Don Gutteridge - Dubious Allegiance

Adelaide let out a long sigh.

“Even if I had not found it there, I could have got a warrant to have your luggage searched at Gananoque. It gives me no pleasure to conclude that you and your brother conspired to kill Captain Brookner, a man each of you wished dead.”

“You must not blame my brother,” Adelaide said, as some feeling began to flow back into her voice. “It was I who shot Randolph. You wanted to know why I did it yesterday. Well, I’ll show you.” With that, she undid the top two buttons of her coat to reveal the camouflaging crepe scarf. Very slowly she unwound it from around her regal neck. Even in the uncertain light of the coach’s interior, what Marc saw there made him gasp in shock: purple-black bruising about her throat, with the imprint of fingers and thumbs grotesquely visible.

“He tried to kill you?”

“I don’t think he thought of it that way.”

“The night before last I heard you two quarrelling. I had already begun to suspect that he was an abuser, and I waited for his slap or your cry. I raced out into the hall and stood-somewhat foolishly-outside your door. I heard nothing for a long while. Then your husband began snoring. I concluded I had been wrong.”

“Those were not snores. That was me gagging for breath. Randolph always thought I was being melodramatic. Once the fury passes with him, he’d pretend it didn’t really happen or wasn’t of any consequence. He turned his back and went to sleep, while I sat awake most of the night, knowing that sooner or later I would die in one of his rages. To suggest a divorce would be to publicly humiliate him and induce a tantrum that might prove to be the fatal one.”

“Did you plot to kill him then and there?”

“I knew he had a second pistol. He bought it when rumours of rebellion began to heat up last summer. He showed me how to load and fire it. I planned to follow him on his walk and shoot him, hoping that some faceless vigilante could be blamed. I prepared the pistol in the moonlight and hid it in among my clothes. But I fell into an exhausted sleep, and when I woke up, he was nearly dressed and ready to go out. I threw on my coat and boots and used the outside fire-stairs to gain a minute or two. By the time he reached that spot in the creek where the spring is, I was right behind him. He never once looked back nor to either side until that bubbling spring caught his attention, and he stood gazing at it. I almost lost my nerve, but my throat ached and my skin burned from his assault. I raised the pistol and fired. He fell into the cold water. I was surprised there was so little blood.”

A shudder passed through her body, but she did not lower her head. The veil swung delicately above her ravaged throat.

“So you returned to your room via the back way?”

“Yes, though I went straight to Percy’s room. I still had the pistol in my hand. I was in shock. Percy took the thing, climbed up on his dresser, and dropped it down under the eave of the roof. After I had calmed down, we discussed the possibility of an outsider being blamed. But we couldn’t be sure that Miles Scanlon had not already been captured. It was I who eventually proposed the deception which we played out. I did not want to involve Percy, but he insisted that the ruse would work better if he were seen talking to Randolph in the hallway. I could not dissuade him. He felt he was partly to blame because he had not been able to protect me from Randolph’s cruelties.”

“But there was the problem of the boots and greatcoat.”

“Percy wanted to hide the coat in his trunk, but if it were found there during any investigation or as a result of something raised during the inquest, he would hang with me for sure. I refused to let him take that chance. I remembered the loose floorboards I had noticed the day before. I had no time to hide the coat when I first came up the fire-stairs, but I slipped back up about noon on the pretext of getting some night-clothes. You and Ainslie were in the lounge. I got the floorboards up far enough to stuff the greatcoat in there. The boots I put in Randolph’s trunk. The hat, as you guessed, was Percy’s.”

“But when no suspicions were raised later on, why didn’t you or Percy remove the coat and pack it in your trunk?”

“There was too much coming and going up there by then. I was with the Dingmans, and Percy decided to leave things as they were.”

“Yes. It was the uniqueness of that coat that could give away the show.”

Adelaide had turned back to gaze at the snow and at the eons-old landscape it made pristine for a brief season. After a long while, without looking at him, she said in a muted, uncertain voice he had not heard before, “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to carry on to Toronto, where I shall wed my fiancée.”

Percy Sedgewick rejoined them shortly thereafter. A quick but telling look was exchanged between brother and sister. Percy relaxed visibly and began to tell stories of the homesteading Sedgewicks who pioneered Landsdowne Township, where men were men and women their helpmates and companions, working side by side in field and fallow. Much later in the afternoon Percy went back up on top to smoke a pipe with Gander Todd, and Adelaide returned to the subject of their earlier conversation.

“I will not ask you why, but only thank you for such an unexpected gesture,” she said with feeling. “But are you not worried that by not turning Percy and me in to the magistrates you are perhaps putting Miles Scanlon’s life in danger? I know for a fact that he was not involved with his older brothers in the rebellion. He helped them after the fact, as Percy did their wives and children. He will not hang for that, but he could hang for murder. I would not want his death on my conscience. Nor would I permit it to happen.”

“Do not be concerned for Miles Scanlon. When I went into Dr. Murchison’s surgery this morning, he told me that word had reached him late last night that Scanlon had been captured and held in custody on a farm many miles north of here, twelve hours before your husband was shot. There is no way that he will be accused of that crime.”

“I am relieved to hear that.”

“Apparently, he admitted planting the death-threat in the coach, but swears he never planned to do the captain harm. He just wanted to frighten him. According to the doctor, the poor bugger was bushed.”

“So then you were certain I had done it?” Adelaide actually smiled.

Marc smiled back. “It was either you or Gander Todd!”

It was dusk when the coach bearing the living and the dead neared the village of Gananoque. Percy was back on top with Gander.

“With Miles Scanlon out of the picture,” Marc said suddenly, “the coroner told me that he would have to enter a finding of ‘murder by person or persons unknown.’ He will add a comment in his summary to the effect that the motive appeared to be political and the assassin a vengeance-seeking vigilante from the rebel camp. He feels that Captain Brookner may have been a symbolic target picked at random.”

“Why did you not give him your theory and your evidence back there? Or had you already decided on a course of action?”

“I had not made up my mind either way. The greatcoat would still be where you put it and I left it. And I wanted to be sure I was right.” Marc thought it prudent not to mention the acute embarrassment of the scene in Lambert’s room yesterday afternoon and the fragility of theories.

“And?”

“And I saw the murderous bruises on your neck.”

After a pause, she said, “I suppose his regiment will insist on giving Randolph a funeral with full military honours.”

Marc gave her a wee, ironic grin. “Why not? He died as a martyr for the people’s cause, did he not?”