Don Gutteridge - Death of a Patriot

The young woman-she could not have been more than eighteen-had the blondest hair Marc had ever seen, and her skin was so white as to be almost transparent. But when she turned to face the visitors and present them to the profane voice in the chair, her eyes, blue as cornflower steeped in sunlight, indicated that she was not albino. Her dress was little more than a cotton shift and clung to her woman’s silhouette like wet silk. She wore no stays or corsets. And her beauty left Marc momentarily stunned and unaccountably distressed.

“I apologize for shouting, my dear. Now would you be kind enough to rustle up some coffee and edibles for our guests?” Even when it was not shouting, the voice-its progenitor still hidden behind the wing of the chair and its angled back-literally boomed, delivering its message with a tragedian’s trajectory.

“Yes, Uncle,” the girl said, and fled.

“Come in, gentlemen. We mustn’t keep the government from doing its business, eh?”

Robert was glancing about in search of a place for his hat and coat.

“Jesus, throw the goddamn thing on that stool over there and park your arse on that chair. I haven’t got all day to waste on William Baldwin’s best boy. I’ve got a nap to take!”

Doubtful Dick Dougherty was holding forth on the woeful inadequacies of the courts, the justices, and the Upper Canadian legal system in general, as if Marc and Robert were a two-man jury unsympathetic to the prosecution’s case. It is doubtful, however, whether either was much affected by his grandiloquence. They were still in shock and staring. Richard Dougherty had been born large and imposing, with a lumberjack’s bones and a wrestler’s physique, and had apparently set about, as one of his life’s tasks, to enlarge it. His black bottle-brush brows leapt straight out, their impertinence exaggerated by the contrast of his bald and gleaming pate. His ears, tufted and crenellated, flapped like a rooster’s wings in unsuccessful flight. His nose was gargantuan, fleshy and sagging, except for a pugnacious upturn at its very tip. His lips were protuberant and sensuous, made more so by their being set below a pair of bloated, rubicund cheeks and above an endless ripple of pale, pink chins. The latter did not so much hang as ooze over his collar, inundating it and the cravat beneath it.

A plaid, food-stained waistcoat had attempted to contain the mountainous chest and belly and given up. Its extruded buttons lay dangling on errant thread, and hairy yolks of flesh pressed up and through, as if seeking air. The trousers, agape where they shouldn’t be, were supported not by his suspenders (one of which, cast adrift, dribbled forlornly down a leg) but by a kimono sash knotted at the left hip. In fact, the only thing diminutive about Counsellor Dougherty were his eyes, just visible deep in their pouches of flesh: tiny, green, piggish, and as tough as a pair of withered black-eyed peas.

“Contrary to the views of the hoi polloi, the American experiment was not launched over the tawdry business of tea and import duties and rep by pop. No, gentlemen, our magnificent Constitution was a direct and necessary response to the inescapable corruptions that follow upon the executive appointment of judges to posts they can only be persuaded to vacate upon death and, even then, reluctantly.” At this witticism, he paused to flick the ashes of his cigar upon the only unblemished spot on his waistcoat and laughed-something between a chuckle and a whinny.

Neither Marc nor Robert seized the opportunity to stem the monologue’s tide, for they were still trying to take in the fascinating anomalies of the émigré’s household. On three sides of Dougherty’s chair, as far as his reach or whim would permit, was the same dissolute disorder that characterized his person and clothing. Scattered about within this self-imposed perimeter were dozens of books, tossed on their backs, pages aflutter, ripped apart where they had struck stone or iron, scorched by the adjacent fire, thumbed, and bookmarked. Helter-skelter among them were cigar butts, coils of pipe ash, mouldy bread crusts, rotting apple cores, a broken wine goblet, and several discarded (and overused) handkerchiefs. However, beyond this personally supervised hemisphere of chaos, the room was as neat as a royal chamber. The chairs on which the guests sat opposite their host were clean and comfortable. Oriental throw rugs and polished tables, a sideboard with gleaming crystal decanters, framed portraits and certificates on the walls, and dust-free china figurines on the mantel-all suggested a tidy and industrious hand at work. Celia’s, most likely.

As if privy to Marc’s thoughts, the young woman appeared with a tray. While Dougherty followed her every move with a darting eye, Celia-unaccustomed, it seemed, to the protocol of distinguished callers-managed to pour their coffee with a minimum of spillage and only a single, prolonged blush. She did not offer her uncle any; he flicked a finger and sent her scurrying to stir the fire, which had begun to flag. As she bent over to do so, the flimsy shift rode up upon her calves, and just before Marc succeeded in averting his eyes, he was certain he caught Dougherty leering at her. When he looked back, Celia had taken a white cloth out of the pocket of her dress and was wiping the sweat from her uncle’s forehead and hairless dome with slow, tender strokes.

“Be sure and tell Brodie to say good-bye before he goes off, will you?” Dougherty said to her.

“Yes, Uncle. You know he always does,” she said, and left.

“Miss Langford and her brother are not my niece and nephew,” he said to his guests. “They’re the children of my late, lamented law partner. As they had no one else, I brought them with me.”

Robert cleared his throat. “I’m sure you suspect that we have not come here today to pay you a belated social call or exchange views on constitutional practice, as edifying as that would no doubt prove.”

Dougherty may have smiled, but it was hard to be sure because his lips were continuously in motion, as if they were forever about to formulate a phrase or were just finishing one, while his eyes were correspondingly still, sequestered in flesh, and watchful. “I would say the question has already moved beyond suspicion,” he said. “My bones tell me not only that it is close to nap time, but that you gentlemen are here to discuss the sham legal proceedings concocted by Sir George and shamelessly agreed to by your ‘independent’ judiciary.”

Robert blinked but did not falter. “My father and I are concerned that Caleb Coltrane get a fair trial.”

Marc was wondering how Dougherty, who had not been espied in the open air since his arrival two years before, knew so much about the local scene, particularly as he saw no sign of discarded newspapers among the detritus.

“That’s noble of you, Mr. Baldwin, but a fair trial implies an impartially empanelled jury, a disinterested judge, and appropriate legal counsel.”

“I am here, sir, to guarantee the first two.”

This time Dougherty was genuinely amused. He gave out with his horse laugh, initiating a rippling of chins and a spray of spittle. “And you’d like me to guarantee the third?”

“Can you think of anyone more qualified?” Robert said. “And partial to the accused and his cause?”

“The latter point is, as you ought to know, irrelevant. As barristers, we are sworn to pursue the law, not causes or clients with causes, however laudable.”

“But you must see, sir,” Marc said, “that a court-appointed and, shall we say, less than enthusiastic local attorney would not only be detrimental to Coltrane’s defense but would be perceived as-”

“-a typical British ploy to guarantee the wretch’s conviction?”

“Something like that.”