by Ann Birch
Perhaps you can roast Mackenzie on a spit, like the iguana, Sam thought. Astonishing, really, how someone who had been in Upper Canada for a mere—what was it?—five months, had all the answers. Sam had lived all his life in the country and knew too well that simple solutions to complex problems did not work.
“Indeed, sir,” Jameson said, picking up his cue. “Before you arrived in Toronto, I read in the English newspapers of your vigorous administration of the new poor law, how you protected your officers from enraged paupers who found the workhouse no substitute for the dole. All such insubordination, especially when it comes from the lower orders, must be suppressed.”
Sam suspected irony here, but Jameson spoke in measured tones, and Sir Francis smiled, showing his brown teeth. He poured himself another glass of port.
Sam, as he looked down at the empty cellarette by his chair, remembered his bills. Time to be thankful to the Governor, who had given him a promotion that offered a partial solution to his problems. “You will be the man of the hour, Sir Francis,” he said.
Robinson made a non-committal sound in the back of his throat. He was, after all, Chief Justice. One does not have to be obsequious when one has reached the summit. He cut himself a huge piece of Stilton and dipped the edge of it in his glass of port.
“There is one other matter, gentlemen, to which we must address ourselves before we join the ladies. Sir John Colborne left behind some details in his files about the Inspector General of Public Accounts.”
“George Herchmer Markland, sir?” Sam asked.
“Him. Perhaps you can give me an opinion of his worth. I shall be interested in what you can tell me.”
“A good fellow. He has been my friend for years.” Markland had testified for Sam at the murder trial. While he and Sam had been walking arm in arm along King Street, Ridout had come out of the tavern and attacked Sam with a cane. “Dead drunk he was,” Markland had told the jury, and he had given compelling evidence of how badly Sam’s wrist had been injured by this act of violence.
“Why do you ask, sir?” Sam continued.
“Apparently my predecessor received rumours of…er… improper letters sent by Markland to a law-student named”—Sir Francis took a piece of paper from his waistcoat pocket and looked at it—“Frederick Muttlebury.”
What on earth was the Governor talking about? “Improper letters, sir? I am at a loss as to what you mean. Markland is entirely honest. He was a classmate of mine at the Archdeacon’s school in Cornwall and has always enjoyed an excellent reputation. He could surely not be involved in any financial skulduggery.”
The Governor took a handkerchief from his vest pocket and coughed into it. “It was skulduggery of another sort. He gave a nervous laugh. Unnatural relationships, that sort of thing.”
Robinson spoke up. “Markland is a good fellow, as Jarvis has said, very friendly—but now that I think of it, rather feminine in his speech and action.”
“I will not involve myself in conjecture,” Sam said. “I know from experience the damage done by scandal-mongering. If a viper like Mackenzie got hold of the rumour, it would sweep the town.”
Fitzgibbon put in his penny’s worth. “And really, Sir Francis, it’s a tempest in a teapot, is it not?”
“Hardly. You surely know that sodomy is punishable by death.”
“If everyone were punished for sodomy, our hangman would not have a day’s rest. You have never lived in a barracks, Sir Francis, so you have not seen first hand what we seasoned veterans call ‘Greek love’.”
“Greek love? What do you mean?”
“One of my men served under the captain of a British ship that sailed to Cyrene to plunder relics for the Prince Regent. There in the ancient ruins they found several statues of Apollo, all of which had identical faces, unlike anything the collectors on board the ship had ever seen before. Someone in Cyrene told them that a Greek had hired a sculptor to put the head of his lover onto the body of the god. Hence, ‘Greek love’.”
“I see what you mean. But Cyrene is one thing. Toronto, another. We cannot have such goings-on here in a respectable outpost of which I am in charge.”
“But these ‘goings-on’ are commonplace, Sir Francis. Two lonely men in a garrison far from congress with their wives may well turn to sodomy. I do not judge them. Indeed, when I reflect on it, I feel that the seduction of innocent young women by the Don Juans of the regiment is a far worse crime.”
The Governor turned to Jameson. “We’ve heard nothing from you, sir. Do you know Markland?”
Jameson seemed preoccupied with the dregs of port at the bottom of his glass. “I’ve met him, of course. Everyone here knows the prominent men of our town. But I know nothing about his private life.”
“I think, Sir Francis,” Sam said, “that if Governor Colborne did not pursue the matter, you may take that as an indication of Markland’s innocence.”
From the drawing room came the sounds of the pianoforte, played in a manner equal to Miss Siddons’s best performances— perhaps better. It certainly wasn’t Mary. Or Mrs. Robinson, who had one number only in her repertoire, something she called “The Happy Farmer”. Perhaps Mrs. Fitzgibbon? But then Sam remembered her blue-veined, arthritic fingers. So it was Mrs. Jameson.
“Shall we go to the drawing room?” he asked.
They entered just as Mrs. Jameson finished playing—something from The Beggar’s Opera, was it?—and at the same moment, the yellow cat which had been lying by the fireplace jumped up on the back of the pianoforte. As it landed, it knocked off Sam’s valentine, and the card fluttered down onto the keys, hitting the back of Mrs. Jameson’s fine white fingers.
“Oh my,” Mary said, blushing, “that is my dear husband’s poem. He wrote it for me.” She picked it up as it fell from the keyboard to the floor and held it for an instant to her cheek. “Do look at it, Mrs. Jameson. You are a writer, after all, and will appreciate its excellence.”
Their guest took the card, admired the roses on its cover and looked briefly at the words on the inside. She turned towards Mary. Sam could see the raised eyebrows and the small smile that hovered on her lips for an instant, then disappeared. “So—Mr. Jarvis’s poem. Very pretty.” She set the card back on top of the pianoforte.
She knows, thought Sam. Will she say something?
“And now,” Mary said, “while you are still at the pianoforte, will you and Mr. Jameson sing for us, if you please.”
Jameson moved to the pianoforte, leaned over and whispered in his wife’s ear. A soft chord, then he launched into the first line of the song: “Drink to me only with thine eyes...”
“And I will drink with mine,” was her answer.
And so it went to the end, each taking a line, perfect tenor voice linked to sweet soprano. Sam moved close to Mary; and on the sofa, the Colonel held Mrs. Fitzgibbons’s hand; Robinson and his wife turned in their adjacent chairs and smiled at each other.
The Jamesons seem so in love, thought Sam, as he listened. It’s strange. Her face is so expressive and his so expressionless. Not a line in his cheeks or forehead, though he must be over forty. How do they get on together? She would be passionate, I believe, but he’s such a cold fish.
The Governor rose to take his leave. They all stood up and bowed. Sam followed his guest into the hallway, where the corporal helped him into his coat and handed him his gloves and walking stick. He put on his beaver top hat, took a peek at himself in the mirror, adjusted his hat, and departed.
The other guests were now moving into the hallway. Sam noticed Mrs. Jameson looking towards the dining room. On impulse, he went straight to the table, plucked the carnations from the bowl, wrapped them in his linen handkerchief, and presented them to her.
“My dear Mr. Jarvis,” the lady said, “I shall keep these in my bedchamber as a reminder of your kindness.” She turned towards him then so that the other guests were behind her, and said in a low voice. “You may not be a poet, but as a gentleman, you are sine qua non.”
/> “What was Mrs. Jameson saying to you a moment ago?” Mary asked, when all the guests had left.
“One of her fancy Latin expressions. Don’t know what it means, but I think it was a compliment. She liked my giving her the carnations.” In fact, he did know. It was a phrase Robinson liked to throw around.
“She’s so clever. And pretty, too, though you don’t notice it at first. She and Mr. Jameson make a fine couple.”
“He’s lucky. In many ways. On his way up, so I hear. Rumour has it that by the month’s end, he will be Vice-Chancellor of the new Court of Chancery. An extra twelve hundred pounds a year in addition to what he’s already raking in. And his wife, undoubtedly she will settle in, perhaps become another Emma Robinson—though I can’t see that—and live happily ever after as the Chancellor’s lady. No children to support and no burden of debt to struggle under. I should be so fortunate.”
“You sound bitter, Sam. Do you regret your children?”
He thought of Ellen and Emily and their performance of the sonnets, of little Charlie banging on the dinner gong, of the other children, of his pride in them. “No,” he said, “I do not regret my children.”
And, he added to himself, most of the time I do not regret Mary...
SIXTEEN
Anna heard the door of Robert’s bedchamber shut behind him. Well, that was that. She would spend St. Valentine’s night alone in bed. For an hour or two, she had hoped, that maybe the music of their duet had touched him, that maybe he would feel sentimental. But that performance had been pure theatre.
She put back into her trunk the contraceptive sponge she had taken out earlier in the evening. She had been stupid to hope for anything. The Niagara trip should have quenched any wayward yearnings. But did a woman ever stop hoping to be loved? She looked at herself in her mirror. Good skin still, red hair that set it off, a narrow waist and full bosom.
Robert didn’t give a damn.
She poured water from her pitcher into a vase and arranged the lovely red carnations that Mr. Jarvis had given her. She folded the linen handkerchief he had wrapped them in. She held it to her face and breathed in his scent, an agreeable mix of fine burgundy and imported cigars.
She put on her nightdress and climbed between the covers, but before she closed her eyes, she heard the dreadful clang of an alarum.
She ran to the window of her bedchamber and saw, perhaps two blocks east of their residence, red flames against the black sky. She rang for Mrs. Hawkins, but there was no answer, and when she went to the head of the stairs and looked down, she noticed that the fire buckets were not in their place in front of the main doorway. Her housekeeper must have seen the fire even before the alarum. She ran to Robert’s room.
“Fire! Get up, Robert, we must go and see what we can do.”
He sat up in bed. She could just make out his white nightcap in the gloom. “What are you shouting about?”
“Fire! Down the street. We must dress and go out and see if we can help.”
“Nonsense. There are fires every other week in this place. What do you expect of a town made up of log houses? If I went out to them all, I should never get my rest. And I have an appointment with the Governor for tomorrow morning.” The nightcap bobbed downwards.
She shut the bedchamber door then ran to the window again. In one direction, a full moon looked down upon the snowy landscape, and the icy bay glittered like a sheet of silver. Clouds of smoke and spires of flame rose into the sky. Far off, the garrison was beating to arms. Church bells tolled.
She threw off her nightgown and pulled on a dress and her heavy coat. She took her sealskin muff from the hook by the front door then made her way through the snow-heaped streets crowded with running, shouting people, and into a kind of court or garden at the back of the blazing houses.
A pitiful pile of furniture, bedding, pots, bottles and viands stood like a hillock in the midst, and a poor woman kept guard over it, nearly up to her knees in the snow. In the flickering light from the flames, her face seemed pale and wrinkled. Her figure was thin; a man’s overcoat hung loose on her shoulders. She held a baby in her arms.
Anna climbed up onto a bedstead, on which was a feather mattress. “Come up here with me,” she said to the woman. “You will freeze if you stay in the snowdrifts.” But there was no response. “Hand me the child, then. I have a fur muff it will just fit into.”
The woman looked at Anna, assessed the sealskin muff on her left arm, and passed the babe to her. He was a tiny, squalling bit of a thing with stick-like arms and spindly legs barely covered by a tattered nightshirt and a bit of cloth that looked as if it had once been a towel. He had soiled himself, and his legs were wet. Anna laid the infant on the mattress and took the muff from her arm. She pushed the baby’s legs into its aperture and tugged the length of it up over the tiny chest. His head she cradled in the sleeve of her coat. Warm now, the infant stopped his wailing. In a moment, he fell asleep.
So Anna stood on top of the bedstead, infant in her arms; the woman stood in the snow. Thus they remained till suddenly, with a terrible thud, part of the row of buildings fell in.
“This must be dreadful for you,” Anna said, “to have to stand by and watch while your home is destroyed!”
“Yes, ma’am; but it’s God’s will, so they say. And now Jemmy’s safe, I don’t care for the rest. Jemmy’s sister burned to death.” She pointed to a small wrapped body, lying in the snow, over which Archdeacon Strachan and a sobbing woman kept guard.
“Is Jemmy your baby?”
“My sister’s. Her man died yesterday of the fever, and now she has lost her little girl, only two years old.”
Anna looked down at the frail bundle in her arm. If there is a God, she prayed, may he guard and protect this mite.
There had at first been a scarcity of water. Now she saw the bucket brigade in action. Holes had evidently been made through the ice on the lake. A double line of several hundred people had formed. Both lines extended from the lake to the buildings. One column passed water towards the burning rubble, and one column passed the empty buckets away from the fire back to the holes in the ice. In the lineup close to the burning buildings, she saw Mrs. Hawkins and her husband. They were swinging the buckets to people who stood so close to the flames that their clothes must have been singed.
“Here’s Jemmy,” Anna said to her companion. “Keep him warm in the muff. I don’t want it back. I must go now and help the bucket brigade.”
She ran towards the lineup and wedged herself in place behind her servants. “Lordy, lordy, it be you, ma’am, come to help us,” her housekeeper said. “We surely can use all the bodies we can muster.”
The pails of water came thick and fast. Soon Anna’s shoulders ached from swinging them forward, but there was no stopping. At first, she tried to use her right arm, but then she learned to grab the pail with both hands, and move it to the left with one smooth motion, spilling nary a drop in the process. “Got the trick of it, ma’am,” Hawkins said, as she swung a pail into his hands.
A sleigh went by her at full gallop. In the moonlight she could just perceive the extended form of a man with his hands clenched to his head. Dr. Widmer was beside him.
It was almost morning when the fires were finally extinguished. The bucket brigade began to disperse. “Go back home,” Anna said to Mrs Hawkins, “and get into bed. I’ll be along soon.”
Through the smoke, she watched the crowd turn away from the charred and broken buildings, their faces smudged, their posture weary. It reminded her of a painting she’d seen, “The River”. Where was it, Milano? In a room filled with pretty Madonnas and pretty Venetian landscapes, she’d come upon it, her attention caught by the brutality of the depiction. A hopeless, desperate crowd running from some long-ago disaster. Time to go to safety myself, she thought, but first I must check on Jemmy.
But the babe and his guardian were not where she’d left them. She could hear the Archdeacon’s voice calling through the smoke. “Everyone into t
he church who needs help. You may sleep in the pews until we get lodging for you.” His wife and some of the women from the congregation trudged by with kettles, probably of hot soup.
There was surely more she could do. She paused, uncertain of where to go next.
“Mrs. Jameson!”
It was Mr. Jarvis. His face was blackened with soot, and she might not have recognized him in the gloom, had it not been for his square, athletic body and the cut of the fine formal suit that he had worn—was it only a few hours ago?
“Can you help at St. James? I fear there will not be enough women to dispense the soup.”
“Willingly.”
There was a shout from nearby. Mr. Jarvis took her hand in his. “Thank you. And now I must help the sheriff. We have to carry people’s belongings into sheds and taverns for safekeeping.” He was off at a run.
At the church, she and Mrs. Strachan dragged tables from the vestry and put the kettles of soup upon them. Several women had brought a supply of crockery and ladles, and they turned to serve the dazed, stricken people who had begun to line up. Anna noticed the decorum of the crowd: no pushing, no angry words, though surely most of them had lost all their worldy possessions.
She was relieved to see Jemmy’s guardian in the lineup for soup. In one arm she held the baby sound asleep in the muff, and her free hand clasped the shoulders of the sobbing woman Anna had seen earlier. Jemmy’s mother: the poor soul who had lost two of her family in as many days.
Anna ladled soup into cups and put them on a small tray. “Follow me,” she said, leading the little family to a choir stall. “Sit here, out of the crowd.” She handed them the broth. “Drink it, even if you don’t want it. It will help you.”
“Oh, ma’am, you must not fash yourself. We are fortunate. Mr. Jarvis put our belongings into the horse shed at the tavern. And he give me a slip of paper so as we can claim them when this ree raw gets sorted out.” The woman fished the precious bit of paper from deep in the muff, showed it to Anna, then put it back, safe with Jemmy.