Settlement

by Ann Birch

  He looked at his pocket watch and rose, laying his hand on Anna’s arm and drawing her aside. “Time for our visit to the Governor. I do not know what our reception will be, and we must not keep the Great One waiting. Governor Colborne always looked on the natives as a problem to be solved, and I fear that our new man will be no better. Worse, in fact. I’ve heard that the common appellation bestowed upon him is Governor Bone Head.” He smiled, and Anna noticed again the attractive dimple in his left cheek. “But of course, you must repeat nothing of what I say, especially to my wife, who worries about my lack of discretion.” He shook hands. “Good day, ma’am. I hope you now have new insights. And perhaps I should tell you that Jacob is in mourning for his wife. That’s why he has blackened his face.”

  In parting, Chief Snake said something to her which Jacob translated as, “The blessing of the Great Spirit be on you and your house.” Elijah White Deer held out his hand to her, and in a moment’s impulse, she unhooked her wampum bag from her belt and gave it to him. He held it aloft for a moment, smiled and put it immediately into his deerskin sling.

  Last to leave was Jacob. Anna stretched out her right hand and touched his sleeve. “May you find happiness in the New Year.”

  “Thank you,” Jacob said. “You and Nehkik are good people. Not often I find good white people. Only sometimes.”

  Who was Nehkik? Anna wondered. And then she remembered. It was Mr. Jarvis, of course. Jacob had called him by that name earlier. And this “Nehkik” had actually asked her to keep a secret from his wife. What was she to think of that?

  Mrs. Hawkins came forward as soon as the front door closed behind the guests. “Oh, ma’am, it be so exciting. Never have I seen a savage inside a white man’s house before. Only at the door when they swap salmon for butter.”

  “Perhaps we ought not to call them savages, Mrs. Hawkins. They were anything but savage in their demeanour and their manners at table.” She thought of her silly letter to Ottilie. Perhaps she could get it back and tear it up. “Has your husband already gone to the post office with my letter?”

  “Oh yes, ma’am, it most likely be on the mail sleigh for Kingston by now.”

  So the damage was done. She had made a few bad jokes at the expense of people she knew nothing about. She was as bad as Mrs. Powell with her ignorant attitude towards the serving classes. She remembered the woman’s dismissive remarks about her maid’s pregnancy. Well, she would correct herself in her next letter to Ottilie.

  ELEVEN

  On New Year’s Day, Anna and Robert stood at the entrance to their drawing room and waited for the door knocker to sound. Robert pulled out his gold pocket watch several times, while Anna tried not to look at herself in the wide mirror which she had installed over the mantel.

  Because Mrs. Hawkins did not know how to dress hair, Anna had fussed with curl papers to produce the ringlets that now clustered on her forehead. She would not have bothered with this silliness in Europe, but here in Toronto she wanted to achieve an utterly feminine look to persuade the gentlemen at the levee that she was the perfect little woman.

  Robert, she was pleased to note, looked every inch the Attorney-General-soon-to-be-Chancellor, or so they both hoped. With his black morning coat and black cravat, he had donned a new pair of fine striped trousers and leather shoes with laces instead of buckles.

  “You look well, Anna,” Robert said, studying their images in the glass. “Not pretty, in the conventional sense of the word, but well enough. Your red dress might have been an unfortunate choice with your red hair, but happily it sets off your complexion to advantage.”

  “Qualified praise indeed, Robert, but I thank you. And how pleasant it would be if you could say something at least as commendatory about the house.”

  “An improvement, my dear, and well worth the considerable expenditure. But why are those ugly black buckets at the front door? I noticed them there before, but now that you’ve put down that new carpet, they stand out like pustules on a pretty face.”

  “They’re fire buckets. Mrs. Hawkins said they can’t be removed. It’s the law, since there are no fire brigades in this place.”

  “But what on earth are they for?”

  “When the church bells sound the knell for a fire, we take these buckets and run to the lake. Everyone must volunteer in these situations, apparently. Have you not heard this before, Robert?”

  “Perhaps, but I doubt the magistrates can enforce participation. At any rate, I leave these things to the servants.”

  Anna had rented livery for Hawkins, and he seemed pleased with the effect. She’d heard him say to his wife earlier in the day, “We’ve moved up the ladder since the missus arrived.” Now he stood by the front door, ready to take the visitors’ coats and usher them up to the head of the stairs where she and Robert waited.

  By noon, the door-knocker sounded like the drumming of a drunken Scotsman the evening after the parade. It was a strictly male affair, the idea being that the men of the town spent the day paying their respects to the ladies. By two o’clock, some forty gentlemen had come and gone. These were all young men in hordes—or was it herds?—of nine or ten at a time. They came in, bowed, sat down in the drawing room for two minutes, got up, bowed again, and left without saying a word or taking a bite of food. Most of them Anna had not seen before, and her husband made little attempt to introduce any of them to her.

  He seemed much more interested in the seven or eight older men who arrived after the herds and who actually paid a visit of some duration. They were talking together now in the drawing room. She had been so happy to see Mr. Jarvis among them. He could keep a conversation going, something that her husband found difficult.

  From the hallway, she watched Mr. Jarvis now talking easily to Archdeacon Strachan and Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, who, she had discovered at the Governor’s party, liked to lay down the law when he spoke. In addition she noticed Dr. Widmer— without his wife, fortunate for Mr. Jarvis, no doubt—and several members of the militia and the Legislative Council, and the lawyer, Henry Boulton. Colonel Fitzgibbon was also in the group, and if she could get a private word with him, she would set a date for their sleigh ride on the lake.

  As she came into the drawing room, Robert and the others rose. She took a seat in one of the smart walnut chairs she had purchased, facing the drawing room door so that she could greet any latecomer who came into the upper hallway. To her right was Colonel Fitzgibbon, and on her left, the Archdeacon.

  “I understand you are a friend of Mr. Tazewell,” the Archdeacon said to Anna.

  “I have benefited from his help with some of my etchings. And he has supplied some wonderful pictures for my walls.” She gestured to one she particularly liked, a scene of a family having a picnic on a grassy knoll which overlooked the Falls at Niagara.

  “He has been of inestimable help with our educational system. Before he came to Toronto, we had no Greek grammars for our youth, because there were no printers here with fonts of Greek type. He had an ingenious solution to the problem. He printed a grammar by making lithographs of pages from an existing text.”

  Lawyer Boulton yawned and tapped his foot. Robert got up and refilled the man’s glass from the decanter.

  “You have a fine educational system for your sons,” Anna said, as she looked about the room, “but I have always found it sad that both here and in England, there is very little education for girls.”

  Robert’s well-shaped eyebrows contracted. The other men looked at their drinks and said nothing.

  “And what do you think, sir?” she said, turning to Chief Justice Robinson. “Do you not often wish that the women of Toronto had pursuits other than child-rearing and household management?”

  “I have four daughters, madam,” he said, his nose wrinkling ever so little, as if he had just caught a whiff of an unemptied chamberpot. “I wish nothing more for them than that they should find suitable husbands and devote themselves to the care of their partners and their children. That
is woman’s lot, and I see no benefit in their having a knowledge of Greek, an ability to do algebra or a view of history. It does not signify what women think: they are not called upon to act or judge outside the purlieu of their household.”

  “Well put indeed, Robinson,” Robert said, as several of the men in the room nodded their agreement. He gestured towards the dining room. “Anna, perhaps the gentlemen are ready for the fine meal you have ready.”

  “In a moment. First I must respond to the Chief Justice.” She turned and leaned towards him. “You are entirely right, sir. Women in this town have no need of Greek, algebra, or history because... because it is in every man’s interest to keep his wife and daughters ignorant. For when the horse and ass begin to think and argue, adieu to riding and driving.”

  There was a long pause while the gentlemen took this in. Then the Archdeacon and Colonel Fitzgibbon laughed. But the Chief Justice’s face grew red, and her husband’s redder.

  From the corner of the room near the pianoforte, a pleasant baritone voice called out, “Bravo!” Anna looked at Mr. Jarvis. He smiled at her. He was so attractive in his well-cut frock coat and black silk vest. Suddenly she felt as if she’d like to reach out and touch his square chin, put her finger on that dimpled left cheek.

  In the London society she knew so well, there were men whose real material of mind it was difficult to discover. Many had been so smoothed and polished down by society, or overlaid by the ornaments of education, that the coarse brick-work or rotten lath and plaster of their real being was covered over.

  In this new country it was so much easier to tell at once the rough brick from the granite and marble.

  Mr. Jarvis was fine granite indeed. One of those smoothed and polished men of British society would have viewed her comments about the horse and the ass as mere metaphorical flourish. Their “Brava!”—for they knew about feminine adjectives—would have been for her verbal wit, not for the truth behind it.

  In this tiny community Mr. Jarvis stood out. She would undoubtedly meet him again and again. The prospect was titillating.

  Robert’s voice grated on her thoughts. “My dear, please see if our housekeeper is ready with food.”

  As she rose, she heard the front door close and footsteps on the stairs. She went into the hallway. A young man stood at the top of the staircase looking about him.

  “Percy Ridout, at your service, ma’am. I am a clerk in Mr. Jameson’s office.” He bowed and smiled. He was a tall young man with lovely white teeth.

  “I am happy to meet you.”

  “I fear I am late in arriving. I intended to come with some of my friends half an hour ago.”

  “I was almost giddy watching those young men appear and disappear, Mr. Ridout.” Anna put her hand on his arm and drew him closer. “You must explain something. Why do the gentlemen— the young gentlemen—come into my drawing room, bow, sit down, wait exactly two minutes, then rise and bow themselves out of the room again without uttering a single syllable?”

  Her guest looked down at his feet. His wind-burned face grew redder. He gave several “hmms” and “hems” and lapsed into silence.

  “Please, Mr. Ridout, you must inform me of the customs of this new country.”

  “Well, ma’am, there is a contest...”

  “A contest, sir? Tell me about it.”

  “To see how many houses they can visit in one day...”

  “And the purpose of this bizarre contest?”

  “Mead.”

  “Mead?”

  “Mr. Bloor—you may have heard of him—has a brewery. He will give a prize of mead to the winner. Once, when he had taken a dram too much, he told me his recipe: fourteen pounds of honey, four gallons of water, ginger, two handfuls of dried elder flowers, and a large gravy spoon of fresh yeast. Excellent stuff it is, ma’am.”

  “Ah. That explains it. Drink is the great motivator in this land, is it not? Thank you, Mr. Ridout. But come in, come in. You must sample my housekeeper’s excellent cranberry pie and rum punch—unfortunately we have no mead.” She gestured towards the dining room, where Mrs. Hawkins, in a spotless white cap and apron, had laid out a first-class repast.

  But as Mr. Percy Ridout followed her towards the table, she saw him draw out his pocket watch, look at it furtively, then tuck it into his vest.

  “I have kept you back, have I not? You are in the competition with the other young men. Am I right?”

  He blushed. “Yes, ma’am. But I would be glad to stay a few minutes and eat something.”

  “No obligation, sir. But tell me, how do the...uh...competitors keep track of how many levees they have attended?”

  “The cards, ma’am. They collect the calling cards from each place they visit.”

  “Then let me mark on mine, ‘forcibly detained by me, the undersigned Anna Jameson’. Will that do to explain why you have stayed here for five long minutes instead of two?”

  She watched her guest wrestle with a decision. “Cranberry pie, Mrs. Jameson? I haven’t had it since my dear old aunt used to make it. Lead on.”

  Anna took him into the dining room. “A large piece of pie for Mr. Ridout, please, Mrs. Hawkins.”

  He had just picked up a fork and a napkin, ready to enjoy the pastry, when he looked across into the drawing room. “Oh, Lord, I cannot stay.” He set the plate down with a bang on the sideboard. “Sorry, so sorry...” He moved back into the hallway.

  “What on earth is wrong, Mr. Ridout? You look quite agitated. For heaven’s sake, explain.”

  “It is not your fault, ma’am. You have not been in this town long enough to understand.”

  “Understand? What?”

  “That scoundrel Jarvis who sits in your drawing room surrounded by the Archdeacon and the Chief Justice is a murderer. In 1817, he shot my young cousin in cold blood, and now he sits in fashionable salons—unpunished and unrepentant.”

  Anna felt a sudden vertigo. She put her hand on the wall to steady herself. “Murderer, you say? Surely not, sir. Murderers are hanged.”

  “Not always. It was a duel. And he is a Jarvis. And the judge was his future father-in-law. And the judge’s favourite daughter was in love with the brute.” Mr. Ridout wiped his face with his sleeve and took a deep breath. “I was a small child at the time, and I have had to listen to the sorry tale all my life. I cannot get it out of my head.”

  Was there any truth in this? Obviously they could not talk further at the moment. “I understand why you must leave, Mr. Ridout. I am so sorry.” She walked down the stairs with him.

  Hawkins took her guest’s coat from the hall tree. As he shrugged his shoulders into it, Anna said, “Will you wait for one moment?”

  She went back up the staircase and into the dining room, where the gentlemen had just gathered. On the sideboard was the untouched plate of pie. She took a napkin and slid the pie onto it. Down at the front door again, she handed the pie to Mr. Ridout. “Perhaps you will let me know if Mrs. Hawkins’s recipe is as successful as your aunt’s?”

  “You have been kind to me, Mrs. Jameson, in spite of my behaviour. No doubt you will hear the story of the duel. It is still talked about in many quarters. And now I bid you good day.”

  She watched his retreat down the front walk. Then, taking a deep breath, she went upstairs again to the dining room. The gentlemen were bent over the table, heaping their plates with cheese and fruit and cranberry pie and whipped cream.

  The Archdeacon stopped to whisper in her ear. “Ah, Mrs. Jameson, you come from a world where female emancipation can be a topic for debate. Here, I am afraid, there is no discussion. But do not despair, you have shaken them. They will think about what you have said.” He took a fork from the sideboard. “And now I must do justice to your excellent pie.”

  Back in the drawing room, there was talk about Mackenzie and his supporters (“pigs”) and the roads (“fit for pigs”), but the focus was on the food. Anna could think of nothing but the young man’s outburst. She was relieved when the gues
ts rose, one by one, and made preparations to depart.

  She followed them down the staircase and watched as Mr. Jarvis pulled his coat from the hook. It was a beautiful coat of grey superfine, lined with soft fur, perhaps from a fox. But now she could scarcely look at the fur without thinking of the trapped animal, its bloody carcass taken to the tanners for cleaning. In her mind’s eye, there flashed the image of the Ridout boy’s corpse.

  “It has been a pleasure, ma’am,” Mr. Jarvis was saying. “I shall tell Mary about your housekeeper’s excellent pie.”

  And Colonel Fitzgibbon, who had just pulled on his gloves, said to her in a confidential whisper. “I shall take you for a drive on the lake this week, Mrs. Jameson. You have been stuffed up here too long. Some fresh air is always a treat.” He grinned at her.

  “A reasonably successful event, I believe,” Robert said to Anna afterwards as she rearranged chairs in the drawing room. “You seem to have captivated the Archdeacon, Fitzgibbon and Jarvis, all influential men in the town. But at the same time, I fear you offended Chief Justice Robinson. Did I not make clear, Anna, that you must have no opinions while you are in this town?”

  “I don’t know what to think sometimes. Perhaps my opinions are all wrong, and I should just keep my mouth shut—the way you manage to.”

  “This is affecting humility, my dear. What has brought on this burst of self-doubt?”

  Anna stacked some dirty dessert plates onto a tray.

  “Well, Anna? I asked you a question.”

  “Finish off this rum punch, Robert, while I ask you a question.” She waited while he spooned the dregs of the punch bowl into a crystal cup. “What is your opinion of Mr. Sam Jarvis?”

  “A war hero, a member of a founding family of Upper Canada, and a crusader against the indecency of the vulgar press, in the opinion of the Tories. A rogue who murdered a young boy in cold blood, in the opinion of the Whigs. A renegade and violator of the democratic ideal of freedom of the press, in the opinion of the Radicals.” He drained the cup in one long swallow.