Turncoat (24 page)

The crowd's shouted approval rattled the windows and ricocheted into the rafters. Perry, a squat bulldog of a man stripped to his shirtsleeves and in fighting trim, began his speech at full throttle and cranked it upwards from there in carefully calibrated degrees of vehemence and mockery. His target was Sir John Colborne and the news that, in the final days of his regime, he had secretly signed a bill creating fifty-seven additional rectories for the Established Church, thereby adding a thousand or more acres to the already corrupt and bloated glebe lands of the Clergy Reserves.

The crowd roared its disapproval as one. It cheered each note and jab of Perry's defiance. The occasional dissenting “Nay” or “Shame” was drowned out instantly or used by Perry to goad the faithful to further indignation. The heat in the hall—the heat of exhaled rage, of bodies sweating in winter gear, of anticipation—was growing unbearable as Perry soared to the peak of his impassioned flight.

“We shall no longer tolerate the insolence of high office, the flouting of His Majesty's will by petty appointees of the colonial secretary, the hauteur of Rector John Strachan and his Anglican cronies, the daily repudiation of bills passed by the people's duly elected Assembly! We will march through every village and town in this province and tear these ill-got rectories down, board by arrogant board!”

During the tidal wave of applause that pursued Perry to
his seat, Marc slipped out the side door. He breathed in several draughts of cold, fresh air and set about on the first of his half-hourly rounds. It was completely dark now. Marc studied the steady stream of men moving from hall door to privy and back. The glazed excitement in their eyes, like a flame under liquid wax, was not wholly due to the effects of the fiery rhetoric from the platform. Many, he suspected, would have concealed flasks to draw inspiration from as occasion demanded, but such a limited source could not account for the extent of the weaving and yawing in front of him.

Half an hour later, after the third speaker, a failed Reform candidate from Kingston, had finished, Marc noticed a pronounced increase in the level of inebriation. The crowd, somewhat more subdued during the two speeches following Perry's opening salvo, was pacing itself no doubt for the feature attraction yet to come. At the current rate of imbibing, Marc hoped it would come soon.

“Where in Sam Hill are they getting the stuff?” Hatch said to him outside.

“Damned if I can figure it.” The two men stared at the three privies carefully. They had been erected in such a way that they were set into a hedge-like row of cedars: to mute their vulgar presence perhaps, or to provide in the cedar fringe a ready alternative for male relief. Only some of the men here bothered to use a privy, but they were the ones for the most part doing the weaving and muttering. Marc took a
quick look into each cubicle and in the near-dark could see nothing unusual. No jugs littered the floor or bench.

As he turned back towards the hall, Marc heard a shout that he imagined might have risen from the Highlanders on their first charge at Culloden or King Billy's Protestants at the Battle of the Boyne.

W
ILLIAM
L
YON
M
ACKENZIE WAS CENTRE STAGE
, the spot marked out for him by Destiny—God's or the Devil's, depending on your politics. The heat and stink of the room was overpowering, but the audience pressed forward so tightly that anyone fainting would remain upright and unnoticed. The double doors were open, the principal effect of which was to have the torches shudder more ominously in their tin calyxes and throw a less reliable light on the crowd below. Marc stood on a bench to better monitor the proceedings.

Mackenzie, the Scots firebrand whose name Marc's superiors had never uttered except in contempt, was surprisingly small. Even though he was swaddled in two greatcoats (of different colours), the thinness of his frame and fragility of his bones was evident—in the delicacy of his fingers, which probed and struck the air in rhetorical bursts, and in the dancer's nimbleness of his feet, which hopped and paused in concert with his words. His head was absurdly large for such a body, as if it had been fashioned solely for the passion of
public speech. His blue eyes blazed continuous outrage yet still found moments to dart and judge, or confer brief benediction on those few apostles positioned near enough to receive it. During the first minutes of his jeremiad, the crowd, even those who had been jeering bravely, went quiet, as if some stupefying awe had taken hold. Their messiah did not disappoint.

He reviewed for them the long and sorrowful history of their attempts to gain a legitimate voice in those affairs of state that most affected their lives and the future of their children. There was no need to remind anyone in the room, he said, of the sacrifice already made by a populace comprised almost entirely of outcasts, voluntary exiles, and the dispossessed: ordinary men and women who, like their courageous counterparts in France and the United States, were to be numbered among those first generations of humankind who, in the simplicity of their conviction, said no to tyranny, laid their bodies naked before it, and proclaimed to all oppressed peoples of the Earth: “It shall not pass!”

A rustling thrum and a sustained murmur began to resonate through the hall, wordless but nonetheless coordinated and edged with threat. Marc glanced anxiously towards the big doors but could see no one that mattered. A few souls—exhausted, drunk, or frightened—were slipping out into the night.

The firebrand moved on to catalogue the most recent outrages, pausing between tirades for roars of approval and working the crowd like a seasoned tent-preacher, while his
orange-red hair flared about his face like a demonic halo. The throng hooted and participated in his derision of Chief Justice Robinson and Attorney General Boulton and other charter members of the Family Compact who had three times had him expelled from the parliament to which he had been elected and defiantly re-elected. They laughed wildly when he recounted, with apt mimicry, the stunned response of said worthies when, unable to assume his lawful seat in the House, he had subsequently been elected the first mayor of the new city of Toronto. He paused, took a swig of water from a pitcher, ran his fingers through the shock of his hair, and glared out over the crowd as if seeing, beyond them, their common tormentors.

He changed to the subject raised by his fellow legislator, Peter Perry: the fate of the Seventh Report on Grievances. One by one, and in a voice now more terrible for its calculated restraint, he touched on the particular wounds that festered and burned amongst them: the Clergy Reserves, the ruinous lending policies of the Bank of Upper Canada, the rejection by the appointed Legislative Council of bill after bill that would alleviate their suffering, the graft and bumbling of the Welland Canal Company, the low prices of grain manipulated for the benefit of the mother country and its coddled emissaries here among the ruling clique, the greed and venality of district magistrates more arrogant than English squires or the absentee landlords of Scotland and Ireland.

A chant now rose up from the throng, softening whenever
Mackenzie hammered home a point and swelling to occupy even the briefest pause: “No more! No more! No more!”

The rage had become contagious. The parishioners were slowly metamorphosing into a mob, with a mob's unreasoned and overfocused hate, its craving for a scapegoat. Suddenly Marc realized that this kind of collective outrage was potent enough to propel one of its participants to murder, to a sort of political execution whose sole purpose might be release for pent-up anger. The choice of victim could be arbitrary, as long as he represented the party of oppression. Even someone like Joshua Smallman might well do, particularly if he were behaving like a paid agent of the enemy.

Mackenzie had not quite finished. Having stirred their passions and gained their full attention, he began explaining to them, in moderated tones and with didactic earnestness, the importance of their recent success in getting the Report on Grievances a fair hearing in the British cabinet, of their unequivocal victory in the alien question, of their current control of the Assembly and its bills of supply, and, no mean feat, of the Family Compact's acute embarrassment over the abrupt reassignment of the meddling John Colborne. Indeed, a new governor—a man with no military experience to hobble him, a man of letters who penned travel books and poems—was en route from Montreal to Toronto at this very moment. Now was not the time for precipitate or thoughtless action. The recent and sterling example provided by Jacksonian democracy in the republic to the south
proved that, with patience and unceasing pressure and petition, the voice of the people even in remote regions would be heard and would prevail.

A reverent hush once again gripped the faithful. Hope, however feeble, had been resuscitated.

“What about my rights?” The voice from the crowd was a high-pitched, irreverent cackle.

Mackenzie halted in mid clause. Instantly his gaze fixed the woman twenty feet from him who had spoken. He smiled and, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “And what rights have we not yet addressed, madam?”

Heads craned and feet shuffled.

“I wanta know when the land I've been squattin' on fer twenty-five years is gonna be deeded to me and my young'uns.”

“But squatters' rights have always been protected, ma'am—unless you're perched upon a bishop's birthright!”

The crowd roared its approval of this quip, but not before one phrase tittered through it, lip to lip: “It's Mad Annie!”

From his position Marc could see the portly sheriff trying to force his bulk across the room towards the citizen of his county he admired the least.

“Then why won't the arsehole callin' himself our magistrate assign me the deed?”

“Have you improved the property according to regulations?” Mackenzie said patiently to Mad Annie over the derisory howls of the men around her.

“If plantin' whisky trees and harvestin' a bastard a year are improvements, you shoulda had that piece of swamp years ago!” a neighbourly wag suggested.

“You shut yer fuckin' face, Hislop!”

“Madam, there are ladies in the hall—”

“Fuck the ladies! I want my rights! What kinda dickless wonder are you anyways?”

The sheriff and a brace of constables were closing in.

“We got trouble outside,” Hatch said to Marc, drawing him through the side door and away from the low comedy. At least Mad Annie had redirected the crowd's attention, and, with Mackenzie's own unexpected shift at the end of his speech, Marc felt certain that the evening would conclude without a riot.

“Behind the privies,” Hatch said, hurrying towards an opening in the trees to the right of the outhouses. “Young Farley spilled the beans to me inside.”

Marc followed Hatch, and the two soon emerged into the clearing behind the privies. A few yards farther into the bush, they heard a commotion: low cursing, hissed commands, and a clatter of wood and crockery.

“Damn!” Hatch cried. “Somebody's tipped them off!”

By the time he and Marc reached the scene of the crime, Mad Annie's enterprising progeny had scurried into the trees, lugging their paraphernalia with them. Pursuit was unthinkable.

“Well, I suppose the sheriff will appreciate us confiscating
what's left.” Hatch chuckled as he held up one of the dozen or so clay jugs that remained unbroken.

They walked back to the privies, noting a well-trodden path between the improvised outdoor shebeen and one of the toilets. “How in blazes did they get the rotgut to the customer?” Hatch mused aloud.

“This way,” Marc said. He was pointing to a Dutch door cut into the upper half of the back wall of the middle privy. “Not everyone came here to do his business.”

“Jesus,” Hatch said, “and I bet the ruckus Mad Annie created in there was a diversion while her lads dismantled the operation and hightailed it home.”

Hatch went back into the hall through the side door, but Marc decided to go around to the front door for a final check. He remembered that the shorter constable had left his post there to assist the sheriff in his pincer movement against Mad Annie. The uproar inside appeared to have escalated a decibel or two, and Marc hoped the crowd had not begun to view the hapless Annie Pringle as its scapegoat. As far as he could tell, the pile of potential weapons had not been reduced. Six or seven of the women had wisely come outside (Beth was not among them), and several were standing on alert beside their family sleighs. The Reform rally was nearing its end.

Marc stepped through the double doors—into bedlam.

“I'm gettin' the ladies out!” Durfee shouted at him. “Try to get to the platform if you can!”

In front of him Marc could see only a seething tangle of arms, legs, and contorted faces, the arms ending with fists, and not a few of them wielding stout sticks or cricket bats. As the weapons came crashing down, the thud and crack of wood upon clothed bone or vulnerable skull reverberated above the cries, curses, and howls of pain. A full-scale donnybrook was in progress. But who was fighting whom? And where had the weapons come from?

Marc plunged in. A berserk fellow was indiscriminately swinging a hobnailed stick at a group of farmers in desperate, jumbled retreat.

“We're gonna bust the heads of every one of you republican arseholes!” the attacker screamed, and he lashed out, striking one of his victims on the shoulder and knocking him sideways. Marc leaped ahead and put both hands on the stick before it could be raised again, ripped it out of the lunatic's grip, and clipped him on the jaw. He dropped in his tracks.

The victim groaned. It was Angus Farley, one of the American immigrants Marc had visited late Thursday afternoon. “Who are these hooligans?” he said, helping Farley to his feet.

“Orangemen from Toronto,” Farley rasped. His left arm was hanging limply at his side. “We gotta get to the platform. It's Mackenzie they're after!”