Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace

Twelve - Solomon’s Temple

Chapter 45

The law offices of Bradley, Porter, and MacKenzie are located in a new and somewhat pretentious red-brick building on King Street West. In the outer office a lank youth with colourless hair sits at a high desk, scrabbling with a steel-nibbed pen. When Simon enters he jumps up, scattering inkdrops like a dog shaking itself.

“Mr. MacKenzie is expecting you, Sir,” he says. He places a reverent parenthesis around the word MacKenzie. How young he is, thinks Simon; this must be his first position. He ushers Simon along a carpeted passageway, and knocks at a thick oak door.

Kenneth MacKenzie is in his inner sanctuary. He’s framed himself with polished bookshelves, expensively bound professional volumes, three paintings of racehorses. On his desk is an inkstand of Byzantine convolution and splendour. He himself isn’t quite what Simon has been expecting: no heroic delivering Perseus, no Red Cross Knight. He’s a short, pear-shaped man — narrow shoulders, a comfortable little belly swelling under his tartan vest — with a pocked and tuberous nose, and, behind his silver spectacles, two small but observant eyes. He rises from his chair, hand outstretched, smiling; he has two long front teeth like a beaver’s. Simon tries to imagine what he must have looked like, sixteen years ago, when he was a young man — younger than Simon is now — but fails in the attempt. Kenneth MacKenzie must have looked middle-aged even as a five-year-old.

This is the man, then, who once saved the life of Grace Marks, against considerable odds — cold evidence, outraged public opinion, and her own confused and implausible testimony. Simon is curious to find out exactly how he managed it.

“Dr. Jordan. A pleasure.”

“It is kind of you to spare me the time,” says Simon.

“Not at all. I have Reverend Verringer’s letter; he speaks very highly of you, and has told me something of your proceedings. I am glad to be of help in the interests of science; and as you have heard, I am sure, we lawyers always welcome a chance to show off. But before we get down to it —” A decanter is produced, cigars. The sherry is excellent: Mr. MacKenzie does himself well.

“You are no relation to the famous rebel?” Simon asks, by way of beginning.

“None at all, though I would almost rather claim kin than not; it isn’t the disadvantage now that it once was, and the old boy has long since been pardoned, and is seen as the father of reforms. But feeling ran high against him in those days; that alone could have put a noose around Grace Marks’ neck.”

“How so?” says Simon.

“If you’ve read back over the newspapers, you’ll have noticed that those which supported Mr. Mackenzie and his cause were the only ones to say a good word for Grace. The others were all for hanging her, and William Lyon Mackenzie as well, and anyone else thought to harbour republican sentiments.”

“But surely there was no connection!”

“None whatsoever. There is never any need for a connection, in such matters. Mr. Kinnear was a Tory gentleman, and William Lyon Mackenzie took the part of the poor Scots and Irish, and the emigrant settlers generally. Birds of a feather, was what they thought. I sweated blood at the trial, I can tell you. It was my first case, you know, my very first; I’d just been called to the bar. I knew it would be the making or the breaking of me, and, as things turned out, it did give me quite a leg up.”

“How did you come to take the case?” asks Simon.

“My dear man, I was handed it. It was a hot potato. No one else wanted it. The firm took it pro bono

— neither of the accused had any money, of course — and as I was the youngest, it ended up with me; and at the last minute, too, with scarcely a month to prepare. ”Well, my lad,“ said old Bradley, ”here it is. Everyone knows you’ll lose, because there’s no doubt as to their guilt; but it will be the style in which you lose that will count. There is graceless losing, and there is elegant losing. Let us see you lose as elegantly as possible. We will all be cheering you on.“ The old boy thought he was doing me a favour, and perhaps he was, at that.”

“You acted for both of them, I believe,” says Simon.

“Yes. That was wrong, in retrospect, as their interests proved to be in conflict. There were a lot of things about the trial that were wrong; but the practice of jurisprudence was much laxer then.” MacKenzie frowns at his cigar, which has gone out. It strikes Simon that the poor fellow doesn’t really enjoy smoking, but feels he ought to do it because it goes with the racehorse pictures.

“So you’ve met Our Lady of the Silences?” MacKenzie asks.

“Is that what you call her? Yes; I’ve been spending a good deal of time with her, trying to determine…”

“Whether she is innocent?”

“Whether she is insane. Or was, at the time of the murders. Which I suppose would be innocence of a kind.”

“Good luck to you,” says MacKenzie. “It was a thing I could never be satisfied about, myself.”

“She purports to have no memory of the murders; or at least of the Montgomery woman’s.”

“My dear man,” says MacKenzie, “you’d be amazed how common such lapses of memory are, amongst the criminal element. Very few of them can remember having done anything wrong at all. They will bash a man half to death, and cut him to ribbons, and then claim they only gave him a little tap with the end of a bottle. Forgetting, in such cases, is a good deal more convenient than remembering.”

“Grace’s amnesia seems genuine enough,” says Simon, “or so I have come to believe, in the light of my previous clinical experience. On the other hand, although she can’t seem to remember the murder, she has a minute recollection of the details surrounding it — every item of laundry she ever washed, for instance; and such things as the boat race that preceded her own flight across the Lake. She even remembers the names of the boats.”

“How did you check her facts? In the newspapers, I suppose,” says MacKenzie. “Has it occurred to you that she may have derived her corroborative details from the same source? Criminals will read about themselves endlessly, if given the chance. They are as vain in that way as authors. When McDermott asserted that Grace helped him in his strangling escapade, he may very well have got the idea from the Kingston Chronicle and Gazette, which proposed it as fact, even before there was an inquest. The knot around the dead woman’s neck, they said, obviously required two persons to tie it. A piece of rubbish; you can’t tell from such a knot whether it was tied by one person or two, or twenty, for that matter. Of course I made hash of this notion at the trial.”

“Now you have turned around, and are pleading the other side of the case,” says Simon.

“One must always keep both sides in one’s head; it’s the only way to anticipate the moves of one’s opponent. Not that mine had a very hard job of work, in this case. But I did what I could; a man can but do his best, as Walter Scott has remarked somewhere. The courtroom was crowded as Hell, and —

despite the November weather — just as hot, and the air was foul. Nevertheless, I cross-examined some of the witnesses for over three hours. I must say it took stamina; but I was a younger man then.”

“You began by disallowing the arrest itself, as I recall.”

“Yes. Well, Marks and McDermott were seized on American soil, and without a warrant. I made a fine speech about the violation of international frontiers, and habeas corpus and the like; but Chief Justice Robinson was having none of it.

“I then attempted to show that Mr. Kinnear was something of a black sheep, and lax in his morals; which was undoubtedly true. He was a hypochondriac as well. Neither of these things had much to do with the fact that he’d been murdered, but I did my utmost, especially with the morals; and it’s a fact that those four people kept popping in and out of one another’s beds like a French farce, so that it was hard to keep it straight who was sleeping where.