LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

      “Oh, my goodness, Thaddeus Lewis. I haven’t met him personally, of course, since we’re a Wesleyan congregation, but everyone knows of your father, after all that unpleasantness a few years ago. Retired, you say? That’s a shame. The church has lost a good man. Awfully good of you to pass on his respects. But tell me, what brings you to these parts?”

      Luke was a little taken aback. He was perfectly willing to trade on his father’s good name as a preacher. He hadn’t expected to be welcomed on the strength of Thaddeus’s reputation as a solver of crimes. He hoped that if he were indeed offered a bed for the night, he wouldn’t be expected to regale his host with details of the infamous Simms killings, or his father’s role in the discovery of a murderous wild boy in the sand hills of Wellington. Such lurid tales were novelties, he supposed, and apparently people had little else to talk about, but he had recounted what little detail he knew far too many times.

      “I’m on my way to visit my father,” he said in reply to the preacher’s question. “Unfortunately, I seem to have missed the last stage. I could walk it, but I don’t fancy navigating the way by moonlight.”

      “Very wise, very wise,” the preacher said. “There’s a rough crowd on the roads these days. All the emigrants coming in — they all say they’re looking for work, but when they don’t find it, they have no compunction about taking what they need.”

      Luke wondered if the brother of the man from the Irish settlement was one of these, and if the want of a few coppers was enough to turn him into a thief. He resolved to make every effort to find Charley Gallagher.

      One of the women stepped forward then. She had had time to get a close look at Luke’s cheap and travel-worn apparel. “Have you a place for tonight?” she asked.

      “I thought I’d just ask the local livery if I could bed down in the straw,” he said. “But from what you tell me, strangers aren’t exactly welcome these days.”

      The woman turned to the preacher. “This boy can stay with us if he likes. It would be an honour to have the son of such a famous preacher.” She turned back to Luke. “I’m afraid our little house is quite full, but you’re welcome to a meal and the kitchen bed if you can find no better.”

      The other women looked quite put out. They hadn’t spoken up soon enough and now they’d been trumped.

      “I’d be much obliged, ma’am,” Luke said. It might cost him a few tales about his father, and perhaps a prayer or two, but the Methodists had not failed him, bless their hearts.

      Luke found not only a bed and a meal, but a ride. The Methodist woman, whose name was Mrs. Howard, was married to a book merchant who, as it happened, had business in the town of Guelph the next day. Mr. Howard was perfectly happy to accommodate a travelling companion, and they set off the next morning after what seemed to Luke a rather late breakfast. It was fully eight o’clock by the time Howard collected a horse and trap from the nearby stable.

      The Guelph Road was very busy in comparison to the Huron Road, where he and Rumball had sometimes driven for miles without encountering another soul. Now Luke saw everything from coaches to smart traps, farm wagons, single horsemen, and pedestrians heading west toward Galt.

      Mr. Howard obligingly deposited him at the coach inn, where he had only a short wait before he climbed aboard a stage for the final leg of the journey to Toronto. He found himself sharing the coach with a well-dressed man and an older woman. The woman snatched her skirts away from Luke’s dusty boots when he climbed in to sit beside her, but the man seemed friendly enough and inclined to chat.

      He was a lawyer, he said, on his way back to Toronto after trying a case in Guelph. “A nasty case of aggravated assault. It’s a wonder the victim survived at all, and I’m sure he won’t be quite right as the result of it. Culprit safely locked away now, of course.”

      “One of the Irish, I suppose,” sniffed the woman. “They’re causing trouble everywhere.”

      “On the contrary,” the lawyer replied. “Boy from quite a good family, in fact. Just goes to show that you can never tell.”

      As they continued east, they were passed by a great number of wagons, carts, and drays piled high with luggage and household goods.

      “Where is everyone going?” Luke asked. “It looks like the whole world is moving house.”

      “They are,” the woman said. “Everyone who has somewhere else to go is getting away from the ports, because of the malignant fever. My daughter lives just on the outskirts of Toronto, but I’m not taking any chances. I’m on my way to collect her now. She and the children will stay with me until the contagion passes. It’s the emigrants, you see. They’ve brought it with them and now it’s spreading everywhere.”

      “Malignant fever?” Luke had heard of it, but only in passing. Cholera was the usual companion of emigration, and even in his short life there had been a number of epidemics that had raged through Upper Canada.

      “That and ship’s fever,” the lawyer said, “although I’m not sure if they’re one and the same. Any emigrant who looks ill is supposed to be held in quarantine, but it seems as though a dreadful number of them are slipping through.”

      As they passed the long miles, the traffic increased, although it began to change in nature. Those who were walking were, for the most part, respectable-looking enough — farmwives or labourers — but here and there they would pass knots of sullen-looking men who could have done duty as scarecrows placed in a field of grain to chase the birds away. These men would step aside and let them pass, but they grumbled as they did so. Occasionally, it appeared that there were whole families trudging along the road, wives and children straggling along in the rear, ragged, thin, and scowling.

      They were like grey shadowy wraiths on the road, haunting the lanes with their cheekbones jutting in reproach. What work could these thin ghosts find in a land that was still being wrested away from the trees, and whose soil was so recently broken to the plow? No one would hire these men, Luke knew, even if there hadn’t been fear of the diseases they brought.

      It was well after noon when the coach halted at a stop in order to water the horses. Luke climbed down, weary from the ride, and walked across the road to where a large oak tree offered a shady place to sit. As he left Galt, the good Mrs. Howard had pressed a box on him. Now he opened it to discover most of a loaf of bread and a large wedge of cheese wrapped in cloth.

      As he lowered himself down on the soft grass, he noticed a woman and a boy sitting in a heap beside the watering trough. The woman seemed exhausted and indifferent to their arrival, huddled into the tatters of clothing that hung off her. But the boy eyed him curiously, his eyes widening at what had been hidden by the cloth. Luke was ravenous, and stuffed a huge piece of the crusty bread into his mouth. But he was disconcerted by the boy’s stare. He pulled another chunk from the loaf and held it out.

      “Are you hungry?” he asked. “Would you like this?”

      The boy jumped to his feet and ran forward, snatching the bread from Luke’s hand. He returned to the woman, tore the bread in two, and handed her a piece.

      Roused from her apathy, the woman looked up.

      “Go raibh mile maith agat,” she called in a lilting cadence. “Bless you, sir.”

      “Is your name Gallagher by any chance?” Luke called. A woman and a boy travelling alone didn’t exactly fit the description of Henry Gallagher’s brother, but it was worth asking in case they knew of the missing Irishman.

      The woman shook her head and turned her face away.

      Luke returned to his meal, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat it all. When it appeared that the coach was ready to continue its journey, he wrapped another chunk of the bread and a small piece of cheese in the cloth and handed it to the boy before he once again boarded the stage.

      “You shouldn’t have done that,” the lawyer said. “If that’s the way you’re going to go on, you’ll have every

Скачать книгу