Don Gutteridge - Turncoat

“Thank you for being so candid and forthcoming,” he said formally. “And good day to you.”

She left her fingers where they lay for a second or two after Marc released them, and she looked steadily at him, as if he were one of her father’s books that might possibly deserve reading.

“I intend to find out what happened to Joshua,” he said.

“I believe you will.”

He watched her until she had passed the barn and disappeared into the summer kitchen attached to the rear of the house. Then he turned to make his way to Hatch’s house, but a banging noise brought him up short. He stopped to listen. Somewhere a door was flapping freely in the light breeze. He checked the barn, then swung his attention to Elijah’s cabin near it. The old goat had left his door unlatched and, if the wind picked up even slightly, it would soon blow off its leather hinges. Reluctantly, for he did not wish the pleasant afterglow of the interview with Beth to be disturbed, Marc walked down towards the cabin.

He grasped the plank door by the knob, but before fastening it, he decided to have a look inside, in case the wretched fellow had fallen or taken ill. In the grainy light that illuminated the interior, Marc could just make out the unmade and unoccupied bed, an empty chair, and a makeshift desk cluttered with papers. Marc stepped back outside and peered around for any sign of Elijah. A movement up beyond the house caught his attention: someone was trundling across the road and into the woods on the far side, where the path led up to Squire Child’s estate-Elijah What’s-his-name scuttling, quick as a dog in heat, over to call upon his lady friend, Ruby Marsden.

Marc latched the door and turned to leave, then suddenly wrenched it open again and stepped boldly inside. He moved swiftly over to the desk and sat down on the rickety chair in front of it. The desk was a mass of jumbled newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides, speckled with ash and shards from cracked pipe bowls. For a man reputed to be illiterate, Elijah had chosen some unusual recreational materials. One by one Marc held these up to the dim light that fell through the window. On every item, passages had been underlined or crudely circled with charcoal. The subject of each marked passage was instantly clear: political statements, whether they were in the reports of the minutes of the House of Assembly, a manifesto in broadside or tract, or a hyperbolic claim in the capitalized line of a poster. And each of them bilious with the rhetoric of the left-the bombast of the radicals. Among this detritus lay a single leather-bound book, the Holy Bible.

Gently Marc opened it, and he peered at the fly-leaf. A name was scrawled there, faded but legible. The word “Elijah” was readily decipherable, but the letters of the last name were tangled and blurred. After some minutes, Marc deciphered them as: c — h — o — w — n.

Elijah Chown.

So, Elijah had secrets to keep. He was a furtive reader and a closet Reformer. Little wonder, then, that he had been so protective of the Smallmans. But why the secrecy? Beth herself did not know he could read-or else she had lied about it yesterday when she had implied that only she among the New Year’s guests was literate, a conclusion he now rejected out of hand. And what else might he have to hide? Somehow, Marc thought, he was going to have to find a way of interrogating the prickly old misanthrope. He needed to know much more about what was really going through the mind of Joshua Smallman in the weeks before his death. And he needed to hear it, unfortunately, from someone less partisan than his daughter-in-law.

At any rate, the hired hand would bear watching.

Just as Marc rounded the north silo and turned towards the miller’s barn, he heard a high-pitched squawk that rose to a terrified shriek, then stopped, as if an organ-pipe had been throttled with a vengeful thumb. Before he could even hazard a guess as to the tortured source of the sound, the elongated and fully engaged figure of Winnifred Hatch emerged from between the barn and the chicken coop. In the vise of her left hand, the silenced but thrashing body of a bulb-eyed, dusty-feathered capon struggled futilely against the inevitable. In her right hand, she clutched a hatchet. The miller’s daughter-garbed in sweater and skirt and an intimidating leather butcher’s apron-marched to a stump near Marc, one that had been set firmly in the ground for her purpose. She plopped the lolling head of the doomed creature upon it and brought the hatchet blade down with the zeal of a Vandal. Blood burst everywhere. Marc leapt back, then stared down at the crimson spatter on his boots and the gaudy petit point etched suddenly in the snow. As Winnifred jerked the decapitated fowl up by its feet to let the blood drip out, she noticed the spectator for the first time.

“Around here we do our own killing,” she said. Then she wheeled about and strode into the barn. At the base of the stump, the creature’s dead eye was wide open.

Marc scrubbed his boots in the snow and carried on. At the door to the back shed, he noted the probable cause of Winnifred’s scorn, if that’s what it was. Standing just inside, obscured by shadow, Mary Huggan was twisting a cotton hanky in her fingers and doing her best to hold back her tears.

“It’s all right now, Mary,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing tone. “You can go on over there. Beth’s expecting you.”

Mary sped away, carefully skirting the blood-drenched path beside the coop.

After a midday meal of cheese, cold ham, and bread, Marc and Erastus Hatch walked down to the barn, where Hatch asked Thomas Goodall to saddle their horses. They continued on to the mill and sat smoking in the tiny office the miller kept there, more as a sanctuary than a place of business.

“I could go out there on my own,” Marc said.

“I’m sure you could, son. But this ain’t England, you know. That tunic of yours is more likely to raise the bull’s hackles than to instill fear, or even generate a modicum of respect.” He was chuckling but nonetheless serious.

“I do know that,” Marc said. A mere eight months in the colony had taught him to disregard the graces and rules of the society he had been raised in. In Great Britain there were dozens of offences for which a man who forgot his place in the unchangeable scheme of things might be hanged-and frequently was. Here in Upper Canada, you had to murder a man in front of ten unimpeachable witnesses before the scaffold was brought into play. And dressing down an insubordinate or an offending citizen was just as likely to get you a string of retaliatory oaths as a cap-tugging apology. Even women who professed to be ladies smoked pipes in public and were known to utter a curse or two when provoked. It was only at Government House and at the few mixed gatherings of the officers’ mess that his scarlet tunic and brass set tender hearts aflutter or elicited respect amongst the enlisted men and servants. That he had been the son of a gamekeeper was neither here nor there, especially if no one were ever to find out.

“I’ll just ride on out ahead of you,” Hatch said, “and let Wicks and Hislop know you’re coming, and why. Then I’ll leave you to them.”

“That’s extremely kind of you.”

“Still, even if they accept you as an advance man for the quartermaster, I don’t quite see how you’re likely to bring the conversation around to a death almost everybody in the township believes to be an accident.”

“I don’t rightly know myself,” Marc said. “But I think I’ve learned enough to improvise something. It shouldn’t be hard to start a discussion of Joshua’s accident: there’s certain to have been lots of gossip and speculation about it. All I need is a cue to ask whether or not these people ever knew or met him. I might suggest that I knew him a bit back in Toronto. None of these men will know precisely when I came here or how long I’ve been in the garrison at Fort York.”