A reverent hush once again gripped the faithful. Hope, however feeble, had been resuscitated.
“What about my rights?” The voice from the crowd was a high-pitched, irreverent cackle.
Mackenzie halted in mid clause. Instantly his gaze fixed the woman twenty feet from him who had spoken. He smiled and, with a twinkle in his eye, said, “And what rights have we not yet addressed, madam?”
Heads craned and feet shuffled.
“I wanta know when the land I’ve been squattin’ on fer twenty-five years is gonna be deeded to me and my young’uns.”
“But squatters’ rights have always been protected, ma’am—unless you’re perched upon a bishop’s birthright!”
The crowd roared its approval of this quip, but not before one phrase tittered through it, lip to lip: “It’s Mad Annie!”
From his position Marc could see the portly sheriff trying to force his bulk across the room towards the citizen of his county he admired the least.
“Then why won’t the arsehole callin’ himself our magistrate assign me the deed?”
“Have you improved the property according to regulations?” Mackenzie said patiently to Mad Annie over the derisory howls of the men around her.
“If plantin’ whisky trees and harvestin’ a bastard a year are improvements, you shoulda had that piece of swamp years ago!” a neighbourly wag suggested.
“You shut yer fuckin’ face, Hislop!”
“Madam, there are ladies in the hall—”
“Fuck the ladies! I want my rights! What kinda dickless wonder are you anyways?”
The sheriff and a brace of constables were closing in.
“We got trouble outside,” Hatch said to Marc, drawing him through the side door and away from the low comedy. At least Mad Annie had redirected the crowd’s attention, and, with Mackenzie’s own unexpected shift at the end of his speech, Marc felt certain that the evening would conclude without a riot.
“Behind the privies,” Hatch said, hurrying towards an opening in the trees to the right of the outhouses. “Young Farley spilled the beans to me inside.”
Marc followed Hatch, and the two soon emerged into the clearing behind the privies. A few yards farther into the bush, they heard a commotion: low cursing, hissed commands, and a clatter of wood and crockery.
“Damn!” Hatch cried. “Somebody’s tipped them off!”
By the time he and Marc reached the scene of the crime, Mad Annie’s enterprising progeny had scurried into the trees, lugging their paraphernalia with them. Pursuit was unthinkable.
“Well, I suppose the sheriff will appreciate us confiscating what’s left.” Hatch chuckled as he held up one of the dozen or so clay jugs that remained unbroken.
They walked back to the privies, noting a well-trodden path between the improvised outdoor shebeen and one of the toilets. “How in blazes did they get the rotgut to the customer?” Hatch mused aloud.
“This way,” Marc said. He was pointing to a Dutch door cut into the upper half of the back wall of the middle privy. “Not everyone came here to do his business.”
“Jesus,” Hatch said, “and I bet the ruckus Mad Annie created in there was a diversion while her lads dismantled the operation and hightailed it home.”
Hatch went back into the hall through the side door, but Marc decided to go around to the front door for a final check. He remembered that the shorter constable had left his post there to assist the sheriff in his pincer movement against Mad Annie. The uproar inside appeared to have escalated a decibel or two, and Marc hoped the crowd had not begun to view the hapless Annie Pringle as its scapegoat. As far as he could tell, the pile of potential weapons had not been reduced. Six or seven of the women had wisely come outside (Beth was not among them), and several were standing on alert beside their family sleighs. The Reform rally was nearing its end.
Marc stepped through the double doors—into bedlam.
“I’m gettin’ the ladies out!” Durfee shouted at him. “Try to get to the platform if you can!”
In front of him Marc could see only a seething tangle of arms, legs, and contorted faces, the arms ending with fists, and not a few of them wielding stout sticks or cricket bats. As the weapons came crashing down, the thud and crack of wood upon clothed bone or vulnerable skull reverberated above the cries, curses, and howls of pain. A full-scale donnybrook was in progress. But who was fighting whom? And where had the weapons come from?
Marc plunged in. A berserk fellow was indiscriminately swinging a hobnailed stick at a group of farmers in desperate, jumbled retreat.
“We’re gonna bust the heads of every one of you republican arseholes!” the attacker screamed, and he lashed out, striking one of his victims on the shoulder and knocking him sideways. Marc leaped ahead and put both hands on the stick before it could be raised again, ripped it out of the lunatic’s grip, and clipped him on the jaw. He dropped in his tracks.
The victim groaned. It was Angus Farley, one of the American immigrants Marc had visited late Thursday afternoon. “Who are these hooligans?” he said, helping Farley to his feet.
“Orangemen from Toronto,” Farley rasped. His left arm was hanging limply at his side. “We gotta get to the platform. It’s Mackenzie they’re after!”
“He’ll get out the back way,” Marc said.
“They’ll be waitin’ for him. You don’t know these people!”
There was no way that Marc, even armed with a hobnailed bat, could push through to the platform. From the scuffling and scrambling about him, he got the impression that the invaders were fighting a holding action while the main thrust of the attack lay elsewhere. He dashed to the double doors, where a score of bleeding and battered men were staggering onto the street, picked up a dozen hoe handles, and tossed them back into the fray. At least the odds could be narrowed a bit. Then he sprinted through the snow towards the rear of the hall. And stopped.
Mackenzie’s sleigh was occupied by three bat-wielding thugs, lying in wait. Two more commanded the side exit. The honourable members of the Reform party were still trapped inside.
Suddenly the rear door burst open. Six burly men emerged, strung out like pallbearers, and wriggling frantically in their grip was William Lyon Mackenzie.
This outrage, Marc knew, if carried off successfully, would wreak such havoc on the body politic of Upper Canada that the murder of a retired dry goods merchant would seem but a mote in a maelstrom.
TWELVE
The stable boy bringing the sheriff’s horse, Old Chestnut, from the livery on Division Street did not recognize the soldierly figure who leapt into its saddle, dug his heels into the horse’s ribs, and galloped away towards the rear of the Township Hall in a furious blur of scarlet and grey.
Marc bore down upon his quarry with only the vaguest of rescue plans in mind. Fortunately, the abductors had chosen to indulge in a bit of boyish fun before settling down to their more serious business. To raucous cheers from their three bat-wielding companions on the sleigh, they formed a ragged circle, lifted the helpless Mackenzie above their heads, and began spinning him counter-clockwise—with the intention, it seemed, of concluding the game with a bravura flourish that would see him tossed like a beanbag onto the floor of the getaway vehicle.
“Hurry up, lads,” a burly fellow cried from his perch on the sleigh. “We got the tar hot and the feathers itchin’!”
Marc drove the sheriff’s horse hard between the sleigh and the abductors, reached down with his right hand, grabbed a thick handful of overcoat, and drew Mackenzie up across the horse’s withers. As he charged back towards the road, cries of dismay trailed away behind him. He didn’t pause to see whether or not he was being pursued, but he did catch a sideways glimpse of a huddle of astonished women just before he wheeled and galloped south to King Street, with the bundled bones of William Lyon Mackenzie bouncing unceremoniously in front of him.
Marc hurried eastward on the main road, cantered across a bridge over a small creek, and pulled up in front o
f the Newcastle Court House and Jail. He dismounted, then reached back up and tipped Mackenzie upright. The little Scot slithered down the horse’s flank and landed on both feet. He was gasping for breath and struggling unsuccessfully to utter some word appropriate to the occasion.
“We’d better get inside, sir. I am not armed and I have no way of knowing how far those men will go to get you back.”
Mackenzie let out a wheeze that resembled a “Yes,” which Marc took for consent. Holding his prize by the elbow, he led him into what appeared to be the sheriff’s office and anteroom to the jail. A rotund woman of indeterminate age sat snoozing beside a candle-lantern.
“Mrs. MacLachlan!” Marc shouted. “Does your husband keep a pistol here?”
The woman’s eyes opened, and then popped wide. “Jiminy,” she cried, “I ain’t Miz MacLachlan, and who in blazes are you?”
MRS. TIMMERMAN, THE CHARLADY, STIRRED THE fire in the stove, got some water boiling, made the tea, and helped Mr. Mackenzie wrestle out of his two mismatched overcoats and adjust the orange-red wig that had come askew. While Marc stood vigil by the window, she poured two dollops of Jamaican rum into Mackenzie’s tea. He drank it down like a parched Bedouin at the last oasis. His fingers trembled as he held out the cup for more.
“Are you going to turn around, young man, so I can see your face and thank you properly?”
Marc obliged. “I’m Ensign Marc Edwards, sir, from the 24th Regiment at Fort York.”
“The latter I’ve been able to deduce, Ensign Edwards,” Mackenzie said dryly, thrusting out his ungloved hand. His blue eyes glittered with intelligence and unshakable purpose. Only the cold sweat that glistened on his craggy face indicated the extent of his fright and the shock of its aftermath. “I am Willie Mackenzie.”
“I deduced that,” Marc said, smiling.
Mackenzie smiled back. “You realize, Ensign, how this will look when the Tory newspapers get hold of the story: radical Reformer saved from a tar-and-feathering he well deserved by one of His Majesty’s own house-guards.”
“They won’t hear about it from me, sir.”
Mackenzie eyed him closely. “No, I don’t believe they will,” he said, and he wiped the sweat from his brow with his sleeve. “Tell me, though, why did you do it? You are unarmed. Those lunatics would have broken your skull as soon as look at you. And I find it difficult to believe that you adhere to many of the sentiments I expressed in the hall tonight.”
“I’m a soldier, sir. I know my duty.”
Mackenzie smiled again; there was no mockery in it. “This province would be a better place for all of us if every man in it did his duty.”
They were interrupted by a commotion outside. Marc opened the door in time to see Hatch at the helm of a cutter drawing up to the jail. Several figures spilled out of it. Sheriff MacLachlan and his two constables pulled a resisting body out of the cutter and began dragging it, kicking and spewing obscenities, across the snow towards the cells at the back of the building.
“Lord in Heaven,” Mackenzie said, “that’s a woman they’re abusing.”
“That’s no woman,” Hatch said, coming up to them and grinning, “that’s Mad Annie.”
THE JAIL’S ANTEROOM WAS ALMOST AS crowded as the hall had been—with constables, combatants itching for a rematch, and assorted well-wishers and town gossip-mongers—but space was quickly made for Magistrate Philander Child and his estate manager cum bodyguard, John Collins, who wore a pistol in his belt. Mad Annie’s protestations of innocence could still be heard through the stone partition, like howls under water.
Child went right to the seated Mackenzie. “I am happy to say, sir, that none of your colleagues has been injured, and, even now, they are on their way here to retrieve you.”
“And I, sir, am happy to report that I am unscathed, except for the wound to my dignity, which is likely to heal in due course.”
Child looked relieved, then said with some vehemence, “I am embarrassed, outraged, and indeed mortified by what happened back there. I am a justice of the peace, and the peace of my jurisdiction was broken tonight in a most reprehensible manner. I realize, sir, that there are those amongst your supporters who will conclude that the attack on them and upon the safety of their leader was instigated by the authorities in Toronto, or that, in the least, they turned a blind eye to it.”
“I am not among them,” Mackenzie said. “I know who did this, and why.”
“I believe that,” Child said. An anger he was struggling to contain made his cheeks flame and the pupils of his eyes dilate dangerously. “For my part I do not condone public violence of any kind. My forebears have served as magistrates and squires to every king since Henry the Eighth. One of my grandfathers stood with the Royalists against the Antichrist Cromwell. We have taken pride in meting out justice according to its rules, sparing not even ourselves. Hence, I do not condone the barbaric behaviours of the Orange Order or those acting under its direction. They may profess the same cause I do, but he is neither friend nor ally who perverts my cause by committing outrages in its name.”
“Well spoken, sir,” Mackenzie said. “And I commend this young ensign here. He has loyalties and a sense of duty as powerful as your own.”
Child acknowledged Marc with a slight nod. “I will arrange an escort for you,” he said to Mackenzie.
“No need,” Mackenzie said, pulling on one of his coats. “I hear my fellows coming for me now.”
Outside, several sleighs had drawn into the yard, the largest and nearest one filled with cheering Reform supporters, now armed with sticks and clubs. Some of them sported bandaged heads or slings supporting battered limbs. Mackenzie quickly disappeared into their midst, and they drove off, as cheerful as if they had just won the Battle of Lundy’s Lane. In one of the other sleighs, Marc thought he saw Beth.
Behind him, in the smoky, sweaty anteroom, Child had switched from lofty anger to infantile tantrum. “None of this would’ve happened if that travesty of a woman, that whore of Babylon back there, hadn’t primed the crowd with her rotgut liquor and then had the temerity to spew out such malodorous drivel and create the confusion that allowed those maniacs to waltz in through the front door!” He fixed the smaller of the two constables with an Old Testament stare.
“My man left his post only to come to my assistance,” MacLachlan snapped. “And we did get the bitch! By God, Child, we got the old harlot in chains after all these years!”
“I say it’s time we cleared out the whole rotten mess of them!” Child cried, and he banged on the desk with a fist as heavy as a mace. Mackenzie’s teacup bounced.
A dozen heads swivelled and froze. The magistrate’s countenance, governed usually by civility and the courtesy of office, was now swollen with a wrath as venomous as Jehovah’s before the sins of Jeroboam. His voice was hollow, sepulchral. “I will take away the remnant of that house as a man taketh away dung.”
“Mad Annie’s, ya mean,” the sheriff said helpfully.
Child cast his eyes over the motley crowd in the room. “Yes,” he said more calmly, but with no lessening of purpose. “I am hereby authorizing a raid on that squatter’s pigsty tonight. We’ll go in there with guns and torches and purge every last one of that bastard brood!”
Within minutes, the magistrate’s enthusiasm (and legal warrant) had galvanized those in the room and in the courtyard beyond. A tactical plan of action rapidly evolved. A score of stalwarts from the town would be deputized as supernumerary constables. Four sleighs and teams would be officially commandeered. They would leave town at ten o’clock, proceed along the frozen ribbon of Cobourg Creek to the point where it intersected with Crawford Creek in the thick cedar-and-birch bush immediately north of Mad Annie’s squattery. From there they would march on snowshoes through the woods to unleash a lightning assault on its unprotected (and unbooby-trapped) rear. With Madame Tarantula in leg irons, the broodlings would panic and scatter. A discreet torch touched here and there, and Mad Annie’s seraglio would no lo
nger offend the public eye, ear, or sensibility—or the liquor laws.
“I’ve got to go with MacLachlan,” Hatch said wearily to Marc. “I’ll do my best to see that no one gets hurt out there. Folks are mightily stirred up tonight.”
“I’m going back with James,” Marc said. “I’m exhausted, and I’ve got some hard thinking to do.” Pieces of the puzzle were now flinging themselves up faster than he could catch and examine them.
“Good,” Hatch said. “The women’ll need an escort. We didn’t nab a single one of Ogle’s loonies, so the woods and back roads could be full of ’em. Thomas is gonna drive the Huggan girls and a couple who live farther west along the highway. You could follow them, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“What about Winnifred?”
“She’s helping Dr. Barnaby with the injured. They’re setting up in the Common School. He’ll bring her home, tonight or in the morning.”
Emma Durfee was yoo-hooing them from the driver’s bench of the cutter. A light snow was beginning to fall.
“By the by,” Hatch said, “I do have some happier news.”
“Oh?”
“One of the speakers at the rally told me they’d stopped for refreshment at Perry’s Corners on the way down, and the constable there had an Irishman in manacles.” Hatch laughed. “And one unhappy donkey.”
“SO HOW DID YOU PERSUADE UNCLE Jabez to let you quit lawyerin’ and head off to military school?” Beth asked.
“I didn’t. I persuaded Uncle Frederick and he persuaded Uncle Jabez.”
Beth laughed as if she were now part of that happy conspiracy. A snowflake chose the tip of her nose on which to alight, glisten in filigree, and turn invisible. Emma and James Durfee, wrapped together in a single buffalo robe on the driver’s seat, were humming an ancient air suited to the occasion and their feelings and letting the Belgians lead them home.
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