Man in the Shadows (9 page)

Conor had very little religious training. Thomas had not entered a church since he buried Margaret. He was determinedly Irish Catholic, but as a nationality, not a religion. Christmas was a day off at the lumber camps. Easter just meant the bars were closed. Sundays meant some free hours to nurse the wounds of the week. The priests in the camps had given Conor a smattering of religious education when Thomas was out of sight, but mostly they prayed for his eternal soul.

That’s what Conor wanted to do: pray for his soul. But how?

He stared at the statue of the Virgin Mary. He felt a vague glow of contentment, or relief, or something peaceful within. The serenity in the place calmed his nerves and renewed his purpose. He had been heartless with his father; there would be a time for atonement and, maybe someday, true forgiveness. But that would take time. For now, he would not wallow in self-loathing. He had made a mistake, but his father had overreacted. He still believed that Thomas needed to move on with his life. The world outside this sanctuary—the world that, just hours before, he had embraced with passion—had not changed. The sun would rise on July 2 and there was work to do. His future was just as promising as before.

Thinking of his mother delirious and dying on a coffin ship had hardened his perspective, but not his prospects. He couldn’t live his father’s nightmare; he had to chase his own dreams. He breathed a
determined sigh and rose from the pew. He nodded toward the altar, awkwardly genuflected to the image of suffering on the cross and left.

THE
streetwalker’s name was Annie; she was an eighteen-year-old orphan from County Cork. Her parents had both died of cholera when she was ten, and she had had to make her own way in the world. For a while, she begged on the streets, perfecting the needy, pitiful pout of the street urchin. It seemed a natural step to sell her body and make more money. At first, she was in demand—young, somewhat pretty and willing—and for a time she actually worked at Mrs. Campau’s House. Mrs. C. ran the most established brothel on Clarence Street. It was clean, efficient and attracted a better sort. But she had recently replaced her working girls with a new selection to keep the customers interested, and Annie was back on the streets.

She rolled over in bed and looked at her customer. She was no great judge of character, but this was a troubled man. He seemed full of hate even when performing loveless sex. He had paid her well. He had been a little too rough, but he was better company than some of those drunken, vulgar lumbermen. It was getting too late now to return to the streets. The drunks had passed out and family men had gone home. Maybe she could talk this one into another go-round for the same price. “What do you say?” she whispered, breathing softly in his ear, her hand reaching teasingly below his taut stomach. “Any more money to spend?”

He didn’t speak, but she could feel him respond. She smiled as he reached for his wallet in his grey coat and she lay back, bracing herself for another cold, mechanical onslaught.

There was no time for her to react when she saw the knife. She tried to scream, but his right hand tightened over her mouth. He smoothly dug the blade into her left breast. Her body quaked with pain. Her
mind told her to hit him, kick him, attack him, but her arms and limbs were frozen in shock. Her murderer smiled at her helplessness as he plunged the knife deeper and slashed it across her chest.

“You might have recognized me,” he whispered, almost pleasantly. “It’s better this way.”

He felt her muscles relax in death. Quickly, he washed off the blood and removed the money he had given her. She won’t be needing it, he thought.

CONOR
crossed back over Sappers Bridge into Uppertown. He retraced his steps from hours before toward Sparks Street. Where else could he go? He leaned against the imposing, closed door of the Toronto House and fell asleep. His tie was askew, his shirt soaked with sweat and his one good suit jacket rumpled, dirty and worn.

At dawn, Mary Ann Trotter opened the door, gently woke him and said, “There’s an extra bed upstairs.”

Happy birthday, indeed.

THAT
morning, in a small upstairs room on Clarence Street, police discovered the naked body of a woman, torn to shreds by a knife. It was a room that people rented by the hour. A prostitute, probably killed over money, they deduced. The killer was long gone by now. The two policemen glanced around, looking for clues, saw none and ordered the body removed. She would be buried in a pauper’s grave. There would be a perfunctory investigation, and they would close the book on a life to which no one had ever paid much attention.

The first murder in the new capital of Canada would never be solved.

The fate of our land

God hath placed in your hand

Polly Ryan arrived fifteen minutes early. She sat in a tavern in LeBreton Flats, nursing cheap gin and waiting. No one paid her much attention. She knew she was still attractive to men, but she also knew that after a few drinks, most women were. She looked after herself, but there was a stifling sadness about her. She had not stopped mourning her husband. She wondered if she ever would.

She had to support herself. He would understand that. And she had her causes. They were his causes, too.

At one table, some men were playing cards, and she noticed money changing hands. At the bar, a lone patron was alternating spitting tobacco juice into a spittoon and emptying a bottle of grey-brown liquid. Whisky, she assumed. The drinker watched her with hazy lust, but made no moves toward her. It was the kind of establishment where single women looking around for strangers was quite common. But she wasn’t looking at the other people; she was watching the door.

He arrived right on time, looked around the dark room as if he were searching for someone who wasn’t there and left. No one seemed to notice. Except her. His face was hard to identify in the bright attack of light from the doorway, but Polly knew it was him. She finished her drink and left.

She followed him down the street and around the corner to the back of a wood-frame building. The streets were quiet. Not peaceful, just empty. She expected the building would be empty as well, and there would be no one else in the room where they would meet. Just her and him. He would give her instructions, and she would follow them. Just as she had promised.

F
or almost two weeks, Conor had been staying at Mrs. Trotter’s Toronto House. She gave him chores to do, supposedly to pay for his room and board, but he knew he was a charity case. He had given them an edited story of what had happened with his father. Even fragments of Thomas’s experiences were met with great sympathy.

He couldn’t tell what his relationship was with Meg. Friend or something potentially more than that? She obviously enjoyed his company. He found himself becoming more comfortable with her, but there were doors he left shut. Especially about his past. Meg suggested he approach Thomas to try to reconcile, but Conor bristled. “Not yet!” It was the only time he had spoken sternly to her, and neither wanted it repeated.

At Mrs. Trotter’s table, dinner was a treat. It was how he imagined a college seminar would be—engaged, inquisitive, challenging. She encouraged Conor to talk history and politics with Will, and asked him to tell stories he had heard from D’Arcy McGee. He loved showing how he knew the men behind the political spectacle. He even mimicked McGee’s style and inflection. He recounted one night in Lapierre’s when Macdonald initiated a bunfight by attacking
Liberal MPs who didn’t get some joke. Will and Meg loved Conor’s anecdotes. Mrs. Trotter scolded him. “I was hoping you would talk of legislation and political enterprise.” But Conor knew she also loved a good story.

Conor told one story he knew Mrs. Trotter would find interesting because she admired the middle road of compromise and conciliation. In the heated days before Confederation, a Grit backbencher who always voted against Macdonald fell ill and was away for months. On his return, Macdonald crossed the floor, shook his hand and declared, “I’m delighted to see you back in good health so you can get on voting against me.” The man didn’t become a Macdonald supporter, but from then on was absent for many key votes.

“Hmm. Have you told Mr. McGee that story?” Mary Ann Trotter asked.

At night, Conor was in a kind of torment, just down the hall from Meg, so tantalizingly close that it drove him nearly senseless. Sometimes in the middle of the night, he would awake and yearn to knock on Meg’s door, but he was certain she would be insulted by such effrontery. And so she should. He must act like a gentleman. And there was always the prying eye of Mrs. Trotter. What if she heard him? He shuddered to think of it.

MID-JULY
to most Ontario Protestants meant only one thing: the Orange Parade. The brash display of Protestant power was illegal in most of the Empire, but not in Canada, and certainly not in “Loyal True Blue and Orange” Ontario. Conor had spent most Julys in Ottawa but had never gone near an Orange Parade. All he knew about the Glorious Twelfth was that it was a Protestant day and it was wise for Papists to lie low. He didn’t know a single Roman
Catholic who had been to an Orange Parade. That piqued his curiosity, and his daring. “No one can keep me away from anything,” he told Meg.

His father’s terrible story had sparked in him a new willingness to judge British values. All his life, he had casually accepted the greatness of the Empire as a matter of course. Now he was learning that its glory came with trappings and its power came from brutality. He needed to discover what, and who, made up this country. Maybe then he could better understand his father, and himself.

For a week, he had urged Meg to join him. “I just want to peek behind the fence,” he insisted. “I won’t infect the crowd.” He rubbed his red hair and joked, “I’ll even wear a bowler hat and cover up.”

Reluctantly, she agreed. “You won’t like what you see,” she warned. “And neither might I.”

As they left the Sparks Street boarding house, Mary Ann Trotter pulled Conor aside. “Be careful,” she said. “Please be careful.”

CONOR
O’Dea was the only Roman Catholic in the crowd as the soldiers marched on July 12, 1867. “King Billy” majestically led the parade on his gleaming white horse. Conor noticed that it was actually Matthew Lindsay, who ran a dry-goods store on Rideau Street. Mr. Lindsay was a quiet sort with simple tastes, a stalwart of the Methodist church, a teetotaller, a family man who never wore anything brighter than a grey suit. Today, he was resplendent in flowing wig and garish uniform. Today, he was William of Orange—the conqueror of Ireland.

The marchers behind him wore bowler hats and orange sashes and strutted proudly. If you failed to notice the sea of orange sashes, they sang about it, over and over again.

The sash. The Protestant symbol of supremacy. The Glorious Twelfth. On July 12, 1690, King William of Orange crushed the Irish by the shore of the Boyne River. To Protestant loyalists, the Battle of the Boyne solidified Britain’s righteous rule over Ireland. To Irish Catholics, the Orange Parade was a heinous reminder of the day Britain strengthened its grip on Ireland’s throat.

Conor tried to look into the eyes of the marchers. He saw some of Will’s friends and some he thought were his. He asked Meg, “Is it true that most Protestants are members of the Orange Lodge?”

“About a third, I read somewhere.” She smiled at a drummer she knew. Her smile was too friendly. It infuriated Conor.

“I know some of these marchers, too,” he said. He wondered who the drummer was.

“I know lots of them,” she answered, her eyes following the parade’s progress. “My father was an Orangeman, you know.” Her words hit Conor like the kick of a mule. He knew the power the lodges held and that every Orangeman wasn’t a bigot, but still, her father! “It was the fastest way to get a job,” she continued, unaware how her words were affecting him. “Especially in Toronto.”

All his life, he had heard the taunts of the Protestant bullies, had listened to his father complain about the oppressive Orangemen, but he had ignored it all as idiocy and fanaticism. But these marchers were neither idiots nor fanatics. That was the most horrifying part of it. They were businessmen, teachers, politicians and clergy—everyday people, some of stature and importance, marching in a solid line.

At the end of the parade, the youngest boys marched, perhaps the most proudly of all. The future. They chanted another catchy tune:

Conor’s ears rang with the sound of bigotry. What was he doing, standing in the crowd, watching King Billy’s soldiers parade? What was he doing with an Orangeman’s daughter?

“You know that we aren’t still members of the lodge,” she said, reading his thoughts.

“Then what are you?” he asked, not intending to sound as cruel as his words came out.

“I’m a person, that’s all.”

Conor didn’t answer. It wasn’t that simple. People were categorized: winners and losers, good guys and bad, us and them.

The marchers started another chant:

Meg blushed, appalled and embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Conor,” she said. “I’m so ashamed.” She took his arm and held it for comfort.

“It’s all right,” he answered, vacantly. “I understand.”

But he didn’t understand. And she knew it. No matter what self-styled religion her mother practised, the fact remained that Conor
had fallen for an Orangeman’s daughter. They were from different worlds.