Minor Corruption

by Don Gutteridge

  “You say ‘paying court,’ but that covers a multitude of peccadilloes, sir. Please be specific. You are under oath.”

  Dr. Baldwin cleared his throat but his words could barely be heard. “McCall caught them in bed together – in his own house.”

  Sensation one more time! For here was surely the final nail in Seamus Baldwin’s coffin. The man had seduced a minor before in Ireland. And how many had preceded that offence? If the man himself heard the accusation, he gave no sign.

  As the judge banged his gavel in a fruitless attempt to restore order, Marc thought for a moment that his heart had stopped.

  ***

  It was two-thirty in the afternoon when Cobb pulled his buggy into Ogden Frank’s livery on Colborne Street at West Market Lane. He now had to do one of the few things he genuinely feared: hire and ride a horse. The oslter’s lad chuckled as he helped Cobb wobble into the saddle of an elderly and sedate mare of various brownish hues and a crooked star on her forehead.

  “If ya speak soft-like, sir, she won’t buck – too hard.”

  Cobb was beyond irony or humour. He twisted the reins in his fists.

  “How far ya goin’?”

  “Thornhill,” Cobb said bumpily as the mare stepped forward. Then he gritted his teeth and aimed the beast at Yonge Street.

  On Yonge Street Cobb pulled on the right rein and the horse kindly obeyed and turned north. Thornhill was a hamlet a dozen or so miles up Yonge Street. Not far. But renting a buggy had been out of the question, for the road above Gallows Hill was rutted and near-impassable this time of year despite the recent stretch of Indian summer. And time was of the essence as the trial would likely finish up in the morning or early tomorrow afternoon. If new evidence were unearthed, then it had to be made known before this evening. Hence this horse, a beast that was incompatible with all things Cobb. As a lad he had ridden old draught horses a few times on his father’s farm near Woodstock, but he had never taken to the activity as his brother Laertes had.

  Above Queen, where the traffic and houses thinned out, he felt obliged to urge the mare beyond a walk. But its teeth-jarring trot became unbearable by the time they reached the Bloor crossroad. The Red Lion Inn on his right looked awfully tempting, but he put one hand on his belly to stem its jigging and carried on manfully. With Gallows Hill in sight, he tried spurring his mount on to a gallop, but quickly lost one foot from its stirrup and was damn near pitched into the mire of a pig-yard beside the road. When he pulled back on the reins, the horse magically reduced its speed to a leisurely canter, and to his surprise he found that he could move his squat body in some sort of rhythm to match the mare’s. So this was how it was done!

  At Eglinton he passed through the toll-gate with a cheery wave of his horseman’s unreined hand, glanced once at Paul Pry’s inn, and cantered on. A mile or so father on he swept by the Golden Lion Inn, then Finch’s Inn – his thirst now monumental – and finally the Sickle and Sheaf. Only three or four miles to go, with bush now closed in on both sides, separating the partly cleared farms.

  At five o’clock he cantered past the Thornhill Hotel, yanked back on the reins, trot-jiggled back to the inn, and gingerly dismounted. When his feet hit the ground, his knees buckled and he collapsed onto them, panting and parched.

  “You look like ya could use a drink.”

  It was the proprietor of the hotel, aproned, red-cheeked, and smiling.

  ***

  Cobb finished his ale, nodded gratefully to the innkeeper, and asked his first question: “I was told a Seymour Kilbride lived here at the hotel. Is that so?”

  “Well, no. He does work here on Saturdays when we’re busy. But he don’t live here.”

  “You know where I can locate him?”

  “In trouble, is he?”

  “Not at all. He has important information we need fer a trial goin’ on in Toronto.”

  “We don’t pay no mind to the shenanigans goin’ on down in Toronto. But, yeah, Seymour works a little vegetable farm just east of town. You take this crossroad and ride fer about two miles. On yer right you’ll see a huge chestnut tree beside a pond. Follow the trail around it inta the bush about a half-mile. You can’t miss it.”

  With his rump feeling as if it had ridden through Whittle’s grist-mill, Cobb made his way to the designated tree and pond, and then moved carefully along a rugged bush-trail until he came to a log cabin, flanked by a chicken-coop and a hay-barn. The ruins of several summer and fall garden-patches were plainly visible. It looked as if the new owners had plenty of work to occupy them for some time to come.

  Cobb tethered the mare, went up to the rickety door, and knocked. It was half a minute and several further knocks before the door was eased partway open.

  “Yes?” The single word emanated from a young man whose face was just visible in the shadows of the ill-lit interior. “Whaddya want?” Then when the fellow realized Cobb was a police constable, he tried to slam the door shut. It jammed on Cobb’s boot.

  “I ain’t here to cause trouble,” Cobb said. “But I got some information you oughta hear about, and you got some I need to hear. You are Seymour Kilbride, ain’t ya?”

  At the sound of his name, the young man pulled the door away from Cobb’s boot. “Sorry, sir, but we don’t trust strangers much around here. I am Seymour Kilbride. What’ve ya got to tell me? I’ve done nothin’ wrong in Toronto ‘cause I ain’t set foot there fer months.”

  “I’d like to come in.”

  “I prefer to talk here.”

  But Cobb was too quick for the lad. He brushed past him and entered the murky interior. Two women sat at a deal table, peeling potatoes. In the dim light afforded by a nearby window, Cobb could see that one was young and pretty. The other was of indeterminate age. She might have been under thirty but life had scrawled its stress and strain across a sunken face with pale, frightened eyes set deep in bruised sockets. Her auburn hair hung down her back like frayed strands of hemp.

  “And this must be Missus Kilbride,” Cobb said with a slight tip of his helmet towards the pretty one.

  “That’s my Marion,” Kilbride said, looking dismayed.

  “So it is. And this young lady would be yer sister – Lottie Thurgood.”

  FOURTEEN

  Marc felt dazed and disoriented as he stood up to cross-examine Dr. Baldwin. What could he do? Were there any mitigating circumstances? Any way of blunting the dagger pointed at Uncle Seamus’s heart?

  “You said McCall’s daughter was almost eighteen?” he began lamely.

  “Yes,” Dr. Baldwin said with some semblance of enthusiasm, “she was a month away from her majority. And the affair was not sordid in the way Mr. Cambridge tried to imply. Susan McCall was a mature young woman in love. This was no tawdry seduction. My uncle swore to me that he loved her and immediately offered to marry her, an offer she was keen to accept.”

  “But Mr. McCall would not agree?” Marc was starting to get his second wind.

  “No. He felt the difference in their ages was insupportable. He had tried to keep them apart all along, and when they succumbed to – to their mutual passion, he discovered them and threatened to have the law on my uncle. It was then arranged for him to retire quietly, and following his deep depression, further arrangements were made to have him join his family here in Toronto.”

  Well, it could have been worse, Marc thought. But not by much.

  Cambridge went right back to work in his rebuttal.

  “Seamus Baldwin and Miss Mcall were found in flagrante delicto in a bed in the McCall household?”

  “That’s what I was told, yes.”

  “A sixty-year-old man with a seventeen-year-old innocent girl?”

  Dr. Baldwin merely nodded, but Cambridge wasn’t interested in the exact nature of his response.

  “And her father threatened to have the law on him, as he had every right to because Seamus Baldwin was guilty of statutory rape and the corruption of a minor, am I right?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Baldwin s
aid, his face full of misery.

  “No more questions, Milord.”

  No more were needed, Marc thought.

  ***

  It was a gloomy post-mortem in Robert’s chambers. The trial had been scheduled to continue on Thursday morning, when Marc was expected to begin his defense. But there was no defense. No character witness could be produced who could undo the damage done by the afternoon’s testimony. Marc had placed all his eggs in one basket: impeaching the Crown’s testimony and developing alternative accounts of the crime – and those eggs had been smashed, along with the basket. Worse still was the unthinkable thought that refused to stay put in his subconscious where it belonged: what if the old gent really did do it? What if his plausible explanations were just that – mere plausibilities? Marc was grateful that there were no recriminations, but it was cold comfort. He ached for the Baldwins, all of them.

  Finally it was decided that they would have to move directly to closing arguments. Marc was sent home to compose the best speech he could devise under the circumstances. It was a dispirited advocate who made his way back to Briar cottage. Beth was waiting for him.

  “You did what you could,” she said sympathetically. “And you had no way of knowin’ what was to come.”

  “The only inkling I had, love, was the odd reaction of Dr. Baldwin back when I first suggested he appear as a character witness. He must have been torn up inside.”

  “He knew, of course, what his brother’d been up to back in Ireland.”

  “Well, that sordid episode does help to explain the old gent’s depression and his inordinate attraction to Edie and Betsy, doesn’t it?”

  “He was lookin’ to replace a hole in his heart, I’d say. But that still don’t make him a corruptor of minors. He was good to those girls. Still, it looks awful fer him, doesn’t’ it? So the best thing I can do is get the kids out of your way so you can sit down and write the greatest speech of yer life.”

  But the best and most loving thing she did was not raise the question of Uncle Seamus’s possible guilt, for he honestly did not know how he might answer her. He realized, too late, that he really knew very little, first-hand, about Uncle Seamus. He had spent a mere twenty minutes with him. He should have returned and questioned the man more closely, got some idea of his own what made the fellow tick. But he had been too much in love with the image of Doubtful Dick Dougherty, who had never lost a capital case. His mind was in a turmoil as he went into his study – alone.

  Small wonder, then, that he was on his third version of the opening paragraph when, about eight o’clock, there came a knock at the front door. He tossed his pen aside and decided to answer it for himself. He went to the vestibule and opened the door.

  It was Cobb – with news.

  ***

  Everyone was taken by surprise on Thursday morning when the defense – widely expected to move to closing arguments – asked Justice Powell for permission to call an unscheduled witness. The judge, recalling the Crown’s manoeuvre yesterday afternoon with Dr. Baldwin, glanced over at a puzzled Neville Cambridge and said, “Granted, Mr. Edwards. And if Mr. Cambridge requires time to prepare a cross-examination, he will be allowed it.”

  All eyes now turned to the door of the witness-room where a strange woman was being ushered in. She was of medium height and walked awkwardly, not quite with a limp but tenderly, as if her feet might have wished they did not have to touch the floor. Her dull auburn tresses were bound up behind her in a tidy bun. She wore a freshly washed, plain black dress. Her boots were scuffed and unpolished. When she stood in the witness-box and turned her face to the benches and the galleries, there was from the latter a sharp cry. Mrs. Auleen Thurgood had cried out and then fainted in her husband’s arms. He himself sat staring at the witness, open-mouthed, incredulous, barely conscious of his wife’s collapse.

  The woman, who was in reality only twenty-six, looked fifty. Her face was pallid, tubercular, haunted. As she accepted the oath, her voice was fragile, as if, once broken, it would be irreparable. She stated her name as Loretta Thurgood. From the galleries there was as much puzzlement as curiosity.

  Marc began, fully aware of the focussed intensity around him. “Miss Thurgood, you are the elder daughter of Burton and Auleen Thurgood and sister to the deceased, Betsy Thurgood.”

  “I am.” Lottie Thurgood sat perfectly still and looked straight ahead. Not once did she glance to her left where her parents were sitting – mesmerized, as if watching a ghost.

  “And you have come here voluntarily to tell us your story, a story that has great pertinence to the case before us?”

  “I have.”

  “Tell us where you have been living since you left home nine years ago.”

  “Mostly in Montreal.”

  “What were you doing there to earn your living?”

  “I worked in a brothel. I was a whore.” Lottie did not change her tone or raise or lower the volume of her voice when making a declaration that drew gasps of surprise and disapproval from the spectators.

  “And how have you managed to return to the Toronto area?”

  Marc glanced at Neville Cambridge, but he looked more baffled than concerned.

  “My brother Timothy came and got me a month ago. I used to write him letters sometimes and send them to the Toronto post office.”

  “Not addressed to your parents’ home up by the mill?”

  “No, sir. Never.”

  “You didn’t want your parents to know what had become of you since your leaving?”

  “I did want my mother to know I was alive. Tim and I were always close. I knew I could trust him. When he left home to get married, he came and took me away from Montreal.”

  “So it was your father whom you wanted to keep in the dark about your whereabouts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “With my brother and his wife near Thornhill.”

  “Under what assumed name does your brother live?”

  “Milord, this testimony is going nowhere.”

  “I agree, Mr. Cambridge. Counsellor, get to the point – quickly.”

  “Tell the court, Miss Thurgood, why you lived apart and estranged from your parents for nine years and why your brother has taken another name.”

  Lottie hung her head briefly, then looked up and directly across at Marc. It seemed as if she were summoning up the last of her meagre strength. “My father abused me . . . from the time I was twelve till I left home when I was seventeen.”

  There was a stirring in the side-gallery to the left. Burton Thurgood had leaned forward threateningly in his seat and was refrained from moving further by a large man on his right. He scowled across at his living daughter, but she was not looking his way. His mouth hung open to protest, but no words came.

  “You mean sexually abused, do you not?”

  “Yes. I had my own room. Betsy and Tim had the other one. Father came to me almost every night. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Until you ran away?”

  “Yes.”

  “To your knowledge, did your father sexually abuse your sister?”

  “She was only six when I left. But Tim, who was twelve, said he would protect her.”

  “So Tim knew what your father was doing?”

  “He only found out when I told him – before I lit out fer Montreal.”

  “But Tim got married and left himself, did he not, in the last week of July?”

  A great commotion now halted Marc’s examination. Burton Thurgood was standing up, pushing away the arms trying to hold him down. “I loved her!” he cried wildly. “I loved my little Betsy! And she loved me! There was no rape! None, I tell you! You’re spittin’ on her grave, all of you! I’d’ve kept the babe, too, and raised it as my own!”

  The bailiff moved in, with help. Thurgood was pulled towards the back doors of the august courtroom. The judge banged his gavel into the confusion and consternation that followed this mad outburst.

&nbs
p; “In view of what has just transpired,” he shouted, “this trial is suspended pending further investigation into Mr. Thurgood’s ravings.”

  ***

  It was almost four o’clock when Marc joined Cobb and the Chief in Sturges’ office.

  “Thurgood’s made a full confession,” Marc informed them.

  “Thank goodness for that,” Sturges said. “Saved you and the court a peck of trouble.”

  “That’s right,” Marc said, sitting down and heaving a substantial sigh of relief. “Cobb here filled me in last night on what he’d found out about the Thurgoods. I figured I’d have to put Whittle on the stand and grill him about trout fishing, then call Thurgood and try to break him down. His outburst and confession have put the seal on it.”

  “Then it’s over,” Cobb said, also much relieved.

  “Tell us about the confession, Marc.”

  “Well, he started with the admission that he had in fact sexually interfered with his eldest daughter, Loretta, for many years – while his wife, poor soul, looked on, terrified to intervene.”

  “Quite a bastard all round,” Sturges said.

  “When Loretta ran away to Montreal, he became desperate to have a run at Betsy. But he waited until she was twelve before trying. Then he suddenly had an insurmountable problem. Betsy and Tim had shared a room during their childhood years, and were very close. Tim had also become a strapping teenager, bigger and stronger than his dad. Several tactless approaches apparently confirmed that Betsy was not likely to keep quiet if he made a move while Tim was nearby.

  “So she was safe as long as Tim was in the house?”

  “Right. But the lad had had enough of the family and his tyrant-ical father,” Cobb added. “He and his sweetheart moved out and away, gettin’ hitched in Toronto, then skedadellin’ up to Thornhill. and changin’ their name to Kilbride, the wife’s mother’s name.”

  “Fortunately, or unfortunately from Thurgood’s viewpoint,” Marc said, “Betsy was taken on steady at Spadina a few days before the elopement.”