Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  The scaffold stood on the village green, which spectators’ boots were churning into mud. The rain had only just stopped. Men, women and children continued to congregate even as the thick, drab figure in the middle of the platform was being asked if he had any last words.

  Martin moistened his lips. He had plainly never made a speech, and his voice was low and mumbling. From where he stood, Harris caught the drift only. There was something about deserving death, being afraid, the comfort of the Gospel. If his sister were alive, he said, he forgave her for not coming, was sorry he had shamed her. God have mercy.

  After this muffled imprecation, Postlethwaite’s ringing “Amen” came as such a contrast that the crowd tittered. The preacher glared down at them while the hooded hangman stepped forward to pull over Martin’s head first a white sack and then the noose itself.

  It was already well past the appointed hour of eleven. Without more ceremony, the hangman pulled the lever that drew the bolt from the trap—which he stamped on at the same time. A petulant gesture, it appeared. He may have been afraid that the rain had swollen the planks and made them bind. The trap swung smartly down on its hinges. Martin fell through. The rope tautened.

  The rope broke. Harris heard a mild pop, then saw a frayed tassel swinging where a hanged man should have been. The executioner evidently knew his lumber better than his hemp.

  Martin fell before the front rank of gasping spectators straight into the pine crate waiting to receive his remains. Kneeling in it, he found his voice.

  “Hallelujah, Lord! I’m saved!” he bawled out, his words lifting and spreading through the moist air. “I’m saved! I’m saved!”

  Whether he truly thought himself dead and in heaven or believed the accident entailed an earthly pardon was unclear. Pressing forward with the throng, Harris could see little of what was occurring at ground level. Postlethwaite descended the stairs with the help of the railing. His steps faltered, for the first time since leaving the coach, as he escorted Martin back up to the platform. They were raggedly reciting, “The Lord is my shepherd . . .”

  The trap was soon set again. Repairing the rope took longer. There was nothing for Harris to do but wait. He could not hope to get close enough to Martin to speak to him again. Martin, besides, after the bungled execution, was in such a state of religious exaltation as to be quite incoherent. The white cloth had been pulled from his enraptured face. Exclamations burst from him like thunderclaps. Some segments of the restless crowd jeered and baited him, only to be hushed by others.

  Amid these exchanges, one figure’s stillness caught Harris’s eye. The young keeper had taken off his uniform tunic and cap, which had left a red stripe across his forehead. His oak-brown moustache looked humid and heavier than ever. Harris worked around behind him.

  “Hallo, Vaillancourt. Don’t be alarmed.”

  The keeper started, relaxing when he saw Harris was alone.

  “For Paul Taggart,” he confided. “Someone had to come, with leave or no.”

  “Employers are fallible,” said Harris. “A man has to think for himself.”

  “I thought I should only be off my watch ten minutes. Who could have expected this?”

  “Who gave you the anonymous letter?”

  “I wasn’t supposed to tell Martin.”

  “You can tell me,” said Harris in a tone that left no room for doubt. “Was it a man or a woman?”

  It was, said Vaillancourt, the angel Providence had brought to Paul Taggart’s bedside when he had no one to tend him but his shipwright father, a gouty grandmother and the charitable women of the village. The stranger was soon doing more than the rest put together.

  Vaillancourt knew. He often called by before his watch, be it morning or night. He found her, Ruth Nagle, unflagging in her attentions to a patient never at rest or more than semiconscious. Her quiet resolve radiated beyond the sickroom to steady a community chafed raw by the length and horror of Taggart’s struggle—to steady most particularly the keepers, men like Vaillancourt who had to go back among violent convicts day by day.

  Last Saturday he had arrived at breakfast time. His friend’s struggle had ended the night before, as Vaillancourt had known sometime it must. And yet the nurse, after fifteen days of exemplary composure, was beside herself with grief and groundless self-reproach. Apprised of his access to Martin, she begged Vaillancourt to read the condemned man a letter she pressed into his hand. That night she vanished from the house and Portsmouth.

  The thought that Saturday night was less than two days ago so consumed Harris that he barely saw the second noose slip at last over Martin’s re-bagged head. Theresa’s middle name was Ruth. Her mother had been a Nagle. Ruth Nagle had by the keeper’s account arrived July 17, the very day Theresa’s coach would have passed through Portsmouth. Why had she nursed Taggart? Harris couldn’t say, but he knew for a certainty that fewer than forty hours now lay between him and her.

  Theresa had written on Sibyl’s behalf—done it for her.

  “I know this woman,” Harris whispered urgently. “Where’s the letter? I must see the handwriting.”

  The hangman’s hand went to the release lever. He raised his foot.

  “Burned it,” said Vaillancourt. “I had to.”

  “I’ve got it!” Martin bellowed across the green. “Brothers, I’ve got—”

  The trap dropped. Three or four powerful spasms shook Martin’s frame. After that he was merely a fourteen-stone weight swinging at the end of a mended rope.

  Harris stared. He had seen a human being die for the first time. There was the body. There had not been one to see after Oscar jumped, so that death didn’t feel quite genuine. This didn’t feel genuine either. Harris felt he had missed it. Other concerns had so absorbed him that he almost had. Shame tinged his sense of wonder.

  Some of the villagers were cheering, while others turned queasily away. Vaillancourt crossed himself. Nearby, a shop woman said it was a pity Martin’s death could not have been drawn out six weeks like Taggart’s.

  “No,” said the keeper, not to her, perhaps not even to Harris. “He died in chains, in public. Twice! He paid all we can ask.”

  Some moments later, a gentleman in black climbed up on a stool, ripped open Martin’s mud-stained shirt, put his ear to Martin’s grey chest, and pronounced the heart still.

  “It doesn’t bring Paul back,” said Vaillancourt, “but it is just.”

  Harris swallowed hard. He could imagine being anything sooner than a cold-blooded executioner. If only the guilty would destroy themselves.

  “If you see Miss Nagle, thank her.” With these words the keeper slipped back to the Penitentiary in his shirt sleeves and suspenders to face the consequences of his truancy.

  The girlish Mrs. Postlethwaite meanwhile arrived with friends to take charge of her husband. The preacher was wheezing now and peevish at having had to assist at one more hanging than he had bargained for. Harris helped him promptly to the waiting carriage, then had himself directed to Taggart’s house.

  Whether his haste was callous or an impulse in the presence of mortality to “seize the day,” Harris could not have said. The clatter of a pine crate being nailed shut lashed the air behind him.

  Taggart’s grandmother said nothing of gout, complaining only of sore feet. Paul had done the heavier housekeeping. She had a tired, sallow face, yellowed white hair, and enough bulk to hold down a chair in any wind. Harris had eventually found her ensconced at the apothecary’s. Fever had laid up her son, Paul’s father, so the family had not been represented at the execution. Mrs. Taggart was catching her breath and awaiting news.

  Harris made a somewhat tongue-tied report. The farce of the broken rope was difficult to reconcile in one narrative with the gravity of a broken neck. He found, notwithstanding, that the effort to do so helped him to put some order into his own nightmarish impressions and to steady his mind for the contemplation of Ruth Nagle. Mrs. Taggart deprecated the incompetence of county hangmen and gave thanks that
the world was now safe from Crusher Martin. Harris understood her sentiments and said so. Then he asked about the nurse.

  Mrs. Taggart had needed help caring for Paul, but had been wary. This Miss Nagle who presented herself was so young and slight, her costume so garish and soiled. She had no luggage. She claimed, however, to come of a Montreal medical family and to have nursing experience. She gave references. Rather than waste time checking them, Mrs. Taggart simply sniffed her breath for liquor and examined her on the properties of various pills, poultices and fumigations. In a plain linen gown lent by the apothecary’s wife, Ruth Nagle was admitted to the sickroom.

  Harris glanced at the woman behind the counter. Yes, he thought the dress sizes comparable. Mention of the Montreal medical family didn’t discourage him, for Theresa would quickly have recognized that whatever story she told would require too much effort to verify. It made no sense for her to stop here, and yet . . .

  “When she left you, Mrs. Taggart,” he entreated, “was there any indication at all where she might have gone?”

  “The warden sent us a fancy doctor—all paid for, mind—a Kingston man.” Mrs. Taggart’s lips pursed sourly. “Did my grandson no good that I could see. No more than my poultices. Anyway, he wanted her to go work at the City Hospital there, but whether she did or not I couldn’t say. She left in the middle of the night, you know. No note or notice. I never found out where to send her wages.”

  Ruth Nagle had been quiet, hard-working and respectful enough, if Harris were wanting her in any professional capacity. What she lacked, to Mrs. Taggart’s mind, was resignation.

  Martin’s attack had cut Mrs. Taggart up badly. Nevertheless, when she saw how her sweet boy was afterwards—confused at best, barely ever awake at all, day after weary day—she had started preparing for the Good Lord to take him. His nurse had refused to look at this possibility. Ruth Nagle always thought there was something more she could do in the way of cleaning the room, changing the ventilation, varying the diet, rearranging the pillows. Busy, always busy, and then—she couldn’t accept God’s will.

  “How do you mean?” asked Harris.

  “Why, the way she grieved!” The fat old woman twisted irritably in her chair. “She, who never saw Paul when he was properly himself. Strong he was, sir—but gentle, trusting to a fault. Oh, I had cause to moan and howl more than any stranger. Then the way she bolted! Took only the gaudy clothes she came in and—” Mrs. Taggart seemed to see Harris’s green waistcoat for the first time. “I must say, the shade improves on acquaintance. If you’re of the girl’s family, sir, I meant no offence. What with the strain of recent events . . .”

  Harris hastened to assure her he appreciated her frankness.

  “No one could have saved my grandson,” said Mrs. Taggart, “excepting the wretch that’s hanged. Without your kinswoman, Paul’s end would have been harder and meaner, no question about it.”

  Customers were arriving from the place of execution in search of stomach medicine. Other spectators came to gloat and gossip. While grateful for Mrs. Taggart’s tribute, Harris was able to get nothing more of value from her or anyone in the village.

  At this point, having missed breakfast, he should have stopped for lunch. His own appetite had somehow survived the hanging. He had noted, however, that cabs were scarce in Portsmouth, so when he saw one jogging past he promptly engaged it for the drive into Kingston. If no moments were lost, the kitchen at Irons Hotel would still be open.

  His head rocking against the horsehair seat back, he reckoned again the hours he had to make up—so many fewer than he had dared hope. Finding Theresa had become feasible. He wondered what stroke of fortune could have caused the interval between her and him to narrow so dramatically.

  For her attendance on Paul Taggart, he simply could not account. She had not surely left Toronto for this. At the same time, if her object had been to disappear, stopping two weeks in Portsmouth, under a relatively transparent alias, represented a substantial risk. A risk, moreover, for someone there was no evidence that she knew at all.

  And what of her letter to Crusher Martin? Her leaving that communication till after Taggart succumbed seemed no accident. Her attempt to save the keeper might all along have been an attempt to save the convict. If Taggart lived, his assailant’s sentence might be commuted. If Taggart died, his slayer would swing. Harris wondered, though, how Theresa could possibly have incurred so heavy an obligation to the Martins.

  How she must have had to mortify herself to live under Mrs. Taggart’s roof! Terms like quiet and respectful fit the fugitive Harris was pursuing as ill as they did the captivatingly lively woman he had once known.

  The detective picked drying mud from the seam of his boot. He felt steeped in death. Martin’s abrupt fall from man to corpse re-enacted itself unbidden in his fancy. As for Sibyl, he shied away from speculating on the circumstances of her end, because he didn’t want to think that Theresa might have had a hand in it. He knew she couldn’t have, unless perhaps accidentally.

  Enough. The point was to find her, as he soon would if she were in Kingston. On a full stomach, he would turn over every last block of grey limestone to do it.

  Out the cab window to the right, the lakeside prospect included up ahead a squat, round Martello tower that marked the entrance to the harbour. Harris was entering familiar territory. At the same time, in a park to the left stood a three-storey public building he wasn’t sure he recognized. An ochre-haired young woman coming from it was waiting to cross the street.

  Her glance met Harris’s. She raised thick eyebrows, half smiled, and was lost to view. Harris reacted slowly. He didn’t stop the cab, thinking she must have mistaken him for someone else. He would have remembered her eyes. Only blocks later did he suspect she might be the passenger with gold opera glasses from Triumph. Tawny, those eyes looked, and sly.

  Eyes that knew him, yet that he didn’t know. The eyes, like as not, of a police spy.

  On alighting, he asked the driver what the building opposite the Martello tower housed. It was, he learned, the City Hospital.

  Chapter Eleven

  Running Water

  Stopping only to buy a loaf of bread, which he gnawed in the cab, Harris returned to the hospital. Theresa wasn’t there and never had been, as either nurse or patient. He made sure. His tongue had become a machine for asking questions, stamping them out like tin trays. He interviewed Taggart’s fancy doctor. He tried the Roman Catholic hospital as well. He looked without success for Vandervoort’s tawny-eyed agent. Then he started in on his regular inquiries, which kept him several days in Kingston and its vicinity.

  The gravestone-grey, monolithic city was handsome enough, built up as a provincial capital in the forties, but deserted now by Parliament, bypassed by the Grand Trunk, emptying of business, and most particularly devoid of people who had seen Theresa. As of Wednesday night, Harris had fallen sixty more hours behind her and into a state approaching automatism. His feet found their own way back to his hotel room. He didn’t want to think. Having felt his forehead fanned by the wind from her heels, he would only be thinking how he had lost her again.

  He didn’t want to feel. He had telegraphed Toronto to forward his mail, then delayed opening the envelopes that came until he judged himself too exhausted to be much distressed by their contents. Midnight was now approaching. Without loosening his cravat, he sank onto a chaise longue and lit a cheap cigar.

  The letter signed, “Yours ever, Jasper” was—those words apart—distressing first to last. Apropos of their most recent meeting, Small said “that piece” had solemnly sworn to stay in the bedroom until Harris had left, but perhaps it was just as well for Harris to know he had been overheard. Besides, to make a whore behave would take an engineer cleverer than any the age had yet produced. In this and all departments, Small confessed himself quite helpless.

  “Since the Old Man’s defection,” he wrote, “I have so much to do I can begin nothing, except another bottle.”

  Clien
ts were going elsewhere, which simply demoralized Small further. Important documents had been misplaced. As for selling Harris’s properties, he didn’t know what he could do, but would mention them to Esther, who was always looking for investments.

  Harris hated use of the word piece to refer to a woman. He turned the page down in his lap and squinted through cheroot smoke at the ceiling.

  The rasping tobacco scent plucked him back to a billiard haunt of Small’s. “One more game, Isaac?” Jasper would ask lazily. And one more after that. Harris’s eyes were smarting. Not a brilliant player, Jasper, but elegant as a prince—a challenge to beat and a pleasure to watch. Formerly at least.

  Damn.

  Harris wondered, though, if Jasper had really changed, or if his friends had simply failed to understand his character. Take Sheridan, for example.

  As he had other of his employees, Sheridan had overestimated Small. The young lawyer worked well under direction. His greater command of his temper had saved Sheridan embarrassment, and worse, time and again. Sheridan’s mistake lay in taking Small as his only partner, in leaving him no one to rely on but Sheridan himself.

  This mistake magnified the impact of Sheridan’s death. If his clients lost thereby, someone else’s clients must correspondingly be winners. Wondering not for the first time who these winners might be, Harris glanced down and found writing on the letter’s back.

  P.S. As yet have lost only some business while you appear to have thrown yours up entirely. Sincerely hope you’re not going quite to pieces. Rumour here is Theresa killed the servant out of jealousy and fled. All twaddle of course.

  P.P.S. No need to worry about Crane’s testifying against her. Under present British (hence Canadian) law, husband and wife considered one flesh, therefore not competent witnesses when spouse put on trial. There’s comfort anyway. Coroner’s inquest into arm etc. now set to proceed. You’ll be subpoenaed if found.

  Harris changed hotels instantly. Gladly as he would have given evidence two weeks ago when the inquest should have been held, he had no intention now of being found by some paper-server and dragged away back to Toronto. The move took little time. He had just bought a change of linen, but had no other luggage. He found himself sweating all the same.