Turncoat (12 page)

Philander Child wished Marc well in his efforts on Sir John's behalf, complimented him on his good manners, and offered his assistance if it should be required. Walking back to the mill, grateful for Hatch's companionable silence,
Marc went over the evening's conversation. He concluded that he had been told much that had been intended and some that had not.

Coming up to the house, Marc suddenly said, “Who is Mad Annie?”

Hatch snorted. “You really don't want to know that long, sad story.” He placed a fatherly hand on Marc's shoulder and said with mock solemnity, “I'll give you the gory details in the morning.”

M
ARC LAY AWAKE FOR A LONG
while that night, mulling over what had been said or not said. What was really keeping him from sleep was the dread of interrogating Beth Smallman about two men whom she loved and who had been taken from her in the most horrific manner imaginable. At the same time, he was not prepared to discount any suspect, even an attractive and vulnerable one, in advance of the facts. But he was happy that the four gentlemen with whom he had just spent a most pleasant evening had themselves been together during the critical hours of New Year's Eve. He was just about to drift off upon this comforting thought when he heard a door open and a familiar footstep in the hall outside his room.

He waited several seconds before easing himself out of bed, slipping the door ajar, and peering down the dark hallway. This time he caught a glimpse of white nightdress and
a fleeting image of the female form undulating within it before the door to the back section of the house shut it out of sight. Then came the same giggle he had heard the previous night, the only difference being that the figure he'd just seen animating the nightdress was a head taller and a good deal more Junoesque than Mary Huggan's. It was undoubtedly the handsome Miss Hatch.

Well, lad, what did you learn of value last night?” Hatch said to Marc, stabbing a sausage.

The question startled Marc, not because it was impertinent or sudden but because he had been absorbed in close observation of Thomas Goodall and his mistress, Winnifred Hatch. That they were lovers, and by all the evidence frequently and consensually so, could not have been inferred from the cool and formal intercourse between them over the Thursday morning breakfast table. Winnifred moved briskly about, neither smiling nor unsmiling, until the three men had been served, then sat down next to Marc across from her
father and began her own meal. Mary Huggan soon joined her, and the two women exchanged pleasantries. Goodall, as was his custom, kept his eyes locked on his food, which he consumed rapidly but mechanically, as if eating were a duty. Like the miller's, his hands were large, roughened by cold and searing sun, and shaped to the plough and axe-handle.

Was it possible that the proud Miss Hatch was ashamed to admit her attachment to such a plain and taciturn man? Or had it more to do with a sense of obligation to her father? Marc had begun to realize that he had much to learn about the ways of these country folk, and that such knowledge might be necessary to unravelling the mystery of Joshua Smallman's death.

“Did we give you anything useful?” Hatch asked again, and he nodded towards the two women as if to say, “Keep it general.”

“Yes,” Marc managed to say. “Yes, you did. You gave me something definite to ask the gentlemen whose farms I plan to visit today.”

“That's good, then.” Hatch reached across the table and, with Mary Huggan's consent, tipped her uneaten egg and sausage onto his own plate.

“Thank you, Mary,” Hatch said, and the girl blushed to the roots of her pale hair. Winnifred gave her a sharp look, and she blushed anew.

“We'll have to get that blush of yours repaired one of these days,” Hatch said impishly.

“Leave the lass alone,” Winnifred said, and before her father could recover from the rebuke, she turned to Marc and said, “You're likely to find most of the surplus grain among the farms on the Pringle Sideroad north of the second concession.”

Marc suddenly found her face, with its strong bones and dark, perceptive eyes, no more than a foot from his own, and he could hear the whisper of her breathing beneath the taut bib of her apron. Across the table, Thomas uttered a satisfying belch and pushed his chair back.

“Oh, why is that?” Marc said.

“They're good Tories, of course,” Winnifred said, and Hatch let out an approving chuckle. “The Reformers on the Farley Sideroad,” she continued, “are too busy organizing petitions to get a decent crop in, or keep it from the thistles when they do.”

“Winnifred keeps all the accounts here,” Hatch beamed. “She knows the worth of every farmer in the district to the nearest shilling.”

“Don't exaggerate,” Winnifred said, nudging Mary Huggan, who jumped up gratefully and began clearing away some of the plates. Goodall had already stumped out to his chores, unremarked by anyone.

“I'll take your advice to heart,” Marc said gallantly.

“It would be more useful in the head, I believe.”

Mary knocked over a cup; Hatch reached out, caught it, and handed it back to the girl.

“Go put some more water on,” Winnifred said firmly to Mary. “I'll finish up here.” She rose and began stacking the dishes. There wasn't an ounce of self-consciousness anywhere in her body. “I wish you good hunting, Ensign Edwards,” she said with cool solicitude as she went back into the kitchen.

“Don't mind her none,” Hatch said. “She's a bit set in her ways.”

And her straightforward, no-nonsense ways were certainly not those of the young ladies Marc had encountered at the mess parties and the soirees of Government House, ladies whose “aristocratic” breeding and overwrought manners seemed barely able to tolerate the indignities of mud-rutted streets, slatternly servants, uppity tradesmen, and stiff-fingered seamstresses.

“She's quick with figures, mind—like her mother,” Hatch was happy to add. “And a handsome lass, eh?”

Summoning his own good manners, Marc said, “Most men would describe her so.”

M
ARC WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO THE
challenge of eliciting essential and perhaps incriminating information from Israel Wicks, Azel Stebbins, and Orville Hislop—the trio of suspected extremists passed on to him by Sir John. But he was not anticipating with any pleasure the imminent interview with Beth Smallman. The death of a loved one—
especially a parent—was devastating. And while he himself had been a mere five years old when both his parents had died of cholera, he could still recall the numbing sense of loss, the abrupt rupturing of the world he had believed permanent and incorruptible, and the long, bewildering absence that followed and would not be filled. More immediate perhaps was the love he felt for “Uncle” Jabez, who had adopted him and raised him up in ways that would have been inconceivable had his parents survived. Beth Smallman had seen her husband hang himself out of some deep despair, the roots of which Marc knew he must probe, and barely a twelvemonth later she had suffered the unexplained death of a father-in-law she had come to revere as much or more than she had her husband. How and why that affection had grown, and its consequences, were facts he had to learn, if his investigation was to be rigorous and objective.

Taking a deep breath, Marc turned onto the Smallman property.

“You again, is it?”

“My visiting your mistress is no concern of yours,” Marc said when he had recovered from the shock of Elijah's sudden materialization—this time from behind the manure pile in the stable yard. He realized immediately the ineptness of such a reprimand here in the bush, but not before Elijah had guffawed with his own brand of upstart contempt.

“The missus and me'll decide what concerns us,” Elijah said. “We ain't impressed by no fancy uniform.”

Marc ignored the remark and switched tactics. “When did you leave your cabin and walk up to Philander Child's place on the day your master died?” he demanded in his best drill-sergeant's voice.

Elijah's eyes narrowed, and his ungloved fingers squeezed more tightly around the handle of his pitchfork. “And who wants to know?”

“The lieutenant-governor,” Marc said, bristling.

But Elijah had already turned away and was now ambling towards the barn. As he went in, he called back over his shoulder, “Don't tha' be long up there. I won't have ya upsettin' the missus.”

So much for imperial authority.

“YOU'RE WONDERIN' WHY I'M NOT DRAPED
in widow's weeds,” Beth Smallman said.

In truth, Marc was silently noting not the absence of mourning attire but the arresting presence of a plain white blouse, brown woollen skirt, and an unadorned apron that might have been stitched together out of discarded flour sacking. Once again her flaming russet hair was behaving as it pleased.

“Well, there's no one would see them, is there?” she said, once again seated across from him in the tender light of the south window. “Besides, grief goes much deeper than crêpe or black wreaths upon doors.”

“I apologize, ma'am, for the necessity of this interview—”

“Please don't,” she said. “I'm as eager to learn why Father died in the way he did as you and the governor are.” Her face was grave but not solemn. She struck Marc as a woman who would do her weeping at night—more Scots than Irish. “Livin' with ‘whys' that never get answered is as hard as grievin' itself.”

That she was alluding to her husband's death as much as to her father-in-law's was not in doubt. But Marc was not ready to take up that cue. Not yet. “It is the why, the motive, that I need to discover,” he said quietly. “And to do so, I must learn as much as possible about your father-in-law's thoughts and feelings and actions over the past few months.”

“I understand,” she said. Her voice was breathy and low: she would be an alto in the Congregationalist choir, he thought. “I'll help in any way I can.”

“My task is made somewhat easier by the fact that until your husband passed away a year ago, your father-in-law lived and worked in Toronto. We need to focus then on those activities he took up here subsequent to his return.”

“He was born here,” she reminded him, “and grew up on a farm near Cobourg. When his father died, he sold the farm and moved to Toronto—it was still York then. He enjoyed the country very much, but his talents lay in business, in the life of the town.”

“And your husband's?”

Beth paused, smiled shrewdly, and said, “They did not share similar interests.”

Marc decided it was politic to sip at his tea and sample a biscuit before he spoke again. “Jesse was not enamoured of dry goods?”

“While his mother was alive, he pretended to be. When she died seven years ago, Jesse took the money she left him from her own father's estate, moved back here where they were just opening the township, and bought this farm.” She looked down at her tea but did not drink. “He felt he'd come home.”

The scraping of a boot along floorboards announced the entrance of Aaron. Marc waited patiently while Beth fussed over the boy, tucked a biscuit into his twisted mouth, did up the top button of his mackintosh, and escorted him back outside, whispering instructions into his ear as if she were not repeating them for the hundredth time.

When the tea was replenished and she was seated again, she said, “You'll want to know how we met.”

“Pardon me for saying so, but you don't look as though you've been a farm girl all your life.”

“You're very observant for one so … young,” she said. And so coddled and pampered and protected from the true horrors of the world, she implied with her single, taut glance. “But these are genuine calluses.” She showed both her palms while the cup and saucer teetered on her knees. “You learn how when you have to, and quickly.” That she herself was younger than he appeared to be of no relevance.

“You met your husband here, then?”

“My father was the Congregationalist minister in Cobourg. We came up here when I was eight, after my mother died back in Pennsylvania.”

“But your husband was Church of England,” Marc said.

Once again he was raked by that appraising gaze. “A venial sin,” she said. “Congregationalists are a tolerant lot. And democratic to boot.” She watched to see the effect of this last remark.

“Would you say that relations between Jesse and Joshua were strained?”

“Did Father come to the wedding, you mean?”

“Did he approve of the … way his son's life was going?”

“He came down for the wedding at St. Peter's in Cobourg.”

“And that was … ?”

“Almost four years ago. Jess and I came directly here.”

“Did his father visit?”

Each new question seemed to disconcert her just a bit more, but the only outward sign of discomfort was the length of the pause before she could answer. When she did, Marc could see no indication that she was reluctant, withholding, or evasive.