by Seán Haldane
The experienced Frederick had chosen an angle from which the girls and the mother could be seen in a row, from the side and slightly behind. Directly across the aisle was the delicious sight of hair curling just below the bonnet above a pink cheek, mouth opened delicately to sing, eyes under long lashes cast down modestly at the hymn book. Aemilia, the eldest, was the nearest to me, then came Letitia, Cordelia (Frederick whispered to me that this was she), and the mother. They were not exactly like peas in a pod, but the resemblance was striking. All three girls had the fine turned-up nose and chocolate-box pretty look which the mother, although stouter and with a plumper face, still possessed. I could not see much of their eyes, which might have provided more distinction between them. Aemilia, however, stood out – and literally, I noticed, stood at a slight distance from the others, even more than that required by her crinoline. She was taller, her face was thinner and less conventionally pretty, and what I could see of her hair was a chestnut brown not unlike my own, whereas her sisters and mothers were more fair. They were dressed elegantly but not, by the looks of it, too expensively. Not having had sisters, I knew little of such things.
Frederick spent the service in a state of elastic erectness, chest puffed out, eyes sparkling, voice resonant in the hymns. I found myself mimicking this involuntarily. It was a sort of mating display, in case the ladies caught sight of us out of the corner of an eye. Another person on his best behaviour was the young curate, Mr Firbanks, who was clean-shaven and had blond hair which had been incredibly smoothed, so that he looked like a porcelain angel. He read the Collects unctuously in a light and melodious tenor voice. I wondered idly why curates always seemed to be tenors, then became baritones when they matured into parsons. As if, to use the idiom of my school, their balls had dropped a notch further. I stared through the bare glass windows at a dove grey sky. The weather had turned cool and showery.
The last hymn was
There is a happy land,
Far, far away
Where saints in glory stand
Bright, bright as day …
Some contrast to McLevy’s Happy Land where ‘there is no religion save that of the devil’! I no longer believed in the words, but the hymn with its naïvely cheerful tune reminded me of childhood – in fact I could almost hear it in children’s voices as I contentedly roared out with the others,
Come to that happy land,
Come, come away,
Why will ye doubting stand,
Why still delay?
Oh, we shall happy be,
When from sin and sorrow free,
Lord we shall live with Thee,
Blest, blest for aye.
The service ended. Frederick and I stayed in place so that Frederick could smile, and myself nod politely, at the ladies on their way out. Then as the two of us filed out of our pew we ran into a broad shouldered young man, with stiff-looking black hair and a somewhat swaggering walk. ‘Hello, old chap,’ he said quietly to Frederick, with a wide smile which was also stiff, almost a rictus. This was the more conspicuous for the fact that he was clean-shaven. His voice was thin and dry as if squeezed out. His eyes which, given his bearing, might have been expected to be penetrating, were of the sensitive brown kind, and moved between Frederick and me with a quick but wavering movement. The three of us paused to let others past, and Frederick made a quiet introduction: ‘Hobbes. Beaumont.’ Then to Beaumont: ‘Hobbes was up at Oxford with me. He’s acting Sergeant in the police.’ And to me: ‘Beaumont is a Lieutenant in the Marines.’ We shook hands. Beaumont’s hand was large, warm and dry. He seemed a friendly sort of chap, though odd.
We came out of church where a gently rising slope had been cleared and gravelled to provide spaces for horses and carts, although it was surrounded by wild and mossy crags under a dense cover of firs interspersed with cottonwood and oaks. Below the church was the graveyard, with a tiny yew which must have been brought from England – it was surely not native. I took in the scene before facing up to the introductions to the widow Somerville and the three ‘eligibles’ who had been standing outside in earnest conversation with the curate. With the forward touch of the colonies, the ladies readily held out their velvet gloved hands to be briefly clasped.
To my surprise Mrs Somerville was ready for the charge. ‘Mr Hobbes! I know who you are – the constable working on the case of our poor dear Dr McCrory! So conscientious of the authorities to leave no stone unturned before condemning an Indian. After all, even the lowest of savages is entitled to the best of British justice. You dreadful man, Frederick. The next thing, you’ll be bringing Mr Hobbes to our house for an interrogation. Seriously, Mr Hobbes, you must come with Frederick to Orchard Farm this afternoon – you are most welcome to join our little circle – but you must promise not to question us all about our movements on the fatal day! Poor Dr McCrory. He was always such an informative man. A delight. Truly.’
All this was delivered in the imagined style of the English ‘grande dame,’ but in an unmistakably colonial manner. Without doubt her tactics were good. I was quite disarmed but tried to regain lost ground.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I came across Frederick at the funeral – a sad occasion. But I was most offended not to have seen him for some months. We used to spend Sunday afternoons together. It was only after the deepest interrogation, I assure you, that he revealed where he had been all this time.’ I smiled gallantly around at the ladies. As I had expected, I caught nothing but bland sociability in the faces of the two youngest sisters, but there was a certain ‘hauteur’ in that of Aemilia.
‘Chad is an old friend of mine from Oxford,’ Frederick put in.
‘How nice!’ Mrs Somerville said. ‘You will come to see us.’
‘Of course.’ I was not sure how wise it was, after all, for Frederick to have played the Oxford card. The colonies, even this one, were filled with third rate Oxonians whose status as a ‘university man’ was the most they would ever claim. A man of action like Beaumont was well ahead in the game. The colonies needed soldiers and Marines, not Oxford men.
Beaumont was greeting the girls. They called him by his Christian name, which was George. ‘King George Diaub,’ I found myself thinking. The word ‘George’ was not much of a connection, though Beaumont like any military man, or policeman for that matter, was a ‘King George’ par excellence. I observed him closely. In spite of his almost mechanical stiffness he was definitely socially ‘ept’ (as opposed to in-). He even had a cavalry-officer lisp: ‘Wather looks like wain, doncher think?’ Was this natural for a Lieutenant in the Marines? They were a long way down in the social scale from the cavalry, although since the charge of the Light Brigade the cavalry were recognized as also light in brain-power. Marines were more versatile, but Beaumont hardly seemed a brain: the affable fixed smile ruled that out.
The Somervilles set off for Orchard Farm in as much style as their equipage – what was known, American style, as a two horse buggy – allowed. Their Negro farm-worker, grizzled and older than I had expected, who must have been hanging around outside, cracked his whip above the horses with panache. Beaumont, who had a satchel containing what he described as ‘an American seedcake for the ladies,’ plus his own sandwich, tagged on as Frederick and I followed the grandly known Cedar Hill Cross Road, really a track, through a defile between crags and firs. It was cold on this sunless day. We chatted mainly about Beaumont’s rather glamorous and idle existence as part of Her Majesty’s occupying force on San Juan Island.
This island, less than ten miles away across Haro Strait, is the subject of a boundary dispute between Britain and the United States. It was, like the Victoria region, occupied by both British and American settlers under the protection of the HBC. But when the boundary between Washington Territory and British Columbia was established, in 1849, the wording of the treaty was ambivalent about whether Haro Strait, or Rosario Strait on the other side of San Juan, was the boundary. In 1859 an American on San Juan shot a pig belonging to the HBC, some Ameri
can army hotheads occupied part of the island, and on the pig it seemed as if a global war depended. After all the Americans once sent an expeditionary force against Morocco in the so-called ‘War of Jenkins’ Ear’ – Jenkins being the American Ambassador whose ear had been lopped off by a Moroccan. The Americans have ambitions to extend their domain, in Manifest Destiny, all the way up to Alaska. And if they can go to war over an ear, no doubt they can do so over a pig.
But for ten years there has been a stalemate, in which a force of Marines at English Camp protects the interests of the third of the few hundred people on the island who are British, and a force at American Camp protects the rest. The Americans have been more than tied up in their Civil War, so the Pig War has remained quiescent. Now the question of the boundary has been referred for arbitration to the President of Switzerland, a neutral, who is taking his time. In the meantime the Marines at English Camp twiddle their thumbs in their quarters which have recently been rebuilt at great expense, and organize seasonal parties with their American counterparts.
‘Dashed agreeable place, weally,’ said Beaumont, demonstrating that his cavalry lisp only applied to the r’s at the beginning of words, although I won’t continue to transliterate it here. ‘Not a lot to do though.’ He said he came as often as he could to Victoria. It was a hard two hour row or sail across the Strait to Telegraph Cove, but every two weeks or so, weather permitting, he could get three or four Marines – he was, after all, second in command at the camp – to take him over in one of the small boats. They would tramp the four miles into Victoria and spend the day, and perhaps a night there. Or on a Sunday, when Beaumont came to visit Orchard Farm, the lads would lounge around at Telegraph Cove or nearby at Cadborough Bay, with a bottle or two of grog, and make friends with the people who came out from town to the beaches for picnics. Beaumont would walk to St Marks, then on to the farm.
The road broke out of the forest into more open country. Ahead of us was a wide valley, in which patches of trees alternated with fields and homesteads, and to the right the blunt cone of Mount Douglas, its lower slopes solid with fir, its top bare and rocky with patches of scrub.
I was trying to find an avenue of conversational approach to the subject of McCrory when Beaumont, as Mrs Somerville had done before him, brought up the subject himself: ‘I heard Mrs Somerville say you’re hot on the trail of the murderer of our friend the doctor.’
‘Not really.’ I had decided that my strategy for the day would be to play down my role as detective. ‘They’ve already charged a man, an Indian. I’m just tying up loose ends. Very little is known about this chap McCrory. He was a bit of a mystery man.’
‘Really? I always thought he was quite forthcoming – talkative, full of anecdotes. Vulgar, of course. But life and soul of the party, what?’
‘You mean at the Somervilles’? Or elsewhere too?’
‘Elsewhere?’ Beaumont’s wavering brown eyes looked almost wounded – incongruous above the tight smile and jaw. ‘I’d never know a man of that sort elsewhere. I mean, I’ve never met him at Government House.’
This I felt, and was perhaps meant to feel, was a snub. I had never been near Government House, meaning ‘Carey Castle,’ a rather vulgar (to use Beaumont’s term) wooden house in which Governor Seymour held court surrounded by the sort of sycophantic and rootless English who I imagined might be found in any outpost of the Empire, from Peshawar to Botany Bay.
‘Now, Orchard Farm is different,’ Beaumont continued. ‘Very amusing. Of course the mother is a bit much, but a dear old fig, really. Lovely gels. Quite unusual by any standards. I dare say with a bit of coaching they’d quite star at any hunt ball at home.’
‘I say, Beaumont,’ Frederick interrupted, hasty as always. ‘Don’t be patronizing. They can certainly hold their own here, which is what counts. And more than that. Cordelia is lovely too. I’m sure you don’t find girls like that in your part of the world. You can’t tell me the Yorkshire moors are much more civilised than this.’
We sat down on some rocks overlooking the valley, and pitched into our picnic lunch, Frederick and I passing our bottles of ale to Beaumont for an occasional swig. Frederick and Beaumont bantered about the respective merits of the North Riding of Yorkshire, and Kent – both 8,000 miles away.
9
The house at Orchard Farm is like the alienist’s, a small two storied box, only with a wide roofed veranda or ‘porch’ around three sides, and extensive outbuildings, including a cottage presumably lived in by the farm help, the Joneses. Beside the house and along the road is a paddock, with a zig zag ‘snake fence’ of cedar poles, their ends laid over each other alternately at each joint. Behind and on each side of the house, surrounded by more snake fences on a gentle slope, is the orchard. There are at least a hundred trees, many of them now in blossom. Their scent on this dull day when perhaps the atmosphere held it down like a blanket, reached out along the road as if to greet the three of us.
We let ourselves in the front gate, closing it behind us, as a collie dog bounded cheerfully around us. At the hitching post were the Somervilles’ buggy and another, more stylish one, whose two horses munched in their nosebags. The Negro, Mr Jones, appeared and began to unhitch the Somervilles’ horse to lead it to stable. With him were the so-called picaninny, only a few years old, and the Indian boy, obviously a half breed white, about ten years old. Since there was no resemblance whatsoever between him and Mr Jones, the speculation about Mrs Jones was understandable.
We thumped up the steps onto the porch, and the door was opened by an angular-looking woman in a maid’s costume, Mrs Jones. She was only about thirty years old but looked rather severe, I thought, to have lapsed into having congress with an Indian.
She showed us along the hall, a mere few paces, and into the drawing room, which consisted of two small square rooms connected by a wide proscenium type arch, with plaster curlicued columns. There was actually a fireplace – the more usual Victoria farmhouse would have had a potbellied stove – of brick and tile in which, for form’s sake, although it would not have been chilly indoors without it, a wood fire was burning. Form was clearly important for the Somervilles, not that I thought less of them for that. Life in the Colony was not economically easy, except for government officials and some property speculators, like Mr Quattrini, who had arrived before us and rose to greet us. He was a burly red cheeked man with a thick black beard, squeezed into his Sunday best – a black suit like that of an undertaker, and a pearly grey tie on which shone an unnecessarily large diamond pin. His manner was forthright. He obviously knew better than to put on airs, as he probably would have if he had been English and therefore ashamed of money. But airs were not absent in the manners of the Somervilles, especially Mrs S, whose presence was overwhelming in a bosomy maroon coloured crinoline dress trimmed in lace. The younger girls had a simpering tendency. Aemilia, tall and elegant in a lilac coloured crinoline which complemented her eyes, which were soft grey like the sky outside, was not simpering but stand-offish.
The room was furnished in the fashionable way. Almost every inch of the walls (themselves covered with a thick-looking floral wallpaper) was covered with something. There were paintings of the Landseer ‘Monarch of the Glen’ type (reminding me of the Hotel Argyle) or of the sentimental type: an ‘Abyssinian girl’ bare-footed, casting large black eyes heavenward as if in prayer while a muffled horseman galloped into a distant landscape of mountains and minarets; some ‘gypsy’ children, also barefoot, selling clothes pegs outside an English Inn, their faces pretty and seraphic with unlikely innocence. The remaining areas of wall were bedecked with whatever ornament could be accommodated to its flatness: a riding crop with a woven leather handle, a sabre with a silver guard, a cavalryman’s pennant – these presumably the father’s – and crochet work and embroidery in frames. On the mantelpiece were the usual clock and engraved silver trays and candlesticks. The fireplace was surrounded with enough equipment in the way of brass handled tongs, pokers, scrapers and b
ellows to maintain three such fires at once.
The back half, as it were, of the drawing room doubled as a dining room (unthinkable in England) and had open shelves packed with china dishes and plates turned outward on display (very English, but unthinkable in more practical houses in the Colony where the shelves would have been enclosed in cupboards, so as to obviate the need for constant dusting). The front half was cluttered not only with armchairs and two settees, but with leather ottomans on which the Somerville girls perched. In view of the floor space occupied by furniture and crinolines, there was very little of the somewhat worn wine-red Axminster carpet visible, and no way of walking around. I found myself stuck on a not very comfortable hard backed chair near the door while an urgent cluster formed around the main feature of the room, an ‘upright grand’ piano against the wall beside the fireplace. Letitia had been playing when we came in, and now she resumed, with Beaumont turning the pages, his fixed agreeable smile and mechanical movements making him look like a huge well-dressed puppet. Cordelia abandoned her ottoman and stood fluttering with Frederick, as close together as manners and crinoline would permit, behind Letitia’s other shoulder.
Letitia was playing, inevitably, one of Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs Without Words’ – Faith, which I knew was one of the easiest – with competence but not much verve. They were, I thought, rather insipid girls, but they were pretty and it was a pleasure to let the eye feast on them. Quattrini and Mrs Somerville were conversing quietly. Aemilia, who might have been expected to take up the social slack by making me feel at home, had instead taken up a sampler and was stitching the usual hearts and flowers in it while listening, with a sad look, to the music. Frederick had said to me that she was melancholy, and a blue-stocking, and it was clear why she did not exert the same obvious tug on young men as her younger sisters, or even as her mother must have done in her day. Aemilia did not really look melancholy but she was obviously very serious, which was not fashionable, and considered to be intimidating. Irritated, because Frederick had predicted this, I found myself drawn to her. Her face was paler than that of her sisters, with a few freckles on her cheeks and nose, which would of course be considered a blemish, but she did not seem to have made any attempt to cover them up with powder or cream. Her skin was in fact of a milky smoothness. Her grey eyes were clear and, I imagined, wise. Her hair, out of its Sunday bonnet, was gloriously rich in colour although rather thin in texture. The turned up nose was pretty as her sisters’. Her mouth, less of a rosebud than theirs, might have been more generous but now looked severe. She must have seen I was studying her, but paid me no attention.