“What’s happened?” he asked cautiously.
“I’ve been thrown out of the house, bag and baggage!” Patricia cried, indicating a pathetic bundle of clothes tied up with a man’s belt.
“By your father?” Marc asked redundantly.
“He told me that unless I obeyed him and got myself ready for the ball tonight and behaved there like a perfect lady, I could go out into the street and fend for myself!”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean it,” Beth soothed.
“He’s gone mad over that stupid dance!” Patricia sobbed, reaching for outrage but not quite getting there.
Marc sighed. “The man has certainly become obsessed about the honours due him at the governor’s gala,” he said to Beth. And while his heart went out to this wretched girl-her lover murdered and his adversary, captor, and jailer demanding her fealty-Marc’s thought was that such an obsession was reason enough to do away with the one person who most threatened its fulfillment. Marc had to find the incriminating letter among Coltrane’s effects or one like it in the hands of his sister. Everything now depended on it.
“What’ll we do about this?” Beth wondered aloud, handing Patricia a dry hanky.
“I’m certain the colonel will relent once the gala is over and he’s got his medal and citation. In the meantime, I suggest she bunk in with Charlene for the night, and if necessary you could arrange for her to stay with Mrs. Halpenny in her apartment above the shop. She’ll be safe there and have lots of female company.”
“I’ll see to it,” Beth said without ceremony, and Marc was once again grateful that his wife was a strong and highly capable woman.
Marc turned to Patricia. “Where was your mother when this happened?”
“She was there, and I could see she wanted to step in and stop it, but she didn’t. She just stood there and watched.” The thought of Almeda’s timidity induced a further bout of sniffling. “She used to stand up to him, but lately she’s just let him carry on and doesn’t say a word.”
“Well, I’ll find a way to get news to your mother that you’re all right. By Monday morning the storm will have blown itself out,” Marc said in his most avuncular voice.
“I will be delivering some ribbon for the hat your mother chose for church tomorrow,” Beth said. “I’ll take it up in the morning and tell her what’s happened to you.”
“I’m pretty sure she knows where I was headed, ’cause I told Shad at the door. I didn’t want her worrying all through the dance,” Patricia said. “Oh, how can I ever thank you?”
By testifying to your father’s obsession in court, Marc thought, but said nothing.
After supper, when Patricia and Charlene had been safely quartered in the latter’s room, Marc told Beth about his day and his decision to go to Detroit. She took the news calmly.
“You’re worried about me being alone here, aren’t you?” she said.
“I am. The colonel is a volatile and unpredictable man.”
“I’ll get Jasper to come and sleep on the chesterfield. He’s already over here most of the day; he might as well stay the night too. I’ll take Charlene to work with me on Monday. We’ll have a lot of tidying up to do after Twelfth Night. Jasper’ll keep our stoves alive.”
Jasper Hogg chopped their wood and did any heavy chores around the house that Marc was too busy or too clumsy to do himself. He was a carpenter’s helper who worked whenever and wherever he could but had much idle time on his hands. He was also muscular, reliable, and pathologically shy around adults who were not of his own gender.
“And he’ll be able to admire Charlene up close,” Marc said. “I’ll go next door and arrange it.”
“I just hope you’ll be careful in Detroit,” Beth said.
“Don’t worry, love. I’ll have Cobb with me.”
THIRTEEN
It was eight o’clock Sunday morning when the two-horse cutter carrying Marc and Cobb left the comfortable confines of the capital city and struck out through the bush along the snow-packed highway that would take them through Brantford to Woodstock and the forested districts beyond. This particular January morning was crisp and clear. Sunlight and new-fallen snow took turns dazzling the travellers. In the breezeless air, the drift-adroop boughs of cedar, fir, and tamarack preened like debutantes at the Twelfth Night Ball. As the runners on the sleigh sang against the grooved surface of the road and the horses nickered in delight of their task, Marc was once again enthralled by winter’s breathtaking landscapes. So smooth was the thoroughfare and so swift the stalwart steeds that Marc was convinced they were flying, mocking gravity and the illusory grip of civilization. For a precious, distilled moment or two, tawdry tales of murder and intrigue, avarice and vanity seemed far away and insubstantial.
“I c’n drive a team one-handed, ya know,” Cobb said quietly, but in the silence of the woods and empty skies, it sounded more like a shout.
“It’s all right,” Marc said, the reins relaxed in his hands, as the seasoned pair of gray geldings knew their own way and preferred to take it. “There’ll be other days, and I’ll let you know when it gets too much for an English gentleman to handle.”
Cobb was supposed to find this reference amusing but didn’t. As he and Marc had walked to Frank’s livery stable near the market to pick up the cutter and team, Marc had explained the disguise he was planning to don in order to be able to move freely about the dangerous streets of Detroit. And just in case there were enemy agents lurking in or about the inns along their route, each was to take up his role and practise it twenty-four hours a day. The border raids of the past ten months had made everyone jumpy and suspicious. “Walls have ears” was their motto. The idea for the roles they would enact had come to Marc yesterday just as he was leaving Baldwin House and about to head for Cobb’s. Marc himself would be an English gentleman, a journalist from London, and Cobb would be his “man.” (“You took the easy part fer yerself,” Cobb had complained.) Cobb would play not his customary valet but one he had scavenged along the way on his North American journey.
“I’ll exaggerate my educated accent somewhat to impress the locals,” Marc suggested, “and you can just be your winsome self.” To further legitimate his own role, Marc decided to take on the name of an actual English journalist, Athol Briggs, whose byline appeared regularly in an underground, libertarian paper, Egalité, a publication known to be sympathetic to extremists among English Radicals and to American republicanism. Marc had a stack of back issues, from which he had selected half a dozen samples, each of which bore a front-page fulmination by Athol Briggs. Marc also decided to gild the lily a bit by awarding himself a life peerage.
“That mean I gotta call ya ‘Yer Lordship’?” Cobb had spluttered.
“I’m afraid so, while I perforce must refer to you simply as ‘Bartlett.’ ” The coincidence between this appellation and Cobb’s silhouette was not remarked upon.
Cobb’s aches and pains had kept him awake much of the night, and so he was content to pull the buffalo robe up to his chin, snuggle down, and snooze most of the way to Dundas. Meanwhile Marc tried to blank out as many details of the case as he could, partly because he had already mulled them over more times than was necessary. He wished to absorb and appreciate, with subliminal satisfaction, the scenery they were gliding through: rolling hills, snowbound lakes, the lowering edge of the escarpment, a spooked deer by the roadside. Their plan was to change horses two or three times a day, leaving the current team with the inn’s ostler. These same teams would be picked up in reverse order when they came back by the same route. It would be costly, but then Lord Athol Briggs was a sponsored journalist of private means in search of sensational material for his famous weekly.