Toronto: September 1840
“So you’re finally gonna let me have a peek at the legendary Uncle Seamus?” Beth said to Marc as the brand-new brougham veered off Brock Street north onto the bush-path that meandered its way up to Spadina House.
Marc gave eighteen-month-old Maggie an extra dandle on his right knee and responded to his wife’s remark in a similar bantering tone: “It’s not as if we’ve been hiding him under a bushel, and the dear fellow can’t help it if his antics have made him notorious in the stuffy drawing-rooms of Tory Toronto, now can he?”
“Would anyone be paying attention at all if the man wasn’t a Baldwin?” Brodie Langford called back from his perch on the driver’s bench. He was able to turn only partway around, not because he felt obliged to keep an eye on the pair of spirited horses in front of him but because he did not wish to remove his arm from the willing shoulder of his fiancée seated beside him.
“Possibly not,” Marc laughed as he held Maggie up so she could see the forest flowing past them and marvel at the goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace that bloomed flamboyantly along the edge of the path and in the beaver meadows here and there along their route. It was Maggie’s first trip out of town, and she was wide-eyed with wonder.
“Well, he’s been here since July, hasn’t he?” Beth said without turning her own gaze away from the view on her side of the carriage or disturbing the baby asleep against her breast. “And he hasn’t shown up at Baldwin House or anywhere else that I’ve heard.”
“Seamus Baldwin emigrated here for the sole purpose of retiring to the bosom of his family. Why should he wish to leave the company of his brother and nephew and his nephew’s children and the delights of Spadina-in-the-woods and brave the urban ruckus of the city?”
“What I’d like to know,” Diana Ramsay said from under Brodie’s left arm, “is what exactly makes him notorious?”
Diana was governess to Robert Baldwin’s sons and daughters, and although stationed in the Baldwin’s town-house at Front and Bay Streets with her charges, she had accompanied them often out to their country retreat, Spadina.
“But surely you of all people would know?” Marc teased. “You’ve seen the great man up close more than any of us.”
“I have, and as far as I can see, he’s a jolly elf of an Irishman who loves a jig, a sentimental song and a good joke. What’s more, he’s become the darling of Mr. Baldwin’s children, especially little Eliza.”
It was to celebrate nine-year-old Eliza’s birthday that Marc, Beth, Maggie, baby Marcus Junior, Brodie and Diana were jogging along towards Spadina on an early September morning in full sunshine under a cloudless sky. Brodie had just taken possession of the brougham – with its elegant, retractable roof, Moroccan leather seats and oak trim – and although he could afford to have several servants (and did), he had not yet relinquished the reins to anyone but himself.
“Ah, but what songs! What jigs! What antics!” Brodie laughed as he gave Diana a discreet squeeze.
She gave him in return a gentle elbow in the ribs. “You’ve only seen him once,” she chided, “and that was in July just after he came.”
“It’s you two who are going to be notorious,” Marc said with mock solemnity. “Perhaps you should shorten your engagement, eh?”
The young couple laughed, as they were meant to, but the date set for their wedding, more than a year off, was not really a laughing matter. Although now a wealthy young gentleman and budding banker, Brodie was not yet twenty-one and Diana, several years older, had accepted his proposal only when he promised to wait until all four of Robert Baldwin’s children were comfortably settled in school and she could, in good conscience, leave them in the hands of another governess.
Maggie squealed and clapped her hands as a scarlet tanager flew up out of a pine tree ahead of them and fluttered in surprise over the horses’ heads.
Marc sat back with his daughter in his lap and let her excitement play itself out. How much more content could a man get? he thought. Last April Beth had presented him with a son, Marcus Junior (now purring away in his mother’s arms). Soon after, work began on the five-room addition to Briar Cottage, more than doubling its size, and by midsummer it was completed. Maggie had a nursery to herself, Marc a study and library, Beth a sewing-room (also used as an office in her capacity as owner and manager of Smallman’s ladies shop on fashionable King Street), and their new live-in servant, Etta Hogg, had a small but satisfactory bedroom. And for all of them, a spacious parlour with a fieldstone fireplace. Their long-time servant, Charlene Huggan, had left them in June to marry Etta’s brother, Jasper. The couple took up housekeeping next door in the Hogg family home, caring for Jasper’s sickly mother and doing their best to expand the Hogg dynasty.
Whenever he was not supervising the construction – carried out by Jasper and his new business partner, Billy McNair – or keeping watch on an unpredictably mobile Maggie, Marc found some time to assist his friend Robert Baldwin in his law chambers and to confer with Robert, Francis Hincks and other key members of the Reform party. Even politics, against all odds, seemed to be moving in their favour as both Reformers and Tories continued to lobby and plot in the run-up to the new order of things: the union of Upper and Lower Canada in a single colony with a common parliament. The Act of Union had been passed in the British Parliament in July, and it required only the Governor’s official declaration to become an irreversible reality, a move widely expected early in the new year. After that, of course, fresh elections would be held in each of the constituent provinces, and then it would soon become apparent whether French and English, Catholic and Protestant, Tory and Reformer could resolve their ingrained differences and make the unified state prosper where its individual parts had so glaringly failed. Unbenownst to the Tories, however, the Upper Canadian Reformers, last February, had concluded an accord with the Quebec radicals, and their hopes were high that together they could effectively dominate the new parliament. And that alliance had held and been kept secret now for over six months.
“You aren’t gonna talk politics today, are you?” Beth said as they rounded a bend and came in sight of Spadina. It was not really a question.
“I wouldn’t think of it,” Marc said. “We’re here to celebrate a little girl’s birthday, aren’t we?”
A skeptical tittering from the driver’s bench seemed the only comment required.
***
It was a glorious late-summer day, and the festivities were organized to take full advantage of its blessings. A picnic luncheon was to be served on the broad, sweeping lawn behind the grand Georgian manor-house that Dr. William Warren Baldwin had designed and had had constructed out here northwest of the city proper. Extra servants had been commandeered just for the occasion; the fruits of the season – snow-apples, melons, grapes and several species of sweet, ripe nuts – had been gathered and prepared; and three trestle-tables had been set out in white-clothed splendour beneath a towering elm. For Robert Baldwin, a widower now for four years, this birthday celebration was both a homage to the absent Eliza and a joyous, grateful day of thanksgiving for the one still alive and thriving.
Before being ushered onto the picnic grounds, Marc and his party were greeted at the front door by Robert and his father and mother, and seconds later Beth was introduced to, and took a first impression of, the infamous Uncle Seamus. Before her, holding onto her gloved hand and kissing it lightly, was a short, wiry gentleman impeccably dressed in morning-coat and freshly pressed trousers. He sported a great shock of grey-white hair, which alone gave the illusion of bulk and height, but it had been at least partly tamed by pomade. The face was angular and pixyish, completely unlike the strong, regular and handsome features of his younger brother William and his nephew Robert. But it was the eyes that arrested Beth’s attention. They were large and a pale blue, their size and roundness exaggerated by the bony sockets that attempted to contain them, as if a pair of moonstones had been inadvertently dropped there and left to fend for themselves. When he stepped back and straightened up, Beth noticed that his clothes, though covering his nimble limbs appropriately enough, seemed somehow incongruous, as if his body had suddenly shrunk inside them. Beth had the feeling that he had come out of the womb as a fully-formed gnome and had grown older and marginally larger in slow, measured degrees.
“I am most honoured to meet the lady who takes such good care of our Mr. Edwards,” smiled the elfin uncle.
“It’s been far too long between visits,” Robert said to Beth. “Your husband and I really must withdraw from politics and the law long enough to observe and enjoy the more important things in life, mustn’t we?” Then by way of illustration he reached out and took a willing Maggie out of Marc’s arms.
“You mustn’t chide yourself,” Beth said, giving the baby an affectionate squeeze. “We’ve all been far busier than we ought to. And you have four very fortunate children, who see you every day.”
“Who are already in the back yard whooping it up,” Dr. Baldwin said. “We’d better see to them, eh?”
“And I hear more little rascals coming up the drive,” Brodie said as shouts of laughter echoed through the open front door.
“You good people go on through to the garden,” Uncle Seamus said affably. “I’ll stay here and play butler. Go on with you, Miss Diana. Eliza’s been waiting for your arrival since breakfast.”
“Yes, yes,” Dr. Baldwin said. “Please do. Let us not stand upon ceremony.”
As Diana, Brodie, Robert (with Maggie tucked under his arm), Marc and Beth (babe in arms) moved down the hall towards the rear of the house, Beth whispered to Marc, “Robert’s uncle seems like a proper gentleman, doesn’t he?”
“Disappointed, are we?” Marc teased, then squeezed her hand.
Behind them a roar of laughter and a cacophony of little-girl giggles erupted.
***
It was a children’s party all the way. Eliza was Robert’s favourite, and he had spared no expense and overlooked no detail to make the day as perfect as possible, given the whims and vagaries of nine-year-olds. Eliza’s older sister Maria and her brothers William and Robert had been assigned various supervisory and administrative roles, and carried them out with a lawyerly eye for protocol and decorum. The birthday girl herself was supported by a cast of almost two dozen of her peers, who included not only several cousins and the children of Robert’s friends and associates (Robert Sullivan, his law partner, Clement Peachey, the firm’s solicitor, and Francis Hincks) but the offspring of neighbours in town and half a dozen youngsters from the nearby cluster of homes housing several of the mill-hands who worked for the local miller, Seth Whittle. Even eleven-year-old Fabian Cobb had ridden out in one of the special carriages arranged by their host, seduced as he was by visions of bonbons and prizes for the swift and dextrous.
For the first hour or so the children were allowed to roam freely about the wide lawns, amusing themselves nicely with improvised games of tag and Simon Says, punctuated by frequent trips to the sweets table where peppermints, Turkish delight and macaroons seemed to be in endless supply. (This latter miracle was accomplished by three bustling, red-faced housemaids attired in black uniforms with white caps.) Meanwhile, the ladies and gentlemen reclined in garden chairs at the base of a horse-chestnut tree, sipping punch and chatting idly. Marcus Junior woke up, of course, demanding to be fed, and Maggie waddled happily in the direction of the nearest celebrant. In addition to various aunts and uncles were Marc’s party of four, Robert himself, Clement Peachey, Francis Hincks and their wives. Dr. and Mrs. Baldwin were inside supervising the parade of goodies. If Beth were puzzled by the absence of Uncle Seamus, she was too polite to comment.
Marc was beginning to wonder how Robert planned to corral the free-ranging youngsters, whose squeals and yips were growing more and more frantic, when the answer presented itself. Chalmers, the Baldwin’s elderly butler, had emerged from the house carrying a wooden pail that resembled a miniature butter-churn. Behind him he was trailed by the two youngest maids – Betsy and Edie, if Marc recalled correctly – one with a smaller pail and the other with a large bowl of what appeared to be cream. Chalmers set the churn-like contraption on a nearby table and waited for the maids to reach him. He gestured to Betsy and she carefully poured the frothy contents of the bowl into the churn. Then he took the pail from Edie and tipped it up to the rim of the churn. There followed the tinkle of ice-chips into the hollow space between the churn’s inner and outer walls. What happened next was as dramatic as a headmistress striking the school’s dinner gong!
“Ice cream!” a wee female voice trilled.
“Ice cream!”
“Ice cream!”
The cry echoed over the grass and through the shrubbery. A minute later every child, regardless of age or gender, had raced to the table where Chalmers was stoically turning the churn’s handle. He was soon ringed by children, squatting or fidgeting or hopping from foot to foot. (Even the young maids sank daintily to their knees and stared.) All eyes were on the magic bucket that they knew, or surmised, would transform ordinary cream into a chilled ambrosia you could boast about for the rest of your days. And almost as magical was the sudden silence, so deep you could detect a cricket stretching a foreleg.
“It’ll take some time, children,” Chalmers said.
“We know, we know. And we can help you churn if your hand gets tired,” offered young Fabian Cobb, who was quickly seconded by several of his male companions.
“You’re a genius,” Beth said to Robert, who was observing the scene with some satisfaction.
“It was Chalmers’ idea,” Robert said with his customary modesty.
“Won’t ice cream spoil their luncheon?” said the ever practical Diana.
“By the time it’s churned and chilled, the sandwiches and cake will have been served and eaten,” Robert said. “That is if the candies haven’t dulled their appetite entirely.”
“Surely they’ve run off those effects,” Brodie said.
At this point Maggie went tumbling to the ground just beyond Marc’s chair. He jumped up, ran over to her, picked her up in both hands, and raised her over his head. She had considered crying but decided to turn her protest into a squeal of pleasure. Marc grinned over at Beth, but she seemed preoccupied.
She was wondering why they had seen no sign of Seamus Baldwin.
***
The luncheon went as smoothly as a barrister’s summation: with the three maids serving up the sandwiches, meat tarts, and gallons of fresh milk; with Diana Ramsay leading the children in song; and with Robert cutting the birthday cake with exaggerated strokes and numerous winks. Chalmers then carried the ice cream over to the head of table, and Dr. Baldwin had the pleasure of doling it out as if it were goose and he were Father Christmas.
Following such unalloyed excitement, Governess Ramsay concluded that a few minutes quiet time was in order. So, while the adults partook of their luncheon – cold chicken, cucumber sandwiches and chilled champagne – the boys and girls slumped down in the nearest shade and dozed contentedly in the early-afternoon sun. Robert had just finished making a toast to his assembled friends and neighbours when the first notes of a pipe fluttered upon the breeze. The guests followed Robert’s gaze and the source of the music. There upon a knoll at the far edge of the yard stood the piper. At first blush it appeared to be a leprechaun materialized out of the greensward itself, for the figure was short and bandy-legged and loose-limbed and clothed entirely in Kendall-green broadcloth. Its shoes were of green leather and as pointed as an elf’s foot, and they were hopping merrily to the ethereal ditty his long, nimble fingers were producing on the Irish fife they held as lightly as a pheasant’s plume. Upon his head, but barely covering the wild sheaf of his grey-white hair, there swayed in time to the other rhythms of his body a pointed cap, topped by a tinkling bell.
Uncle Seamus had made his entrance.
While the adults gaped, this incarnation of the god Pan danced a sprightly jig that brought him floating – it seemed – across the lawn towards the resting children. Then one by one, as if awakened and entranced by the music, the little ones rose to their feet and, without guile or prearrangement, fell in behind him, prancing and lalling some wordless child’s song in tune with the melodious notes of the fife and its manic master. The white lace and muslin of the girls’ dresses and the flagrant blouses of the lads behind them fanned out on a musical breeze like so many pristine petals. It was all so innocent and beautiful and ephemeral that there was not one of the adults watching whose heart did not lurch at the sight. The melody and the gay parade seemed to go on forever, but it was less than a minute before Pan and his pipe reached a grassy knoll and the music stopped in mid-note and their goat-footed deity planted both feet on the ground, stared blue-eyed at his acolytes, and blew a single, high, fierce note – so loud the air itself seemed momentarily stunned.
“All right, my children, it’s time for the games to begin!”
At this exhortation the nymphs and dryads instantly became children once more. They cheered and chattered, and broke into their constituent groups. Pan himself, with a satisfied smile, sat down cross-legged on the knoll and proceeded to observe the games, whose nature and rewards had been predetermined by the Baldwin boys and under whose aegis they were to be executed. The adults, after giving Uncle Seamus a well-deserved round of applause, moved their chairs over to that part of the lawn where the various races and contests were to take place. Beth excused herself in order to slip a short ways off and once again feed Junior before he began making his own brand of music.
Marc noticed the two young maids begin to edge over in his direction, but they were summarily brought back to the business of clearing the luncheon tables by their superior, Miss Faye Partridge, a mannish-looking woman in her late thirties with a wizened face and a permanent glower. Marc felt sorry for Edie and Betsy, who could be no more than fifteen or sixteen years of age. They were children too, but compelled by necessity to perform adult drudgeries. Still, Robert had seen to it that they had had a share of the ice cream and had been encouraged to join Diana’s sing-along.
The games lasted almost an hour, and were ajudged a success even though two skinned knees in the sack race and a bruised elbow in the wheelbarrow event threatened to bring the party to a halt. Eliza and two other younger girls found the excitement too much, and were seen sitting in the grass near Pan the piper, pretending not to doze. Robert gave out the prizes with unashamed generosity: trinkets and toys lovingly wrapped in tissue and tied up with ribbon by Diana Ramsay days before the event. Robert would miss her as much as his four children would when she finally left to marry Brodie Langford. (A woman’s touch was needed around Baldwin House, but Robert had had only one love, and she had been taken from him.) When the last bauble had been given out, to one of the mill lads, Robert looked over the gathering and opened his mouth in order to announce that the party was over. But it was the voice of Uncle Seamus, who had not stirred from his Buddha-like position on the knoll, that carried over the assembly.
“We can’t end a birthday party,” he shouted, bouncing to his feet, “without a game of Blind Man’s Buff!”
Tired and sated as they were, the children seemed energized merely by the sound of the piper’s voice and the sheer possibility that he might raise the fife to his lips and improvise a jig. Which he did, in a brief flurry of pretty notes.
The children cheered and ran towards him. His blue eyes danced.
“Now who’s gonna tie this scarf tight around my eyes?” he called out, pulling a green scarf from around his throat and letting it flutter between a thumb and a forefinger.
“Me! Me! Me!”
Uncle Seamus laughed heartily and handed the scarf to the nearest tot. He squatted down until she was able to reach up and wrap it loosely around the upper half of his face, making the bell on his cap tinkle.
“Now I need a strong young fella to tie it tight,” he chuckled. “We don’t want any peeking, do we?”
A chorus of “no’s!” confirmed this conclusion, and Fabian Cobb stepped up and drew the folded scarf back until it was opaque and snug, and then tied a perfect reef knot to hold it in place.
At this moment, a small female voice called from the far side of the knoll, “Can we play, Uncle Seamus?”
“Edie Barr, you keep yer mouth shut or I’ll wash it out with soap!” The naysayer was Miss Partridge, the senior maid.
“Let the girls join in,” Uncle Seamus shouted. “And anyone else here who’s not forgotten how to be a child!”
Robert nodded in the direction of the two maids, and cautiously they moved into the gaggle of boys and girls surrounding Uncle Seamus. Uncle Seamus let out a whoop, tucked his fife in his belt, and began to lurch and lunge towards the children, who taunted and teased, as children have always done, just beyond the blind grasping of his fingers. Close calls produced shrieks of joyful terror or yips of satisfaction. Uncle Seamus played his role for all it was worth. His gestures were exaggerated and deliberately clownish. He hopped about with his knees bent spider-like and his arms waving like the tentacles of an octopus, and all the while hissing out a futile “Gotcha!” Whenever a tardy child did come within his reach, he pretended to stumble over a tussock of grass and let the laggard squeal away. The children were frantic with delight. Their clamour swelled to a maelstrom of uninhibited cries, like a Greek chorus that had lost its conductor. The adults looked on, open-mouthed.
Suddenly the tumult ceased. The blind old fellow had caught someone. He was clutching her waist with his bony claws. The others watched in disbelief: the game had turned. The captive stood stock-still. It was Edie Barr, her baby face and blond curls a vivid contrast with her dark maid’s uniform. She was holding her breath and trembling.
“You gotta guess who it is!” shouted the birthday girl, and her suggestion was taken up by the other participants until it became an insistent chant.
“Ah, now, that’s gonna be easy, isn’t it?” Uncle Seamus cried, and he began moving his hands down along the girl’s waist and hips, his fingers tracing but never touching their quarry.
“It’s a large boy! Right?”
“No!” came the roar of denial and delight.
The fingers now moved up the front of the girl’s body, again they lingered and wriggled, to instant laughter from the jury, but did not touch. Then Edie appeared to totter abruptly and contact was made in several, and highly inappropriate, places. It lasted for no more than a second or two, but no-one watching, even casually, would have missed the emboldened widening of the girl’s eyes and the sudden stiffening of Piper Pan’s fingers.
“It’s Miss Partridge!” he trilled.
The hysterical response of the boys and girls doubled them over with laughter. Quick as a wink, Uncle Seamus’s fingers were up over the girl’s spray of curls, and he wheeled about and just before whipping off his blindfold, shouted, “It’s Betsy Thurgood!”
“Wrong again!”
“You lose!”
“Put the mask back on, you’re still it!”
Uncle Seamus – his wrinkled, rubbery features set in a calculated grin – sank slowly to his haunches and threw his hands in the air. “Thank you, children, for a most exhilarating afternoon. But your old uncle is all elved out.”
Robert took the cue, and within minutes the children were being herded, happy but reluctant, towards the house. Meanwhile, Marc took notice of two events that might easily have gone unremarked. As she walked away from the slumped figure of Uncle Seamus, Edie Barr turned and gave him a look that was part puzzlement and part reproof. Then she glanced at Betsy Thurgood as if somehow it were her fault that she had been named captive out there, even though the girls were unalike, opposites even. Where Edie was shapely and tall and luxuriously blond, Betsy was plump and short with straight brown hair arranged in bangs. When Betsy smiled and tried to take her friend’s hand, Edie pulled away and ran towards the house. Then, at the back door, with Maggie in his arms, Marc looked back for a moment and saw, to his surprise, Uncle Seamus still seated on the grass, his head between his knees. Exhaustion? Or something else?
***
Robert was standing in the doorway of the library as Marc and his party were moving down the hall towards the foyer. “Marc, could you spare me five minutes before you go? It’s urgent.”
“Politics?” Marc said with a half-smile.
“Only indirectly.”
“Isn’t that usually the case?”
“Alas.”
“Give me a minute to visit the water-closet,” Marc said.
“I’ll wait for you in here, then.”
Marc handed Maggie over to Diana, apologized to Beth for his being delayed, and then found the smaller hallway that led to the water-closet. On his way back, he passed an open door and overheard this exchange:
“But if he loves me, why did he insult me by callin’ out your name?”
“He don’t love you like that, Edie. He don’t love nobody like that. He’s a nice old gentleman.”
Edie snorted. “You’ve got a lot to learn about men!”
There was no immediate response to this remark, and Marc was just about to carry on to the library when he heard a girl’s snuffle that quickly turned to weeping.
“I’m sorry, Betsy. I really am. My mom says I got a big mouth and a tart tongue. But you are younger than me, ya know.”
A maid’s tiff, Marc thought, the kind he had heard often during his childhood on his adoptive uncle’s estate in Kent. He sighed, and headed for the library.
***
Robert came straight to the point. “It’s my uncle, Marc. He’s getting to be a problem here and could soon be a bigger one in the city.”
“I don’t follow. How can he be of concern, isolated as he is out here in the countryside?”
Robert frowned and looked decidedly uncomfortable. But he was not a man to back away from trouble or his duty. “You saw how he behaved out there.”
“A man in his second childhood, I’d surmise, enjoying the children he didn’t have in his other life.”
“If that were only the whole story . . .”
“Seamus was a lawyer, wasn’t he? And a bachelor?”
“He was married as a young man, but his wife died in childbirth along with the babe. He never remarried.”
“Stuck to the law?”
“Yes. As a solicitor, doing the dog-work for a prestigious firm in Cork. And leading a narrow, monotonous, constricted life, I’m afraid.”
“With a personality unsuited to that kind of life?”
“In the extreme. My grandfather forbade him to pursue his first love: the stage. Well, last winter he suffered a nervous breakdown of sorts and abruptly retired – alone after thirty-five years service.”
“He had your family back in Ireland, did he not?”
“Over the years he had become increasingly estranged from them, and then when he needed them most – ”
“They were not there for him?”
“Something like that.”
“So your father suggested he might as well come out to the colony, where a ready-made and loving family awaited him?”
“My father is as perceptive as he is kind. He believed that because he and Uncle Seamus were close as children and he had known him well that my children and their many friends would be the tonic he needed to restart his life. After a furious exchange of letters and exhortations, he agreed to emigrate.”
“And it’s obvious, is it not, that the fellow loves children. And yours are out here every weekend and a good deal of the summertime. So what’s the problem?” Marc had a pretty good idea what the problem was, but he was hoping against hope that he was mistaken.
Robert smiled grimly. “I don’t believe for a second that you did not see the inappropriateness of some of his behaviour today.”
“It looked to me as if the girl deliberately leaned into him,” Marc said carefully.
“Perhaps. But it was he who invited the maid to play and he knew full well who he was grappling with. He has played this parlour game before, and he can see quite well through that fake blindfold.”
“And you think his hands lingered a bit too long where they shouldn’t have?”
Robert sighed. “He does a ventriloquist act at parties, using Edie or Betsy as his dummy, sitting on his knee and flapping their lips whenever he pokes them in the back. I must admit it’s hilarious, and our guests love it and the girls, especially Edie, don’t seem to mind. But good Lord, Marc, the man is sixty years old! And my housemaids are barely sixteen!”
“Perhaps you need to talk to him. Clear the air. Set some limits on his behaviour.”
“You’re right. And my father and I want nothing more than to do just that. But we’re also fearful of undoing the gains he has made thus far in restoring his mental and physical health. He was deeply depressed and melancholic when he first arrived. But after that display today, we may have no other choice.”
“Perhaps you could replace the maids with more mature servants.”
“You don’t really mean that, do you?”
Robert knew his friend too well. Both he and Marc felt strongly about employing girls whose family life and grinding poverty made escape their only option. Edie Barr and Betsy Thurgood were the daughters of nearby mill-hands, who themselves led a hardscrabble existence. Robert would no more think of sending his young servants home penniless any more than Marc would have returned Charlene Huggan (now Mrs. Hogg) to her abusive father in Cobourg.
“No, of course not,” Marc said, sitting down. To this point the two men had been standing beside the big mahogany table that dominated the book-lined room. Robert joined him. “But if it is even remotely possible that your uncle has a prurient interest in these girls, then you must act to protect them. They are in a real sense your wards.”
“That’s what has made the past few weeks so agonizing for my father and me. We are devout Christians, and we take the guardianship of those in our care as a solemn responsibility. So far we have made certain that my uncle’s contact with the servants is formal and usually within sight of others.”
Marc was tempted to mention the conversation he had just overheard, but felt it was unfair to prejudice either Betsy or Edie on the basis of a twenty-second bit of dialogue for which he had no context. Besides, Robert already had his suspicions about the potential improprieties. Instead, he said, “You hinted earlier in the hall that there was an indirect political implication in this business. I don’t see any except the possibility that a scandal might occur that would tarnish the magic of the Baldwin name among Reformers in the province.”
“I plan to make sure that does not happen, but there is a further and more imminent issue.”
“And that is?”
Robert reached for the macaroon dish he always kept to hand and whose contents he used like worry beads. “Uncle Seamus wants to help out in chambers. The truth is he is no longer melancholy, but simply bored.”
“But I thought he liked the outdoors: hiking and trout fishing and that sort of thing.”
“He does. And with duck and goose hunting coming up, I figured he’d be well amused. But not so. He’s determined, he says, to pay his way.”
“But I assumed it was the law that drove him nearly crazy,” Marc said.
“True, but he feels he needs to earn his keep,” Robert said with a resigned sigh. “He knows that you and I and my cousin Bob are increasingly involved in politics, leaving the day to day running of the firm in the overworked hands of Peachey and our clerks. I don’t see how I can refuse his offer. So far I’ve put him off by saying that we won’t need extra help until the assizes begin in two weeks. He’s agreed to wait.”
“But aside from the fact that the work might set back his progress or that he may turn out to be more of a burden than a help to us, what is there to worry about in the larger sense?”
“You saw the man out there today. Even without the presence of children, who do set him off in dramatic fashion, the fellow loves to play pranks and practical jokes. And my four children and two young maids will be right next door. I’m afraid he will materially disrupt the work of chambers at a time when you, I and Francis must begin devoting all our energies to the coming elections and maintaining our alliance with Louis.”
Robert was alluding to Louis LaFontaine, the leader of the radical rouge party in Quebec, and to the secret alliance that he, Marc and Francis Hincks had hammered out last winter. As the date for the proclamation of the united colony approached and the elections that must ensue shortly thereafter, Robert, as leader of the Upper Canadian Reformers, was spending more and more of his time writing to and visiting ridings across the province. He was hoping to drum up support for the nomination of strong candidates, ones who would also show a willingness to work with their French counterparts as the struggle for a responsible form of government continued. Increasingly he had been asking Marc either to accompany him or had been going off on his own as far afield as Windsor or Cornwall. That left Robert Baldwin Sullivan as the lone barrister in the firm and Clement Peachey as the sole solicitor. And while Robert didn’t need the money generated by his law practice (the family was well off), he was loath to give it up. For although he was the only man whom Reformers of all stripes trusted, he had not sought leadership nor did he enjoy it. Always he saw himself doing his duty and then retiring to the more peaceful satisfactions of his chambers.
“No need to worry,” Marc said with more assurance than he felt. “Let me take your uncle under wing when he arrives in town. I’m not due for any travel until the end of October. In that way you’ll be free to move about as you’re needed. I’ll see to Uncle Seamus in the city while you and your parents look out for him in the country.”
Robert smiled, as fully as he ever did. “I was hoping you would say that. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
“I’ll accept the compliment after the event,” Marc said.
A pre-emptive squeal from Maggie in the crowded foyer drew Marc back to his primary duties. “My daughter says it is time to go home.”
As they were settling in the brougham – Brodie, Diana, Maggie and Junior – Beth turned to Marc with a small shudder and whispered, “Did you see the look on that girl’s face when Seamus touched her?”