Burn it all

By Pierre Turgeon

On April 25, 1849, Montreal, the capital of United Canada, was under serious threat. While the government was preparing to compensate the French-Canadian victims of the 1837 Rebellion, Orangemen set fire to the Parliament building and the 25,000 books of the National Library. Governor-General Elgin hesitated to launch the imperial army against his compatriots. With their murderous ambitions camouflaged behind this smokescreen, influential men attempt to seize the immense fortune of Henry Blake, the gas magnate, who is found murdered in his castle. The life of Marie-Violaine Blake, his young widow, and that of his father, the chief engineer Gustave Hamelin, are threatened. Stéphane Talbot, the heir to the Grand-Remous seigneury, will stop at nothing to save Marie-Violaine, his beloved. At the end of this day of fire, the story of the characters will have changed so unexpectedly that one must admit that one rarely receives one's gift from Divine Providence, but rather, as the author writes, according to the tortuous ways of poetic justice

EXCERPT: It always happened late in the evening, when the magnate had just gone down to one of the brothels in the port, where he demanded that all the residents, one after the other, come to pay their respects to him and tried, always at length and often in vain, to get him to grant their caresses. As Blake mistreated his servants to the point of fearing that one of them might try to kill him in his sleep, he locked them in the basement of his manor at 9:00 every night, except for his coachman, to whom he entrusted the mission of freeing the servants at dawn. This jailer's behavior allowed Mrs. Blake to receive her lover without the risk of prying eyes and to move freely in all the rooms, especially in the living room where Stéphane asked her to get naked and take poses identical to those of the statues around them. He would then have fun correcting the mistakes she made in her imitations, raising the elbow of the arm she wore on her forehead in a tearful gesture; accentuating the bending of her neck, the spacing of her thighs in this sketch where she played the nymph admiring herself in the water of a stream. Sometimes he even lifted her hair in a bun or wove it into braids at each temple, so that the resemblance to the marble or bronze model was even more striking. In his hands, she became totally malleable and docile, except when he stroked her as if by mistake at the tip of a breast or in the hollow of a buttock, and she could not hold back a shudder of pleasure. In this game, she was stronger than he was, for he was always the first to break the enchanted circle of the statues and lay her down on the high wool carpet in front of the cedar fire in the hearth. She continued the comedy a little longer, pretending to be dead under him, until she, too, flared up

REVIEWS: "At the end of this day of fire, the story of the characters will have changed so unexpectedly that one will have to admit that one rarely receives one's gift from Divine Providence, but rather, as the author writes, according to the tortuous ways of poetic justice." – Jean Chartier, le Devoir

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Quebec City, October 9, 1947 - Novelist and essayist, Pierre Turgeon published his first novel, Sweet Poison, when he was only 22 years old. Several works followed 22 titles in all: novels, essays, plays, film scripts, and historical works. He won twice the Governor General's Award. As a publisher, he released more than a thousand authors, amongst which Magaret Atwood, Peter Newman, and Jack Higgins. He is also the only Canadian publisher to have one of his books, a biography of Michael Jackson by Ian Halperin, Unmasked, reach the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. He also authored 16 movie scripts, one of which, The Mighty River, became an Oscar finalist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cogito
• Release date: Nov 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201884567

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Burn It All

Pierre Turgeon

A Novel

Other books by Pierre Turgeon

NOVELS

Sweet Poison

One, two, three

Coming Soon

The first person (Won the Governor general award for novel)

Hitler’s boat

Last blues for October, (a true novel)

The torrents of hope

ESSAYS

Company of Good Books

Radissonia: the James Bay adventure (Won the Governor General Award for essays)

Accelerate

Les Bâtisseurs de Montréal,

THEATRE

The interview (Won the prize for Theatre plays Radio-Canada).

HISTORY

Canada: a people’s history – Volume 1

Canada: a people’s history – Volume 2

Contents

OTHER BOOKS BY PIERRE TURGEON

THE CHARACTERS

PART ONE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

PART TWO

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

THE CHARACTERS

The Talbot

Pierre-Amédée Talbot: Lord of the Great Upheaval. Husband of Catherine Quinty. He gives her two sons, Stéphane and Marcel. Died during the insurrection of 1837.

Catherine Talbot: Wife of Pierre-Amédée Talbot. Mother of Stéphane and Marcel. Died during the typhus epidemic of 1847, with her son Marcel, not without having saved Kevin Parker, Mervynn Parker’s nephew.

Stéphane Talbot: Son of Pierre-Amédée and Catherine Talbot. Only heir of the seigneury of the Great Upheaval. Lover of Marie-Violaine Hamelin.

Marcel Talbot: Youngest son of Pierre-Amédée and Catherine Talbot. Died of typhus in 1847.

The Parkers

Mervynn Parker: Lieutenant of the British Dragoons who, in 1837, saved the lives of Catherine Talbot and her two sons, Marcel and Stéphane. Lover of Catherine, he lent her money so that she would not be dispossessed of the seigneury of the Great Upheaval. In 1839, he left Canada for China.

The Hamelin

Gustave Hamelin: Chief Engineer of the Montreal Gas Light Heat and Power. Father of Augustine and Marie-Violaine.

Augustine Hamelin: Daughter of Gustave Hamelin. Wife of the very rich American Jack Grambs.

Marie-Violaine Hamelin: Daughter of Gustave Hamelin. Wife of Henry Blake and mistress of Stéphane Talbot.

The Blakes

Henry Blake: Owner of the Montreal Gas Light Heat and Power. Husband of Nancy, who gives him Julian, before dying of consumption. He then marries Marie-Violaine Hamelin.

Julian Blake: Son of Henry and Nancy Blake.

Other characters

James Bruce Elgin, Lord: Viceroy and Governor General of the Province of Canada from 1847 to 1854, 8th Earl of Elgin and 12th Earl of Kincardine.

Frederick Elgin: Younger brother of Lord James Bruce Elgin and Colonel of the Hussars.

Moses Hays: Chief of Police of Montreal.

Paul Leclerc: Detective and Deputy Chief of Police.

Carolus Van Gelder: Owner of the tavern of The Sudden Death.

Alphonse Bertrand: Archivist of the National Library.

PART ONE

It is not necessary to hope in order to act,

nor to succeed in order to persevere.

William of Orange

Known as William the Silent

ONE

During the night, Saint-Paul Street looks like a trench where one walks in darkness. But on April 25, 1849, at around two o’clock in the morning, the full moon had taken this artery in its wake and lit it up with a bright, milky glow that left no more shadow than at noon sharp. At that moment, a shutter violently struck the façade of a store’s top floor. A blond head bent down and withdrew too quickly to be identified. A moment passed, in a silence so absolute that one could have thought one was up there, on the moon.

Behind the shop window on the ground floor were state-of-the-art oil and gas lamps, topped with glass or crystal globes and golden or silvery lampshades. New wicks were wrapped in a sheath of non-combustible fabric, infused with nitrate to give the flame more brightness. The name of the establishment - Les Lumières - was displayed in golden letters on a round sign that hung over one of these boardwalks that conveniently turned into a raft during the flooding of the St. Lawrence River.

A horse neighed, hooves echoed against the cobblestones, and an open cabriolet stopped at the exit of the carriage entrance, to the left of a store. A young man was driving, sitting on the coachman’s bench, his knees wedged against the mudguard. He examined the surroundings with concern. Only a sleeper with a bulldog face, snoring, slumped on the threshold of the butcher store across the street.

- Do you recognize him? asked Stéphane as he turned around.

- He’s my husband’s former coachman, replied Marie-Violaine, stroking the red head of a six-year-old boy sleeping next to her on the bench.

- I believe Mr. Blake found you, Mrs. Blake, and instructed poor David to keep an eye on you. But drunkards make very bad spies, said Stéphane, pointing to the empty gin bottle that had rolled down the gutter at the feet of the dead drunk coachman. I bet that with your disguise, he wouldn’t even notice that you are a woman.

A small grin broke on Marie-Violaine’s face, that Stéphane guessed by the twinkle in her eye, since the bottom of her face was buried in a scarf. She lifted her top hat slightly and, in a caricature of a low voice, she asked:

- Beware, my brave one, if you insult me by calling me a woman, you will have to answer to me on the field of honour.

It would have taken a very keen eye to recognize a young lady under the appearance of this young man, certainly a bit slender, but whose white gloves and tuxedo with a midnight blue lapel indicated that he belonged to high society.

As soon as she made this joke, Marie-Violaine collapsed from sleep: even the movement and the icy air of the night could not have stopped her.

How long had the three of them been breathing the lighting gas that was gradually spreading its poison through the house? All Stéphane knew was that when they went to bed, at around nine o’clock, there was a blackout in the whole neighbourhood. Around midnight, a migraine woke him up. He had noticed that the lights had come back on in the street, but still not in his house. He then discovered that someone had cut the main gas line inside the metal box that protected the meter. Worried, he remembered the Montreal Gas Light Heat and Power employee who had visited his back store late that afternoon, supposedly to try to find out the cause of the gas failure. How could he not recognize that face with its wrinkled forehead and hanging jowls? Daniel was not the real culprit of the sabotage. He was surely only obeying the orders of his boss, Mr. Henry Blake, president of the gas company and husband of Marie-Violaine.

Stéphane took one look at his young mistress, stunned by the poison that had mixed into her blood and was now going to her brain. These symptoms could well dissipate within a few hours, as could his own migraine, which continued to tighten his temples. As for little Kevin Parker, he was sleeping with a smile on his face. Perhaps he was seeing Catherine Talbot, Stéphane’s mother, who had cared for him and taken him in two years earlier. Certainly, if heaven existed, Catherine had deserved to go straight up there. At the time of the Rebellion of 1837, after the drowning of her husband and the destruction of the Talbot lordship, she had had to take refuge in Longueuil, with her father Antoine Quinty. When the horse merchant himself disappeared two years later, she had managed to ensure her survival and that of her two sons by working as a maid at the home of Father Bissonnette. In 1847, while typhus was wiping out thousands of Irish immigrants, nothing and no one had forced Stéphane’s mother to leave the safety of her home in Longueuil and go to the rescue of Kevin, whom she had just learned was among the sick crammed into the fever sheds at the entrance to the port of Montreal. Nothing, except the debt of honour she owed to Kevin’s uncle, Mervynn Parker, the dragoon lieutenant she still loved, long after his posting on the eastern borders of the British Empire. For three days, she had searched for her former lover’s nephew while helping the Grey Nuns fight the epidemic. She had finally found Kevin and saved him, but she had paid dearly for her bravery: a week later, typhus took her and Marcel, her youngest son.

Since then, Stéphane considered the Irish orphan as his brother and regularly invited him to spend a few days with him at his store on Rue Saint-Paul, which relieved the child’s official guardian, Father Bissonnette. The old man quickly declined in his presbytery in Longueuil. Stéphane and Marie-Violaine planned, as soon as their situation permitted, to adopt Kevin, who would otherwise, upon the priest’s death, have to go to an orphanage or seminary.

Stéphane looked up at the upstairs window behind him, which he had left wide open to let the gas escape, and then lowered his eyes to the window of the small shop he managed for Gustave Hamelin, Marie-Violaine’s father. Could he ever come back here? He felt strangely calm for someone who had just come close to death. Perhaps because he knew that danger was still lurking and that he would need to keep cool to get to the other end of Montreal, to Marie-Violaine’s father, who would know how to care for his daughter.

Eager cries and whistling could be heard. A group of men was coming towards them, jostling each other. Under normal circumstances, the people in the street would have put their heads out of their windows and threatened to call the constables. But on April 25, 1849, Montreal was no longer a peaceful and safe city.

The Governor General of United Canada, Lord Elgin, had provoked the anger of English Canadian ultra-royalists by agreeing to compensate people whose property had been destroyed during the Rebellion of 1837. Stéphane himself would receive compensation of three thousand pounds, with which he intended to rebuild his father’s seigneury, which had been razed to the ground by English artillery fire. At the time, the Gazette had published the names and addresses of the indemnified, and Orangemen, armed with clubs and rocks, hunted them down, with the tacit agreement of passers-by because Montreal had become predominantly English-speaking.

Stéphane could have gone back to the Richelieu River valley to build the new Talbot watermill right away. But he felt it was his honour to be present when Lord Elgin, the next day, gave royal assent to Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine’s 1837-1838 bill - compensating for damages suffered during the insurrection - in the grounds of the former Sainte-Anne’s market, where the Parliament of United Canada was sitting.

To avoid crossing the troop coming towards them, Stéphane decided to take the docks and turned left at the corner of Notre-Dame-du-Bonsecours church. A light mist was fraying over the St. Lawrence River, where ice clumps were passing through in a tumult of shocks that diminished more and more each day as the remnants of the ice pack melted. Since the break-up, which had occurred two weeks earlier, a dozen frigates from Europe had already anchored in the port. And for once, the river remained in its banks, even though the ships moored in tight rows floated so high that they seemed to want to continue sailing inland.

A smell of tar and wood chips rose from the sheds that housed the dry-dock workshops; mallets resounded in a frenzied rhythm, while the night shifts finished caulking three new steamers destined to go down to New York, via the Richelieu, the Chambly Canal, Lake Champlain and the Hudson. Heavily laden with lumber, the fourth steamer of this line, the Kent, stretched a trickle of steam over its tall blunderbuss chimney. The fire in the boiler was kept going so that the steamer could start at dawn.

In the distance, Stéphane heard a shattering of glass and was certain that the thugs he had narrowly avoided had just broken his window. He trotted his horse and made his way safely westward, leaving behind him the Virgin who, from the back of the church, opened her arms to the port. Stéphane had found this gesture, which was meant to be protective, quite ineffective when his ship returned to port after two of his sailor friends had drowned in the Lachine rapids. He wondered what had become of the Iroquois pilot Tehostoseroton. He was probably still working for one of the shipping companies. With his suede jacket adorned with glassware and his helmet made of eagle feathers, the giant was an attraction for tourists looking for thrills in the middle of the rapids.

Stéphane walked past Place Jacques-Cartier, with its grey granite buildings eternally facing each other on either side of a muddy field, littered with the garbage that the market had left behind when it closed and would cover, in a few hours, with a new layer of animal and vegetable waste. As if disgusted by this spectacle, British Admiral Nelson turned his back on it and, from the top of his column, he looked down on the town hall and the Champ-de-Mars esplanade.

Like every time he passed by the statue of the destroyer of the French navy, Stéphane felt the vague desire to blow it up with a well-placed powder charge, but shouts took him out of his reverie. Men were shouting out of one of the taverns in the port and, instead of dispersing, they gathered in the rue de la Commune, blocking the way. They were Orangemen, recognizable by the pig, wearing a purple bishop’s miter, which they brandished over their heads. Staked on an iron stake, the animal looked from afar like a naked, pink baby.

For a moment, Stéphane thought of turning back, but a glance over his shoulder allowed him to see that another group had just emerged from Place Jacques-Cartier and was now forbidding him to retreat. His carriage was soon joined and surrounded by the demonstrators who were warmed up by the gin and anti-papist speeches that had just been served to them in profusion.

- Hey friends, look here, we’ve got ourselves a Frog! cried one of the men, pointing at Stéphane, who hadn’t opened his mouth, but whose physique betrayed him.

Laughter erupted. Someone had the idea of removing the mitre from the pig and walking towards the cabriolet while unfolding the bellows of the triangular headdress.

- Let’s see if it fits!

With his heart in a vise, Stéphane stooped down to take the only weapon at his disposal under his seat: a long whip. A hand was immediately placed on his and prevented him from completing his gesture. He turned around sharply. Marie-Violaine had risen in the back of the cabriolet and, arms folded, she examined the crowd unhurriedly, like an officer reviewing troops.

- Pray tell me, what are you gentlemen doing with this hat and this pig? she asked, in a hoarse voice that denoted the accent of jaded curiosity that the British nobility was fond of.

There was a flutter in the crowd. They thought they were attacking a Canadian and came across a London dandy, perhaps the son of a general or a lord. Stéphane himself was amazed: he was so used to thinking of Marie-Violaine as his little French girl that he too often forgot that she had attended one of the most posh colleges in England. As no one answered him, she shook her head impatiently:

- This will have to wait. My brother is sick, and we must hurry to the doctor.

She slowly sat down next to Kevin who, with his eyes closed, moaned as he held his stomach.

- Quickly, please! she said to her coachman.

Would this comedy have been enough to finally open the way for them? They never knew for sure since, at that very moment, a strong explosion shook the ground. Immediately flames rose from the back of the Bonsecours market, almost reaching the height of the unfinished dome. The young so-called Londoner and his astonished coachman lost all interest in the Orangemen. They all set off in a hurry in the direction of the disaster. A voice shouted: That’s the idea, boys! Roast them! which was taken up in chorus by about thirty voices: Roast them! And the whole troop ran behind the pig, deprived of its miter, which was swinging at the end of its steel stake.

- When the pigs start to fly, they make big birds, said little Kevin, whose stomach cramps had just magically disappeared.

This childish joke didn’t make Stéphane laugh. The sudden violence of the flames and their bluish colour, the fact that they were not giving off any smoke, all this probably meant that it was the Les Lumières shop and its large supply of fuel that was disappearing into oblivion, along with the dream of the two associates to use their profits to finance their electricity laboratory.

Marie-Violaine must have guessed her lover’s fears because, as if to console him, she bent down, took his hands and placed them on her round hips, touched the back of his neck and pressed her full bust against his chest. The young woman’s eyes sparkled with mischief as she slowly brought her fleshy lips closer to his.

- Would you still know, sir, how to give electric kisses?

The previous summer, she had paid him an impromptu visit on St. Paul Street, a few weeks after she and her father had finished moving into their new home on Wellington Street. She had gone up the outside staircase at the back and knocked on the door of the large room above the store that served as a bedroom and laboratory. Bare-chested, leaning over a steaming soup with a spoon between his teeth, Stéphane was taking notes in a notebook. Instead of blaming her for her effrontery, he smiled and opened the door for her, then put on a shirt and brought her a towel to dry herself, because she had run bare headed in the rain and her wet dress stuck to her skin. She wanted to know what he was doing with all those strange objects, those assemblages of retorts and coils that gave off powerful acid odours, that enormous magnet that turned inside a copper ring. In response, he grabbed the ends of two cables connected to a stack of metal washers inside a glass tube: his hair stood up like pins on a pin cushion, lightning flashed from his hands while his whole body was in a state of slight vibration. Marie-Violaine had taken a step backwards.

- Kiss me, you idiot!

Curiosity and desire had prevailed over fear. Hands behind her back, she had hoisted herself up on tiptoes and her lips had brushed against those of Stéphane. Tiny sparks had spurted out from under her nose, and a delicious tingling had run down her throat, from the tip of her tongue to the roots of her hair. She had turned her face away.

- What are you up to, you silly goose?

- Guess! he replied, laughing.

She had stopped hesitating and embraced him with all the ardour that a nineteen-year-old had, wrapping her thighs around his waist, grasping his neck, biting his upper lip and moustache, whose bristling hairs she felt on her gums. Convulsions had run through her, shaking her body with such intense pleasure that she had thought for a moment to loosen her embrace, but, even if she had wanted to, she could not have torn herself away from the magnetic field that welded their two bodies together. They had vibrated in unison, with increasing violence, until Stéphane dropped the two cables he was holding between his fingers, his arms still spread.

The small horse was impatient in his harness. The cries of the rioters faded into the distance.

- An electric kiss? But... Stéphane said with a gesture of confusion, as if to show that he did not have with him the instruments that had allowed him to give his demonstration of the conductive virtues of the human body. Was the poison starting to make her delirious?

- Kiss me, you idiot!

He finally realized that she was gently mocking him and, bowing over the oak bench that separated the coachman from the passengers, he grabbed her by the waist and lifted her up, kissing her cheeks and neck fervently.

- So, naughty, you want me to give you electricity? Here you go! Again, and again!

Little Kevin laughed and clapped his hands.

Suddenly, Stéphane felt that his mistress had gone limp in his arms. To add spice to their game, was she playing a fainting act for him? Worried all the same, he put her down on the bench: she collapsed to the side. Kevin caught her immediately, otherwise she would have rolled to the back of the cabriolet. Had it not been for the breathing that lifted her chest, she would have seemed dead.

- Vio! shouted Kevin,