Kanata (15 page)

Macdonald was drunk every night, and occasionally in the day, and McIlvoy wondered when he would simply collapse. His diplomatic skills, normally astute and effective, were fraying. When the lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia approached him for concessions, Macdonald stared at the man through bleary eyes and replied, “Sir, if I had the gunpowder, I would blow you up.” With the Civil War raging in the U.S., Macdonald wanted to be sure to craft a strong central government; concessions were a path to hell.

That night, McIlvoy went to Macdonald's room and found him standing in front of a mirror, a rug draped across his shoulders, steeped in alcohol, reciting Shakespeare. “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unus'd.”

The following night Macdonald was again in his rooms, suffering from his excesses, going through a point of law with McIlvoy when Brown burst in, his mountainous rectitude filling the room. The Old Testament given human form. It was confirmation of McIlvoy's lowly status that Brown didn't notice him, or chose to ignore him, or perhaps he had become one of those servants who were in fact invisible, and therefore somehow incapable of bearing witness himself. “You are a disgrace, Macdonald,” he boomed. “And through your appalling behaviour, the behaviour of a schoolboy I should say, you are putting into jeopardy our very cause. For God's sake, man, can't you desist for a week at least.”

Macdonald watched him with his half smile. “Perhaps it is you, sir, who jeopardizes our cause, with your selfrighteousness,” he said. “These colonies are entering a union, not the kingdom of heaven.”

“Whatever they are entering, they don't want to be shepherded to the door by the town drunk.”

“As the people occasionally remind you, Mr. Brown, they would rather have a drunken John A. Macdonald than a sober George Brown.” Brown, along with Antoine-Aimé Dorion—a devil's bargain—had formed the government when Macdonald and Cartier resigned. The Brown government lasted four days, and Macdonald referred to it for
months as “His Excellency's most ephemeral administration,” something that still had the capacity to irritate the irritable Brown.

“Perhaps they haven't had the opportunity to see you throwing cake,” Brown said. “Or sleeping amid the refuse of your debauchery, or other samples of your Highland wit.”

“They still await samples of
your
wit, Mr. Brown,” Macdonald said. “I'll wager they'll have to wait a good deal longer.”

Brown stood there, volcanic in his rage. “You want to build a country that is founded on strength, Macdonald, yet you lack the strength to govern your own base impulses. That may be your downfall, sir, but it shouldn't be the nation's.” With that, Brown turned and left. Macdonald resumed his conversation with McIlvoy as if nothing had interfered with it, then took a healthy sip of his brandy. Rather than act as a soporific, as it did with most men, it seemed to give him life.

“It is Brown's wife, Anne, I suppose, who bears the brunt of responsibility for this,” Macdonald said. “Rescued him, you know. He spent months bedridden, overcome with nervous ailment, believing, for good reason, that his life had been for naught. A black despair, I'm told. Then he met Anne Nelson in Scotland, and the poor misdirected thing convinced him otherwise. Saved by a woman. A common occurrence, though tragic nonetheless.”

As he so often did to McIlvoy, Macdonald spoke while staring slightly above and to the side of his head. “Of course the loss of a woman has the opposite effect. Isabella was my cousin, you know. She was five years older and her ailment was a third party that rarely left the room. Bliss eluded us.” He stared upward. “Do you have children, McIlvoy?”
He didn't.

He didn't have a wife, nor time for a wife. McIlvoy's life was contained in that one query, someone he had spent eight years with asking him if he had children, as if they had only just met. McIlvoy's invisibility was sometimes so profound that he believed in it himself, believed he could walk undetected among the people. Perhaps he could walk through walls. Who knew the lengths of this extraordinary power? He didn't answer, but of course that was answer enough for Macdonald.

“We are hostage to them,” Macdonald said. “Brown has spent a lifetime trying to draw my blood, yet those cuts, hundreds of them, some of them well placed, have nothing like the effect of a single look from an infant. In that one look, you can see your shortcomings, your responsibilities, your wants, all reflected back, contained in our own blood. A mute child possessing greater power than the largest newspaper, with all its damnable lies, its vitriol and insistent daggers.” McIlvoy knew that Macdonald kept a box of wooden toys that had been his son John's, dead at thirteen months. He had once come upon him holding them, drunk beyond reason or vanity, stuporous, weeping, a terrible thing to see.

2

L
ONDON,
1867

London was rendered in shades of black: dark skies, soot-stained buildings, the clothing of the people on Oxford Street, the very air charcoal-coloured in the rain. Macdonald stayed at the Westminster Palace Hotel near Westminster Abbey. The British government viewed him as they would a thirty-two-year-old son who is finally leaving home: with thinly veiled relief. Macdonald and Cartier worked on the British North America bill, and McIlvoy was sent off on errands, fetching this bit of legal history, that bit of constitutional lore. The weather was foul, but the city was an excitement. McIlvoy noticed that Macdonald was drinking less, constrained perhaps by the nearness of his mission. He knew that he had encountered Agnes Bernard, a woman he had
tried to woo after Isabella's death. They had met by chance on Bond Street, and Macdonald believed it to be fate, and tried to woo her once more.

The British North America bill began its wretched halting progress through the Commons and the House of Lords, and the delegates spent their time visiting the sights. McIlvoy was grateful for the time, which he spent walking incessantly, breathing in the smoke and dust of civilization, hoping it would stay with him when he returned to North America.

On Oxford Street one day, he saw Macdonald walking with Agnes Bernard. He was talking, his hands waving, chopping the air for emphasis, and she beamed at him. That night, Macdonald called McIlvoy to his room. When he arrived, he could tell the sort of summons it was: Macdonald wanted someone to drink with. McIlvoy was no great drinker, but he was content to sip as Macdonald emptied his own glass repeatedly and spoke at length about the genius of the British North America Act. But his real subject was Agnes.

“As you have gathered, McIlvoy,” he said, “we have been spending some time together. We passed a few hours in the British Museum, extraordinary, the world in one building. We shall have to do something like that. Capture history, put it on display.” Macdonald stared across his room, which would have held McIlvoy's room and seven more like it. “I intend to marry her,” he said. “A man needs a companion. To go through life alone, even steeped in purpose, is to die slowly each day.”

It wouldn't occur to the politician that this was precisely McIlvoy's plight, although his purpose was muddier than Macdonald's. His purpose might be said to
be
Macdonald.

When McIlvoy left, it was early morning and Macdonald was almost insensible, though this time out of sheer happiness. An hour later, McIlvoy was wakened by Cartier's hammering at his door, summoning him at once to Macdonald's quarters. McIlvoy ran out in his nightshirt to find the space empty, though it was filled with smoke and the bed still smouldered. “Get some water, man,” Cartier whispered to him. “Attend to that fire.” McIlvoy filled a bedpan with water and threw it on the bed, which hissed and then fell silent. He opened the window, closed the door behind him, and then went to Cartier's room. Luce Cuvillier was sitting on the edge of the bed in a red silk housedress, smoking a cheroot, coolly staring. Macdonald sat looking like a bewildered animal. His hair was singed, which gave its normally wiry wildness even greater drama. His eyebrows were burnt as well, and when Macdonald gingerly put a hand to his face, McIlvoy noticed that his palms were blackened, as if he had used them to pat out the fire. His nightshirt was burned partly away, revealing a flannel shirt beneath it.

“It was like the devil come to claim me,” he said. “I woke up and both my bed and nightshirt were aflame.” Macdonald and a candle, that combustible pair.

“We should speak of this to no one,” Luce Cuvillier said. Her meaning was not to tell Brown. Or the hotel, though in the morning some explanation would need to be concocted, a job, most likely, for McIlvoy.

The following week, Macdonald married Agnes Bernard at St. George's Anglican Church in Hanover Square, and on March 29, 1867, Queen Victoria finally signed the bill into law as the British North America Act. Macdonald returned to Ottawa with a new country and a new wife.

3

O
TTAWA,
1868

It was April, the last of the stubborn winter still here. D'Arcy McGee stood in Parliament and spoke passionately about the Fenian threat and the need for a united Canada. Annexation to the United States, he also argued, would produce an ignominious future of northern peasants supplying lumber for America, a feudal prison. By the end of his lengthy speech it was after midnight, and he and Macdonald went down to the parliamentary bar and ordered brandies and cigars. They drank warily with one another (Macdonald had once halfjokingly told him that the party couldn't afford two drunkards and McGee would have to quit).

“Admirable words, McGee.”

“I wonder if they penetrated the thick heads across the floor.”

“I should hope not, or we'd be out of business. Without the obtuse Liberals, what would be the point of us?”

“There are those who wonder our point as it is.” McGee paused to take some of his drink. “I have nightmares, John.”

Macdonald sipped his brandy and looked at McGee, a man filled with Celtic dread and a poet's imagination.

“I have nightmares that I'll be killed, though it's not my death that wakes me with a fright. It's the thought of leaving my family with my debts.”

“Are they considerable?”

“They are.”

Macdonald, of course, had his own substantial debts. Why was it more profitable to create a company than a country? They were in the wrong business.

“Beware of Irish Catholics,” Macdonald said. “There's blood in that religion.”

“There's blood in every religion. What better way to attract new sheep? The Fenians are a threat, though.”

“Better a threat to the country than to your person, McGee. This murder …”

“I can't bear to think of it, John. It's as if I'm dying each night.”

“I suspect the brandy will take you before the Fenians do. Or you may be bored to death in the House, a fate that awaits us all.”

Macdonald finished his brandy and took his carriage home.

McGee stayed for another drink and then left to walk to Mrs. Trotter's boarding house. He was wearing a black cashmere overcoat against the late-winter chill, and a white top hat that added a dandyish touch. He carried a silverheaded bamboo cane that had been a genteel affectation but
was now a practical crutch for his sore knee. There was new snow on the ground and the air was fresh. A full moon threw light onto Metcalfe Street. He smoked a cigar and thought of his wife and family who were at home in Montreal. McGee was forty-two, in poor health and heavily indebted. He was still intoxicated by the newness of the country, but his own situation weighed upon him. How to rectify this? How to repay the debts? He had been having nightmares for weeks. McGee turned on to Sparks Street and looked for the key in his pocket.

His key turned in the lock and the door opened to the smells of cabbage and smoke and the punitive soap Mrs. Trotter used on everything. He heard a step behind him, quiet in the snow, and felt the presence of the gun, felt the violent Irish inevitability that had followed him to the New World. Then the explosion.