Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “No. He can’t be dead.”

  “Poisoned by your hand.”

  “Never!” She advanced upon me so that the point of my poker actually touched the bodice of her gown. “If I had done such a thing,” she wailed, “I should never have waited here.”

  “You’ll explain that to the constables,” I replied, standing my ground. “You’ll deny poisoning me as well.”

  “A sleeping powder, Mrs. Crane, for your good. Anyone could see you needed rest.”

  “I’m rested now, Sibyl, and I’ll take charge of the keys.”

  I locked her in her room, then sat at the kitchen table. Sickly, I pushed aside the bowl of oyster soup. I still smelled pudding: the cloth it had been steamed in hung over the back of the opposite chair. I put my head down on my arms and wept. The excitement of the late encounter must have helped flush the blunting morphine from my blood.

  I wept at first for every selfish reason. Also for the loss to Papa himself of a life he kept finding, for all its sorrows, pleasure-full. But the longer I lay there, the more the public character of the tragedy overcame me, the loss to the voters of York County, to Parliament and to the country, to Catholics and Protestants, to the accused and impoverished, and to the miserable woman in the next room (I didn’t care if she heard me), who with her employer’s death, had lost the best friend she ever could have had.

  And she the author of her loss. Here truly was insanity, worse than that which condemns many a poor woman to the harsh, stone cells of this convent’s lunatic wing. How cunning did Sibyl’s previous fits now seem! Her efforts to drive me from the house by words and fire were to make way for the grand insanity of destroying her good angel.

  What sense could one make of such things? I shed fresh, baffled tears.

  A musket feu de joie along the Esplanade finally roused me, together with shouted insults of the Pope. I wrote to summon doctor and police. Henry had left standing orders to advise him should Papa’s condition alter for the worse. My note enjoined him send whatever black cloth we possessed. Although I didn’t expect badges of mourning to chasten Orange tongues, I wanted the revellers to know, howl as they might, that William Sheridan had no more to fear from their malice.

  From Papa’s doorstep I engaged a neat, respectful boy to bring the constables. I used the word murder. The other two commissions went to a likely runner.

  Two constables arrived soon after nine. When I opened to their knock, the one calling himself Devlin did up a button on his tunic. He was all angles but for his limp black hair. His more compact, blond companion, introduced as Morgan, was already buttoned up and looked in every way more reliable, but said very little. Constable Devlin thought it unfair that he should be on duty when the whole town was celebrating, but murder was murder, the public had to be protected, and where was the deceased? He slapped Papa’s cheeks and pronounced him dead. Constable Morgan turned down the bedclothes, put his ear to Papa’s chest and nodded. Neither wished to touch the supper tray, which might be evidence. Better leave that till the doctor arrived.

  Of greater interest was the suspect in the basement. Morgan for once seemed to speak for both of them when he admitted he had never laid eyes on a murderess. Devlin wanted to lay hands on Sibyl as soon as possible and remove her to the cells of Station No.1, where she could be watched at every hour of the day and night. I might think her secure enough in a locked room with barred windows. But could I swear she had no second key? No means to harm or even make away with herself before she could be properly questioned? I could not.

  I didn’t (and don’t) have enough faith in human justice to wish Sibyl preserved for the scaffold, but for examination yes. I needed to understand. They led her from her room with hands chained together and hanging in front of her loose brown dress. She didn’t raise her eyes to meet mine.

  “Why did you do it, Sibyl?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Sibyl Martin,” said Devlin knowingly. “You were discharged from Grand Master Gowan’s four months since for loose behaviour.”

  “The goings-on were none of my doing,” she muttered. “I left because I had a better place to go.”

  “And look what you’ve made of it!” I said.

  Such perversity beggared belief. What I had been considering a private act of madness appeared now in the light of a political assassination. Plotters could not have furnished their Corday with a story apter to secure access to her victim. Papa was a notoriously celibate widower. Mr. Gowan is a widower tout court. Allegations that improper advances had been made to Sibyl or to anyone else under the Grand Master’s roof would have disposed Papa to offer his client’s sister employment where such indignities were impossible.

  My hope of understanding dimmed. Such police as I had so far seen might not be competent to solve a murder, however much they wished to. To expose an Orange conspiracy they would have no wish at all.

  “I’ll see she minds her tongue, ma’am,” said Devlin, pushing Sibyl towards the stairs. “Constable Morgan will wait here for the doctor.”

  But Morgan didn’t want to miss his chance to walk beside a woman in shackles. I saw what I must do. Whatever her desserts, parading Sibyl along the Esplanade as part of the evening’s spectacle ill became a society that long ago abandoned the public pillory. I pinned about her shoulders a shawl long enough to cover the handcuffs. I placed her most concealing bonnet on her head. No one thanked me. I didn’t mind.

  Left alone, I hunted the morphine bottle. I was prepared to look long and treat its absence or emptiness as suspicious. It came to hand among a number of patent medicines in a locked compartment of the kitchen dresser. The contents appeared little depleted. Before I could inspect them further, Henry’s carriage arrived.

  His step was brisk, and his knock, but I had never seen his skin so pale or eyes so red.

  “Theresa, I can’t tell you how sorry . . .” Of course he couldn’t. It would have spoiled the effect.

  I stepped back deeper into the hall as he stepped forward, and he halted as if he perfectly understood.

  “Dr. Hillyard has still not arrived,” I said as evenly as possible. His note was to have been delivered before Henry’s, and how much rather I should have seen Papa’s misogynistic old pal than my crocodile husband!

  “I’ve just—” Henry shook his head and waved his long right arm to the east. “Just seen Sibyl being taken into custody. I’ve never misjudged anyone more. I don’t expect your forgiveness. Only understand I should give anything for today not to have happened.”

  I believed him. A murder in the family was something he would survive, but it couldn’t benefit his projects. I was grateful for his not defending Sibyl to my face.

  He wanted to see Papa. Considering what their relations had been, I dreaded the encounter. I begged him to wait for the doctor and was relieved presently to hear that gentleman’s cab at the door.

  Dr. H. was always frailer by evening, but the change in him today was extreme. He walked with two canes. The sores on his forehead were raw from scratching. He would not speak a word until he had with laboured breath hauled himself all the way up to Papa’s room. Ten o’clock struck while he was doing it.

  He opened Papa’s eyes. He opened Papa’s mouth and sniffed inside. When I pointed the half-eaten pudding out to him, he placed a spoonful of it in his own mouth, depositing the matter after a time in a folded handkerchief. At Henry’s urging, he likewise tasted the oyster broth.

  “A relapse, my dear,” he said to me. “No one’s to blame.”

  I showed him the bottle he had left. These crystals, he confirmed, were morphine, not some filler added to hide misappropriation. A small, non-fatal dose might have been removed. I could not bring him a sample of the tea, which had all been cleared away while I slept.

  “The housekeeper drugged me so I couldn’t protect Papa,” I insisted. The sight of a rosette on Dr. H.’s lapel kept me from mentioning the Orange Lodge. “She can’t be innocent.”

  Hen
ry promptly seconded me. “As you know, sir, Mrs. Crane is of a scientific turn of mind and not given to wild assertions. If she says the housekeeper killed our dear father, it must be true.”

  “Administering a sedative,” the doctor said distinctly, “is not, one must hope, the same as murder.”

  And that was all he would say: my pleas for a post-mortem went unanswered. He gave my arm a sorrowful pat and wearily accepted Henry’s offer to dismiss the doctor’s cab and drive him home in our brougham.

  Our coachman had meanwhile trimmed Papa’s door in black as I had wanted. It was ghastly.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Letter (continued)

  Thursday, 21st August

  Have for four days been too ill to write. Sister Saint-Jacques today allows me to sit in a corner of her cabinet-lined dispensary while she grinds her herbs and prepares her tinctures. She wants me to know that no church but hers allows women to be pharmacists. I suspect, however, that I owe my returning health to no product of her garden, but rather to her having turned her budget inside out to buy me quinine. She will say only that Peruvian cinchona bark is a Jesuit discovery, which Oliver Cromwell died from refusing.

  One cabinet contains her medical library. I have just confirmed there what I knew the night Papa died: an abscess could not possibly have formed and fatally ruptured in the few hours of my forced nap. However unwholesome, the suet pudding had not caused death, not without some quicker-killing additive. I spent Saturday night wondering which, for I had made his spirit a vow to find out how he died.

  Henry had meanwhile determined that it would overtax me to watch by my father in a servantless house and had arranged to have Papa removed to Ogilvie’s establishment. The body could be professionally laid out, for viewing at our own villa on Monday, and interred the day after. I protested this extraordinary arrangement to no avail. Later Saturday night, when I asked Henry what progress he had made with Dr. H., he replied that the doctor had persuaded him (with details Henry could not for reasons of delicacy repeat) to accept Papa’s death as natural after all. Conceive my sense of betrayal. I scarcely can now myself, for it presupposed a trust in my husband I should long since have put aside.

  Sunday morning, I wished to see Papa. I was told the undertaker’s sabbatarianism made this impossible, so I went to church instead. My father had for the decade since its construction supported Holy Trinity, but a house of worship without reserved pews wasn’t smart enough for Henry, who preferred his wife to be seen at the Cathedral, not that he often went himself. I sometimes rebelled, but today indulged his preference. Having given Oscar the day off, Henry drove me in our old chaise to King and Church. When he handed me down, he as usual pleaded business at his office two blocks east and engaged to come back for me in an hour and a half.

  Worshippers who had heard of my loss waylaid me in the porch, until Kate MacFarlane and her daughters swept me up. I was alone? Then I must join Kate, for with her husband truant as well, there was ample room in her pew. Her brusque kindness promptly overrode any scruple Jasper had planted in my mind regarding the MacFarlanes. I stipulated only for the aisle seat.

  At the time I was aware of no plan to leave during the service. I simply felt stifled, as if I needed open space through which to receive God’s Word. Kate sang the first hymn like an angel at my side. Her clear, rounded voice would grace any concert hall, but I believe she imbued it with exceptional strength and sweetness for my special consolation. I added my thinner warble and was consoled, until we reached the words:

  “The flowers beneath the Mower’s hand

  Lie withering e’er ’tis night.”

  I whispered to Kate not to follow me and left.

  An empty cab was passing on King Street. I got in. I should not have found one outside Holy Trinity, and it would have been twice as far to Papa’s. That Henry had relieved me of Sibyl’s keys presented no obstacle. In a hiding place convenient to Papa’s kitchen door, I kept a key of my own. When I felt it turn in the lock, I believed that something inside must show me why William Sheridan had withered e’er night. I entered and locked the door behind me.

  The doctor’s word would free Sibyl, if it had not already done so, free her to melt with her secrets back into the bush. I started my search in her room. I was looking not only for a murder weapon, but also for any document indicative of a conspiracy. While locked in here, she would have had ample time to burn evidence, so I supposed I had to look for ashes as well.

  None of the plaster was loose nor any of the bricks in the cleanly-swept floor. It’s a bright room for a basement, with two south windows. I opened each and, reaching through the bars, set aside the dead leaves and scraps of paper that had fallen into the window wells. Nothing.

  On the back of the door hung a spare shapeless gown and a winter cloak. Nothing was tucked or sewn into either. From the pine chest I yanked the three drawers, turning each over to ensure nothing was pinned to the back, sides, or bottom. The stockings and chemises that tumbled forth I turned inside out and, finding nothing, threw back without refolding.

  On top of the chest beside an oil lamp lay a volume of popular theology. Also one of popular history which seemed to place a lurid emphasis on all the bloodiest episodes of regicide, insurrection, crime, war and suppression: the Roman Empire, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, the Borgias, Napoleon. Nothing was concealed in the spines or between the pages. The bindings showed no signs of tampering.

  My task grew harder. There was still the bed, but I couldn’t pull all the straw from the tick and set the room to rights again in time to keep my appointment with Henry. While deliberating how to proceed, I glimpsed my grim, white face in a mirror I’d neglected to look behind. I unhooked it from its nail. Out of the back fell a folded piece of brown wrapping paper, which I’ve managed to keep through every chance that has befallen me since. The round, childish hand I recognized at once as Sibyl’s. I read:

  Who finds this please send to Chas. Martin, Provincial Penitentiary. Brother, we are cursed indeed. My master is dead and your best hope of pardon with him. Do not look even to see me in Kingston, for I am suspect of murder. Mrs. Crane has shut me in and means I think to break my skull, innocent though I am. She should sooner look to her Henry. You know I have a carnal nature which I abhor but cannot fight. And where could I have learned to resist a man who bends wills as he bends rails? Henry told me the old stag was failing, and I must find a new protector in him, although the master’s help I never had to earn by sin . . .

  Sin with Sibyl? Again I caught my breath at Henry’s capacity to deceive me. Once his total dupe, I still had not learned to doubt him enough and perhaps never would.

  Adultery I had suspected, as I’ve said. I’ve seen him help a red-cheeked laundress with her basket, or whisper in a parlour maid’s ear, or follow a seamstress with his eyes, or let his hand brush that of a pretty shop girl. I’ve seen him come home late, and early, too flushed and languorous to have come from the business he alleged. But I never guessed he would prey on my father’s servants. Besides, Sibyl was not pretty. Could she really be to Henry’s taste, or had he seduced her for reasons of policy, precisely because she served in Papa’s house and might do his bidding there? I shuddered to think.

  Involuntarily, my eye measured the bed. I couldn’t assimilate the thought of Henry, sleek and scented, lying here with grey-skinned Sibyl. There wasn’t time to assimilate it, for an even graver and less credible charge still hovered in the wings. I hastened to read on.

  . . . For Mrs. Crane’s health, he persuaded me to give his wife sleeping medicine. While she slept, he visited the master. I heard voices raised, and afterwards, Henry left without seeing me. The house was still. I couldn’t move. If I had left then, I should be safe now, but if the master was alive, I couldn’t leave him, and I was too afraid to go upstairs and look. I have seen dead folk, some like our drowned parents pretty bad. My legs, forgive them, would not take me up into the master’s room where I might meet the sightless
eyes of our one benefactor, brought to grief through me. I waited and listened. I practised believing Henry had not done it. The master if dead had died of his own weakness, like the man you hit. At length I heard Mrs. Crane stir. If she should scream or call out I should fly. She never did. She went up to her father and came down again, her step so calm I thought my fears were groundless. It was only the drug. So I am tricked by my own trick, and now if she don’t kill me she’ll have me put in gaol . . .

  Sibyl’s paper slipped from my fingers at the sound of a key in the outside kitchen door. Instinctively, I slid the drawers back into the dresser and hung the mirror. Nothing else was obviously misplaced. Through the room door which I had left ajar, I heard the indistinct voices of two people who had entered the kitchen, one male, one female. I didn’t long debate a hiding place: there was but one. Scooping up the letter from where it had fallen, I rolled beneath the low bed.

  Along the side, the coverlet fell to within inches of the floor, but the foot of the bed had no such valance. Turning on my side, I bent my knees hard lest my shoes betray me. Three layers of petticoats complicated this manoeuvre. A hoop skirt would, for good or ill, have prevented it.

  Once anxiously compressed, I listened again for the voice that had warned me into so amazing a posture. It was Henry’s voice, in its peremptory rather than its solicitous register.

  I had never known Henry to be violent, merely ungentle, and yet I realized that of late I had been increasingly apprehensive in his presence. It was possible some intractable, undisclosed problem was altering his character. Or even some physical process in his brain. Desperate as my concealment may appear, I was still not convinced that an industrialist of such achievements as Henry Crane’s could be a murderer. I just did not want to take the risk of his finding me.

  I did, however, want to hear what he and Sibyl were saying. Although it would increase my danger, I actually willed them to come into the room where I was. Presently my wish was granted.