Luke wanted to make a stop in Wellington, in case there had been an answer to his letters to George Harliss, but Thaddeus argued that this was unnecessary.
“We already know that Margaret Porter was headed to Cobourg. We’ll check the lists there, and if she got off the boat we know Harliss is in Bewdley. With any luck Margaret will be there as well.”
“But what if she didn’t?” Luke said.
“Beverly and Bexley aren’t that far apart. If we have to go on, we can easily go to both.”
Luke wondered if his father’s reluctance to return to Wellington stemmed from an unwillingness to be reminded of Betsy’s death. It would be hard for Thaddeus to return to the empty cabin, although Temperance House itself would be full of life — Francis, Sophie, Martha, all the guests. Still, there would come that moment when Thaddeus must go home — cross the yard and open the door to no one there. Luke didn’t blame him for putting that moment off.
There were few other passengers on the packet steamer that ran between Kingston and ports west, so they had a corner of the cabin to themselves while they talked.
“I don’t think there’s any question that David Porter is our Wellington corpse,” Thaddeus said, “but we can confirm that at Cobourg. The body had to have gone overboard somewhere between there and Kingston. If the name Florence Mullen is absent from the list, that will be a good indication that we’re correct.”
“And if ‘Charley Gallagher’ went on, we’ll know we’re right about Flea Mullen taking his ticket.”
“Yes. But the only thing that would tie him to murder is the green ribbon. He certainly had motive enough, and opportunity, but without the ribbon, who’s to say that David Porter didn’t get tangled up in his skirts and fall overboard?”
Luke shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “There’s one question we haven’t addressed yet.”
“What’s that?” Thaddeus asked.
“Even if we do find out that the Mullens are responsible for the Porter deaths, what are we going to do about it? The evidence is all circumstantial, based on hearsay from witnesses who are just as likely to deny it all if asked again.”
“Yes, I know. And it’s equally likely that no one would do anything even if the witnesses could be persuaded to repeat their stories. Who cares if two more Irishmen die? And I certainly have no intention of standing in front of a constable and telling him about fairies. But it’s not a question of bringing anyone to justice. It’s question of knowing the truth.”
“And what good will that do?” Luke asked.
“It will allow you to keep a promise,” Thaddeus said. “You’ll be able to tell Charley Gallagher’s brother what really happened to him.” He cast Luke a shrewd look. “I’m not sure the whole story is really all that important to Mr. Gallagher, but I have a suspicion that for some reason it’s vitally important to you.”
Luke’s hands began to shake a little and he folded his arms so that it wouldn’t be noticeable. His father was right, it was important to him. He couldn’t be such a monster, could he, if he kept his promises? There was no bargain he could make that would be acceptable to God, he knew, but he could at least try, like his father had, to become a better man. He realized that Thaddeus’s words were an invitation to confide, to share what was troubling him, but he held to his resolve — his father must never know what Luke suspected about himself.
Thaddeus broke the silence, which Luke was aware had stretched out far too long. “In any event,” he said, “Providence has a way of taking care of things, even if the law won’t. We’ll discover what really happened, and then we’ll have to wait for a higher court to mete out its justice.”
The emigration agent at Cobourg was far less cooperative than the clerk in Kingston had been. It was a smaller port, for one thing, with fewer people landing, so the agent was the only man in the office. Not even Thaddeus’s sad story about being a minister looking for someone from his lost flock was enough to melt his stone-faced refusal to let them look at the lists.
But they had the luck of timing to help. Just as they were turning to leave, a whistle blew. It was an emigrant steamer chugging into port, and it served them well as a distraction. The agent rushed hurriedly through the door, the latest record book tucked under his arm.
“He’ll be a few minutes, don’t you think?” Thaddeus said, reaching across the desk for the pile of ledgers that lay in a neat stack to one side.
They quickly located the books that held the dates in question, Luke scanning the lists from the last week of July, Thaddeus opting for the first of the season.
Luke ran his finger down a column and there it was: July 26, Margaret Porter. And a notation to the far right of the page — “trunk sent to Toronto by mistake.”
Poor Maggie, chasing her family’s luggage across a strange land. And unless she had enough for steamer fare to get herself back to Cobourg, she and her trunk were probably still in Toronto. The sorry crowd of Irish he had met earlier that summer had been forced to walk miles to claim their belongings. “They’ll pay one way, but not the other,” the old man had said.
“She was here and went on,” Luke said to Thaddeus. “Hurry up before the agent comes back.”
“Mmm,” was the reply. Thaddeus appeared to be reading everything twice.
Luke was about to replace his ledger when it slipped out of his hand and fell to the floor, its pages splaying open. He picked it up and smoothed out the pages, brushing the dust from them as best he could. And then his mind registered a name: John Porter. Travelling alone. Disembarked at Cobourg. Given a shilling for lodgings until he could meet up with his relatives.
But John Porter had died in Kingston. Luke had buried the body himself. And then he realized what the entry meant: not the John Porter he knew, but his son. Anna had called him “Jack” and said that he was ill and had been quarantined at Montreal. Perhaps his illness wasn’t typhus, but something else from which he had recovered in a few days. It happened often enough, he knew, this mistake in diagnosis, and Montreal was worse than Kingston in terms of the numbers of typhus victims they were treating. Even if Jack Porter had the dreaded ship’s fever, he might have recovered enough to have been sent on his way as soon as possible, so that his bed might be used for someone else. He checked the date in the ledger: August 6.
He was bursting with what he had discovered, but he waited until his father finally shut the other ledger with a bang and then they replaced both books, as far as they could tell, in the order in which they had found them. After a quick look out the door to make sure the agent was still fully occupied, they slipped outside and walked away as fast as they could.
Luke let his father speak first. “I could find no listing for Florence Mullen,” he said. “Charley Gallagher spent one night in Cobourg and presumably boarded another steamer the next day. Our dead man is almost certainly David Porter.”
“Margaret Porter’s trunk was mistakenly sent on to Toronto, and she followed it there.”
“Could she have returned with it in the meantime?”
“I doubt it,” Luke said, “unless she had some money with her. They don’t pay for them to come back.”
“Then it’s off to Bewdley,” Thaddeus said. “Either she tracked down her luggage and came back to her uncle’s, or she’s still in Toronto.”
“I did find one other name of interest,” Luke said. “John Porter. It can’t be Anna’s father, so it must be her brother Jack.”
“Her brother? You didn’t tell me there was a brother involved,” Thaddeus said. “Honestly, Luke, if you expect me to help you solve puzzles, you have to give me all the pieces.”
“He was quarantined at Montreal. I just assumed he was either dead or still there. He must have recovered from whatever he had and come to Cobourg to find his uncle.”
“And now we’ll find him,” Thaddeus said. “Let’s see if we can hire a couple of horses and we’ll make a ride to Bewdley.”
They rode west for six or seven miles to the town of Port Hope before they turned north. Bewdley was situated at the tip of Rice Lake, Thaddeus said, and although he had preached there on occasion, the Wesleyan Methodists, a denomination at odds with his own Methodist Episcopals, had made great inroads in the area. He did allow, however, that the Church of England appeared to be the most popular in the township.
Bewdley was a very small town indeed, and Luke wondered how his father had ever gathered enough people together for the meeting at which he had wrestled a heckler to the ground. There was a sawmill, a general store, and an inn, along with a scattering of houses, none of them particularly imposing. It would be the timber trade, he supposed, that kept Bewdley going, and he wondered how the town would fare now that Britain’s railways no longer needed Canadian wood.
When they asked for directions at the general store, the storekeeper directed them along a road that led northwest. As the man was also the postmaster, he handed them two letters and asked if they would mind delivering them, “seeing as how Mr. Harliss hasn’t been in for weeks, and you’re going there anyway.” Luke recognized the letter he had himself sent, and, with a sinking heart, suspected that the other one was from John Porter. He tucked his own letter away in his pack. If this was the George Harliss they were looking for, there was no point in delivering it. If he wasn’t, there was even less purpose in doing so.
They found the Harliss farm down a narrow road that was overgrown with grass and weeds. They might have gone right past the cabin, it was so hidden by gnarled lilac and sapling trees, but the sound of an axe slapping against wood made them stop and take a closer look through the bushes. There was only the faintest evidence of a path, and when they found it, it was deep in fallen leaves. It was clear that few people had walked from the cabin to the road in recent days, nor had anyone ventured down the path to the clearing.
The cabin, when they found it, was tiny and lopsided, a settler’s shanty, built many years ago and unimproved since then. They followed the sound of the axe around to the back, where perhaps two acres had been cleared, the scanty crops harvested. Beyond that, there were only trees.
“Not much has been accomplished here, has it?” Thaddeus remarked.
“No. And it doesn’t look much like the fine farm he described in his letters.” Harliss had apparently been here for several years. Luke thought of the many acres he had chopped and burned, and the progress that his brother’s Huron farm had seen in much the same amount of time.
They crossed the field to where a thin young man was attempting to fell a large oak, his axe pinging off the dense wood. With every stroke he made, the axe head tangled in the branches of a stumpy cedar close by, hindering the effectiveness of his effort. Not far away, an older man was digging at a stump. They stopped when they saw the Lewises and waited while they crossed the field.
“Are you George Harliss?” Thaddeus asked, and when he received a nod in affirmation, he turned to the boy. “And are you Jack Porter?”
“Who wants to know?” The reply was surly, the boy’s face narrowed in suspicion.
“We have news of your family.”
“My family’s dead, as far as I know,” Jack said. “They died of being Irish.”
“Not all of them,” Luke said.
At this, the older man spoke up. “Who are you anyway? Why have you come here?”
“I’m Luke Lewis, and this is my father, Thaddeus. I’ve come from Kingston, where I was helping in the fever sheds. I wrote you a letter.”
Harliss spat. “Haven’t been to town since spring.”
Luke wasn’t sure how to proceed. He was about to tell these men that nearly all of their family was dead or missing, and yet he had to do it in such a way that he could offer them some hope as well. After all, there were still Anna and Maggie to think of. He was grateful when his father spoke, addressing Jack directly.
“Your sister Anna is in Kingston. She’s being looked after by a very kind woman, but she’s anxious to find her family. We have every reason to believe that your other sister, Margaret, is alive as well, and we were attempting to find her when we discovered your name on the passenger lists in Cobourg.”
Jack Porter was very still as he asked, “And Ma and Pa?”
“I’m afraid they died of the fever. I’m sorry.”
Jack’s shoulders sagged. “Yes. I was sure that was the case, otherwise they’d have been here by now.”
“We’d best go up to the cabin and you can tell us what you know.” Harliss walked over to Jack and took the axe from his hand. “C’mon boy, you should go sit down.”
There was a bench at the back door by the well, and Jack sat down heavily. Harliss lowered himself down beside the boy and looked expectantly at the Lewises, but instead it was Jack who spoke.
“They took me off the boat at Montreal,” he said. “The doctor there said I had fever, and it’s true, I was burning up. The others were told they had to go on without me. Pa told me that when I got better I was to stop at a place called Cobourg, as that was the nearest port to Uncle George’s farm, and that he would leave word with the emigrant agent there that I was expected. He’d leave a little money, he said, and directions on how to reach Bewdley and the farm.”
These must have been comforting words to Jack’s ears, Luke thought, this notion that he would get better and join the family again. John Porter must have believed that he was saying a final goodbye to his oldest son, but he had hidden it for the boy’s sake.
“My fever went away in a few days,” Jack said. “It comes back now and then, but it wasn’t the same fever that was killing everyone else. When I got better, they stuck me on a boat and sent me on. They said they needed the bed for someone else.”
Luke nodded. “Yes, they would have done. The hospitals have been overflowing with sick.”
“I got off at Cobourg and went to the agent like Pa said to, but he had no message for me, and no money either. I didn’t know what to do. They fed me a little and tried to make me get on another steamer, but when I said I wouldn’t go, they gave me money for a bed for the night. The next day I asked the way to Bewdley. I thought maybe Uncle George could help me look for the others, but of course I thought Uncle George had a fine, working farm and all kinds of money to spare. I didn’t expect this.” He looked around him in disgust.
Harliss said, “It will be one day, my boy. I’d been counting on your father to lend a hand, mind you, and the others to work as well. But even if it’s just you and me, we can build it up.”
Not unless you manage to clear your land a little faster, Luke thought.
Jack looked at his uncle. “You don’t even know how to cut the trees down,” he said. “At the rate we’re going, it will be a hundred years before you have a farm.”
“Be that as it may,” Thaddeus said, “we have some other issues to deal with first.”
Luke was glad that his father had interjected with this. Jack Porter was obviously profoundly disappointed in his uncle and spoiling for a fight over it.
“Perhaps Luke, here, would be the best person to tell you what happened to your father. He was there at the time.”
“By the time they reached Kingston, your parents were both showing signs of infection,” Luke said. “They were quarantined there. Your mother died. And although your father survived the fever, and appeared to be getting better, he died a few days later. I’m sorry.”
“He was getting better? But he died anyway? And how does that happen then?”
“It happens,” Luke said. “Sometimes the fever leaves a person with congestion, or it affects the kidneys. It’s not that uncommon.” Except that John Porter was also left a green ribbon along with his pneumonia.
“And Maggie? What happened to Maggie?”
“Some of your luggage went missing, and no one was sure where it was sent. Your parents and Anna went one way and Maggie the other in an attempt to track it down.”
“Da would have told her the same as me,” Jack said. “She would have asked the agent at Cobourg if there was any message for her.”
“There was, of course, no message, but she did find out that her trunk had been sent on to Toronto. We think she followed it.”
Jack sighed, but suspicion had returned to Harliss.
“Why are you botherin’ yourselves about this anyway? There’s hundreds of missing Irish. Are you going to track them all down?”
“My son’s initial motivation was to try to find what is left of Anna’s family,” Thaddeus said. “She is being looked after, but her current situation is less than ideal.”
Jack snorted. “There is no situation in the world that would be ideal for that whelp. They say our grandmother was a merrow, and I believe it, for Anna’s inherited all the traits. She brings good fortune in one hand and carries it away with the other.”
So even her own family considered her something strange. Poor Anna.
“There are some other considerations,” Thaddeus said. “There are some things that have happened that are a puzzle. As I find myself in need of diversion, I offered to help Luke try to solve it.”
“What things?” Jack asked.
Luke brought the green ribbon out of his pocket. “I found this with your father’s body.”
Jack leapt to his feet. “I thought you said Pa died of fever,” he shouted at them.
“I’m almost certain that he did,” Luke said. “He certainly had typhus. And in all probability that’s what killed him.”
“Do you know what the green ribbon means?”
“Someone told me that when it’s found with a body it signals a vigilante killing. What we don’t know is whether it was placed with him, or if he intended to leave it with someone else.”
“The green ribbon is left by Catholics,” Jack said. “If you want to know how it ended up with my father, you should ask them, since they’re the ones that murder people in their beds.” He stopped for a moment as if to consider the import of what he had just been told. “So my father was killed.”
“I don’t know that,” Luke replied. “Sometimes patients die just when you think they’re getting better. I can’t be certain this wasn’t the case with your father.”
Again George Harliss interjected. “And just how many fever victims have you found with green ribbons?”
Luke ignored him. “Do you know what happened that day? The day of the eviction?”
Jack sat down again and cradled his head in his hands. “What difference does it make?”
“Leave him alone,” Harliss said. “He’s just found out that his parents died. Why pester him with questions?”
“Because we’re looking for the truth,” Thaddeus said. “The truth … and Margaret.”
“I was there,” Jack said.
“At the eviction?”
“Yes. The bailiff knew there was going to be trouble. Too many people had been turned out, and they all blamed us. We were just doing a job and happy with the extra money we were being paid to do the teardown. Pa was uneasy when the guns came out, but we were making plans to emigrate and every penny was welcome, so we could hardly refuse.” He sighed. “You have to understand — our potatoes turned black too. Even once we’d sold our corn, there was going to be barely enough to feed us all and pay the passage as well.”
“What happened?” Thaddeus asked.
“We were just about to pull down the roof beam when a mob came along the road, yelling. They shouted at us for a few minutes and then some of them started throwing rocks.” He shrugged. “Some shots were fired, and then Gallagher fell over.”
“Do you know whose shot hit him?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It all happened so fast. Uncle David, maybe. Da was on the roof. I’m not sure if the bailiff fired or not. Suddenly everybody was running toward Gallagher, but then Pierce Mullen went after Uncle David and the priest tried to stop him. The priest and Connor Doyle.”
“And what happened after that?”
“Everybody ran. The mob, Uncle David, me. I went home and told Ma what had happened, and she was in a state until Da came in. She was sure he’d be murdered.”
Thaddeus frowned. “Why was she worried about your father? Everyone was convinced it was your uncle who had fired the shot.”
“I didn’t know that at the time,” Jack said. “All I knew was that there had been a killing. By a Porter. And our name was Porter, and we’d share the blame. It looks like Ma was right to be worried, doesn’t it? Only they waited until he was in Canada to get him.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Thaddeus pointed out. “Where did your Uncle David go?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. He just went away.”
Luke was sure that Jack wasn’t telling the whole story. Higgins had said that no Protestant would ever be convicted of shooting down a Catholic under the circumstances. After all, the Catholics had attacked first.
“Didn’t your uncle have Anna’s protection?” he said. “I was told that no one dared touch a Porter because she’s a merrow.”
“That’s such a load of nonsense,” Jack said. “Da always said she was like his mother, and that our good fortune was due to her. If that’s the case, the effect must have been diluted over the generations, because our fortune was never very great. As far as I’m concerned she’s just a strange wee thing who makes everyone nervous because of the way she looks.”
“What has this got to do with anything?” George Harliss said. “This is ancient history. Ancient Irish foolishness. It should be left in Ireland where it belongs.”
Thaddeus ignored him. “Can you think back for me, Jack? On the day of the shooting, who ran to Charley Gallagher first?”
“The priest and the Mullens.” Exactly as the priest had said, Luke thought. At least he hadn’t lied about that. Then Jack’s eyes widened. “Do you think the Mullens had something to do with Da? How could they from Ireland?”
“They’re here in Canada,” Luke said. “They were in Kingston.”
“Well, there you have it, don’t you? If you think Da was murdered, you needn’t look any further than the Mullens.”
“I’m not making that assumption,” Thaddeus said, “nor should you. We don’t know what happened. It could well be as Luke said and your father died as a result of the fever. But in the meantime, we need to find out what happened to your sister. We’ll go on to the next port after Cobourg and see if we can trace the records.”
“I’m coming with you,” Jack said.
Harliss protested. “You can’t go off and leave me now. I’m counting on you, boy.”
Jack spun to face his uncle. “And we were counting on you. A lot of good that did us, you old liar!”
Harliss began to whine and looked to Thaddeus in the hope of support. “I had no help. And I don’t know how to chop. I don’t know how to do anything. I thought it was such a grand thing that I could have my own land, but no one told me the state it would be in. I didn’t know there could be so many trees in all the world.”
“As far as I’m concerned, you can make the personal acquaintance of each and every one of them,” Jack said. “And you can do it without me.”