Desperate Acts by Don Gutteridge Read Free Book Online Page B

to justify their
actions,” Crenshaw said. “They claimed that Governor Head had
usurped the election of 1836 and had acted arbitrarily against the
express wishes of the Colonial Secretary in London. And they
suggested that the province was drifting into chaos and certain
ruin.”
    “But Francis Head was the King’s surrogate
here, was he not?” said Dr. Samuel Pogue, physician and unsolicited
advisor to successive lieutenant-governors. “To threaten him was to
threaten the Crown itself.”
    “I shudder to think on it,” Sir Peregrine
added.
    “But is the state not something larger than
the monarchy?” Dutton chipped in, his lawyer’s mettle having been
whetted. “Is not Britain bigger than any single king or queen?”
    “Surely the monarch is the state,” Sir
Peregrine said hastily, alarmed that the discussion was plummeting
from the lofty altar of Bardic idolatry.
    “Tell that to King Charles,” said Ezra
Michaels, King Street chemist and staunch supporter of the Orange
Lodge and its obsession with all things monarchical.
    “Gentlemen, gentlemen. Could we not bring the
debate back to Mr. Shakespeare’s glorious play?”
    But the ferret was out of its box.
    “Surely we are right to see Cassius as a kind
of Willie Mackenzie, organizing the overthrow of the legitimate
government for his own selfish ends,” Dutton said with some
passion, “and in the process deceiving both ordinary, naïve
citizens and his own associates, like Bidwell and Rolph – and poor,
pathetic Matthews and Lount, whom we hanged for their sins.”
    “And who, then, would our Brutus be?”
Fullarton said, giving Brodie a gentle nudge, “Robert Baldwin?”
    This drew a laugh that puzzled Shuttleworth
but was well understood by the assembled Tory gentlemen.
    Brodie, no Tory, knew that the others around
the table saw Robert as a reluctant rebel who had not exercised his
conscience so much as his sense of self-preservation in not joining
Mackenzie’s revolt. He felt it was time to make his maiden
contribution to the discussion. “Are there, then, no circumstances
in which an oppressed people can legitimately seek to relieve their
grievances by some kind of insurrection?” he said.
    Those around the table turned as one to the
nineteen-year-old upstart – more expectant than hostile. How would
the Yankee youngster and prospective banker answer his own
question, given his upbringing in the breakaway republic to the
south?
    “You are alluding to the soi-disant revolutionary war, I presume?” Sir Peregrine said, lifting both
chins and staring down the table with a watery, blue-eyed gaze.
    “If the grievances of the American settlers
had been addressed, perhaps Queen Victoria would still have her
Thirteen Colonies,” Brodie said.
    “I take great exception to that remark,”
Cyrus Crenshaw said. “My father, God rest his soul, died a hero’s
death on the bloody battlefield of Moraviantown in a glorious
effort to halt the advance of General Harrison’s Yankee
freebooters, who burned and pillaged as they drove into the heart
of our land.”
    The direct relevance of this outburst to the
debate was not readily discernible, but its passionate delivery
overwhelmed any logical inconsistencies. It was not, of course, the
first time that Crenshaw had insinuated his father’s martyrdom into
the club’s deliberations. It was a subject upon which the
candle-maker and legislative councillor was fixated.
    “But we survived that war, didn’t we?”
Fullarton said, his banker’s instinct for propriety and equanimity
taking hold. “And we have welcomed into our midst thousands of men
and women from the Republic and made them loyal subjects of the
Queen. And Willie Mackenzie was a disaffected Scot, not a rabid
democrat from the United States.”
    “I trust, Cyrus, that you and the Legislative
Council will fight against the pernicious tide of Durham fever?”
Dutton said, unconscious of both his non-sequitur and the mixed
metaphor.
    Crenshaw