Don Gutteridge - Dubious Allegiance

“Todd?” Brookner said as he pulled back the glass of his window and strained to see ahead. “With my life. His grandfather was an Empire Loyalist and his father fought at Crysler’s Farm in 1813. They don’t come any more faithful than Gander.”

“I hear hoofbeats!” Pritchard said.

“What is it, Todd?” Brookner called up, as the others sat up, fully alert.

“Trouble ahead, sir. On horseback.”

Brookner pushed his way over to the door, yanked off his garish green greatcoat to expose his weaponry, and leapt into a drift. Marc suddenly wished he hadn’t repacked his pistol. But he felt compelled to follow, excusing himself as he bumped against Adelaide.

“Don’t try to stop the old fool,” she whispered fiercely. “He’ll get us all killed yet.”

The old fool was already stomping past the horses in the direction of the half a dozen mounted men riding easily towards them down the road. They wore no uniform or insignia to telegraph their allegiance.

Just as Brookner was about to draw his pistol, the lead horseman hollered, “Hold on! We’re friends!”

Brookner kept his fingers closed on the pistol in his belt. “Prove it!” he said.

The leader of the group dismounted and walked towards Brookner with both hands well away from his body. His cohort stood at ease, watching but not looking particularly worried. Marc relaxed.

Brookner and the men exchanged a few words that Marc could not quite catch. Then Brookner took several pieces of paper from the stranger and began walking back to the coach. The latter remounted and led his troop past the carriage, each man tipping his hat to Adelaide, who peered out at them from behind her mourning veil.

“They’re local men,” Brookner said to Marc, but loud enough for all to hear. “They’ve been deputized to track down several desperadoes from Mackenzie’s revolt. They’ve got pictures of them on these posters. That fellow there is Miles Scanlon.”

Marc made a pretense of studying the posters. One of them contained a sure likeness of Thomas-cum-Thomasina Goodall.

The encounter seemed to have got Brookner’s adrenaline flowing. Ever since the death-threat yesterday he had begun to cast himself in what could only be called a romantic light. His strut had become more animated and his speech more formal and consciously laboured, as if he were a character out of Ivanhoe or The Bride of Lammermoor. Without instigation from Pritchard, though richly responded to by that well-read gentleman, Brookner launched into a more vivid description of his capture of the three Scanlon brothers, and then capped off the entertainment with a narrative of the encounter south of Montgomery’s tavern and the subsequent counterattack by the Queen’s forces under the superlative command of Colonel Allan MacNab-with flags flying and bands tootling and drummers thumping-as if he himself had been present and the detail had been adduced first-hand instead of third or fourth.

Pritchard was goggle-eyed at all this, Marc pretended to doze, Adelaide stared out at the snow beginning to fall again, Lambert appeared to be listening but showed no particular reaction, and Sedgewick grunted and mumbled throughout but not loud enough to steer Brookner’s fanciful tale off course.

“My brother-in-law’s allegiance has been disturbed, shaken even, by the recent tragic events,” Brookner said to Pritchard in response to Sedgewick’s last snort of disapproval.

“Farmers fightin’ farmers,” Sedgewick said. “What’s the good of it?”

“Quite right,” Pritchard said amiably. “There’s nothing civil about a civil war. It’s like a family feud.”

Sedgewick gave him a half smile but did not add to the sentiment.

“There’ll be a few hangings and then folks’ll begin to see things straight again,” Brookner said loftily. “You mark my words. And a little war-quick and precise-isn’t a bad thing every once in a while. Like a belt on a delinquent’s backside.”

This aphorism seemed to stall the conversation, and the sudden arrival of snow fluttering past the windows in mesmerizing wavelets drew attention to the outdoors for a few minutes.

“I am not in the least concerned that these woods are crowded with vigilantes or foreign invaders,” Brookner said, staring up at the ceiling where a larger and more discriminating audience might lurk. “Why, when my grandfather and grandmother trekked five hundred miles from Virginia through forests like these in 1783-as their home burned behind them and they paid for their loyalty to King George with everything but their lives-these woods were infested with Indians: Senecas and Osage, as primitive and vicious as they come.”

“Mohawks and Onondagas,” Adelaide responded, to the astonishment of all. “And up here, Algonquins-Ottawa and Montagnais. And most of them were running, too.”

No-one could think of anything to say to such a mild but authoritative interjection. Marc saw Brookner’s body stiffen and his lower lip quiver.

“Addie was tops in her class,” Sedgewick said, ostensibly to Pritchard sitting opposite him. “Always.”

Brookner ignored the remark and said patronizingly, “That may well be, my dear-you are often correct about such minutiae-but what does it matter in terms of the point I was making? One savage is like another.”

“Oh, I trust, sir, that any of those remaining in the province are somewhat civilized by now,” Pritchard said with such obvious anxiety and sincerity that the conversation was brought, mercifully, back to more immediate and practical matters.

“Your scalp is safe here,” Marc said, looking out at the snow to hide his smile.

“Rest-stop up ahead!” Gander Todd called out.

And this time, as if to demonstrate how secure these woods were, Brookner did not approach the half-log grog-shop with his sword flashing.

Two hours later, without further incident or much meaningful chatter, the coach pulled up at an inn that sat on the river side of the road about a quarter of a mile from the village of Prescott. Marc got out of the carriage and surveyed the establishment, reputed to be the finest hostelry in these parts.

The Georgian Arms was a sprawling, two-storey clapboard edifice with a pillared verandah and false balcony above it and seven or eight chimney-pots, all of them issuing smoke. Barns and stables were set back discreetly in the rear. The village itself, on a clear day, would have been visible as there were working farms on either side of the road, dozing now under tender pillows of January snow. Just behind the outbuildings Marc could see, in blurred outline, a copse of evergreens and the telltale shadow where the banks of a creek meandered. Beyond the rim of the bush to the southwest, he knew, the St. Lawrence would be pouring blue and frigid underneath its carapace of ice.

“Well, this is more like it,” Pritchard said approvingly.

The interior offered little to change the Englishman’s mind. There was a spacious reception chamber that rose two storeys to a vaulted and timbered ceiling. All the guest-rooms apparently were on the second floor of the two-storey, in the rear section of the inn. Off the foyer, left and right, there were five or six good-sized rooms that served variously as smoker, waiting lounge for the coach service, public and private dining areas, and a taproom for travellers and local tipplers. Beneath the guest-rooms were the kitchen and probably the office and living quarters of the owner. Two strapping youths took their luggage and lugged it through the hall on the left and up a narrow set of stairs, while the honoured guests themselves were greeted effusively by the proprietor, Murdo Dingman.

Dingman looked as if he had been press-ganged into his clothes. Bulges of neck and waist leaked out at cuff and collar, accenting even more his globular head and a glowing pink scalp barely rescued from baldness by two grey tufts of hair standing above his ears like undotted exclamation marks. His berry-brown eyes were beady and hyperactive between beetle brow and bursting cheek, the only quick-moving parts of an otherwise phlegmatic physique. What he lacked in sprightliness, however, he compensated for by his enthusiastic patter.