Man in the Shadows (5 page)

“I won’t wear someone else’s discards.”

“You’ll wear what I tell you. You’re growing like a weed, and this is all we can afford.”

Conor figured that his father had squandered his winter’s wages gambling or drinking or something worse. He saw the look of shame in his father’s eyes. He could have taken pity, been understanding, but there was no way he was going to line up with the others. He was not desperate. He would never allow such a disgrace. He ran away, furious and determined.

It was the first time he defied his father.

“CONOR,
do you want an apple?”

He knew the voice. Her name was Polly. He wasn’t sure of her last name. Ryan, maybe. Or Reagan. She was friendly with Thomas. Polly was a washerwoman of dubious reputation. She was a widow, but there was talk of a mysterious past. A bit of the scruff, in Conor’s mind. She repeated, “Would you like an apple?”

“No, I’m fine,” he answered and kept walking.

Was he a snob? Sure. He didn’t like Polly and he didn’t care if she knew it. But he did smile at Mrs. O’Connell as he ambled toward her stall. “I’ll be t’anking you again for the breakfast, Mrs. O.”

THERE
weren’t many people on the banks of the Ottawa River. The Rideau Canal was a safer place to swim, but Meg had always liked the drama of the river. It was a place of stories and adventure. By mid-afternoon, she had grown bored with sitting by the river with her brother’s dim-witted friends. She had found that Conor character interesting, with his clumsy talk of Nelson and Victoria. She rather liked watching the boys get flustered around her, but she had a sense that this one wouldn’t stay flustered long. There was a resolved
look behind that scrubbed face. But those whiskers! Who did he think he was, General Burnside?

She had acted as if she didn’t know him, but she did remember him from Ottawa summers, his face always hidden behind a book. Her mother had recently told her about D’Arcy McGee’s bright young assistant. An Irish boy without a chip on his shoulder. A very promising young man pulling himself up from the dirty streets. Meg thought the Irish were a homesick people who prayed and swore and drank too much. In London, they were always causing trouble with their appeals for Home Rule and their violent ways. They were colourful, she’d give them that, but curious, too, with their extravagant churches and pompous priests. She stopped herself. This is terrible. “Live and let live,” was how her mother had brought her up. “Be respectful of others.”

She had been raised as a Protestant—a Methodist, actually—by her father, but she hadn’t been to church since his funeral five years ago. At his death, her mother turned away from organized religion and declared herself “a free thinker.” She didn’t reject the existence of God, but took a dim view of the practice of religion.

Will was never really interested in philosophical discussions, but Meg embraced the freedom of her mother’s eccentric and, to some, heretical beliefs. She read Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the transcendentalists from New England, who believed that the individual was the spiritual centre of the universe. That made sense to her. People, not priests or pastors. Like her mother, she found power in poetry and the divine in the miracle of nature—and there certainly was a lot of nature in this wild country. Her father would not have approved of these ideas. In fact, most people didn’t, so the Widow Trotter and her free-thinking daughter usually kept their radical views to themselves.

Meg looked at the river and up to the beautiful Gatineau Hills.
Rather far from windswept Galilee or the busy River Thames. These Canadians wanted to create “Westminster in the Wilderness.” They saw themselves as empire builders, more British than Yorkshire peers. What rubbish. Why didn’t they accept the wonders they had? The vastness of the land. The wild green forests. The freedom of open spaces. London was grandiose, with its statuesque buildings and magnificent promenades, but this land was glorious, with its untamed beauty and changing seasons. Better to worship nature’s might than perpetuate old prejudices—or fight yesterday’s wars.

And where was that Irish boy? She wanted to taunt him some more.

THE
walkway behind Parliament Hill was sometimes called Lover’s Walk. Conor walked it alone. It was mid-afternoon when he carefully descended the steps to the river. He quickly spotted Will Trotter’s group sitting by the water’s edge. He knew most of them vaguely, and cared little for them. He preferred the company of older people. In fact, he found most people his age vacuous and a little silly. He had befriended Will more as a younger brother than a contemporary. He liked Will’s sense of humour and they shared a love for the game of politics, but he glanced past Will, ignoring his friends, looking for …

Meg.

She sat calmly reading. The very picture of serenity. It was clear to Conor that she was not concerned about when, or even if, he might arrive. He decided to be forthright and approached her with the lines he had been practising for an hour.

“May I join you?”

She nodded, slightly.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Tennyson.”

Damn it. He’d expected her to say Charles Dickens, so he could go on about the Artful Dodger and sound learned. Or even Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in which case he could show wit and well-placed sarcasm—“It was a dark and stormy night …” She put the book down and filled the pause. “Have you read him?”

“No, I’m not much of a poet,” he stuttered. “But I love to read.”

“And what are you reading these days?” She had already noted with disdain that neither her brother nor his friends had brought along anything to read.

“I just finished Macauley’s
History of England
, and now I’m reading an account of Wellington at Waterloo,” he said, proudly.

“Nelson. Wellington. Trafalgar. Waterloo. Are you aiming for the service?”

“No, I like studying strategy. And I’m fascinated by the glory of empire.”

Here was his plan: He had rehearsed a conversation about England and empire and queens and dukes—the stuff a pretty, sophisticated girl from London would want to talk about, the stuff she would never expect an Irishman to care about. He would demonstrate the depth of his knowledge, show how much they had in common, and then start asking her about life in London, the greatest city in the world. He would initiate, manage and control the conversation. He would impress.

Instead, she took command. “I don’t know how anyone could think of the glory of war these days after the war between the American states,” she said. “It disgusts me.”

He answered truthfully. “It fascinates me. The willingness of men to run into the fire, of brothers who kill each other, of the power of hate.”

“Is hate more interesting than love?”

“More interesting, but not as appealing.” He was satisfied with his answer. Clever. Sensitive. Even a bit daring. He’d rarely thought much about love, and he was uncomfortable talking about it. He’d never seen love in his father’s life, and he was not sure he would recognize it in his own. The institution of marriage appealed to him. It was proper. He took for granted that he would eventually find a suitable wife who would help guide him up the social ladder. Was that love, or just the appropriate thing to do?

“You are different,” she said and returned to her book.

Will and his friends were talking about some sport called “base ball” that was becoming popular in the United States. Conor considered joining their conversation, then thought better of it and opened his book, pretending to concentrate. Did I go too far with the empire bit? he thought. Probably. He decided to retreat and attack later.

Meg called over to her younger brother, “Come on, Will. Let’s go swimming.” She dropped her towel and stood up. Conor discreetly watched her walk into the water in her long, flowing bathing costume. Not for the first time, he wished someone would devise more revealing bathing garments. After all, they would dry faster.

DOWN
the cliff, under the Parliament Buildings, the river was misleadingly treacherous. The current quickened and swirled, and the water turned angry and shrill. The voyageurs had said the water boiled, and named the rapids Chaudière. By the 1860s, there were modern dangers. Stray logs from the rafts upriver floated freely in the river’s current, many bearing lethal, rusting spikes. Those implanted in the river bottom were called deadheads. The worst ones were hidden just under the surface.

Meg confidently swam a few breaststrokes, then turned and floated on her back. Conor watched her intently. What gave her such self-assuredness? Her education? Her beauty? Good Lord, she even swam with poise. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a log right behind her.
A deadhead.
He looked closer. There was a spike jutting out of it.

“Meg!” he screamed, but she couldn’t hear him. He called to a boy who was splashing around uselessly near her. He screamed at her again. But she kept floating toward the rusting nail, gently kicking and propelling herself toward disaster.

He had to react. And fast. He dove into the water, kicked away and swam frantically toward her. Head up, staring at her, arms pulling water, feet kicking wildly, he was a man possessed. His clothes weighed him down, but he found strength he didn’t know he had. Gasping for air, he reached out and grabbed her. He pulled her tightly toward him, away from the deadhead, away from danger. He felt he was in heaven. Meg Trotter was actually in his arms. Then he saw the look of horror on her face. My God, he thought, she thinks I have attacked her. He coughed water and breathlessly sputtered, “You were going to hit a deadhead.”

She looked behind her and saw the log with the sharp nail sticking out. It was just off to her side, out of harm’s way. She smiled. “Thank you, Conor. Thank you very much. I’ve been in London so long I forgot how dangerous the river can be.”

She held on to him so tightly that Conor thought maybe it really was his birthday.

I
t was mid-afternoon in Sandy Hill, and John Macdonald was supposed to be relaxing. Immediately after the Privy Council ceremony, at a private working lunch with his cabinet, he had to face the fury of his slighted colleagues. He knew only time—and a few more knighthoods, if he could help arrange it—would heal the wounds.

Agnes sat peacefully knitting as her husband paced the drawing room, dodging the cluttered side tables. Now that his headache had subsided, he poured himself a glass of sherry. “Medicine, my dear,” he insisted.

While they were on Parliament Hill, the staff must have tried to soften the smell from the rotting wooden drains by disinfecting them with chloride and lime. He didn’t know which scent he detested more: yesterday’s excrement or today’s disinfectant. He held the sherry glass to his nose. And looked at the clock. Fifteen minutes late. The nerve! Of course, Macdonald had been deliberately late for many meetings in his career. Arriving last showed who had the busiest schedule, who was most important. But when someone kept him waiting, it was inexcusable and damnably rude. He continued pacing anxiously.

It was Confederation Day, and already there were problems to iron out. He looked at Agnes, knitting by the window. The aristocrat’s
daughter, so much younger than him, and so damned content. Well, he wasn’t content. In fact, he was starting to find the peace and quiet in the room infuriating. Fifteen minutes late. Imagine!

“So what do you think, milady?” he asked, with an affected accent. A Scot from Glasgow trying to sound like an Englishman from Belgravia. “I guess we’re all just petty provincial politicians to the likes of you.”

“Not all of you.” She smiled coyly. Agnes Macdonald was a child of the British bureaucracy. Her father had been attorney general in Jamaica. While cash had been scarce, status had not. She grew up in a world of butlers, cooks, maids and servants. She would often say that her people were poor as church mice, but what a splendid church they had. That was as close as she came to joking. The minor aristocrat’s daughter was more commanding than charming; more severe than sweet. Although Agnes was twenty years younger than her husband, it seemed more natural to call her Lady Macdonald than to call him Sir John.

Macdonald’s first wife, the sickly and long-suffering Isabella, had died ten years earlier. For thirteen of their fourteen years together, John Macdonald tended her sickbed, watching her health decline. She took laudanum, liquid opium, to relieve her pain, just as her husband often turned to alcohol for a spark of joy. He rarely spoke of Isabella and never talked of her death. Agnes wondered whether, in the end, he had felt relief. Isabella had been sick for so long, what kind of life could they have had together? Agnes occasionally looked at Isabella’s picture. She was rather beautiful in a grave way, with her aquiline nose, long dark hair and sad, thoughtful eyes.

John and Isabella had two sons together: John Junior, who died as a toddler, and Hugh John, who had been brought up by his aunt in Kingston and rarely came to Ottawa. Agnes once asked her husband about John Junior and learned quickly that this was treacherous territory
for her to enter. There were doors of sadness and hardship in his past he preferred to keep shut.

Theirs was a brief courtship and a quick marriage. John had actually proposed to Agnes in Ottawa a few years before, but she had turned him down. He seemed too reckless and overbearing, and she too young to control him. Then, last year, between readings of the British North America Act in London, the most eligible bachelor in British North America took a stroll along Bond Street and saw Agnes Bernard across the road. A chance encounter, and a few weeks later, an engagement.

“It’s a time of union,” he said. And it was.

Macdonald did not like being surprised, but he loved surprising others. He took special delight in announcing the unexpected wedding. D’Arcy McGee was as astonished as everyone else when Macdonald informed him, “There will be fewer nights down in the bars, D’Arcy. I’ll be staying home a bit more.”

Since moving to Ottawa and taking residence as the wife of a leading politician, Agnes Macdonald had found most of these Canadians rather gauche. The nation, like her husband, had to learn how to behave. Already, many in Ottawa found her haughty and stuffy. She didn’t mind; she was a great man’s wife.