The Bishop's Pawn Read online

  “Is this the Dougherty residence, ma’am?” said one of the two, though both of them were eyeing her curiously.

  “It is. Who would you like to see?”

  “Doubtful Dick, if he’s at home.”

  Celia smiled again. “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Ah . . . two old . . . associates – from New York.”

  The smile vanished from her face.

  ***

  The ringing of these same bells was duly noted in the cluttered and shuttered workshop at the rear of Bartholomew Burchill: Silversmith on King Street at Jarvis, a mere block away from St. James. When it stopped, Matthew Burchill said “Eleven o’clock” under his breath, like an amen at the end of a prayer. His father would now be safely inside at the family pew. With the bishop-in-waiting about to deliver the gospel in the flesh, nothing short of a fire would drive him or any other parishioner out into the sunshine. Matthew had one hour. They would have one hour – together. It wasn’t much, but when you had a father with the passions and prejudices of Bartholomew Burchill, it was as much as one could hope for. All of which made Matthew adore Celia Langford even more, if that were possible.

  He stood back and examined the silver teapot he had spent part of the night repairing so that he could slip away to their morning assignation. Father expected it would occupy the hour he was away and unable to supervise his son, idle hands being the Devil’s workshop. The mend was perfect. In spite of his father’s severe appraisal, Matthew knew that he was talented and that, given a chance, he could go into business for himself and make a go of it. Celia said that she had money, an inheritance from her dead father (she fatherless and he motherless) and that someday, when she finished school and they could think about marrying, they could open their own silversmith shop. Alas, what Celia, in her lovable naiveté, did not understand was that his father would never relent, would never change his mind about her guardian, Dick Dougherty – pervert, Anti-Christ, Yankee.

  “He’s not anything like they say,” she had told Matthew earnestly. “I’ve heard all the stories, especially since I’ve been attending Miss Tyson’s Academy. They’re all lies!” Brave, hopelessly infatuated, foolish perhaps, he had asked to be introduced to the notorious barrister and recluse, who after all had done the state some service in his brilliant defense of Billy McNair in January. “Not yet,” Celia had replied. “It’s not that he wouldn’t agree to see you. It’s just that I haven’t yet got up the courage to tell him about our love. So much has happened to us – all of it good – since the trial, and as soon as this awful business with the Law Society is over, I think he’ll be ready to absorb the shock of my having fallen in love with the son of a man who has libelled him in print.”

  Just the week before, a letter had appeared in the Upper Canada Gazette, signed by Bartholomew Burchill, in which the scourge of Yankeeism and its malevolent consequences upon the province – upon its politics and its morals – were exposed, detailed, and then pitilessly damned. Although the outraged silversmith for the most part kept to generalities – preferring to tar every interloper, émigré and republican blackguard with a single brush – he did, towards the end, veer dangerously close to naming names. He could not, he averred, in good conscience conclude his exposé without especial reference to certain hellish abominations, so repellent that even the Holy Bible could not bring itself to put a label on them, and which were being committed under their very noses by a disbarred lawyer from a neighbouring state. That such a reprehensible creature should be allowed not only to carry on his unspeakable perversions in the godly city of Toronto but also to contemplate practising his own dubious profession in the province and prosper at its expense – well, no words could adequately describe the writer’s indignation (though the previous four hundred had come close to doing so).

  At their next secret rendezvous, Celia had assured her distraught suitor that her guardian had been irritated by the letter, but only because he felt it might prejudice his request to be admitted to the Bar. As a controversial trial lawyer in New York City who had routinely got acquitted accused murderers and wealthy embezzlers, he was used to adverse public reaction and character assassination. And before Matthew could dredge up the courage to ask the question that had to be asked, Celia – bless her – had said with amazing calm, “No, he did not do any of the terrible things he’s been accused of.” After an awkward pause, Matthew had said, “Or the things they say he did that got him kicked out of New York?” “None of them,” she’d replied, looking him straight in the eye. After another, longer pause, he said with his heart thudding in his chest, “How do you know for sure?” Hurt but undaunted, Celia said, “Because he was my father’s law partner and friend for all the years of my life. Brodie and I called him ‘uncle.’ And still do.” Then, miraculously, she leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Now we don’t have to discuss my guardian or your father any more.”

  Matthew removed his apron, washed his hands, combed his hair, pulled on a sweater, and slipped out the back door of the shop. He went along the service lane to Jarvis Street, checked to see that the roadway was clear of people who might recognize him, and headed north. Five minutes later found him treading past a silent foundry and on towards a small shed behind it. He gave the coded knock, and entered.

  Celia wasn’t there. The discarded cushions that they had found here and arranged for their comfort among the foundry’s detritus were still in place. No-one had been inside since their last meeting three days ago. Perhaps something had delayed her. With a sigh, he sat down to wait. He hated losing even a minute of their time together. It had been only a month since he had met her and they had known that they must meet again, despite the odds against them. Matthew’s father never let him leave the shop unsupervised except on occasion to deliver packages, of new or repaired pieces, to demanding customers. Even then, old Burchill knew how long it should take his son to get there and back. When Matthew pointed out that he was almost nineteen and needed a social life outside of church and guild meetings, he was sent back into the repair shop and given double his usual quota. However, one of his rare deliveries had been to Miss Tyson’s Academy, and it was Celia who had received him and asked him ever so politely to wait until the headmistress could come from her junior class to check the parcel. In the meantime, would the gentleman like a cup of tea?

  The knock came, jarring him out of his reverie. The door opened, and Celia came in. His heart leapt at the sight of her golden hair – wantonly free – her pale perfect skin, and her tiny figure dwarfed by the cloth coat she always wore. Then he spotted the worry in her blue, blue eyes, and his heart sank.

  “What’s happened?”

  She scooted down beside him. “I was just about to leave the house,” she said, out of breath, “when I heard someone at the front door. The servants don’t come on Sunday, Brodie went off to St. James, and Uncle was feeling poorly from his exertions at the legislature last night.”

  “Take your time,” Matthew said, alarmed and aroused by the pretty heavings of her chest beneath the coat.

  “So I had to answer it.”

  “And?”

  “There were two well-dressed gentlemen, lawyers, I’m sure, from back home. They looked vaguely familiar. They asked to see Uncle. I woke him up from his nap, and he said to show them in.”

  “Did he look worried?”

  Celia paused, thinking. “Not really. But then he’s a barrister. He made his living acting out the parts he had to play in court. So I’m not sure. I felt I ought to stay, even though I was desperate to see you.”

  “Dearest Celia,” Matthew stammered, uncertain of the protocol and niceties of lovemaking.

  “But he ordered me out of the house, quietly but firmly. He told me not to come back until noon.”

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about, is there?” Matthew said hopefully.

  Celia teetered against him, and let herself be consoled.

  FIVE

  The Reverend John Strachan �
� D.D., Rector of York County, Archdeacon responsible for the Established Church in Upper Canada, arch-Tory, and Defender of the Queen’s faith – was in full flight. His church (soon to be a cathedral?) was packed with the faithful, the near-faithful and the merely curious – a thousand strong, a quarter of the adult population of Toronto! The beleaguered verger, Reuben Epp, had had to damp down the fires that normally kept the hallowed space comfortably warm on a crisp March day, for the body-heat of enthusiasm and anticipation proved to be more than sufficient. The earlier parts of the service seemed to some onlookers to have been mysteriously hurried and perfunctory, almost as if the Lord Himself were urging them on to the main event. And when Archdeacon Strachan ascended to the pulpit, the silence was as deep as the instant of Communion itself.

  The homily delivered by the Rector of St. James could not have been described as a farewell address, but it was definitely a kind of summing up. He began with a well-known Biblical text from Matthew 7: 12-20, which begins with talk of false prophets and wolves in sheep’s clothing, and ends with “Wherefore by their fruits shall ye know them.” He then spoke with quiet pride about the wilderness of Upper Canada in 1801 when he himself had arrived from Scotland at the tender age of twenty to teach school. Convinced that education had to be imbued with the religious spirit, he had providentially decided to take ordination, and thenceforth to this day had endeavoured to spread the Word of God in combination with a love for learning. Religion and education were forever to be entwined, and his pupils at the Cornwall Academy and later at his school here in the capital had imbibed The Book of Common Prayer with their Aristotle. Nor had the rod been spared.

  But it was by the fruits of these pioneering efforts in schooling and churching that their worth had to be measured. And for examples of these, those seated before him need only look around them. Two graduates of this inspired system even now sat amongst them, had indeed served them as pastor and moral guide for many years. (All those who could see the vicars alluded to – David Chalmers and Quentin Hungerford – strained to catch any revealing glance they might make to such public acknowledgement, while everyone else attempted to assess the significance of Chalmers being mentioned first and with slightly more emphasis.)

  Others, Strachan continued, now occupied positions of power and awesome responsibility in the Executive and Legislative Councils, superintended the banks that fuelled the economy, and operated the honourable businesses that had blossomed everywhere in Upper Canada. And these were men of probity and humility, charged with noblesse oblige, comfortable with a Constitutional Act whose wise makers in 1791 had set out the abiding traits that would govern the province’s Heaven-blessed future. Chief of these had been the setting aside of the Clergy Reserves for the perpetual support of an Established, and Protestant, Church!

  Several murmurs and mutterings stalled the Rector’s rhetorical swoop at this point, but the intrepid pastor carried on.

  Like the plagues that had struck Egypt, he roared, the fruitfulness of this Heaven-blessed land had been insidiously and profanely corrupted. Profanely: because the province had prospered under its original charter, had pampered its adherents, had welcomed the poor and the outcast – who could be likened to the meek inheriting the good earth. Thus, there had been, and was now, no cause to poison the well! And insidious it was, too, because those dissenting did so in the guise of reason, in the seductive sophistry so beloved of Lucifer and Beelzebub. Clothed in the tempting phraseology of democracy, in the Siren song of republicanism, in the false promise of social levelling – a cabal of non-believers had insinuated the very field-and-fallow of this thriving domain. But it is by their fruits that ye shall know them, he iterated with a soft and bemused restraint, taking his audience by surprise and prepping them nicely for the denouement.

  What were the actions of these mountebanks and apostates, he demanded to know. Why, they had organized secret meetings and subversive societies, had publicly called for the dismantling of Her Majesty’s Established Church, had sweet-talked the Legislative Assembly into withholding supply, had sent delegations to London to undermine the royal authority, and, finally, had conspired with Yankee freebooters to overthrow the government in a coup d’état!

  More murmurs here, some of them of a dissenting tone. But they were drowned out as Pastor Strachan reached back for his full lamentative voice, and began to reel off the names of those whose “fruits” had belied their words, including Willie Mackenzie, John Rolph, Marshall Spring Bidwell – and, having got onto the American roster of villains, he tossed in the names of the half-dozen “patriots” whose invasion attempts had been foiled last year and who had been summarily hanged for their folly.

  Roused and re-roused to near exhaustion, the congregation braced itself for the fine flourish that invariably concluded a Strachan sermon and brought it elegantly full circle. But the jeremiad was not finished. Hand in glove with the political infestations from across the border had come moral decay and its handmaiden, atheism. Were not most of the Methodist circuit riders, with their devious catechisms, former Yankee peddlers, who spread their levelling nonsense along with their false doctrines? Had not the common schools, founded by Anglicans and supported by their efforts, fallen into the hands of Yankee schoolteachers preaching egalitarianism? And with democracy and godlessness, could moral collapse be far behind? Why, one had only to look at the example of an exiled Yankee lawyer living within blocks of this very pulpit, whose beguiling palaver and litigious shenanigans had given him a dubious prestige among the ignorant classes, while the deeds – the fruits, if you will – of his personal life were so vile and abominable, so ripe with unnatural voluptuousness, that all the fires of Hell could not purge them!

  The Reverend Strachan – bishop-surely-to-be – paused. Into the shocked silence, he spat with seething vehemence, “I say to all of that ilk: ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!’”

  ***

  Nestor Peck, Cobb’s favourite snitch, was beside himself. Here it was well past seven-thirty on a Monday morning, the sun having already risen into a cold, cloudless sky, and he had just reached the service lane that ran behind the shops on the south side of King Street between York and Bay. If others had got here before him, the pickings would be pitifully slim.

  Nestor was famished, in addition to being sore and hung over. He regretted now the impulse that had taken him, with four shillings in his pocket, to the bootlegger’s in Irishtown. The cheap, sweet wine had tasted good going down, but had made him forget, for a fatal moment, the ingrained caution that had kept him whole and productive as Constable Horatio Cobb’s principal snitch and the premier scrounger among the city’s lowlife. He must have joined the dicers – his memory of the night’s events was still hazy – for he had ended up penniless, coming home to his own vomit with the second-last tooth in his lower jaw hanging by its dead nerve. The moon had been down when he had crawled into his hovel on Brock Street behind the hatchery.

  Usually, whenever he had no money for food and drink, he got up before sunrise in order to be first on the scene in those service lanes where the garbage – especially from the weekend – was likely to be tasty and abundant. It was amazing what people tossed out, particularly the shopkeepers who lived on or above their premises. A perfectly wearable bowler hat, for example, with a bit of reblocking and dusting, had fetched him the four shillings he had just squandered. Unfortunately, he had had no information about criminal activity to sell to Cobb for over a week. Crime had either taken a holiday or become more close-mouthed.

  Nestor hurried past the jeweller’s – he was notorious miser – and stopped at the narrow alley between that shop and the grocer’s next to it. Old Southey usually cleaned house after the Saturday surge of business, ignoring the Sabbath and putting two drums of edible refuse out next to his side door – to be picked up by one of several garbage wagons that plied their trade hereabouts (most ordinary folk burned or buried their trash). Yes, the drums were there, and from their position, they appeared
to be untouched by greedier hands.

  The alley itself was in shadow, and Nestor could see his breath as he slipped soundlessly towards his prize. But something else caught his eye, a few yards beyond the drums and almost at a spot where the alley met King Street. It appeared to be a large, lumpy bundle, covered by a wool blanket or tarpaulin. Ever curious and opportunistic, Nestor scuttled past Southey’s garbage and headed for the more intriguing cache. As he came up to it, he stopped abruptly. In the half-light now he could see that whatever it was had been covered with a gentleman’s cloak, one that, if salvaged, would bring a year’s food and a warm place to eat it. But what lay under it? And who would be foolish enough to leave it here unattended?

  Caution now overtook curiosity. He checked the alley behind him and the tiny window high in the jeweller’s wall. Nothing stirred. No sound, human or otherwise, came from the street three yards away. Nestor knelt down and slowly lifted up one edge of the huge cloak. He spotted a boot. Christ! There was somebody under the cloak! Somebody very large. It was then that a beam of sunlight struck the west wall of the jeweller’s house and refracted into the alley, allowing Nestor to see the pool of blood still oozing from somewhere beneath the cloak. He felt himself trembling all over. He had to force himself to keep his eyes open, for something terrible had happened here, and he must decide whether he ought to run or stay. This bloodied creature could be alive, the victim of a vicious thief. The police would be clamouring for information, information they might pay for.

  But he couldn’t stop shaking. He was hungry and cold and afraid. He forced himself to stand up and examine the body more carefully in the quickly expanding light. My God! the cloak was full of jagged slits, bloody and gaping where a dagger had been plunged again and again. And Jesus, Jesus, the thing was still there, rammed to the hilt. And pinned to the cloak by its blade was a sheet of white paper, torn across the bottom. Nestor was no great reader, but the single word scrawled in scarlet on it was instantly recognizable: