The Bishop's Pawn

by Don Gutteridge

  “I suspect the great man himself would feel more comfortable among a troupe of actors, however sweaty and thick-tongued,” Marc said.

  “Very true. But we do occasionally stoop to acting out a scene or two – by way of illustration, of course.”

  “Of course. You wouldn’t want to tear a scene to tatters, not with the likes of Sir Peregrine Shuttleworth keeping a close watch on the proceedings.”

  Brodie laughed. “I find my membership in the club about as amusing as you do. And just as incongruous and unexpected. But, then, if you had told me a year ago that I would be where I am today, I would have called the asylum-keepers to come and get you.”

  “You’ve come a long way in a short time,” Marc said, his tone now as serious as it was full of admiration for this remarkable young man of nineteen years.

  Orphaned at the age of thirteen and subsequently raised by his dead father’s law partner in New York City, Brodie Langford had, in the past two years, suffered an abrupt and scandal-ridden uprooting from his native land, followed by a constrained and circumscribed existence here in Toronto with his young sister and their beloved guardian, Dick Dougherty. Brodie had idolized Dougherty – in spite of the man’s questionable past in New York – and had felt more and more responsible as the health of his “uncle” had deteriorated under the strain of exile and ostracism. Even so, Brodie had managed to secure a position at the Commercial Bank, where he had impressed his skeptical superiors and thrived. Then, just when life had begun to offer him a glimmer of hope, he and Celia had been orphaned once again – in the most sordid and tragic circumstances.

  “You know, don’t you,” Marc said, “that I heartily approve of everything you’ve done since your Uncle’s death, the manner in which you’ve conducted yourself and the wise decisions you’ve made for you and your sister?”

  “Much of which has been the result of your avuncular advice,” Brodie said, only half-teasing. Marc was not yet twenty-nine, and, while recently made a father, he was not quite ready to accept the more senior role of elderly advisor.

  “Well, you look every inch the gentleman tonight,” Marc said. “If a young man with a New York twang can ever pass for such in Her Majesty’s colonies.”

  Brodie was wearing a dark frock coat cut in the latest style and a matching top-hat that served not only as proof of his affluence and taste but also as a startling contrast to his blond hair, pale complexion and almost transparently blue eyes. In his right hand he swung a silver-tipped walking-stick with a handle carved like a wolf-s head, as if he disdained in the vigour and pride of his youth to have it touch the rotting sidewalk or assist his striding in any discernible manner.

  “I hope you don’t think me too forward or presumptuous in agreeing to take part in the club’s activities?” Brodie said as they strolled past the City Hall, which faced Front Street at the foot of the market. “It was Mr. Fullarton’s idea. He thinks it’s time for me to move out into society and make my mark.”

  Horace Fullarton was the manager of the Commercial Bank, Brodie’s superior, and very much the young man’s champion. In fact, Marc had heard elsewhere, Brodie was being groomed as Fullarton’s right-hand man. With the death of his guardian and the subsequent inheritance of both his father’s estate and his guardian’s (to be shared equally with Celia when she came of age next year), Brodie had become suddenly rich, with plenty of money to live sumptuously for the rest of his life – without working a single day. And although he was now wealthy and independent enough to move back to the United States (anywhere but New York, that is), he and Celia had decided to remain in the city their guardian had chosen for their exile after his ignominious banishment. And, more compellingly, Richard Dougherty, the “uncle” they had worshipped since childhood and who had become a second father to them, was buried here. Who else was there to place flowers upon his wide and lonesome grave?

  Nonetheless, here or abroad, money was money, and oodles of it generally seduced its possessor into a life of leisure and moderate debauchery. But Brodie was American, not British. He saw himself becoming a man who would do something in the world. With his father’s charm and a mind keen for business, he had cared not that he had begun as a lowly bank clerk. He believed in his own abilities, and was Yankee enough to think that social class was something you chose. Nor did his unexpected wealth alter his determination to succeed on his own in the financial arena. (It had not yet occurred to him that he had the wherewithal to found his own bank.) His principal concession to wealth had been to move him and Celia out of their rented cottage on Bay Street into a two-storey brick residence on Sherbourne Street north, in a area where houses with spacious parkland about them were being constructed as quickly as the new middle-class itself. Their cook and butler, who had been Dougherty’s day-servants, followed them faithfully, and settled into the servants’ quarters of Harlem Place, as they had named their new home.

  “By rights, I should really be tagging along with you to Robert’s place,” Brodie said as they crossed Yonge Street and paused to admire the play of sunlight and shadow on the perfectly still waters of Toronto Bay, framed by the island-spit that gave the city its splendid harbour. There were no houses of any kind on the south side of Front Street to block the view or suggest that the bustling capital was anything but comfortable with being a “seaside” port or otherwise concerned that its parliament buildings, its most prestigious domiciles and its commercial heart was thus visible and vulnerable. “I must admit, Marc, that while I understand the significance of the current political debate – how could I not, knowing you and Robert as I do? – I am nevertheless unable to sustain a proper interest in it.”

  “There are, of course, other reasons for a bright and not unhandsome fellow to visit Baldwin House with me,” Marc said. Such an illusion to Brodie’s love life might have drawn a blush a few months ago, but the young man’s obvious success at winning over Diana Ramsay had left him immune to the older man’s teasing.

  “Diana has taken her charges out to Spadina for a few days – to enjoy the country air while this Indian summer lasts,” Brodie said.

  Miss Ramsay was governess to Robert Baldwin’s four motherless children. Robert shared one half of Baldwin House with his famous father, Dr. William Warren Baldwin, and ran his legal practice, Baldwin and Sullivan, from the other half. Spadina was their country residence. Robert was slowly becoming as well-known as his father, both of them heavily involved in promoting political and social change that the conservative clique who had ruled the province for thirty years labelled “radical,” “subversive,” and “anti-British.” Marc was headed for the Baldwins’ parlour for an evening meeting of half a dozen Reform-party stalwarts, during which a critical strategy for the fall session of the Legislative Assembly was to be hammered out.

  “Would I be foolish to suggest that you and Miss Ramsay are beginning to take each other seriously, despite the frightening discrepancy in your ages?”

  Brodie didn’t blush, but he gave Marc a mocking chuckle. “She’s not yet twenty-three, hardly a candidate for spinsterhood. And I’ve been told I look a good deal more than nineteen.”

  “But it is getting serious?”

  “Yes. But I doubt you’ll be hearing the banns read any time soon. I have the means to support a wife, all right, but I am determined to do well at the bank – I feel I owe it, and Mr. Fullarton, a great deal. He had faith in me before I had faith in myself. I expect to devote the next two years at least to fulfilling the promise he has seen in me. Furthermore, Diana has become devoted to Robert’s children over the past year, and she is determined to remain their caregiver until the youngest, little Eliza, is of school age.”

  “Despite the dictates of her heart?”

  They were approaching Bay Street, where Marc would turn north a few paces and find himself before the elegant, colonnaded residence of his friend and fellow barrister.

  “I admire her loyalty, and we are quite content to keep each other company, as we do now, for the fo
reseeable future,” Brodie said with all the fearless certainty of youth. “We understand each other completely, for in a way we are both orphans.”

  Marc stopped. “I knew Miss Ramsay was here in Toronto on her own, but I was unaware she had no parents back in Montreal.” As someone who had lost – and found – several parents, Marc was uncommonly interested in the subject.

  “She has an older brother and his family there. He raised her and made sure she was well educated, but both her mother and father died of cholera when she was nine or ten.”

  “And like you, also, she is more or less exiled from her home city?”

  “Not quite, though I see what you mean. Robert, you remember, was passing through Montreal in 1836 on his way home from Ireland. Charles Ramsay’s father had been an acquaintance of Dr. Baldwin, and Robert looked the family up when he arrived there in December of that year. He was much impressed with Diana, who made it known she was looking for a position as governess or tutor. So, when the children’s regular governess resigned to get married a year ago last July, Robert wrote immediately to Charles. Who, it seems, was more than delighted to let his sister go off on her own to the wilds of Upper Canada.”

  “And the rest is history, eh?” Marc smiled.

  Brodie gave his elaborately knobbed walking-stick a drum major’s twirl. “Well, I’ll leave you and Robert to solve the problems of state. I’m off to The Captain’s Arms to see if I can prevent the assassination of Julius Caesar by his faithless followers. Or something like that.”

  “I’d keep an eye on Cassius, if I were you.”