Bloody Relations (2 page)

A
few hours later, in the household of Mr. and Mrs. Marcus Edwards, Charlene Huggan, the maid and all-purpose servant, was giggling so heartily she could barely remove the last of the pins from the hem of her mistress's gown without damage to herself or the lady in question.

“If you don't stop teasing the girl, we won't get to Spadina before midnight, at which time—according to the brothers Grimm—we all turn into pumpkins.” Marc did not seem displeased that both women turned at this witticism to notice how resplendent he looked in his top hat and tails. He did half a pirouette, just in case.

Beth fixed him with that blue-eyed stare of hers. “Am I Cinderella or one of the ugly stepsisters?”

Charlene giggled again, and spat pins in several directions.

“With that look, you could pass for the heartless stepmother.”

“Don't she do the dress proud, sir?” Charlene stood back and gave Beth and her ball gown a worshipful scrutiny. “And missus thinkin' she couldn't put herself beside any of them ladies up at Spadina!”

“The only genuine lady up there will be Lord Durham's wife, who was born a lady and whose father was prime minister of the
United Kingdom.” Marc leaned back and surveyed Beth like a tailor approving a perfect seam. “The rest of them, Charlene—and you mustn't ever forget this—are just ordinary women dressed up as titled ladies and hoping to pass as such. And their husbands likewise.”

“As ladies?” Charlene's eyes danced impishly and she gave Beth a conspiratorial glance.

“As pretend
gentlemen
,” Marc said patiently. “And Mrs. Edwards, as usual, will be herself in that company and, for all that, will be thought a true lady.”

“Why don't you try flatterin' me?” Beth asked with a cautious peek in the mirror that Charlene had set against the nearest wall.

“If I didn't know better, darling, I'd accuse you of carelessly droppin' yer
g
's.”

Charlene, who could have stood and listened to this conjugal banter all evening, was rudely brought back to her duty by the sound of a carriage drawing up outside the house. “It's here!” she cried, and raced to the window.

Marc went over to Beth and placed a woollen shawl across her bare shoulders. “I'm glad you decided to come after all,” he said with sudden seriousness.

“So am I,” she said. “I know how much it means to you to meet Lord Durham.”

“I truly believe he is the only person in Christendom who can save this dominion and begin to salve the wounds that have been inflicted.”

“Even though he's a Whig,” Beth said, smiling.

Marc smiled back. “I've come a long way, haven't I?”

Beth squeezed his arm, and they walked briskly towards the hired gig outside their front gate. Only Beth noticed that as her husband moved like the born gentleman he was to the waiting
vehicle, there was still a perceptible limp in the left leg—a memento of the personal injury he had suffered in the civil turmoil of the past nine months.

When the invitation to the ball at Spadina had arrived five days before (Durham's advance men had been busy orchestrating his tour through the Upper Province), Beth had simply refused to take it seriously. “It has to be a mistake,” she informed Marc when he got back home from his afternoon walk. “We don't hobnob with the Family Compact—or any other compact.” Marc noted that their surname had been spelled correctly and the messenger from Government House knew perfectly well where Sherbourne Street was. Indeed, most of the town knew exactly where the “hero of St. Denis” had taken up residence with his bride in the middle of May, even though he no longer graced the thoroughfares of the capital in his officer's uniform with its glittering sabre and the green-feathered shako of the 23rd Regiment of Foot. “Invalided out” was the story in circulation, despite Marc's futile attempts to scotch it: he had bought out his commission as a gentleman was obliged to do and had abandoned his military career without regret and with good reason, in his view. Soon after, he and Beth had purchased the substantial stone cottage on Sherbourne Street, near the outskirts of the town proper, complete with barn and extensive garden.

Marc's assumption that the invitation was the work of Colonel Margison, the kindly commanding officer who had attended Marc and Beth's wedding in full regalia, was borne out the following day. But Beth's initial no was as unshakeable as it was succinct. Marc gently reminded her that she would not be alone or unbefriended at the gala. Major Owen Jenkin, their best man and faithful ally, would be in attendance alongside the colonel and several other officers whom she had met at the wedding breakfast
and taken up willingly as dancing partners afterwards. Among the local ladies there would be perhaps a dozen whom she knew from her days as co-proprietress of the millinery shop on King Street, an enterprise Beth and her aunt Catherine had expanded to include dressmaking, utilizing the designs and sewing talent of Mrs. Rose Halpenny. Alas, the Rebellion and its fallout had caused its closure, and Aunt Catherine had returned to her native United States.

“I'll wager that a third of the gowns up there will be products of your own enterprise,” Marc had declared, a tad too effusively.

“And I'm sure the good ladies of Torytown will be happy to see their dressmaker do-si-doing with their hubbies,” Beth had shot back, silencing him.

A day later he tried another tack. After luncheon with Major Jenkin at the mess in Fort York (his first trip back since his discharge), Marc informed Beth that the principal reason for the colonel's encouraging Marc's attendance at the ball was to have him meet and, with luck, talk to Lord Durham.

“What in ever for?” was Beth's disingenuous response.

Marc plunged ahead. “Lord Durham is in Toronto for four days only. Colonel Margison feels that he should meet a broadly representative group of citizens and be exposed to a wide spectrum of opinion. In fact, the governor himself has asked that this be so. The colonel has put forward my name as someone to be consulted, and feels that if Lord Durham has an opportunity to meet me, even informally at the gala, he might decide to include me in his official consultations.”

“I don't suppose yer ‘wide spectrum' includes citizens who drop their
g
's or who aren't the right sex to vote.”

“This is serious business,” Marc said, miffed.

“Don't pout; I know it is. And I know you've got a lot more
sense to talk than most of those Tories with half a brain and twice the prejudice. So go on up there by yourself. Talk sense. You don't need a dancing partner to distract you.”

Marc knew when he was defeated and when to keep his counsel. To his surprise, though, that night as they were getting into bed, Beth announced quietly that she would go. They both knew the real reason behind her initial reluctance, and thus he appreciated the courage her acceptance entailed. Beth was as bright and politically astute as any gentleman likely to be found fawning over Lord Durham. She had operated a farm in the rural districts where the folly of government policies were keenly felt, then helped to found a successful business in the heart of Toronto's commercial district. Marc could not help appreciating too that she was more naturally beautiful than any of the overdressed and cosmetically improved chatelaines of the town, their native accents no less flat-vowelled or uninflected than her own. But she was most comfortable in her own home and especially in her garden, where she had spent her days since late May preparing the neglected soil and planting spring vegetables. In the house she worked alongside Charlene, whom she thought of more as a favoured niece than a servant. She had no desire to mix with her so-called betters, abashed by the notion that she might be mistaken for one of them.

Marc had tried in vain to persuade her that this attitude was an inverted form of snobbishness and that if only she were to meet and get to know some of these women, she might change her mind. “I met most of them in my hat shop,” she'd reply, and no elaboration was deemed necessary. Marc also realized, but was too tactful to say, that Beth missed her brother and her neighbours, including the other Huggan sisters, from her days on the farm at Crawford's Corners. All of them were now homesteading in the
Iowa Territory, victims of the recent upheavals. She missed too the easygoing, unpretentious women of the Congregational church in Cobourg. As a compromise, but with scant conviction, they both now attended St. James on most Sundays.

So, improbably but happily, Beth and Marc found themselves speeding along King Street in the July gloaming, en route to the splendours of Spadina House. Once Beth made up her mind that something had to be done, she accepted it with grace and executed it with a will. If her husband required a pretty wife to decorate his arm and send the hearts of hopeful dancing partners aflutter, then so be it. She would smile and chatter as lightly as could be expected in such frivolous circumstances and dance the midnight down. After all, the cause was critical. And it was partly her own.

•  •  •

CONSTABLE HORATIO COBB WAS IN A
vile mood. And the fact that he had been put in such an uncharacteristic funk—being by his own admission a man of cherubic good cheer—had made him even more irritated at the world in general and at Constable Ewan Wilkie in particular. Wilkie had been inconsiderate enough to take to his bed on the one day in the year when every officer of the Crown, from pig warden to assistant sheriff, and every soldier and resuscitated militiaman had been pressed into service to protect and otherwise coddle the newly arrived earl of Durham. Cobb had spent the morning being elbowed and cursed by the citizens' mob down at the Queen's Wharf, frantic in their efforts to catch a glimpse of His Lordship's haughty chin. Cobb's capture of two pickpockets and a cutpurse had earned him a bruise on the left cheek and not a lick of thanks. After a mandated two-hour afternoon nap, the four regular constables and their chief were expected to return to their street patrols and remain there with utmost vigilance until the last carriage or ambulatory
gentleman-drunks had found their way safely home from the governor's gala at Spadina House. That is, unmolested by any thieves, rabble-rousers, or garlic-breathing gawkers who might be tempted to take advantage of the hubbub and inadvertence excited by the earl's hospitality. As for Cobb and his fellow constables, it guaranteed them a long, foot-wearying night.

Cobb's regular patrol was the southeast sector, below King and east of Bay as far as the city limits beyond Parliament Street to the Don River. It was an area he knew well, having superintended it for the three years he had been a member of the newly formed Toronto constabulary. It included his own home and half a dozen congenial watering holes that supplied him with a steady flow of useful information from a cadre of thirsty snitches, along with the odd meat pie
avec
flagon. He knew every alley and service lane where a miscreant might hide or contemplate ambush. If a window curtain were out of place or a shop door abnormally ajar, he would spot it in a wink and spring into fearsome action. This in spite of his unspring-like shape, which placed a bit too much rotundity just above the centre of gravity. Like his fellow patrolmen, he had learned to navigate in the dark or the shadowy near-dark—there were feeble candle-lamps only along King Street for a few blocks—preferring to deploy his keen sense of hearing rather than use the cumbersome lantern recommended by the chief. What did one do with it when the right hand reached for the trusty, wooden truncheon: hold it up to give the thug a clearer target?

But Cobb was not on Cobbian ground this evening, thanks to the perfidy of Wilkie. It was not that he had not covered for Wilkie before or that this area of town was totally unfamiliar. But given that the bigwigs' ball was being held at Dr. Baldwin's extravagance way out on the northwest edge of the city, Cobb's own southeast patrol would have been as peaceful as a teetotaller's
picnic. So peaceful in fact that when Wilkie's wife reported him sick at suppertime (he'd somehow managed to force down a roast-beef dinner before collapsing from the effort), Chief Sturges had reassigned Cobb to the stricken man's area without a thought to the safety of the abandoned southeast sector.

It was now early evening. Two or three carriages had already passed him, heading west along Newgate Street, their occupants sitting sedately as if in their Sunday pews. How different, Cobb mused, would be their demeanor on the return trip, when the broughams, barouches, and democrats departing Spadina would be abulge with the whooping and dishevelled or quietly inebriated representatives of Upper Canada's upper crust. At the corner of Newgate and Yonge, with the lingering acidities of Barnett's tannery prickling his nose, Cobb turned and plodded dutifully past Hospital Street towards the northern border of his patrol along Lot Street. The summer night was beautiful, with a cool breeze to waft away the mosquitoes and the pungent scent of fresh grass and the invisible and nameless wildflowers that sprang up wherever they were not discouraged. So welcoming was the evening that Cobb was in danger of forfeiting his aggrieved state. And this in spite of his aching feet and the throb of his bruised cheek and Wilkie's apostasy. Moreover, and to his unacknowledged disappointment, there had been not a single pub disturbance or domestic contretemps or attempted theft the entire time he had been tramping about the northwest sector, almost spoiling for a fight.