Act of Injustice

by Argyle, Ray

  “Help me up, Mr. Babington,” Carpenter pleaded as he caught his breath. “I have awful news for you. The Queen is dead.”

  Queen Victoria had been on the throne more than sixty-three years. No one at the Telegram, and none but the oldest of her subjects anywhere, had known any other monarch. The clock in the editorial room showed a few minutes before two. Leonard called for assisstance, and ran to Black Jack Robinson’s office. In a few minutes, the two men had mobilized the editorial staff to the all-consuming task of recording the passage of an era. Black Jack Robinson ordered all the small ads off the front page and told the pressroom to run fifty thousand copies of the three o’clock edition. An hour later, boys were selling it on the streets for five cents instead of the usual penny.

  QUEEN VICTORIA IS NO MORE. AND A GREAT EMPIRE IS BEREAVED

  “I want every man to scour their beats for reaction,” Leonard ordered his reporters. The bell at City Hall had begun to toll at a quarter past two. Flags dropped to half-mast. The bells of St. James’s cathedral began to chime, followed by others throughout Toronto and all of Canada. Stores and offices brought out black draping and the council chamber was dressed in black. Civil servants were sent home. Mayor Howland dispatched a cable of condolence to Buckingham Palace.

  Leonard arrived home late and exhausted. He had the last edition with him, and as he went through it with Kathleen, he told her how each story had been gathered and how the paper would be putting out a memorial edition in a few days.

  “Everything is changing,” Leonard told Kathleen when they finally settled into bed, a little before midnight. “We’re in a new world, with a new king,” he added. His voice rose with excitement. “An age of science. All these astonishing new things – moving pictures, the motorcar, those two brothers in the States working on a flying machine. Everything is out there for us, Kathleen. We just have to take it.” And he wondered: Would there be any room for the memory of Rosannah in that new world?

  Chapter 36

  THE GREAT FIRE

  April 19, 1904

  With the hanging of the painting of King Edward VII, on the throne for three years, all was in readiness for the grand opening of Toronto’s most palatial hostel, the eight-storey King Edward Hotel. Leonard Babington watched a worker hastily remove a ladder from the lobby as George Gooderham, the whisky distiller who had raised two million dollars to build this splendid symbol of the city’s wealth, sauntered through the front door. Bejewelled ladies applauded while reporters took notes of the ribbon cutting ceremony.

  Leonard gazed with interest at the plush furniture in the lobby and the ornate oak counter where guests were being registered. Looking up, he saw an arched ceiling that rose over the mezzanine where tables had been set up for serving drink and food. He had more on his mind, however, than the celebration for the opening of this new hotel. He was meeting Dr. Thomas Sproule, one of the special guests invited for the occasion. Leonard hoped that Dr. Sproule, who had conducted the autopsy on Rosannah Leppard, might yet be able to tell him more about what had happened to Rosannah the night of her death. Perhaps he’d changed his opinion since that so long ago trial, or maybe there were facts he’d not told the court. Meeting Dr. Sproule tonight might be his final chance to learn the truth of Rosannah’s last hours.

  The crowd was beginning to fill up the lobby, chattering and laughing as they accepted drinks and canapés from hotel waiters. Leonard stood at the wall, next to the painting of King Edward and Queen Alexandra. When he spotted Dr. Sproule he moved to his side. He looked older and heavier than the last time Leonard had seen him, but his welcome was as warm as it had always been. Dr. Sproule spoke of the meeting of the Loyal Orange Order he would attend while in Toronto, and of the welfare work the Order was doing among poor Protestants.

  “The Order is stronger now than ever and represents all the best interests of those who make up our British Canadian community,” Dr. Sproule said. He always talked that way, Leonard thought, as if he was addressing a crowd. That’s how he got to be a member of Parliament, and Grand Master of the Orange Order. Happily, there was no discussion of party politics. Leonard scribbled hasty notes that he would never use in a story – all he cared about was how Rosannah had met her fate. By now the two, drinks in hand, had wandered into the alcove between the hotel’s front counter and the men’s room. A pause in their conversation gave Leonard the opportunity to raise Rosannah’s name.

  “Have you ever given thought to the autopsy you performed on Rosannah Leppard?” Leonard asked.

  “Cook Teets’s wife, you mean?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve never changed my conclusion, if that’s what you’re asking. She died of strychnine poisoning. Who did it, is another matter.”

  “Then you’re not convinced it was Cook?”

  “Never was. The poor devil didn’t have a chance. He’d get a fairer trial these days, now they allow prisoners to testify in their own behalf.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have done it?”

  Dr. Sproule drew his watch from a vest pocket and checked the time.

  “Got to be going,” he said. “Any number of people could have been involved in that foul deed. She had too many men friends. Vandeleur is full of incorrigible characters. Take that Scarth Tackaberry, he’s jumped bail on assault charges. Beat up a man something terrible at Munshaw’s hotel. If he dies, they’ll be looking for a murderer.”

  Tackaberry? Jumped bail? So that explained it. Leonard thought he’d seen Scarth Tackaberry when he went to Allan Gardens on Christmas Eve to buy Kathleen a poinsettia. The man Leonard saw lifting Christmas trees off a wagon looked just like him. By the time he got close, the figure had disappeared. A ghost, or a figment of his imagination? He couldn’t decide which. Leonard left the King Edward and in less than three minutres was at his desk at the Telegram. He wrote a note and posted it on the reporters’ bulletin board. “Information wanted – fugitive named Scarth Tackaberry. May be frequenting hiring halls or the docks, looking for work. Inquire at the saloons on Front st. and in The Ward. Let me know if you hear of his presence in Toronto. – LB, City Editor.”

  Toronto’s poor still huddled in The Ward, the neighbourhood north of Queen Street that stretched drearily from Yonge Street to University Avenue. Immigrants crowded into shacks along its alleys while they struggled for a toe-hold in Canada. Leonard understood how The Ward embraced everything the most comfortable people of Toronto despised – the Irish who fled the potato famines, Jews driven from their homelands by pogroms, Chinese who made it their first home here, and before them, blacks who had found it a safe haven after escaping slavery via the Underground Railroad.

  Leonard knew The Ward well from his forays there while covering crime stories; the robberies, shootings, and killings for which the district was notorious.

  “I was terrified the first time I had to go in there,” he had confessed to Kathleen. “I remember it was a cold, wintry day and I saw kids running in the alleys with no shoes. A girl who must have been no more than twelve said I could lie with her for a quarter. The men all seemed to be drunk. I thought to myself, I’d be drunk, too, if I had to live like that. Yet nobody ever seemed to care. There I was, raised in the clean fresh air of the country. I’d no idea such places exsted. Nor does anyone on the city council, if you believe what you hear.”

  For the Toronto that lived outside The Ward, the new century was shaping up to be all that Leonard had hoped for. The Art Gallery of Ontario was to get its own building, something Owen Staples was sure would make Toronto a city of culture. There were plans for a grand memorial on University Avenue to honour the volunteers of the South African War, while Sir John Eaton presided over meetings of Canada’s first automobile club. At home, Leonard and Kathleen enjoyed their new gramophone machine. They liked the records of the Canadian tenor, Henry Burr, and their favourite song was Silver Threads Among the Gold. Kathleen was preoccupied with her volunteer work at the Asylum, and Leonard kept up his once-
a-month visits to Molly Leppard. He was still hopeful that Molly would help him get to the bottom of what had happened to Rosannah, still convinced that Scarth Tackaberry was somehow involved in her death.

  A little after eight o’clock, tired after a longer than usual day at the Telegram, Leonard was putting on his coat when he heard someone pounding up the stairs to the editorial floor. It was Tuesday, April 19, 1904. A few reporters and the night editor cocked quizzical eyes toward the stairway. Tom Cornell, the copy boy, rushed into the room.

  “Fire, the whole place is on fire! The whole street is burning up. We’re sure to be next. We better get out of here!” Tom couldn’t stand still, so agitated was he at having witnessed flames burst through the roof of a warehouse a street away from the Telegram. Leonard watched him rush about the editorial floor. Alarmed that panic might set in, Leonard told one of the night men to take hold of the boy and calm him down. “I’ll go out on the street and see what’s happening.”

  The evening was cold and blustery and an unseasonable snowfall had begun. Leonard pulled his jacket closer as he stepped onto the sidewalk. He could hear noises of crackling and burning and when he reached Wellington Street, a block below the Telegram, he saw flames eating at the Currie Building. Leonard watched a horse-drawn fire wagon pull up in front of it, one of the largest buildings in the warehouse district. He recognized the fire chief, John Thompson, who led his men into a neighbouring building, and soon emerged on the roof. From there, they threw down lines to haul up hoses. A great roar sounded and the building across the street exploded, enveloping others on both sides of Wellington. The firemen, trapped and helpless as the blaze ate out the innards of the building on which they stood, scrambled to slide down their lines to the ground. Leonard saw chief Thompson fall the last six feet. He lay there until his men carried him off.

  Elbowing aside bystanders, Leonard hurried back to the Telegram. He found the night staff clustered at the windows watching the fire. He dispatched Tom Cornell to the homes of his three best reporters, with instructions to come downtown right away. He gave Mary Dawson, the night telegraphist, orders to rouse Black Jack Robinson and every senior editor she could reach by phone or telegram. Then he turned to night editor Jerry Snider. “The fire will be here soon. We’ve got to try and save the building. Pray to God the sprinklers will work. We need to get a hose up on the roof.” He remembered seeing a faucet on the roof and it was there that composing room foreman Charlie Crosby led his typesetters. They’d found a hose in the basement and lugged it to the top floor. Men stumbled as they struggled to connect the hose. Once hooked up, they began to spray water onto loose sparks that were landing on the roof. By now, the fire had burned its way up Bay Street and the Office Specialty Building, next door to the Telegram, was in flames. Its roof collapsed with a roar, setting fire to dozens of desks, chairs, and other furniture.

  “Get back from the windows,” Leonard ordered the night staff. Just as he did, one window blew out with a tremendous roar, sending glass across the editorial department. He picked shards from his jacket and watched water from firemen’s hoses cascade onto desks and the floor. The noise and smells coming in through the windows told him that burning buildings along Wellington and Front streets had begun to collapse. Reporters arriving at the Telegram spoke of boats anchoring far out in Toronto Harbour to escape the flames. One told of how drinkers at the Queen’s Hotel deserted the bar to man hoses and play water on the building. Guests were told to fill pots, pans, and pails while the staff tried to smother sparks with wet blankets.

  Owen Staples and Lillian were enjoying dinner with their friends the Brigdens on Rose Avenue, close enough to the fire for them to hear the commotion of crowds shouting advice to the firemen. Owen raced first to the bridge at York Street, sketched the scene there, and made his way down Wellington Street before reaching the Telegram, a swatch of drawings under his arm. Sparks had landed on his jacket and smoke and dust had blown onto his face. “You look a sight,” Leonard told him, “but we’re glad to see you. Some of the boys are putting their stories together. We’re going to lose everything in the wholesale district, maybe a hundred buildings are on fire.”

  For the next three hours, the fate of the Telegram – the last bastion preventing the spread of the blaze up Bay Street and into the city centre of King and Yonge – rested on fate and the wind. By eleven o’clock, the fire began to burn back into the structures it had demolished, leaving only outside walls and a few blackened storefronts. Banker William Cawthra’s sandstone mansion at the corner of King and Bay Streets had been saved, the gold door-knob on its front door having been removed and stored safely away. More firemen were on their way by train from Hamilton, Buffalo, and London.

  It had taken Mary Dawson an hour to raise the Grand Trunk telegraph operator in Mimico, the western suburb where Black Jack Robinson lived. When a telegraph boy finally appeared at his door with Leonard’s message, he hitched a horse and buggy and headed into town. He abandoned the buggy at Portland Street and walked the rest of the way. Barging onto the editorial floor, he called to Leonard: “Dammit, Babington, it looks like all Toronto’s on fire. I want you to get out there and find out what started this infernal blaze.”

  Surveying the havoc on the editorial floor, Leonard considered how to answer his boss. He told Black Jack that putting out tomorrow’s paper came first. “We’ve got our boys writing up the fire, and Owen’s sketches are down with engraving. We’ll find out the cause later.”

  As he spoke, Leonard looked around at upset wastebaskets and overturned spittoons. There were puddles of water between the desks and a chill wind blew in through the broken window. It was then he saw three burly firefighters come onto the floor. Leonard recognized John Noble, the deputy chief. “We’re doing everything we can to get things under control,” Noble said. “The Queen’s Hotel is saved, and you folks are safe. The fire’s stopped short of the Customs House. Nobody’s died, thank God, but poor Chief’s in the hospital with a broken leg.”

  Leonard was anxious to send word to John Ross Robertson that the paper had survived the fire. The publisher was somewhere in Egypt, enjoying tours of the pyramids and no doubt feasting on Arab delicacies. He called Mary Dawson aside and dictated a telegram to Robertson’s son Charles in London: “Big fire. Telegram saved. Publish tomorrow as usual.”

  More reporters had come in from the streets and Leonard by now had accumulated pages of their notes. He cleared off a section of the copy desk and put paper in a typewriter. His words came quickly as he typed:

  The desolation wrought by the greatest fire in the history of Toronto, if not in Canada, cannot be described simply because, thank God, it does not occur often enough in the lives of men or of cities to have a descriptive term made for it.

  Leonard looked up at the clock on the wall of the editorial room and saw it was about to strike one. He worried about Kathleen and realized he should have telephoned her long ago. Startled by a movement beside him, he saw she was standing at his desk. Her face was smeared and her shoes were sodden and smudged. Whatever had she been up to and where had she been?

  “Kate, my God,” – as he’d lately taken to calling her – “you should be at home instead of here in the middle of this terrible fire. What’s happened to you?”

  “I’ve been at the Asylum all evening. I had a terrible time getting here. The streetcars stopped running and I had to push my way through the crowds. Smoke and ashes all over the place. But that doesn’t matter. There’s something you have to know.”

  “All I know is I want to get you home.”

  “No, Leonard, now’s not the time to be going home. I’ll stay here with you. I don’t care what you say.” Kathleen looked for a chair, found one at the end of the copy table, and pulled it up to Leonard’s desk. She was breathing rapidly as she struggled to hold back tears. Dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, she looked at Leonard as if in appeal for his understanding.

  “We could hear the fire sirens at the Asylum, thoug
h we were never in danger. But that didn’t make any difference to Molly. She was convinced the flames of Hell were about to consume her. She was almost hysterical. She absolutely has to talk to you, Leonard. Says she has something to tell you about Rosannah.”

  Kathleen reminded Leonard that Molly had befriended her when she was first sent to the Asylum. “She protected me from some pretty nasty people, and she taught me what I needed to know to get along there. It was awful to see her in such a state. She only calmed down when I promised you would see her tomorrow.”

  Leonard fidgeted with the pages of the story he’d pulled from his typewriter. “Of course I’ll go and see her – whenever I can get away.”

  More reporters turned up over the next few hours, each with stories of havoc and heroism. Major Anthes laughed about how the Queen’s Hotel was saved by its best customers – “saved by sentiment, they weren’t going to lose their favourite watering hole.” Chuck Fowler, the manufacturing reporter, read a list of buildings destroyed and goods lost.

  “All that cloth stored in the Currie building, they won’t be making neckties of it anymore,” Fowler said. Leonard’s favourite ties had come from Currie’s, including the blue and white one he’d worn that day. Fowler said that Mayor Tommy Urquhart had even considered blowing up buildings to stop the fire. “The Highland Regiment was called from Stanley Barracks and they warned against it. Said explosions would just spread the flames. So the mayor put the soldier boys to work controlling the crowds.”

  Kathleen didn’t speak until the reporters finished their accounts. “Those poor firemen, it’s a miracle no one’s died,” she finally said. “A good thing it happened at night.”

  “Yes, the workers were safe at home,” Leonard replied. “Could you get me a cup of tea, Kate? Kitchen’s one floor up.”

  Kathleen was back in a few minutes with two cups of tea sweetened with sugar.