Every one of the several hundred spectators inside the hall was standing, even though a number of benches were available on the periphery for the infirm or dyspeptic. The torches that lit the smoky, shadowed interior were set high on metal sconces on the walls. As Marc took up his assigned place between the podium and the side door, the first speaker was being introduced: Peter Perry, member of the Legislative Assembly for the nearby constituency of Lennox and Addington. A thunderous roar erupted as he stepped into an undulating pool of torchlight in the centre of the makeshift platform. His companions in the cause, four of them, were seated behind him, hidden in the oily darkness beyond the reach of torchlight.
The crowd’s shouted approval rattled the windows and ricocheted into the rafters. Perry, a squat bulldog of a man stripped to his shirtsleeves and in fighting trim, began his speech at full throttle and cranked it upwards from there in carefully calibrated degrees of vehemence and mockery. His target was Sir John Colborne and the news that, in the final days of his regime, he had secretly signed a bill creating fifty-seven additional rectories for the Established Church, thereby adding a thousand or more acres to the already corrupt and bloated glebe lands of the Clergy Reserves.
The crowd roared its disapproval as one. It cheered each note and jab of Perry’s defiance. The occasional dissenting “Nay” or “Shame” was drowned out instantly or used by Perry to goad the faithful to further indignation. The heat in the hall-the heat of exhaled rage, of bodies sweating in winter gear, of anticipation-was growing unbearable as Perry soared to the peak of his impassioned flight.
“We shall no longer tolerate the insolence of high office, the flouting of His Majesty’s will by petty appointees of the colonial secretary, the hauteur of Rector John Strachan and his Anglican cronies, the daily repudiation of bills passed by the people’s duly elected Assembly! We will march through every village and town in this province and tear these ill-got rectories down, board by arrogant board!”
During the tidal wave of applause that pursued Perry to his seat, Marc slipped out the side door. He breathed in several draughts of cold, fresh air and set about on the first of his half-hourly rounds. It was completely dark now. Marc studied the steady stream of men moving from hall door to privy and back. The glazed excitement in their eyes, like a flame under liquid wax, was not wholly due to the effects of the fiery rhetoric from the platform. Many, he suspected, would have concealed flasks to draw inspiration from as occasion demanded, but such a limited source could not account for the extent of the weaving and yawing in front of him.
Half an hour later, after the third speaker, a failed Reform candidate from Kingston, had finished, Marc noticed a pronounced increase in the level of inebriation. The crowd, somewhat more subdued during the two speeches following Perry’s opening salvo, was pacing itself no doubt for the feature attraction yet to come. At the current rate of imbibing, Marc hoped it would come soon.
“Where in Sam Hill are they getting the stuff?” Hatch said to him outside.
“Damned if I can figure it.” The two men stared at the three privies carefully. They had been erected in such a way that they were set into a hedge-like row of cedars: to mute their vulgar presence perhaps, or to provide in the cedar fringe a ready alternative for male relief. Only some of the men here bothered to use a privy, but they were the ones for the most part doing the weaving and muttering. Marc took a quick look into each cubicle and in the near-dark could see nothing unusual. No jugs littered the floor or bench.
As he turned back towards the hall, Marc heard a shout that he imagined might have risen from the Highlanders on their first charge at Culloden or King Billy’s Protestants at the Battle of the Boyne.
William Lyon Mackenzie was centre stage, the spot marked out for him by Destiny-God’s or the Devil’s, depending on your politics. The heat and stink of the room was overpowering, but the audience pressed forward so tightly that anyone fainting would remain upright and unnoticed. The double doors were open, the principal effect of which was to have the torches shudder more ominously in their tin calyxes and throw a less reliable light on the crowd below. Marc stood on a bench to better monitor the proceedings.
Mackenzie, the Scots firebrand whose name Marc’s superiors had never uttered except in contempt, was surprisingly small. Even though he was swaddled in two greatcoats (of different colours), the thinness of his frame and fragility of his bones was evident-in the delicacy of his fingers, which probed and struck the air in rhetorical bursts, and in the dancer’s nimbleness of his feet, which hopped and paused in concert with his words. His head was absurdly large for such a body, as if it had been fashioned solely for the passion of public speech. His blue eyes blazed continuous outrage yet still found moments to dart and judge, or confer brief benediction on those few apostles positioned near enough to receive it. During the first minutes of his jeremiad, the crowd, even those who had been jeering bravely, went quiet, as if some stupefying awe had taken hold. Their messiah did not disappoint.
He reviewed for them the long and sorrowful history of their attempts to gain a legitimate voice in those affairs of state that most affected their lives and the future of their children. There was no need to remind anyone in the room, he said, of the sacrifice already made by a populace comprised almost entirely of outcasts, voluntary exiles, and the dispossessed: ordinary men and women who, like their courageous counterparts in France and the United States, were to be numbered among those first generations of humankind who, in the simplicity of their conviction, said no to tyranny, laid their bodies naked before it, and proclaimed to all oppressed peoples of the Earth: “It shall not pass!”
A rustling thrum and a sustained murmur began to resonate through the hall, wordless but nonetheless coordinated and edged with threat. Marc glanced anxiously towards the big doors but could see no one that mattered. A few souls-exhausted, drunk, or frightened-were slipping out into the night.
The firebrand moved on to catalogue the most recent outrages, pausing between tirades for roars of approval and working the crowd like a seasoned tent-preacher, while his orange-red hair flared about his face like a demonic halo. The throng hooted and participated in his derision of Chief Justice Robinson and Attorney General Boulton and other charter members of the Family Compact who had three times had him expelled from the parliament to which he had been elected and defiantly re-elected. They laughed wildly when he recounted, with apt mimicry, the stunned response of said worthies when, unable to assume his lawful seat in the House, he had subsequently been elected the first mayor of the new city of Toronto. He paused, took a swig of water from a pitcher, ran his fingers through the shock of his hair, and glared out over the crowd as if seeing, beyond them, their common tormentors.
He changed to the subject raised by his fellow legislator, Peter Perry: the fate of the Seventh Report on Grievances. One by one, and in a voice now more terrible for its calculated restraint, he touched on the particular wounds that festered and burned amongst them: the Clergy Reserves, the ruinous lending policies of the Bank of Upper Canada, the rejection by the appointed Legislative Council of bill after bill that would alleviate their suffering, the graft and bumbling of the Welland Canal Company, the low prices of grain manipulated for the benefit of the mother country and its coddled emissaries here among the ruling clique, the greed and venality of district magistrates more arrogant than English squires or the absentee landlords of Scotland and Ireland.