by Mel Bradshaw
“. . . I was just surprised she didn’t stop the night here after.” The proprietress sounded unexpectedly wistful as she rose from Harris’s table and straightened her white cuffs. “There were not two hours of daylight. That dress besides was miles long for walking. If she had stopped with me, she could have unburdened her spirit, as I’ve been bereaved myself—but, no, she slipped away. Suspicious, don’t you think? I wonder now if I wasn’t as credulous as that gentleman we were speaking of . . .”
To be thorough, Harris had her step out and identify Nelson. The purchaser’s death came as sad news.
“So far from his mother’s hearth.” She stared across her well-swept, lamplit inn yard at the plank road winding into darkness. “I’ve the St. George’s Society expecting their monthly supper here at ten thirty, so I had best get my dining room set to rights. My, they are a splendid crew. It would have eased that poor man’s heart to hear the toasts.” A smile lifted her full cheeks. “You can say that in your obituary.”
Harris explained that he was not a journalist but a friend of the lady in green. “Did her habit have both sleeves?” he asked.
“Sleeves? Yes, of course, but why—”
“Could any of your establishment,” he hurried on, “have seen which way she went?”
“I asked, sir—no. What is it she’s running away from?”
“Help me find out,” he begged.
So she let him ask again, from stable hand to scullery maid. The latter tugged at her red fingers, scuffed her shoes, glanced at the floor and confessed at last. She had no notion where the lady went, but behind Mistress’s back she had let the lady use kitchen shears to cut a swath from the bottom of her bright skirt. In return the girl had been given the surplus fabric for her granny to make a waistcoat.
Electricity moved Harris’s legs without his choosing. By the calendar eighteen days behind Theresa, he nonetheless felt as close now as to the next tree.
He rode straight to the grandmother’s and bought the waistcoat.
After a few hours sleep at Sager’s Hotel, Harris set out on foot. As August 3 was the day the butler had named for Crane’s return, Nelson had to be available and rested.
Harris’s course lay through long-settled agricultural land, the lake on his right. Soon after five, the sun climbed from the water to fire the corn fields and set aglow farm windows. It felt like a new dawn in a long season. Last night, for the first time, Harris had spoken to people who remembered having spoken to Theresa later than July 13. If not at ease, she had at least been whole and active. Although no one so far could quote to him any of her actual words, she and he had ridden the same mount, and a piece of the fabric she had worn now girded his chest.
The hue and texture were not new to him. Allowances made for differences in weathering, they matched those of the Rouge Valley sleeve. No pleasant thought on a promising morning.
He walked faster. He must walk in Theresa’s shoes now, for she had left the Northumberland Inn without a horse. Would she double back? He thought not. She would continue east, the lake on her right. Crows and blackbirds serenaded Harris as he moved from farmhouse to farmhouse. He mentioned dates and times, showed the practically illegible tracing, pointed to his ill-fitting emerald vest. One family gave him breakfast, none information.
He worked east towards Cobourg, the nearest town after Port Hope. Arriving on King Street close to nine, he considered the day half gone and was surprised to find hotel clerks still yawning and grumpy. A whisky and tobacco aftertaste of Saturday night seeped from taprooms into lobbies. Saturday’s guests were unremembered, let alone those of July 15. Check the register and welcome.
At Weller’s Stage Lines, however, a stable boy had not forgotten. He was busy harnessing a team of four out in the yard, and practice lent his movements a grace despite his ill-proportioned physique. Hands, ears and feet all seemed untidily large for his body.
“I found her in one of the stalls talking to Jupiter.” He seemed so certain, and—mercifully for a Harris dumbfounded by this stroke of luck—he had more to say. “The light there is poor. I could not see her face, not at first. She sounded not much older than what I am, but dead tuckered out. It was morning like now. I told her if she was waiting for the eastbound, she would be more comfortable waiting in the office or at the Globe Hotel next door. Passengers aren’t supposed to be in the stables. But she said she would rather be with beasts that asked no questions.”
The boy grinned his approval of this sentiment. Stealthy rather than calm, Harris followed him from strap to tightening strap. How gladly would he have dispensed with questions, could he but have picked his informant up and wrung the entire encounter from him!
“What else did she say?”
“She talked about Jupiter’s teeth being worn sharp and him biting his tongue and not being able to chew right. He was off his feed was all I knew. She said try filing, and it worked. No ribs showing now, eh, Jupe?” He slid a bridle over the head of a bucktoothed grey and secured the throat latch. “It was only when she came out of the stable to board the coach that I saw how beautiful she was. If I had known, I’d have felt awkward talking to her—if you know what I mean.”
Harris nodded silently, remembering his silence the evening Sheridan had said, “My dear, Harris here is new to town, but from the riding,” and Harris had met the gaze of large, green eyes burning in a seraph’s face.
“She was just so matter-of-fact about Jupiter, not like . . .” The boy’s voice trailed off, leaving his difficulties with Cobourg’s belles to be imagined. “You’re the first person I’ve told about her.”
“Did she ask you not to tell?”
“Not in so many words. I just knew she was hiding from something. When we got outside, I could tell from the earth on her dress that she had been sleeping rough. But now . . .”
“Asa,” an elderly man in a battered felt hat called from the office door, “you get those animals put to yet? It’s nine fifty-seven.”
“Now?” said Harris.
Asa finished buckling the traces and set to threading the driving reins through terrets on the horses’ collars and saddles. “Well, mister, I keep wondering where she is and does she need help. Not that I can do much about it.”
“You can. You are. Did she leave on the eastbound coach?”
“The ten o’clock,” said the boy, “same as this one here.”
“I’ll be on it too then. She didn’t tell you how far she was going?”
She had not told him—nor could Asa guarantee that today’s driver was the one who had conveyed the beautiful lady in question. All coach drivers shouted at him much the same.
The vehicle was uninvitingly square and spartan, with a chipped coat of red paint and rolled canvas flaps in place of window glass. The felt-hatted man led three passengers from the office and held open the coach door while they climbed inside. He then hoisted himself grumbling onto the box.
Harris was about to join him when the grey horse caught his eye. “Did you,” he asked the boy aside, “overhear any of what she was saying to Jupiter when you found her?”
“There was something about it being hard to sleep. And then I think—this is what I keep puzzling over because of it being spookish, and her voice so low and weary.”
“Tell me quickly.”
“Telling would ease my mind. It sounded like—don’t ask me what it means—sounded like, ‘Isaac, I must do it for her.’”
“Isaac?” Harris’s scalp was tingling. “Are you sure?”
“Asa,” the driver called down, “is that gentleman coming or staying?”
“Isaac’s what I heard. Did she have a horse of that name?”
“Asa!”
“But do what?” Harris pleaded. “For whom?”
“‘Isaac, I must do it for her.’ That’s all.”
Harris almost went back on his decision to leave. “I’m coming,” he said.
He swung himself up onto the box just as the yellow wheels started to rol
l. He looked back to thank Asa, but too late. The boy had already turned towards the stable. On either side of his head, his ears stood out like jug handles. Fine ears they were too.
Harris’s excitement ill suited him for the trip he now faced. Asa’s testimony to Theresa’s exhaustion made him anxious, while the thought that she had called upon him—and he could not doubt that he was the Isaac she meant—reinforced in him a joyous yet desperate sense of purpose. That after so many days of flailing about, he now had a trail to follow sharpened his joy. That he was following it so sluggishly deepened his despair.
Once under way, the driver became less irritable, but denied having noticed any female passenger in green, or any other colour. His one topic was horse-drawn transport in the quarter century it had employed him.
“Winter’s best of all!” he exclaimed, pulling his battered hat down against imagined blizzards. “Ice ties your steamers snug in port. Then we put runners in place of wheels and off fly our coaches over potholes, over swamps. Winter’s your great road improver in this country, young sir.”
He might have thought Harris freshly arrived from Jamaica and unfamiliar with the properties of snow. Long before winter, of course, the Grand Trunk Railway would be complete from Toronto to Montreal and swallowing his custom whole. Harris let him brag while himself puzzling over the words Theresa had addressed to him.
If she were running away from Toronto, it sounded as if she were also running towards some task she thought she must perform. Which task was not obvious. Easier to start speculating as to where it was to be done, and for whom.
The coach creaked and rattled its way eastward—the lake not always in view, but always to the right—and would be pursuing its laborious course as far as Kingston. Theresa’s mission, though, might take her farther, down the St. Lawrence River to Marthe Laurendeau’s home in Coteau-du-Lac. With more time, Harris could have mentioned these names to Asa. He mentioned them without profit to the driver.
“In French Canada, young sir? Now there they understand that winter’s your time for travel and social calls. Ever hear of muffining? You take your muffin—your young lady, that is—out in a sleigh and . . .”
Harris wondered if “for her” could signify anything other than for Marthe. Theresa had few friends and no family, save perhaps for some cousins across the Atlantic. She had been fond of Kate and Elsie MacFarlane. Sibyl Martin she had apparently suspected of murder, which provided no motive to do the housekeeper good—unless Theresa had subsequently concluded that her suspicions were unjustified and wished to make amends. This was conceivable—even if, as Harris believed, Sibyl were dead. Nevertheless, Sibyl would still have to have a connection to some place on the road ahead.
By four o’clock Monday morning, that road had dwindled from plank to ill-graded earth. The change lengthened times between scheduled stops by fifty per cent, for at speeds above three and a half miles per hour teeth threatened to loosen from gums. Harris had by now been coaching for upwards of eighteen consecutive hours and would gladly have seen every such conveyance splintered for boiler fuel.
From Napanee on, an increasingly heavy rain softened the bumps, but deepened the ruts. Drivers too had changed for the worse. The replacement had brought an open bottle of whisky on board with him at Shannonville and seemed to be drawing consolation from it with increasing frequency at the very time road and weather conditions were making team management more critical.
In the vain hope of sleep, Harris had moved inside. There each sway and jolt seemed exaggerated by the lack of external reference points. Not only was it still dark night, but the canvas flaps had been lowered to keep the compartment relatively dry. Louvers in the door admitted air sparingly. The seats’ wafer-thin upholstery had been tamped thinner by generations of passengers.
For Theresa, the journey had been worse. The most recent innkeeper had seen her on the coach more than two weeks before. Frail, was how he described her, and yet too preoccupied to take nourishment, “not so much as a cup of broth.” He had failed as others before him to persuade her to stop the night. She had mentioned no destination. Harris hoped now that it was indeed Coteau-du-Lac, where she might at least give herself into the care of someone she knew, but from the inn to Marthe’s, she still had more than two hundred miles to cover.
Blackly, Harris reflected that he still had many hours in which to dust off his bookish French.
He would rather have been riding Banshee. He would have worn her out long before now. Incessantly he had to remind himself that in this limping coach he was making the best time possible. The railway wasn’t finished. No steamers sailed on Sunday. Besides, only by stopping at each stage could he be sure Theresa was still travelling east along the Ontario shore, the lake always to her right. He was eighteen days behind but no longer losing ground.
The only other steadying thought in that hour before daybreak was that, in her anguish, the woman Harris had built his life around had used his name, and his alone. He felt she had asked for his protection.
Since swimming ashore from Triumph, Harris had had no inkling about whether he was being followed. He had been wary at each stage point, though. By now any spy of Vandervoort’s who had sailed on to Kingston could have rejoined Harris by coaching west.
Three passengers had boarded at Napanee. Opposite Harris dozed a musty-smelling Methuselah in preacher’s black. Beside him, his young wife clutched a suitcase that but for the rain she would gladly have got out of everybody’s way by having carried on the roof. To her chagrin, her feet occasionally collided with those of an extensive traveller to Harris’s right. He acted very much at home and, whenever he thought anyone awake, spoke of the virtues of various kinds of insurance.
None of them resembled any of the steamer passengers. Still, it was dark. The preacher, for example, might not be as old and decrepit as Harris assumed.
He almost put the man’s resilience to the test by hurtling onto his lap as the coach bounced down a slope. At the last moment, a lateral jolt threw him instead on top of the insurance salesman. After that, the coach didn’t move.
Through the downpour, the driver could be heard climbing down from the box. He flung open the downside door and between curses told the inmates they would have to get out if the horses were to have any chance of pulling the coach from the mud. The preacher’s lady had difficulty waking her husband, who had allegedly exhausted himself at some camp meeting the day before. What a shame, the salesman whispered to Harris, if the reverend died uninsured!
Once the three youngest passengers were drenched, the woman begged the driver to leave her husband in the lightened coach. Exposed to the rain, he would surely catch a chill. When the horses pulled, however, the right wheels only sank deeper, aggravating the tilt, and she became reconciled to his getting wet. He would sustain graver injury if the coach overturned.
Harris lifted him clear and set him, with his wife for support, on the rail of a short bridge just ahead. The driver meanwhile prepared to urge his team forward again. Harris knew this would not work. He had felt the ground in front of the wheels and found it even softer. A couple of yards farther on, the deck of the bridge would carry the wheels to where the road started climbing out of the gully, but there was no driving through that intervening mud hole.
“Hallo there, driver. Let’s get some logs down first.”
“No need for that, damn it.” The rain fairly sizzled off the man’s drink-inflamed face. “This here is a strong team.”
He laid his long whip on the animals’ flanks, and the coach came another ten degrees nearer capsizing.
Harris, his hand quickened by anger, took possession of the whip. “Now we’ll have to pull the coach back before we lay the logs. Unhitch the team.”
“Here, I know my business . . .”
“Do it,” said Harris.
While the team was being unhitched, he set the insurance salesman to identifying likely looking timber along the gully. In the lee of the coach, he got a tin lantern li
t and gave it to the preacher and his wife so they could alert any oncoming traffic to the obstruction. The one favourable circumstance was twilight’s incipient dilution of the inky sky. The rain fell hard as ever.
The ground behind the coach was appreciably less firm now than when they had first got stuck. Harris and the driver hastened to attach the traces to the rear axle and the horses dragged the vehicle back, if not out of the mud, at least onto a more even keel.
Just then a woman’s shouts rang out. Harris looked up to see the preacher’s wife waving her lantern at a waggon coming west over the brow of the rise. A square, flat load stood out against the paler clouds.
The insurance salesman meanwhile sauntered up complaining that he could find no logs large and sound enough to bear the coach’s weight. Whether he had looked at all was not evident from the cleanliness of his checked suit.
“Never mind,” said Harris, mud from cuffs to collar. “Here’s something better. Look on the waggon.” To the carter he called, almost cheerfully, “Good morning there! Can you lend us ten feet of road?”
The waggon was carrying pine planks, eight inches wide. The carter, his assistant, Harris, and the coach driver laid them crosswise, three deep in front of each pair of wheels and as far as the bridge. After that it was easy. With the water-logged team back in front, the stage coach rolled to firmer ground. The lumber waggon drove over the planks in the opposite direction before they were pried out of the mud and returned to the load.
“You won’t find any more bad patches before Kingston,” the carter called as he drove off.
Harris waved and climbed up on the box.
“Before we start,” he said, “let me have the whisky bottle.”
The other three soaking passengers had already resumed their seats.
“Empty,” grunted the driver. “You better ride inside.”
“Show me.”
Harris was shown. A tantalizing last half ounce swirled around the dimple at the bottom of the bottle. Harris emptied it into the mud.