Turncoat Read online

  “Who the hell’re you!” Hislop shouted querulously. He started forward.

  Marc continued on towards him. Hislop stalled, uncertain of his ground. His glazed eye had caught the tufted shako and flash of scarlet at the open throat of the military greatcoat. Hislop himself was clad only in overalls, boots, and a bulky sweater, which struggled to envelop a low-slung belly that seemed at odds with his otherwise muscular and work-hardened body. He wore no cap, and the brindled mop of his hair was littered with straw, and worse.

  Marc shot out his hand. “I am Ensign Edwards,” he said, “on assignment from the quartermaster at York. We’re looking to buy surplus grain or pork for the army, as soon as possible.”

  “Are ya, now? You don’t look like no quartermaster to me,” Hislop growled. “And what’ve ya been foragin’ at in my house, eh?”

  “Your good wife directed me out here to you,” Marc lied, with an ease he was growing accustomed to.

  “Good wife, my arse,” Hislop said, and Marc could see now that he had been drinking—a lot—and that he had become suddenly aware that this uniformed stranger had noticed it. He grinned broadly, exposing three yellowed stumps of teeth, and winked. “You’ll know all about it when you’re married.”

  “I understand from Mrs. Hislop that you’ve had a bad year and that I’m not likely to find what I’m looking for.”

  “She told ya that, did she, now? Weren’t that just splendid of her! Well, Mr. Ensign Edwards, you just come along with me and I’ll show you half a dozen of the finest hogs in the county.”

  Marc followed Hislop into a rickety, shed-like appendage to the barn, trying to keep upwind of him. Inside, the stench was overpowering: the result of a pigsty unmucked for weeks, mixed with a similar stink from the adjacent cattle stalls.

  “Takes a little gettin’ used to.” Hislop chuckled, peering sideways at Marc as the latter thrust a handkerchief over his mouth and nostrils. “Just plug yer nose and take a gander at them barrows. They’ll be as fat as my wife’s tits by Easter.” Marc could just discern the scrawny outlines of several young, castrated hogs, so begrimed it was only their occasional twitch or shudder that distinguished them from the mud and excrement they inhabited.

  “Good thing we don’t eat the outside of ’em,” Hislop said encouragingly.

  “Yes,” Marc said, and he stumbled back outside. A few yards away was the peculiar lean-to affair. “That where you keep your sick boar?” he said between gasps.

  Hislop squinted, coughed, gargled a mouthful of phlegm, and said, “That’s right. I been tendin’ to the poor bugger all afternoon.”

  “I was raised on a farm, believe it or not,” Marc said. “My uncle worked wonders with sick animals. I’d be glad to have a look at him for you.”

  Hislop’s eyes widened as far as his alcoholic haze would permit. “That’s mighty considerate of you, sir, but it’s just a touch of colic.” He had Marc by the elbow and was ushering him towards his horse. “You be sure to let me know about them barrows of mine. I’ll take any price that’s fair, especially if you’re payin’ cash this round. We don’t see much minted money in these parts. I can give ya the names of some other fellas in the township—”

  “Quartermaster Jenkin will be in touch with you next month, provided those hogs are healthy … and clean as a babe in its bath,” Marc said, mounting his horse. Then, without a nod or farewell, he rode straight out to the sideroad.

  At first he headed south towards the highway, but when he came to a path that wandered west through the bush below the Hislop place, he urged his horse onto it. He followed it slowly in a wide arc until he was at the rear of the farm, where he had a sheltered view of the lean-to and the barn behind it. He was just in time.

  Glancing around every few seconds, Hislop was skulking his way towards the lean-to. He staggered around to the near side of it, where a rickety door or hatch had been propped up to block the low entranceway. He stood still, as if listening intently. From inside the lean-to came a mewling sound, most unpig-like in its keening persistence. Seemingly satisfied, Hislop jerked the hatch away and flung it aside.

  “Stop yer whinin’! Ya want Bella out here with the snips?”

  The keening increased, broken finally by a series of hiccoughing sobs.

  “Get yer skinny arse outta there, the fun’s over.”

  A moment later a woman’s head pushed its way out of the murky interior: first a tangle of red curls, then a pale face.

  “Outta there, ya little hooer,” Hislop barked. He reached down to grasp the girl—for she was only that—by one thin wrist and heaved her up and out into the nearest drift. She landed on both buttocks, her equally thin legs splayed and one oversized boot ripped off. She was clothed only in a flannel nightgown and a man’s sweater that she had not succeeded in getting over her head in time.

  “I want my shillin’,” she said with a perfunctory whine.

  “You almost cost me twenty dollars—if I’d’ve missed that soldier, out here with the likes of you.”

  “I’ll holler my head off—”

  But she didn’t. Hislop kicked her in the stomach, knocking the wind and any resistance out of her. She let out a gasp, curled up into a ball of bent limbs, and started to whimper.

  Marc was just about to spur his horse forward when the girl leapt up and turned to flee. Hislop whirled around and snatched at her nightgown, and as she wrenched herself away from him, the entire gown with the sweater came off in his hand. Hislop’s chin dropped in amazement. The girl saw her chance and sprinted towards the sideroad, stark naked but for one blackened boot that thumped into the snow like a club foot.

  Marc realized immediately that she would come out onto the sideroad only a few yards from where the path he had taken met it, so he headed at full gallop back through the bush. As he charged out onto the road, the girl was just coming through the trees. Unexpectedly she turned north and, still bounding like a spooked doe, oblivious of her nakedness or the freezing air around her, she sped towards the end of the road. Marc caught up with her just as she veered back into the bush. Leaning down, holding the reins slack in one hand and guiding the horse with his knees, Marc grasped the girl under her arms at the apex of one of her leaps and swept her up in front of him onto the horse’s withers. She let out a surprisingly loud shriek and tried to strike him.

  “I’m not Hislop!” he cried. “I’ve come to help you.” The horse kept on going along a faint trail through the bush. The girl’s struggles eased—in relief or exhaustion. Marc brought the horse to a halt and dismounted.

  “I’m going to take you down from here and wrap you up before you freeze to death,” he said. “Please don’t scream. There’s no need. I’m not going to hurt you.” She said nothing. Her body went limp in his arms.

  He drew her gently down and, holding her under the arms—his gloved hand crushing one of her small, stiff-nippled breasts—he tugged a blanket out of his saddle-roll and pulled it about her, twice. Tiny shudders racked her wasted body, no more than a hundred pounds in all. Her lips had turned a ghastly purple, her teeth chattered, and her eyelids blinked frantically. She’s dying, Marc thought. He’d seen death like this up close, not on any battlefield, but in the alleys of central London where, every morning as he walked from his rooms to the offices of Jardin and Musgrove, he passed the casualties of lust and other hungers: prostitutes with the rags of their trade falling off their ruined flesh, their emaciated faces peering up at anyone foolish enough to bend down to them and venting a final curse or death’s-head plea as their eyelids fluttered and closed.

  He opened his greatcoat and crushed her body in against his own warmth, cocooning her, willing her to survive. Foolishly he kissed the top of her head, pushing his nose into the thick, reddish curls, as if the least gesture of affection might astonish and resuscitate. Gradually the shuddering diminished, her cheeks went suddenly rosy, her eyes swelled with tears, and a pink sliver of tongue slipped out to lick her upper lip. Then she snuggled farther into th
e hug that held her.

  The girl sighed, closed her eyes, opened them again, and said in a low, sweet, Sunday-school voice: “You gonna poke me?”

  HER NAME WAS AGNES PRINGLE, AND they were on a woodsy trail that, as long as she directed Marc, would lead them to her home. With the blanket and greatcoat still wrapped around her and Marc’s extra mitts on her feet, she insisted she was well enough to ride up behind him, holding tight with both arms around his chest. The horse moved at a sedate pace.

  “You don’t mean to say your mother’s Annie Pringle?” Marc said.

  “That’s right, Mad Annie,” Agnes said cheerfully.

  Erastus Hatch, as promised, had explained to Marc who Mad Annie was, and had sternly warned him to steer clear of her squattery out on the marshland north of the surveyed concessions. The only route into it lay in a maze of trails, the miller had said (not without some admiration), most of which were booby-trapped and life-threatening to the unescorted. What lay at the heart of this mischievously mined moat was the subject of much public speculation and sustained moral outrage. “Just Mad Annie, a still, and her brood of ne’er-do-wells,” Hatch had suggested, “but you could get maimed trying to prove it!”

  “You can just let me off at the end of this here path,” Agnes said. “I know my way up to the house.”

  “I could make a lot of trouble for Hislop,” Marc said.

  “And he’ll only make more for us.”

  “But he assaulted you.”

  Agnes giggled. “He did a lot more’n that to me.”

  “He owes you a dress,” Marc said.

  “We take care of our own,” Agnes said.

  Hatch had warned him also about the infamous Pringle boys, Mad Annie’s obstreperous male offspring, and Marc decided not to be nonchalant about this errand of mercy. A military uniform out here could easily be misconstrued.

  “Nobody’ll hurt ya,” Agnes said, sliding off the horse. She removed the greatcoat with a slow, purring gesture, rubbed it sensuously against her cheek, then held it up to him. She watched him put it on, then said, “What about yer mitts and this here blanket?” She started to draw the edges of the cloth away from her chest in a sad parody of seduction.

  “You’ll need them if you aren’t to freeze,” Marc said. “You sure you can make it home?” He was gazing dubiously through a screen of cedars at an uneven open area that was likely a swamp come spring, dotted here and there with scrub bushes, the remnants of cattails, and stunted evergreens. Several hundred yards farther, on the distant verge of the clearing, he spotted several shacks and tumbledown outbuildings. No welcoming smoke rose from any one of them.

  Agnes was in the midst of nodding “yes” to Marc’s inquiry when her eyes widened and her pale cheeks went paler. “Jesus,” she hissed. Then she wailed, “It’s Ma!”

  From the cover of a nearby cedar stepped the woman known throughout the district as Mad Annie. Marc’s initial instinct was to laugh, for she was at first glance not a prepossessing sight. From Hatch’s descriptions and cautions, given in detail on their ride to Buffaloville, Marc had expected her to be a female of formidable bulk. But before him now, with her feet planted apart as if she were on snowshoes, stood a tiny woman clothed in a loose sweater, a lumberjack’s tuque, woollen trousers fastened at the waist and ankle with binder-twine, and a pair of mismatched boots. Her face was misshapen, like a badly aged apple doll. But it was her eyes that caught Marc’s attention. They were large and round—intelligent, belligerent, and curiously vulnerable. At this moment, they blazed with suspicion and imminent aggression. Marc could see nothing lunatic in them.

  “Put the girl down,” she commanded.

  “She is down,” Marc said firmly. “I’ve brought her home—to her mother, I presume.”

  “Who I am ain’t your business, mister,” she said, assessing the uniformed rider and his horse with a single cold, bright glance. Then she turned to the girl, as if Marc were now of peripheral interest at best. Agnes wrapped the grey blanket twice around her and shuffled across to her mother.

  “What’d the bastard do with yer dress?” Mad Annie said.

  Agnes ducked away from a blow that did not come. “Tore it offa me.”

  Mad Annie smiled with her lips only (she appeared to be toothless). “They do get excited at the sight of tits and a fur-piece, don’t they?” When Agnes peeked up to acknowledge her mother’s remark, Mad Annie cuffed her smartly on the back of the head.

  Marc started forward in the saddle. He was still trying to square the image of this crone with Hatch’s colourful account of a matriarch who had “whelped” seventeen times, including two sets of twins, only the first three of her litter being traceable to Mr. Pringle, who had long since vamoosed or died happily by his own hand. Mad Annie caught Marc’s movement out of the corner of one eye and wheeled about.

  “You stay right where you are, mister. You’re trespassin’ on Pringle property.”

  “I suggest you leave the girl be,” Marc said. “She’s been kicked and abused enough for one day.”

  “That so?” Without looking, she reached out and grabbed the blanket covering Agnes’s shoulder and hauled the girl before her. Agnes collapsed submissively at her feet. As she did so, the fabric parted, exposing her breasts, like two puffed bruises. “He pay you?” Mad Annie barked, glaring back up at Marc.

  “It was Hislop, it was Hislop,” Agnes whimpered. “He did me every way all afternoon in that … that pigsty, and then he rips my dress and throws me out.”

  Mad Annie ignored her daughter. “You poke her, you pay,” she said to Marc.

  “Madam, I find you a repulsive and unnatural human being. I recommend you take your daughter, who has suffered an outrage and nearly lost her life, and care for her with any kindness you can muster as her mother and protector. Otherwise I shall have the law on you.”

  Agnes was shaking her head at him.

  “And I recommend you turn that ball-less bag-o’-bones around and hightail it offa my land before I do somethin’ beneficial, like blow yer pecker off.” From under her sweater, or through one of its several vents, she had drawn a pistol, and she was aiming it at the ensign.

  Marc had never before stared into the business end of a deadly weapon aimed at him. His gut went queasy, but the disciplined training he had endured for over a year at Sandhurst held him in good stead. He blinked, but did not flinch.

  Agnes took advantage of the momentary standoff by scampering up and away, clutching the army blanket to her throat.

  With steely calm, Marc turned his horse and trotted deliberately back down the trail, his broad shoulders providing the perfect target for a bullet. At the first bend he stopped and turned to look back. Mad Annie had caught up to Agnes but was not berating the girl. Instead, the two women had joined hands and were making a rapid, zigzagging dash across the frozen marsh towards home.

  Avoiding their own booby-traps, Marc thought. Only now did it occur to him that the pistol appeared to have been neither primed nor loaded. He rode slowly, pondering what further assault might yet be made upon the dignity of the Crown’s commissioned investigator. More than that, he was shaken by the raw realities of existence in this savage hinterland. The law and civilized society seemed very far away.

  NINE

  I know, I know,” Hatch said, “back home the likes of Mad Annie and Orville Hislop would be thrown into Bedlam or packed off to Van Dieman’s Land on the first boat.”

  “Hanged at Newgate more likely,” Marc said, but in truth he was more disappointed than outraged. Any anger remaining was now directed at himself and his failure to glean any new information.

  “The way many folks around here look at it, they really aren’t doing much harm to anybody but themselves. Annie’s gaggle do manufacture bad hooch from time to time, and once in a while the sheriff catches one of her boys stealing a chicken and they spend a month or two in jail. And those Yankee farmers are just an independent lot by birth and upbringing. You never really stood much of a ch
ance of getting anything useful out of them. Still, I think you did the right thing by carrying on to see Farley and McMaster. Those farmers have been here since before the war and are as tame as brood hens, but they’ll soon report that you seemed to be what you claim to be. It’ll keep Hislop and Wicks wondering and set you up for the Stebbins place tomorrow. You’ll find them quite a different kettle of fish.”

  Marc and Hatch were seated before a lively fire mulling over the day’s events and taking stock of the investigation. Erastus was being as encouraging as his good nature and the facts would allow. They were alone in the house.

  After a fine roast-chicken supper, parts of which proceeding seemed to be coldly amusing to Winnifred Hatch, Thomas Goodall had hitched the Percheron team to the family cutter and joined Winnifred and Mary Huggan in the forty-minute drive to Cobourg, where a charity meeting of the Ladies’ Aid had attracted the two women and an evening at the pub their driver. According to Mary, Beth Smallman had been invited to join them but had politely declined. Winnifred had dressed for the occasion in a carmine-coloured dress with ruched sleeves and jutting shoulders, of a material that swished like shale ice when she moved.

  “It’s hard to imagine any of these expatriate American farmers forming so strong a personal hatred towards Joshua that they’d want to see him dead,” Marc said. “They all knew who he was, and showed no hesitation in admitting it. Their anger is focused on the government and the leaders of the Family Compact. You’d have to believe that they chose Joshua merely as a scapegoat for the Legislative councillors or the Toronto bankers. If so, then why choose a man who himself had begun appearing at Reform rallies and listening respectfully to what was being said?”

  “I agree, though I also think we’re looking for one man with some kind of personal grudge. Stebbins is a known hothead and a very secretive chap. He seems to do an awful lot of hunting for a fellow whose smokehouse is usually empty.”