Don Gutteridge - Turncoat

“Well, all I know is a person shouldn’t spend all their days doing good deeds.”

“Like taking care of them who can’t help themselves?” She paused, then shot him a telling look.

When she pulled Marc’s coattails down, it was with a brusque, dismissive gesture: he felt the steel in her touch, the merest hint of contempt.

“She’ll never find a husband,” Hatch had said as soon as they’d left the house. “God knows there’ve been many who’ve tried.”

“I’m surprised,” Marc said graciously. “Your daughter is a handsome and … efficient young woman.”

Hatch glanced warily, hopefully, at Marc. “That she is,” he said.

That hers was also a cold beauty did not need to be uttered.

“You’d be alone, would you not, if she were to marry?” Marc said, probing gently.

“I’m afraid that’s how she looks at the matter.” Hatch sighed. “But then, I’ve been alone since Isobel died.”

Philander Child was an englishman who had arrived in Upper Canada as a youth of eighteen, and in his subsequent thirty years in the colony had not permitted a whit of his God-given Englishness to be weathered away. His prosperity was evident in the layers and folds of his corpulence, and though he had grown fat upon the land, his mind had not forgone its lean and hungry motive. Having reaped a modest but irritatingly slow profit from farming (more accurately, from instructing others how to farm for him), he had turned to the law. The reliable flow of conveyancing fees bestowed by grateful associates and confederates of the ruling clique and the magic of compound interest had made him rich. Finally, appointment to the Legislative Council by the former lieutenant-governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, yeoman’s service to the fledgling Bank of Upper Canada, and eventual retirement to Deer Park as magistrate for Northumberland County and superintendent of its quarter sessions had secured him a well-earned and affluent old age.

This much Marc had concluded by the time the ceremonial cigars had been smoked, the first snifter of brandy consumed, and the blaze in the magnificent fieldstone fireplace had died down to a warm, conspiratorial glow. Coggins, the footman-cum-butler, poured each of the guests a second glass from a crystal decanter, bowed in the direction of a portrait of Squire Child in his hungrier days, and discreetly left the room.

“So, young man, Sir John was not entirely impressed with my report of the inquest into dear Joshua’s death?” Child said, still en rôle as the affable jurist, the epitome of good breeding, exemplary manners, and moral probity. And not, Marc thought, unlike his guardian Uncle Jabez, or their more illustrious neighbour in Kent, Sir Joseph Trelawney of Hartfield Downs.

“He asked me merely to double-check the evidence,” Marc said diplomatically. “Smallman was a man he knew well and admired much.”

“Certainly, certainly,” Child said. “A gentleman could do no less, and Sir John Colborne is every inch a gentleman.”

“Sir John intends to leave you here in the province, then?” asked Major Barnaby, retired army surgeon, who had sawed the limbs off many a brave man on the killing grounds of the Spanish Peninsula. His Scots burr was a faint echo of the speech he had heard but little since leaving home at age eleven. His big-boned ruggedness was somewhat offset by deep-browed eyes that twinkled with humour yet gave away little of the thought and feeling stored up behind them.

“Like most young men,” Marc said, “I joined the military to fight under the Union Jack.”

“So you think there will be insurrection in Quebec,” Child said, catching Marc’s unhappiness at Barnaby’s assumption.

“I have been led to believe so.”

“And what is your assessment of the situation in this province?” Child asked Marc, opening a silver snuffbox.

“I don’t really know, sir. I’m just a junior officer.”

“Surely in the seven or eight months you’ve been here-in the confidence of Sir John himself, Hatch tells me-you’ve formed some opinion of the hurly-burly of our politics?”

“I was hoping to learn more about that this evening,” Marc said, waving off the offer of snuff.

“It looks as though Sir John thinks there may be a political motive behind Joshua’s … death,” Hatch said helpfully.

Child smiled indulgently at Marc. “All three of us were there,” he said. “No one preceded us. Charles examined the body carefully, on the scene and back in his surgery.”

“Died of a massive skull fracture,” Barnaby said. “Knocked insensible, but could’ve lingered for some while, alas. Rigor had just passed off, delayed by the cold. My best guess is he died sometime between nine and midnight.”

“Which jibes with Beth’s account,” Hatch said, looking at Marc.

“There were no other injuries, no torn clothing, and no note or paper was found among his effects,” Child said.

“And with no witness to corroborate Mrs. Smallman’s suspicion that he had received a message sometime after seven o’clock, and no sign around the scene itself of any other disturbance or presence, we had no other choice than to make the finding we did.” The magistrate spoke without the least note of defensiveness. His was the kind of dispassion Marc had come to respect among the barristers and judges of the Old Bailey, whose precincts he had haunted as a twenty-year-old articling clerk playing truant from his firm of lowly London solicitors.

“However,” Barnaby said in his more humoured, laconic style, “Durfee here informs me you have a detail or two to add to our investigation.”

James Durfee, who had followed the dialogue closely with an encouraging nod from time to time (while managing to devote a good deal of attention to his brandy and cigar), smiled sagely.

“Erastus gave me a quick account of your trip out there yesterday afternoon,” Child said, “but we’d all appreciate hearing you yourself describe it for us.”

Marc could detect nothing but curiosity in the faces of the four men whose attention was now fully focused upon him. He sensed that the next few minutes were critical to any success he might have in his mission. Without the wholehearted co-operation of these influential figures, he had no hope of proceeding one step farther. Moreover, to complicate matters, Sir John would not condone any unnecessary ruffling of feathers among the friends of the government. Why, then, had he-novice and interloper-been chosen? Suppressing any inadequacies he might feel, Marc plunged ahead. As he related the events in the exact sequence in which they had occurred, Marc found the energy he’d experienced the previous day returning, and with it the confidence-conviction even-he had felt in winning Hatch over to his theories.

“And so you see, gentlemen, one is compelled to face the incredible coincidence of two men being in that peculiar vicinity on discrete errands, along with the cogent question of why a respectable gentleman like Joshua Smallman would, on a whim as it were, ride out there in a snowstorm while the New Year’s Eve party he was hosting was about to start.”

For a full minute no one spoke.

It was Barnaby who broke the silence. “Well, in the least you’ve added to the number of questions we haven’t been able to answer,” he said dryly.

“Ensign Edwards thinks that we must try to discover the motive for any possible foul play, and work backwards from there,” Hatch said.

Durfee turned a concerned and pained face to Marc. “We four have spent a good deal of the past two weeks going over and over that question in our minds. Joshua was a generous, likeable man. He had no enemies. He was a loyalist more than he was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative like us. I’ve heard many a professed Reformer in my pub speak respectfully of him when they would rather have cursed him for his views.”