Marc was staring, transfixed, at the heading under which “J. Smallman, Crawford’s Cnrs.-6 casks” had been set and then very lightly crossed out: “Hunting Sherry.” The word “hunting” had been underlined. And the two names just below it were Nathaniel Boyle and Jefferson Boyle, the Yankee smugglers Hatch and Child had driven from the county. Were they all connected to the Hunters’ Lodges? Surely the reference was no coincidence.
Every ounce of blood drained from Marc’s face. “My God,” he whispered. “This is the second list I’ve seen with J. Smallman on it. I’ve had it wrong from the beginning.”
“Had what wrong?” Hatch said.
Marc didn’t reply, but climbed slowly onto his horse as if in a trance.
“Where’re you off to?” the bewildered miller asked.
“To flush out a murderer,” Marc said.
FOURTEEN
Marc’s first stop was Elijah’s cabin. He knew that he would not find the hired man in it, now or ever. He also had a pretty good idea where the old devil would turn up. But for the moment, it was the contents of the cabin itself he needed to examine, something he should have done long before this.
The door opened easily enough. The signs of a hasty departure were everywhere, and it was such haste that Marc was counting on. The table had been cleared of the incriminating newspapers with their religiously underlined accounts of the radical activities in the Cobourg area and beyond. Marc now knew the real reason why they had been singled out, and again chastised himself for having missed the obvious on his first visit here. But the clutter of spilled tobacco, broken quill pens, and pieces of clay pipe remained just as he had noticed them earlier in the week. In less than a minute he had found what he was looking for.
Not wishing to disturb Beth again (it didn’t appear she would be riding into Cobourg to church with the Durfees), Marc walked the horse back to the path beside the creek, rode down to the mill and then across the road into the bush that surrounded Deer Park estate. He would have to walk the last few yards, as he intended to approach the grand house from the rear. It was the magistrate’s cook he had to see next.
Marc left Ruby Marsden in tears, but Philander Child’s servant had told him what he needed to know, breaking down rapidly under his quick and intimidating interrogation. He walked around the stone house from the servants’ quarters to the porticoed entrance at the front with the confident stride of a man who has the truth in his pocket.
Squire Child’s cutter stood beside the porch. As Marc strode up to it, the great man himself came down the steps and boomed a hearty “Good morning” to the sleigh’s driver.
“Off to church, are you?” Marc said, coming up.
“Ensign Edwards,” Child greeted him, unconcerned and friendly as ever. “Do you wish to ride with me?”
“I wish to talk to you in the privacy of your study, sir, about a matter of some importance.”
“Indeed?” Child showed only mild suspicion. “But you can see, young fellow, I am about to set off for St. Peter’s.”
“The service will have to wait, then.”
Child, who had taken one step up into the cutter, halted. He turned a severe face towards the rudeness offered him, the kind he had occasion to practice often on the bench and at the quarter sessions, where his unappealable decisions could make or break a man and his family. “I beg your pardon?” The driver had dropped the reins and was looking on with amazed interest.
“I wish to speak to you, alone and immediately, about the death of Joshua Smallman. I know who killed him.”
Child blinked once. “Well, then, we had better find a warm place to sit.”
Coggins was haled from his midmorning nap to stir the fire and coax coffee out of a distraught cook. When he closed the door of the study discreetly behind him, Child poured out two snifters of brandy next to the coffee cups and raised his glass to Marc.
“To the truth,” he said. Then, “Well, don’t give me a long rigmarole about it, tell me what it is you have to say to me about poor Joshua’s accident that’s important enough to keep me from the Reverend Sinclair’s sermon.”
“Murder, sir. Joshua Smallman, like his son, was murdered.”
“Yes, Hatch told me about Connors’s confession. Puzzling business, that, but I’ve sat on the bench for twenty years and I still can’t fathom the serpentine convolutions of the criminal mind.”
“Jesse was murdered in a dispute with smugglers. Joshua was murdered,” Marc paused, eyeing Child intently, “by you.”
Child’s coffee cup slowed almost imperceptibly, then continued up to his lips. He sipped contemplatively. His brows arched as he said, “By me? Well, then, it’s quite a tale you have to tell.” He eased his bulk back into the leather folds of his chair. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just sit here and listen. It’s one of the things I do best.”
Marc was somewhat nonplussed at the magistrate’s calm response, but then he realized he had not laid out any of the pieces of the puzzle that, with Ruby’s admission and what he had found in Elijah’s cabin, now formed a complete pattern in his mind.
“The tale, as you call it, begins with motive. I surmised long before I arrived here that I would have to discover the motive for Joshua’s murder before anything else could come clear. I have already explained to you, on Wednesday evening, how I thought the killing took place that night-”
“And a plausible bit of deduction that was. Though highly improbable. But I interrupt-please continue.”
“You decided that Joshua must be killed because you concluded he was a turncoat and because his death would be personally convenient and profitable to you.”
Child smiled. “The man was a Tory. When he cut himself he bled blue.”
“Quite so. When he came back to Crawford’s Corners, you took him into the Georgian Club. You attended the same church. You became his solicitor. More than that, you had already taken an interest in the property of his son and daughter-in-law. You arranged a mortgage on their farm for them so they could build a barn, buy cattle, and diversify, likely using your contacts with the Bank of Upper Canada, which routinely refuses loans to impecunious farmers.”
“You’ve learned a lot about us in eight short months.”
“Not enough, I fear. But I suspect you coveted Jess’s farm because it borders on the Clergy Reserves section. Given your status and influence with those in high places, you planned to purchase that protected property, a very valuable piece of real estate that would eventually yield a handsome profit.”
“It is not against the law to make a profit.”
“But you knew that Jesse Smallman was not likely to make a go of his farm.”
“Then why would I be foolish enough to bail him out with a mortgage?”
“You had to get him in deep enough to ensure his complete financial failure, and to have the land revert to you as the mortgage holder. You must have been pleased when he took his own life, as you and everyone else thought at the time.”
“It wasn’t I who manufactured the drought. Nor did I sit in the Legislature that enacted the Clergy Reserves statute. Even so, I fail to see what this putative bit of melodrama has to do with Jesse’s father or cold-blooded murder.”
“Following Jesse’s death, Joshua Smallman surprised himself and you by packing up and leaving Toronto to come to the aid of his daughter-in-law. He paid off the mortgage, thwarting your designs on the property. Still, with the drought and no government action on the Clergy Reserves, the farm remained a doubtful prospect for the Smallmans. I believe you befriended Joshua not only because he was a conservative businessman but because you hoped you might persuade him to give up the farm as a losing proposition and take his in-laws back to Toronto or over to Cobourg.”
“You are employing a surfeit of ‘suspectings’ and ‘believings,’ are you not?”
Child appeared to be enjoying himself. Certainly Marc could see no sign that his mounting assault was having any disquieting impact on the magistrate.