Turncoat

by Don Gutteridge

  A short time later, one of the landmarks that had been mapped out for him came into view. Here the roadway veered so close to the lake that its icy expanse could be glimpsed through a screen of leafless birch and alder trees. He was three miles or so from Perry’s Corners, where, if he was lucky, he would find a cold meal and space by the postmaster’s fire. A steady canter would put him there in less than half an hour, despite the deep snow, the rapidly descending darkness, and a weary mount. He looked up in time to see the single star in the southern sky swallowed by cloud. The east wind, bringing no good, was cranking up for another blow.

  Not a person to repeat his mistakes, Marc cajoled his horse into the woods on the right, knowing that the cliff above the lake would deflect some of the fury of the approaching squall and send it screeching over the trees. He soon found a suitable spot, tethered the horse, spread the canvas out at the base of a stout pine, covered this with a wool blanket, and sat down to wait out the worst.

  IT WAS AN HOUR LATER WHEN, with no sign of the storm abating, Marc made the decision to camp somewhere in the shelter of the woods. There, the snow was not yet deep enough for him to have to strap on his Indian snowshoes (if he did, it would be his maiden excursion on them), but he couldn’t walk far. His feet were nearly frozen: he needed a fire and some boiling tea—soon. He had noticed earlier, just to the south of him towards the lake, a small rise in the land that had kept the drifts from accumulating on its leeward side. He thought he might erect a makeshift lean-to there.

  After giving the horse a shrivelled apple and a reassuring pat, he trudged through the snow towards the ridge. Within a few minutes he had reconnoitred a sort of den formed by the ridge and the exposed roots of a large tree. With the sailcloth for a roof and a ground sheet from his army kit under him, he would be as snug as a hibernating bear, with plenty of brushwood for a smudge fire. He was in the midst of congratulating himself when he saw the smoke.

  He stood stock-still, cursing himself silently for having trod so noisily into an unknown area with no thought for his personal safety. He was unarmed: his pistol was in his saddle-roll, his sabre in its scabbard. He spoke no aboriginal tongue. He was shivering and, to his consternation, found himself nearer exhaustion than he had been willing to admit. But his mind remained alert: he listened for the slightest sound and was certain now that he could hear voices. The smoke itself continued to pour upward in thick whorls not twenty yards to his left, its source hidden by a knoll and several squat cedars. This was no campfire smoke, or if it was, it was of no kind Marc had ever seen.

  He had two choices: he could return to the horse and risk being heard (one nicker from the animal would ring like a rifle shot through the silence of these woods) or get close enough to the murmuring voices to discern if it would be safe to approach whomever it was and ask for a warm place by their fire. He chose the latter strategy.

  Taking one slow, muffled step at a time, he edged towards the knoll and the coils of woodsmoke. When he was within a few yards, he eased himself up the slope of the ridge. Then he crawled along its height until he was at last able to look into the wintry glade below him. What he saw was a log hut, no more than ten by ten, windowless (on the two sides he could see), but sporting a lime-and-straw chimney—in active service. A trapper’s cabin.

  “Well, sir, don’t just sit up there like a frozen cod, come on down and join us.” A face poked out from behind the chimney. “You look like you could do with a wee drop of the craychur.”

  “NINIAN T. CONNORS AT YOUR SERVICE,” said the big Irishman with the Yankee-accented brogue and the ready smile. He handed Marc a cup of whisky and urged him to move his feet (unbooted, with much effort and more pain) closer to the fire. “My associate, Mr. Ferris O’Hurley, and I are always pleased to oblige a gentleman of the officers’ fraternity, whether his coat be blue or scarlet.”

  “And I’m the fella to second that,” added the other one, as dark and wiry and toughened as his partner was florid and generously fleshed. When he drank his grog, he gulped the cupful entire, squeezed his eyes shut as his whiskered cheeks bulged, and then blinked the rotgut down his gullet like a toad with a stubborn fly.

  “I am most grateful for your kindness,” Marc said, sipping at his drink and wishing it were hot tea. His horse stood at ease outside the cabin, keeping a donkey company and sharing its feed. When Marc had offered to pay, Connors had taken exaggerated umbrage: “The laws of hospitality in this savage land are as strict as the ones in ancient Greece, and necessarily so. It is we, sir, who are obliged to you for honouring us with your unexpected but worthy presence.”

  “You headin’ for Cobourg?” O’Hurley asked between gulps.

  “In that direction,” Marc said, taking the slice of bread and cheese held out to him by Connors.

  “What my associate means,” Connors said, with an impish twinkle in his blue eyes, “is that we seldom see an officer of His Majesty’s regiments travelling alone on the Kingston Road.”

  “You know it well, then?”

  “Indeed we do, though you have no doubt surmised that we are citizens of a neighbouring state.”

  “We’re up from Buffalo,” O’Hurley said.

  “Peddling your wares,” Marc said evenly.

  “We don’t do nothin’ illegal,” O’Hurley said, then he glanced at Connors as quick as a cat.

  “What my confederate means is that we are not mere Yankee peddlers, as noble as that profession might be. Mr. O’Hurley here, whose father was as Irish as mine, is a bona fidee tinker, a tinsmith and artiste of the first rank. You, good sir, are drinking from a recent product of his craft.”

  The tin cup held by Marc looked as if the donkey had tried to bathe in it, but he refrained from comment. His toes had thawed out, the crude meal and whisky were sitting comfortably on his stomach, and the mere thought of curling up in his own bedroll next to a fire was beginning to warm him all over.

  “Mr. O’Hurley here travels these parts—highway and back road alike—several times a year. He not only sells a grateful citizenry household items unattainable in the British half of America, though commonplace in the great Republic to the south, but he repairs anything constructed of metal, and where repair will not suffice, he fashions original works with the touch of a true master—an impresario, you might say, of tin and copper.”

  “You have an established itinerary, then?” Marc lit his pipe with a tinder stick and puffed peaceably.

  “Well, not what you’d really call regular-like,” O’Hurley said.

  “Which is to say, we improvise,” Connors said, leaning over to allow Marc to light his clay calumet with a fresh tinder, “as occasion dictates.” He sucked his tobacco into life and continued. “As a man of the world, I’m sure you know there are people in this distant dominion of King William who, notwithstanding the intent and principle of His Majesty’s law so recently and justly amended—”

  “You are referring to the repeal of the Alien Act? Naturalized citizens from the United States can now keep their property and participate fully in political life,” Marc asserted confidently.

  Connors squinted—part frown and part smile—then grinned and said, “Yes, but many of your countrymen persist in believing that any resident of this province who hails from the United States of America—however long ago and however naturalized since—is a primee fashia blackguard and potential seditionist. A Yankee spy under every rock, to use the vernacular.”

  “So you move about … judiciously,” Marc offered.

  “How well put. You seem uncommonly schooled for a soldier, sir.”

  Marc acknowledged the compliment with a nod. “And are you a smithy as well?”

  O’Hurley coughed and spluttered into his cup.

  “I, sir,” Connors declaimed, “am a smithy of words and subordinate clauses, of tracts and contracts—monetary, fiduciary, and commercial. I draw up bills of sale and bills of lading, deeds of property and dunnings of debt. I drum and I stake and I capitalize; I minister and m
ollify.”

  “A solicitor, then.”

  Connors reeled back as if struck by a blow as cowardly as it was mortal. “You jest, sir. If I am to be vilified by that name, it can only be in the generic sense. I do what lawyers in my country do, but without the handicap of education or licence. In brief, young sir, I am what the Republic hails as its quintessential citizen: an entrepreneur.” He leaned back, laid his gloved hands across his mustard waistcoat, and smiled without a trace of guile.

  “He does the thinkin’,” O’Hurley said, “and I do the craftin’.”

  “The perfect partnership, you might say,” Connors added.

  “And you travel together, then? Both of you on a single donkey?”

  “Not literally, of course, like Yankee Doodle or our Good Lord on Palm Sunday. I come up by myself to scout out new territory and solicit orders, and once in a blue moon I get the urge to hit the open road for a spell. Then Ferris and I set out in tandem.”

  Assuming he had been tossed a cue, Ferris blinked sleepily and said, “Ninian’s got a sister up here he likes to visit.”

  “And where does she live?”

  “Now you’ve gone and done it, Ferris old friend,” Connors sighed. “You’ve flat out embarrassed me.” He turned to Marc and slowly raised his downcast, abashed eyes. “The visits to my dear sister are, sir, acts of kindness towards that poor impoverished soul and her wretched children, and Ferris knows full well I do not wish to have broadcast those acts of Christian charity that should be executed privily for their own sake and not for the public aggrandizement of the perpetrator.”

  “I think it’s time for me to turn in,” Marc said.

  “You’ll not have one more drink, then?”

  Marc yawned and shook his head.

  “Surely one toast to His Majesty.”

  “Just two fingers, then,” Marc said.

  “Why don’t you give him a swig from the canteen?” O’Hurley suggested.

  Connors shot him a look that was part reproving, part resignation, then managed to attach his smile to it in time to say, “Splendid thought! We keep a modest dram of superior spirits to mix up a syllabub now and then.” He drew what appeared to be a regulation army canteen from under his jacket and poured each of them a toddy.

  “To King William the Fourth!”

  They drank to the fount and guardian of the British Empire.

  “Your toast, good sir.”

  “To honest men everywhere!” Marc said.

  The liquor slid silkily down Marc’s throat: overproof Jamaican rum.

  AS SOON AS HORSE AND DONKEY had been made as comfortable as possible, the three men set about arranging their bedrolls around the last glow of the fire. When Marc went back out to relieve himself, he slipped his sabre from its scabbard and tiptoed back inside. All was dark and quiet.

  For a long while, Marc lay awake, despite the demands of his body for sleep, waiting for the telltale snoring of the peddlers, who, graciously enough, had given him pride of place next to the fire. While checking his horse earlier, Marc had given the donkey and its packs a searching look and decided that these men carried no weapons of any size. Nor did he see anything that resembled contraband goods among the pots and pans of their tradesmen’s gear.

  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 somet
ime 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.

  MARC 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.