Vital Secrets Read online

  OTHER MARC EDWARDS MYSTERIES BY DON GUTTERIDGE

  Turncoat

  Solemn Vows

  Touchstone

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10020

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007, 2011 by Don Gutteridge

  Originally published in 2007 in Canada by Trinity Enterprise Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  This Touchstone export edition July 2011

  TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-6371-9

  ISBN 978-1-4391-7268-1 (ebook)

  For George Martell, with thanks

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One: March 1837

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two: October 1837

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my agent, Beverley Slopen, for her constant support and wise counsel. Thanks, too, to my editor for this edition, Jan Walter. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Alison Clarke and Kevin Hanson of Simon & Schuster for their unflagging confidence in the Marc Edwards mysteries.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Vital Secrets is wholly a work of fiction, but I have endeavoured to convey in it the spirit of the period and the political tensions that led to the Rebellion of 1837. Actions and characterizations attributed to actual historical personages, like Sir Francis Bond Head and William Lyon Mackenzie, are fictitious. All other characters are the invention of the author, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  There were theatres, amateur acting groups, and touring companies from New York and elsewhere in Upper Canada during the late 1820s and throughout the 1830s. While details are sketchy, the first permanent playhouse is reputed to have been the Theatre Royale, located on the upper floor of Frank’s Hotel in Toronto. The Regency Theatre described herein is a much more elaborate one than actually existed—though establishments like it were flourishing by the 1840s—and my Mr. Frank is fictitious. For details see Murray D. Edwards, A Stage in Our Past. Information on the theatres in New York City during the period may be found in Mary C. Henderson’s The City and the Theatre: New York Playhouses from Bowling Green to Times Square.

  Finally, by 1835 the new city of Toronto boasted the first municipal police force in North America, a five-man constabulary headed by a chief constable and modelled on the London “peelers.”

  PROLOGUE

  It is March 1837, and Upper Canada is as restive as ever. There had been high hopes when Lieutenant-Governor Sir Francis Bond Head engineered victory for the Tories in the election of June 1836. It was expected that a period of stability would be ushered in, and that the many grievances of the farmers and their representatives in the Reform Party would soon be addressed. It was not to be. Head proceeded to enact repressive legislation and thwart the efforts of the Reformers in the Legislature. Drought had gripped the province, and the banks, safe in the hands of the Family Compact, refused to grant credit. Moreover, the clergy-reserves question still rankled. One-seventh of all the usable land was set aside for the established Anglican Church and was being held uncleared until land prices improved. More grating was the deadlock in the provincial parliament, where the unelected legislative councillors vetoed legislation put forward by the elected Reformers that might favour the suffering population.

  As a result of Head’s machinations, unrest had become increasingly widespread. A more radical wing of the Reform Party evolved under the strident direction of newspaper editor and politician William Lyon Mackenzie, who had lost his parliamentary seat in the 1836 election. Secret meetings and rallies took place throughout the countryside, and rumours of impending civil strife and the smuggling of arms from the United States were rampant. In a few months a new queen, Victoria, would be crowned, but she would bring no peace to the troubled colony.

  PART ONE

  MARCH 1837

  ONE

  For the second time since his arrival in the New World, Lieutenant Marc Edwards was setting out on a winter expedition to Cobourg and, this time, to places eastward to Kingston. On this occasion he was not alone, for at his side, cantering contentedly on a sleek, bay gelding and puffing coils of pipe-smoke into the air along with his frozen breath, was Major Owen Jenkin, quartermaster of His Majesty’s 24th Regiment of Foot. The newly risen sun floated above the horizon-line of the forest ahead of them like a disk of burnished brass, as the duo swung up the long curve of King Street towards Scaddings Bridge and the Kingston Road. Behind them, the capital city of the province lay rumpled and quiescent in its coverlet of snow.

  “By Christ, but it’s good to be on the road again, eh, Marc?” Jenkin said without taking his teeth off the stem of his pipe.

  And it was. Ever since he had resigned his post at Government House—on a matter of principle—and returned to the spartan barracks at Fort York after his second investigation, Marc had suffered the boredom of peacetime military routine. He didn’t regret his decision, but he had jumped at the chance to go foraging with Owen Jenkin.

  “It was kind of you to invite me along, sir. I’m sure you could have managed quite well without me.”

  Jenkin emitted a rumbling sort of laugh, one that began in his substantial belly and rose up through the smoky realms of his throat till it met the clamped jaws and had to wheeze its way past. The older man had the face of a fallen cherub, with rubicund cheeks so bulging they pinched against his thick eyebrows and made the dancing orbs of his eyes all the more prominent for having to operate in such a confined sphere. The lips, had they been visible beneath the flourishing and unfashionably grizzled beard, would have shown themselves fleshy and sensuous. Evidently the quartermaster was a man who had feasted upon the fruits of life and found them satisfactory.

  “Since you’ve had the impertinence to question why I brought you along, lad, I’ll tell you. I’m told that when you came this way last winter on special assignment for the former governor, you passed yourself off as an agent for the quartermaster searching out reliable suppliers of pork and grain.”

  “There are few secrets in a garrison, I see,” Marc said.

  “I’m told also that your eye for quality and your nose for the bogus were as keen as a horse-trader’s.”

  “You forget, sir, that I was part of that large foraging party you led two summers ago into the western region,” Marc said.

  “I do not forget that at all. I was quite aware of you watching me and taking note of every detail of the operation. I also know you were raised on a country estate in Kent, where matters agricul
tural were close to hand and as natural as breathing air uncontaminated by London soot.”

  “You know a great deal about me indeed,” Marc said in what he hoped was a respectful tone.

  “Don’t look so worried, lad! I haven’t been spying on you. With a mug like mine, espionage would be a hazardous occupation, to say the least.”

  Marc wondered how much, if anything, the major knew about what had happened last June when Marc had tried, and failed, to win the hand of Beth Smallman. Surely he couldn’t know that Beth had left her millinery shop in Toronto last January to return to Crawford’s Corners, near Cobourg, to nurse her ailing brother Aaron.

  “To tell the truth, I’ve admired you and your deportment since the day you arrived here. Your exploits and actions are well remarked among the officers of the regiment.”

  “I’m flattered, sir, but—”

  “You’re too quick with a ‘but,’ lad,” Jenkin chortled. “The chief reason I rescued you from a death by boredom was entirely selfish: I can’t ride a mile unless I have someone to laugh at my witticisms.”

  Any further talk was forestalled as they clattered across the planking of Scaddings Bridge, which spanned the frozen curve of the Don River. To their right they could see on the flats below the snow-softened outline of Enoch Turner’s brewery and Gooderham’s distillery with its giant Dutch windmill, whose broad appendages were utterly still in the windless winter air. Beyond these familiar signposts of civilization, the great lake sprawled frozen and silent to a far horizon. A few rods past the bridge, they entered the bush, through which meandered the only highroad linking Kingston and Toronto.

  To his surprise, Marc found himself relaxing as the forest drew them into its infinite precincts. The irregular twenty-foot span of the road itself was now the only indication of a human presence. Invariably Marc had entered the bush—winter or summer—with nothing except a shudder and a prayer. But today the sun was shining as if it mattered. The rolling drifts and powdered mantle on bough and branch glistened and beckoned. It might have been England, except that here in the New World, he had begun to realize, bush and stream, insect and beast, lake and ice were the primary datum. All else was secondary. Once you accepted this irreversible fact, Marc thought, you could begin to feel the power and awful beauty of the wilderness.

  The Kingston Road, for example, was a fanciful name attached to what was a wagon-track winding through the pine, fir, birch, and maple of the great boreal forest. It provided easy going for the pair of soldiers, as the rutted mélange of mud and corduroy was still frozen stiff, and the recent flurries had been packed down by constant coach- and foot-traffic. And where the odd tree had been downed and blown across the right-of-way, diligent farmers had hauled it aside and cleared away any accumulated drifts. With no wind and not a cloud anywhere in the blue vault above, they expected to travel the sixty miles or so to Cobourg easily. There they could seek out a welcoming hearth and a feather bed. And should their horses flag, they could stop for luncheon and a rest at the hamlet of Perry’s Corners. As Marc well knew, much land had been cleared in Northumberland County around Cobourg, and the quartermaster would be planning to visit the many farms there to make arrangements for the purchase of hogs and grain. The actual deliveries would be made later in the fall when the harvest was in and the sucklings fattened.

  They rode a little ways along the track before they rounded a bend and the road behind them vanished. The quartermaster took the pipe out of his mouth and picked up the conversation. “I knew your uncle Frederick, as it happens. I’ve known him for most of my adult life.”

  Frederick Edwards was the brother of Marc’s adoptive father, Jabez Edwards.

  “Ah, I see,” Marc said with a rush of feeling he could not quite control. “You and Uncle Frederick fought together, then?”

  “We did indeed,” Jenkin said, knocking the ashes out of his pipe against the pommel of his saddle. He sat back, loosened his grip on the reins, and let the bay find its own trotting pace.

  “Where did you meet?”

  “At Sandhurst. We were both striplings, really, not yet twenty, but puffed up with the arrogance of youth and spoiling for a chance to unseat General Bonaparte.”

  “You didn’t have to wait long,” Marc said with a meaningful sigh. “Those were momentous days for an army officer.”

  “Don’t get me started on that story. Once I get going in that direction, only a cannonball can stop me.”

  After an hour’s stop at the inn of Perry’s Corners to feed, water, and rest the horses and to refresh themselves with what the quartermaster called a “traveller’s toddy,” the duo set out again. For a long while neither spoke. Jenkin returned to the pleasures of his pipe, and Marc let the vast silence of woods and sky settle serenely where it wished.

  “Lieutenant Fred Edwards, your uncle Frederick, and I fought side by side for eight years in Spain,” Jenkin said, as if their earlier exchange had not been interrupted. “We crossed the Pyrenees and walked all the way across France to the gates of Paris. We helped bring the Corsican bastard to his knees.”

  “It was Uncle Frederick’s stories that encouraged me to withdraw from the Inns of Court, give up the law, and join the army,” Marc said. “It never occurred to me then that Britain might not have any more wars to fight or tyrants to depose.”

  “There will always be wars somewhere, lad. Of that you can be sure. And I’m not certain one should wish too hard to have them visit us again. Your uncle Fred may have left a few of the less glorious particulars out of his fireside tales.”

  “It’s true, I must admit, sir, that I did wish for some modest insurrection to break out when I first arrived here, with just enough skirmishing for me to prove myself to myself and to my country.”

  “From what I hear at the garrison, you’ve gone some ways in that direction already.”

  Marc made no reply to the compliment. After a while he asked, “Did you know Uncle Jabez?”

  “We met, yes. He spoke of you as his son.”

  Marc smiled. “I call him uncle, to everyone’s confusion, because that is the term of endearment I used for him before he adopted me when I was five.”

  “I know. I met your real parents once. Fine people they were.”

  “Thank you, sir. I myself have only the vaguest recollection of them, a few memories of my father as he took me about the estate, and of course my mother knitting in front of a huge stone hearth. But the feeling of once having been loved and cared for has never left me.”

  “You were the only child that Thomas and Margaret Evans ever had.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Cholera is a terrible form of the plague,” Marc said, alluding to the disease that had felled his parents within days during the summer of 1815. But he was thinking now of young Aaron McCrae, Beth’s brother, struck down by typhoid fever, yet another of the recurring pestilences sent by God, it was said, to keep His people humble and in their proper place.

  “Did you meet me, then?” Marc asked, that odd possibility having just occurred to him.

  Jenkin laughed and said, “My word, no. You were not yet born. I came down to the estate with your uncle Fred sometime before ought-six, it must have been, because it was in September of that year that we were ordered to Devon to defend our sovereign soil against invasion by the French. From that day until we reached Paris in 1814, we were soldiers and little else.”

  “You didn’t fight at Waterloo with Uncle Frederick?”

  “No. That was the only battle we didn’t stand side by side. I was wounded near Paris, nothing serious—until gangrene threatened to set in. The surgeons cut out half of my left buttock, and I was ordered home, standing at attention all the way!”

  “But you remained in the army?”

  “By then it was the only life I knew. I was thirty-some years old and looked fifty. But I took up a less hazardous line of duty, thanks to Sir John Colborne, as quartermaster of the 24th, a post I’ve occupied with some satisfaction now for over t
wenty years, at home and abroad.” And here he rubbed a gloved hand across his ample paunch.

  “I think it was about ought-five when Uncle Jabez gave up his law practice in London and returned to manage the estate his father had left him.”

  “And you were not yet a gleam in your father’s eye.”

  “So it was likely that summer that you came down to Kent with Uncle Frederick.”

  “Most likely. What I do remember clearly is that we were treated like royalty by Jabez. I think he missed the bachelor parties and goings-on in London, and we were gay company, as I recall. Your neighbour, Sir Haughty Trelawney, condescended to invite us to a county fête where Fred and I got regally pissed and made inappropriate advances towards a pair of ageing debutantes.”

  “I’ve always suspected Uncle Frederick liked the ladies.”

  “They weren’t all ladies,” Jenkin roared. Then, in a more serious tone, he added, “But don’t get me wrong, lad. Once Captain Edwards met Delores that year in Paris, he never looked twice at another woman.”

  “Which is why he’s stayed in France all these years.”

  “Indeed.”

  “He came over for wonderful extended visits about every second year. But I’ve never met my cousins, nor my aunt Delores.”

  “Nor your other aunt, of course,” Jenkin said casually, then stopped abruptly.

  Marc’s horse, an all-purpose mare borrowed from the garrison stables, stumbled on a rut and lurched against the quartermaster’s gelding before righting herself. Marc reached out and put a hand momentarily on Jenkin’s pack. “It’s all right, sir. I know about Uncle Jabez’s younger sister.”

  Marc was relieved to see the smile return to Jenkin’s face, where it was a near-permanent feature. Whatever horrors lay locked behind it—and there must have been many during his service in the long, mad Peninsular War—they did nothing to diminish its affable glow.