Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Occasionally, she would assent and lie still. She spoke little, but more easily now the tremors had passed, and on one point only did she seem confused. She spoke as if Paul Taggart were alive.

  “Has he wet his bed again?” she asked abruptly.

  Harris felt his face redden in the lamplight. “Why—no.”

  “It’s common enough in injuries to the front of the brain—but what about his pupils? Are they dilated? Do they respond to light?”

  “He has everything he needs.” Harris wondered again what Taggart had meant to her. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  The morning was still thousands of miles away. It seemed even farther when after midnight she began sobbing quietly. Harris touched her shoulder. Her face fell towards him, cambric white and crumpled. She felt and looked as if the last drops of vitality were being wrung out of her.

  “I’m afraid, Isaac,” she whispered.

  “What’s she say?” asked Mrs. Lansing, looking up from her work. To divide the interior of the shack, she was tacking together a curtain from various scraps of dyed fabric.

  Harris gestured a request for her forbearance. To Theresa he said, “I’ll keep you safe.”

  “From Henry?”

  “Of course.” He didn’t hesitate.

  “There’s Judgment too.”

  It took him an instant to realize she was talking theologically. “Not yet, my love.”

  “Yes, Isaac. I’m dying and—I’m—not ready.”

  “Then we’ll have to get you well.”

  Neither believed it was up to them, but he urged them to fight as if it were. She cried harder. Between sobs, she spoke of her dead parents and infant brother, alleging they would be ashamed of her, deaf to Harris’s assurances to the contrary.

  At length, the squatter hag came to have a look. The rustle of the silk riding habit behind where Harris knelt set his teeth on edge.

  He acknowledged that, her own meager circumstances notwithstanding, she had sheltered and protected Theresa when it mattered most. Without Harris’s reasons of the heart, with only her medicinal plants and teas to shield her, she had exposed herself to the risk of contagion. At the same time, her self-serving system of malnourishment had blasted Theresa’s chances of recovery. Under her roof, Harris had hitherto swallowed his reproaches. If, however, she attempted now, at Theresa’s bedside, to gloat or vindicate herself, he was prepared to let her taste his rage.

  “There’s a good sign,” said Mrs. Lansing. “She’s starting to sweat.”

  Harris had not noticed the lamplight reflected from Theresa’s forehead.

  “The fever was shorter this time,” the woman continued. “She’ll sleep now, and it will do her a power of good.”

  Theresa slept. Harris sat and listened to her breathing before he spread his oilcloth on the earth floor. Then he lay down and went on listening.

  The afternoon’s trumpets were still. Finding her was such a fragile victory—which he looked to the Laurendeaus to help consolidate. Perhaps Marthe could discover the source of Theresa’s sense of shame.

  The next day saw a removal to more sanitary quarters. Lansing had still not appeared. Etta nonetheless undertook “for a trifle” to summon a ferry-man from Bath. Following a short row over calm waters, Harris took a private room for his patient in that village’s coaching inn.

  Theresa subsequently endured another cycle of chills and fever, much mitigated by the quinine. After a late supper of beef tea and puréed vegetables, she snuggled down amid the snowy bed linen and turned to Harris.

  “You look like—what?—an auctioneer,” she said gravely. “Have bankers’ fashions changed?”

  “I’m—off duty.” He wondered if he had without realizing been modelling his detective attire on Vandervoort’s.

  She seemed to accept his imprecise answer. “Where’s your bed?” “Across the corridor.” For the sake of form, he had taken a dormitory bunk he did not intend to use.

  “I’ll manage on my own,” she said. “I’m not planning to whimper like last night.”

  “I think,” said Harris, “you’ve been very brave.” He felt a rush of tenderness, as well as hope that, now her illness was receding, she would soon be brave enough to voice her other hurts.

  She looked stricken at this tribute. Her large eyes turned suddenly inward, and the air of the cheery little room thickened between them, making speech sluggish and blind.

  “Truly,” said Harris, uncomprehendingly.

  “Don’t —please don’t call me brave.”

  “All right then,” he soothed.

  “You don’t know,” she said after a pause.

  “I should like to . . .” He had been about to add an endearment, but checked himself. “Would it ease your mind to tell me?”

  She shook her head.

  “Tell me,” he coaxed, “what happened to Sibyl Martin.”

  Now the head that shook shrank back into the bedclothes, and Theresa’s face tightened so painfully as to close the subject.

  “Oh, why did you come looking for me?” she asked when she could speak.

  “I was afraid you were in danger.”

  “But why you, Isaac?”

  He shrugged. “Jasper told me you wanted a friend.”

  “You can’t stay with me, go on supporting me . . .”

  Stung by her retreat into some private gloom, Harris opened his mouth to defend his presence, but closed it again so as not to alarm her. He feared she was in danger still.

  “It’s too late, Isaac,” she said at length. “I’m married.”

  “I know you are.”

  He pocketed his right hand, which had been lying on the coverlet of her bed. Her admonitions were unnecessary. She had nothing to fear from his regard, nor need she anticipate its loss—for nothing he had to learn about her could change it.

  “To think last night how scared I was of dying!” Theresa exclaimed. “I wish I had. I wish—”

  “Well, you’ve missed your chance,” Harris retorted.

  That silenced her, and he wasn’t sorry. The rags, filth and fever were still too present to his senses to render such perverse prayers tolerable. He moreover believed, as Oscar had, that Theresa was in essence forward-looking. In time she would make peace with herself. Meanwhile, he wasn’t about to leave her alone—however little she seemed to want him.

  From the taproom, roars of Friday night revelry rose through the plank floor. Someone was trying to sing “The Hazel Dell.” At every mention of the deceased Nelly, listeners broke in to substitute other names. Hoofs and harness rattled an accompaniment from the inn yard. Harris went to the window, almost expecting to see Crane’s brougham arrive.

  “You’ve grown harder in the last three years,” said Theresa. “I’m glad. Still—if I need any more tending, could you not find a woman to do it?”

  “What about Marthe Laurendeau? You must have thought during these past weeks of seeking refuge at Coteau-du-Lac.”

  “Often.” The memory seemed to make her like herself no better.

  “I’ll take you there. Why not?”

  “Because,” she said, “threats to propriety terrify Marthe, and her father’s position makes it even more difficult for her to be associated with any scandal. I can’t impose upon her.”

  Nonetheless, Harris continued to hope for an invitation from Canada East. Three days and two inns later he returned from the Kingston post office with a thick envelope. It enclosed another envelope addressed to Mme Henry Crane. The gist of Marthe’s letter, as translated for Harris from the French, was sympathy for Theresa in her bereavement and ill health, esteem for her late father, regret that she had left her conjugal home, advice that she return, and—in the event that she refused—a recommendation. Marthe’s mother was a benefactress of the Soeurs Grises or Sisters of Charity. The order’s hospital on Foundling Street in Montreal had agreed to receive Theresa, although not a Catholic, and on her recovery employ her. This refuge would of course not shield her
from a court order to return to her lawful husband. Pending such, however, she would live secluded and secure from worldly dangers. In time, it was to be hoped she would herself write to Henry Crane and tell him where she was. The Laurendeaus would not presume to do so.

  Harris’s first thought was what Kate MacFarlane had said, that Marthe wasn’t truly Theresa’s friend.

  Mess in with the nuns? A wholesome prospect. Just as Theresa was starting to gain weight too. Her mind was also taking nourishment, from whatever books Harris found for her in Kingston. Free from fever, she no longer permitted him in the room when she was in bed, and the black scab had dropped off her lip—though deeper causes still made it painful for her to smile. He had to have more time to find those causes out.

  “But we can’t go on changing inns every day,” said Theresa. “Otherwise, I do nothing but read. I’m shut up all the time anyway.”

  “Only to avoid discovery,” Harris protested. “You don’t require hospital care.”

  “I could be of use there with the nuns. I should so like to—and I have to do something to earn my keep.”

  Don’t let her leave me, thought Harris. He wanted her good above all, and for her good had confined his affection in a strait waistcoat of service—but he also wanted her near him. In the present case, he believed the two objects compatible.

  “Build your strength up first,” he suggested.

  “Forgetting myself in the care of others is the only way I’ll get strong. Then my strength will have a purpose.”

  A plain white bonnet Theresa had had Harris buy to cover her cropped hair already gave her face a severe monastic outline. Her eyes and voice, however, glowed with an energy he had not felt tugging at him for years. It had become no easier to resist. At the same time, he wondered how well a house of disease and death would nurture that rekindling flame. Nursing Taggart had almost killed her.

  He said so. She didn’t waver. Her thirst for usefulness confirmed his supposition that she was trying to balance some moral or spiritual account. He proposed consulting a priest of her own faith.

  “The nuns are godly women, Isaac. I don’t intend to become one, but I don’t fear their company.”

  Harris feared it for her. It was one thing, he reflected, within a Protestant environment to condemn Orange excesses, to encourage a Septimus Murdock, or even to walk through a vast Romish cathedral—but quite another to expose Theresa in her present vulnerable state to the risk of proselytization.

  He asked whether—even if she were determined to place herself under the Pope’s protection—her refuge might not rather be the modestly scaled Hôtel Dieu in Kingston. She said not. Kingston remained her aversion, and the Grey Nuns were not established there. A Catholic institution would moreover hedge her more effectively if situated in a Catholic city like Montreal. The sooner she set out the better.

  Lest she attempt the journey on her own, Harris agreed to accompany her.

  They boarded an eastbound steamer that very morning and breakfasted next day, August 12, at a coffee house opposite the combined hospital, asylum and convent. Foundling Street, so-called, was really more of a square. Across its dirt surface, Harris stared from their window table at architecture even more daunting than he had pictured. Behind plank sidewalks rose a limestone wall reminiscent of the Penitentiary’s. Above the wall loomed a three-storey grey octopus of a building, spreading wings like tentacles over a ten-acre site. French-style dormer windows pimpled the high roofs, and from the centre of the beast a belfry surmounted by a spire surmounted by a cross struck deep into the soft dawn sky.

  Theresa seemed to see none of it. She was reading a work of popular medicine and pencilling notes in the margins.

  “Good strong coffee,” she said approvingly. “What they served at the last inn was mostly chicory.”

  A customer cast her an admiring glance. The steamer had shot the Lachine Rapids just before docking, and the excitement still showed in her face. Her complexion, thought Harris, was recovering its bloom.

  “You won’t taste anything like it in there.”

  She knew this, of course, perhaps looked forward to the sacrifice, but a sweetness in her silence gave him hope.

  “Don’t go in,” he said. “We’ll keep travelling east, to Saint John or Halifax—find a secluded farm if you prefer.”

  There would still be sacrifices, but ones he would share.

  Her forehead furrowed. Even if he were prepared to defy morality, she appeared to be thinking, why could he not remember that she didn’t consider herself at liberty? She closed her book and mumbled something about the expenses he had already incurred on her behalf.

  “You could work if you like,” he said, “keep your own establishment.”

  “No, Isaac.” She struggled to gather her thoughts. “I wish it were otherwise, but I must—stay here. Not forever. I very much want to see you again, when I’m more myself.”

  “I’ll visit,” he said. “I’ll bring you coffee.”

  She looked puzzled. “I won’t be allowed visitors.”

  “Of course not,” said Harris, “but they will have to make an exception in my case.”

  “And not in my husband’s?” She mentally rehearsed the next sentence before saying it. “You’re the worldly danger the Laurendeaus want to save me from.”

  “And you, do you think I’m a danger?”

  “Never. You’re my dearest friend.”

  He swallowed hard. She had passed through so many stages in the five days since he had found her—gratitude, fear, self-loathing, zeal, and now a poignant regard that made separation monstrous.

  She didn’t know how long they would be apart. She couldn’t say.

  “Then as a friend,” said Harris, leaning forward, “there’s something I must ask you. I’ve spared your feelings as long as I can. The Toronto police are looking for us both. They believe your father’s strongbox was plundered and that you know something about it. They believe you know something about the death of Sibyl Martin, and so do I. I’ll stand by you no matter what, but I have to hear what happened to you in Toronto and after, what you did, what you saw. Tell me now.”

  She stammered and turned pale. She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t bear to live it again.

  “The nuns,” said Harris, “unless you become one of them, will want you to return to Henry.”

  “I won’t, ever.”

  “But if he fights to get you back, he will have wealth, law and religion in his camp. Give me some tools with which to help you!”

  Across the table, she took his hand, trustingly, and took courage from the contact. “When Papa died,” she said, “I thought many dreadful thoughts, among them that warmheartedness had gone out of the world—that I should never meet it again, affection without reserve. I now believe—I see more clearly every day—that I have it from you, Isaac.”

  “You do.” Moved but undistracted, Harris returned her fingers’ pressure as he urged her forward. “You also have enemies. What is it that haunts you? What’s threatening you?”

  “I saw him—I watched him . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, I’m a fool! I can’t say it.” She pulled her hand back in a flash of irritation before clearing her throat and repeating in her most matter-of-fact voice, “I can’t say it. I’ll write it for you in a letter—within the week.”

  “You saw Henry kill Sibyl, is that it?” Harris had tried not to prejudge, but this way all she had to do was nod, and they would be in medias res.

  “Not now,” she said. “I’ll find a way to get a letter out.”

  Harris doubted. Once, after an expedition to identify wildflowers, she had written him a note of correction, which read in full, “Not lobelia. Bugloss. Expect you Wednesday at seven. T.” It was touching that she had not wanted him to go so much as a day with a false idea in his head, but he had never known her to write at much more length.

  “Start your story now,” he insisted. “Start at the end if that’s easier. You w
ere robbed.”

  How easy she would find the robbery to relate depended on what she had suffered from her assailant. Harris had been deferring this question. He wondered, though, if the memory of the assault might not be making it more difficult to speak of earlier crimes.

  Railway workers in earth-stained fustian were by now streaming past and into the shop. Talk was of the Grand Trunk’s Victoria Bridge. Above the din, an Irish serving girl could be heard announcing that if the bridge-builders wanted buns, they would have to wait.

  “I left the Taggart house around three thirty,” Theresa abruptly began.

  “A week ago Sunday morning?” Harris asked.

  “Sunday, yes. I forget which.”

  “Why were you at the Taggart house?”

  “That is another story. When I left there, my head and joints ached. My limbs felt like lead. I thought it was because I was tired and in low spirits.”

  Harris perceived that she was deliberately using bland phrases to swath jagged pain. Having for an entire fortnight wrestled with a delirious patient and his soiled bed linen, only to lose him after all, she must have suffered unutterably worse than “low spirits.” Such inaccuracies notwithstanding, she kept up the pretext of a scientific tone.

  “What it was,” Theresa continued after a fortifying mouthful of coffee, “was a warning of the onset of malarial fever. That’s not something you expect in the long-settled areas. Etta Lansing says someone must have cut a stand of trees and let the sun in on stagnant water. I don’t know if that’s the cause.”

  She reached for her medical text, but Harris—impatient of diversions—covered it with his hand.

  “You were walking west,” he suggested, “when the first fit began.”