by Mel Bradshaw
Harris meanwhile made more footprints. He tramped about impatiently, not looking at or seeing anything in particular. He was inclined to believe in Lamb, but was at the same time hoping that Lamb would find that he had underestimated the period of the limb’s immersion, by even as little as a week. Surely, an expert could go that far wrong without disgrace.
The professor at last removed his photographic plate. When he loaded a second, Vandervoort voiced concern for the public purse. One photograph, he said, would be quite enough. Lamb went ahead anyway, uncovering the lens for twice as long.
Collecting himself somewhat, Harris took this opportunity to show Whelan the tracing of Elsie’s sketch. The Pickering constable didn’t believe he had ever seen the subject.
“Is it her arm then?” he asked.
Harris had no reply.
“Well, whoever the poor lady was, bless her soul, her other parts had better not go turning up in the township of Pickering.”
When Harris asked if the lower Rouge were considered a dangerous place, he was harangued about the increase in lawlessness generally, short-sighted paring of police salaries, and the drunken rowdiness of railway crews in particular—although they had last month finally moved on to Darlington. Ending on a more cheerful note, Whelan said that at least the valley was no longer frequented by wolves and bears. “The only beasts today are the two-legged kind.”
Leaving Lamb to wrap the arm for transport, Vandervoort ambled over with a cadging gleam in his eye. He looked altogether too comfortable.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a cigar, inspector?” Harris inquired dryly.
Vandervoort’s face fell. “I was about to ask you the same,” he said. “Afraid I smoked the last of Lamb’s—but we might try Whelan.”
Poor Whelan, who was busy hoisting the dinghy’s sail, had not even managed to bring his trousers. Harris said he would sooner hear what the police knew of Mrs. Crane.
“We’ve been down that road before,” said Vandervoort.
“But something must have turned up in the last four days. Look here, Inspector, you seem happy enough to have been told about this find. Let’s work together.”
Vandervoort shook his head. “I saw it at Sheridan’s funeral,” he said, “when you tried to protect my informant from me. You’re an enterprising sort of man, Isaac Harris—and one that will not mind his own business.”
“Could you not tell me—?”
“I’ll tell you this. I’ve questioned your lighthouse keeper sober, and I’ve loosened his tongue with drink. I’ve turned him upside down and inside out. He knows nothing of any harm Mrs. C. may have come to.”
“And did you,” Harris pursued, “offer him the inducement of leniency in the matter of the contraband revolvers?”
“That’s out of my hands. Ask no more.”
Harris saw from a purplish tint suffusing Vandervoort’s countenance that he was about to anger the detective. The professor’s brains would in any case make for better pickings.
The first breeze in over a week had crept up on the lagoon and was ruffling its surface. Waves from the lake pushed through the gap beneath the trestle. A sharpish gust brought Lamb over.
“I don’t like the look of this weather,” he said. “I’m a hopeless sailor.”
“How are you on a horse?” asked Harris. “You’re more than welcome to Banshee.”
“So, I qualify for a loan after all,” the professor commented mildly.
Harris smiled at the reference, which eluded Vandervoort.
“I don’t know, really,” Lamb continued, “since your animal hasn’t yet made my acquaintance, whether I should feel quite safe without you there as well.”
Harris agreed to go with him and set about shortening Banshee’s stirrups. Lamb meanwhile stood and watched the loaded dinghy—Whelan working the sheet, Vandervoort at the helm—head into open water. As the wind lifted the professor’s coat skirts and sent his grey curls scuttling away from the smooth crown of his head to cluster over his ears, he expressed apprehension that the oilskin package and all his camera equipment would be lost “at sea.”
This risk appeared negligible compared to the ghastliness of transporting the limb by land, which it was in any event too late for Harris to propose. He helped the professor into the saddle and mounted behind him, reaching around his thick waist for the reins.
“On the row out,” said Lamb, “I managed to lose a perfectly serviceable beaver hat to the lake before there was any wind at all. I don’t know how I managed to cross the Atlantic—but, ever since I got off the boat from England, I’ve felt the great thing about Canada is that it’s not an island.”
Returning to Toronto consumed the balance of the morning. Banshee was unused to carrying double weight, Lamb uncomfortable with any pace faster than a walk. Harris had a unique chance to question the country’s top forensic scientist and took especial care that no sudden movement should result in such an eminent cranium’s being dashed open against a rock.
Lamb denied having ever met or seen Theresa. His curiosity and his official responsibilities were what had brought him out on the water so early on the Sabbath, a rather arbitrary day of rest in any case—if Mr. Harris didn’t mind his saying so. Not at all, Harris assured him. And Vandervoort? Lamb gathered that Vandervoort had had another case upon which he had been counting to secure advancement, but that that case had somehow fallen through. The inspector accordingly found himself in need of an alternative opportunity to shine.
Harris was interested, and at the same time preoccupied by a more urgent question he was afraid to ask. A pricking at the back of his neck kept making him want to turn around. He couldn’t be sure he had searched the valley thoroughly enough. What if, in the bushes just beyond . . . ?
“Professor Lamb,” he blurted out, “could the woman whose arm this is still be alive?”
“I’m no physician, but I doubt it. We don’t appear to be dealing with a surgical amputation.”
Harris saw the green-clad figure pulled roughly from her horse by unknown hands. She twists loose, tries to run, but trips over the long skirt of her riding habit. Thrown flat in the marsh grass, she looks up. The axe arcs high and falls.
It keeps on rising and falling.
“An attacker mad enough to inflict this wound would not have stopped there?” said Harris.
“Even if he had,” Lamb replied, “the shock and loss of blood must have been fatal.”
So further explorations could wait. The broad, blind expanse of the professor’s back was suddenly irksome. Harris ungratefully considered bundling his companion into a stagecoach in order to nurse alone the cooling embers of his hope.
Lamb half turned in the saddle. “You referred to the deceased as a woman,” he said. “We can’t assume that.”
Harris begged his pardon.
“I may not be able to say for sure even after I get a chance to weigh the bones. I’ll certainly want to scrutinize those hairs under a microscope.”
“How soon can you do all that—all that weighing and scrutinizing?”
“The coroner would normally give me a week to ten days.”
“The sleeve and bracelet could be a disguise,” Harris admitted without conviction. Ten days was a long time to go on searching in a state of uncertainty.
“Come now,” said Lamb. “The dress is female, but we must no more base our conclusions on such externals than you bankers do when you decide to extend credit, or to refuse it.”
Still digesting Lamb’s revelation, Harris did not rise to this bait.
“Incidentally,” the professor added, “I took your good advice.”
“Oh?” Harris was starting to wonder who besides Theresa, male or female, had disappeared in recent weeks.
“I approached the Hon. Robert Baldwin. He has agreed to petition the regents of the university to pay me more.”
“You couldn’t have made a sounder choice,” said Harris, remembering his manners. “Not only did Mr. Baldwin’s gover
nment found the university, but he is the one man in Toronto who never breaks his word.”
“Present company excepted, I hope.”
“Professor Lamb,” Harris pleaded, “could you not hasten or somehow expedite your examination of these remains? So long as any chance remains that Mrs. Crane is still drawing breath, every moment is precious.”
The green shoulders under Harris’s nose shrugged unencouragingly.
Soon after, the end gable and two-storey verandah of the Half Way House came in view on the right of the plank road. When Banshee and her riders stopped for refreshment, Lamb slid from the saddle unaided.
“The chemistry laboratory,” he said, brushing sweat from his straight upper lip, “is at present housed in a far from weatherproof pig shed in behind the Provincial Observatory. Look in on me this evening if you like.”
On reaching the cashier’s suite in the early afternoon, Harris moved from room to room like a man who can’t remember what comes next. He took a bottle of brandy from the dining room sideboard. He left the bottle in the pantry. He opened wardrobe doors, then instead of hanging up his clothes threw them over chairs. Perplexed by this behaviour, he supposed it had something to do with having passed a night in the open on top of five anxious days. Presently he wandered down the corridor to his bedroom, fell on his bed and slept.
He plunged straight into the deepest slumber and ascended gradually. Anxiety returned before fatigue lifted. Waking took forever. Thrashing about the middle ground, he found himself buffeted by more extreme emotions than blew through either his workaday mind or his dreams. He had schooled himself since entering on a business career, and more particularly in the past three years, to give his feelings play within a range not much wider than the arc of the pendulum in his tall mahogany clock. Now, while the wind outside made noisy sport with an ill-secured shutter, his pendulum swung full circle.
Through 180 degrees, he conceived of Theresa as dead. He walked behind the glass-doored hearse, his gaze fixed on the floral tributes piled on her casket. Panicled dogwood, trailing arbutus . . . His sobs shook bricks loose from houses of the quick. Even if he never saw her, he couldn’t bear the thought of her large, green eyes not turning towards a new sight—her soft lips not parting to utter a fresh thought. Or perhaps behind reason’s back, he had hoped to see her again, and now he couldn’t.
Lost, dead, worse than dead. Butchered. Thoughts of the pain and terror this imaginative young woman must have suffered—his Theresa—made him want to eat glass.
Grief needed no addition, and yet the casket he followed was William Sheridan’s too. Tears for each flowed together. Harris mourned a fiery old lion together with a child of energy, grace and light. Fate had dashed what was best in the age, its reforming heart, its questing spirit. The world was left to vermin. Harris fancied he felt them crawling through the mattress beneath him.
At the limit of misery, his spirits would begin to lift. Through the other half circle, someone else had been dismembered. Theresa lived. Amid the clamour of the wind, her footsteps sounded on the stair, her crisp tap at the door—which, try as he might, he could not rise to answer. What if she went away? No, there it was again—tap, tap. Now somehow she was inside the door, in the hall, in the room, on the bed. The nape of her neck nestled in his hand. Her smooth cheek pressed against his, and he was breathing the sunny scent of her hair. They were each other’s, no one else’s. For the first time in all his months of inhabiting the Provincial Bank’s string of opulent, empty rooms, he was at home.
Then men with black scarves wrapped around their hats came to lay her in a box.
He kept hoping for something like a thunderclap over Bay Street to wake him fully, but after an hour or two his inner storm simply played itself out. When he sat up, it was still Sunday afternoon. The blue and white porcelain wash stand looked cheerful enough against the yellow wallpaper. He poured water from the pitcher into the basin. He brushed his teeth with Atkinson’s Parisian tooth paste. Refreshed and on his feet, he knew the world contained decent people and his bed no bugs to speak of.
While water was heating for his bath, he answered bank correspondence. At the same time, part of him wanted to rush back to the edge of town and scour the landscape in broadening rings until he dropped. Somewhere, in one or more pieces, was the rest of a body.
Efforts to establish an agency of the bank in the city of Hamilton seemed frivolous by comparison. For the first time, Harris considered resignation. He would still have the rents from his real estate holdings in addition to his savings. On the other hand, neither his bank nor its competitors could be counted on to understand. Leaving one employer might foreclose his future with any. He tried believing that, whatever its origin, Vandervoort’s new interest in the case made drastic action on his own part unnecessary.
It was a hypothesis, at least.
The moment might still come for a prolonged, out-of-town search. Then Harris would have to decide. In the meantime, there were things he could do in Toronto.
Not all could be done on a Sunday. Harris wanted to ask the undertaker if he had buried William Sheridan with both his arms. From what bank messenger Dick Ogilvie had said Wednesday, there would be no point trying to raise the matter with his father today. The Sabbatarian mood was on the rise. Harris took care to date his letters as of Monday, July 21.
The MacFarlanes, he trusted, would receive him. Bathing and dressing quickly, he managed to reach their Queen Street West villa before the end of the tea hour. The servant showed him through to the garden.
Surrounded by three of her children and a pair of spaniels, Kate MacFarlane sat in the shade of a shrubbery. A viewer with stereoscopic photographs of Niagara Falls was being passed around. These were solemnly pronounced to be arresting and sublime, though the water was a woolly blur.
Harris returned Elsie’s sketch book, avoiding mention of his grisly discovery, and asked if anyone knew who Theresa’s fine-featured companion might be. A French-speaking lady, he suggested, recalling that the miller’s assistant had not been able to understand her.
“Mademoiselle Marthe!” Elsie exclaimed. “She was teaching Mrs. Crane French.”
“Yes, more of a teacher than a friend,” Mrs. MacFarlane briskly concurred. “We don’t really know her.”
“She came here once. I wanted to sketch her, but there wasn’t time.”
“Elsie, dear, take the viewer from your brother and show him how to put that stereoscope in properly before he bends it.”
No one seemed to know Marthe’s family name. Elsie had heard and forgotten it. Her mother suggested that Harris speak to Mr. MacFarlane, who was in his study.
Harris finished his tea before going in. Communicative and attentive on other subjects, Kate MacFarlane appeared to have cooled towards his search. He asked again about her last glimpse of Theresa. She would not speak of it. As he ambled across the scythe-cut lawn, he wondered what had happened to change her mind.
Above the loggia in the centre of the garden façade rose a broad semicircular tower reminiscent of engravings of Windsor Castle. Money could scarcely have bought more in the way of aristocratic pedigree. Transparent in intention, the trappings nonetheless had their effect. Although he had exchanged pleasantries with George MacFarlane at half a dozen soirées, Harris felt suddenly diffident. He followed a servant down an unfamiliar tapestry-lined hall with a sense that he was about to intrude on momentous deliberations.
Or perhaps the hall’s length simply allowed time to reflect that MacFarlane didn’t need the medievalism to inspire awe. Harris flattered himself that he knew how one became a Crane, the deals and compromises one made. Not so in the case of MacFarlane, who as early as 1840 had allegedly been worth £200,000 and who today could doubtless buy five or six Henry Cranes. To become a MacFarlane there weren’t enough business days in a lifetime.
A carpenter’s son, he had started trading sticks of wood. With each trade he acquired more cutting rights or property in what became Victoria County. Ti
mber export made him a ship-owner, then a ship-builder. Some ships were simply dismantled in Britain for their timbers. Others returned with cargoes of textiles or of people he could settle on the land he had cleared. Rumour had it that he was either about to establish spinning mills in the Toronto area or about to buy a newspaper. He had contributed articles on business or culture to a variety of periodicals and, to lure immigrants, had written the novel Flora of Fenelon Falls, as well as a statistic-laden Guide to Canadian Opportunities. Mining and whaling also figured among his interests. Many more ventures he likely kept to himself, though he made no secret of financing and captaining his own company of militia.
A pair of gargoyles guarded the study door. Beyond it, Harris found an ample room lined with overflowing black oak bookcases. Behind the refectory table that served as a desk, the more than ample George MacFarlane rose from an ecclesiastical looking chair with a high, pointed back.
A senior member of William Sheridan’s generation, MacFarlane was tall, broad-shouldered and corpulent. His nose resembled an inverted ship’s prow. His offered hand was so large that Harris could barely grasp enough of it to shake. Blue saucer eyes gave him a deceptively ingenuous expression.
“Sit down, sit down. I was just scribbling a bit of verse on the Treaty of Paris for one of those competitions, nothing that can’t wait ten minutes.” His voice was both soft and gruff, like sawdust with splinters scattered through it.
He had been interested to hear that Harris believed he could find “our friend” Mrs. Crane and had asked his wife to refer any further inquiries to him. Above all, he didn’t want Elsie upset. In fact, the more quietly they worked the better. There were Henry Crane’s feelings to consider as well as those of society.
“I’m only doing,” said Harris, “what her own brother would do if he had lived.”