The Burying Ground (7 page)

Dr. Christie saw them out the front door and handed them into the buggy while Luke trailed behind, his manners forgotten. Once he saw them off, Christie beckoned Luke back into the parlour.

“Well, well, well,” he said, “since there's tea at such an unexpected time of day, we might just as well finish it off. It will save Mrs. Dunphy some trouble later if we make a meal of this.” He scooped a gingersnap off the plate and crunched it loudly.

Luke was too dumbfounded to eat anything. He had hoped to nurture his chance encounter, of course, but he hadn't expected it to turn into anything more than a nodding acquaintanceship. He didn't know what would be expected of him at a social occasion. And he certainly didn't like the sound of “unmarried girls all aflutter.” He hoped he wouldn't be invited to anything that involved dancing, or drinking, or any of the other temptations that his father had always warned him against. He didn't know how to dance, and had never touched anything stronger than beer.

“Well, my boy, I must send you off to the city more often,” Christie said, snatching another gingersnap. “That's just the sort of person who could do us some good in terms of raising the tenor of the practice.”

“How?” Luke asked. He had only the vaguest notion of how connections worked, since he had never had any.

“Well,” Christie said, “she might introduce us to a better class of patient.”

“In Yorkville?”

“There are not many, I admit. But there are a few. Although I'm not sure they pay their bills any more promptly than anybody else. Still, they were a decorative pair of women, weren't they? Nothing wrong with having a couple of fine-looking ladies in your parlour.”

“I suppose not.”

“Of course not! Now,” he said, pouring himself another cup of tea and settling himself back comfortably, “tell me everything that happened.”

The pounding of feet on pavement. The shattering of glass. Shouts in the street.

Luke woke up trembling and drenched in sweat. He sat up in bed and tried to calm his panicked breathing and still his wildly pounding heart. Slowly he calmed down and oriented himself. He was in bed. He was in Stewart Christie's house. He was in Yorkville. He had had a nightmare. He must have been asleep for some time if the positioning of the sliver of moon in the sky was any indication. The day's events had conjured frightening memories, he decided. Being trapped between a burning building and an excited crowd had taken his mind back to Montreal.

Ben had been standing by the front window of Ferguson's book shop. “There's a mob out there,” he said. “I could hear something before — voices and a few cheers — but it sounded as though it was quite a long way away. I couldn't tell where it was coming from at first, but now it seems to be moving this way.”

“Who are they?” Luke asked.

“The same crowd you saw this afternoon, I expect.”

Luke had been returning to the shop after the delivery of a parcel of books to a customer at the edge of the city limits when he noticed a stream of people headed south toward the river. Just like today, or rather yesterday, he supposed it was now, he feared a fire or some other catastrophe, and wondered if he could be of some assistance. He followed the crowd along the street to St. Anne's Market, recently conscripted to house the Parliament of the United Province of Canada. A mob was assembled in front of the massive porch at the front of the building — a restless, surly bunch that muttered and shouted in English.

“No money for traitors!”

“Go back to England!”

“You'll be the last governor we'll ever have, Elgin!”

As Luke watched, a distinguished-looking gentleman flanked by policemen emerged from the porch. He realized that it must be Lord Elgin, the aristocratic governor general of Canada, whose sympathies were said to be aligned with the current reform government of Baldwin and LaFontaine. Elgin ignored the crowd and made his way to a waiting carriage.

Luke could see that some of the people at the front of the crowd had arms raised to launch turnips and potatoes obtained from the nearby market stalls. As they threw them, the vegetables came perilously close to hitting the governor general. He appeared oblivious to the assault, but as soon as he reached his carriage the crowd surged forward, shoving against Elgin's servants and a handful of police. The noise was deafening. Luke turned and fled back along the street toward the bookshop. It was an ugly scene and he wanted no part of it.

“Ah,” Ben said, when Luke related what he had seen, “Lord Elgin must have signed the Rebellion Losses Bill into law. It's an unpopular move, but I didn't think his opponents would go so far as to attack him physically.”

The Rebellion Losses Bill was a piece of legislation designed to compensate those in Lower Canada who had lost property in the Rebellion of 1837. A similar bill had already been applied to Upper Canada, where a nearly simultaneous rebellion had been led by William Lyon Mackenzie. In Quebec, however, there was violent opposition to the bill from the old political elite who were pining for the power they had lost when the colony was granted its own government and from the merchants whose commercial empires were in danger of dissolving in the sudden economic depression. They were cheered on, aided and abetted by the anti-Catholic Orange Societies. All three groups saw the bill as an opportunity to wrest power away from the Reform government that had been elected.

“Treason!” they cried. “The government is paying out compensation to those who caused the rebellion in the first place.” It was an issue tailor-made to discredit the coalition led by French Canadian Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and English Canadian Robert Baldwin and to call into question the loyalty of everyone who supported them, from Reform proponents to Roman Catholics to French Canadians, the last by virtue of their language and origins alone.

Luke was familiar with the old “loyalty to Britain” mantra that had been used so effectively in the past to shore up the position of privilege. He had heard his father rail on about the ruling Tory elite in Upper Canada, and how they had used the Methodist Episcopal Church's American roots to claim that Methodists were, by definition, a threat to the Crown. It was an old, tired ploy, but the Rebellion Losses Bill could well be the spark that would fan it into flames once more.

“What do you think will happen?” Luke asked.

“I don't know,” Ben said. “But if they've gone so far as to pelt a British lord with old neeps and tatties, they may be prepared to go further. There will be trouble tonight, I'm afraid. One of us should stay up, to protect the store if there's a riot.”

“We'll both stay up,” Luke said, although he wasn't entirely sure what he could do if a mob descended on the bookshop. But then again, why should they? Ben had made no public show of support for anyone, Tory or Reformer, and Luke had been so busy with his exams that he had only barely been aware of the crisis that had been brewing.

That evening, Ben locked the shop door and put the
C
losed
sign in the window. Luke went upstairs and heated up two bowls of soup and took them, along with some bread and cheese, downstairs to where Ben was waiting. He had no sooner placed the food on the little table by the stove at the back of the store when they heard the clang of the fire brigade coming down the street. Ben ran to the door and flung it open.

“Loyal Britons, join us!” a man called from the wagon. “On the Champ-de-Mars! Come to the Château Ramezay!”

A newsboy running behind the hook and ladder wagon threw a thin paper at Ben's feet. It was a special issue of the
Montreal Gazette
rushed into print as an extra evening edition. “The Disgrace of Great Britain Accomplished” the headline screamed, and below it “Canada Sold and Given Away — Rebellion Is the Law of the Land.”

“They must have had it already printed, to get it out on the streets so fast,” Luke said. “It's only been a couple of hours since Elgin was at Parliament.”

“I don't know what kind of crowd they'll get over at the Château,” Ben said. Château Ramezay was the current Government House, the residence that Elgin used when he stayed in Montreal. “Maybe no one, now that the bill is law. Maybe a lot of people. But there will be speeches, I suspect. A lot of ranting. It will take some time to get a mob mobilized, if there is to be one. It could be a long night.”

“Let's eat,” Luke said. “And then we'll watch together.”

It was nine o'clock when the distant roar of the crowd swelled and drew nearer. The mob was streaming down Notre Dame Street with lighted torches, shouting and smashing as they went. Ben shaded his lamp and stood to the side of the window so he wouldn't be seen. Luke grabbed the poker from beside the stove and stood at the ready, a few feet from the front door. If anyone broke in, he would defend the shop, and Ben, from anything they might do.

The crowd seemed to be focusing on the establishments of known Reform supporters, Ben reported, rather than indulging in full-scale destruction. They watched as the mass of people marched west, fuelled by indignation and alcohol and led by the hook, ladder, and hose brigade.

“There are thousands of them,” Ben said. “I'm guessing they're headed for the Parliament Building.”

They stood and watched for an hour or more, until the crowd began to thin, the stragglers too cold or too drunk to keep pace. They relaxed then, and Ben turned to Luke.

“You should get some rest. I think the worst has passed us over, for tonight anyway.”

He had no sooner spoken the words than they heard a renewed disturbance, one voice strong above the others.

“Let's get the Sodomite,” it said.

“No, it's Reformers were after,” came a slurred reply.

“Reformers, Catholics, nancies — they're all scum. We should clean 'em right out of the city.” And then there was a crash as the front window of the shop smashed, a flying shard of glass hitting Ben in the face.

Luke rushed forward as two men began pounding at the door in an attempt to force it. He slipped the lock and flung it wide, his poker held high. And then he let it fall, cracking it against a head, then a shoulder, then a shin.

Fortunately, the men had been drinking heavily. They stood, befuddled by the sudden attack.

“Go on,” Luke hissed from the dark shadow of the shop. “You have no business here. Join the others. Go get the Reformers.”

“He hit me,” one of them whined. “We should burn him out.”

“We have no torch. We'll have to come back later.”

And then they staggered back out to Notre Dame Street in pursuit of the more focused protesters.

Ben grabbed a cloth and held it against his bleeding face. Luke gently pulled it away to find that the flying glass had carved a two-inch gash in Ben's cheek.

“This needs to be sewn up,” he said.

Ben shook his head. “I'm not leaving the shop. No one should be on the streets tonight.”

“At least let me bandage it.”

Luke found a freshly laundered towel and ripped it into strips, then tied them, as best he could, over the cut. “You'll have a scar.”

“I'll just look all the more rakish,” Ben replied, but Luke could see that he was shaken by the assault.

“How did they know?” Luke asked.

“Everyone knows everything about everybody in this place. It's too small a city for secrets. I've always been careful. If you're careful, no one seems to make an issue of it.”

“They did tonight.”

“Those men were drunk. They won't even remember what they did. In the meantime, we'd better see what we can find to board over the window.”

There were packing crates at the back of the store. Luke hammered them apart and used the wood to fashion a barrier against further attack, and Ben tacked up a curtain that would provide some protection against the cold night air.

And then they waited, listening, but it appeared that Ben was right. Their assailants had been too drunk to remember that they were hunting nancies as well as Reformers.

The next morning they locked the shop door behind them and ventured out into the streets to hear that the unimagin­able had occurred. The unruly crowd, aided by the fire brigade's long ladder, had rammed open the front doors of the Parliament building, where the legislature had been sitting in a late session. Rioters stormed up the stairs and into the chamber. They were met by fierce resistance from the members of parliament themselves. Then the crowd outside pried up paving stones and began hurling them through the windows. One of the chunks of pavement struck a gaslight. The shade ignited. The fire spread. And by the early hours of the next morning the Parliament Building was a smoking ruin.

Luke and Ben stood in the street in front of what had once been the seat of the government of Canada. Lost along with the building were the library and archives, twenty-three thousand books in all, a chronicle that stretched back to the very first European settlement of the country.

“The building was just stone and mortar,” Ben said, “but the books can never be replaced. Canada's history is gone.” The man who loved anything printed on paper had tears in his eyes. For him, the loss of so much knowledge overshadowed anything that had happened to him personally.

The madness continued for days. Rioters took over the downtown area and surrounded the Government House. Prime Minister LaFontaine's house was sacked, his stables burned, his furniture and library destroyed. All across the city, Reformers' houses and businesses were attacked.

LaFontaine and his ally Baldwin calmly reassembled the government and recalled the legislative assembly, using Château Ramezay as a meeting house. Police, even assisted by a makeshift militia of Irish Catholics and French Canadians, were unable to control the frenzy. Finally the military was called in to restore order, but was given extraordinary instructions — as little force as possible was to be used to contain the rioters. Restraint was to be the order of the day.

In hindsight, Luke could see how effective this policy had been. There were further incidents, to be sure, but eventually the excitement died down. Reformers from other places rushed in to provide support. There were a small number of arrests. But there were no martyrs.

From Luke's perspective, the main casualty in the disturbance had been Ben. Some inner vitality had burned away as surely as the books had. And then the malady that made him so thin gained a greater hold. It had been a downhill course from there.