Duelling in a New World Read online

  He dresses and finds his way to the staircase, grasps the balustrade, and descends. The voices are coming from the kitchen, and he stumbles in that direction.

  “Mr. White, good morning.” Miss Russell, always kind and vigilant, pulls out a chair for him and plants a cup of thick syllabub on the table in front of him. He takes a moment to savour it: the whipped egg whites and cream with the sweet underlay of wine and sugar are exactly what he needs to soothe the pain in his head and the ache in his back.

  At the other end of the long pine table, Russell and Smith are deep in a loud dialogue. They stop to acknowledge his presence with a nod, then resume their discussion.

  “He’s written to the homeland to ask for a leave of absence. Gout’s got to him, I’m thinking,” Smith says.

  “Who?” White interjects, wiping foam from his chin.

  “Who? Who’d you think? Our Governor, that’s who.”

  “I’m afraid it’s true, White,” Russell says. “He told me last night that I am to administrate the province in his absence.”

  “You’ll do that well.” Stupid comment. But he does not know what else to say.

  “Perhaps, but it will mean removing to the new capital of York, and the Governor has given us his marching orders for the summer of next year, latest. I must from this point onwards consider what am I to do with this commodious house I’ve just built and furnished at great personal expense.”

  Now Smith starts his rant again. “I’m bloody not moving. My house is the best in town, better even than yours, Russell, if I may say so. Two storeys with a widow’s walk, constructed, embellished, and painted in the best style. And in the best location in town to boot. I’ve spent a fortune on it.”

  Everything the man says is true, but his superior tone is infuriating. “Your wife’s fortune, did I hear you say?” White asks.

  Miss Russell picks up a sheet of paper from a small table near the kitchen window. “I have just this morning wrote to my dear friend Lizzie saying that I am not a-going anywhere until there be a comfortable place in York to receive me. Never again do I expose myself and Mary to what we suffered when first we moved to this place. Poor child, I know that wretched cabin where we once lived for certain brought on her ill health.”

  There’s a pause while they all listen to the coughing sounds that issue from a room upstairs.

  Now they’re all staring at me. What am I to say? Time to take a stand.

  “Toronto or York—whatever its name—is a savage place from all I’ve heard. They say it is crushed against the lake by vast forests to the north, and entirely cut off from adjacent settlements, except in the late spring and summer. Never mind that I too have gone to the expense of building and furnishing a house here. The Gov in his arrogance does not consider such trifles.”

  “Hear, hear!” This from Smith, accompanied by small bleating noises from Miss Russell. Only her brother is silent.

  Then Russell clears his throat and makes one of those pronouncements that White has so often heard him utter from his unwarranted position on King’s Bench. “This bravado is all very well, but it has no substance. We must all go to York. We must face our future and embrace it.”

  “Bloody embrace what you like, Russell. Kiss the Governor’s ass, too, if that makes you feel good. Excuse my language, Miss Russell.” Smith rises, moves to the kitchen door, and slams it shut behind him with a bang that starts White’s head throbbing like an Indian tom-tom. His nose begins to bleed. He pulls out a handkerchief.

  “Dear Mr. White,” Miss Russell says, “Job will drive you home in our carriage.” She pours the remaining syllabub from a bowl into a pitcher. “Take this with you and get right into your bed. I shall call later this afternoon and give your cook a remedy for your nosebleed. Try not to think too hard about the move. We still have time to ready ourselves.”

  As the horse and cart bump their way along the forest path to his house, White holds the handkerchief to his nose and watches the blood seep into it.

  There’s a metaphor somewhere here. Try to remember . . . yes, something Shakespeare said . . . Macbeth maybe . . . yes . . . ‘I am in blood stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er’. . .

  “Say something, sir?”

  “Nothing, Job. Drive on.”

  I do not deserve this treatment. But what can I do about it? I made a brave speech this morning, but Russell is right. It’s all bravado. I must move if I am to keep my position. But where can I find money right now? Maybe Sam Shepherd will come through for me again. And I’ve got to make a decision about Marianne and the children. Oh Lord.

  Inside his house, he pours Miss Russell’s syllabub into his large pewter mug and ascends with it to his loft.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  September 1795

  The explorer Alexander Mackenzie has stopped at Newark for three days on his canoe journey to Montreal. He sleeps in White’s bed in the loft while his host has made quite a comfortable corner for himself in the alcove off the kitchen. It’s a small space, but Yvette has provided him with a bear skin rug. It smells a bit—probably like a bear, though White has never, thank God, smelled one up close—but it shields him from the rough pine floor.

  It’s early afternoon now, and Yvette serves up her whitefish stew and dandelion wine.

  “Tasty,” Mackenzie says, shovelling a substantial forkful of fish into his mouth. “I call this cuisine.”

  “Better than what you had on the Pacific Coast, is it?” White asks, thankful that he has not had to apologize for Yvette’s offerings.

  “You may have noticed that my teeth are ground to a thin edge?” Mackenzie grins at White. His teeth look perfectly normal, a flash of white in his tanned face. “One of the Indian tribes there gave me their pièce de resistance, the bark of a hemlock tree—”

  “You joke, sir!”

  “Not at all. It was actually a cake of hemlock bark, fifteen inches long and half an inch thick, but impregnated with salmon oil that made it quite tasty—especially if you consider how hungry I was after a hard day’s walk over rock and through forest.”

  I am to believe this? But the man spins his yarn with a perfectly straight face.

  “I gather that Mrs. Simcoe liked the fine furs you presented her with?”

  “She plans to sew a shoulder cape from the mink skins, so she says. She is a pleasant woman, but I know not what to make of His Excellency. What is your opinion of the man?”

  “He has many good qualities, but his health is bad. Gout is his affliction. He has applied for sick leave and may return to England if his application is successful.”

  “I gave him a bottle of Turlington’s Balsam. He took it, mumbling something about ‘damned quackery,’ but I mind not his insult. He is just another snot-nosed Englishman.”

  “Present company excepted, I hope?”

  “Too long have I been in heathen society, sir. My apologies for a stupid remark. You have been kind to me. Had I not met you on the quay three days ago, I might have had to tether my canoe and set up my bedroll within it.”

  Mackenzie is now tucking into the Indian pudding, and he’s switched from fork to knife for the transmission from plate to mouth. White feels glad the knives have rounded edges. Otherwise, he’d have to find one of the local remedies for a bleeding gullet. Mrs. Jarvis’s castor oil, he fears, would not be efficacious in those circumstances.

  White has noticed Mackenzie has no difficulty spinning conversation with whomever he meets. His manner of speaking is easy, but his sometimes awkward phraseology leads White to surmise he has been long without white man’s company. “This is tasty,” he says now, turning to address Yvette who’s hunkered down in a chair in the corner by the hearth. “How do you make it?”

  “Milk, cornmeal, des oeufs, . . .” she answers, then she lapses into her patois, blushing at her failure to know the English words.

  Mackenzie answers at length in her lingo, and she gives him a large second helping.


  “You are at home in her language,” White says.

  “Well, as you know, I was for many years a clerk for the North West Company in Montreal, and when I started my exploration westward to the Pacific, I often had voyageurs with me on my voyage. Expert canoe-men they are, the best in the world I thought, until we embarked one day with seven natives. Then I found that the voyageurs are actually inferior to the Indians. So I’ve picked some of the lingo from both sets of paddlers. I expect you know the dialects, White?

  “I know very little of anything but the King’s English. Sometimes I don’t even understand American.” He laughs. “But I have observed those canoes you talk about. When they’re loaded, their gunwales are within six inches of the water, and the fate of the passengers has always seemed to me to be inevitable. Your own canoe, I see, rides barely above the water, and yet you and your crew are very much alive.”

  “So much depends on the paddlers. I remember once a rapid stream where we were making six miles an hour. We came to a weir where the Indians landed me and my two friends. They then proceeded over the weir without taking a drop of water, received us on board again, and on we went. Glad was I to thank them with a few words in their dialect.”

  To White, Mackenzie seems a creature from another planet in spite of his Scots accent, tousled red hair, and tanned cheeks. Over the three days, he’s been in Newark, he has spun tales so exotic that White has been transported into a new world.

  The man is talking now about his stay with an Indian band a short distance north east of a place he calls Elcho Harbour—“not Echo, mind you, Elcho”—somewhere within sight of the Pacific Ocean. “There are four elevated houses in the village,” he says, “with floors twelve feet above the surface of the ground. Their length is a hundred and twenty feet, and they are forty feet in breadth.”

  “How on earth do they get up into these places? Or perhaps I should stay, how from earth do they get up into these places?”

  “Easily. At the end of each house is a narrow scaffolding, which they ascend by a piece of timber with steps cut in it. The whole length of the structure is divided by cedar planks into apartments, each with room for cooking and sleeping.” Mackenzie pauses, sees that Yvette is busy scraping the remains of her stew into a bowl, and continues, sotto voce. “They thought of everything, those so-called ‘savages.’ At each end of the structure is an opening for them to pee or shit through. Since they remove not the heaps of excrement that accumulate on the ground below, it appears that this effluvia does not bother them.”

  White pushes his plate away. Pee, shit, and effluvia in two sentences. The man has a wide vocabulary. “You give me a vivid picture,” he says. “But if you intend to write up your travels for publication, as you’ve indicated to me, I suggest that you—”

  “Omit these details or reword them. I have not been so long in the wilds that I have forgotten the sensibilities of English readers. Indeed, even when I come to this place you call Newark, I find it a good deal like one of your villages in England, full of gossip, teacups, and evening tête-à-têtes. A week in the wilderness of Western Canada would rid these people of their narrow concepts and customs.”

  “You have obviously not sat at Mrs. Simcoe’s table and eaten her special Upper Canada treat of roasted black squirrels. A pity. That would rid you of your narrow concepts about Newark parties.

  “But you may be right about your impressions of life here. We do fritter away a good deal of time in petty squabbling and picayune endeavour. I fear we are often like the fox in the Aesop fable. We want the grapes, but we tire easily and give up and excuse ourselves by saying the grapes are probably sour anyway. But you, sir, are a veritable Jason. You have discovered an overland route to the Pacific Ocean and to the great furs of that far-flung land. With your Argonauts, you have brought back the Golden Fleece. I envy your accomplishments.”

  Mackenzie laughs and pours himself another glass of Yvette’s wine. “You are generous, White. But I am no Jason. I have made mistakes like any ordinary being. On my first voyage westward, no knowledge had I of compasses or chronometers, and I ended in the Arctic Ocean rather than the Pacific.” Here Mackenzie pauses and looks down at his calloused fingers. “But I went back to Britain, made myself familiar with navigational skills and tried again. Second time round, I listened to the Indians. They were the ones who knew about the overland route to the Pacific, and good use I made of their knowledge of this vast land. But true it is that when I set myself a goal, I attain it. Success comes with knowledge. And endeavour.”

  He pulls out his pocket watch. “I must leave you now, sir. My paddlers wait for me on the river.” He leans over and pulls from under the table the huge canvas knapsack that carries his worldly goods. From inside it he produces two packages loosely wrapped in pelts. “For you, ma’am,” he says to Yvette, shaking off the pelts and handing her a warm-looking pair of fur-lined skin gloves. “And for you, White, a fur hat for these winter winds that will be soon upon us.”

  “With ear flaps and a strap to tie under my chin,” White says. “Perfect.”

  “Not made of the Golden Fleece, my friend, but perhaps warmer.”

  He embraces White, waves to Yvette, and heads out the back door. White watches him from the window of his cottage. His tall figure disappears down the slope towards the river. In a moment, there is nothing left of him, only his empty glass and the gifts that he laid upon the table. But still, yes, there’s an aura that remains . . . the man’s air of successful endeavour, the way he speaks freely without inhibition . . . his joy in life.

  * * *

  White goes into the alcove, kicks aside the bear skin rug, and extracts a letter from one of the pigeon-holes in his desk. It’s the latest missive from that devil Hodgkinson who has badgered him—and Osgoode, too—for months for a licence to practise law in Upper Canada. He is a scoundrel with low education and even lower morals, and he and the Chief had been of one mind in refusing his insolent requests. Now that Osgoode has departed for Montreal, White must take on Hodgkinson and others of his ilk single handed.

  And herein he sees an opportunity. Though I am not a Jason, perhaps I can find a quest of my own. Yes, I will put right the ignorant and inefficient legal and judicial system of this colony . . . But how? A governing agency perhaps, a society that will regulate the licensing of lawyers . . . I must write out my thoughts.

  “More wine, Mr. White?” Yvette stands at the door to the alcove, a bottle in her hand.

  “Thank you, no. I have work to do.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  March 1796

  White has had a quiet winter in Niagara. He calls the settlement by its original Indian name openly now, free of the Gov’s insistence on “Newark.” The Simcoes are far away in York, and from all he hears, set to fly like the passenger pigeons—back to England as soon as the Gov gets his request for leave of absence granted. They’ll have to come back to Niagara for their goodbyes, but undoubtedly for a few days only.

  Peter Russell, ever the faithful servant of the administration, has moved to York temporarily where he has bought a house that he is now in the process of enlarging. But Miss Russell reminds everyone that she is “not a-going anywhere,” as she puts it, until the house is ready. So White has had her companionship all winter. She’s a sympathetic listener, always willing to hear his complaints about William Jarvis who has become even more lazy and sulky in past months.

  “I don’t know which of them—the man or his wife—I loathe most,” he tells Miss Russell now, sitting at her broad oak kitchen table and watching her whip up a bowl of syllabub. She pours the cream and whites of eggs into the bowl with wine and sugar. Then she gets to work with a whisk that she’s made out of birch twigs. It’s a hard task whipping it all into a heavy foam, and it takes her at least a quarter of an hour, but they talk as she works.

  “That wife of his put him up to challenging me to a duel, I know, and I’m never going to forgive her for that.”

  “She
’s an uppity soul,” Miss Russell says, “but it’s all been settled for many months. Perhaps it be . . .” She pauses and shakes the whipped mixture from her whisk.

  “I know what you’re going to say, ma’am. Let bygones be bygones. And your brother did the right thing in bringing Jarvis to court and settling the matter there. When I get the legal system righted in this country, I’ll see that the courts are an avenue for redress for these stupid quarrels. My brother-in-law tells me that since 1790 in England, men have begun to use the courts instead of the pistol for settling these crazy manifestations of male ‘honour.’”

  More swooping motions with the whisk of twigs and finally, judging by the decisive way she whacks the whisk against the bowl, the syllabub is ready. If he were a dog, he’d be drooling. She moves towards the mantel above the hearth and takes down a large tankard.

  “Perhaps you could come to my house one of these days and teach Yvette how to make it. I’m not complaining about her dandelion wine, mind, but syllabub would be a delicious addition to her repertoire.”

  “I’d be mighty pleased.” Then, sotto voce, she adds. “If I can escape from Cousin Willcocks for an afternoon. He gets up late—he be still abed now at this late hour—and then he expects a full meal put in front of him.”

  Job, the Russells’ faithful servant, has evidently heard her words. From the corner of the room, where he’s stirring a pot of soup on the open hearth, he heaves a large sigh.

  The words and the sigh serve to herald the appearance of the man himself: William Willcocks, dressed in a banyan and slippers, as if it were eight o’clock in the morning rather than three in the afternoon. He is a fat man, probably sixty years of age, with bushy eyebrows, a mess of uncombed white hair, and a broad red nose.