The Tinsmith (24 page)

He stood and, unblinking, faced the self-righteous Southerner. “When you threaten a man or his country, you must expect the consequences. I won't hesitate to defend myself.”

“Defend?” Richardson's jaw trembled. “Is that what you call the war, a defence?”

“Yes. A defence of principles.”

Richardson's cheeks flushed. His jaw and eyes went rigid. “I suppose you're referring to the negroes. And do you suppose, doctor, that you've done that race a great service? You think they're happier now, working for the great munificence of your wages?”

“I would imagine they are, yes. Better to do an honest day's work for yourself than to do a lifetime's work for someone else.”

Richardson smiled unpleasantly, revealing a yellow cast to his teeth. “That's the trouble with your country, doctor. You make no distinction between work and money. It never occurs to you, does it, that a man might work for something greater than that?”

“If money means freedom, then it must be great indeed to those who are only allowed to earn it for others.”

“Have you lived among them? Do you understand the first thing about what they value?”

Suddenly Anson saw a young, white-skinned man staggering across an open stretch of torn earth, his eyes swimming with terror. Money was beside the point. That young man had almost driven himself mad to earn his freedom. Anson had no more time for the Southerner's platitudes about slavery than he had for the Christian's blind belief in a merciful God. Dare existed outside of both positions. He assumed only one: that a man of character and courage deserved to be the master of his own life.

But before Anson could articulate the thought to Richardson, the Lansdownes returned.

“Our sincere apologies, gentlemen,” the elder said. “We wished only to make a check of the property. The Orientals, and the Indians of the area, are generally to be trusted, but, of course, we can't take their movements for granted.”

“Be thankful,” Richardson said, still meeting Anson's eyes, “that you do not live among negroes. A country free of their treachery must indeed be a country of opportunity.”

Anson looked down without responding. In a few seconds, once he had composed himself, he raised his head again. The bitterness, he acknowledged, was understandable. After all, his side had won the war and he had tasted the dregs of the victory; he could only imagine how much greater was the bitterness of the defeat. Suddenly, Ambrose Richardson, standing there in his honour, missing one arm and who knew what else, seemed a pitiable figure. Anson had no desire to continue the verbal gamesmanship.

He didn't have to. Henry Lansdowne said with surprising coolness, almost vehemence, “We do not sit in judgment, sir, but it would be best not to speak of your country's unfortunate history of enslavement.”

“Brother,” Thomas Lansdowne said as he stepped in front of him to address the Southerner. “It's been a trying evening. My wife, as you can see, is ill. Dr. Baird has, I believe, been too long among us and we have been perhaps too preoccupied with daily matters to be sufficiently hospitable. As well, the time of preparing for the next salmon run is difficult and puts us all on edge. An early evening, I think, is advisable.”

This was the longest and most articulate speech Anson had heard from the younger Lansdowne, and it was remarkably effective. Ambrose Richardson soon deferred to it with a nod and a few curt words.

“I've not come all this way to discuss negroes with those who have no knowledge of them. You're experts on the subject of the salmon, and about the canning of them for market. That is why I'm here. Tomorrow you'll show me your operations and we'll discuss business.”

He bowed stiffly, his arm across his waist.

“I'll walk back with you,” Thomas Lansdowne said.

“And your good lady?”

Henry Lansdowne explained that he would accompany his sister-in-law home after she'd rested a while. Then his brother and Ambrose Richardson departed. Anson found himself alone with the elder Lansdowne. They stood in uncomfortable silence for a moment until the Englishman finally excused himself. Anson, understanding the man's embarrassment, waited briefly before walking into the front hall and putting on his coat. Then he stepped outside.

It was a clear night, the sky star-clustered, a small full moon shedding wan light over the fields and slough. The figures of Thomas Lansdowne and Ambrose Richardson, a dog at their sides, were just visible against the black backdrop of the woodlot. Anson lit a cigar as he watched them diminish, and inhaled gratefully. Though he disliked to admit it, he conceded that the Virginian had a point; it had been improper to confront the Lansdownes about Dare in that company. First, one of the ladies was indisposed. Second, he had only just made Richardson's acquaintance. Anson accepted that his timing had not been propitious. He blew smoke at the stars and stepped slowly along the veranda. Fifty yards to the west loomed the bulk of a ridge-roofed barn. Just beyond it, along the dike, began the cluster of cannery buildings, and beyond those there was only river and marsh. Much closer, thirty yards to the north of where he stood, the Lansdownes' gangway and wharf hung, tiny as children's toys, at the edge of the great muddy river.

Anson exhaled another plume of smoke and tried to orient himself. Two miles up the river, on the opposite bank, was the city of New Westminster. Dare's settlement was almost as distant, though on the near bank. It seemed hard to imagine any
single
human life, not to mention whole communities of them, out there in the thick, brinish dark. Anson gazed at it until the heavy sameness forced him to blink. If nothing else, he thought, a man had plenty of quiet for reflection here. Other than the intermittent hooting of owls and lowing of cattle beneath the wind, the night was still. The Chinese, of course, were by now well ensconced in their melancholic sojourns along the opium trail, and it was all Anson could do to keep his thoughts from becoming regretted actions. Dare had made life unexpectedly difficult for him, but perhaps the trial had a purpose, perhaps he was meant to endure it for a greater good he could not yet foresee. Even so, Anson was not sure that he should wait any longer for a Victoria-bound steamer. It might be a pleasant diversion to visit New Westminster, even if for only a week. Someone there might be able to provide more information about Dare's conflict with the two Englishmen; it couldn't be a large city, after all.

He put his hands on the veranda railing and stared at the red end of the cigar in his fingers. In the surrounding dark, the tiny light was like one of the soldiers' meek fires in the days after the Battle of Antietam. How fragile they had seemed after all the carnage, and how welcome too—ever since, Anson had never ceased to be attracted to a good fire; it seemed at once a refuge and an escape. In those long nights of misery, his hands and feet aching, his bowels loose and stomach cramped, his lungs filled with the spreading miasma of death, how powerfully the soldiers' weakest fires had fortified him. Between the comfort and hope inherent in the flames and the equally vital presence of goodness in William Dare's character, Anson had found his survival. Was he, then, to feel chagrined by his continuing loyalty? No, he would not apologize for that. But a man of his years ought to practise greater diplomacy.

He lifted the cigar to his lips again and considered the immediate future. Thomas Lansdowne must be warned about the perils of his wife's condition; she clearly required more than a few hours of rest. And Anson realized it was indeed advisable that he should take the next steamer out of Chilukthan, no matter which direction it was headed. In the meantime, he'd stay discreetly out of Ambrose Richardson's company and he'd limit his conversations with the Lansdownes, especially on the subject of Dare.

Satisfied, Anson flicked the cigar into the muddy yard and was about to return inside the house when he heard a faint, curious tinkling sound coming from the direction of the river. It was an eerily familiar sound, and at first he doubted that he'd really heard it. He strained to shut out the wind. Yes, there it came again, a glassy shivering. Anson closed his hands to keep them from shaking. All the calm he'd gathered from the cigar was evaporating with each repetition of the sound. He looked dully into the moonlit dark, expecting . . . what? He knew that glassy shivering, but it took him a moment to see the wagon in his mind's eye and the burly photographer with the heavy brogue and pointed questions. It had been some time since Anson had recollected that image. Ah, but it was too much, fanciful—the product, he knew, of futile brooding. A man could find the past everywhere if he wasn't vigilant against it.

Self-knowledge. Anson had never considered himself a fool, and he wasn't about to change. And yet, there was a reason for the patterns the mind assumed, just as there were reasons for the rhythms in nature. If he'd come to the delta of the Fraser River to find again the battlefield of Antietam, so be it. And why should that even be a surprise? In twenty years Dare had never asked for him to come anywhere, had only sent telegrams and brief letters regarding business matters after their last meeting, when Dare had stayed at Anson's home. So, out of loyalty and genuine faith in the man, Anson had come to this Canadian river. There was misery and tension all around him, his old longing for opium had returned, and a former enemy bearing the physical evidence of defeat had opened the painful wounds of his country's severance. Why should all this not be photographed like a battlefield? It would make a fine study of the dissolution of the years. Anson could see the grinning Scotsman making a square of his fingers before his eyes.

But the image faded. Anson knew he was not prone to fancies. So he left the veranda and walked around the house. The glassy sound increased as he crossed the field toward the wharf, and, walking up the gangway, he recognized the sound as piano music. He could not have been more amazed if there had been a tripod set up on the planks with a grinning figure poised to vanish under a black cloth. In different circumstances, Anson would have clapped his hands with joy at the unexpectedness of life, he would have gladly succumbed to humility before the mysterious workings of a greater power. As it was, the sight he came upon only deepened his dread, for it struck him as grotesquely out of place, like seeing children emerge from a woodlot at Antietam. His mouth filled with the smoke of long-dead ashes, Anson approached the unlikely congruence in the moonlight. But with each step, one amazement gave way to another. For as he reached the source of the sound, he felt easier in his spirit, liberated from the poisonous miasma of his own musings.

The girl stood in the middle of the wharf, her thin figure in the moonlight slightly hunched, her elbows extended to either side. Bareheaded, her long, black hair gleaming, she faced the river. But he knew she could not see it, for her view was blocked by the large wooden crate that had been unloaded from the paddlewheeler some days before and that Anson had assumed contained cannery equipment. Off to her right, stepping rapidly forward and back, poised as if to run, stood the girl's older brother, Edward, a reserved, handsome boy of twelve years. Near his feet lay the front side of the crate. Only when Anson had reached the end of the gangway and stepped onto the wharf did he notice that the boy held a hammer in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Even in the bright moonlight, his face looked ashen.

But Louisa did not lift her hands from the piano, which, as far as Anson could see, was a handsome instrument, the front of its high back ornately carved and almost gleaming, as if made of rosewood or some other special variety. The high notes swirled into the damp air, notes as delicate and pretty as the child who gave them life. Anson felt the tears come to his eyes. In such a remote and forlorn place, where beauty seemed mostly to exist in the surroundings, such music was a rare beneficence. Even the sucking of the tide at the pilings and the drone of the mosquitoes seemed quieted by Louisa's playing.

The boy, only a few feet away, suddenly dropped the hammer and crowbar and hurried to his sister. He grabbed both her elbows from behind. She gasped and the music stopped.

“That's enough, Lou,” he said and then added in a whisper, “You're upsetting the doctor.”

Anson, however, was smiling broadly and letting the tears press against his lenses until he finally had to remove his glasses.

The brother and sister, blurred now, waited. The lost music had drifted away with the current, which gurgled and sucked at the pilings. Anson tried to hold on to the notes. In a quavering voice, he said, “That's very pretty. Chopin, I believe?”

“I . . . I don't know,” the girl said. She hardly even seemed a part of her surroundings, her face shone so vividly. Anson noticed that her fingers still played the air at her sides.

“You don't know? Well, I suppose the composer doesn't matter as much as the composition. But you play beautifully, Louisa. And at such a young age. How long have you been taking lessons?”

“She's never even had one,” her brother said, and it was as if he'd turned all the moonlight onto the girl.

She lowered her eyes and said quietly, “Ed, you're forgetting Mrs. Parmiter. She gave me a lesson.”

“That hardly counts. Two or three minutes was all it lasted before Mother came in and made you . . .”

The boy stopped and glanced over Anson's shoulder in the direction of the house. He frowned and all the sudden enthusiasm over his sister's talent drained out of his body as if he'd been punctured. Anson, still amazed by what he'd come upon, hurried to address the girl.

“Do you mean that you've never been taught to play? How is it that you can play Chopin?”

Her brother's enthusiasm flooded back. His broad, handsome face beamed.

“She has a gift. Mrs. Parmiter said so. She said Lou was a . . .  a . . . what was that word, Lou?”