In this small, unlikely capital, politicians were all around him. Most were puffed up and self-important, but there was something vital about them as they plotted, negotiated, schemed and occasionally actually achieved. They were devising a blueprint for a new country. And they were gentlemen. He studied their movements, practised their accents and copied their dress. He strove to become as shrewd as John Macdonald, as dogged as George Brown, as overbearing as George-Étienne Cartier, as eloquent as D’Arcy McGee—and more determined than the lot of them. If he met the right people, if he accomplished the right things, he would become as rich as a railway baron and as happy as a prince. And he would leave far behind his life in a hardscrabble lumber camp and dirt-poor Irish shanty town.
Conor began enjoying the space between his old life and the new. It was liberating, proof that he was advancing. Annoying his father was a sign of his emerging success. He went through the motions of helping his father out at the tavern, sharing the occasional meal, talking the smallest of small talk, but a coldness developed. What did they really have to say to each other anymore? Conor was preparing for a life that didn’t include Thomas. He was nice to the people in the neighbourhood, but he found them more quaint than inspiring.
“I am worse than a snob,” he told his emptying glass. “I’m a brat and a bully.”
He rubbed smoke from his eyes and thought, The masquerade is over. No more sneaking into the halls of power, acting as if he belonged. No more saying he was a speechwriter when he was really just an assistant. No more posing.
He ordered another whisky. The liquor made him think clearly. How had he thanked his father for years of sacrifice? By taking Thomas for granted and belittling his ignorance. He had betrayed his own people. He had been … Come on, he thought, you’re a man of words, think … He had been … cavorting with the enemy. That was it. Cavorting with the enemy. Macdonald was one of them; so was Meg’s father. What kind of judge of character was he? These were the sorts of people he admired? He was a fool who would never amount to anything. And he didn’t deserve to. He said aloud, “Jane Austen can—”
“Conor! I’ve finally found you.” It was Meg.
He almost dropped the glass of whisky.
“Meg, you can’t come in here,” he slurred.
“I can go wherever I want. You do.”
He looked around. No one seemed to notice. By now, everyone had drunk so much that they were engrossed in their own stories, telling their own lies. Drunks don’t listen, they talk; they don’t think, they react. He learned that at Lapierre’s.
“Come.” She tried to pull him out of his chair. “Let’s go.”
He resisted and reached for a beer to wash down the whisky.
“I’m happy here.”
“You don’t look that happy to me.”
She let him stay seated and went over to the bartender. “How much?” she asked. She was shocked by the price. Either he had drunk an extraordinary amount or she was being cheated. She paid the barkeep, left a modest tip and dragged Conor out to the street. He was wavering unsteadily, but was able to walk the few blocks to Parliament Hill. “Lie down,” she instructed. He did as he was told, stumbling to the ground. He lay on his back and watched the sky spin madly. It was a clear night, and the stars glistened and spun like a kaleidoscope. He was afraid he might be ill.
“What do you see?” she said.
“I see stars.” It came out as shtarshs.
“Look at them as if it’s the first time you’ve ever seen them, and tell me what you see.”
He composed himself staring at the Big Dipper. It was the only collection of stars he knew by name. “I feel I can reach up, pull the handle and grab them,” he said.
“Pull them from the sky?”
He laughed. “Maybe.”
She let the moment lie; let him think about this for a minute; let the other stars come into focus. Her mother had taught her to love nature, not manmade idols; to worship God’s creation, not an imaginary creator; but when she looked at the stars, she felt there must be something else. Some purpose. Something greater than simple existence.
“There are things nobody can take away from us,” she said.
“Is this that nature stuff you admire?” He was trying to be cruel.
She ignored him. “It’s a simple truth,” she said and sighed. “What’s wrong, Conor? You’re not a good enough actor to affect sarcasm. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I lied to you by the river. I have read some Tennyson. I told you I hadn’t.”
She looked confused. That was just idle small talk.
“A man in one of the lumber camps had a book of poetry, but I didn’t understand it. I don’t understand anything. I just say things to sound impressive.”
“How old were you when you read it?”
“I don’t know. Ten, maybe twelve. His name was Tex. He was trying to teach me, but I couldn’t follow it.”
“Everything has been so hard for you,” she said. “I can’t imagine.”
“I don’t know that. All I know is …” He braced himself and said it: “I’ve been cavorting with the enemy.”
“Good Lord!” she exclaimed. “Do you know how stupid that sounds?”
It did sound melodramatic. But melodrama fuels a drunk.
“Are you saying I’m the enemy?”
“You, Macdonald, the drumming marcher, your father, your—”
“People marching. So what? I thought if you didn’t like something, you’d want to change it.”
“Why bother?”
Why bother? Wasn’t that the point: to bother to change what you don’t like, to bother to get it right? “What about Mr. McGee? He’s as Irish as St. Patrick, and he’s not running away.”
“That’s different,” he said. But he knew it wasn’t. Somehow, McGee made sense of the contradictions and confusions of life.
She moved closer to him. “While you wallow in self-pity, there’s a world out there. You wanted it so much. Don’t lose it.” He didn’t respond, and she added, “Don’t run away. Get bothered. I like you that way.”
He leaned toward her, his breath reeking of cheap whisky. She gently pushed his nose up toward the heavens and they stared at the night sky together. The Milky Way looked like painter’s strokes on a jet-black canvas. The North Star beckoned amid the clutter of lights. She loved the sky. It was eternal. Infinite. Mystic.
Conor closed his eyes tightly and tried to think like his father. Meg’s life had been so much easier than his. Sure, her father had been killed, but off she went to London for an education. She may not be upper-crust, but she had a rich aunt who helped the family out and an understanding, deep-thinking mother. He had nobody. She was right about one thing: she couldn’t imagine how hard it had been for him and how hard it was still going to be. She couldn’t picture herself trying to claw her way out of poverty, working to open doors in a closed society.
“Open your eyes,” she said, “and look at me.” He let his eyes adjust to the sky’s splendour. “You know what you need to do?” He didn’t answer, and she didn’t wait for a response. “Just be yourself. Quit trying to be someone you’re not. You don’t need to try to impress people; you are impressive.” Her hair was falling in her face. She brushed it aside. “Don’t forget about the Orange Parade. It happened. It’ll happen again. But don’t let the bigots stomp over your own ambitions.”
He smiled to himself and thought, That’s the kind of thing D’Arcy McGee might say.
“What happened with your father was a shame, but you won’t find forgiveness in a bar. You’ll find it out here, or”—she touched his left arm—“you’ll find it with me.” She pulled him closer, and he felt his anger dissolving. He couldn’t summon his father’s resentment and fury, not in the arms of this Protestant girl. They kissed cautiously.
“What’s happening, Meg?” Conor was afraid she would see his eyes filling with tears. “It’s all spinning too fast.”
“I don’t know. All I kn
ow is that you are a complicated mess of a man, and I rather like the idea of trying to sort you out.”
He looked deeply into her beautiful blue eyes. “Don’t ask me to speak to my father. Not yet.”
“I will ask you, but no, not yet.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“You will go to Montreal to work on Mr. McGee’s election. You will go back to work.”
“And you?”
She leaned over and kissed him softly. It was a gentle kiss—not passionate, but inviting, certainly not the kiss of a friend.
“And I will …” she said, “I will be waiting here.”
He felt so inept, so inexperienced. “In the lumber camps, I didn’t really get to know many girls.”
“Shhh. Words, words, words. Can’t you just be quiet?” She held him tighter.
“I need you, Meg,” he muttered into her long black curls.
“I know you do.”
12
It was late afternoon in Westboro, a sleepy little village west of Ottawa. Nothing much had happened here since a fox bit the Duke of Richmond and he died, far from the comforts of home. They named a rough road that ran along the valley after him. These days, farmers from “up the line” would travel that road for provisions, and the occasional logger would stop en route to Ottawa. It was not uncommon to find strangers on the tree-lined streets. A weathered sign over the door of a tiny shop read j.p. willard: gunsmith and general merchandise.
He had left his old grey coat in Ottawa. In a lightweight, oversized brown jacket, he surveyed the shop, waiting patiently for the right moment. It had been a disappointing week. He had spent much of it watching Thomas O’Dea. O’Dea was drinking too much, and he seemed to be falling into that Irish pit of despair. He gave O’Dea credit, though: he wasn’t filling every ear that came into that miserable bar with his lament, whatever it was. Still, O’Dea was pathetic, and he hated that. Too bad; he might have been useful. Maybe later he could be of some help.
Anyway, he had to do this job alone.
As the afternoon drifted to a lazy end, he decided the moment had come. He quickly walked into the shop. He knew the storekeeper was alone inside, and he knew no one had seen him enter.
“I’ll have a Smith and Wesson revolver with six chambers and some bullets.”
“Certainly,” Mr. Willard answered kindly. “Are you new to these parts?”
The man in the large brown jacket ignored him.
“You’re a logger, then?” Mr. Willard searched for eye contact with the customer.
Again, no answer.
Unfriendly chap, the shopkeeper thought, as he opened the back cupboard and fetched the goods. He presented the gun and the ammunition to the stranger.
“Nice weapon, here,” he said. “Very popular in the United States, I’m told.”
The customer simply took the handgun from him, looked it over carefully and started loading bullets into the cartridge. It was as if Mr. Willard wasn’t even there.
“Impatient, aren’t you?” the storekeeper remarked. Perhaps he should have started to feel uneasy by now—maybe he should have called for help—but his mind was on other things. “Well, me too, I guess. I’m a bit impatient myself. I want to get home and see the grandchildren.” He didn’t expect a response from this unfriendly man, so he stuck to business. “That will be a dollar, unless you would rather pay in sterling?” It had been a slow afternoon. It would be nice to see some money in the till.
The stranger continued to act as if he were alone in the room and Willard didn’t exist.
“I said, that will be a dollar.”
He finished loading the gun and, for the first time, looked straight into the mortal face of James P. Willard. But a memory caught him off guard. A flash of humanity. This man and his own grandfather were so much alike: the same rosy cheeks, full white hair and kind eyes. He could picture his grandfather weaving stories of Irish heroes: the Wexford Martyrs, Mary Doyle, Wolfe Tone. He remembered his boyhood before his father’s imprisonment, before the rot set in. If no one had seen him come in here, there was no need to kill this man. He took the money from his back pocket, put the dollar on the table and, as politely as he could, muttered, “Thank you.”
He started for the door. As he reached for the doorknob, he stopped. What was he thinking? Had he gone mad? He turned to Willard and said, almost sympathetically, “I can’t go soft.”
Two shots exploded. The force of the bullets threw the old man back to the wall. He still had a look of shock on his face as he hit the ground, dead. It had happened so fast that Mr. Willard had not had time to scream.
His murderer quickly collected more ammunition and another revolver, stuffed them in his pockets and casually walked out into the late-afternoon sun.
No one had seen him. And no one seemed to have been startled by the noise. With children shooting squirrels and farmers hunting gophers, gunshots were common in country towns. By the time James Willard’s granddaughter found his body, his murderer had thrown away the brown jacket, retrieved his long grey coat and was far away. Not up the river, where the police would assume, but back to Ottawa.
He had spent a relatively quiet July. He planned a busier August.
LADY Macdonald wasn’t snooping. She was putting away a pair of shoes in a closet in her husband’s office when she stumbled across a little rocking horse. It was perched at the back of the closet, covered in dust.
“It was little Johnny’s,” he said that night. “My son who died.”
She could see that his eyes were watering, but she pressed on, carefully. “You never talk of those years. Your children … your … wife.”
“It’s an old story. Isabella got sick in the first year of our marriage and never recovered. She basically lay in bed for twelve years, comforted by an increasing amount of patent medicine and laudanum.”
“And you worked.”
“I worked and tried my best to help.”
“And your sons?”
“Well, you’ve met Hugh. He’s a chip off the old block. A little stubborn, but a promising Tory, I would think. Louisa really brought him up. I was too busy with …”
“With your work,” she said for him.
“Yes, thank God for dutiful sisters.”
She was learning to accept his selfishness. She knew countless political battles had left their scars, but they were flesh wounds. His pain was deeper. He was famously charming, cute with quips and stories, but there was a cunningness behind it all. If he couldn’t make the rules himself, he looked for ways to circumvent them.
Where did the politician end and the person begin? Who was he, really? A family man wounded by premature death, or a career politician who would not let anything thwart his ambitions? Had she married someone desperately in need of love, or a man with a cold heart?
She watched as he reached for a glass on a side table.
The facts spoke for themselves. He used people like his “dutiful” sister and ignored his only living son; he destroyed political enemies without a thought and discarded friends when their purpose was served. But here, with a child’s toy secretly stashed away, he looked so vulnerable, so forgivable, so worth all the effort it took to be with him. She might never reach into his heart and really know him, but she could try. That was her job. She looked at the rocking horse. And then at her husband.
“I couldn’t part with it when little John died,” he said. “He was just two years old when he fell.”
She dared ask the question that haunted her. “John, is that why you drink so much?” She knew she probably should not have asked the question so directly. He ignored it anyway.
“You know my younger brother James died, too. Right in front of me. He was struck down by a man who was supposed to be caring for us.” She thought he might put down his drink and seek comfort in her arms. Instead, he took a small sip. “I was seven years old. James was only five.”
The pain in his voice was deep, naked, honest. This was the
real John Macdonald: not a strutting statesman, but a vulnerable man chased by demons; not a hardened political actor, but a suffering brother, father and husband. Her suffering husband. And she loved him for that.
“Tell me: Why do I live and the others don’t?”
How could she answer? What could she say? She was a new wife; this was a new start. “John,” she said tentatively, “let’s have a child of our own. I want us to be a family.”
He looked at her blankly, then a slow nod and a trace of a smile. He put down his drink and moved closer to his young wife. Much closer.
THE entire Trotter family saw Conor off at the railway station. Mary Ann Trotter was like a mother hen with her flock. “Say hello to Mr. McGee for me,” she commanded. “Tell him I have some stories for him.” The Widow Trotter was becoming the mother Conor never had—or never remembered.
Conor smiled back at her. “If I can get a word in, I will.”
Will gave him an awkward punch in the arm. Meg allowed a peck on the cheek and squeezed his hand. Very proper and reserved, he thought, but suggestive, just as Jane Austen might have written. Conor thought he saw some of the boys who had marched in the Orange Parade watching them, but he ignored them. Meg pulled him slightly toward her, whispering, “I need you too.”
He shuddered, mumbled something back and boarded the train.
Conor brought along a book to occupy himself on the journey: a collection of poetry by Thomas D’Arcy McGee.
IN the first-class section of the train, another man was reading a book by D’Arcy McGee. The dense but very popular History of Ireland obscured the reader’s face. A grey coat lay on his lap, covering one of the guns he had acquired from the late James Willard of Westboro.
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