Turncoat (5 page)

Some time later he opened his eyes wide. How long he had slept he did not know, but he soon knew what had wakened him. Connors and O'Hurley were both upright, huddled against the door and fumbling for the latch.

“Jasus, it's cold. We shoulda stayed in Buffalo.”

“Well, I gotta take a piss and I'm not fouling my own nest.”

“Me too, dammit.” O'Hurley was jerking at the latch in the dark.

Then Connors whispered, “Sorry to wake you, Ensign. Ferris and I have got to answer a pre-emptive call of nature.”

The door opened, colder air drifted in from outside, and the peddlers vanished. Seconds later the air hissed with their exertions, but they did not return. Marc reached over and felt for the saddlebags, his own and his hosts'. Both were still there. Once again he fought against sleep—thinking hard.

O'HURLEY HAD HIS EAR AGAINST THE
door. “I don't hear no snorin'.”

“Let me have a gander, before my balls freeze solid and drop off.” Connors eased the door open a crack. The unexpected onset of moonlight allowed him a partial but clear view of the ensign wrapped in his bedroll, his fur cap pulled down over his face against the biting cold of a midwinter night.

“Edwards,” Connors said in a low, amiable voice. “You awake?” No reply. “We're just gonna move the animals to the other side of the cabin.”

“He's out for the night,” O'Hurley said nervously.

“The rum did the trick.”

“We gonna go through with this?”

“Of course we are. We can't take any chances.”

“He seemed like an okay fella to me.”

“You wouldn't last a week on your own,” Connors said without rancour.

The decision had been made after they had relieved themselves in the brush at the foot of the knoll, though not without several minutes of furiously whispered argument.

“I bet that horse's worth fifty bucks,” O'Hurley said, warming to the task at hand.

“It may be too risky to take,” Connors said.

“If only the bugger'd not asked so many questions.”

“Here,” Connors said, and he held out a stout log frozen as hard as an iron bar. “Get on with it.”

“Why me?”

“Your turn, old boy,” Connors said, smiling. “Besides, it was you that blabbed about the rum and my sister.”

With the weapon shaking in his grasp, O'Hurley inched the door farther open, shuddering at every creak it made. But exhaustion seemed to have claimed the redcoat utterly. He would never see the blow that killed him. Perhaps there would even be no pain: he would simply not wake up.

O'Hurley stood over the silent, unsuspecting sleeper, his eyes riveted on the ornate haft of the officer's sabre just peeping above the army blanket. He could sense Connors watching in the open doorway behind him. He raised the log, hesitated, shut his eyes, and brought it down upon the fur cap. He opened his eyes just in time to see the entire bedroll spasm and grow still. There wasn't even a moan. Thank God.

“Jasus Christ and a saint's arse!” Connors yelled. “You can't kill a man with a fly-swat like that!” He ripped the club from O'Hurley's grasp and slammed it down on the rumpled cloth. “And may you rot in Hell like every other English bastard!”

“Go ahead and hit him again, if it makes you feel better.”

The assassins wheeled about in confusion, then dismay. Ensign Edwards stood in the doorway—bareheaded, coatless, unshod—with a loaded and primed pistol in his right hand. “I can only shoot the liver out of one of you, but I assure you I will kill the other with my bare hands.”

Even the smithy of words could find none suited to the occasion.

“I followed you out when you went to take a leak,” Marc said by way of helpful explanation, “and heard everything. You've gone and made a mess of my hat.”

“What're you gonna do?” Connors was able to say at last.

“I want you to hop on that donkey and hee-haw your Irish arses out of this province.”

“Now? In the middle of the night?”

“Now. You're lucky I don't haul you into Fort York and have you hanged before sun-up. Get going before I change my mind.”

The peddlers tripped over one another scrambling out the door. Connors fell into a drift and lost a glove, but he didn't stop to retrieve it. They skedaddled to the donkey as if expecting at any moment to feel a lead ball between their
shoulder blades. The tinkling of copper and ironware and sundry animal grunts were loud enough to rouse every wintering creature within ten miles.

“Hey,” Connors called back from his precarious perch on the donkey's rump, “what about our saddlebag?”

“You can pick it up sometime at the Crawford's Corners post office, if you've got the courage to show up there!”

“You bastard! Our life savings are—” The sentence went unfinished as the donkey foundered in the snow and Connors tumbled off.

“If I see or hear of you two anywhere in this province, you won't have a life worth saving!”

Remounted, cold, wet, and dishevelled, the tinker and the wordsmith cursed the donkey forward, towards the Kingston Road and Toronto.

Marc took one step in their direction, raised his right arm, and fired the pistol. The ball went where it was aimed, into a thick branch just above the fleeing duo.

“Giddy-up, ya jackass! We got a maniac behind us!”

The donkey, true to the breed, slowed down.

That felt good, Marc thought, damn good.

M
ARC JUDGED IT TO BE ABOUT
four o'clock in the morning. The three-quarter moon was shining in the windless, star-filled sky. He saddled up the horse, packed his gear, tossed the peddlers' saddlebag across the withers, and led his
mount back to the Kingston Road. He would ride steadily until he reached Port Hope, rest a few hours, and proceed to his destination early the next afternoon.

He knew he should have taken half a day to escort the would-be murderers to Toronto, but Sir John's warrant and instructions outweighed all competing considerations. Nor could he ride into Crawford's Corners with his pistol primed and a pair of cuffed miscreants clanking the news of his arrival everywhere. Instead, he would have to be content with giving their names and a description to Constable Hatch, who would forward the information east and west by the first available coach or courier. Besides, two bumblers who connived to clobber you with a makeshift club in the middle of the night were dangerous only if you allowed them to be. Still, he would like to have known what their motive was.

As he veered onto King William's high road and let the horse settle into a canter, it occurred to Ensign Edwards that, in a very real sense, he had just experienced his first skirmish in the field, fired his first shot in the heat of battle, and lived to tell the tale.

Up here, about a hundred yards,” Erastus Hatch hollered back to Marc, pointing to a trail of sorts.

“You'd have to know it was here to find it,” Marc said, catching up and drawing his horse to a halt beside the constable's.

“Joshua Smallman was born and raised in these parts. He knew where he was going all right.” Both men nudged their horses forward into the drifts between the trees.

“Then you don't accept the story that he became disoriented in the blizzard and wandered into the deadfall in a fit of panic?”

“You've been reading the magistrate's report,” Hatch grinned. They had met less than an hour before, but Marc was beginning to like him already and, prematurely perhaps, to trust him. “I don't think Child himself believed what he wrote there. But it was the only conclusion that made sense.”

“You think he met with foul play, then?”

Hatch waited until Marc was abreast of him and they had paused to let the horses rest. He turned to look directly at him before answering. “To be frank, I don't. Major Barnaby, the surgeon, came out here with Child and me on New Year's Day after the alarm was raised. Barnaby's an ex-army man and a good tracker. We were able to pick up Joshua's trail despite a little overnight snow, and it led us where we're headed right now. The three of us found the body. Charles looked him over real careful here at the scene and later at his surgery in Cobourg.”

“He died when the deadfall struck him?”

“Possibly, but more likely some time afterwards. His neck wasn't broken. Poor bugger probably froze to death.”

“But why was he out here?”

“I said I didn't think there was foul play, but I also figure he didn't trot out to this old Indian trail to enjoy the scenery on New Year's Eve, leaving his daughter-in-law and guests to fend for themselves.”

“So you do believe he was coming to meet someone. A secret rendezvous, of some kind.”

The horses plunged forward again, wheezing and protesting.

“Or he was out here in search of something.”

“It would have to have been bigger than a moose to be seen in this stuff.”

Hatch laughed, as he had often since their meeting at his house earlier in the afternoon. By temperament and build, the man had been destined to become a miller or smithy. He had a broad, wind-burnished face with a raw, unfinished look to it. That was true of so many of the native-born out here, Marc thought, even though their parents most probably had been undersized, underfed émigrés fleeing famine and persecution. Even their accents vanished, it seemed, in a single generation.

“Don't make sense, does it?” he said.

They dismounted and, with some difficulty (most of it on Marc's part), laced on their snowshoes. The horses had done all they could.

“This is where we found Joshua's big roan,” Hatch said. “Despite last night's blow, you can still see where the poor beast thrashed about.”

“Nothing had been taken or tampered with?”

“Nothing. And Joshua was carrying no money, according to his daughter-in-law.”

“Bathsheba Smallman.”

“Everybody around here calls her Beth. You'll get a chance to ask her yourself. The Smallman farm's right next
to the mill. What she told the inquest, though, was that Joshua told her he'd got a message and had to go out. Nothing more.”

“You found no note or letter on him?”

“No. And neither Beth nor any of the neighbour guests at the party remember any note being delivered.”

Marc took his first giant steps on the raquettes, amazed to find himself on top of the snow. He felt the same light-headed exhilaration that might have come from waltzing on a cloud or striding over a Cumbrian lake—that is, until he tipped sideways into a drift and had to be hauled out by the grinning Hatch.

“You can't tell a snowshoe how to behave,” he said, not unkindly. “Let it take you with it and you'll be fine.”

“You could still follow Smallman's trail this far on that morning?” Marc said once he was upright and moving again.

“Just faintly, but clear enough. Till we came round this cedar.”

They stopped. A few feet ahead the massive boles of several trees formed a natural aisle that any hunter or wayfarer would be foolish not to enter. Even now the scene before them was peaceful and innocent under the fresh snow: except for the huge log that stuck up odd-angled out of the drift at the base of the arch. They moved cautiously towards it, as if its murderous power were still somehow extant.

“Was there any sign that the contraption had been recently re-rigged?” Marc said, staring down at the brute log
and the tangle of rawhide rigging that had provided the trigger for its lethal drop.

“None. As you can see, it's the kind of trap the Mississauga Indians used to make when these were their prime hunting grounds. The rawhide is old and quite dried out. Joshua was just unlucky, I figure. Nine times out of ten this rope'll snap when it's hit and leave the deadfall in place. Still, the log is designed to fall when the shim is given the slightest shock.”

“You searched the area all around here for other footprints or signs of human disturbance?”

“Yes—once we'd recovered from the shock of seeing one of our dearest friends lying there dead and stiff.”

“I'm sorry,” Marc said. “I must remember he was no stranger to you.”

“As soon as he came back to help out on the farm after his son's death last year, we took him into our company. He was one of us. He joined us every Wednesday evening he could.”

“Us?”

“The magistrate, the major, me, and Durfee, the postmaster. He was supposed to be with us on New Year's Eve over at Child's. It's a sort of gentleman's club, made up of like-minded citizens, you might say.”

“Loyal Tory gentlemen,” Marc said with a slight smile.

“That's right,” Hatch said, taking no offence.

“You were all there, then?” Marc said, more abruptly than he'd intended.

“Could one of us have been floundering about out here, you mean? Lurking in the shadows like Madame Guillotine?”