Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “Not since July 25, sir.”

  “‘Gentleman’ then,” said the coroner, pursing his lips as he penned the word. “Well now, right hand on the Book. The evidence which you shall give to this inquest on behalf of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, touching the death of this person or these persons unknown, shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help you God.”

  Harris said nothing. He had hoped to make even less of an impression than the glove-maker, but his very quietness was attracting attention. Spectators stopped shuffling. Jurors gawked at the silent witness. What had Small meant by telling him to refuse the oath?

  “So help you God,” the coroner insisted. “Say it.”

  “Dr. Hillyard,” Small objected, “as I have already had the honour of informing you, Mr. Harris is an infidel.”

  The term set the farm kitchen popping with expressions of incredulity, which Hillyard did nothing to suppress.

  “I can’t take your word for that,” he said.

  “All I ask is that you question him directly if you did not have an opportunity to do so on the voir dire.”

  Voir dire? What this see-say might be Harris had no idea, but he gathered that Small was pointing out as diplomatically as possible that Hillyard had neglected some part of his duties.

  “Oh, all right, Small,” moaned the coroner, scrabbling through his manual with moistened fingers. “I am to determine whether you, Isaac Harris, are such an infidel as to be incompetent to give evidence. You shall true answer make to all such questions as the court shall demand of you. So help you God. Do you believe in a future state of rewards and punishments, in this world or the next?”

  “No, sir.”

  Harris felt a dolt for not having seen sooner what Small was about, for not having discovered this escape hatch for himself. The oath had seemed to him a pure formality. Such an out-and-out materialist as medical witness Bernard Lamb had taken it without an instant’s hesitation.

  “You do believe in life everlasting, do you not?”

  “No, sir.”

  “For shame,” someone cried, to general approval.

  “Order,” said Hillyard. “Do you believe in God, Mr. Harris. Think before answering.”

  Yellow lamplight cast in relief the jurors’ lean, mistrustful faces. Isaac Harris had grown up at his father’s mill among farmers like these, and from them he would never have chosen to divide himself by raising the present question. But he was in no doubt now, his course of action clear. Little as he relished offending the sensibilities and inciting the wrath of Scarboro’s Christian yeomanry, he must prefer such consequences to perjuring himself or—by refusing to speak—incurring a charge of contempt.

  “No, Dr. Hillyard, I do not believe in God.”

  It took Hillyard some moments to restore order. A babe in arms woke with the commotion, which it then augmented. The atheist had made the infant cry.

  “Who summoned him as a witness in the first place?” Harris heard someone behind him say. It seemed prudent not to look around.

  “Constable,” cried the coroner, “the next person who speaks out of turn is to be shown the door. Is that understood? Now, Mr. Harris—”

  Hillyard mouthed the name with distaste. Older palates are finicky, thought Harris, and sensitive to shocks. He prayed that this senescent voice of order might say nothing inadvertently to inflame the volatile gathering.

  “—I understand that other witnesses can in part supply the lack of your testimony, but that it will take some days to bring them before us. You have caused an adjournment that will incommode many people. Still, I suppose you cannot have foreseen that consequence when you formed your religious beliefs. You are excused.”

  On rising, Harris found himself the object of Crane’s study. If the witness would bear such opprobrium for the sake of disqualifying himself, he had a secret worth knowing. Crane’s wide-spaced, hazel eyes had never looked so small and shrewd.

  “For the accommodation of the jury,” Small rose to suggest, “might the adjournment be for two weeks? By then I understand the harvest will be complete.”

  So urging, the man who had exposed the infidel made himself still more popular with those present, who seemed in the theological excitement to have lost the thread of the inquest in any case. To L.L. Matheson fell the unhappy duty of pointing out that so lengthy a delay was most irregular. Mr. Small’s client had, moreover, been excused. Matheson challenged Mr. Small’s right to make submissions of any sort.

  “That will do,” announced the evidently fatigued coroner. “I am not used to having my inquests punctuated by the continual eructations of counsel. I’ll entertain no more of them, from any quarter. Risk of the body’s deterioration would normally prohibit a fortnight’s interruption in proceedings, but we are dealing here with bones and bone fragments. They’ll keep. The jurors’ attendance will be required again here on Thursday, the 28th day of August at one o’clock in the afternoon precisely.”

  Harris and Small slipped out to their waiting cab before the closing formalities had been completed. The evening steamers to Montreal had long since sailed. To thank his friend, Harris offered to treat him to a late supper. He had a question for Small too.

  “Who are these witnesses you nominated to take my place?”

  “Any of the innkeepers who saw Theresa whole after the remains were found, Crusher Martin’s keepers.”

  “Will his arm-breaking confession be ruled out as hearsay?”

  “He’s dead, different rules.” Small yawned. “The Lansing woman sounds an unpromising witness, but I threw her name in for luck. With that lot the jury should at least identify the deceased as Sibyl, though they won’t be indicting Crane for her murder, if that’s what you were hoping. Poor creature! Dismembered, incinerated. How she died we may never know.”

  Theresa must know, thought Harris, might indeed already have told him. He wished himself at Rasco’s, with his mail.

  “I should be halfway down the lake by now if Hillyard had only examined me before the inquest began.”

  “As he ought to have done,” Small affirmed, “but the old pustule didn’t want to lose a witness and flatly refused to believe so sober-looking a gentleman would publicly proclaim himself a heathen.”

  “I’m just relieved not to have been tarred and feathered.” Harris stuck his head out the cab window into the soft, steady rain to make sure there was no sign of pursuit. No, none.

  He laughed aloud. What a trick Small had played on him, the two of them had played on Hillyard! What social and legal consequences his declared irreligion might entail Harris was as far from considering as pole from pole.

  “It’s a fine night, after all,” he said, wiping his face. “Where shall we eat?”

  “Not tonight, Isaac. I’m promised.”

  “Not to . . .?”

  Small shrugged. In the damp air, the horsehair upholstery smelled of neglect.

  “That’s madness, Jasper. The woman struck you in your sleep.”

  “Aha. Why did she do that?”

  “Why? To show she owns you, I suppose.” High spirits had passed into high indignation, without which Harris couldn’t have brought himself to allude to the liaison. “Break with her,” he urged. “You still have a talent for the law.”

  “The spark went with Sheridan.”

  “No, I saw it today. Break with her before she kills it. I don’t advise whoring—but you can do better, even among whores.”

  “You’ve acquired some experience then.” Small settled more snugly into his corner of the rattling cab. “Dear wicked Esther,” he mused. “You know, I’ve been drawing inspiration from her plump thighs all evening. She does own me—and I advise you to keep well out of sight of the police. Forget about eating in public. Crane will insist on your being questioned within an inch of your life, oaths optional.”

  Resignedly Harris let Small and his inspiration be. Small’s warning made sense, however, and Harris thought of Theresa’s precarious clo
ister. He thought of her slender ungloved hand laying a compress on a sick child’s forehead in the Grey Nuns’ foundling wing.

  Unknown to him, she sat before a blank sheet of paper.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Letter

  Grey Nunnery, Montreal

  Friday, 15th August

  Letter writing harder than I thought. Am sorely out of practice. I used to write long letters to my mother, though she died before I was ten days old. Addressed them to Heaven and gave them to Papa to post.

  Because she had cholera, they would not let her hold me. It’s not a quiet end. I’ve read that when your body is drained dry, you groan with cramps for hours. It’s mostly fatal still. Papa never talked about her illness, but in his own last days he railed against the ship-owners for bringing us the cholera epidemic of ’32. Many at the time blamed the immigrant passengers, even tho’ they suffered worst. Here in Montreal, the Grey Nuns marched bravely off to nurse them in the fever sheds at Point St. Charles, where the rwy. bridge is being built.

  They did the same fifteen years later when typhus broke out. Parliament was sitting in Montreal. I was in lodgings with Papa. I wasn’t allowed out, but from my window saw these women pass in their drab, Quakerish dresses and black bonnets, and marvelled that they always made a point of visiting those with infectious diseases.

  Must collect the eggs now. If diligent, hope to be allowed to nurse, but perhaps the sisters consider me the infectious one on account of my Protestant religion. More soon.

  17th August

  Have suffered a mild relapse and been ordered to my bed. While I no longer have access to quinine, the dispensing sister has administered an herbal febrifuge. All that is prescribed now is rest, which I intend to borrow from to write to you. I promised you an explanation. Here it is.

  The sisters will suppose I am making peace with my husband. You will read how likely this is.

  I don’t propose to enter into detail as to why I married Henry. I admired his mature energy. I don’t say I loved him for his steamships or his railways, but he made you believe he was contributing to his age. His eye saw the future. His shoulder turned the wheel of progress.

  My pampered upbringing made me no keen judge of character. Furthermore, though I doted on my father, I didn’t believe he had that variety of judgment to teach me. I dispensed with Papa’s guidance, and he indulged my choice.

  At the time I accepted Henry, I believed you wanted no more from me than the fraternal companionship we had been enjoying. Too late, I knew I had mistaken you both.

  Isaac, our marriage brought no joy.

  Perhaps Henry didn’t notice. Once a project is completed, he looks to the next. Once his bride was secured, he cared only that his wife decorously perform her duties. He had no more conversation, no more visions to unfold. He had expended all on courting. Apart from his physical attentions, which were never other than painful and perfunctory, he paid me scarcely any attention at all. Why had he wanted me? As a catch, I think, to be mounted and displayed.

  The abruptness of his transformation from persuasive suitor to indifferent husband stupefied me. For months, I doubted it. I had never met such coldness. I tried to find out if I were doing something to displease him, or whether he had learned anything to my discredit, but he would admit to no change in his feelings towards me. Eventually I began to suspect there were other women and by then was grateful to them for sparing me his company. I filled my days with study and charitable work. I visited Papa.

  You must not suppose, Isaac, that I loved my father too dearly to make a good wife. When I married, I took my husband a whole heart, moving into his house without regret. While Henry professed to understand and to admire the strength of my filial sentiments, so long as I had not quite despaired of his esteem, and for a good while after, I gave him no demonstration of those sentiments that could incite the least envy of his father-in-law. Years passed.

  Now for Sibyl Martin. I’ll introduce her as I first made her acquaintance. You ask about her end, but if I am to make you understand anything, I must take each fact and impression in order.

  While law and Parliament absorbed my father’s keenest energies, his servants came and went. You know how Papa was. Last March or April, without taking advice, he engaged a new housekeeper.

  I had misgivings, starting with her family.

  Sibyl and her twin brother Charles were born out of wedlock in the back woods of Simcoe County. My father had defended Charles Martin on a murder charge and saved him from the noose once by adducing evidence that his victim had a weak heart and that a healthier man would have survived his blows. Martin’s life was spared, but even a Penitentiary sentence was too much for his parents to bear. Considering it a judgment on their unsanctified union, they drowned themselves. A violent heritage and no mistake.

  My alarm grew when I learned Sibyl’s former employer was Orange Grand Master. Orangemen hated my father as they did Robert Baldwin, hated them for being Protestant Irish and still having campaigned to suppress the Lodge. The bill didn’t pass, but it made Papa enemies. I read his mail.

  He tried to assure me that Sibyl took no interest in questions of politics or religion, but I thought her possibly just close-lipped. She was quiet certainly, to the point of stealthiness. She made too little noise. I would be discussing something with Papa, look up, and there she would be, clearing away the tea things. “Tell her not to come till she’s rung for,” I suggested. He didn’t see the necessity.

  You will recall how he used to wink at informality. She took ample advantage. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that mistrust quickened my sense of her shortcomings.

  In the keeper of my father’s house, I should have been reassured to see good spirits and a spruce demeanour. Sibyl showed neither. While she kept his villa clean enough, her skin looked grey and waxy, as if personally she never scrubbed. She had a slovenly slouch. Her perpetual mud-brown dresses she wore loose, sacrificing smartness and convenience to her comfort. And still her mouth took a grudging twist. In her fourth decade, she seemed to want it known she had lived through a long succession of unrewarding years. Papa paid her well, gave her a full day off each week, seldom criticized. You would never have thought it to see her. By the time she entered his employ, I suppose her discontented mien was set.

  You will think me harsh, Isaac, possibly jealous. It was true that this woman occupied the place for which I should have bartered my own chilly hearth in an instant. I tried to think better of her and succeeded pretty well until Papa’s last illness.

  The legislative session that ended 1st July left him exhausted. I expect you know as much as I about the political tug of war that has been going on. Your friend William Sheridan had fought his proudest battles as a reformer, but George Brown’s party of radical reform was sounding increasingly anti-Catholic, while progressive conservative John A. Macdonald spoke more appealingly of making friends with the French. Both sides wooed Papa fiercely. At the same time, he was undertaking a case or a cause of some kind which seemed to shake him to his foundations, and yet which he did not feel he could ease his spirit by telling me about.

  He enjoyed robust health generally, as you’ll recall. In recent years, however, he had suffered recurrent bouts of debilitating abdominal pain, diagnosed as iliac passion or inflammation of the intestines. They chose this moment of nervous strain to flare up once more.

  Over the next days, I spent less and less time at Henry’s, more and more at Papa’s, till I was in effect living there. Then Sibyl was the jealous one. “You go on home, Mrs. Crane,” she would say. “I can do everything here.” This although she knew nothing of nursing. Used to free rein, she apparently considered herself mistress of Front Street and resented dilution, however temporary or exceptional, of her authority.

  Unluckily, her brother’s devastating news arrived this same week. He had committed another assault and was in a month’s time to hang for it. I offered Sibyl leave and her steamer ticket. She said she preferr
ed to wait till her master was out of danger, as we all believed he soon would be, but I should have insisted. She became positively obstructive in the kitchen. Accidents happened.

  On Friday, 11th July, I went down early to light a fire after sitting up all night with Papa. He could not sleep for stomach aches. His temperature had risen above 100, and I feared peritonitis might have set in. Dr. Hillyard had left him morphine. He would not take it. He didn’t complain, but kept rolling that enormous, white-thatched head of his as if to avoid meeting the eye of some impudent lobbyist or favour-seeker. Pain had dug deeper the furrows that ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth. The skin seemed to have lost its resiliency.

  Isaac, I cannot tell you what I felt. I have not the skill, the time, or a steady enough hand. That night I believed Papa and I were coming as close to a goodbye as we ever would, and I was right, even though he got better.

  He asked me to read him his favourite verses by Thomas Moore. I have always read badly, too fast and without enough expression. It didn’t matter. More often he recited from memory:

  “Row, brothers, row, the stream runs fast,

  The Rapids are near and the daylight’s past.”

  And from the Irish Melodies:

  “The heart that has truly loved never forgets,

  But as truly loves on to the close . . .”

  At ten to four, he stopped tossing and reciting. When I let the lamplight fall on his face, his eyes under his great white brows were purposeful, though weary. He said the pain was subsiding and, in answer to my question, that he thought, yes, he might sleep, but he would like to shave first, as he expected Jasper that morning with documents pertaining to their new case. I said I should scrape his face gladly if he were still awake by the time I had heated the water.

  On bare feet, I slipped down to the kitchen. Sibyl’s room adjoined it, but I didn’t hear her stirring, and it was too early to wake her. My guard was down, as you can imagine. After what had seemed a death watch, I felt blessed release plus the fatigue that anxiety had kept me from admitting. I went straight to the stove. As I raised the top to see if a fire had been laid, I glimpsed a flicker of flame at my elbow, just under the sleeve of my light summer nightgown.