Don Gutteridge - Dubious Allegiance

“I had lots of opportunities, but I didn’t take them up.”

They walked side by side in silence across Bay Street, nearing Yonge. The streets ahead were rapidly filling with people, on foot, in sleds, and mounted, all funnelling into King and surging eastward towards the Court House. Marc and Cobb passed Beth’s shop.

“Don’t worry, Major. She’ll be here.”

“I know.”

“The stage from Hamilton’s not in yet.”

On the other side of Yonge they were slowed by the crowds ahead of them. The boardwalks on either side were overflowing, and all the traffic on the road itself had ground to a halt in a tangle of horses, cutters, toboggans, and impatient sightseers.

“So, are ya really thinkin’ of gettin’ outta the army business?” Cobb enquired, nudging his way forward with the tip of his truncheon.

“I have been thinking of little else lately.”

“But what in the world would ya do?”

Marc smiled. “Why would I have to do anything? I’ve got a thousand a year for life from Uncle Jabez. I could simply be an English gentleman abroad.”

Cobb snorted and said, “It’s too late fer that now.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“You been mixin’ too long with the locals. It takes some of the shine off yer softa-fi-cation. ”

“You may be right.”

There was a shout somewhere in the crowd ahead of them.

“I could always go back to lawyering.”

“Shufflin’ paper and coun-soling widows and orphans all day? I can’t see it.”

“Neither can I. But I might try for the Bar. Don’t you think I’d look smart in a periwig and gown?”

“Well, you could talk the plaster off the walls, that’s fer sure.”

They were having to step off the boardwalk and onto the ice-runnelled street itself to make any progress, while dodging hooves and errant horsewhips. An even louder roar shook the morning air, part cheer and part dismay.

“A hurrah fer My-dame Gullet-keen, ” Cobb said with disgust.

“I never imagined it would be like this.”

They found a quiet space in the doorway of the chemist’s shop.

“You could always help Beth run the hattery.”

Marc smiled as best he could, knowing that this curious, curmudgeonly man, who had against all odds become his friend, was attempting to keep him distracted from the grim events about to unfold a few hundred yards from where they stood.

“I’m afraid politics have ruined our chances there.”

“It’s ruined pretty near everythin’.”

A drum-roll rippled and shuddered up by the jail: the troops arriving.

“You could always try bein’ a policeman,” Cobb suggested.

“I haven’t got the stomach for it.”

Cobb glanced down at the wheel of flesh that circumnavigated his middle and was kept sturdy by a steady feeding of warm beer and pub-grub. “I can’t see you bustin’ heads and manhandlin’ drunks, but Sarge tells me over in England the bobbies hire a body they call an investigator to come in and help them find a murderer. And that’s all he does. If he catches the culprit, he gets ten pounds or so. If he don’t, he hasta go home and live off the a-veils. ”

“At that fee there would have to be a lot of murders and he’d have to solve most of them just to keep bread on the table and his kiddies in shoes.”

Cobb feigned surprise: “But I heard you English are a particularly murdersome people.”

“I’m going to try to get closer,” Marc said, edging back out into the surging throng.

“I’ll see ya later, then, Major.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Over to the station, if I can get that far. There’s a felon in our cell I’d like to purr-sway inta confessin’ his sins.”

The Cobbs had told Marc about the trial of Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews. Both men had been lieutenants in Mackenzie’s rebel “army,” and had conducted themselves during the two encounters on Yonge Street in December with courage and dedication. Neither denied his involvement. Neither recanted his actions nor forsook the cause they had willingly taken up. Attempts were made to have the prisoners, particularly Lount, incriminate their fellow rebels in return for leniency. Each refused, and was sentenced to hang as the first and foremost example of the fate awaiting all traitors in Upper Canada. The Tories, by and large, cheered. However, moderate Reformers like Robert Baldwin and Francis Hincks, who had stood aloof from actual insurrection, now stepped forward to plead for clemency. A petition with eight thousand names on it was presented to the new lieutenant-governor, Sir George Arthur. But like his predecessor, Arthur had already succumbed to the vengeful demands of the Family Compact, despite the fact that Lord Glenelg, the colonial secretary in London, had been advocating a policy of conciliation and tolerance for almost three years. On a more personal note, Matthews and Lount, if hanged, would between them leave a total of twenty-two destitute children. All such pleas, however, were obdurately rejected.

At six feet, Marc was tall enough to see over the heads of the two hundred or so people who had come out to witness the hangings. He stood on the south-side boardwalk of King Street and looked north across the road and over the public square in front of the adjacent Court House and jail. A pair of gallows had been erected in the space between the two buildings, and the grisly procedure had already begun.

It turned out that Cobb had been wrong. This was not the French peasantry gathered here and baying for blood. The shout Marc had heard had apparently been a supportive cheer at the first appearance of the rebel-martyrs, tempered by dismay at the sight of them bound and stepping forthrightly towards the gallows. The second roar-of universal disapprobation-had been directed at the arrival of a squad of regulars and three mounted officers. But there was no need for a troop of soldiers to keep the crowd from disrupting the awful ceremony. Those gathered in the square had now become eerily silent, as if the reality of what they were about to witness had struck home all at once.

Each of the condemned men was accompanied by a clergyman. The hangman appeared without warning behind one of the gallows and mounted the platform linking them. The crowd began to murmur morosely, but Lount held up his hand as if to say It’s not the hangman who’s to blame, and the murmuring ceased. The prayers of the clergymen were audible as Sheriff Jarvis, with tears streaming down his face, led the prisoners up to their respective gibbets and to the nooses swaying patiently in the breeze. Matthews and Lount knelt over the trap, praying, as the hangman slipped the rope about their necks.

Beth’s gloveless hand eased into Marc’s. Without taking his eyes off the scene before him, he gave it a welcoming squeeze. He felt her head wisp against his shoulder.

“You’re not in uniform,” she said.

“No, I am not.”

She curled his fingers lovingly in hers “It’s time to go,” she said. “We’ve had enough of sadness.”

Still holding hands, they turned sedately and began walking away from the despair of the Court House square. They walked slowly down Church Street, as the Lord’s Prayer drifted away behind them, growing fainter and fainter. They crossed Market Street, bereft of people, just as the communal groan and the snap of the trap and the plunging rope sickened the air and the innocent morning. A tiny shudder disturbed the linking of the lovers’ hands, but they carried on to Front Street, where the snows had blurred the borders of land and lake, so that they scarcely heard the second cry of bereavement, the anguish consequent upon the doing of what can never be undone. Still, the lovers walked westward along the shoreline, letting the slate-and-stone edifice of the city slide away unregretted. Past the bulwark of the provincial bank, past the contentious benches of Parliament, past the last outpost of civility.