It had hardly begun when he heard voices raised next door through the thin walclass="underline" the Brookners, having a husband-and-wife dispute by the sound of it. Fortunately, it did not last long, and by the time it had subsided he was asleep.
ELEVEN
Captain Brookner, ever sensitive to the welfare of Lieutenant Edwards, and even more so having observed him in the full glory of his scarlet tunic and tufted shako cap, saw to it that no-one disturbed the good soldier until midmorning. At which time the sunlight flooding his room did the trick, and an hour later the entourage was once again settled in their familiar seats in the carriage. Marc had had one anxious moment before boarding. As he was instructing Jones’s son regarding the placement of his trunks-his uniform tucked inside one of them along with the pumpkin-Jones proper came sidling up to him, looking concerned. Marc immediately assumed that there was some bad news from the ferryman.
Jones forestalled his question: “Don’t look so worried, sir. Your friend and her little one reached Waddington safely.” He paused and gave Marc a sly glance. In a whisper he said, “Along with the elderly sister.”
So Clark Cooper had already come visiting and spilled the beans.
“Was there a problem with that?” Marc asked, using all the authority of his rank and his lawyerly voice to put an end to the dangerous direction of this conversation.
Jones smiled with a weak attempt at a man-of-the-world demeanour. “Just a wee one, sir. Coop mentioned that you were one pound short of the fee last night, but you promised to pass it along before you left.”
Marc smiled back, then slipped a one-pound note into the innkeeper’s hand. “You’ll be sure to deliver it,” he said.
Jones almost winked his assurance.
If the militia captain was disappointed that the lieutenant had not continued to wear his uniform, he was too polite to say so. The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Brookner had been frosty and uncommunicative from the outset, so it was hard for Marc to tell whether the dispute he had heard last night was the norm or represented an escalation of their apparent dislike for each other. Oddly, Brookner was always as courteous to her as he was to others. Even this morning he had taken her arm to lift her into the coach, and, as before, she had jerked away as if she had been pinched. She continued to sit in one corner and he diagonally opposite. The sun still shone, though cloud was building up in the southwest; the runners slid weightlessly along the packed snow of the roadbed; and for a little while the passengers could imagine they were on a Sunday afternoon outing in a snowy paradise of spruce boughs and plumed drifts.
Ainslie Pritchard concluded it was safe once again to initiate polite conversation. “Could you tell me, Mr. Lambert, whether that bustling new village of yours has a first-class hotel? One that might be interested in some of the new French wines I intend to introduce into this part of the world?”
Lambert looked up. “We have a hotel, but what class it may be, I don’t know.”
Marc was not surprised that Lambert had decided to answer the question. He had slowly been coming out of whatever shell he had been hiding under. What did surprise him was that he could detect no trace of a French accent in Lambert’s English. Perhaps it had not been Lambert speaking joual in Jones’s kitchen last night after all.
“Would you mind giving me the name of it? I could write the owner from Toronto,” Pritchard said, then flashed Lambert a jowly grin: “Better still, I could stop over there, and you could show me the sights.”
Marc thought he saw Lambert pale.
“It’s the Lakeside, is it not?” Marc said to Lambert.
Lambert betrayed an instant’s doubt, like the barrister whose witness has just given him an unrehearsed answer, then said with conviction, “Yes, it is.”
“You’ve visited the place, then?” Pritchard asked, turning to Marc.
“I stayed in nearby Crawford’s Corners for several weeks two years ago, and visited again last winter.”
This neatly deflected the conversation from hotels in Cobourg. Pritchard was not satisfied until he had gleaned as much information as possible about Marc’s fiancée and wedding plans, many of them fabricated to keep Pritchard happy. During this exchange, Marc kept a sharp eye on the brothers-in-law seated side by side across from him. Whatever the source and depth of their drunken disagreement two nights ago, they seemed to have settled into a sort of reluctant truce, for the sake of their fellow passengers, most likely.
Without warning the coach began to slow, and once again their driver’s desperate “Whoa’s!” were alarming.
“Can we trust this chap?” Pritchard asked Brookner with a frightened look.
“Todd?” Brookner said as he pulled back the glass of his window and strained to see ahead. “With my life. His grandfather was an Empire Loyalist and his father fought at Crysler’s Farm in 1813. They don’t come any more faithful than Gander.”
“I hear hoofbeats!” Pritchard said.
“What is it, Todd?” Brookner called up, as the others sat up, fully alert.
“Trouble ahead, sir. On horseback.”
Brookner pushed his way over to the door, yanked off his garish green greatcoat to expose his weaponry, and leapt into a drift. Marc suddenly wished he hadn’t repacked his pistol. But he felt compelled to follow, excusing himself as he bumped against Adelaide.
“Don’t try to stop the old fool,” she whispered fiercely. “He’ll get us all killed yet.”
The old fool was already stomping past the horses in the direction of the half a dozen mounted men riding easily towards them down the road. They wore no uniform or insignia to telegraph their allegiance.
Just as Brookner was about to draw his pistol, the lead horseman hollered, “Hold on! We’re friends!”
Brookner kept his fingers closed on the pistol in his belt. “Prove it!” he said.
The leader of the group dismounted and walked towards Brookner with both hands well away from his body. His cohort stood at ease, watching but not looking particularly worried. Marc relaxed.
Brookner and the men exchanged a few words that Marc could not quite catch. Then Brookner took several pieces of paper from the stranger and began walking back to the coach. The latter remounted and led his troop past the carriage, each man tipping his hat to Adelaide, who peered out at them from behind her mourning veil.
“They’re local men,” Brookner said to Marc, but loud enough for all to hear. “They’ve been deputized to track down several desperadoes from Mackenzie’s revolt. They’ve got pictures of them on these posters. That fellow there is Miles Scanlon.”
Marc made a pretense of studying the posters. One of them contained a sure likeness of Thomas-cum-Thomasina Goodall.
The encounter seemed to have got Brookner’s adrenaline flowing. Ever since the death-threat yesterday he had begun to cast himself in what could only be called a romantic light. His strut had become more animated and his speech more formal and consciously laboured, as if he were a character out of Ivanhoe or The Bride of Lammermoor. Without instigation from Pritchard, though richly responded to by that well-read gentleman, Brookner launched into a more vivid description of his capture of the three Scanlon brothers, and then capped off the entertainment with a narrative of the encounter south of Montgomery’s tavern and the subsequent counterattack by the Queen’s forces under the superlative command of Colonel Allan MacNab-with flags flying and bands tootling and drummers thumping-as if he himself had been present and the detail had been adduced first-hand instead of third or fourth.
Pritchard was goggle-eyed at all this, Marc pretended to doze, Adelaide stared out at the snow beginning to fall again, Lambert appeared to be listening but showed no particular reaction, and Sedgewick grunted and mumbled throughout but not loud enough to steer Brookner’s fanciful tale off course.