Man in the Shadows (12 page)

He had left his old grey coat in Ottawa. In a lightweight, oversized brown jacket, he surveyed the shop, waiting patiently for the right moment. It had been a disappointing week. He had spent much of it watching Thomas O’Dea. O’Dea was drinking too much, and he seemed to be falling into that Irish pit of despair. He gave O’Dea credit, though: he wasn’t filling every ear that came into that miserable bar with his lament, whatever it was. Still, O’Dea was pathetic, and he hated that. Too bad; he might have been useful. Maybe later he could be of some help.

Anyway, he had to do this job alone.

As the afternoon drifted to a lazy end, he decided the moment had come. He quickly walked into the shop. He knew the storekeeper
was alone inside, and he knew no one had seen him enter.

“I’ll have a Smith and Wesson revolver with six chambers and some bullets.”

“Certainly,” Mr. Willard answered kindly. “Are you new to these parts?”

The man in the large brown jacket ignored him.

“You’re a logger, then?” Mr. Willard searched for eye contact with the customer.

Again, no answer.

Unfriendly chap, the shopkeeper thought, as he opened the back cupboard and fetched the goods. He presented the gun and the ammunition to the stranger.

“Nice weapon, here,” he said. “Very popular in the United States, I’m told.”

The customer simply took the handgun from him, looked it over carefully and started loading bullets into the cartridge. It was as if Mr. Willard wasn’t even there.

“Impatient, aren’t you?” the storekeeper remarked. Perhaps he should have started to feel uneasy by now—maybe he should have called for help—but his mind was on other things. “Well, me too, I guess. I’m a bit impatient myself. I want to get home and see the grandchildren.” He didn’t expect a response from this unfriendly man, so he stuck to business. “That will be a dollar, unless you would rather pay in sterling?” It had been a slow afternoon. It would be nice to see some money in the till.

The stranger continued to act as if he were alone in the room and Willard didn’t exist.

“I said, that will be a dollar.”

He finished loading the gun and, for the first time, looked straight into the mortal face of James P. Willard. But a memory caught him off guard. A flash of humanity. This man and his own grandfather
were so much alike: the same rosy cheeks, full white hair and kind eyes. He could picture his grandfather weaving stories of Irish heroes: the Wexford Martyrs, Mary Doyle, Wolfe Tone. He remembered his boyhood before his father’s imprisonment, before the rot set in. If no one had seen him come in here, there was no need to kill this man. He took the money from his back pocket, put the dollar on the table and, as politely as he could, muttered, “Thank you.”

He started for the door. As he reached for the doorknob, he stopped. What was he thinking? Had he gone mad? He turned to Willard and said, almost sympathetically, “I can’t go soft.”

Two shots exploded. The force of the bullets threw the old man back to the wall. He still had a look of shock on his face as he hit the ground, dead. It had happened so fast that Mr. Willard had not had time to scream.

His murderer quickly collected more ammunition and another revolver, stuffed them in his pockets and casually walked out into the late-afternoon sun.

No one had seen him. And no one seemed to have been startled by the noise. With children shooting squirrels and farmers hunting gophers, gunshots were common in country towns. By the time James Willard’s granddaughter found his body, his murderer had thrown away the brown jacket, retrieved his long grey coat and was far away. Not up the river, where the police would assume, but back to Ottawa.

He had spent a relatively quiet July. He planned a busier August.

LADY
Macdonald wasn’t snooping. She was putting away a pair of shoes in a closet in her husband’s office when she stumbled across a little rocking horse. It was perched at the back of the closet, covered in dust.

“It was little Johnny’s,” he said that night. “My son who died.”

She could see that his eyes were watering, but she pressed on, carefully. “You never talk of those years. Your children … your … wife.”

“It’s an old story. Isabella got sick in the first year of our marriage and never recovered. She basically lay in bed for twelve years, comforted by an increasing amount of patent medicine and laudanum.”

“And you worked.”

“I worked and tried my best to help.”

“And your sons?”

“Well, you’ve met Hugh. He’s a chip off the old block. A little stubborn, but a promising Tory, I would think. Louisa really brought him up. I was too busy with …”

“With your work,” she said for him.

“Yes, thank God for dutiful sisters.”

She was learning to accept his selfishness. She knew countless political battles had left their scars, but they were flesh wounds. His pain was deeper. He was famously charming, cute with quips and stories, but there was a cunningness behind it all. If he couldn’t make the rules himself, he looked for ways to circumvent them.

Where did the politician end and the person begin? Who was he, really? A family man wounded by premature death, or a career politician who would not let anything thwart his ambitions? Had she married someone desperately in need of love, or a man with a cold heart?

She watched as he reached for a glass on a side table.

The facts spoke for themselves. He used people like his “dutiful” sister and ignored his only living son; he destroyed political enemies without a thought and discarded friends when their purpose was served. But here, with a child’s toy secretly stashed away, he looked so vulnerable, so forgivable, so worth all the effort it took to be with
him. She might never reach into his heart and really know him, but she could try. That was her job. She looked at the rocking horse. And then at her husband.

“I couldn’t part with it when little John died,” he said. “He was just two years old when he fell.”

She dared ask the question that haunted her. “John, is that why you drink so much?” She knew she probably should not have asked the question so directly. He ignored it anyway.

“You know my younger brother James died, too. Right in front of me. He was struck down by a man who was supposed to be caring for us.” She thought he might put down his drink and seek comfort in her arms. Instead, he took a small sip. “I was seven years old. James was only five.”

The pain in his voice was deep, naked, honest. This was the real John Macdonald: not a strutting statesman, but a vulnerable man chased by demons; not a hardened political actor, but a suffering brother, father and husband.
Her
suffering husband. And she loved him for that.

“Tell me: Why do I live and the others don’t?”

How could she answer? What could she say? She was a new wife; this was a new start. “John,” she said tentatively, “let’s have a child of our own. I want us to be a family.”

He looked at her blankly, then a slow nod and a trace of a smile. He put down his drink and moved closer to his young wife. Much closer.

THE
entire Trotter family saw Conor off at the railway station. Mary Ann Trotter was like a mother hen with her flock. “Say hello to Mr. McGee for me,” she commanded. “Tell him I have some stories for him.” The Widow Trotter was becoming the mother Conor never had—or never remembered.

Conor smiled back at her. “If I can get a word in, I will.”

Will gave him an awkward punch in the arm. Meg allowed a peck on the cheek and squeezed his hand. Very proper and reserved, he thought, but suggestive, just as Jane Austen might have written. Conor thought he saw some of the boys who had marched in the Orange Parade watching them, but he ignored them. Meg pulled him slightly toward her, whispering, “I need you too.”

He shuddered, mumbled something back and boarded the train.

Conor brought along a book to occupy himself on the journey: a collection of poetry by Thomas D’Arcy McGee.

IN
the first-class section of the train, another man was reading a book by D’Arcy McGee. The dense but very popular
History of Ireland
obscured the reader’s face. A grey coat lay on his lap, covering one of the guns he had acquired from the late James Willard of Westboro.

He too was going to Montreal to meet D’Arcy McGee.

The fate of our land

God hath placed in your hand;

He hath made you to know

the heart of your foe

Thomas D’Arcy McGee—poet, author, journalist, member of Parliament for Montreal West and Father of Confederation—sprung from his bed in hysterics. Clutching his sheets, his eyes wide with fear, he was screaming something about a waterfall.

“Jesus, no!” he yelled. “For the love of Jesus, no!”

Mary McGee reached out in the darkness. “What in the world is the matter?”

He didn’t answer. Or couldn’t answer. His eyes darted around the room, red and blurry with panic, until suddenly Mary spun into focus. “I had a dream,” he said, clutching her close to him. “A nightmare.”

“I know that,” she answered gently. “But that’s no reason to wake the dead with your shrieking.” He smiled, barely. Recently, he had been prone to nightmares. His swollen leg hurt him so much at night, and he was under such intense political pressure, that his muscles rarely relaxed. But this nightmare was different: it was so real.

“I dreamed,” he began haltingly, “that I was running along the bank of a river, calling to a boat in the water. It was heading toward a waterfall. The boat was out of control, drifting to certain disaster, and no one would pay attention to my warnings.” He looked at his wife for understanding. “They were doomed. But I couldn’t get anybody’s attention.”

“And you do hate to be ignored,” Mary joked feebly.

He didn’t respond. His eyes just grew wilder. “And then, I was pulled into the water, too. It was terrible. The boat floated safely to shore. No one on board knew how close they had come to disaster. And no one cared.”

Mary McGee could hear noise outside. She assumed it was just men coming home from the tavern. D’Arcy was too deep in his nightmare to hear anything.

“Now I was caught in the rushing water. The current held me and I was heading toward the waterfall.”

“D’Arcy,” Mary whispered, “it was just a dream.”

He gazed beyond her as if watching the nightmare again on the wall. “I was grabbing for something, anything, calling for help. But I was alone, all alone, and being pulled to my death by the current’s force.”

“But you survived,” Mary reminded him.

“Yes, I survived. In dreams, you always survive. It’s only in life you go over the edge.”

Mary didn’t say another word. She watched as her husband closed his eyes and fell back to sleep. But she couldn’t sleep. Not again that night. She lay awake, thinking about his dream. Wondering. And worrying. There was trouble seething in Montreal, and as always, D’Arcy was at the centre of it.

C
onor, where are you, you overpaid, overwhiskered boy?”

“I’m at my desk, sir.”

“Well, I need that list of—”

“Here it is,” Conor said, handing D’Arcy McGee a piece of paper.

“That’s better.”

Conor was back in Montreal, riding the tidal wave of McGee’s bombast. McGee had just read a proclamation written by General O’Neill, the Fenian commander-in-chief in New York, and he was furious. “‘Fifty thousand are ready’—what nonsense,” he bellowed. “I’d ignore the blather, but this talk of liberation can incite the people, the irresponsible meddlers.”

McGee was barely five foot three, but when on a rant, he seemed to tower over everyone—even Conor, who stood at least six inches taller. McGee was quick-tempered and fiery. Volcanic. He was constantly dishevelled, in his baggy suits, stained shirts and undone ties. His black hair was persistently askew and his beard in dire need of trimming. His dirty fingernails often sifted through his curly hair. His wife, Mary, told him he looked like an unmade bed. In fact, when once asked if she worried about him away from home so often with many single women about, she answered, “I take great comfort in his ugliness.”

McGee was running for re-election in Montreal West. Part of the riding was St. Ann’s parish in the Irish community of Griffintown, clustered between the railway tracks and the Lachine Canal. It was Montreal’s version of Ottawa’s Lowertown, but with more people, more spirit, more energy—and more tragedy. Typhus and cholera built up in the open sewers and spread through the crowded homes. In 1852 a fire destroyed half the buildings and left five hundred families homeless. Griffintown sat on low-lying land and was prone to flooding. The worst flood was in 1857, the year D’Arcy McGee moved to Montreal. McGee told his friend Father Dowd that God seemed to watch over Griffintown with Old Testament fury.

Men from Griffintown dug the canals, built the bridges and laid the railways. They worked terribly long days, raised strong families, kept the breweries and distilleries alive on Saturday nights and went to mass on Sunday mornings. They were D’Arcy McGee’s people. They welcomed him into their midst. They supported and encouraged him, and what was most important, voted for him with rare consistency. McGee had never lost an election in Griffintown. In fact, he had won a few by acclamation. But during the first election of the new Dominion, something was going dreadfully wrong. Griffintown was in turmoil, the people rebellious, and the little Irishman was in the campaign battle of his life. Conor noticed it as soon as he arrived from Ottawa. The city was tense, the people in Griffintown edgy.

“Think nothing of it, my bucko,” McGee told him. “It’s the weather. It’s so hot here that even the streets seethe with anger.”

Conor knew the problem was much deeper than that. By constantly attacking the Fenian movement, not only had McGee infuriated many in Griffintown, but he had given his opponent, Bernard Devlin, an election issue. “D’Arcy McGee works with Orangemen,” Devlin told the crowds. “He is anti-Ireland and anti-Catholic.”