“This is outrageous!” Pritchard fumed, in part to conceal his fear.
“I agree, sir,” Brookner said. “But the good news is that it was the Frenchies and not our own so-called rebels. We’re well inside Upper Canada now, and the French traitors are no doubt skedaddlling back to their own territory.”
They all got into the coach without further discussion. Gander Todd leapt up to his position, and they skittered off towards the safety of Cornwall, the next civilized town. A proper meal and a rest-stop for passengers and horses would have to wait until then.
“Mr. Sedgewick tells me that you operate a hardware store,” Ainslie Pritchard said to Brookner when they were well away from the place of ambush and the silence in the coach had grown as intolerable as it was ungentlemanly.
“Indeed, I do, sir,” Brookner replied with the sort of gruff affability of manner he had recently decided to affect. “My premises are on the main street and constructed of quarrystone-built to last, I tell my customers to amuse them.”
“And I am given to understand that your partner in life assists you in the family enterprise.”
Brookner glared sideways at Sedgewick, who was dozing, and then smiled thinly across at Pritchard. “Adelaide helps out from time to time and, if I may boast, does an excellent job.”
“For a woman,” Adelaide said in a barely audible voice. Her veil had come down again.
Brookner threw his wife a warning glance of some kind, but before he could say anything, Marc said, “My fiancée and her aunt run a business entirely on their own in Toronto.”
“Do they?” Pritchard said with ill-suppressed surprise.
“What sort of shop?” Brookner asked.
Marc noticed that the captain had put his greatcoat on before leaving the coach earlier and had kept it on. Even in the pale light of the coach’s interior, it gleamed a garish green and, with its wearer’s stiff posture, could have passed for a mannequin in a haberdasher’s display-window. Oddly, he was not wearing a black armband.
“Millinery,” Marc said. “With a dressmaker’s workroom in back.” He did not think it wise to mention their recent troubles and subsequent flight.
“Aah,” Pritchard and Brookner said together, with a dismissive sigh.
“She operated a farm before that-on her own, after her first husband died.”
“I’m told the women out here get up to the damnedest things.” Pritchard sighed, more ruefully this time. “But surely she will not carry on once she becomes the wife of an infantry officer.”
“I believe she will, one way or another.”
“But what will happen when the children start coming?”
“I’ve learned to take life one week at a time out here,” Marc said. “You must remember that we are not yet fully civilized.”
“Now there you speak the gospel truth, sir.”
“You have no children, then?” Marc asked Brookner.
“No, I have not, sir. To my deep regret. Mrs. Brookner and I have been happily wed for almost fifteen years, but the Lord has not seen fit to bless us with children.”
“Then it has been most generous of you, Captain, to allow Mrs. Brookner to participate in your commercial affairs.”
“Adelaide does the accounts,” Sedgewick said without opening his eyes.
“Whenever I myself am too busy to do so,” Brookner said quickly. “Is that not so, my dear?”
Whether his good wife was about to answer or demur was not known, because Sedgewick answered on her behalf.
“Addie was very clever in school,” he said, smiling reminiscently across at the veiled countenance of his sister. “Especially in sums. Her other brothers and Marion and me only finished common schooclass="underline" Addie was sent into Kingston to Miss Carswell’s Academy for Ladies.”
For a moment that remark, aggressive and affectionate, seemed to stop the easy flow of conversation. However, silence being anathema to the English merchant, he soon started it up again, in a fresh direction.
“If you are going on to Cobourg, Mr. Lambert, then we shall be travelling together for several more days.”
Charles Lambert, who appeared to have been somewhat shaken out of his earlier trance by his fright in the woods, nodded courteously, but did not speak.
“Cobourg, I was told in Montreal, is a bustling new town on the big lake-Ontario, I believe it’s called.”
“It is an incorporated village,” Lambert said, and for the first time a lawyerly precision of voice and cadence could be discerned. “And barely that. But we hope for more.”
“You are newly set up in practice there?”
Lambert paused, as if considering whether or not he had said too much already, but eventually said, “We arrived there four months ago.”
“Then you may have met my good friend, Dr. Charles Barnaby, a retired army surgeon who has a part-time clinic on King Street,” Marc said, suddenly interested in a man who had resided in Cobourg for the past few months and who, being no more than five miles from Crawford’s Corners, might well have information about the rebellion and its aftermath in the region.
Lambert looked momentarily puzzled by the question, but like a good solicitor in training, he recovered quickly and said, “No, I don’t believe I’ve yet had the privilege. I’m an extraordinarily healthy man.”
“It’s the bracing country air!” Pritchard said, eager to draw the conversation back to himself.
“Then you and your wife must get out to Throop’s Emporium quite often. It’s been honoured with the quaintness award for the province, I’ve been told,” Marc said lightly.
Lambert’s dark brows came down to squeeze his eyes almost shut. “Pardon me for being blunt, Lieutenant, but I don’t see how any of this is your business.”
There was an embarrassed silence. It’s only my business, Marc thought but did not say, if you’ve never actually set foot in Cobourg. And if not, what are you doing on a stagecoach heading there? And what were you really doing up in St. Denis?
“We’re merely trying to while away the boredom of the journey, old chap,” Pritchard said.
“I don’t find my own company boring,” Lambert said uncharitably, despite the obvious truth of the remark.
And that put an end to that conversation.
Fifteen minutes later they reached the outskirts of Cornwall and pulled up in front of the Malvern Inn. It was five o’clock.
Alerted to their imminent arrival by the army courier who had passed through ahead of them, the innkeeper had prepared a sumptuous welcome for his affluent guests. A log-fire blazed in the huge stone fireplace of the reception area. Braziers had been sent up to their rooms and warming bricks placed in their beds between feather mattresses and goose-down comforters. The roast beef was almost ready in the cook’s generous oven, and the wine-steward-cum-errand-boy had just scurried off to the cellar for five bottles of the best that ready money could buy.
Marc was hoping to observe each of his fellow passengers as they removed their outer clothing. He was looking for the telltale bulges of hidden weapons, but it was not to be. Everyone was exhausted, physically and emotionally, from the long journey and its troubling events, and headed straight upstairs to their assigned chambers. An hour later, with a wash and a nap accomplished, they reassembled in front of the roaring fire for sherry and pre-dinner chat. No doubt their various adventures would have been rehashed, if only in a perfunctory way, but Mr. Malvern and his angular wife insisted on sharing their affability and stores of meaningless gossip with their captive customers. And so, with the aroma of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding wafting in from the kitchen, they had to endure the Malvern chatter for the sake of the pleasures to come. Marc found himself almost too weak to eat anyway. He had fallen dead asleep in his room and had had to be wakened by an alarmed Captain Brookner who, once more, showed his disappointment at Marc’s choice of clothes for dinner, but made no comment.