Duelling in a New World

by Ann Birch

  White has summoned Job to make some strong hyson tea, and he and Miss Russell try to drink it. But his friend’s sobs wrack her body. Job hovers, not knowing what to do. His face is contorted with pain.

  “Go back to bed, Job. When morning comes, Miss Russell will wash the body and dress it and I shall summon the rector. We shall need you then.”

  After the servant leaves, White reaches for Miss Russell’s hand. She seems glad of his touch and her sobs abate.

  “You must tell me something of Mary’s early life, ma’am, in those days before I knew her. You must have many memories to share with me while we hold vigil here.”

  “So many memories, though I have tried mighty hard to forget some of them.”

  “It was difficult to raise the child, was it? I expect you and your brother found that an infant thrust upon you was a care and worry. Take comfort, dear ma’am, from your bounty. What would have happened to the babe if she had not found a home with you after her parents were shipwrecked?”

  These comments, intended to stimulate some comfortable memories, instead produce silence. What have I said? Why is she staring at me?

  “I have upset you. Pray forgive me. Let us be silent then.”

  “Oh, Mr. White. You of all the people I have known in this new world have been the best, the kindest. Though it puts me to the blush, I must tell you the truth. Mary is my child. Mine and Peter’s.”

  He stares at her. “I do not understand, ma’am.”

  Her words gush out. “Peter is my half-brother, as you know. We shared the same father, but I was the child of his second wife. I did not know Peter until I was a young woman because he had been in America with the British army for many years. When I was eighteen he came to England for a short time. I was charmed with him, sir. I was so . . . innocent . . . and he was twenty years older. He seemed such a man of the world, and though it puts me to the blush to say it, I was smitten with him—”

  “Perhaps you will regret telling me this, ma’am . . .”

  Miss Russell takes a deep breath, and closes her eyes. “It is a blessed relief, and I am mighty pleased to let it all out after these years of pretence. We were together for near eight weeks and then he went back to his life over the ocean. I did not see him for a decade though we wrote many a letter to each other. Then our father died. And though a daughter should not say it, he was a most evil man who gambled and left me nothing but a pile of debts and a mother who was quite mad.”

  “You were attendant on your mother at the time of your father’s death and afterwards, were you not?”

  Miss Russell’s eyes are still closed as if she’s back in that house in Harwich with all its stresses and grief. “Yes, sir, and I be near mad myself with the care of her. She would bite me and push me against the wall and hit me with her fists. And the day Peter arrived from America to settle our father’s debts, he found me on the floor with Mother astride me. She was near to strangling me. The maid was screaming. I thought I was near to dying . . .” Miss Russell bursts into sobs.

  “And your brother rescued you?”

  “He pulled her off me and forced her into a chair. She became quite silent then, saying nary a word. He sent the maid to the shop for a bottle of laudanum and when she come back, he gave my mother a large glass of wine with the potion in it and made her drink it. Oh, Mr. White, she slept for hours and I was able to get myself firmed up again and ready to deal with life. And that night, dear Peter and I . . . he comforted me, sir . . . and I will ever be grateful.”

  Well I can fill in the blanks, can’t I? Aloud he says, “You must be grateful, too, to have had that lovely child with you over the years.”

  “You do not condemn us, sir?”

  “I am thankful to have known you and your brother and Mary. You have been my great friends in this new world.”

  Miss Russell wipes her face with the napkin Job has left by her cup of tea. “You are kind, Mr. White.” She takes a deep breath. “I only wish I could have stopped the girl from running after those pigeons. I might have saved her . . . I might have—”

  “You heard her last words, my friend. They were happy words. Be thankful she had those moments.” White pauses, trying to choose words that will offer some surcease for the woman’s pain. “Let us imagine that she has flown with those birds to another world, a world free of pain—”

  And suddenly, they are both crying. He helps Miss Russell to her feet and places her in the comfortable rocking chair by the fire. He puts a pillow behind her neck and stands behind the chair rocking it back and forth, back and forth, back and forth . . .

  When she finally falls asleep, he climbs softly up the stairs, stands in the doorway of Mary’s bedchamber and looks at the child. She seems at peace. What was that song I heard the slaves sing in the cotton fields in Jamaica? He ponders, then remembers a line: “I want to cross over into campground.” Is Mary there now with those birds she loved?

  Much later, he is almost asleep, his head on the kitchen table, when he hears the kitchen door open gently. Russell has arrived.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  November 1796

  John White stands in front of the new pier-glass he purchased from Hamilton in Queenston. It’s at present in his dining room. It should be in his bedchamber, but he and Yvette have never been able to figure out how to get it up the ladder into his loft. Not that it matters: it’s the effect achieved by looking in it that counts. He wants to be at his best on this day, a day he dreads. John Elmsley is to be sworn in as the new Chief Justice. No way he can avoid the day: it’s his duty to see that the ceremony unfolds correctly and that events get recorded. He claps the tie wig over his head and tucks a thatch of brown hair under it.

  Then he sets out on foot for the centre of town, to the building housing the courthouse and gaol that was built more than a year ago at the end of King Street, as it’s now called. It’s probably too close to Yankee cannons if they should ever want to go to war, but withal it’s a solid one-storey clapboard structure, plain but adequate, with a court room on the main floor and a staircase leading down to the gaol cells. A damn sight better than anything I’ll get in York.

  He can now count about fifteen solid dwellings of imposing proportions in town, all a far cry from the miserable, straggling little huts that he and Osgoode first espied on their arrival with the Simcoes in 1792. Of course, the most superior one—plunked, as the Yankees say, right in the town centre—is David Smith’s. Beside the Freemasons’ Lodge, it occupies almost a whole block of formal gardens, orchards, and railing in the best English style. White is sick of hearing the man brag about it. But, damn it, it is elegant and distinguished.

  And then there’s Lieutenant Robert Pilkington’s house on a one-acre lot, a fine house which is now vacant since Pilkington has left for Quebec. He was a great favourite of Mrs. Simcoe since they both shared a love of sketching. In his time here, he’d drawn up plans for all the finest houses in town, and his own place is in the best Georgian style. If I didn’t have to make the move to York, I might see about renting it for myself. It would be worth some extra debt. I remember how I once coveted it and planned to rent it on my thousand a year stipend as Chief Justice. Oh, what fools we mortals be.

  He steps through the front door of the courthouse to find a man in a superfine frock coat with silver braid, clearly Elmsley, waiting just inside the chamber. When he first heard the bad news about Elmsley’s appointment as Chief Justice, he remembered Elmsley’s inexperience. The man is young, a year younger than White himself, and it’s only six-and-a-half years since he was called to the bar, apparently. A friend of the Duke of Portland with a Loyalist father-in-law. Patronage counts.

  In his mind he had pictured a man short in stature, someone he could look down upon, but Elmsley is his own height and stares him straight in the eye. Then the impostor pulls out his pocket watch, looks at it, shakes his head, and puts it back in his waistcoat.

  “I’m not late,” White says, trying to quell his in
dignation. He pulls out his own watch and brandishes it in the man’s face. “Right on the mark.”

  “Accedas ad curiam,” Elmsley replies, laughing. The phrase comes at White so suddenly that he is unable to translate it immediately, but he takes a cue from the laughter and returns a smile in reply.

  From the cells below, he can hear the cries of a prisoner. “Damn,” he says to Elmsley. “That wretched guard can surely postpone his whippings until we get through this ceremony.”

  Another Latin phrase issues from the Chief Justice’s mouth, but White pays it no attention: he strides from the courtroom and down the stairs into the dungeon.

  He gets back upstairs just in time to hear Russell’s gavel banging on the podium, and the swearing-in gets under way.

  * * *

  White, Elmsley, and Russell go out for an early supper afterwards at the tavern called Yellow House.

  They sit down near the hearth where a blazing fire staves off the encroaching cold as the front door opens and closes for the “regulars,” a group of rather dirty and disheveled men, obviously labourers.

  Elmsley looks them over, and says in a loud voice, “Well, it isn’t the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn, but one must adjust. The Duke of Portland told me there would be very little of what we Britishers call ‘polite society’ here on the far side of the Atlantic, but one must adjust.” He sighs. “One must adjust.”

  White watches Russell take several deep breaths. His friend looks tired these days. He is now officially Administrator of Upper Canada, and though he has almost finished adding wings to a fine new house in York, he keeps running back and forth between Niagara and the new capital. His sister Eliza has suffered from depression since Mary’s death, and Russell has hovered near her whenever he can spare time from his responsibilities.

  “Do not adjust too completely, sir,” his friend says. “You know that we must resume our duties in the new capital at once. As a matter of fact, Colonel Simcoe wanted us all in York by last summer, latest. And here it is, November.”

  Elmsley puffs out his cheeks and barks out a response that causes the labourers to turn their heads to listen. “I have no intention of going to York. Why would I? There is no court house there, no gaol either, and what would I do there as Chief Justice without jurors for my trials?”

  “Jurors, sir?” Russell is clearly at a loss. White knows what Elmsley is about to say—he’s turned over the same idea in his own mind many times—but he’s determined not to say anything that might seem to indicate an agreement with Elmsley.

  “How are we to get jurors to travel to a godforsaken hole in the forest? There are no roads from what I hear, a harbour that is closed to access from the east, and no place to accommodate them while they are on duty. I cannot proceed with bills of indictment if there are no jurors to examine them.”

  “I promise you a courthouse, sir, within a few months. And roads, too.”

  Elmsley makes a noise in his throat and ejects a gob of mucus into the spittoon that sits by the hearth. The labourers at the next table imitate him, but their spit goes onto the broad pine planks of the floor. Elmsley sees their insolence, but he can do nothing about it except to say “dirty Yankee upstarts,” a phrase that makes them erupt in laughter.

  The atmosphere is heating up, and White knows he must act. If it came to fisticuffs, the three of them would be lying in the spit on the floor. “Drinks for our friends,” he says to the black serving man, pointing to the table of labourers. He can ill afford the gesture, but it has the effect of pacifying them. They bury their faces in the froth of their ale tankards and begin their own conversation.

  He’s thankful for the arrival of their meal. It’s the staple entrée of the Yellow House: boiled cabbage and fried salted pork swimming in a pool of grease. Instead of being delivered by the server to their table, the entrée is set upon a large table in the middle of the room and everyone makes a rush towards it. By the time, he, Russell, and Elmsley manage to push their way to the food, a good deal of the pork has disappeared, leaving only a few pieces in the grease. Elmsley takes a look at it, lips curled. White waits for an explosion.

  “Fabas indulcet fames,” he pronounces. Then, evidently noticing his companions’ lack of comprehension, he offers a translation. “Hunger sweetens the beans,” he says in a condescending voice as he picks a piece of pork for his plate.

  “There are no beans here, sir,” Russell says in a puzzled tone. White nudges his friend’s foot, hoping that he will say no more. Irony has always been lost upon him.

  Back at their own small table, they eat in silence for a time. There seems to be no common topic on which they can fasten. Elmsley asks the server for a napkin “to wipe the grease from my hands.” The notion of napkins seems to be a new one, and the man has to confer for a moment with the owner who is standing behind the bar.

  Dessert—puddings and creams—come next. Again they must troop to the central table to load their bowls. There are large serving spoons but no individual spoons. Even White, accustomed now to the ways of the town, is nonplussed about how to proceed. He looks at the labourers nearby. They are scooping up the contents of their bowls with their knives. He remembers Alexander Mackenzie’s preference for a knife with Yvette’s pudding. The method works fairly well, especially since the knives have rounded edges and can hold a good portion of pudding on their blades. But Elmsley calls for a spoon, and again, there is much consultation on the part of the black servant and his master before one is produced.

  Out on the street again, White and Russell bid Elmsley adieu. The Chief Justice has rented rooms in the town. “You will have a vast acreage in York, sir, when you move,” Russell tells him. “Simcoe insisted on one-hundred acre lots for each of the administration as a douceur to compensate for their removal from this place.”

  “I told you before, Russell—did you not hear—that I am not moving from this place. I have this day paid over a thousand pounds to Pilkington’s agent for the purchase of the lieutenant’s house. When my bride and her father arrive from Boston, they will find a pleasant abode awaiting them, one that, I hope, will distract their attention from the general barbarity of the occupants of this town.”

  White puts his arm through Russell’s and pulls him away. But before they can escape, Elmsley finds more to say. “I have not mentioned my friend, the Reverend Mr. Thomas Raddish.”

  The rotund, little red-faced man who looks exactly like a radish? White has noticed him in the town, always in a clerical collar and clutching a prayer book.

  Russell says, “What about him?”

  “I seek a Church of England appointment for him. But I have not been able to find a church in this place. What do you suggest?”

  “Nothing here for him, Elmsley. You’re right, there is no church. Services take place in the Freemasons’ Lodge. But we already have a rector. The Reverend Mr. Addison has looked after our spiritual lives for many months. Your friend cannot displace him.”

  “What am I to tell him, then?”

  “There may be a need for a rector in York. Tell him to join you there.”

  Elmsley turns quite red with rage. “Good day, sirs.”

  Laughing, White and his friend walk towards Russell’s house on the commons. “Blast the man,” Russell says when they are out of earshot. “Blast his uppity British ways and his damnable Latin phrases. Do you understand any of his lingo?”

  “Some of it,” White says. “Latin was a subject I could barely tolerate, though. But I expect we’ll be hearing a good deal of it in the next years. There’s one phrase, though, I’ll write down for you to memorize. ‘Nescio de quo loqueris.’ I believe it translates roughly to ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.’ Use it when he spouts. By the way, that was a brilliant send-off you gave him tonight.”

  “It made me happy to see the look of rage on his face. I am writing to the Governor tonight. I’m going to tell him of the man’s utter piggery.” He turns towards White, his face almost oblite
rated by the setting sun, so that only the anger in his voice registers. “Are you with me?”

  “Yes. Though I myself have fought against the move to York, I will not ally myself with Elmsley. Court house or no court house, gaol or no gaol, you may count on me to join you soon in York and to back you in whatever you tell the Colonel.”

  At the edge of the long driveway which winds towards the Russells’ house, the men pause to shake hands.

  White trudges towards home. “Uppity British ways,” that was the phrase his friend had used to describe Elmsley’s manners. And I felt the same resentment. Have we become more Canadian than British in a mere four-and-a-half years?

  Then he remembers the drunkards in front of Field’s Tavern on that ill-fated night when he learned that he had been passed over for promotion to Chief Justice. Hadn’t the louts called him and Russell “Uppity Brits”?

  How the world changes . . . His laughter is echoed by a barking dog somewhere on one of the forest paths.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  York (now Toronto)

  July 1797

  In an effort to keep his mind off the letter he received this morning, John White has walked from his new house down to the bay. This bay at York is a place he has come to love. Dense forests line its margins, and he stops on the shoreline to enjoy the images of the trees reflected in the still surface of the water. His presence stirs the calm of early evening, and wild geese and cranes take flight.

  He sees, farther along the shore, the tents of the Mississauga Indian band. He remembers how Mrs. Simcoe called them a dirty, drunken, idle people, compared with the handsome, colourfully dressed Ojibway bands from Lake Huron and the tall, well-built Mohawks who occasionally attended the Simcoes’ dances at Fort Niagara. But he has some sympathy for these Indians. When he first came to this place, he heard how they had given the Gov the appellation of “He Who Changes Names.” He can only imagine how they must feel to find the home they once called Toronto now metamorphosed into York. As well, they must watch the incoming flux of settlers from Niagara, all of whom will occupy the land they looked upon as their own. “Park lots,” the Gov called them, which extend north into the wilderness from the street now called Queen, and “town lots” which go down to the waterfront. In no time, these Mississaugas will undoubtedly have white men chasing them away with muskets.