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  Advance Praise for An Act of Injustice

  “An Act of Injustice brings it all home, a study of crime long forgotten but one that should be remembered in this day and age of reversing verdicts of the innocent.”

  -- Andrew Armitage, Owen Sound Sun-Times

  “Ray Argyle has created a panoramic and absorbing read in this compelling tale of life in Victorian Canada. He brings to light the prejudice and struggle for equality facing so many – in particular, the fallout from wrongful criminal conviction. As his main character reminds us, ‘you have to listen to both sides if you want to get at the truth.’”

  -- Jeanette Lynes, author of The Factory Voice

  “In An Act of Injustice, Ray Argyle has written a multi-layered combination of murder mystery, love story, and sociopolitical study, an historical novel rich in detail and complex characters, shedding light on issues that still plague our justice system today.”

  -- Diane Schoemperlen, author of This is Not My Life

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Argyle, Ray, author

  An act of injustice / Ray Argyle.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77161-229-6 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77161-230-2 (html).--ISBN 978-1-77161-231-9 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8601.R48A63 2017 C813’.6 C2016-905911-1

  C2016-905912-X

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote a brief passage in a review.

  Published by Mosaic Press, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 2017.

  MOSAIC PRESS, Publishers

  Copyright © 2017 Ray Argyle

  Printed and Bound in Canada

  Designed by Courtney Blok

  We acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program We acknowledge the Ontario Media Development Corporation for their support of our publishing program

  MOSAIC PRESS

  1252 Speers Road, Units 1 & 2

  Oakville, Ontario L6L 5N9

  phone: (905) 825-2130

  [email protected]

  Ray Argyle

  Contents

  Part I: The Judgment of Men

  Part II: A New World Awaits Us

  Afterword

  Postscript: Another Thought

  PART I

  THE JUDGMENT OF MEN

  There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.

  Charles de Montesquieu

  It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

  John Adams

  Prologue

  ROSANNAH AND THE NIGHT

  October 31, 1883

  Rosannah awoke in the dark, feeling edgy. Her headache had eased, replaced by a restlessness that brought on a foreboding that something was wrong. At twenty-five, she’d known the hurt of vanquished love and the pain of childbirth, but this was different. She stirred uneasily, not wishing to disturb others asleep in the house.

  It was a simple place, not much more than a cabin where Rosannah had been raised with a dozen brothers and sisters. The one room log house had been built by her parents, James and Molly Leppard, from trees they’d felled and trimmed, using few tools and a lot of sweat. It clung to a hillside where her father held title to six stony acres overlooking the Beaver River Valley, opposite the village of Vandeleur. The Leppards were one of the poorest families in the slab of territory between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay called the Queen’s Bush. It was here that immigrants and sons of farmers and failures from the cities – each seeking a second chance at life – were extending the frontier society of Ontario.

  Rosannah knew every footpath within a half-day’s walk of the house. An hour’s hike took her to The Gravel, the only decent road in this lonely countryside. She sometimes hitched a ride on a passing wagon for the journey to Munshaw’s Hotel, where she’d always find a willing man to buy her a glass of beer.

  It was cold in the house on this night of the thirty-first of Octobor, 1883, and the fire in the stove had burned out. Now fully awake, Rosannah gathered her blanket around her. She wondered what life would hold for her two little girls sleeping below in the trundle bed they shared. Her angels, she called them. One was four years old and the baby was not quite two. How difficult it had been to care for them without a father. She couldn’t have done it without Mother, but it was clear Mother’s patience was running out.

  Rosannah remembered the men she’d been with. First there’d been Father Quinn, the Catholic priest. She detested him for what he had done to her when she was only twelve. He taught her she had something men wanted and they’d pay for, in money or in other things. By the time she was fifteen, there’d been boys her own age and men she’d met at village socials or the blacksmith shop or general store. Later, there was David Rogers, to whom she’d been briefly married. And Leonard Babington, whom she had never married but had dearly loved.

  Six weeks ago, Rosannah had defied her Catholic mother by marrying the Protestant, Cook Teets, in a Presbyterian church in Toronto. He was thirty years older than her, and she was still getting used to being Rosannah Teets. It was all going to be different married to Cook. He was the kind of man she had always wanted: aloof when he encountered coarseness, a spendthrift when he was gripped by passion, compliant when he sought affection. They would have a home together as soon as he could find a place. It was too bad Mother wouldn’t let him stay here. Or that Cook’s mother wouldn’t permit her to set foot in the Teets house. Rosannah had learned long ago that most Catholics and Protestants couldn’t abide each other, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  The small sounds of the night – the creaking of a timber or the distant yelp of a coyote – were upsetting to Rosannah. She thought she heard singing, and then someone fiddling with the latch on the front door. She lit a candle and went to investigate, but no one was there, just the dog lying at the doorstep. The first light of dawn was now showing itself through the thin blankets that hung as a canopy around her bed. Rosannah had been thinking how worthwhile life was going to be when the tingling began. It started in her stomach. In a little while it brought on cramps, followed by spasms of pain that led to convulsions. She heaved and arched her back, seeking relief. Her chest grew tight. It was hard to breathe. Spittle ran down her chin and her muscles went rigid. She felt a hot wetness beneath her. She was losing control of her body. She flung out her arms and whispered, “Dear God, why are you punishing me?” In a moment, she began to scream.

  Chapter 1

  CAUSE AND EFFECT

  November 1, 1883

  Leonard Babington settled deeper into his captain’s chair, emitting a slight sigh of satisfaction. Amid all the relics he had acquired on taking over the Vandeleur Chronicle – an ancient printing press, a grimy type cabinet, assorted pieces of well-worn furniture – only the chair gave him comfort. He relaxed against its wrinkled and cracked black leather cushions, taking pleasure from the way they molded to his body, a form as spare and unembellished as the chair itself. He broke off his study of yesterday’s Toronto newspaper – Grave Crisis in Balkans, read its headline – when he heard the click of the latch being lifted to open the front door. It was barely eight o’clock and he hoped his early visitor might be an advertiser come to pay his bill or a reader with subscription money in hand. Leonard unfolded himself from his chair and went into the hallway to welcome the visitor.

  Constable John
Field, out of breath and looking mournful, stood at the still open doorway. He was not the visitor Leonard had hoped for. Field’s arrival usually signaled a tragedy of some sort – a killing in a beer parlour brawl or possibly a drowning in Georgian Bay.

  “There’s trouble at the Leppard place,” Field said. It was clear he regarded this as important news. “Somebody’s tried to poison Rosannah Leppard. I’m going over there now. Want to come with me?”

  Leonard’s heart heaved and he felt faint with shock. He tried not to let his face show his alarm. Any trace of agitation would confirm the suspicion no doubt lurking in Field’s mind that any news of Rosannah Leppard would be of more than passing interest to him.

  It was like Field to look for notoriety in everything he did, Leonard thought. The Constable for Artemesia Township, that backwater in the Queen’s Bush of Grey County, was paid only for the days he worked on police business – a dollar fifty a day. Every mention he could get of himself in the Chronicle was a reminder to the men on the township council that he’d been doing his job, well and faithfully.

  Leonard had worked for the Toronto Globe before being caught up in a messy situation that cost him his job. He’d worked as a stoker on a Great Lakes steamship and had taken over his hometown Vandeleur Chronicle after its publisher had fallen ill, deep in debt. He struggled to master the tasks of selling advertising, writing up the news, and nursing the old Washington Press that churned out two hundred sheets an hour. On top of all that, he’d had to keep on hand a generous supply of booze to discourage itinerant printers from wandering off after their first payday. He was thin and fair-headed, thirty years old, and lived alone in the estate house his parents had occupied until they’d passed on.

  For Leonard, the news Field brought was far more devastating than his usual mournful tidings. The Constable’s brusque announcement reminded him again of Rosannah’s erratic behaviour. There was that foolish marriage she’d made only six weeks ago. Now, he thought, God knows what has happened to her.

  Leonard Babington pulled off his ink-stained apron and called out to Tyler Thompson, the printer’s devil he relied on to break up the pages after the printing of each issue. “I’ll go along with the Constable,” he said. “I want you to print up the handbill for the piano teacher and take it to over to the school.”

  Constable Field decided it would be quicker to cross the Beaver River by footbridge than take a buggy down the East Back Road and along The Gravel, the name people gave to the Durham Road. On the way, buttoning his canvas jacket against the morning chill, Field explained that Billy Leppard, the youngest of the brood, had been sent to fetch him. They descended the path on the hillside known as Bowles’s Bluff and came to the footbridge. The water was low this late in the fall and Leonard could see fish scudding up the stream, looking for spawning sites. Small islets, not much more than sandbars, housed stunted pine bushes and outgrowths of sweetgrass. They crossed quickly and in half an hour they were at the Leppard place. Field rapped on the cabin’s big wooden door to announce their arrival.

  Molly Leppard, Rosannah’s mother, opened the door and silently let them into the cabin’s single room, a space measuring no more than fifteen by twenty feet. Leonard had been there many times but he had never seen it as it was now. The room was crowded and smelled musty, a combination of sweat and dampness from an overnight rain, and stale odours from cooking. A table was littered with dishes and scraps of food. Clothes were scattered on chairs and an empty whisky bottle sat on a cabinet next to some carpenter tools. Molly Leppard, still in her nightdress, motioned the men forward with a vague wave of her hand. Her hair looked stringy and her face pallid against her eyes, red from crying. Leonard recognized Bridget Leppard, Rosannah’s sister, sitting in a rocking chair. Mary Ann Leppard, wife of one of Rosannah’s brothers, stood behind her. Two small children played on the floor. There was a bench along the far wall, and on the floor in front of it, a man sat crumpled up. Leonard recognized him as Rosannah’s husband, Cook Teets. He was muttering to himself. Leonard could barely make out his words. He was repeating, over and over, “She’s gone, she’s gone.” Everyone’s eyes were red from crying.

  “Mrs. Leppard, what’s happened here?” Constable Field asked. “How is Rosannah?”

  Molly Leppard gestured toward the far side of the room, where a blanket hung from the ceiling partly concealed a washstand and a bed. There was someone in the bed.

  “Rosannah’s gone,” Molly said. She held onto the back of a chair as she spoke. “She died this morning, in awful pain. It was like she had taken poison.”

  Leonard felt a shiver, followed by more pounding of his heart. He was confused and he hoped that somehow it might turn out that Rosannah was still alive.

  “I’ll have to examine the body,” Constable Field announced. Leonard looked over his shoulder as Field lifted the blanket off Rosannah. Her body was arched upward, as if she was trying to lift herself off the bed. The constable bent over her, listened for a heartbeat and finding none, checked her pulse. “Sure enough dead,” he declared.

  “I’m going straight to Dr. Christoe,” the Constable announced. Leonard knew that Dr. William Christoe, the coroner, had an office next to the Township Hall in Flesherton. He would tell Field what he must do in a case of suspicious death.

  “I don’t want anybody to leave, or touch the body,” Field added.

  A half hour later, Leonard was back at the Chronicle and Constable Field was on his way to see the coroner. Leonard learned later that Field had taken Rosannah’s body to Dr. Sproule in Markdale for a post-mortem examination. The coroner had telegraphed Alfred Frost, the Crown attorney in Owen Sound, for instructions. Word came back that an inquest should be held and Dr. Christoe scheduled this for the next morning. He spent the evening rounding up six men. He told them to be at the Township Hall at nine o’clock, prepared to listen to whatever evidence might be presented. It would be up to them to determine what, or who, had caused the death of Rosannah Leppard.

  When the inquest jury assembled in the council chamber of the Township Hall, almost every seat was filled in the small public gallery and Leonard Babington had to squeeze into the last vacancy in the front row. The furnace was stoked up against a November chill and before long people began to slip out of their coats. Dr. Christoe called Cook Teets, but he denied any knowledge of the cause of Rosannah’s death. A neighbour, Scarth Tackaberry, claimed he’d seen Cook in possession of a bottle of strychnine, but Cook denied it. That was when the jurymen asked for a break. After huddling in a corner, they announced that no verdict was possible without knowing whether poison had been the “positive cause” of death. Dr. Sproule said he would send Rosannah’s stomach organs to Toronto for examination.

  The break in the hearing lasted two weeks. Leonard Babington thought a lot about the case. He was unable to fathom how Cook Teets would want to kill Rosannah Leppard. Nothing like this had ever happened in Vandeleur. To the casual visitor, the village seemed smug and placid, an unlikely place to contemplate the act of murder. Leonard knew better. Vandeleur was as filled with jealousies, family quarrels, and sexual promiscuity as any other town. Having been born here, Leonard absorbed without question the sentiments of his elders in matters of faith, morality, and Protestant respectability. Any public recognition of sex was regarded as a horror, and modesty in women’s dress was insisted on at all times. Neighbours carefully scrutinized each other’s observance of the Sabbath. These traits had to be inculcated early in the young, backed up by stern discipline.

  Vandeleur had four churches, an Orange Hall and a cemetery in which Rosannah Leppard was laid to rest three days after her death. There was a schoolhouse from whose flagpole flew the Union Jack. An assortment of blacksmiths, livery stables, and dressmaker and drygoods shops served the village. Its buildings were made of lumber hewed at Jacob Teets’s sawmill, as were the cedar shingles on their roofs. A scent of newly sawn wood and fresh paint could still be detected in the newer stores. They were spaced irregularly
along both sides of a quarter mile stretch of the Beaver Valley Road, and most bore false fronts that affected the pretence of a second floor. Cedar and pine trees surrounded the village and birch and poplars grew in sunlit spaces between the green forest and the road. Twenty-four children were taught, for a time by Leonard Babington, in the one-room schoolhouse of School Section Number Eleven. Leonard was a good teacher despite never having set foot in a classroom, having been entirely home schooled by his parents. Later, he had that stressful and disappointing stretch at the Toronto Globe, before finding himself the proprietor of the Chronicle.

  The prominent families, the Babingtons, the Teets, and others attended one of three Protestant churches – Anglican, Methodist, or Presbyterian – leaving the Catholic church to watch over a flock of mostly poor, mostly Irish believers like the Leppards. Mail arrived twice a week at the post office in James Henderson’s general store, everyone’s favourite stopping place. A bucket on the counter was kept filled with whisky. Customers were encouraged to help themselves. People came and went, but the Beaver Valley Road, clinging to the west shoulder of the valley as it made its way to Georgian Bay, was the one constant feature of the place.

  Leonard lived next to this notoriously unreliable course. In winter the road was covered with glacier-like sheets of ice and in spring it became mired in gumbo. Often, he had to throw down planks to get his horse and wagon over a treacherous section. Among his earliest memories was being told how neither he nor his mother would have survived his birth had not the husband of a skillful midwife carried her the last hundred yards through the mud to the Babington place. Thomas Kells claimed his wife had birthed most of Vandeleur, but insisted it was he who had given birth to the village. He named it after the Irish estate where he’d worked as a gardener for the Vandeleurs, a Dutch family grown wealthy on trade with Ireland. His story was readily accepted, Vandeleur not being important enough for anyone to argue about its name. This village of six hundred souls had never known notoriety, but Leonard sensed this was about to change.