“We couldn’t buy it,” Beth said, “even if we had the money.”
Before he asked why, Marc had to suppress the unsettling thought that Joshua Smallman had been a wealthy man by provincial standards, having established his lucrative business on “fashionable” King Street and paid off his son’s mortgage, and that his daughter-in-law, so recently restored to his affection, would surely inherit whatever remained.
“What you see over there,” Beth said, “and all along this side of the creek, is a lot owned by the Crown. If and when the government ever decides to sell it, the proceeds will go to the clergy.”
Light dawned. Inwardly Marc winced at his own obtuseness, his failure to see how Beth Smallman had been leading him patiently towards this conclusion. The Clergy Reserves had topped every list of grievances headlined in Mackenzie’s Colonial Advocate. This was a phrase flung like a goad against the worthies of the province and the governor’s appointed Legislative Council.
“Ah. . yes. Every seventh lot to be reserved for the use and maintenance of the Anglican clergy,” Marc said, the legalese slipping easily off the tongue. “But surely the assignment of such lots is not random and self-defeating. Surely both parties, the Church of England and the farmers, stand to gain by the rational allotment and sale of such reserve lands.”
“The surveyors laid out these lots ten years ago and applied the grid plan they’d been given by the Executive Council. It’s the same for every township in the province. The disposition of lots is decided in advance. What’s actually on them or not on them is irrelevant.”
“That’s preposterous!”
“Mr. Mackenzie himself used that very word.”
“Even so, can no one buy that lot over there?”
“Clergy Reserve lots are bought and sold all the time. Archdeacon Strachan and his cronies in the Council trade them-like marbles. But only when the value’s been raised or it appears convenient or necessary to their interests. That one over there will be sold when all the property ’round it is cleared and improved and a concession road cut out to the north of it. It’ll be worth ten times what it is now-to someone. Our farm and it would make a natural and very profitable pair.”
“But couldn’t you and your husband have run your tile down to the creek and set up some irrigation pipes in the interim? You could’ve put a squatter’s shack on that piece by the bank, for God’s sake!”
“We could have. But what’s to stop the leaders of the Anglican Church with influence in the governor’s Executive Council from suddenly decidin’ to sell that lot to one of their friends, and that friend then comin’ in and rippin’ up our tile-leavin’ us high and dry like we were in the first place? Not a thing.”
“They don’t have to sell at public auction?”
“Not if it doesn’t please them. And don’t forget, Jess and me were Reformers through and through.”
Recalling Joshua Smallman’s friendship with Sir John Colborne, Marc said, “But perhaps your father-in-law could have petitioned the Executive Council on your behalf?”
“He didn’t believe in that kind of shady dealing,” she replied, with more pride than regret. “He was too honourable.”
“But you’re not suggesting that the government would let politics influence the conduct of its responsibilities?”
The ingenuousness of the question surprised and amused Beth Smallman, but she suppressed a laugh.
“All this has been set out in the Report on Grievances that Mackenzie sent across to Lord Glenelg?” Marc continued.
“The Seventh Report on Grievances.”
They walked slowly back towards the barn, Beth ahead, Marc behind. At the point where the path dipped south towards the mill property (that, as chance would have it, straddled the creek down its full length), Marc prepared to take his leave. He took Beth’s hand and brought her mittened fingers to his lips, a gesture ingrained by long habit and prompted now by something more than courtesy.
“Thank you for being so candid and forthcoming,” he said formally. “And good day to you.”
She left her fingers where they lay for a second or two after Marc released them, and she looked steadily at him, as if he were one of her father’s books that might possibly deserve reading.
“I intend to find out what happened to Joshua,” he said.
“I believe you will.”
He watched her until she had passed the barn and disappeared into the summer kitchen attached to the rear of the house. Then he turned to make his way to Hatch’s house, but a banging noise brought him up short. He stopped to listen. Somewhere a door was flapping freely in the light breeze. He checked the barn, then swung his attention to Elijah’s cabin near it. The old goat had left his door unlatched and, if the wind picked up even slightly, it would soon blow off its leather hinges. Reluctantly, for he did not wish the pleasant afterglow of the interview with Beth to be disturbed, Marc walked down towards the cabin.
He grasped the plank door by the knob, but before fastening it, he decided to have a look inside, in case the wretched fellow had fallen or taken ill. In the grainy light that illuminated the interior, Marc could just make out the unmade and unoccupied bed, an empty chair, and a makeshift desk cluttered with papers. Marc stepped back outside and peered around for any sign of Elijah. A movement up beyond the house caught his attention: someone was trundling across the road and into the woods on the far side, where the path led up to Squire Child’s estate-Elijah What’s-his-name scuttling, quick as a dog in heat, over to call upon his lady friend, Ruby Marsden.
Marc latched the door and turned to leave, then suddenly wrenched it open again and stepped boldly inside. He moved swiftly over to the desk and sat down on the rickety chair in front of it. The desk was a mass of jumbled newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides, speckled with ash and shards from cracked pipe bowls. For a man reputed to be illiterate, Elijah had chosen some unusual recreational materials. One by one Marc held these up to the dim light that fell through the window. On every item, passages had been underlined or crudely circled with charcoal. The subject of each marked passage was instantly clear: political statements, whether they were in the reports of the minutes of the House of Assembly, a manifesto in broadside or tract, or a hyperbolic claim in the capitalized line of a poster. And each of them bilious with the rhetoric of the left-the bombast of the radicals. Among this detritus lay a single leather-bound book, the Holy Bible.
Gently Marc opened it, and he peered at the fly-leaf. A name was scrawled there, faded but legible. The word “Elijah” was readily decipherable, but the letters of the last name were tangled and blurred. After some minutes, Marc deciphered them as: c — h — o — w — n.
Elijah Chown.
So, Elijah had secrets to keep. He was a furtive reader and a closet Reformer. Little wonder, then, that he had been so protective of the Smallmans. But why the secrecy? Beth herself did not know he could read-or else she had lied about it yesterday when she had implied that only she among the New Year’s guests was literate, a conclusion he now rejected out of hand. And what else might he have to hide? Somehow, Marc thought, he was going to have to find a way of interrogating the prickly old misanthrope. He needed to know much more about what was really going through the mind of Joshua Smallman in the weeks before his death. And he needed to hear it, unfortunately, from someone less partisan than his daughter-in-law.
At any rate, the hired hand would bear watching.
SEVEN
Just as Marc rounded the north silo and turned towards the miller’s barn, he heard a high-pitched squawk that rose to a terrified shriek, then stopped, as if an organ-pipe had been throttled with a vengeful thumb. Before he could even hazard a guess as to the tortured source of the sound, the elongated and fully engaged figure of Winnifred Hatch emerged from between the barn and the chicken coop. In the vise of her left hand, the silenced but thrashing body of a bulb-eyed, dusty-feathered capon struggled futilely against the inevitable. In her right hand, she clutched a hatchet. The miller’s daughter-garbed in sweater and skirt and an intimidating leather butcher’s apron-marched to a stump near Marc, one that had been set firmly in the ground for her purpose. She plopped the lolling head of the doomed creature upon it and brought the hatchet blade down with the zeal of a Vandal. Blood burst everywhere. Marc leapt back, then stared down at the crimson spatter on his boots and the gaudy petit point etched suddenly in the snow. As Winnifred jerked the decapitated fowl up by its feet to let the blood drip out, she noticed the spectator for the first time.