The Tinsmith (17 page)

The overseer spat on the frost-hard earth. His thin hair blew back in wisps off his skull as his white breath rose over him and broke apart. The smile on his raw-boned face was crisp.

John could not keep looking at him. His chest burned with the desire to kill. To ease it, he looked beyond the overseer to the back porch of the house. In the frame of the doorway stood the thin figure of the master. Leaning on a cane, his head bare, he looked like stone-struck water. In a few weeks he had aged a dozen years. As John watched, Charlotte came and led the master away. Even from across the barnyard, the misery showed on her face, which hung in the open doorway a moment, like a last autumn leaf, and then fell back out of view.

The trader stood above Daney and shifted from one foot to the other. He scratched the back of his neck. For several minutes he let the women cry out their grief. Then, taking a watch from his inside pocket, he frowned and bent to the rope. Pulling on it firmly, he said, not unkindly, “Come on, now, didn't I agree to take you?”

Daney always said she could bear anything.

The sun dazzled on the frost.

She fell quiet.

So long as her children . . .

The line of women rose as one.

“Go sound the jubilee,” Motes sang softly into the birdsong.

In two heavy lines they commenced the journey south.

•  •  •

The doctor's name was Anson Baird, but John could think only to call him “doctor.” He stood beside John now in the putrid air outside the tent and spoke quickly, almost imploringly.

“It doesn't matter to me what happened with the dead man. I know you by your service on the field. A man owes me nothing who gives so freely of his courage and strength. Do you think your having been a slave changes that? I imagine you were driven to it. I don't need to know. You were a slave, but now you're white enough to get away clear. For good. Do you hear me? This is a chance that doesn't come to many. Act like a soldier among soldiers, as you've already done, and you'll be taken for a soldier. Keep clear of the contrabands. If you're among them, someone might look close, as close as I did.”

John squinted into the setting sun, which spilled its bloody light across the rolling hills of battle-churned earth. A hundred yards away, pressed up close to the dark woods along the Smoketown Road, a mass of blue-clad troops sprawled and squatted and strode among a settlement of tents. Nearer, close enough for him to hear their low chanting, three black men dragged a dead horse by its legs along a stubbled, blackened cornfield toward a massive bonfire. Everywhere he looked, John saw another dead horse or a shattered wagon or a torn coat or knapsack. But the bodies of men had all been shovelled into the ground. With Caleb. Into the ground.

The bonfire crackled and spat and white smoke poured off its top like a horse's rippling mane. From down among the troops floated the sad notes of a harmonica.

And the overseer too. With his bloodied ruff of beard. Into the ground. John's pulse quickened as he studied the ravaged landscape for the mulatto's vengeful charge. But it was only dead horses he could see, only chanting and the sad music he could hear. Into the ground with his pathetic lie about John's blood. How could he be white and not know it? He couldn't be. And even if it were true, he had no way to prove it. Not even the kind-faced doctor would believe him. But it wasn't true. It wasn't. He was black enough to love Daney and Caleb and the others. So he was black. Orlett knew it. But there was no trick the overseer wouldn't use to weaken a man. Only Orlett was dead now, and his death had made John a man, a man with a new name and a different future. He felt the doctor clap him on the back.

“I'll give you my address. I want to know how it goes with you. And if we both survive, perhaps I can be of some service.”

John took the extended hand and shook it. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

The doctor smiled. The red sunlight played over his tired face. “May God keep and protect you,” he said.

And John, who was to think of himself now as William Sullivan Dare, put his booted feet into the dirt of the Smoketown Road and did not look back until he had blended into the worn and tattered blue of his new life. By the time he turned, the doctor had already gone.

PART TWO

I

July 1881, New Westminster, British Columbia

The smell of money rising off the river and drifting into the hotel bar almost made Jacob Craig smile. Instead, he touched his aching molar with the tip of his tongue, then sipped at his drink as he considered the company he'd called together: four Scotsmen, three Americans, two Englishmen, and a Swede. Most were seated around the bend of the long bar counter, though a few stood, heads tilted down to catch the conversation. This time, Craig allowed himself a brief smile through the pain. His competitors looked just like gulls perched on a cannery roof; one or two birds were always too restless to settle completely.

But these gulls had ordered drinks. Whisky all around. No, not quite all—Henry Lansdowne was a teetotaller, an odd fact given that the man's brother was famous from Victoria to far up the Fraser for his resemblance to the squat bottle of a particular brand of Scotch that he favoured. A man could enter almost any saloon in the province and ask for “a drap o' Tam Lansdowne” and there'd be no confusion. But the older brother had earned a different reputation and a very different nickname: most called him “Squire.”

Craig let the alcohol gather in one cheek and swallowed it with half his mouth. Then he looked along the counter at the two Englishmen and smiled inwardly. Farmers. Sheep for the fleecing. It gave him some small measure of national pride to know himself superior to the English Lansdownes. Besides, he knew about the debt they'd been steadily accruing and suspected he knew even more about it than the older brother did. They were easy enough to control without that knowledge, of course, but the extra advantage never hurt. He could see the worry writ bold as moonlight on the stockier brother's face. It was a pleasing sight. How men could dig themselves into such holes, Jacob Craig never understood. But that they did so made things all the better for him.

The cigar smoke thickened, and as the party moved to the sparsely furnished drawing room with a window facing the river, the smoke trailed after them like a Chinese dragon. The Swede, Ben Lundberg, boomed out a laugh as he clapped Marshall English on the shoulder. In an hour, English would be too drunk to count his own fingers. By the end of the meeting he'd be excusing himself to vomit out the window. Craig doubted the American would last much longer in the salmon business. A Californian, he'd already lost one fortune during the stock market slump two years before, keeping only enough to invest in a cannery. But the high livers never endured. Craig had seen dozens come and go already, and this business wasn't a decade old.

Ben Lundberg was different. In truth, Craig found it hard to take the Swede's measure. Most annoyingly, the man's success came from his ability to finance his operations with American funds—and the source of these was difficult to ascertain. If a man was prey to Victoria interests, as in the case of Thomas Lansdowne, there was nothing Craig could not discover about him. Lansdowne's wife, for example, was an hysteric, if the agent Smith could be believed.

The other Americans, Adair and Wadhams, were also indentured to the eastern banks and could be controlled. Adair, a bachelor, liked to frequent the whores at Madam Tong's in the north end of town, and that would be the end of him eventually—women, unless you wedded them, were a drain on finances, and they often remained so even after marriage when a man was weak, as most were. It was another advantage Craig held over other men; he'd sooner ride a squaw for nothing than waste money and energy on romance.

He watched the frown on Henry Lansdowne's face tighten to a grimace as the men, all seated now in horsehair armchairs around a long table, poured themselves more drinks out of the several whisky bottles in front of them. A fire crackled in the grate opposite the wall with the window, but most of the light in the room came from the wooden chandelier hanging close above the table, the sound of its hissing gas unusually loud in the rare cessation of talk and laughter. Henry Lansdowne's obvious displeasure in such company in such a room would have made Craig laugh if he'd ever felt the inclination. It was a good thing he never had, for the coast literally crawled with his own former countrymen, and in a company of Scots jollity was dangerous.

Craig peered over his glass at Alexander Owen and felt that he was looking at his own reflection, only it was colder because he could not be sure what thoughts lay behind it. Owen sat comfortably, his legs crossed at his boots, his vest unbuttoned, a barely discernible smile on his sun-weathered face. He raised his glass slowly, as if it contained something he could sell instead of drink. Owen would not be driven out, he was as fixed on this coast as any of its rivers. In fact, he might have to be brought along. Or perhaps there was enough wealth in the new province for at least two sons of Hibernia to make their kingdoms.

That could wait: there was a more pressing concern. Craig took a discreet puff of his cigar, then leaned back in his chair, picking flecks off his lower lip. His surprise guest was due to arrive at any moment. Then the business of this business could begin.

Tobacco juice pinged off the brass spittoon in the corner. The gaslight flickered with each burst of conversation as the men's shadows leapt along the bare wood walls. Despite the cigar smoke, the smell of the river, heavy as wet dog fur, dominated the room. Craig's blood quickened at the smell. He turned and stared a moment at the dark square of open window. It was almost as if the river was going to pour in and drown the men in coin. The salmon were gathering by the millions, and each precious one was money in his purse. And with what he had learned in Victoria—a gift from the Maker, no less than that, an act of providence he would never have thought to pray for, had he time for prayer—Craig knew the most difficult American would soon be history.

“Come now! Come now!” the Swede shouted, standing up from the table, a stub cigar like a blossom in the corner of his gap-toothed grin. “What is dis all about, Craig, hey? It's not like you to spend money on drink for no good reason.”

The voices subsided, leaving a brief quiet into which Henry Lansdowne coughed like an old maid. “Yes. I think we'd better come to the point. Some of us have land to work tomorrow.”

“Relax, Squire,” English said with a sloppy grin plastered on his thin, pointed devil's face. “You're not one of them. A swamp hardly counts as land.”

Boisterous laughter washed up and died against the elder man's sober countenance. A glass clinked. Wadhams, still smiling, struck a match. His paleness was like the belly of a dead salmon left too long in the sun. Favouring spirits was one weakness, but not being able to handle them was even worse. At least English remained composed after spilling the surplus into a roadside ditch or out of the nearest window. Craig suspected that Henry Lansdowne, if he ever drank, wouldn't lose his sobriety. And if the man had been a Scot, no doubt he'd have controlled his finances in the same way. But then, not all Scots were cut from the same cloth. Braddock and McKay, for example, sitting side by side, prim as schoolmarms when a moment ago both were slapping their knees and throwing their heads back to get the Scotch down faster; they'd do all right in a good year and they'd survive in a bad one at least a few times, but they lacked the fierce mettle to rise to the top and stay there. Lyon and Laidlaw, the remaining Americans, were no different, cautious and carefree by turns. All of these men, however, possessed to some small degree one dangerous quality: the volatile, mercurial nature of their fortunes made them, in the end, unpredictable. And this remained a frontier place, despite its still-fresh status as a province. The nights were very dark. Miles and miles of emptiness stretched away from the banks of a savage river and ran into thick forests. Craig feared no one, but he trusted no one either. A man required a plan, the nerve to put it into motion, and the wisdom to operate things at some remove.

He looked through the wisps of grey smoke and the yellowish light at the powerful, slumped form of Thomas Lansdowne. Legend had it that he and his brother had been on the first coach to cross the United States into California after the Donner party. Physical courage in Thomas Lansdowne was a palpable fact. It would take a fool to challenge such a man directly, even when he was in a good mood. Now he sat brooding among the company, resembling a barrel of powder whose fuse was burning down. It almost pleased Craig to think that his news would lighten Thomas Lansdowne's burden.

Suddenly Craig felt Owen's slate-cold eyes upon him. He drew his shoulders in against that unflinching grey assault and waited. Owen's words were always few and always as clear as the sun striking the salt ocean. It was impossible not to admire him. Who else would have thought of packing salmon in one-pound flats instead of talls, then charging the English a dollar more per case? And Owen, as far as Craig could discover, never borrowed; he simply used his own profit to expand. He'd been a fisherman himself too, and that seemed to have given him a profound understanding of the creature's behaviour. All the appetite of a gull, all the patience of an owl: that was what the Swede had famously said of him. But witticisms didn't adhere to Owen; he wasn't part of the world from which they came.

Owen leaned forward in his chair and, when he spoke, it was impossible to see any movement of his mouth in the thick, red beard. But the words were as clear and loud as if shouted from the heavens.

“You have five minutes, Craig.”

Everyone stopped, as if listening for some great clock to begin ticking. When, almost immediately, three quick raps came on the door and it pushed open, even Craig, who was expecting the new arrival, blinked confusedly at the short, slope-shouldered man standing there in gumboots with the yellow light reflecting off his bald head. His thick, white side whiskers and flushed, fat face might have been genial if not for the piercing scorn of his gaze and the aggressive ease of his manner.