Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Small, in evening dress, lay asleep on the ottoman. His left arm shielded his eyes from the daylight, while his right trailed to the floor. He looked, with one knee slightly bent, surprisingly graceful in his abandonment.

  Without preamble, Esther Vale slapped him hard between the legs. A whimper escaped him, more like a maimed rabbit’s than anything human. Harris couldn’t speak. He lifted Small in his arms and carried him as from a fire out of the office and out of doors.

  “Hallo, Isaac,” Small said thickly. “What is it then?”

  Behind them, Small’s assailant had thrown up the sash of the office window.

  “Until tonight, little sprout,” she laughed. “No later than ten.”

  “What is that she’s saying?”

  Harris didn’t answer, nor did he set Small on his feet until they were on Parliament Street in sight of a cab.

  “Jasper, I’ve found her.”

  “You’ve changed your tie knot.” Small’s pale eyes blinked away most of his stupor. “Found whom?”

  “Theresa. I need you to come to the inquest this afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Small. “I wish I could feel it as I ought.”

  “No, no,” Harris corrected, “she’s alive, or was two days ago.”

  Small looked dubious, saw that this time there was no misunderstanding, and clasped Harris’s hand.

  “By God, that’s wonderful,” he declared wholeheartedly, “the first good news all summer—but then—”

  “The inquest doesn’t concern her. Jasper, that’s why I want your professional advice—today, right now—to keep Theresa out of it. Your old friend Hillyard is presiding.”

  “Professional?” The word seemed to stir a distant memory, to recall—if only one could concentrate . . . “Dash it, Isaac, I’m sore. Have I been horseback riding?”

  “Forget what you’ve been doing, and hear what’s to be done.”

  Harris’s problem was how not to tell the coroner’s court where Theresa was. He asked this simple question in the cab, which he directed first to Jasper’s building, and asked it again as they climbed the two steep flights of stairs to Jasper’s door. From Sheridan’s partner he kept nothing back. By the time Small had shaved and changed into morning coat and striped trousers, he seemed to grasp that the secret of Theresa’s refuge must be kept. What strategy he contemplated, however, Harris failed to discover. Small insisted on dozing away the drive out Kingston Road, while his companion counted off the fifteen miles with foreboding.

  No sooner had their cab turned in between Wilson’s unpainted gateposts than Harris recognized the austerely prosperous farm as one he had stopped at on July 21 when looking for the burned shack. He had not on that occasion been invited into the kitchen, which he now found to be large, clean and plain. A room, he thought, to preclude prevarication. To accommodate the inquest, high benches had been improvised from rough planks supported by barrels. Each of the fourteen jurors was on arrival warned against splinters, and not a man of them was able when seated to touch the soles of his boots to the floor. Spectators were obliged to stand, the few chairs being reserved for the witnesses and the coroner.

  Dr. Hillyard looked frail and forlorn seated by himself behind the enormous kitchen table, on which rested two wooden boxes he was doing his best to ignore. On entering, Small went to speak to him. Harris couldn’t hear what passed between them, but noticed the old man start and scratch his head.

  Next to arrive were Professor Bernard Lamb in his antiquated green frock coat and John Vandervoort, who spied Harris immediately and insisted on wringing his hand.

  “Well done, Mr. H., I knew we should find her. Where is it Mrs. Crane is stowed? You’ll soon be telling the jury anyway, and under oath.”

  “Have ‘we’ discovered,” asked Harris, “how Sibyl Martin died? I thought that was the subject of today’s proceedings.”

  Before Vandervoort could reply, Small came and took him off Harris’s hands. Jasper Small, barrister and solicitor, a pleasure to see the inspector again, and would he favour the coroner with a word?

  Harris meanwhile greeted Lamb, whose good news somewhat cheered the reluctant witness. Supported by the Hon. Robert Baldwin, the chemistry professor’s request had been approved, his salary to increase before Mrs. Lamb’s confinement. Here was one situation saved.

  Farmer Wilson was by now getting impatient. He had crops to harvest, he ringingly let it be known, and so did his neighbours on the jury. No one contradicted him. He was a hard, proud-looking man with a black fringe of beard and a permanent scowl as if he were being photographed. Arms folded, he sat in the middle of the room waiting to give his evidence. Family members approached deferentially if at all.

  Shortly after one, a rattle of hoofs and wheels announced the arrival of the last participant. Tall and florid, serious but not severe, Henry Crane became the centre of attention from the moment he entered Wilson’s kitchen. The rural patriarch was superseded, his dampening spell broken. The harvest was set aside in a buzz of talk about the railway and steamship baron. Was it not true, a spectator leaned over to ask Harris, that Mr. Crane was involved in the laying of a transatlantic telegraph cable?

  Harris didn’t know, was too preoccupied even to guess. He was mentally contrasting Crane’s current composure with his agitation on the occasion of their last meeting. Crane would affect not to remember the scuffle on the Great Western. And what would he remember of his wife? With rumours now in circulation of her being seen alive, should he not be showing more anxiety regarding her condition? So much the better for Theresa if he truly cared nothing for her return. Ha! There was wishful thinking.

  Crane was today accompanied by a grey-haired lawyer Harris had met socially and had heard highly praised. Together with his client, L.L. Matheson took possession of an unused end of the kitchen table and spread out his notes. Dr. Hillyard raised no objection.

  A local constable then proclaimed the court open, and the coroner began by calling over the names of the jurors. Small returned to Harris’s side.

  “I tried,” he whispered, “to get the old fossil to cancel proceedings, in view of the uninformative condition of the remains, but it seems he needs the money.”

  “Was it fear of lost income that made him jump like that?”

  “Like what?” said Small absently. “His fee won’t reach fifteen dollars—even if he spins things out over two days.”

  The prospect of having things spun out made Harris squirm. He burned to be back in Montreal. Small said he would next attempt to prevent other witnesses and members of the public from hearing Harris’s testimony.

  The roll taken, the constable opened the two boxes. The jury were then called forward to view the two collections of bones, a complete skeletal arm in one case, calcined fragments in the other. Random gasps and exclamations brought Small to his feet. He moved that in the interests of decency the inquest be held in private. Spectators hissed this suggestion. The coroner, after calling querulously for order, rejected it.

  The jurors were sworn in the presence of the bones, whose examination was the next order of business. No new facts emerged. No cause of death could be assigned. The court rituals were new to Harris, but, under present circumstances, of little interest—with one exception. Jurors were formally advised to observe the bearing and conduct of the parties in attendance, in case one of them betray a guilty knowledge.

  Most eyes went scurrying around the room. Harris’s went straight to Crane, who leaned back in his chair at his ease. Noticing Harris for the first time, he nodded gravely, betraying neither qualms nor bravado. The coroner’s method had nothing here upon which to work; for what could observation reveal about a man so dead to feelings of culpability? Harris bobbed his head in grim acknowledgement of his late assailant.

  And the inquest ground on. While directing the jury’s attention to one feature or another of the remains, Dr. Hillyard incidentally criticized the police department for having removed them from the sites of their
discovery. Inspection of these sites—one on the neighbouring property, one at two miles distance—consumed the balance of the afternoon.

  Lamb’s photograph helped direct the assembly to the exact spot where the arm had been found. After nearly four weeks, Harris stood again on the sandbar. His throat tickled with the memory of what he had at first thought a dead fish, and his sympathy quickened for a woman he had never known—but he could no longer do full justice to the horror of that other grey afternoon. His worst fears then had not been realized.

  Other fears for Theresa pricked him now—relapse into illness, a nun’s vocation, persecution by Crane, betrayal by an unguarded response of his own. Observe the parties in attendance. Harris turned to ask Small how, under direct questioning, to keep her whereabouts concealed.

  Small was no longer anywhere in sight. Harris worked around the periphery of the inquest, his feet sinking in the soft sand at the water’s edge. Had anyone seen the grey-eyed city man with wavy hair? Yes, a farm labourer claimed to have been asked where in the neighbourhood you could get a glass of French wine, or at least a pennyworth of white whisky.

  Harris lifted his face to the heavens, which spat on it their first drops. Rain would further impede the already interrupted harvest, but the farmers took acts of God with restrained dignity. “Sent to try us” was the common view. The ex-banker wondered whether he himself would have found religious belief an asset or a liability.

  Small, meanwhile, had gone for a drink.

  All participants save the coroner wanted to conclude the inquest in one day, and so after a recess for refreshment, the witnesses were heard.

  Towards seven thirty, evening drew in around the farm kitchen. As lamps were lit and hung, Harris noted a change in the spectators. Idlers had drifted away to taverns and not returned—to be replaced by men who, before dusk and rain abbreviated their labours, had more productive employment than cramming their heads with stories of old bones. Small did return—dulled, thought Harris, but not disgracefully drunk. He said he had planted a seed with Hillyard and they would just have to see whether it sprouted.

  Farmer Wilson was sworn first. He established the time of the fire, having seen the embers smoking when he rose before five on the morning of July 16. Once satisfied that his own property was not in danger, he got on with his work. He had not snooped around, he said.

  Then Vandervoort told of his discoveries at the fire site. The axe head and green fabric seemed to link these remains to the arm, while the key to Sheridan’s kitchen gave the jury its first hope of identifying the deceased. Who, one member asked, had a copy of this key? Harris pricked up his ears. With a respectful nod in Crane’s direction, the red-haired police detective replied that that would be for other witnesses to say.

  The coroner had questions of his own for Vandervoort. Did he know Sibyl Martin? Yes, he had last seen her at about eleven thirty on the morning of July 13, at which time he had had her released from police custody. Her dress had been brown homespun. She had been William Sheridan’s housekeeper and suspected of her employer’s murder before it had been determined that his death was natural. She had had no keys in her possession when she left Station No. 1. She left with Mr. Henry Crane. Again Vandervoort nodded towards him.

  If the assembly had shown interest in Crane before, they were now on the tips of their toes and the edge of their plank seats to hear what he would say. No one had had a chance to chat with him. During the intermission, he had retired to his carriage with his legal adviser—supposedly to consume delicacies too rare for any present but the journalists to imagine.

  “It’s other men’s work that fills his gut,” muttered one detractor. “Now move your head so I can see.”

  Harris had left Crane alone. The only motive for doing otherwise would have been to provoke the industrialist to some fresh hot-tempered attack, the effect of which on such awestruck bystanders Harris judged too uncertain. Witnesses might put the wrong man in gaol, and Theresa would be worse off than before.

  Then again, Crane might not have risen to the bait. The unhesitating ease with which he proceeded to the witness chair Harris had not seen him exhibit at any time in the past month. Theresa’s husband apprehended no threat from coroner or jury, but it was more than that. Some other cloud had lifted from his spirit.

  He readily admitted he had been wrong to let his wife go riding on July 13, the day following her father’s demise. She had left soon after the noon meal, about two p.m. He had not seen her since, and his last memories of her were still painfully vivid. The silver bracelet in evidence had been on her right wrist. He likewise identified the green sleeve as belonging to the riding habit she wore.

  Her father had given her a key to his villa. Crane had not seen whether she took it with her, but neither had he subsequently found it among her personal possessions. He could account for William Sheridan’s own key and for the one formerly in the housekeeper’s charge. He knew of no other copies.

  One of the duties associated with winding up his late father-in-law’s household had been settling accounts with Sibyl Martin. William Sheridan had treated servants generously, and Crane wished to honour his memory.

  “I don’t blame Mrs. Crane in the least,” he said, “but in the first access of her grief, she had the poor woman locked up on suspicion of poisoning our father.”

  From where Harris stood, he could see only the back of Crane’s head, with its yellowish fringe and cherub-pink bull’s eye. Crane’s unmusical voice, however, plainly carried homegrown authority. For all his money and turns of phrase, he was heard to be “from around here.” There had already been murmured condemnations of emerald green as a colour of mourning, and now auditors seemed disposed to make fewer allowances for Mrs. Crane than did her bereft husband.

  “On learning that he had not died poisoned,” Crane continued, “I did what I could to deliver the Martin woman, as I’m confident her late employer would have wished.”

  Heads bobbed sympathetically, including Hillyard’s.

  Deliverance could not be effected until the morning of July 13. To make amends, Crane had driven Sibyl from the lock-up to Sheridan’s villa that she might collect her belongings, and thence to the coach office. She was no longer required in Toronto and had pressing family business near Kingston. Crane had not stayed to see her board the one-o’clock eastbound, but had left some minutes earlier to pick up Mrs. Crane at church. He had not seen the housekeeper again.

  He sounded most credible. Still, Harris knew he was wrong about the sleeve. It wasn’t from Theresa’s habit, however uncannily similar. And could Theresa really have worn the bracelet of silver medallions when she went riding on July 13? If so, then—in order for Harris to find it six days later—she must have parted with it again well before the robbery on August 3. She had told Harris, though, that her assailant had taken all the jewellery she had with her. Crane must be lying.

  The coroner was falling behind in his transcription of testimony, true and false. His pen scratched ploddingly across his page. Belatedly he ruled that Sibyl’s “family business” was hearsay, and the jury were to disregard it. Small roused himself to remark behind his hand that Hillyard always lost steam by this time of day, and that they might be in for a continuance after all.

  “Can’t you move that coffee be served?” Harris whispered back in frustration.

  Small smiled enigmatically.

  The jury foreman asked Crane which of Mrs. Crane’s possessions besides the key were missing after her departure. Crane’s lawyer objected on grounds of relevancy, and Hillyard concurred, sparing the husband any discourteous speculation as to whether his wife had meant to desert him. Crane volunteered that their years together had been very happy. He missed her every single day.

  Following so noble and well-received an admission, the evidence of the glove-maker made too little impression even to count as anticlimax. Until called forward, he had been standing behind taller spectators. Harris had not previously remarked him and, still st
unned by Crane’s hypocrisy, could find little to remember the new witness by—a mousy demeanour, perhaps, and a rusty black suit. Given the dimensions of the Rouge Valley hand, he testified, it could not have been Mrs. Crane’s. Mrs. Crane’s was two full sizes smaller. From this position there was no shaking him, and he was speedily excused.

  Then it was Harris’s turn. He was to testify last, it seemed, for no better reason than that he had been the last witness found. He stopped fretting about Crane’s deceits and resumed fretting about his own.

  The state of his nerves recalled his first anxious days as cashier of the Toronto branch of the Provincial Bank, the first opening of the vault, the first closing, most of all the first letter to head office. It concerned a default. He trembled then for his career, but never considered any course other than perfect candour—whose eventual cost would be his alone to bear.

  His path today was foggier. He felt heartsick at the prospect of making the jury believe what he knew to be false, doubted indeed that he could do so, and yet doubted as fiercely that Theresa’s interests didn’t require him to sacrifice his scruples and mislead the court. As he made unhappily to rise, Small restrained him.

  “Speak the truth,” the lawyer commanded sotto voce, “strictly the truth whatever the question. You’ve too much conscience and too simple a mental engine to make any kind of convincing liar. Refuse the oath.”

  Harris begged his pardon, but Small was now propelling him forward in response to the constable’s stern repetition of his name. The coroner had Harris state it once more himself. That much was easy.

  “Abode?” said Hillyard.

  Harris groped for the strict truth. In Canada East he had a room he had never seen, in Canada West one where he had not slept in over a fortnight.

  “Speak up, speak up.”

  “Toronto,” said Harris, “the American Hotel.” He knew the next question would be more embarrassing.

  “Occupation?”

  “None.”

  Dr. Hillyard sat up and shook the bread crumbs from his waistcoat. “According to my information, you are a bank cashier.”