January 1, 1800
It is mid-afternoon. With Charles and William out on the ice no doubt yelling “Hoicks, hoicks!” and Susannah’s little girls having their nap, John White decides to take advantage of the solitude and force himself to face an unpleasant task. At his desk in the withdrawing room, he pulls a stack of bills from a compartment and leafs through them. Berczy’s bill of forty-four pounds for “fixes” around the house and Mrs. Page’s cabin can be put aside until the man comes back from England. But look at the rest of them: Abner Miles, shopkeeper, forty-eight pounds; the German tailor, one hundred and fifty-five pounds; the garrison tally, fifty-one pounds; Dr. William Warren Baldwin, ten pounds; the schoolmaster William Cooper, ninety pounds—
He throws the lot on the floor. It’s hopeless.
What is he to do? As Attorney-General, a position to which he once aspired, he now has no influence. He remembers how he helped the Gov draft the slave bill; how he made the circuits with his friend Osgoode; how he set up the Law Society of Upper Canada and laid out the governing rules for the certification of lawyers.
But Peter Hunter, the infamous Governor Poobah, wants no help from him. And Elmsley runs the whole show in the courts of the province. There are rumours that Elmsley may go to Lower Canada soon, but White knows now that there is no hope for his own advancement to Chief Justice. All that’s left to him of any import is the drafting of the land grants, and that brings only the daily squabbles, accusations, and insults from Jarvis.
The special friends he has in this small world—Peter and Eliza Russell—seem almost as despairing as he is. He can do nothing to help them, nor can they offer him respite.
He has heard nothing from Marianne or Ellen. What would they have to say to him anyway, if they could bring themselves to put quill to paper? They hate him. He did write one letter to Ellen and then threw it into the hearth. It’s hopeless to try to explain the inexplicable.
There can be no future with Susannah. If they could ever marry—the most unlikely of events—how could he take on the expenses of her two little girls?
“Moping melancholy” is the phrase that pops into his mind now to describe his woes. Looking back on his time in Upper Canada, he can trace a slope downwards into despair. Did he not once complain to William Osgoode of his unhappiness? Did he not even use that term “moping melancholy”? He seems to remember that his friend laughed at the phrase and tried to cheer him by encouraging him to think his efforts would be rewarded with promotion to Chief Justice. But that hope—indeed, all his hopes—are gone, gone, gone. “Moping melancholy,” yes, a pretentious phrase perhaps, but one that exactly sums up his present state in the pit of the inferno.
He pours the rest of the sherry from the decanter into his glass. His head pounds, and the blood from his nose trickles down onto his upper lip. He wipes it away with a napkin that lies beside the decanter.
There is a frenzy of knocking on his front door. Mrs. Page is in the kitchen making supper. As he listens to her footsteps moving towards the door, he tries to scoop up the bills from the floor and throw them behind the sofa.
“Where is he?” he hears a male voice say.
Oh, oh.
John Small bursts into the withdrawing room. “A word with you, sir,” he says, coming so close to White’s chair that he has no room to stand. A tall man, Small looms over him, one of his hands extended in a fist.
“You are upset, Small. Please sit down.”
“Ah, sir, those words tell me a good deal. You know why I have come today.”
“I have no idea. But let us converse like reasonable gentlemen. I cannot talk to you while you are standing over me. Please, sit.” White gestures to a chair.
Small sits down, then scrapes the chair across the floor so that it faces White’s. They are so close now their knees are almost touching.
Susannah hovers in the doorway of the withdrawing room, obviously wondering what she should do. She twists her hands into her apron.
“Please leave us to talk, Mrs. Page, but in a few minutes you might bring us some wine.”
“No wine for me, woman. I want simply to have a few minutes alone with your master.”
Susannah leaves. White takes a deep breath and waits.
“Well?”
“You have said things to that bastard Smith about my wife.”
“I may have. What are you implying?”
“He has been very liberal in certain scurrilous communications to the Elmsleys. They have passed on this communication to others, particularly to the Powells. Now the whole town is talking about my wife.”
Small bobs his head from side to side as he says this, and the wig he wears slips to one side. He tears it off with one hand and places it on his knee. He runs his other hand through his mess of black hair. He is wearing a frock coat with silver buttons, one that seems too grand for his lowly station as Clerk of the Executive Council. But White notes the stains down the front of his waistcoat as if he had risen suddenly from his dinner table and upset a glass of grog over himself.
“What are you staring at, White? Does it give you pleasure to see me in this state?”
“I stare merely because I have no idea why you have come here today and why, having done so, you are telling me about your wife.”
“I demand that you publicly deny the venomous gossip that Smith has spread.”
“How can I deny it when I have no idea what exactly he said? Why do you not talk with him? He, according to you, is the man who has spread the gossip.”
“The bastard has flown the coop, and no one knows when he will come home to roost. But does it matter? You are the one who started the rumours. He spoke directly to Elmsley and repeated, word by word, phrase by phrase, what you told him at the goddamn subscription ball. Out with it, White.” Small raises his fist and whacks it down on the arm of the chair. “What did you say?”
“It is possible that he may have said more or less than I told him. If you will kindly repeat the exact tale which he communicated to the Chief Justice, then I will know whether there is anything to deny or not.”
Oh, I relish these words.
Small stands up. He trembles from head to foot. Tears run down his cheeks, and his face becomes so purple that for a moment White worries that he will drop into an apoplectic fit.
“Sir, you are insolent. I will stay no longer in your accursed presence. Mr friend Alexander Macdonnell will call on you tomorrow morning.”
He claps his wig back on his head, searches into the pocket of his frock coat and extracts his gloves.
He throws one of them down on the floor in front of White’s chair. Then he runs from the room knocking into Susannah who has just come through the doorway carrying a tray. The bottle of wine smashes onto the floor spattering blood-red stains on the stray bills that he did not manage to hide. The front door opens, then smashes shut.
Susannah sees the glove. She screams.
“Hush, my dear,” he says, “please, please . . .”
“You know what that glove means, John?”
“Yes.”
“But you cannot . . . you must not . . .”
“Accept the challenge? I do not know what to do. Leave me, please.”
She stoops down and tries to pick up the shards of glass with her fingers, putting the broken bits onto the tray. He bends over her and pulls her to her feet. “Leave it all for now, Susannah. I must be alone. Please.”
She does as she is told. As she closes the withdrawing-room door behind her, he drops onto the sofa and shuts his eyes, trying to block out the horror of the afternoon.
He hears the patter of the boys’ feet in the hallway and Susannah’s shushing of them. The moments pass. What to do?
He remembers the character Edgar in King Lear, a production he once saw in Haymarket before he married Marianne. What was it that Edgar said? Something so pertinent to his present situation . . . Now he remembers, not the exact words probably, but something like this: “We are reconciled to death by the changes and chances of this mortal life which make us hate it.”
He looks at the jagged neck of the wine bottle lying beside the sofa. He picks it up, brings it towards the pulsing blue vein of his left wrist. It would be easy, so easy to end this mortal life . . .