Man in the Shadows

by Gordon Henderson

  28

  Across the country, Canadians were in mourning. The new nation was in a state of shock—and panic. It was just too horrible to be believed: Thomas D’Arcy McGee assassinated a block away from Parliament Hill, gunned down in the moonlight. Rumours spread like brushfire. If the Fenians were that powerful, surely they were going to strike again. Who could stop them? Could the country last a year?

  Guards were increased around all government buildings. There was a rumour that Fenians were going to blow up the Parliament Buildings. In Kingston, it was reported that Irish revolutionaries planned to free all the prisoners. What was true and what wasn’t? No one was really sure. The only certainty was that the Ottawa police had done their job; the murderer was behind bars. The Montreal Herald summed it up with the headline “No Doubt Whelan Guilty.” The evidence against Whelan seemed conclusive. Police found a Smith and Wesson revolver in his coat—a six-shooter, the same kind of gun used to kill McGee. One of its chambers was empty and a bullet had recently been fired. Whelan had a motive: he was a well-known Fenian supporter, one of the infamous Barney Devlin boys during the Montreal election. He even had a Fenian newspaper in his coat pocket. After the election, he had left his wife in Montreal and come to Ottawa. Surely he was following McGee. He had watched McGee’s speech from the visitors’ gallery and had been seen clenching his fist in anger.

  Conor O’Dea was a main witness. He had told police about the footprints in the snow, and they matched Whelan’s boots. And there was that coat. Although there were no eyewitnesses to the murder, people including Conor—actually, especially Conor—saw a man in a grey coat nearby. It was a coat just like Whelan’s.

  Any trial was seen as a simple formality before the inevitable hanging.

  But Conor wasn’t sure. “I know everything points to his guilt,” he told Meg. “But it seems too cut-and-dried, too convenient. Maybe he seems too guilty.”

  “GOOD God, man, what are we going to do?” Sir John was practically shouting at Gilbert McMicken. Usually, McMicken stood up to the prime minister, but not tonight. He knew he had better not antagonize Macdonald while he was under such pressure. He answered plainly, “We think we have the man.”

  “Well, I damn well hope so,” Macdonald exclaimed, clutching his glass of port for dear life. “Did Whelan act alone?”

  “I don’t know,” McMicken sighed. “If I had to guess, I would guess not.”

  Macdonald took a deep breath and walked over to his desk, slowly exhaling. He pulled a piece of paper from his top drawer and handed it to the policeman. “Here’s why I sent for you. Read this.”

  The letter’s handwriting was childlike, and the ink was a brownish-red colour. It looked like blood.

  Your life is in our hands. You can save it only if you leave town within ten days.

  No British spy will live in our midst.

  Let the bloody fate of D’Arcy McGee warn you.

  The hour draws nigh. Be it the knife or the pistol.

  Be warned.

  It was signed, “Many Fenians.”

  McMicken looked up from the letter and closed his eyes in thought. All he could think to say was, “We can increase the guard around you.”

  “Don’t be daft. There are already enough police around me to throw a party, and still the letter got through.”

  McMicken became businesslike. “There is no doubt, sir, that the Fenians felt Mr. McGee was their worst enemy. However, they know they won’t make any headway in Canada until you are put out of the way, too.”

  “Well, no one can accuse you of trying to spare my feelings.”

  Macdonald gulped down some dark port. Fortified wine. I can use some fortification, he thought. He was not a particularly brave man, but he was practical. Canada did not have the army to withstand an invasion. More important, he was not sure the country had yet developed the kind of collective spirit to pull together and defend itself. If he panicked, it would play right into the extremists’ hands. He must stand up to these madmen. He had no other choice.

  “Any more word on this man who was causing the trouble in Montreal?”

  “No. It might have been Whelan. But we’re not sure.”

  “What, pray tell, are you sure of?” Macdonald roared.

  McMicken ignored the prime minister’s outburst. “In Irish bars in the States, they are toasting the man who killed McGee,” he said. “And there is even talk of another raid before July the first if the American government doesn’t act vigorously.”

  “Act vigorously! Why, they’re not acting at all. Sniffing around for the Irish vote while we endure—what did you call it?—’a reign of terror.’ It sounds like the French Revolution, for God’s sake.” Macdonald took the threatening piece of paper and crumpled it into a ball. “Without D’Arcy, I’m not sure we would even have a Canada. He was the heart of it. And now he lies in a closed casket with the back of his head blown off.” He threw the letter in the wastepaper basket.

  McMicken stood upright.

  “Listen,” Macdonald continued, gaining his composure. “No one is to know about this letter. No one. I’ll go around Ottawa pretending there’s no danger. I’ll put on a brave face. I’m a good actor. But let me tell you: I’m scared. I’m damned scared.”

  LADY Macdonald leaned against the door. Her head spun and she steadied herself on the door frame. Sir John would be furious if he knew that she had been listening in on the conversation, but she knew something awful was happening and she wanted to discover what. Since D’Arcy’s murder, he had become so sullen and distant. She was afraid he would descend into the shadows again. All this talk of spying and intrigue, and now she was a part of it, eavesdropping on his private conversations. She didn’t have the stomach for it. These Fenians made her blood run cold. The logic was clear to her: if the fanatics were really determined to win, they had to kill her husband. They needed another dramatic death. A Protestant death. This was no idle threat.

  She had come to hear the conversation innocently enough, almost bursting into John’s office to give him her news. She had seen the doctor in the morning. She was going to have—her eyes filled with tears—a baby. This should be such a joyous time. The beginning of life. Instead, her family was consumed by death. She felt cheated and betrayed, and terrified for her husband. She ran to her room in tears.

  29

  It was an epic funeral. Montreal had never seen anything like it. The procession started at the McGee house on St. Catherine Street. There were two stops—St. Patrick’s Church and Notre Dame Cathedral—before the journey’s end at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery.

  The police led off the procession, their band playing Handel’s solemn Dead March. The hearse, fifteen feet long and sixteen feet high, was pulled by six grey horses. Inside, D’Arcy McGee lay in a tentlike canopy held up by pillars, his coffin adorned with feathers. He probably would have been amused that in death he was treated like such a fancy, distinguished gentleman. He would have been more impressed with the crowd. Eighty thousand people lined the streets of Montreal to share his final journey. Irish, English, Scottish, French—religion, language and background didn’t matter today; the mourners gathered as Canadians.

  Mary and the children rode in the carriage directly behind the hearse. She looked out on the huge crowd, still disbelieving. It was almost a curiosity, a macabre party. A few months earlier, D’Arcy McGee had been humiliated in this city. Now he was hailed as a fallen hero.

  Conor stood in the crowd, alone, tears streaming down his face. Meg and her mother had begged him not to go to Montreal, but he felt he had to be there. As the mourning coach passed him, he thought Mary McGee recognized him, but he wasn’t sure. She looked bewildered and lost. She seemed so far away.

  It was Easter Monday. It would have been D’Arcy McGee’s forty-third birthday.

  “DEAD and buried,” he said to himself. “Just where he belongs.” The assassin also stood in the crowd as D’Arcy McGee’s coffin passed by. He admired his work and considered
his next steps. First, he had to be sure of his safety. He didn’t think Whelan would be stupid enough to identify him. He had sent him a clear message in prison that his wife’s future depended on his silence. Just to make sure, he had come to Montreal to pay Mrs. Whelan a midnight visit. Now she too knew her husband had better keep his mouth shut. Or else. Anyway, Whelan seemed to cherish the prospect of being yet another Irish martyr. The fool.

  He was dressed as an Irish workingman with pants that didn’t fit and a woven jacket that looked as if he’d slept in it. His hair was jet black and he sported a simple moustache. Soon it would be safe to return to Ottawa. Everyone was convinced that Whelan was guilty.

  He looked for John Macdonald, with his clingy young wife, in the procession. He couldn’t find him. Probably he was under a table drunk somewhere, mourning his token Irish friend. The Orangeman clearly wanted a quick trial and hanging to get the matter over with. Good. Still, he had better keep a low profile, especially with Thomas O’Dea’s irritating son sniffing about.

  Thomas O’Dea. There was a man with potential. He had the conviction to be another of his soldiers, but he wouldn’t be as easy to manipulate as Whelan. O’Dea was motivated by hatred, not by boredom. That could help, or it could be a problem. He had plans for this bartender, but he would have to be careful. That son of his was an issue he would have to consider. He could just kill him and be rid of him, but he was still useful alive. He had seen a man in a grey coat on Sparks Street, and he’d reported the footprints in the snow. Both would be convincing nails in Whelan’s coffin. Still, before he left this British soil, he would have to do away with him. He was too close to McGee. He was simply too close to everything.

  He would never have dreamed of disobeying his father the way Conor O’Dea had. When he was young, children did what they were told. They learned from their elders. In “rambling houses,” people of all generations would gather to tell and hear the old stories—ramble on—and keep the language and traditions alive. He grew up in a kind of rambling house. His home was a hideaway for rebels and spies and patriots, where they kept the fires of revenge burning. From the day he took his first breath, he was taught to hate, and he learned his lessons well.

  He taught himself to survive.

  His father died in an English jail, wasting away with consumption. An Irish martyr. He was proud of his father’s convictions, but despised his failure. Any fool can make himself a victim. That would never happen to him—he would be the hunter; he would do the killing.

  His mother knew he was the most clever of her nine children. She instilled in him a persistent lesson: “The English must pay for what they did to your father, your ancestors, your country.” While his older brothers and sisters rotted in a Dublin tenement, their vitality deflating each day their father’s prison term dragged on, his energy bubbled. And burst.

  When he was Conor O’Dea’s age, before he had built calluses around his heart, he also had heroes. His greatest hero was the eloquent, fiery Young Irelander—Thomas D’Arcy McGee. McGee wrote with passion and principle, with words that inspired greatness. He worshipped McGee and built his own dreams around McGee’s visions. He followed McGee’s early career as if following a pilgrimage; he read McGee’s fiery proclamations from Ireland and fierce newspaper articles from America; he hung on his every word. Then McGee rejected everything he had stood for. He moved to British North America, betraying his friends, his cause, himself and everyone who had ever supported him. He became a turncoat—a traitor.

  He rubbed his eyes. He clenched his hand into a fist. This was useless nostalgia. He had work to do. McGee was in a coffin on a hearse; soon, he would be on the other side of the grass. He smirked. He had practised that smirk as a child: a slow, sinister grin. He disappeared into the crowd. He had a job to finish.

  SIR John and Lady Macdonald did not go to the funeral. Gilbert McMicken felt it was too dangerous, and there was much to do at home. Macdonald sent George-Étienne Cartier in his place.

  “But they never got along,” Agnes said.

  “D’Arcy has no enemies now,” he responded. “And George gave a beautiful tribute in the House.” Cartier’s knighthood had finally been announced. He would officially become Sir George in a few weeks. He seemed more at peace with himself. And with Sir John A. Macdonald.

  Agnes had every reason to fear that her husband would hide behind the bottle in his grief, but ever unpredictable, Macdonald instead buckled down to work. He arranged for a pension for Mary McGee, read all of McMicken’s reports in detail and planned the next parliamentary session. The country could not descend into gloom or burst into panic. He must show leadership and strength.

  And he was worried about Agnes. Since D’Arcy’s death, she hadn’t been eating properly and felt ill much of the time. All week, she had looked pale and seemed listless. He gently asked, “Are you all right?”

  She choked back tears. “I so wanted this to be a happy time, not a time of murder and funerals.”

  “What’s the matter?” he pleaded awkwardly.

  She looked deeply into his sad eyes and quietly sobbed, “I’m going to have a baby.” Her tears grew stronger. “But is it safe, John? Is it safe to bring a child into this?”

  IN the United States, McGee’s murder had turned some people against the Fenians. Many sympathized with the fallen Irish hero. General O’Neill had publicly condemned McGee’s murder as “dastardly and cowardly.” But Patrick O’Hagan could barely contain his excitement. Alone at night, he toasted the man in Canada and his holy work. And he spent his days preparing, recruiting men and stashing arms by the border.

  It was all going according to plan.

  PART FIVE

  September 1868–February 1869

  The fate of our land

  God hath placed in your hand;

  He hath made you to know

  The heart of your foe,

  And the schemes he hath plann’d;

  Think well who you are,

  Know your soul and your star

  Lady Macdonald knelt in the straight-backed, uncomfortable pew at St. Alban’s Church and prayed heartily. She prayed for her fragile husband; she prayed for the soul of his last wife, the invalid Isabella; she prayed for the soul of his lost son, little Johnny; she prayed for poor Mary McGee and her now-fatherless children. And she prayed for her unborn baby.

  She was proud of the new church in Sandy Hill. It reminded her of a country chapel in England. She would have preferred a steeple and a grander altar, but the organ was fine and the woodwork quite magnificent. She was proud of her role raising funds and gathering supporters. D’Arcy McGee, the staunch Roman Catholic, had helped out when she told him that the first minister, Thomas Bedford-Jones, was an Irishman.

  Lady Macdonald had started going to St. Alban’s Church daily. Sir John didn’t mind a weekly sermon and the occasional prayer for forgiveness, but every day, he told her, “was excessively excessive.”

  John Macdonald had been born into the Church of Scotland—a Presbyterian—but he and his family had joined the Church of England when they came to Canada. He never really took to the kneeling and reciting in the Anglican ritual, but turning C of E was an easy step up the social ladder. And he always had his eye on the top rung.

  He had one of his “headaches” this morning and begged off the Sunday service, so her brother Hewitt escorted her.

  Agnes paid scant attention to the priest. She found the Reverend Bedford-Jones’s sermons wordy and ponderous. “One would think he was lecturing at Trinity,” she often complained. This morning’s sermon was about St. Alban himself, the first English saint, the namesake of the little gothic church. “Alban was a soldier in the Roman army,” Bedford-Jones informed the congregation, “in the second or third century. The scholars are uncertain of the exact date.” She nudged her brother, who was in danger of falling asleep. “The Roman authorities were persecuting and hunting down the few Christians on the island, but Alban, even though he was a pagan, gave shelter
to a Christian priest.” She was feeling the chill in the church. Would she ever become accustomed to this northern country? “The priest converted Alban. When Roman officers came in search of the Christian, Alban met them himself, dressed in the priest’s cloak. He was arrested and tried. He refused to renounce his new faith and was executed. He went to his death with the peace and blessing of a Christian.”

  “So unsatisfactory,” she whispered to her brother. “If only he would explain the history less.” A man dressed in someone else’s clothes, wrongly arrested, refusing to renounce the other man and being executed. What nonsense!

  She lined up patiently to approach the altar and take communion, knowing that the parishioners were watching her. She was, after all, a great man’s wife. As she took the wafer, the body of Christ, she prayed again for the innocent baby she carried. She prayed for peace and order. And she prayed for the end of Fenians and Irish extremists. As she took the wine, the blood of Christ, she solemnly prayed that this man Whelan, this vicious, cold-blooded murderer, would soon hang from his neck until he was dead.

  That would be a blessed thing.

  30

  Conor stood in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, leaning on a gas lamp, watching the people enter the church for Sunday Mass: women in bright bonnets; men in their best suits; some people chattering, others progressing solemnly. It was a dismal early-autumn morning; the dark skies threatened rain and the air had a damp chill in it. Across the river, the Gatineau hills held some autumn colour, but its vibrancy was dulled by the clouds. Flowers that could tough it out to early September brightened the church’s front; soon, a blanket of white would cover the gardens.