River City (62 page)
When the television above the bar showed that Pierre Elliott Trudeau had won the election handily, he drank to the prime minister as well. He liked the way the guy stood up to the mob, even if he was a vague and unlikely suspect in Touton’s big case. Finally, he called Anik, to see what she thought of the results and to ask if she felt like coming out for a nightcap.
“I don’t date cops,” she reminded him.
“I’m off duty.”
“Yeah, like that makes a difference to you.”
“Besides, it’s not a date. It’s just a drink.”
The ensuing silence, he thought, sounded hopeful.
“What’s that bit about you and animals?” she asked him.
“I’m something of an expert on horses,” he admitted. He didn’t usually speak of himself in such glowing terms, but in this instance he had a lot to overcome. Cinq-Mars waited, expectant, almost forgetting to breathe.
“Are you going to admit that you have a crush on me or not?” Obviously, she was determined not to make this easy on him.
“I admit it. Are you coming out or not?” “Don’t get huffy. Just tell me where you are.”
He didn’t think he’d been getting huffy, but he told her where he was.
M
OTHER MCMULLEN ASKED TO BE LET OFF, TO STEP FREE FROM
the carriage a fair distance before her return to the Grey Nuns Convent. She needed time for reflection. Pale, stricken Sister Sainte-Croix was instructed to ride on ahead without the mother superior and not to speak of the day’s events to a living soul. She acquiesced, wiping a tear from the corner of one eye, a sniffle from a nostril. For both women, their knowledge was nigh unbearable. Their souls felt rent. What they had witnessed that morning had left both too staggered to properly think, let alone speak of the disaster, and holding the reins in her hands felt like a great weight to Sister Sainte-Croix. And yet, upon Mother McMullen’s shoulders lay the burdens of responsibility and decision, and while the younger nun wished that she could do more to assist her mentor, she knew to grant her this solitary hour. A stroll through the streets of Montreal on one’s own did not constitute proper form for a mother superior. Nevertheless, Sister Sainte-Croix pulled on the reins and quietly called the white mare with the black rump patches to a halt.
The older woman stepped down from the carriage and commenced her walk.
All her life, she had been a student of war. Until that very morning, she had harboured a secret belief that her life would someday be defined by war, that actions undertaken in the grip of battle would mark the measure of her devotion to her Lord and so mark the intersection of her life with its true destiny. Now she knew that she had been prepared for a different battle, one no less valiant, and perhaps more gruesome. She needed time to steel her resolve,
to thank her God and to prepare herself to ask others to do as she would, to humbly sacrifice their lives.
Mother McMullen had left herself a hill to climb, and did so with supreme sadness. Still, the act of walking and climbing touched her as a pleasure, one that she was enjoying for the last time, perhaps, as she stepped off the main road onto a footpath. Often she had wandered these woods as a young nun in the company of others, never alone, and always she had adored the carefree splendour of the trees, the dapple of sunlight underfoot. As her sadness weighed upon her, she fell to her knees, prayed, wept for minutes and recovered by giving thanks for the joys of her life in the service of her Lord.
She gave thanks also for this final act of devotion placed before her.
Struggling to her feet again, she walked on, pausing to touch the blossoms of the June wildflowers, to feel speckled sunlight upon her face.
Her visage was lean, longish and pale, the eyes small and seemingly sunken beneath the impressive arch of her brow. Mother McMullen readily smiled. Anyone in her company soon felt at ease, despite her considerable authority. She rose to the disciplinary responsibilities of her position when necessary, but generally her nuns endeavoured to please her, to reward her good graces with humility and friendship. None who knew her were accustomed to the heaviness of her current mood, and they would perhaps be taken aback by the fall of skin around her mouth and the stricken countenance behind her eyes.
Death loomed.
She had studied war. For her, the astonishing movements of peoples into and out of battle portrayed the epic journey of the earth, for it seemed that all the building and planning and commerce of peaceable times would be transformed by the foolishness and accident, terror and spite, of battle, and as often by the absurdity of the Acts and Treaties that followed military conflagrations. Lord Shelburne, for example. Few Canadians were aware of his name, yet he had committed a grave travesty against the whole of the nation. To Mother McMullen’s mind, he had committed one of the foremost deceits in history—in all the world’s sordid panoply of political deceptions.
After the American War of Independence, Quebec existed under the governance of the Quebec Act, which had expanded the western border to include
the lands of the Ohio, the southern shores of the Great Lakes, onward to the Mississippi and southward across the Great Plains. Indeed, the vast expanse of the continent was, essentially, Quebec. After England had ceded the thirteen colonies in its disastrous war, one Lord Shelburne of London drew a line that cut the continent in half, into a north and a south, for no reason other than colossal stupidity, and through a naïve belief that being nice to the Americans would cause the Americans to be nice, in return, to the British. He bequeathed to the thirteen colonies the southern half of North America, land the revolutionaries had never requested. The gift of half a continent was presented to the recent enemy on a whim. Perhaps he feared, when examining the map, that Providence behooved him to restrict the progress of the French language overseas. In any case, the British were obliged to man the western garrisons of Michigan, and down the Mississippi, and further west for thirteen years before the Americans made the trek out from their Atlantic seaboard cubbyholes to visit the land that had been delivered to them with the stroke of pen—a vast commonwealth they had neither earned, nor cared for, nor admired, nor visited, nor desired.
How that edict, the Treaty of 1783, had cost the merchants of Montreal. Their consternation had been immense. Why be loyal to England when England beheaded her devout subjects and cut off their limbs? A preponderance of merchants were English themselves, having moved up from the thirteen colonies to live among the French as a gesture of fidelity to the king. Yet these English loyalists had been equally betrayed, robbed blind by the bewildering buffoonery of Lord Shelburne, a man who had never set foot across the sea. Trading routes traditional to Montreal had been sliced in half. The northern part of the continent had been deprived of its well-earned opportunity to become the dominant of the two fledgling nations, due solely to a civil servant’s idiocy. Why fight on the battlefield for anything, when fate could be determined by such louts?
Yet the merchants of Montreal, obliged to develop alternative, imaginative forms of commerce, persevered, egged on by the last fraternity of British merchant adventurers, and the city grew despite its ungainly dependence upon England. Partnerships were developed that exploited both the French ability to
trade through the Indian lands and the English acumen for capital investment. The two languages intermingled and intermarried, and the alliances forged a new prosperity despite the restrictions on territory.
Then came war.
What a colossal blunder.
Mother McMullen still became infuriated whenever the American attitude to the War of 1812 reared up. Visiting friars, priests or nuns from the United States might inadvertently extend their condolences to the Canadas for having lost the war, and Mother McMullen would surge onto a verbal rampage, reciting records and illuminating battle scenes. Her audience would eventually disband, amused, for most of these engagements had been staged to playfully provoke her ire and watch her spark. Every so often, she’d catch on, discover for herself that the arguments had been an entertainment enjoyed at her expense. She’d laugh along. Only to continue her tirade with renewed vigour.
President Madison had declared his war, yet unbeknownst to him he was about to receive faint support from New Englanders, and New England formed the adjacent border with what were now being called Upper and Lower Canada. After the American War of Independence, fifty thousand loyalists had left the United States to re-establish themselves in the Canadas, most of these in the newly settled lands of New Brunswick, while a majority of the remainder chose to dwell along the Niagara Peninsula and the St. Lawrence River, creating the beginnings of Upper Canada.
“Madison,” Mother McMullen recited, “miscalculated.”
“How so, Mother?” a visiting Jesuit from the College of St. John in Fordham, New York, one Father O’Malley, inquired, for he held to the prevailing American view of the war, which dismissed the mother superior’s account.
“His own people did not want to fight. The first incursion into Quebec occurred in 1812, and the rascal Americans turned tail without a shot being fired.”
“Turned tail?” the visiting theologian inquired. This did not align with his own recollection, although he had to concede that the Americans had advanced, and then retreated, and he had never heard mention of casualties.
“Then in 1813, the American army advanced to Châteauguay, where it was crushed.”
“Crushed.” Again, his own interpretation of history had not allowed for a crushing American defeat.
“Madison was informed that the British garrisons were absent, which proved true. What he did not count upon was the response of the people. Three thousand volunteers joined the militia from Montreal alone, another three thousand from Quebec. The Eastern Townships sent enough men to fill six battalions, and that knowledge was enough to dampen the enthusiasm of your General Dearborn’s advance. His men grew disinterested—and, Father, turned tail.”
“I see.”
“Then our General Brock defeated the American invasion at Detroit. Your General Hull and his men were paraded through the streets of Montreal. I was on hand to witness the event—they were marched right past our gates. Right under my nose, Father. This is no invention.”
“Surely, from your perspective, Mother, it had not all been good news.”
“To learn that York had been burned by the Yanks—no, that was not good news. And to learn that the people were being harried up and down the St. Lawrence Valley in Upper Canada proved worrisome. I can tell you, Father, that I and a number of the novitiates visited our Montreal militia while they were waiting for the American advance.”
Her eyes gleamed when she revisited the history she so adored, even when she had to relate bad news.
“What did you find, Mother?” He puffed upon his pipe.
“A high morale, Father. I doubt that any army—and I have carefully studied the progress of armies, Father, it is a hobby of mine—has moved towards its destiny in such splendour. I witnessed with my own eyes the long lines of carts carrying the best wines, along with venison, turkey and ham. Cheeses from the countryside in fine array, butters and syrups. Fruit and vegetables, fresh and in colour. The ordinary private, Father, sat down to a table more glorious than did the governor himself. The king of England, I daresay, eats only as well, never better.”
This was hard to believe, but she would speak further of the glories of the militia’s mess, and the father from Fordham conceded that this had apparently
been a military service of a higher order than the norm. “But could they fight, Mother, so well fed as that?”
“Fight they did. Let me tell you about the Voltigeurs Canadiens. They were regulars, raised for wartime home service, and among their numbers were eight hundred French, some English and two hundred Indians. They went against General Hampton’s five thousand men and ten cannon. Fifteen miles from Montreal the battled commenced, and there, on the plains of Châteauguay, the future of our city would be decided. The Canadians, though, had only about three hundred of their militia in the field, against that formidable force of five thousand.”
“And ten cannon,” the priest interjected.
“And ten cannon. One could easily predict our doom.”
“The Canadians held?” Father O’Malley of Fordham assumed.
“Held?” Mother McMullen admonished him.
“Held?
Again and again, the Americans returned to the attack, their five thousand against our three hundred, and the battle terminated only with the complete disgrace and defeat of the Americans. They fell back across their border, a testament to Madison’s sad folly.”
“But, Mother McMullen, surely you are aware of the Canadian attack on Plattsburgh? Or do you call that a victory also?”
“British attack, Father.
British.
You Americans sank a British supply ship, so the British elected to pull back. The Americans had been defeated at Châ-teauguay, defeated also at Crysler’s Farm near Cornwall, defeated by Brock at Detroit. You had been defeated. Consequently, the British considered that perhaps the Americans were now vulnerable to invasion, and foolishly they set forth. Losing a ship, they reconsidered their strategy and retreated to Montreal. Somehow, I don’t know how, Americans I meet seem to turn that one rather unimportant event into victory in the overall war. Madison declared war, Madison attacked, the American invasion was repelled, your large army was crushed. How can that possibly be considered an American victory?”
She had a point, and Father O’Malley sucked on his pipe. He might have to alter a portion of his teaching at Fordham to accommodate her viewpoint.
“And yet,” Mother McMullen proposed.
“And yet?” the priest asked.
“It would happen again.” She sighed. “The war was won by the Canadians, for history shows that when we truly want to win, we win. Nonetheless, instead of giving the victor the spoils—instead of offering us, I don’t know, Vermont, let’s say—a dimwit in England gave the Americans the state of Maine. Someone in England believed the American claim, that the sinking of a supply ship meant victory in the war. Balderdash! If this is how we are rewarded for winning a war—being stripped of our territory once again—imagine what might have occurred had we lost. On the other hand, I know a merchant who quipped that he hoped we’d be defeated one day, and when I expressed my surprise, and, I might say, my outrage, he laughed, and declared that he wanted to keep our homeland intact. ‘Victory,’ he claimed, ‘has been far too costly.’”
