Turncoat (17 page)

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 the 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?”

H
ER NAME WAS
A
GNES
P
RINGLE, 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.

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 chance 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.”

Marc took note of the point, then said, “Most of these people will have known Jesse Smallman better than his father. Jesse was an associate during the period when the alien question threatened the political and property rights of the immigrant Americans, and tempers were naturally frayed. But the question has been more or less settled for a year. Any direct threat to the livelihood of Wicks, Hislop, or Farley is over. They do appear to me to be consumed by the demands of their farms. And, of course, Jesse himself died twelve months ago. It's an unequivocal connection between Joshua and some mad soul out there that I have to establish and understand.”

Hatch puffed on his pipe. “We also have to consider the possibility that we may well have a different sort of mystery on our hands—one that doesn't involve a deliberate murder.”

It was something they had both been thinking, but, spoken aloud, it seemed somehow more daunting.

O
NCE AGAIN
M
ARC ARRIVED
L
ATE FOR
breakfast. If Winnifred had slipped past his door last night on her way to another assignation with the hired hand, no hint of it showed in her face or demeanour as she went about helping young Mary serve up helpings of porridge and molasses, followed by pork sausages and boiled eggs, with thick slices of just-made bread and peach preserve. Thomas's chin drooped slightly more than usual below his downcast eyes (too much ale, or some more physical activity? Marc wondered), and Mary Huggan's cheeks glowed from something more than fanning the morning fire.

After breakfast, while Erastus and Thomas went off to the mill to check on some suspected damage to the mill wheel from shifting ice, Marc walked down to Crawford Creek. He could imagine the unerringly straight surveyor's line that permitted one curve of the meandering creek to be included in Hatch's property and another curve, in the opposite direction, to be excluded from the Smallman lands, depriving them of drainage and irrigation. Feeling vaguely impious, he tramped off the worn path and along the bank of the stream, impressing his regimental bootprints defiantly upon the clergy's preserve.