The Bishop's Pawn

by Don Gutteridge

  Beth had given Marc her copy of The Pickwick Papers to amuse him, with instructions to read the chapters on the behaviour of barristers in Mr. Pickwick’s trial for breach of promise. But Marc had found little time for reading. The scenery on either side of him was awe-inspiring and ever-changing. Virgin forests, rolling hills, near-mountains, impressively-cleared farms, dazzling lakes, and burgeoning towns sprung up to feed on the wealth that DeWitt Clinton’s canal had wrought: Syracuse, Rome, Utica, Troy. Here, rugged woodlands and pastoral farms abruptly gave way to smokestacks and warehouses and shantytowns and the hilltop mansions of the freshly, deservedly rich. For the first time Marc was seeing the miracle that was America: the fruits of its republican fervour, its jettison of the cumbersome and crippling past.

  And over the course of the three-and-a-half-day journey, Marc and Brodie exchanged confidences.

  With utmost tact, Marc had asked Brodie what he remembered of his guardian’s public life in New York City. He had been just seventeen at the time of the sudden decampment, the young man replied readily, even enthusiastically. He wanted, it seemed, to keep his uncle alive in his life by talking about him. Uncle was scrupulous, Brodie said, about keeping his courtroom antics, with their attendant notoriety, separate from the quiet, domestic life he led at home – with them. When Dennis Langford’s wife had died giving birth to Celia, Langford invited his law partner to live with him and his children. A new wing was added to the family home on the corner of Broome and Mercer Streets, a block away from Broadway. The barristers’ offices comprised the three rooms facing Broome Street, but Celia and Brodie rarely set foot in them. The law practice of Langford and Dougherty began to thrive as never before.

  Langford was the researcher par excellence, who pored over legal tomes to mine the nuggets that the theatrical and brilliant Dougherty could deploy in the criminal and civil courts of the city and state. Paradoxically, once out of court Dougherty was awkward with people, shy even, disabled as it were by his overweening intellect and his searing insight into the foibles and casual cruelties of his clients and their “enemies.” On the other hand, Dennis Langford, bookworm that he was, found himself at ease in social situations. Some of this natural, disarming charm had obviously been handed on to his son and helped to explain, for Marc, Brodie’s success at the Commercial Bank, where callow Yankee scions were not exactly embraced.

  Celia and Brodie had been raised by a nanny and tutored at home before being sent to private school as they approached puberty. Dougherty, whom they saw every day at mealtimes and who accompanied them on picnics and promenades, encouraged them to call him “uncle.” But four years ago, in 1835, Dennis Langford had died of pneumonia, and an idyllic childhood ended without warning.

  “That’s when your uncle became your official guardian?” Marc said.

  “Yes. My father wished it, and I don’t think Celia and I could have survived without him there in our lives – as he had been as long as we could remember. Uncle inherited the business and was made trustee of our legacy. Now we have it all. But not him.”

  Some time later, Marc nudged the story back towards Dougherty’s career. “Did your uncle make enemies? People who might wish him harm?”

  Brodie gave Marc a wry smile. “He was a lawyer in New York.”

  Brodie then answered the question indirectly by filling Marc in on the fractious politics of that great city. After his father’s death, Brodie was sent to an up-state prep school. There he hobnobbed willy-nilly with the sons of the aristocracy and the nouveau riche. The former, Brodie explained, were known as Whigs or Federalists, and were tantamount to English Tories, bent on perpetuating their privileges and maintaining centralized control in government. The new middle class called themselves Republicans or Republican-Democrats, and demanded states’ supremacy, local control, and the unfettered right to make themselves rich.

  But in New York City itself, he said, candidates for Congress, the State Legislature or the Common Council of the municipality were predetermined and guaranteed election by the powerful members of Tammany Hall. The latter was nominally a fraternal organization – the Society of St. Tammany or the Columbian Order – but had evolved into the ruling clique of the middle class, championing the worker in public forums but in fact exploiting him privately for their own ends. Their corruption was legion. Even though he had been only fifteen years old, Brodie learned of these sad truths by listening to the boasts and arguments of his classmates. He heard tales of men whose careers had been crushed because they had defied Tammany Hall, their property auctioned off and their families thrown into the poorhouse or debtor’s prison. This was the dangerous and unpredictable world that his father and uncle had taken such pains to shield him from.

  “Did your uncle defy Tammany Hall?”

  “He stayed clear of politics as far as he could. He revered the law. And after we came to Toronto, he did, despite his near-withdrawal from the society of his fellow man, keep up with the affairs of the city that expelled him.”

  “But how?”

  “He had the newspapers from Buffalo and Syracuse mailed to him every week. When I saw him reading them and grumbling away, I took the opportunity to engage him in a conversation which I felt was long overdue. He would not tell me much, mind you – he just seemed too tired sometimes to move his lips, though that brain of his never rested. But I do know that he was appalled at the way Tammany members rigged elections, bamboozled citizens with their high-flown, jingoistic rhetoric, wrapped themselves in Jefferson’s cloak and, worst of all, abused and corrupted the very laws they proclaimed sacred.”

  “So, as far as you know, he managed to walk through that minefield?”

  “I think he did, mainly by taking on capital cases like murder or attempted murder or armed robbery – and so on. He avoided civil cases, in part I’m sure because he thought the juries would be suborned by the influence of Tammany or their political opponents.”

  “But?”

  “But when President Andrew Jackson, towards the end of his second term, finally destroyed the United States Bank at the behest of groups like Tammany and Loco-Foco, states-first Democrats, the result was a run on all banks, the collapse of paper money, and an instant economic depression.”

  “I saw some of the consequences of that in Detroit last January.”

  “Ten thousand workers in New York City lost their jobs. The Common Council turned down a request for rent relief because the rents for city-owned tenements, which were already thirty-five percent higher than in Brooklyn across the river, helped line the pockets of those in office.”

  “How did your uncle get involved?”

  “A group of once-prosperous tradesmen came to him with a tale of having been bilked out of their meagre savings by the New York and Albany Fire Insurance Company. When the ‘great fire’ of the previous year threatened to ruin the company, its directors declared bankruptcy, pillaged its assets, and went to Tammany Hall for protection. One of them, Silas Biddle, fled to France, but the president, Paxen Wetmore, stayed put. As a former sachem in Tammany – they use Indian names for all their offices and parade up and down Broadway in Indian costumes – he felt himself immune from prosecution.”

  “And Dick took on the case?”

  “He did. He knew the jury would be picked from Tammany ward-heelers, but his clients had provided him with incontrovertible evidence. That, in combination with his eloquence and vigorous cross-examination of Wetmore, resulted in a hung jury.”

  “So Wetmore got off?”

  “Yes. Even if convicted, he never would have paid restitution. Uncle told me, as we chatted together in our cottage last fall, that Tammany’s control of the city council and the state legislature permitted it to pass laws that inevitably absolved malefactors – after the fact. At worst, Wetmore would have been allowed to flee the country.”

  “So Dick did not really hurt Tammany?”

  “Oh, but he did. He told me that his cross-examination of Wetmore had been harrowing and effectiv
e. Wetmore’s reputation was in tatters. He would stay out of jail, but that was about all. You see, he was ambitious to run for state senator as a Democrat.”

  “And your uncle felt that Tammany might not forgive a lawyer who had taken one of their sachems down?”

  Brodie stared out at the brilliant blue waters of Lake Oneida. “They never forgive – or forget.”

  Could such a desire for revenge have extended as far as an assassination in Toronto? It now seemed possible.

  Marc felt he had to press on: “Do you think that Tammany Hall was responsible for your having to leave New York?”

  “Yes, I do. But you have to believe me when I tell you that Uncle refused to explain the nature of his so-called ‘disgrace’ or whether the decision to leave was voluntary or coerced – then or at any time thereafter.”

  “It’s clear that he never intended to tell anyone,” Marc said sympathetically. “But your leaving was abrupt, was it not?”

  “Yes. Celia and I were home on holiday when Uncle arrived one afternoon and announced that we had to go. He said a friend would see to the disposal of our property, but that we ourselves had to leave before sunset. We were stunned. But we trusted Uncle, and could not conceive of living without him. We packed our bags. The only explanation he gave us was that what he had decided was for our own good – to protect us.”

  “And I’m sure it was,” Marc replied. But protection from what? Was it merely the heinous nature of Dick’s “transgression” that might compromise his wards and their future, or was it the possibility that any attempt on his part to defend his reputation might prompt Tammany Hall to put their very lives in jeopardy?

  “But I do need to know what he did,” Brodie said, looking directly at Marc. “Whatever it turns out to be.”

  It was the next day, when they were back on the canal proper, that Marc said to Brodie, “You are aware, aren’t you, of the nature of the charges levelled against your uncle by the rumour-mongers and bigots of Toronto?”

  Brodie nodded, but said nothing.

  “Is it conceivable that the fact that your father and uncle lived so closely together in that house for so many years, and accompanied you and Celia on outings and holidays – could that behaviour have given rise to rumours and false accusations, which your uncle’s enemies were able to exploit to bring him down?”

  At first Brodie did not answer. Finally he said, “All I know for sure is that Celia and I had two fathers. Both of them adored us. In all the years I lived with them, I never saw anything I shouldn’t have.” Then he added, “Love can’t be counted a sin, can it?”

  “If it is,” Marc said, “we’re all lost.”

  SIXTEEN

  “Now that I’ve told you my life story,” Brodie said once they were safely aboard the Constitution at Albany, “it’s time for a little reciprocity.”

  So Marc told him a few details of his own unusual upbringing on Jabez Edwards’ estate in Kent, his abortive fling with the law at the Inns of Court in London, his subsequent stint at the Royal Military School in Sandhurst, and some of his exploits since his arrival in Toronto in May of 1835. Brodie naturally seized upon Marc’s involvement in putting down the rebellion in Quebec, though the strange account of how Marc accidentally found his real mother in Toronto was equally compelling.

  “She now lives in New York,” Marc said. “I’m hoping we’ll have time to pay her a visit.”

  “So you do have a contact in the city?”

  “More than one,” Marc smiled. “A young woman whose hand I once thought to ask in marriage is also there: Eliza Dewart-Smythe.”

  “Ah, I see. And will I get to meet her, too?”

  “Not likely. She and her uncle operate a wine-importing business. Eliza and Uncle Sebastian moved to New York two years ago to set up an American branch of the family enterprise. I haven’t heard from her since.”

  “So what is the plan, Marc? Do we seek out some of the families I know of through my days at prep school, or do we go directly for the jugular?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning, we show up on the doorstep of Brenner and Tallman.”

  “I suspect they’ll be in for quite a surprise.”

  “That’s my hope,” Marc smiled.

  ***

  There was still a quarter-hour of sunlight left when Marc and Brodie found themselves in a taxicab rumbling up Catherine Street from the wharf where the Constitution had docked. Brodie had given the driver, a surly fellow with a strange accent, explicit instructions regarding their route. When Catherine Street ended at the Bowery, they wheeled east onto Chatham and then Park Row, which took them past the magnificent City Hall and its spacious grounds. Reaching Broadway, they swung north, passed City Hall again, and then trotted down what had to be one of the great thoroughfares in the world. Churches with soaring steeples and Gothic pretensions, four-storied public buildings, colonnaded and balconied hotels, majestic theatres, and innumerable shops with glass windows thick with the baubles and bric-à-brac prized by the prosperous. They crossed another broad avenue, Canal Street, and two blocks later turned east again.

  “That’s where we used to live,” Brodie cried. “That gabled place – on the corner of Broome and Mercer.”

  Marc sat back and let Brodie have the next few minutes to himself. He realized what kind of mixed and conflictive feelings that this intelligent young man must be experiencing at his return to the place that would always – to some degree – be home. He sincerely hoped that whatever indiscretion Dick had been guilty of, it was one that Brodie could bear to face. At the same time, Marc was pretty sure that it was connected to Dick’s death. Unmasking those who had used Reuben Epp as their pawn was certain to expose an aspect of Dougherty that no-one who admired him was eager to see.

  The carriage continued on down Broome Street to Hudson Street, where they took several more abrupt turns.

  “This is the Greenwich area,” Brodie said.

  What they saw on either side of them was made even more disturbing by the ghostly, gray haze of the dying day. Here before them, in the charred remains of tenements and workers’ homes, were the visible effects of the “great fire.” On a Sunday evening, with church bells tolling in the air all around them, these streets seemed to be possessed by the wandering and the lost. Men and women draped in rags drifted along the broken walkways, while others poked at nearby mounds of rubble for anything they could sell or pawn. Filthy children, bone-thin and hobbled by rickets, romped about them with the random glee of children everywhere – oblivious for a few fleeting moments of their hunger or those horrors that might lie ahead. A block farther up, the tenements unscarred by fire looked as forlorn and uninhabitable as they did in central London.

  “Has it always been like this?” Marc said.

  “Not really. This was a boomtown once. Workers flocked here to help build ships or man the factories or construct the houses required to meet the needs of three hundred thousand people.”

  “So the bank panic and the subsequent fire have done this?”

  “Yes. But the Council did their share as well. They had refused to build a safe water supply or keep the streets properly paved, and the fire brigades they enlisted were busy undercutting their rivals. So, when the fire struck, the inferno it unleashed had to be fought with buckets.”

  “But the wealth that must have been generated – ”

  “Siphoned off by Tammany, and when they got kicked out, by the Whigs.”

  “Will the city be revived?”

  Brodie smiled. “Oh, yes. America is an idea that cannot be stopped – by others or by its own folly.”

  The cab pulled up in front of a small, discreet hotel, The Houston.

  “We’re here,” Brodie said.

  ***

  Brenner and Tallman, Attorneys-at-Law, was located on Mulberry Street, not far from the infamous Five Points district. Here the three-storey brick edifices of Broadway and its cross-streets gave way to single-storey frame-and-brick buildings set haphazardly
along the poorly-paved and narrow street. Most were shops and businesses – not all of them of a legitimate or savoury character. Saloons, liquor outlets, and pawnbrokers were wedged in amongst greengrocers, dubious eateries, and ramshackle cottages where gaudily draped “ladies” rocked listlessly after a busy night’s trade. At Cross Street, Marc was nearly bowled over by an absconding pig and the urchins pursuing it. The roadway and boardwalks were teeming with ordinary, bustling, hustling New Yorkers. Hawkers, barrow-men, carters, early-morning shoppers, liberated children, spooked horses, loose chickens – the din of their cries shook the foul, urban air and proclaimed to any doubting stranger: we are here and here we are!

  “This is an odd place to hang out a lawyer’s shingle,” Marc said as they stepped onto the wooden stoop before Brenner and Tallman.

  “Close to your clientele,” Brodie said, tugging the bell-pull.

  They were immediately shown into the inner chamber by a stout secretary with an eye for a paying customer. Both lawyers, sharing a single office with twin desks facing each other, rose as one to greet them. They were smiling.

  “I am Joseph Brenner,” said the taller, clean-shaven fellow, “and this is my partner, Lawrence Tallman. How may we be of service?”

  “Good morning,” Marc said. “I am Marcus Edwards and this is – ”

  “Little Brodie Langford,” Tallman said, turning his pleasant, open, moustachioed face to his partner in surprise.

  “My word, so it is,” Brenner said, beaming. “We haven’t laid eyes on you, young man, since you went off to that dreadful prep school.”