Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “John Vandervoort, Mr. Harris. Procurement officer for the Garrison. I must speak to Miss Webster concerning the . . . ah . . . the new battle colours she is stitching for the Wiltshire Grenadiers.”

  Harris knew for a fact there was no such regiment at the Toronto Garrison, or for that matter in the British army.

  He assessed Vandervoort as muscular enough to cause even a strong girl much annoyance if he chose, but past the height of his vigour. Fond of his comforts. His nose was brightly veined, and a tin flask protruded from a side pocket of his check jacket. Harris saw no reason to cringe before him.

  “You’re sure, Miss Webster, you don’t require assistance?”

  “Oh, quite. I’m in no danger. Excuse me.”

  Vandervoort, his hand now at the back of her waist, ushered Marion Webster out of the square. Powerless to detain her, Harris watched with misgiving until they were lost to view, then made his way to Crane’s side.

  “So, there you are, Isaac. We’re next. That’s all right, Oscar.” Brisk now as Harris could desire, Crane opened the door to his brougham before the coachman had time to jump down.

  Mystery seemed to be piling on mystery. As Harris settled into the plush, pearl-grey upholstery, he wondered why Crane—always so avid for the ear of politicians—should choose on this occasion to send them on ahead in the coaches reserved for the chief mourners and himself ride to the cemetery in his own conveyance with no better company than a bank cashier.

  Crane settled into the seat beside Harris and pulled the door shut. The confined space smelled of new leather and of Crane’s soap. What was it? Something oriental, Harris thought—sandalwood perhaps.

  “It’s a warm day for a closed carriage,” said Crane, mopping his forehead with a black-bordered handkerchief, “but it gives us a chance to be by ourselves for a bit.”

  Through the front window, the coachman up on the box could be seen flicking the horse into motion with his reins. Four well-oiled wheels rolled smoothly forward.

  “Mrs. Crane is rumoured to be in the General Hospital,” said Harris. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I really should have thought of something better,” Crane replied. “The fact of the matter is she has disappeared.”

  The word shocked Harris. His entire body seemed to clench. Even the gentle forward motion of the carriage became oppressive, and he would have had the driver stop had they not been in the middle of a funeral procession. Doubly oppressive was the presence of the other man, Theresa’s husband. His voice was so even that he might have been making a heartless joke, or merely putting out another lie for public consumption.

  Harris forced himself to study Crane’s pink, clean-shaven face. It was firmly fleshed, smoothly handsome, dignified, amiable despite small eyes, and otherwise unexpressive. Harris remembered, though, an incident during the funeral service.

  Theresa’s husband had read from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes. Harris thought of Henry Crane as having a glib tongue and heart, but nothing could have been less glib than his performance on this occasion. From the moment he had stood up, the substantial man of business had shown untypical diffidence. He had moved slowly to the reading desk.

  A lamp there had already been lit to supplement the daylight slanting into the church through plain glass windows. The gas flame shone off the pink bald patch in the middle of Crane’s head as he inclined it over the Bible. Around the ears, his straight sandy hair was clipped short. This habitual if unfashionable cut appeared in the context almost monkish.

  “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” His toneless voice reached to the farthest member of the hushed congregation. “A time to be born—”

  Here Crane stopped as if paralyzed. The mourners held their breath. The silence lasted too long to be a mere rhetorical flourish. If Crane had at this moment wiped his eye or sat down or given any other sign of incapacity to continue, Harris would have doubted his sincerity instantly. But the voice at last continued in the same steady key: “—and a time to die.” Crane completed the reading without further interruptions, then walked quietly back to to his seat.

  Harris thought of that halting reading and wondered what more was behind Crane’s show of emotion than had appeared at the time. Again the industrialist seemed hesitant.

  “Disappeared?” said Harris, finding his own voice with difficulty. “How can she have?”

  “She’ll likely turn up safe,” said Crane. “What happened is she went for a ride Sunday afternoon and didn’t come back.”

  “She went alone?”

  “Yes. I was busy with funeral arrangements, but she said she needed air and exercise. I thought they would do her good considering the heavy blow of her father’s death.”

  “Please continue.”

  Crane continued, calmly reasonable. “She often rode alone. My wife is an excellent horsewoman—as you know. I was concerned, but didn’t overrule her.”

  “And her horse?” said Harris. “I take it she was riding Spat. Has the animal not found its way home?”

  “No, Isaac. Look, I wanted to ask you whether she has communicated with you in any way. Has she?” Crane’s voice sharpened suddenly, as if he suspected Harris’s surprise might be feigned.

  “She has not.”

  “Neither before Sunday nor since?”

  “There’s been no communication between us,” Harris flatly declared, “direct or indirect, since before her marriage.”

  His hazel-brown eyes becoming even smaller, Crane held Harris’s gaze. The question still hung between them.

  This was not the Henry Crane who—with never a look behind—had wooed Theresa away from the disastrously diffident Harris. Rolling up Yonge Street past the many crape-hung shop windows, Harris reflected on the change.

  He had been quiet and respectful as a suitor, Crane voluble and relentless. Harris had shared recreative and scientific interests with Theresa for years, but it was only when offered the cashier’s post that he had felt in a position to contemplate marriage. That happened to be the moment Crane began frequenting William Sheridan’s table.

  Crane had been both older and newer, fresher and more seasoned. Harris didn’t really believe Crane’s money had swayed Theresa, but understood that Crane was all the more dashing for never having to think twice about his means. Harris had three or four investments, but Crane had projects. He made things happen. And he wasn’t the least bit reticent around women.

  The brougham turned east on Carlton, a residential street. Harris’s recollection skirted around the snowy afternoon in Sheridan’s Front Street drawing room, when Theresa had innocently told him of her decision. Harris had been unable—had she noticed?—to lift his eyes from one green on yellow arabesque in the Tabriz Persian carpet, a writhing curl that from the intense scrutiny of that half hour in the fading light had become for him the very image of pain. His pain. At no time had he wanted her to suffer.

  For her sake, it was to be hoped that Crane loved her more sincerely than appeared, or that he would come to do so. Harris still had his doubts. Whatever the present state of his affections, though, Crane had plainly lost his former confidence regarding Theresa’s.

  Seeming to read Harris’s mind, Crane relaxed his wary squint and glanced away into the leafy green of Allan Park, where two squirrels were chasing each other around the trunk of an oak. Having apparently satisfied himself that Harris had indeed taken no part in his wife’s disappearance, Crane would have dismissed him had circumstances permitted. Harris, for his part, was glad they were stuck with each other for the eight or ten more blocks it would take them to reach St. James’s Cemetery. He had questions of his own.

  “Have there been any ransom demands?”

  Crane shook his head.

  “Did she take any luggage then—any things she might want if she contemplated being two nights away from home?”

  “Nothing as far as we can make out.”

  Harris wondered if the plural,
which rang with such authority, included more than Crane and his domestic staff. “Have you engaged a detective?”

  “Detective? No-o.” Crane shuddered at the neologism. “It’s my wife that’s missing. I should set a detective to find where pilfered construction materials had got to. No—I had thought she might be with friends and would return in time for the funeral.”

  “And now?”

  A wasp was buzzing against the inside of the front window. Crane seemed not to notice.

  “I’ll speak to Chief Sherwood this evening about police action,” he said. “You’ll understand, Isaac, I wanted to spare Mrs. Crane the embarrassment of any public hue and cry, particularly in view of her bereavement.”

  Hue and cry? That had not been Harris’s suggestion—though it might come to that. “Which of her friends have you spoken to?”

  “I see you take this matter to heart,” said Crane, newly suspicious. “Which friends would you speak to?”

  “Women she went to school with, I suppose. Guests in your home. People she called on. As I think I’ve made clear, I’m hardly in a position to know.”

  Crane squirmed in his seat. His irritation was starting to show.

  “Can’t you do anything about that bug?” he asked.

  Harris lunged at the wasp with his folded handkerchief and missed. Wings whining and clattering, the yellow jacket rose to the upholstered ceiling, dived to the thick-pile burgundy carpet, bounced against the door panels, flew everywhere except out the open side windows to safety, and settled at last on Harris’s striped trouser leg, where he caught it up in the linen pad and crushed it.

  “Thank you,” said Crane.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I’m uncommonly squeamish about killing things, you know.” Crane sounded neither proud nor ashamed of his squeamishness and had more or less recovered his composure.

  Whether by accident or design, the wasp hunt had filled the time necessary to bring Crane’s carriage up Parliament Street to the cemetery gates. The land beyond them resembled a burial ground less than it did a gently undulating park. Although winding roads and paths had been laid out, there were still few monuments of any size and no chapel.

  Up ahead, the hearse could be seen turning left just past an elegant grey granite mausoleum with fluted columns—resting place of a distiller—then climbing towards the squat Sheridan obelisk. William Sheridan had said he wanted it built on a broad base, hard if not impossible for Orange ruffians to push over. He had had the rosy stone brought by horse and waggon from the Credit Valley in the mid-forties, when his wife and son’s remains had been moved from the old Anglican graveyard in town.

  The procession straggled to a halt. Footmen trailing black scarves folded the steps of the two mourning coaches down to the ground, and the pallbearers emerged blinking into the sunlight. Harris scanned the landscape in case Theresa, having missed the church service, might nonetheless show herself at the interment.

  “When last seen,” he asked, “was she wearing black?”

  Crane’s coachman was already holding open the door.

  “She had nothing black,” Crane replied. “Nothing that she could ride in.” He climbed out.

  “What colour was her outfit?”

  Crane was striding ahead towards the open grave. When Harris caught up, he repeated the question.

  “Isaac, I appreciate your having granted me an interview.”

  “Most welcome. Was she wearing blue?”

  “I’m sure your interest is kindly meant.”

  “Green?”

  Crane stopped dead. “Yes, green. Now I appeal to your sense of delicacy to pursue this matter no further.” The rail baron’s face was pinker than before, his voice stern and commanding. “Assure yourself I shall take every measure appropriate to securing the safe return of my wife.”

  Harris saw the futility of asking further questions. Crane was the deceased’s only relative at the funeral, and the rector of Holy Trinity was approaching for a consultation. Before turning to Dr. Scadding, Crane gave Harris’s hand a dismissive shake.

  But Harris held Crane’s hand firm until he had said, “I should like to be informed of any fresh developments.”

  A sharp, appraising glance was the only reply he got.

  There and then Harris made his decision. He was not about to tailor his sense of delicacy to fit Henry Crane’s convenience. Not this time.

  PART ONE:

  Home District

  Chapter One

  The Provincial Bank

  After the interment, Harris sorted quickly through the afternoon’s messages at his desk, then changed into cord breeches and riding boots and made for the Richmond Street livery stable where he boarded his horse. Banshee was a dapple-grey five-year-old with large eyes and lots of stamina. He found her picking at her bedding straw. Not for the first time, he asked if the liveryman was spending enough on feed, but avoided threats to take his business elsewhere. Randall’s was the cleanest establishment within walking distance of the bank and had the biggest stalls.

  Harris saddled up without waiting for the boy’s help. He intended to spend the evening running over what he recalled as Theresa’s favourite rides to see if he could find any trace of her—someone who had seen her perhaps, or some physical sign of an accident.

  The sun at five o’clock was still three hours high and scorching, the air motionless. Only by cantering through it could he obtain the semblance of a breeze on his damp forehead. Unbothered by the heat, the horse whisked him out to Gooderham and Worts’s windmill at the eastern extremity of the Toronto bay, and from there onto the peninsula.

  While he rode, he forced himself to put some order into the thoughts and questions spawned by Crane’s shockingly cool announcement. Respectably married women had never been known to just disappear from this city. Accident apart, what could have happened to Theresa? Harris began listing possibilities in his head:

  1. mental disorder

  2. voluntary flight

  3. abduction

  4.

  He left 4 blank for the moment.

  The least likely alternative was 1. Harris expected grief to shake Theresa hard, but not to shatter her. She had a history of steadfastness in crises. When a drunken cook had hacked her own thumb off with an eight-inch cleaver, sending the housemaid into hysterics, Theresa had dressed the stump without flinching. More to the point, during an earlier—and to all appearances fatal—bout of William Sheridan’s intestinal ailment, she had brushed tears aside to discuss funeral and testamentary arrangements with him. It would surely have taken more than his death to unhinge her reason.

  And yet, Harris had to admit, much could have happened to change her in the past three years. If he were to reach any meaningful conclusions, he would have to question someone like her father’s partner Jasper about her marriage. This topic he had always avoided.

  Suppose—possibility 2—Theresa were hiding from her husband. In that case, Harris didn’t want to be too helpful to the official search until he had a better idea of her reasons.

  They had to relate to her father’s death. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Perhaps as he faced eternity William Sheridan had told her something that made continuing her life with Henry Crane impossible. Perhaps some youthful shame that Crane had thought safely buried in the forests of the Northwest had, against all his calculations, come to his father-in-law’s knowledge. Alternatively, Theresa might some time ago have decided to leave Crane. She might only have refrained from doing so during her father’s lifetime to spare him the scandal—though if she had been able to wait for his death, why not wait two days more for the funeral?

  Harris stopped at the Peninsula Hotel, situated on the narrowest part of the sandy isthmus. Neither staff nor guests could tell him anything of Theresa, and his own observations were nothing to the point. Today in daylight he noticed, as on Saturday night he had not, that a couple more of the low dunes had recently been dug away. New city regulations were not sto
pping businessmen like Joseph Bloor from helping themselves to this sand for their brick works. One good storm now would wash the hotel out and make the peninsula an island.

  Riding on, he approached the hexagonal spire of the Gibraltar Light. Its grey stone glowed warmly in the late afternoon sun. He halted to speak to the keeper, a grizzled bachelor familiar to excursionists for his outlandish costumes, though not yet personally known to Harris. Discovered on his doorstep, Harvey Ingram proved more hospitable than informative.

  Sit down, he urged in a drink-slurred burr. Have a dram. He shifted a jug from the other half of the rough bench he occupied. Surely, he knew Susan—he meant Theresa—Crane, by sight at least. He had not seen her Sunday or since. Had she bolted then? What had got into her? While he sounded sincerely anxious, his confusion over her name did little to raise Harris’s hopes. He wore a Turkish headdress and bits of military gear in apparent tribute to the recently concluded Crimean campaign—dispensing with any stock or collar, however, as he had no appreciable neck to encircle.

  The banker at first declined the invitation on the pretext of making the most of the remaining daylight. Only on his darkened way back to town, after the most thorough examination of every beach and thicket, did the prospect of refreshment tempt him. By then the light was lit atop the eighty-two-foot tower and beckoned him over.

  Ingram had walked out onto the sward before the tower door. He did not mark Harris’s approach. Hands on hips, the lighthouse keeper was shuffling his feet and from time to time essaying a modest kick or hop. Not falling down, at least, thought Harris.

  “I came back, Mr. Ingram,” he called out as soon as he was close enough to be confident of being heard.

  Ingram spun around.

  “Who’s that?” he cried in a tone both peremptory and apprehensive, as if he could expect nothing good of any that came back.

  “No ghost, I assure you.” Harris dismounted and walked forward into the rectangle of lamp light spilling from the tower door. “I thought I’d ask if your offer still stands.”