The Bishop's Pawn (7 page)

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:

SODOMITE!

With his stomach heaving towards his throat,
Nestor stumbled around to where the victim’s head should be. He
eased back the collar of the cloak. The head was there all right,
squashed down against the gravel and pressed sideways. Nestor felt
the bile bubble into his throat. The socket where the right eye
should have been was nothing but a bloody pulp.

The killer had plucked out the Yankee
lawyer’s eye.

SIX

Less than half an hour later, Chief Constable Wilfrid
Sturges (nicknamed “Sarge” in honour of his stint in Wellington’s
army), Dr. Angus Withers, the coroner, and constables Rossiter,
Brown and Wilkie reached the gruesome scene. But it was Horatio
Cobb who had been the first to arrive, having been fetched from his
patrol by a street urchin dispatched by Simeon Galsworthy, the
jeweller. The message had been garbled but alarming enough for Cobb
to have the lad carry on to the police quarters to rouse the Chief
and whoever else might be needed. Between keeping the throng away
from the victim – and from any clues that might lie in the vicinity
– and questioning an uncharacteristically reluctant and befuddled
Nestor Peck, Cobb had been kept busy until Chief Sturges popped up
behind him. And gasped at what he saw in the alley.

“Jesus, Cobb. I ain’t seen nothin’ like this
since my days in Portugal.”

“You ain’t seen the worst of it,” Cobb said,
indicating Dougherty’s maimed face.

“And Nestor here found the body?”

“He did. And I’ve got everythin’ outta him
we’re likely to get.”

Sturges took out a coin and placed it in
Nestor’s still-trembling hand. “You go an’ get yerself somethin’ to
eat or drink,” he said. “Then come down to the Court House this
afternoon. Gussie, my clerk, will need to record a statement of
what you saw. An’ we may have some more questions fer you.”

Rossiter and Dr. Withers came into the alley
just as Nestor was making his way through the crowd, wondering if
he would ever eat anything again and beginning to think of how –
when he stopped shaking – he might turn this horror to his
advantage at The Cock and Bull or The Crooked Anchor. Ewan Wilkie,
the last of the regular constables to show up, was put to work with
Rossiter and Brown restraining the crowd, while Cobb and Sturges
set out to interview any of the neighbouring shopkeepers who might
have been up early enough to spot the killer lurking about. It
seemed that the entire west end of the town had been roused. But
none had been able to get close enough to ascertain any of the
horrific (and usable) details. That the victim was Dougherty was
self-evident, as was his fate.

Angus Withers finished his initial
examination of the body, and came up to Sturges and Cobb. “Six stab
wounds in the back with that vicious dirk – short handle, long,
thin blade. Pirate’s special. Any of those thrusts might have been
fatal, as they went through the lungs, but the deepest one seems to
have penetrated to the heart from the rear. I rolled him over just
enough to determine that each thrust entered from the back. They
are all jagged and wide, indicating that the attacker was in a
frenzy, plunging the blade in, yanking it out, then plunging it
back in again.”

“But the poor bastard fell diagonally into
the alley,” Sturges said. “How would the killer get him in there
and then manage to knife him from behind?”

“There’s a nasty-looking bump on his right
temple. I’d speculate that Dougherty – for there’s no doubt it is
he – was walking east along his usual route when the assassin
stepped out of the shadows here and clobbered him with something
solid, like a rock. As the big man staggered under the blow, he
could have been pushed or manhandled into the alley, where he
toppled right here, facedown. After which, with the victim
unconscious, the killer went about stabbing him – in some sort of
rage.”