Minor Corruption (26 page)

“And how old was the daughter?”

“It was his youngest child. She was almost
eighteen.”

“Thus still a minor. And Mr. Baldwin was
fifty-nine or sixty?”

“Sixty, then.” Dr. Baldwin spoke in a
monotone, the better perhaps not to hear the treachery his words
were effecting.

“You say ‘paying court,’ but that covers a
multitude of peccadilloes, sir. Please be specific. You are under
oath.”

Dr. Baldwin cleared his throat but his words
could barely be heard. “McCall caught them in bed together – in his
own house.”

Sensation one more time! For here was surely
the final nail in Seamus Baldwin’s coffin. The man had seduced a
minor before in Ireland. And how many had preceded that offence? If
the man himself heard the accusation, he gave no sign.

As the judge banged his gavel in a fruitless
attempt to restore order, Marc thought for a moment that his heart
had stopped.

***

It was two-thirty in the afternoon when Cobb pulled
his buggy into Ogden Frank’s livery on Colborne Street at West
Market Lane. He now had to do one of the few things he genuinely
feared: hire and ride a horse. The oslter’s lad chuckled as he
helped Cobb wobble into the saddle of an elderly and sedate mare of
various brownish hues and a crooked star on her forehead.

“If ya speak soft-like, sir, she won’t buck –
too hard.”

Cobb was beyond irony or humour. He twisted
the reins in his fists.

“How far ya goin’?”

“Thornhill,” Cobb said bumpily as the mare
stepped forward. Then he gritted his teeth and aimed the beast at
Yonge Street.

On Yonge Street Cobb pulled on the right rein
and the horse kindly obeyed and turned north. Thornhill was a
hamlet a dozen or so miles up Yonge Street. Not far. But renting a
buggy had been out of the question, for the road above Gallows Hill
was rutted and near-impassable this time of year despite the recent
stretch of Indian summer. And time was of the essence as the trial
would likely finish up in the morning or early tomorrow afternoon.
If new evidence were unearthed, then it had to be made known before
this evening. Hence this horse, a beast that was incompatible with
all things Cobb. As a lad he had ridden old draught horses a few
times on his father’s farm near Woodstock, but he had never taken
to the activity as his brother Laertes had.

Above Queen, where the traffic and houses
thinned out, he felt obliged to urge the mare beyond a walk. But
its teeth-jarring trot became unbearable by the time they reached
the Bloor crossroad. The Red Lion Inn on his right looked awfully
tempting, but he put one hand on his belly to stem its jigging and
carried on manfully. With Gallows Hill in sight, he tried spurring
his mount on to a gallop, but quickly lost one foot from its
stirrup and was damn near pitched into the mire of a pig-yard
beside the road. When he pulled back on the reins, the horse
magically reduced its speed to a leisurely canter, and to his
surprise he found that he could move his squat body in some sort of
rhythm to match the mare’s. So this was how it was done!

At Eglinton he passed through the toll-gate
with a cheery wave of his horseman’s unreined hand, glanced once at
Paul Pry’s inn, and cantered on. A mile or so father on he swept by
the Golden Lion Inn, then Finch’s Inn – his thirst now monumental –
and finally the Sickle and Sheaf. Only three or four miles to go,
with bush now closed in on both sides, separating the partly
cleared farms.

At five o’clock he cantered past the
Thornhill Hotel, yanked back on the reins, trot-jiggled back to the
inn, and gingerly dismounted. When his feet hit the ground, his
knees buckled and he collapsed onto them, panting and parched.

“You look like ya could use a drink.”

It was the proprietor of the hotel, aproned,
red-cheeked, and smiling.

***

Cobb finished his ale, nodded gratefully to the
innkeeper, and asked his first question: “I was told a Seymour
Kilbride lived here at the hotel. Is that so?”

“Well, no. He does work here on Saturdays
when we’re busy. But he don’t live here.”

“You know where I can locate him?”

“In trouble, is he?”

“Not at all. He has important information we
need fer a trial goin’ on in Toronto.”

“We don’t pay no mind to the shenanigans
goin’ on down in Toronto. But, yeah, Seymour works a little
vegetable farm just east of town. You take this crossroad and ride
fer about two miles. On yer right you’ll see a huge chestnut tree
beside a pond. Follow the trail around it inta the bush about a
half-mile. You can’t miss it.”

With his rump feeling as if it had ridden
through Whittle’s grist-mill, Cobb made his way to the designated
tree and pond, and then moved carefully along a rugged bush-trail
until he came to a log cabin, flanked by a chicken-coop and a
hay-barn. The ruins of several summer and fall garden-patches were
plainly visible. It looked as if the new owners had plenty of work
to occupy them for some time to come.

Cobb tethered the mare, went up to the
rickety door, and knocked. It was half a minute and several further
knocks before the door was eased partway open.

“Yes?” The single word emanated from a young
man whose face was just visible in the shadows of the ill-lit
interior. “Whaddya want?” Then when the fellow realized Cobb was a
police constable, he tried to slam the door shut. It jammed on
Cobb’s boot.

“I ain’t here to cause trouble,” Cobb said.
“But I got some information you oughta hear about, and you got some
I
need to hear. You are Seymour Kilbride, ain’t ya?”

At the sound of his name, the young man
pulled the door away from Cobb’s boot. “Sorry, sir, but we don’t
trust strangers much around here. I am Seymour Kilbride. What’ve ya
got to tell me? I’ve done nothin’ wrong in Toronto ‘cause I ain’t
set foot there fer months.”

“I’d like to come in.”

“I prefer to talk here.”

But Cobb was too quick for the lad. He
brushed past him and entered the murky interior. Two women sat at a
deal table, peeling potatoes. In the dim light afforded by a nearby
window, Cobb could see that one was young and pretty. The other was
of indeterminate age. She might have been under thirty but life had
scrawled its stress and strain across a sunken face with pale,
frightened eyes set deep in bruised sockets. Her auburn hair hung
down her back like frayed strands of hemp.

“And this must be
Missus
Kilbride,”
Cobb said with a slight tip of his helmet towards the pretty
one.

“That’s my Marion,” Kilbride said, looking
dismayed.

“So it is. And this young lady would be yer
sister – Lottie Thurgood.”

FOURTEEN

Marc felt dazed and disoriented as he stood up to
cross-examine Dr. Baldwin. What could he do? Were there any
mitigating circumstances? Any way of blunting the dagger pointed at
Uncle Seamus’s heart?

“You said McCall’s daughter was almost
eighteen?” he began lamely.

“Yes,” Dr. Baldwin said with some semblance
of enthusiasm, “she was a month away from her majority. And the
affair was not sordid in the way Mr. Cambridge tried to imply.
Susan McCall was a mature young woman in love. This was no tawdry
seduction. My uncle swore to me that he loved her and immediately
offered to marry her, an offer she was keen to accept.”

“But Mr. McCall would not agree?” Marc was
starting to get his second wind.

“No. He felt the difference in their ages was
insupportable. He had tried to keep them apart all along, and when
they succumbed to – to their mutual passion, he discovered them and
threatened to have the law on my uncle. It was then arranged for
him to retire quietly, and following his deep depression, further
arrangements were made to have him join his family here in
Toronto.”

Well, it could have been worse, Marc thought.
But not by much.

Cambridge went right back to work in his
rebuttal.

“Seamus Baldwin and Miss Mcall were found
in flagrante delicto
in a bed in the McCall household?”

“That’s what I was told, yes.”

“A sixty-year-old man with a
seventeen-year-old innocent girl?”

Dr. Baldwin merely nodded, but Cambridge
wasn’t interested in the exact nature of his response.

“And her father threatened to have the law on
him, as he had every right to because Seamus Baldwin was guilty of
statutory rape and the corruption of a minor, am I right?”

“Yes,” Dr. Baldwin said, his face full of
misery.

“No more questions, Milord.”

No more were needed, Marc thought.

***

It was a gloomy post-mortem in Robert’s chambers.
The trial had been scheduled to continue on Thursday morning, when
Marc was expected to begin his defense. But there was no defense.
No character witness could be produced who could undo the damage
done by the afternoon’s testimony. Marc had placed all his eggs in
one basket: impeaching the Crown’s testimony and developing
alternative accounts of the crime – and those eggs had been
smashed, along with the basket. Worse still was the unthinkable
thought that refused to stay put in his subconscious where it
belonged: what if the old gent really did do it? What if his
plausible explanations were just that – mere plausibilities? Marc
was grateful that there were no recriminations, but it was cold
comfort. He ached for the Baldwins, all of them.

Finally it was decided that they would have
to move directly to closing arguments. Marc was sent home to
compose the best speech he could devise under the circumstances. It
was a dispirited advocate who made his way back to Briar cottage.
Beth was waiting for him.

“You did what you could,” she said
sympathetically. “And you had no way of knowin’ what was to
come.”

“The only inkling I had, love, was the odd
reaction of Dr. Baldwin back when I first suggested he appear as a
character witness. He must have been torn up inside.”

“He knew, of course, what his brother’d been
up to back in Ireland.”

“Well, that sordid episode does help to
explain the old gent’s depression and his inordinate attraction to
Edie and Betsy, doesn’t it?”

“He was lookin’ to replace a hole in his
heart, I’d say. But that still don’t make him a corruptor of
minors. He was good to those girls. Still, it looks awful fer him,
doesn’t’ it? So the best thing I can do is get the kids out of your
way so you can sit down and write the greatest speech of yer
life.”

But the best and most loving thing she did
was not raise the question of Uncle Seamus’s possible guilt, for he
honestly did not know how he might answer her. He realized, too
late, that he really knew very little, first-hand, about Uncle
Seamus. He had spent a mere twenty minutes with him. He should have
returned and questioned the man more closely, got some idea of his
own what made the fellow tick. But he had been too much in love
with the image of Doubtful Dick Dougherty, who had never lost a
capital case. His mind was in a turmoil as he went into his study –
alone.

Small wonder, then, that he was on his third
version of the opening paragraph when, about eight o’clock, there
came a knock at the front door. He tossed his pen aside and decided
to answer it for himself. He went to the vestibule and opened the
door.

It was Cobb – with news.

***

Everyone was taken by surprise on Thursday morning
when the defense – widely expected to move to closing arguments –
asked Justice Powell for permission to call an unscheduled witness.
The judge, recalling the Crown’s manoeuvre yesterday afternoon with
Dr. Baldwin, glanced over at a puzzled Neville Cambridge and said,
“Granted, Mr. Edwards. And if Mr. Cambridge requires time to
prepare a cross-examination, he will be allowed it.”

All eyes now turned to the door of the
witness-room where a strange woman was being ushered in. She was of
medium height and walked awkwardly, not quite with a limp but
tenderly, as if her feet might have wished they did not have to
touch the floor. Her dull auburn tresses were bound up behind her
in a tidy bun. She wore a freshly washed, plain black dress. Her
boots were scuffed and unpolished. When she stood in the
witness-box and turned her face to the benches and the galleries,
there was from the latter a sharp cry. Mrs. Auleen Thurgood had
cried out and then fainted in her husband’s arms. He himself sat
staring at the witness, open-mouthed, incredulous, barely conscious
of his wife’s collapse.

The woman, who was in reality only
twenty-six, looked fifty. Her face was pallid, tubercular, haunted.
As she accepted the oath, her voice was fragile, as if, once
broken, it would be irreparable. She stated her name as Loretta
Thurgood. From the galleries there was as much puzzlement as
curiosity.

Marc began, fully aware of the focussed
intensity around him. “Miss Thurgood, you are the elder daughter of
Burton and Auleen Thurgood and sister to the deceased, Betsy
Thurgood.”

“I am.” Lottie Thurgood sat perfectly still
and looked straight ahead. Not once did she glance to her left
where her parents were sitting – mesmerized, as if watching a
ghost.

“And you have come here voluntarily to tell
us your story, a story that has great pertinence to the case before
us?”

“I have.”

“Tell us where you have been living since you
left home nine years ago.”

“Mostly in Montreal.”

“What were you doing there to earn your
living?”

“I worked in a brothel. I was a whore.”
Lottie did not change her tone or raise or lower the volume of her
voice when making a declaration that drew gasps of surprise and
disapproval from the spectators.

“And how have you managed to return to the
Toronto area?”

Marc glanced at Neville Cambridge, but he
looked more baffled than concerned.