Free Dubious Allegiance by Don Gutteridge Page B

the summer had put the whole province on edge. Rumours of an armed uprising were as frequent, and about as reliable, as the number of bent elbows over a bar on Saturday night. Such matters ought to be the business of the governor and his agents, not the local constabulary. But then not many governors other than Sir Francis Bond Head would have shipped every last redcoat in Upper Canada off to Quebec to fight the Frenchies, leaving Fort York deserted and Government House unprotected. And with the nearest militia across the lake in Hamilton, only five policemen and Sheriff William Jarvis of York County stood between the Queen’s surrogate and a bullet from a radical’s musket.
    As if this were not trouble enough, Governor Head had ordered the chief constable to instruct his subordinates to actas his “eyes and ears” in the city. The least scrap of information that might be inflated to suggest potential seditious activity or the mere thought of seditious activity was to be reported as fact as soon as it was discovered. Each constable was to check in at headquarters at noon, at five o’clock, and at the end of the evening shift—to relay the whiff of rumour or tavern scuttlebutt.
    And, of course, it was Cobb with his fabled network of spies who was expected to supply the chief and the governor with a steady stream of reliable data. Such an expectation had brought complexity to Cobb’s life, and consequent worry. Every one of his “agents,” smelling booze-money in the air, was more than happy to retail the latest rumour and spice it up for good measure. Cobb prided himself on knowing exactly how truthful and how useful any information passed to him in a pub actually was—to the penny or the fluid ounce. But no threat of withdrawal or reprisal on his part could stanch the flow of alarming nonsense. He was not averse to passing it along to Sir Francis if the governor was fool enough to give it credence. What he feared most was that some tiny fraction of the malarkey might be true.
    Since the troops had left, taking Marc Edwards with them, there had been serious incidents in the streets. Shop windows of those merchants directly associated with the Family Compact had been smashed by radical sympathizers or, in Cobb’s opinion, gangs of toughs out for a lark. On the other side, groups of young Tories, who should have known better, had been encouraged by their elders to deface the property of known radicals—which in their diminutive minds included respectable Reform politicians and most Americans. When notin the mood for wielding a paintbrush, they chose to threaten their victims with anonymous, poison-pen letters. But if there really were malcontents north of the city organizing and arming themselves (after all, he and Marc had exposed a gunrunning operation in October, and news of an insurrection south of Montreal had just made the papers), then his life was about to become seriously complicated.
    The problem was, he concluded, that he had too many friends. He was simply too susceptible to friendship, to having his good nature co-opted and taken advantage of. He felt that this must be a character flaw in a man professing to be a policeman. Against his better judgement he had found himself not only working side by side with Lieutenant Edwards on two investigations but coming to like and admire “the major,” as he called him, first derisively and then with affection. Like him, the major was an arm of the law and royal authority, but unlike him, the lieutenant was a Tory, an aristocrat, and a man of learning. Why, at this very moment he might be shooting at aggrieved farmers and ordinary folk like himself or his father or Dora’s kin up in York Township, who had been entangled with Reformers from the beginning. A dozen years ago his own father, still harbouring hopes that his eldest would succeed him on the farm, had pointed proudly to a lush field of wheat and proclaimed,