“The natives are getting increasingly restless, aren’t they?” Marc said.
A few minutes later he excused himself and headed straight up to Smallman’s to bring Dolly the latest word and suggest that a timely visit to the prison, with food and fresh clothing, might go some way to preserving the sanity of her beau, and a long way towards reestablishing a broken engagement.
When Marc returned to Baldwin House, he encountered Dr. Baldwin on his way out.
“Marc,” Baldwin greeted him, pausing on the porch, “you’ve done a good thing in getting Robert involved in this case. I haven’t seen him this excited since Augusta died. Thank you.”
Before Marc could respond, the elder Baldwin strode away down the walk with that much-admired air of confidence and purpose.
Robert was waiting for Marc in the vestibule with his coat and hat in hand. “I want you to come along with me,” he said with some of the enthusiasm his father had just alluded to.
“Where are we going?”
“Up the street two and a half blocks, to call on a retired barrister.”
As they headed north on Bay in the crisp, clear air of January, Robert explained the nature of their errand. Dr. Baldwin had gone to see Chief Justice Robinson the previous evening and proposed putting Coltrane’s defense in the hands of the American émigré attorney, Richard Dougherty. In his quiet but forceful way he had presented the self-evident advantages of having the renegade major defended in the high court by a fellow Yankee, who was himself considered a renegade and a pariah by the New York legal bench. They had not actually disbarred Dougherty, but his moral turpitude had apparently been flagrant enough to see him squeezed quietly out of the profession and, as it happened, out of the country as well. If he agreed to accept the brief, then all that was required was that the chief justice should hold his nose and recommend Dougherty’s admission to the Upper Canadian bar. His current flouting of decorum and decency would permit the benchers to promptly disbar him when he was no longer needed.
Robinson, a staunch Tory and astute jurist, immediately grasped the ingenuity of the proposaclass="underline" Coltrane would be defended by a lawyer with an international (if debased) reputation and acknowledged skill. Thus the trial would be fair and legitimized. Coltrane would hang, of course, but he would be no martyr condemned out of hand. Robinson gave Baldwin his assurance that the moment Dougherty agreed to serve, he would be made a licensed lawyer in his adopted land. The two men, among the most powerful in the province, then shook hands.
“So all we have to do,” Marc said with as little irony as he could manage, “is talk this scandalous creature, who hasn’t done a lick of law for the two years since he came here and apparently doesn’t need to, into taking on a hopeless case, whose political fallout he will readily discern?”
“You’ve got it all in a single sentence,” Robert said, and nearly laughed.
Robert Baldwin was not a spendthrift with his laughter. At thirty-four and only six years older than Marc, he had the air and posture of a man who had decided to take the world seriously at the age of eighteen and only occasionally regretted it. Unfortunately, his natural solemnness had turned to melancholia after his wife’s untimely death. For his part, Marc was happy enough to have such a person act as his legal principal as well as advisor in matters political and public. He knew he could not find a better tutor anywhere. As for Robert, he soon acknowledged and appreciated Marc’s native wit and quick insights into human motive and behaviour. After all, Marc had lived on both sides of the political and class divide, had been a man of decisive action under fire, and was now a committed adherent of the Baldwins’ obsession with responsible government. They had thus spent many evenings in the Baldwin family parlour, smoking their pipes and ruminating on the future the province might have when Lord Durham’s report was completed. And sometimes they even discussed the finer points of the law.
As they crossed King Street, Marc said, “What sins is this chap supposed to have committed in New York that got him drummed out of town?”
“Well now, there are several tales to choose from. One story has it that he was an opium addict who fell asleep once too often during an address to the jury. Another insists that alcohol was his downfall, causing him to be belligerent with clients and outrageous to their ladies. A third has it on unimpeachable authority that he was a womanizer and frequenter of low-life brothels.”
“I know a few gentlemen here who would qualify on all three grounds,” Marc said dryly.
“Alas. But whatever his vices, it seems that the public flaunting of them became too much even for the New York bar and their claims to being egalitarian.”
“ ‘License they mean when they cry liberty!’ ” Marc intoned, quoting Milton.
“Exactly.”
“Well then, I am looking forward to meeting such a paragon of unvirtue.”
“You needn’t wait long. We’re here.”
The house was set back from the street and shrouded in the shadow of a dozen capacious evergreens, drooped with snow. The walkway was unshovelled and bereft of human footprint. Ahead of him Marc noticed a sturdy, utilitarian brick cottage of one storey, ungabled. The windows were frosted and seemed to cringe inward in self-defense. There was no knocker or bell pull.
“Not much of a residence for a blasphemous sinner, is it?” Robert said, as he raised a gloved fist and rapped on the door.
“Why advertise?” Marc replied, and when no sound was heard from within, added his fist to the rapping.
A further minute passed.
“No one’s home,” Robert said, disappointed.
“I’m sure I saw a shadow in that front window.”
Sure enough, a few seconds later the heavy oak door was eased inward an inch, squealing on its hinges.
“Mr. Dougherty?” Robert queried anxiously.
“No,” came the reply, tiny and feminine.
“Are you the maid?”
After a pause, “No.”
“We’d like to see Mr. Dougherty, the attorney,” Marc said. “Does he live here?”
“Yes.” The door inched back yet again, exposing a swatch of blond hair and a single blue eye.
“We’re here on urgent government business, miss,” Robert said. “We must see Mr. Dougherty right away. Would you kindly convey that message to him, and inform him that we represent Baldwin and Sullivan, attorneys-at-law.”
“We don’t have visitors,” the voice said, with enough volume for its youth and vulnerability to register. Then came a second voice from the depths of the house.
“For Christ’s sake, Celia, open the goddamn door and let Mr. Baldwin and his lackey in!”
There was no hallway or vestibule. Marc and Robert stepped immediately into the parlour with their dripping overcoats and slush-covered boots. The frosted windows, curtained thickly, let in little light, but a smoky blaze in the hearth offered an uncertain glow in which they were able to make out the figure of the young woman pointing them towards a ponderous, horsehair, wingback chair beside the fender, and a pair of bare feet with wriggling toes resting upon a footstool next to it. A penumbra of cigar smoke rippled above the chair back like an agitated feather boa.
The young woman-she could not have been more than eighteen-had the blondest hair Marc had ever seen, and her skin was so white as to be almost transparent. But when she turned to face the visitors and present them to the profane voice in the chair, her eyes, blue as cornflower steeped in sunlight, indicated that she was not albino. Her dress was little more than a cotton shift and clung to her woman’s silhouette like wet silk. She wore no stays or corsets. And her beauty left Marc momentarily stunned and unaccountably distressed.
“I apologize for shouting, my dear. Now would you be kind enough to rustle up some coffee and edibles for our guests?” Even when it was not shouting, the voice-its progenitor still hidden behind the wing of the chair and its angled back-literally boomed, delivering its message with a tragedian’s trajectory.