisted a fugitive to escape the justice he had sworn to uphold. And given his name as guarantor.

He watched the triangular white sail till he could see it no more.

The foyer was empty and the dining-room dark when he came back in through the front door of the inn. The others had retired to their rooms. The only activity still in progress was the washing up. He could hear the maid singing a song he could not quite place, melodious and youthful. He stopped to listen. It was an old French folk song, one that his own French instructress had sung to him many years before. He found it both sorrowful and soothing.

The girl, whose tiny figure he could see moving across the opening in the kitchen door, was suddenly joined in midchorus by a male voice. They harmonized beautifully. Marc was unhappy that the duet had to end. When it did, he turned to go upstairs. Male and female were now conversing rapidly in French, but he understood little for it was in the local dialect. However, it was the male’s voice that caught Marc’s attention and drew him out of his reverie. It was Charles Lambert, speaking perfectly inflected joual.

Marc did not want to think about anything tonight except the Goodalls and the Hatches, and those at Crawford’s Corners who had, he realized with a pleasurable start, become his friends. His adoptive father, Jabez, was dead. The land he had been raised on would soon pass into the hands of cousins he had never met. England seemed an eon away. So he pushed his bed up against the door, removed his uniform, tucked it carefully back into his trunk, and lay down on the bed to let the floodtide of memory have its way.

It had hardly begun when he heard voices raised next door through the thin wall: the Brookners, having a husband-and-wife dispute by the sound of it. Fortunately, it did not last long, and by the time it had subsided he was asleep.

Captain Brookner, ever sensitive to the welfare of Lieutenant Edwards, and even more so having observed him in the full glory of his scarlet tunic and tufted shako cap, saw to it that no-one disturbed the good soldier until midmorning. At which time the sunlight flooding his room did the trick, and an hour later the entourage was once again settled in their familiar seats in the carriage. Marc had had one anxious moment before boarding. As he was instructing Jones’s son regarding the placement of his trunks-his uniform tucked inside one of them along with the pumpkin-Jones proper came sidling up to him, looking concerned. Marc immediately assumed that there was some bad news from the ferryman.

Jones forestalled his question: “Don’t look so worried, sir. Your friend and her little one reached Waddington safely.” He paused and gave Marc a sly glance. In a whisper he said, “Along with the elderly sister.”

So Clark Cooper had already come visiting and spilled the beans.

“Was there a problem with that?” Marc asked, using all the authority of his rank and his lawyerly voice to put an end to the dangerous direction of this conversation.

Jones smiled with a weak attempt at a man-of-the-world demeanour. “Just a wee one, sir. Coop mentioned that you were one pound short of the fee last night, but you promised to pass it along before you left.”

Marc smiled back, then slipped a one-pound note into the innkeeper’s hand. “You’ll be sure to deliver it,” he said.

Jones almost winked his assurance.

If the militia captain was disappointed that the lieutenant had not continued to wear his uniform, he was too polite to say so. The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Brookner had been frosty and uncommunicative from the outset, so it was hard for Marc to tell whether the dispute he had heard last night was the norm or represented an escalation of their apparent dislike for each other. Oddly, Brookner was always as courteous to her as he was to others. Even this morning he had taken her arm to lift her into the coach, and, as before, she had jerked away as if she had been pinched. She continued to sit in one corner and he diagonally opposite. The sun still shone, though cloud was building up in the southwest; the runners slid weightlessly along the packed snow of the roadbed; and for a little while the passengers could imagine they were on a Sunday afternoon outing in a snowy paradise of spruce boughs and plumed drifts.

Ainslie Pritchard concluded it was safe once again to initiate polite conversation. “Could you tell me, Mr. Lambert, whether that bustling new village of yours has a first-class hotel? One that might be interested in some of the new French wines I intend to introduce into this part of the world?”

Lambert looked up. “We have a hotel, but what class it may be, I don’t know.”

Marc was not surprised that Lambert had decided to answer the question. He had slowly been coming out of whatever shell he had been hiding under. What did surprise him was that he could detect no trace of a French accent in Lambert’s English. Perhaps it had not been Lambert speaking joual in Jones’s kitchen last night after all.

“Would you mind giving me the name of it? I could write the owner from Toronto,” Pritchard said, then flashed Lambert a jowly grin: “Better still, I could stop over there, and you could show me the sights.”

Marc thought he saw Lambert pale.

“It’s the Lakeside, is it not?” Marc said to Lambert.

Lambert betrayed an instant’s doubt, like the barrister whose witness has just given him an unrehearsed answer, then said with conviction, “Yes, it is.”

“You’ve visited the place, then?” Pritchard asked, turning to Marc.

“I stayed in nearby Crawford’s Corners for several weeks two years ago, and visited again last winter.”

This neatly deflected the conversation from hotels in Cobourg. Pritchard was not satisfied until he had gleaned as much information as possible about Marc’s fiancée and wedding plans, many of them fabricated to keep Pritchard happy. During this exchange, Marc kept a sharp eye on the brothers-in-law seated side by side across from him. Whatever the source and depth of their drunken disagreement two nights ago, they seemed to have settled into a sort of reluctant truce, for the sake of their fellow passengers, most likely.

Without warning the coach began to slow, and once again their driver’s desperate “Whoa’s!” were alarming.

“Can we trust this chap?” Pritchard asked Brookner with a frightened look.