Dubious Allegiance (9 page)

Reluctantly, Marc hailed Sergeant Ogletree. Then he and five infantrymen followed Marc up the street towards the house indicated by Captain Riddell. Two of the men carried pitch-torches. The air was foul with acrid, greasy smoke. The spit and sizzle of flame bedazzled the eye, making the stark silhouettes of the buildings even starker.

There was a meagre bit of light shining through one window of the log house as they came up to it: someone had been brave or naive enough to remain there.

“Somebody's at home,” Marc whispered, and held up his
hand. The men halted behind him. “Sergeant, take two men and watch the rear of the place. I'm going in, carefully. We all know what happens when we corner a rat.”

“We could just fire a volley through the window and order them out,” Ogletree said. “Then set the thing ablaze.”

“We could do that,” Marc said. “But we could also kill innocent civilians.”

Veteran cynic that he had become, Ogletree grunted as if to say that few civilians in a civil conflict could be called innocent. But he obeyed.

Marc rapped at the stout door and called out in French: “Open up, please. No-one is going to hurt you. We require your house as a temporary billet for some of the troops. You will be paid for any food we consume.” He winced at the lie but told himself it was better than needlessly risking lives.

There was no response from inside. Marc could hear Ogletree's group deploying behind the house. The flickering light in the window near the door was definitely that of a candle or lantern. Was it being kept alight to aid an ambush? Surely not. The town was totally in possession of the troops: any armed resistance would be suicidal. Still . . .

Marc pushed at the door. It was unlatched and swung open.

“I'm Lieutenant Edwards. I am commandeering these premises as a billet. I have not drawn a weapon.” With that, he stepped into the room, his sabre in its scabbard and his pistol, primed and ready to fire, tucked lightly in his belt.

The interior was more brightly lit than he had anticipated. To his right several candles were burning, illuminating a
kitchen area with a crude deal table and two log chairs, both occupied by women. Mother and daughter, perhaps, each with handsome Gallic features and lustrous, dark hair. But it was the eyes that caught Marc's attention and held it: black and smouldering, with a malevolence he did not think possible in a woman.

Marc tried to smile, touched his cap, and said hesitantly in his best French, “Good evening. I must ask you to leave. I noticed a shed out back. You could take some blankets out there for the night, or perhaps you have friends or relatives nearby.”

The women remained as still as a pair of gargoyles. The room seemed colder than the night outside. It was the younger one, who would in any other circumstances have been thought beautiful in the first blooming of her womanhood, whose eyes moved first. It was a furtive glance only, but it brought Marc's gaze around to its object. To his left and in among the shadows, there appeared to be a large clothes-cupboard, its thick door half open. Or opening.

Marc reached for his pistol just as the form of a young man unfolded from the maw of the cupboard.

“No!” one of the women screamed.

The young man's right hand seemed to explode, and Marc felt something strike him in the thigh and spin him sideways. Just as a second pistol was being raised into the light, Marc fired. The gunman grunted, and sank slowly to his knees. Both of his weapons clattered to the floor. His hands lifted themselves up to his throat, where Marc could see a grotesque, dark splotch spreading.

I've killed a man,
was his first thought, just before his own pain struck and he reached out in a futile attempt to keep himself from falling. As he lay, numb and bleeding in the sawdust on the floor, the last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was a pair of black, feral eyes wishing him dead.

H
oratio Cobb, charter member of the five-person Toronto constabulary, was a worried man. And what worried him the most, perhaps, was his being worried at all. Cobb, as he was known far and wide across the reaches of the capital city, prided himself on keeping his life simple and uncluttered. But living where, and when, he did was making it nigh impossible to do so.

True, he continued to rise at seven each morning, except on the Sabbath, and checked to see if Missus Cobb was still beside him. This latter gesture was made less difficult by the fact that Dora, as the neighbours called her, was as round and pink-fleshed as nearly three hundred pounds can accomplish. Her work as midwife to the easternmost half of the city, the “old town,” often took her out at all hours of the day or night, and her absence was palpable. But a hot breakfast never failed to appear on the kitchen table, either at the instigation of his
goodly wife or that of his ten-year-old daughter, Delia. After which he invariably waved Delia and her brother Fabian off to school, kissed Missus Cobb or her image, then made his way along King Street into the heart of the city, nodding to familiars, scowling at ragamuffin boys contemplating mischief, and raking every brick and inch of his domain with a policeman's practiced eye. How much more at home he had felt here among the bustle and hurly-burly of the province's metropolis than he ever had on his father's farm. It was his own considered opinion—an opinion he valued highly—that he was a man in his element.

His element included his regular patrol, an area bounded by King Street on the north and the lakeshore on the south and stretching from Parliament Street on the east to Bay on the west. Within that precinct he was the law or its visible representative. His helmet, blue tunic, and belted truncheon, in combination with his stealthy swagger, were enough to keep the hooligans, roustabouts, and inebriates in suitable awe of his authority. And when that failed to impress, there were his powerful arms and hands with the tenacity of manacles, and as a last resort a persuasive fist or two. Each morning, after checking in with Sarge, the chief constable, at the police quarters in the Court House on King between Church and Toronto Streets, he would be released for the day to do as he saw fit in maintaining the Queen's peace. As luck would have it, there were a dozen taverns and grog-shops situated within his patrol, and, believing in that proverbial ounce of prevention, Cobb made his presence felt in such trouble-spots as often as his thirst and capacities would permit. It was here, too, that he
picked up—by subtle threat, beery bribe, or appeal to good citizenship—those tidbits of information that aided him and his colleagues in their ceaseless quest for law and order in Victoria's peaceable kingdom. His network of snitches had become legendary.

That was now the problem, and the source of his uncharacteristic anxiousness. For despite the leisurely and self-regulated pace of most of his days—a lingering luncheon in the Blue Ox or the Crooked Anchor, a pleasant supper with Missus Cobb and the children, and the stimulation of an evening spent clearing the streets of belligerent drunks or assisting the bailiffs in serving warrants on sundry miscreants—he found himself, at the end of a twelve-hour day, dyspeptic and out of sorts. And politics was the efficient cause, first and last. The antics of William Lyon Mackenzie and his fellow radicals over the summer had put the whole province on edge. Rumours of an armed uprising were as frequent, and about as reliable, as the number of bent elbows over a bar on Saturday night. Such matters ought to be the business of the governor and his agents, not the local constabulary. But then not many governors other than Sir Francis Bond Head would have shipped every last redcoat in Upper Canada off to Quebec to fight the Frenchies, leaving Fort York deserted and Government House unprotected. And with the nearest militia across the lake in Hamilton, only five policemen and Sheriff William Jarvis of York County stood between the Queen's surrogate and a bullet from a radical's musket.

As if this were not trouble enough, Governor Head had ordered the chief constable to instruct his subordinates to act
as his “eyes and ears” in the city. The least scrap of information that might be inflated to suggest potential seditious activity or the mere thought of seditious activity was to be reported as fact as soon as it was discovered. Each constable was to check in at headquarters at noon, at five o'clock, and at the end of the evening shift—to relay the whiff of rumour or tavern scuttlebutt.

And, of course, it was Cobb with his fabled network of spies who was expected to supply the chief and the governor with a steady stream of reliable data. Such an expectation had brought complexity to Cobb's life, and consequent worry. Every one of his “agents,” smelling booze-money in the air, was more than happy to retail the latest rumour and spice it up for good measure. Cobb prided himself on knowing exactly how truthful and how useful any information passed to him in a pub actually was—to the penny or the fluid ounce. But no threat of withdrawal or reprisal on his part could stanch the flow of alarming nonsense. He was not averse to passing it along to Sir Francis if the governor was fool enough to give it credence. What he feared most was that some tiny fraction of the malarkey might be true.

Since the troops had left, taking Marc Edwards with them, there had been serious incidents in the streets. Shop windows of those merchants directly associated with the Family Compact had been smashed by radical sympathizers or, in Cobb's opinion, gangs of toughs out for a lark. On the other side, groups of young Tories, who should have known better, had been encouraged by their elders to deface the property of known radicals—which in their diminutive minds included respectable Reform politicians and most Americans. When not
in the mood for wielding a paintbrush, they chose to threaten their victims with anonymous, poison-pen letters. But if there really were malcontents north of the city organizing and arming themselves (after all, he and Marc had exposed a gunrunning operation in October, and news of an insurrection south of Montreal had just made the papers), then his life was about to become seriously complicated.

The problem was, he concluded, that he had too many friends. He was simply too susceptible to friendship, to having his good nature co-opted and taken advantage of. He felt that this must be a character flaw in a man professing to be a policeman. Against his better judgement he had found himself not only working side by side with Lieutenant Edwards on two investigations but coming to like and admire “the major,” as he called him, first derisively and then with affection. Like him, the major was an arm of the law and royal authority, but unlike him, the lieutenant was a Tory, an aristocrat, and a man of learning. Why, at this very moment he might be shooting at aggrieved farmers and ordinary folk like himself or his father or Dora's kin up in York Township, who had been entangled with Reformers from the beginning. A dozen years ago his own father, still harbouring hopes that his eldest would succeed him on the farm, had pointed proudly to a lush field of wheat and proclaimed, “The soil under that crop has no politics. Remember that, son. An uppity cow ain't a Tory. Tend to yer own business, an' the world'll come out right.” But the world here in Upper Canada had not come out right. Crops failed. Bankers balked. Bureaucracy and cronyism had bled the province dry.

Nevertheless, Cobb had tried to take the essential message
to heart: he tended religiously to the business of keeping the peace. Moreover, he did not see himself as an appendage of the ruling Compact and its haughty adherents. He meted out his street justice in an even-handed or (as he liked to remind Missus Cobb) even-fisted way. A menacing drunk was a drunk, whether he be dressed in velvet or homespun. A man beating his wife in public deserved a sharp reprimand on the noggin, whatever his income or lack of same. If the magistrates wished to favour their own with unmerited leniency, that was something he might deplore but could not rectify. The Lord—if He wasn't one of them—would settle the score later on.

It was through his unpolitic friendship with Marc Edwards that Cobb had met Marc's fiancée, Beth Smallman, who had dabbled in debates she had no right to as a woman and gotten her toes scalded. However, in the eyes of the ruling class, once a Reformer always a Reformer. And Beth's partnership in the millinery shop on King Street with Catherine Roberts, her aunt newly arrived from the republic to the south, did nothing to allay such fears. Several of Cobb's informants had been eager to tell him that it was now widely known that one of the aunt's relatives was a gunrunner. So what did Cobb go and do? He got to liking the old girl so much that he stopped in to the shop at least once a shift for tea and a chin-wag. Even worse, when the shop had been vandalized last month, Cobb had been assiduous in his efforts to track down the Tory scions responsible and, through one of his
agents de taverne,
had managed to bring a warrant against two of them. Unfortunately, the lads were both relatives of a rural magistrate and were let off with a reprimand and a promise
to make restitution (still unfulfilled). Needless to say, Cobb's stock with the powers that be had not risen.