The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (41 page)

I made my way, as inconspicuously as possible, along the iron fence, accepting an occasional kick in the backside rather than fight back and draw even more attention to myself.

“Where are you headed?” a voice off to my left said. Fielding was leaning on the Bannerman Park side of the fence, watching the riot through the iron bars, notebook in hand, frantically scribbling. It was like some tableau of her life: Fielding the critic, aloofly watching a riot from the safe side of the fence.

“If you’re planning to make another speech, I’d choose a different theme if I were you,” she said.

She was wearing a heavy woollen overcoat and a stevedore-style stocking cap, her hair hanging down from beneath it. I noticed that her hair was greying and that it had picked up a yellowish tinge from the smoke of cigarettes. But it was still the thick and full hair of a thirty-five-year-old woman. A strand of it, when the wind blew, clung between her lips. She pulled it away with exactly the same flourish of annoyance as when she was a girl. Her cheeks were pink with the cold, her nostrils raw from rubbing and over her eyes there was a glaze of wind-bidden tears, which she kept blinking back. In spite of her overcoat, her lips were quivering. It made me want to touch them with my fingers. For an instant I saw her as I had seen Newfoundland when I had returned to it the first time. It was as if we had never met and never would, Fielding as she would have been if I did not exist, a person apart from me who would remain when I was gone. The world resumed; the mob roared all around me and a gust of wind that seconds ago had come in from across the water blew hard against my face.

“I didn’t think you actually covered anything,” I said, gulping down a lump in my throat. “I thought you only wrote about what you read in other papers.”

She wryly smiled. “I just followed the crowd,” she said. “They went right below my window.”

“The Squireses are still inside, both of them, Sir Richard and Lady Helena,” I said. “I’m trying to get in there, but I’ll never make it by myself, I’m such a runt. I don’t suppose you’d help clear the way for me.”

“What good will you be able to do once you get inside?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But for all I know, they may be in there by themselves.”

Fielding looked at me, then at the Colonial Building, pursed her lips, sighed. “I’m sure there’s a column in it,” she said. She put her notebook and her pencil in the pocket of her overcoat, passed her cane through the fence to me, undid her overcoat, hiked her dress up above her knees, then, with surprising quickness, climbed onto the fence, hoisting herself up onto each of the rungs with her good leg, then lifting the other. I saw the bad leg, or the shape of it, at least — she was wearing longjohns — for the first time. It was not malformed, it seemed, just shrunken, withered, each part in proportion to the others, as much of it as I could see, at least. It might have looked perfectly normal on a woman half her size.

With one leg on either side, standing on top of the fence, she paused to look out over the crowd, shook her head. Then she climbed down, good leg, bad leg, good leg, bad leg, as before. She jumped the last few feet to the ground, took her cane from me and waded into the crowd. She took off her hat and stuffed it in her pocket, shook out her hair, I presumed so the men, seeing that she was a woman, might let her through.

For a while it worked. The more tractable part of the mob, the rear one-third of it, stood aside when she prodded lightly at them with her cane. I followed her, my hand clinging to the belt of
her overcoat, hiding behind her lest I be recognized. She tried to make her way to the front steps, but everyone else was trying to do the same, and we were gradually pushed to one side as the mob surged forward.

“We’ll never get in through the front,” Fielding shouted. “We’ll have to try the side.” We doubled back and went along the fence, where the going was easier because the crowd was thinner. We made our way past the west corner. Fielding put her cap back on, tucked her hair up under it, buttoned up her coat. She looked like a ringleader-sized man.

There was a door without a handle on the side of the building. We pounded on it; Fielding tried to break it down. “We already tried it,” said a man who mistook us for fellow rioters. “Someone’s gone off to get an axe.”

“I can go up the drainage pipe,” I said. “It’s not that high.”

“I might as well go with you,” Fielding said. As the two of us, Fielding second, began to scale the pipe, a clump of men still believing us to be of their faction gathered to cheer us on and a couple of them even gave Fielding’s rump a hoist to get her started. I had little trouble shinnying up the pipe, but I could hear it creaking with Fielding’s weight and that of the men who had started up after her.

“Smallwood,” she gasped. I looked down. She was hugging the pipe, leaning her forehead against it, eyes closed, face beet red.

“Go back,” I said. She shook her head.

“Resting,” she said breathlessly, a lit cigarette at the corner of her mouth. I kept going. Just as I was climbing in through a broken window of the main chamber, I was set upon by a member of the constabulary, who tried to push me back out.

“I’ve come to help Sir Richard,” I shouted, clinging to the window sill with both hands, which the constable eyed, billy club raised to strike. “I’m Joe Smallwood,” I said.

“Smallwood?” I heard a voice I recognized as Sir Richard’s say from inside.

“Yes,” I shouted just in time to freeze the constable in mid-swing.

“Let him in, Byrne, let him in,” I heard another man say. The constable pulled me inside.

“The woman behind me is with me, too,” I said, “but the men below her are part of the mob.” The constable looked down.

“They’re all men,” he said. I checked to make sure that Fielding was still there.

“That first one is Miss Fielding of the
Telegram
,” I said.

A man I recognized as Chief Inspector Hutchings of the ’Stab joined the constable and me as we helped Fielding in through the window, after which she collapsed on the floor, clutching her chest, breath surging from her as if she had been immersed in ice-cold water. I knelt beside her.

“Are you all right?” I said. She nodded.

“Catch … breath … be all right,” she wheezed.

“We’ve got to pry that drainage pipe loose or they’ll all come in this way,” Hutchings said.

As the leading edge of the mob was progressing up the pipe, we looked about for something we could use as a lever and settled on the Speaker’s mace, the narrow end of which barely fit between the building and the drainage pipe. Fielding recovered, and with all four of us pulling on it, the mace dislodged the top joint of the pipe, making it impossible for anyone to climb beyond the first storey. The man farthest up the pipe shook his fist at us. “We’re coming back with ladders,” he said.

All this time, Sir Richard and Lady Squires must have been standing as I saw them now, arm in arm on the legislature floor. Lady Squires wore a maroon cape pinned at the throat with a brooch but was otherwise not dressed for the outdoors; neither was Sir Richard, who wore a black longcoat and a vest.

“Smallwood, Fielding,” Sir Richard said, “what are you two doing here?” It sounded as if by “here” he meant “together.”

“God help you,” Fielding said, “but we’re the reinforcements.”

The men we had prevented from scaling the drainage pipe hurled a volley of rocks through the broken windows.

“We’ve got to take cover,” Hutchings said.

“The Speaker’s room,” Lady Squires said, and we followed her to a large door behind the Speaker’s chair. The Speaker’s room adjoined the main chamber, and it was not much bigger than a kitchen, but the door, which we bolted and barred with the Speaker’s desk, was made of heavy mahogany. There was a lamp, but Hutchings advised we not use it, for fear the mob would see the light beneath the door. He said there were constabulary members outside the main chamber and they had so far been successful in holding back the mob.

It was dark in the Speaker’s room and we could only vaguely make each other out. We all fell silent for a while. I looked at Fielding. She was here to help the Squireses if she could, had risked injuring herself to help them, showed no sign now of wanting to let them fend for themselves despite our situation. I could not reconcile this woman with the girl who had been so eaten up with bitterness that she had written that letter to the
Morning Post
to get me into trouble. It did not seem to me that even when drunk, she would stoop so low. She seemed now more like the sort of woman who would sacrifice herself for a lover, even one as ungrateful as Prowse had proved to be. The hunch I had had at Sir Richard’s house the night we hatched our own letter-writing scheme did not seem so far-fetched as it had then. She might have confessed for Prowse. I could not stand the thought that she had ever loved anyone but me that much, but perhaps she had. I had known myself what it was like to be favoured by Prowse, remembered how important he had made inclusion in his circle seem to be.

Shouts of “Hurray” from outside, as if some new hurdle that lay between Sir Richard and the mob had just been cleared, brought me out of my revery.

“What in God’s name do they want?” Sir Richard said.

“You,” Fielding said.

“Me?” Sir Richard said, as if this was the first he had heard that the riot had anything to do with him, as if he thought he had just been caught up in some pointless conflagration like everybody else, as if it was inconceivable to him that others might value his well-being less highly than he did.

“Well, this is quite a fix we’re in,” Lady Squires said.

Sir Richard turned to me. “Do you actually think they’ll do me harm, Smallwood?” he said.

“As far as I can tell,” Fielding said, “the only remaining subject of debate is the mode of execution. Several have been proposed and dismissed on the grounds of being too good for you.”

“Miss Fielding,” Lady Squires said, “I can barely hear you above the sound of your knees knocking together. Do you always talk this much or only when you’re terrified?”

“My God, Smallwood,” Sir Richard said, “they really do mean to murder me?”

“Nonsense,” Lady Squires said, taking off her cape and fanning herself with her hand, “there’ll be no one murdered here today.” She draped the cape across a chair. “They’re nothing but a crowd of ruffians and cowards. They wouldn’t dare do anything. We should march straight out the front door, that’s what we should do, and face them down.”

“They’re drunk, Lady Squires,” Hutchings said. “They’re not in their right minds; they’re all worked up. There’s no telling what they’ll do. I don’t think we should leave this room.”

“This is a fine state of affairs, I must say,” said Lady Squires. “The prime minister of a country forced to hide out from his own people in some cubby-hole. My God, what is the Empire coming to?” She looked at Sir Richard, but it was obvious that neither the outrage to the office of prime minister nor the unprecedented depths to which the Empire had sunk were uppermost in his mind.

“I can’t believe it,” Lady Squires said. “It’s not like Newfoundlanders to carry on like this. It can’t just be booze that has them so worked up. The Tories started this, you mark my words.”

“I hope no one will stoop so low,” Fielding said, “as to invoke that old cliché about how poverty, chronic unemployment, malnutrition and disease bring out the worst in people. As to what inscrutable impulse causes people to take out their frustrations on the very politicians they voted into office — ” She shrugged.

“If booze was their excuse,” said Lady Squires, “you, Miss Fielding, would be out there with them. You smell like a one-woman riot. I can just imagine what they’ll say about us at Whitehall, Richard, when they hear of this. Squires, the man who was prime minister when the Newfoundlanders ran amok, that’s how they’ll remember you. There’ll be no postings abroad for us after this, let me assure you.”

Suddenly there was a loud pounding on the door.

“Merciful God,” Sir Richard said, as Byrne and Hutchings drew their billy clubs and I picked up a poker from the fireplace.

“Are you there, Sir Richard?” said a voice from outside. “Are you there? We’ve come to escort you out.”

“Is that you, Emerson?” said Lady Squires. Emerson was a member of the opposition.

“Oh, my God,” said Emerson, “are you in there, too, Lady Squires?”

“Yes, I’m in here, too. I’m an elected member of the House of Assembly and the wife of your prime minister, where else would I be? This riot is all your fault — ”

“We didn’t think they would take it this far,” Emerson said, his voice quavering. “It’s got out of hand; we can’t control it. We’re afraid they may set fire to the building.”

“You lot should have thought of that when you got up this parade,” Lady Squires said.

“Emerson,” Hutchings said, “how many of you are there?”

“Thank God, it’s Hutchings,” Emerson said. “There are four of us, sir.”

“Well then, you take Lady Squires out and the four of us will stay here with Sir Richard until you get back.”

“I’m not going anywhere without my husband,” Lady Squires said. I whispered to Sir Richard that he should tell her he would be safe and urge her to leave. He nodded distractedly, but said nothing.

“If Richard and I go out together, they’ll leave him alone for fear of harming me,” Lady Squires said. “I’m everyone’s best chance of getting out of here unharmed.”

“I don’t think we can count on them to act like gentlemen at this point,” Emerson said.

“Don’t speak to me about gentlemen. You’re a disgrace, an absolute disgrace is what you are. You and your crowd put them up to this. You’re no better than Guy Fawkes. You should all be shot as traitors — ”

“Lady Squires, please — ”

“I believe,” Fielding said, “that Mr. Emerson’s main reason for wanting to save your life is to avoid being blamed for your death, which is to say that he will guard you as though you were his reputation, so you need have no fear.”

She was nearest the door and, before Lady Squires could protest, unbolted it, grabbed her around the waist, threw her out into Emerson’s arms, then bolted the door again.