Unholy Alliance (30 page)

“Brutus wasn’t protecting me,” Bessie said.
“He thought you were going to hurt dear Graves.”

Cobb was taken aback, even though he knew he
should not be, given the bizarre goings-on among these eccentric
characters. “But I heard you told yer lover that Brutus was a
limb-tearin’ brute.”

“Unfortunately, that was Graves’s first
impression of the gentle soul, and nothing I could say thereafter
would change his mind.”

“And I suppose it wasn’t you who told the
fella he’d landed in the middle of a forest surrounded by bears an’
ice?”

“A figment of his overheated English
imagination. He had become terrified of our woods during the
coach-ride from Kingston – all those trees and no people. He was
deathly sick by the time he staggered in here.”

“An’ you calmed him down with a cup of clear
tea?”

“He passed out before he could drink it. We
carried him into my quarters and put him to bed, and told the
coach-driver to carry on without him. He had his ticket to Toronto,
and we figured we’d put him on the coach when it came here the next
afternoon, along with his baggage.”

“An’ he ain’t recovered yet?”

She smiled again, less nervously this time.
“He was fine by Wednesday morning. Feeling quite perky, if you know
what I mean.”

“Assisted by a cup or two of yer best
whiskey?”

“He spotted my supply on the table, and how
was I to refuse a sick and frightened man?”

“Who was also quite perky.”

“Well, he got perkier as he went along.”

Cobb heaved a big sigh. Part of him admired
her cunning and temerity as she attempted to mollify a man whose
“cousin” she had flagrantly abused and who himself had barely
escaped strangling at the hands of her henchman. “So you’re gonna
stick to yer tale of a fella so
un-armoured
of the drink an’
the fair sex that he curled up in yer pink nightie fer eleven days
an’ didn’t once beg to sniff the open air?”

“I doubt he’ll say otherwise,” she said,
maintaining her bold stare on him.

“I guess we’ll haveta see about that when he
remembers who he is an’ where he was goin’.”

“You aren’t his cousin, are you?”

“No, ma’am. My name is Cobb all right, but
I’m a constable with the Toronto police. I been out lookin’ fer
Graves Chilton on behalf of Mr. Garnet Macaulay, the gentleman who
was expectin’ him to arrive in town last week.”

“I see.” Cobb could hear the wheels turning
in her head as she reassessed him and tried to decide where she now
stood. “Well, I’d say you’ve done a fine job in tracking him down.
His baggage, I assume, has already been dropped off at his
employer’s. Brutus put it on the coach a few days ago.”

Cobb smiled darkly at the brazen lie. “I’m
afraid there’s more to it than that.”

“I thought as much.”

“The baggage did get there, but another fella
callin’ himself Graves Chilton arrived with it. An’ this one wasn’t
bald like the one you waylaid. He had a head full of orange
hair.”

“My word, an impostor! What is the world
coming to?”

“An’ this one was spotted gettin’ out of a
cutter driven by your Brutus – in Cobourg on Thursday mornin’ of
last week – just in time to hop onto the coach fer Toronto.”

“I – I can’t know or be responsible for
persons Brutus might give a ride to on his way into town.”

“There’s no use lyin’ any more, Bessie. Like
you said when you stopped Brutus from doin’ me in, the game is up.”
He did his best to look stern as he added, “The impostor’s
confessed everythin’.” He considered this falsehood a minor
offence, given the string of whoppers he had just been subjected
to.

Bessie visibly sagged. So much of her
undeniable appeal lay in her exuberance and good humour that Cobb
was shocked to see the flesh of her face droop into folds, and the
rosiness fade from her lips and cheeks.

“I haven’t a clue who the impostor was,” she
said in a voice he had not heard before, and he was inclined to
believe her.

“Then why did you agree to waylay the real –
bald – Graves Chilton an’ keep him, ah, occupied fer almost two
weeks?”

“I didn’t really kidnap him, you know. I only
locked the door when I thought one of those rubes in my taproom
might wander back there and scare the shit out of him or young
Cassandra might decide to practise her techniques on him.”

“We’ll come back to that. It’s the impostor
I’m interested in. Why would you get mixed up in some loony scheme
to send a fake butler to some fancy manor-house in Toronto? You’re
an innkeeper, aren’t ya?”

Bessie sighed, and for the first time Cobb
saw in her face unmistakeable signs of the rough and challenging
life that she – and poor Brutus – had had to endure. “It’s all
about this place, Cobb. The Pine Knot is all Brutus and I have
after a lifetime of effort. I wasn’t about to give it up without a
fight.”

“Whaddaya mean, give it up?”

“I’ve got a mortgage on the inn with the Bank
of Upper Canada. Brutus saw some horses last spring that we just
had to have – if those vultures in Cobourg weren’t going to steal
our business. I borrowed money to buy them. We’re doing all right
because of them, but I got behind in my payments to the bank.”

“They wouldn’t foreclose, would they?”

“I didn’t think so. But two weeks ago today –
Sunday – a well-dressed gentleman arrives at my door to inform me
that he’s learned from a friend of his at the bank that if I don’t
come up with the money due by the end of this month, the bank will
take my inn.”

“What made you believe him?”

“He had a letter from some bigwig at the
bank. He wasn’t bluffing.”

“Wanted the place fer himself, did he?”

“Not at all. He would not tell me why, but he
said he was willing to give me enough cash to make the payments due
and a lot more besides. I almost fainted, and I’m not exactly shy,
am I? The sums he mentioned were damn near enough for me to own The
Pine Knot outright.”

“But in order to get the money you had to do
him a big favour?”

“Yes. He seemed to know a great deal about
me. And he didn’t realize it, but I had spotted his name on the
letter he showed me, and I knew who he was.”

“What was the favour – kidnapping a
butler?”

She smiled grimly. “He didn’t put it quite
like that. He said it was important to him, and to other important
people in Toronto, that a Mr. Graves Chilton, a butler en route
from England, not reach his employer in the city when he was
supposed to. He needed to be delayed for ten days or so, that was
all. This butler would be aboard Weller’s stagecoach from Kingston
some time in the week following that Sunday. My task was to invite
him in for a drink and find a way to keep him away from
Toronto.”

“Did he know Chilton had a weakness fer
whiskey, an’ women?”

“Yes. I don’t know how he knew, but he
did.”

Whoever he was, Cobb thought, he also knew
about Bessie Jiggins’ attraction to men and her considerable appeal
to their baser instincts.

“His advice to me,” she continued, “was to
persuade him to stay here overnight in my bed and be driven into
Cobourg in time to catch the stage before it left in the morning.
That in itself should be simple enough, he said. Then I could
proceed at my leisure to get him drunk and take him off to the barn
or some abandoned cabin and keep him caged as long as necessary.
Then we could take him along the Kingston Road and drop him in the
middle of nowhere. He wouldn’t know where he was or what had
happened to him, poor devil. And who would be the wiser?”

“But you didn’t have to do all that, did
ya?”

“I never intended to. I had other, safer,
plans, didn’t I?”

“But where does the red-headed fella come
into it?”

“The idea was to have some crony of the
schemer take Chilton’s place. My job was to get Chilton out of the
way and stow his baggage.”

“But that was on the coach, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Once Chilton passed out during the
stopover, I went out to the driver and told him the man was quite
ill and we needed his suitcases in here until we got him better and
on his way again.”

“Very clever. What then?”

“I was to send a message to a Mr. Smith, care
of The Cobourg Hotel, that ‘all was ready’.”

“Mr. Smith, eh?”

“By the next evening, the Wednesday, Chilton
was in my quarters, deliriously drunk – ”

“An’ perky.”

“That, too. Brutus delivered the news in
Cobourg. And at ten o’clock that night, in the dark, this stranger
arrives and announces that he is now Graves Chilton.”

“He didn’t give you his real name?”

“No, I swear. He had no need to, you see. He
had the first instalment of my reward with him, and he assured me
I’d get the rest of it if I managed to keep the real butler under
wraps.”

“Why didn’t he just hop on the stage in
Cobourg at nine in the mornin’?”

“He needed access to Chilton’s belongings.
He’d brought a suitcase full of his own butlering clothes, but when
he rummaged through Chilton’s bags he discovered he was about the
same build. He was particularly interested in the various papers he
found among Chilton’s effects. In the end, he left his own stuff
here and went off with every scrap of the other fellow’s.”

“Off with Brutus the next day to catch the
mornin’ stage?”

“That’s what Brutus told me. I wasn’t the
least bit curious about the reasons behind all these shenanigans,
even though I should have been, perhaps. But I’ve had to battle
this world tooth and nail on my own for more than twenty-five
years, and I’ve had to make myself as selfish and as watchful as I
could – even when I didn’t like what it did to me.”

Cobb sat back, vastly satisfied. He had not
only confirmed the presence of an impostor in Elmgrove, he had
discovered how the ruse had been perpetrated. In the process he had
rescued the real Graves Chilton and, if the roadway stayed as it
was, would be able to deliver him, rumpled but unhurt, to his
rightful owner.

“What happens to me now?” Bessie asked
quietly.

“Well, the way I see it, you did a great
wrong to Mr. Chilton an’ you did so without knowin’ what worse
wrongs might be happenin’ in Toronto because of what you was doin’
here.”

“I couldn’t give up The Pine Knot, could I? I
could take myself elsewhere, I always have, but – ”

“But what would Brutus do – without his
horses?”

She nodded slowly, and dropped her eyes.

“I guess it’s up to the butler in yer
kitchen, isn’t it? You did nail yer shutters shut an’ you did lock
that door more’n once.”

Bessie smiled, and some of the fire returned
to her cheeks. “What’s he going to tell the magistrate, eh? That a
forty-five-year-old woman pleasured him into a helpless pulp?”

Cobb loved the way she laughed with her
eyes.

“You got a point there, and I don’t care a
fig one way or another about that business. But what I gotta know,
an’ you gotta tell me, is the name of the so-called gentleman you
spotted on that letter, the fella who set the whole scheme up an’
oughta be in jail.”

“But I can’t do that, Cobb. I’ve kept my part
of the bargain I made with him. I deserve to have the other half of
my fee. Brutus and I, at long last, might own something nobody can
ever take away from us.”

“You got enough to keep the bank from
foreclosin’, ain’t ya?”

“I’ve already sent them a cheque.”

“You’ll haveta be satisfied with that,
then.”

“Or?”

“Or else I’ll haveta drag ya to the
magistrate an’ have ya charged with conspiracy an’ fraud – fer a
start.”

“But I know nothing about what the ruse was
for!”

“And I believe you. But will the magistrate?
Yer Brutus was seen deliverin’ a fake butler to the stagecoach in
Cobourg – with Graves Chilton’s ticket in his hand and a sled full
of Graves Chilton’s bags. Who’s gonna believe you didn’t help the
culprit make the switch an’ steal that luggage? Are you gonna blame
it all on Brutus?”

Bessie Jiggins did not turn away, did not let
the colour drain from her cheeks. She stared at Cobb with a look
comprised of admiration, fear, bemusement and affection.

“I have only one regret,” she said, “and that
is that I can’t remember how good we were when – you know – when we
were . . .
together
last night.” Then she reached over,
squeezed Cobb’s hand, and gave him the name.

***

Sunday morning for Marc was even longer than
Saturday afternoon and evening had been. He had arrived home the
previous day about two o’clock for a joyous reunion with Beth and
Maggie. Both were in good health and high spirits. Now that she had
discovered the wonders of upright locomotion, Maggie felt she had
to demonstrate every one of her new-found moves several times over.
Beth had been free of cramps and false labour since Thursday and
insisted on bundling up and going for a walk down Sherbourne Street
to the lakefront. Here they watched the ice-skaters and bladed
skiffs skimming over the frozen bay where the north winds had blown
the snow clear. But by the time they got home for the supper that
Charlene had prepared for them (and for her easily impressed
fiancé), Marc was already fretting and wondering how Macaulay was
making out in his effort to distract the visitors from Quebec, and
whether Cobb had made it safely to Port Hope or Cobourg.

After supper, Marc had walked to The Cock and
Bull on York Street, where he found Nester Peck, Cobb’s snitch, and
bribed him to track down Giles Harkness. When he got home, Charlene
and Jasper unrolled the plans for the proposed addition to Briar
Cottage (for the humpteenth time), and made several suggestions
even more outrageous than previous ones. Marc had feigned interest
as best he could. And while he wished nothing more than to drive
straight back out to Elmgrove to relieve Macaulay, he realized that
it was more important that he, like Robert and Hincks, make public
appearances and create, for any overly curious Tories, an air of
normality about his movements and intentions. Thus, on Sunday
morning, while Robert and Hincks made certain they were observed
with their families in their pews at St. James, Marc and his loved
ones made the weekly trek to the Congregational church on Hospital
Street.