Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Still Harris walked. Eventually the gas jets in the street lamps ahead burned more distinctly. The fog had lifted. The streets were better lit than in Toronto, and Harris began to take note of the life around him. He was by the river. To his right waggons and drays loaded with barrels laboured up ramps from the piers to the street. To his left the Old Countryman Inn was turning away passengers slow to disembark. Not a bed left. People were everywhere. The evening’s steamers had arrived.

  When he returned to Rasco’s, he found Jasper Small sipping port in the lobby. A scuffed but elegant portmanteau turned on end sat by the lawyer’s chair and served him as drink stand.

  “Just the man!” cried Harris, sated with his own company. “Pour me some of that and let me tell you—” He noticed that Small was sipping rather briskly, and that the bottle was already half empty. “Did you—ah—have a tolerable journey down?”

  “I don’t know why I came,” Small confided. “I have cases in Toronto I’m neglecting, including that of a mechanic disabled by . . . I forget by what exactly, but it’s just the sort of suit for damages the old bear would have taken to heart. Garçon! Another glass.”

  “His daughter’s case,” said Harris, “would hardly have left him indifferent.”

  But Small was in no state to reason, and serious consultation would maddeningly have to wait.

  The waiter brought another glass. Harris filled both. The fortified wine was agreeable—warm and celebratory. Yes, Harris had had grim news of Crane’s deeds, but tomorrow began the campaign to bring their author to justice. Here was cause to celebrate. Theresa would not be returning to Crane. It wasn’t altogether in order to prevent his friend’s finishing the bottle alone that Harris enjoyed a further three ounces of port before bed.

  He gave Small the couch in his room and roused him from it as soon as the first two breakfasts could be ordered up. Small’s heavy-lidded eyes made him look morose and sleepy even when he was not. This morning he confessed he was both—but no, he had not drunk heavily on the steamer, where he had found ladies enough with whom to promenade, play cards, and in the evening, polka. A capital dance, the polka—lively as an Irish jig, intimate as a waltz. Only the want of society while awaiting Harris last evening had made him think of toasting his fair-skinned bawd.

  Harris moved him off this topic by asking for news of the inquest. Small had none, but had heard from a passenger embarked at Kingston that a squatter named Lansing had been arrested. He had apparently raped a farm girl at the very crossroads where Theresa had been attacked. A broken-toothed fellow whose shoes didn’t match.

  “No mystery then,” said Harris, “why Etta’s husband didn’t show his face at their shack while Theresa was there. We must get Crane locked up too.”

  “Aren’t you missing a few steps?” said Small. “I don’t think you had better have any more of that French coffee.”

  Harris read or summarized for Small the parts of Theresa’s letter he believed supportive of a murder indictment. At the suggestion that a pillow had been held over his partner’s face, Small shook his head.

  “The letter’s genuine? You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely,” said Harris.

  “A pillow—what a strange, soft, dreadful death! Poor bear.” Small again shook his head while absently smoothing his dressing gown over his folded knees. All natural emotion in him seemed muffled, muted. “Then I was unjust to Hillyard, the old quack. No wonder Theresa fled.” He cleared his throat. “Still, where’s your case?”

  “Jasper, she didn’t just hear Crane kill Sibyl. She saw it.” Thinking to jolt Small out of his melancholia and to prepare him for battle, Harris read on to the breaking of the housekeeper’s neck.

  “Henry Crane?” said Small. “‘Iron-hull’ Crane?” He gazed out the fourth-floor window at a dull patch of sky while groping for an adequate response. “This is news indeed—but as I believe I told you, Isaac, it doesn’t help in the least. Wife and husband are one flesh, not permitted to testify against each other.”

  “Surely not in a case like this!” Harris exclaimed.

  “In any case except when the spouse is him or herself the victim.”

  “She can’t be one with a murderer!” Harris set his cup down noisily. “What of the other evidence, Jasper? Sibyl’s letter—”

  “—is the undated and uncorroborated allegation of a serving woman that Crane had the opportunity to murder William Sheridan, when the death certificate says there was no murder at all. Theresa was right not to let that pathetic scribble fall into official hands.”

  “A serving woman is negligible, of course,” Harris retorted. “Your late partner had more confidence in her than that.”

  Small said nothing. His expression became very distant. Harris reflected that Sheridan’s faith in Sibyl would not necessarily communicate itself to judge and jury.

  “Forgive me, Jasper. I should not have used him to reproach you.”

  “You know that pyramid he has in St. James’s Cemetery? One side should be engraved THE PEOPLE’S CHAMPION, and around the corner WHETHER THEY DESERVED ONE OR NOT.” Small had been touched on a tender spot. His voice gathered pain as he continued. “Who would be so trusting? Not you, Isaac. By God, not I. And yet trust as ample and generous as William Sheridan’s would be part of any paradise we could imagine. He was irreplaceable because one cannot even quite want to be like him. Oh, hell.”

  Harris left a silence. He had never heard the lawyer talk so explicitly about the weight of Sheridan’s legacy. While sympathetic, Harris was too preoccupied to make use of this opening. He didn’t seek to discover whether any individual aspect of that legacy, any single act committed or neglected by Small, any particular lack of faith, might have triggered the surviving partner’s collapse or might be preventing his regeneration. Was there one specific failure for which Small reproached himself above all others? Harris didn’t ask. The best Harris believed he could do for Small was to interest him in Theresa’s worsening predicament. That would benefit all concerned.

  While Small was dressing, Harris wrote to Theresa. Her sleep and appetite were asked after. Small’s arrival was mentioned—with more optimism than it yet seemed to warrant. Of her long letter, Harris said only that, although distressing, it had no effect on his regard for her other than to increase it. This note he consigned to a hotel messenger for immediate delivery.

  The messenger returned some forty minutes later, while Harris was suggesting—and Small rejecting—ways to incriminate Crane without Theresa’s testimony. What of Crane’s perjury at the inquest? Her husband said he had seen Theresa off on her July 13 ride. He had in fact left the house first. Small doubted much could be made of this, and Crane’s servants were unlikely to contradict him in any case. Harris acquiesced, but perhaps inquiries at the coach office . . . Small asked with a yawn whether after nearly six weeks anyone could be expected to remember the presence—let alone the absence—of so drab a passenger as Sibyl Martin. Besides, Crane had not claimed to have seen her board a coach or even buy a ticket. Harris remembered how difficult it had been to get Theresa’s likeness to show. He despaired of finding one of Sibyl.

  At this point, the door was knocked upon and Harris was handed back his own envelope. It seemed then not to have been accepted. A further setback. Finding the seal broken, however, he removed his letter and saw that Theresa had answered on the back.

  “Mr. Bray,” she wrote in her former laconic style, “leaves for McGill College shortly after ten. T.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Bonds of Matrimony

  Harris took Small to Craig Street. The lawyer’s company would make it easier for Theresa to come for a drive with Harris, who moreover hoped that her company would inspire Small to exert himself on her behalf. Small acquiesced—fatalistically for the most part, since he had left Toronto for just this purpose, but with a hint of trepidation. He sat fidgeting in the rented coach while Harris rapped at the Brays’ door.

  Theresa opened it and pr
omptly slipped out into the street. The proposed outing suited her. She appeared ill at ease, but swore she had eaten and rested well and that the physician who had called the night before, a man she knew and trusted from her previous stay in Montreal, had given her no reason to keep indoors.

  “Jasper,” she said, climbing into the seat beside him, “how good to see you! Papa’s comrade in arms.”

  Small winced, owing presumably to his recent neglect of business.

  “My sympathy on your loss,” he replied stiffly.

  “I value it. And mine . . .” She faltered before his evident embarrassment.

  Only after Harris had had a chance to recount Small’s contribution to the inquest did the lawyer’s spirits begin to revive.

  “Well, infidel, where shall we go?” said Small. “Now that Theresa is out of the convent, perhaps she would care to look at some clothes. The French Empress Eugénie sets the style in this city, I’m told.”

  “I had thought we might drive up Côte des Neiges,” put in Harris, remembering too late that the final “s” was silent. “The air will be better on the mountain.”

  “I’m not going to shop,” said Theresa, “but I should like to see where they’re building the Victoria Bridge.”

  “A capital plan,” Small responded in a thoughtless, agreeable way. “I’ll see if the driver knows where it is.”

  On the way out Wellington Street to Point St. Charles, Theresa showed the men a telegram that explained much of her apprehensiveness. It had been forwarded from the Grey Nuns and was from Crane. Having heard from the Laurendeaus the wonderful news that she was safe, he looked forward to being at liberty to set out for Montreal within the next day or two. Meanwhile she must stay with the good sisters and build up her strength. A letter would follow.

  “He sounds in no hurry,” said Harris, falsely cheerful.

  “He may already have left. Jasper, what happens if I refuse to see him?”

  “If he insists on your return,” said Small, “his lawyer will likely write to your hosts. Court action will be threatened.”

  “Could I not get a divorce?” asked Theresa. “Mrs. Bray was divorced from an adulterer in Connecticut before she became an Episcopalian and married Mr. Bray.”

  Small looked out the window for a gentle answer. They were crossing the Lachine Canal, whose flow powered grey limestone mills and factories for as far as could be seen. Hard surfaces multiplied the din.

  “Jasper,” said Harris, “her testimony would not be required to prove adultery against Crane.”

  “My friends,” Small replied, “a husband’s infidelity may be grounds for dissolving a marriage in Connecticut or Massachusetts where the Puritan influence is strong, but not in the united province. In Canada West, only two divorces have ever been granted, neither on the petition of the wife. Here in Canada East, divorce is unknown.”

  “That’s clear, at least,” said Theresa with a brave tilt to her chin.

  Harris pityingly recalled having to explain banking rules not of his devising, but he had always tried to suggest to the client some course of action. Small seemed to leave them with nothing.

  Before more could be said, the coach stopped and promptly had to move again to make way for waggons bringing limestone blocks to the bridge-head. The three passengers stepped down to find the St. Lawrence before them. Stone piers at intervals Harris estimated above three hundred feet marched away across the river towards the south shore, almost two miles distant. Stone-laden barges approached a coffer-dam surrounding one pier not yet built above water level. Derricks lowered blocks to the river bed. And over barges, dams, derricks, piers and waggons swarmed Irish-accented workers in the hundreds.

  While impressed with the scale of the undertaking, Harris wondered why Theresa—with no known interest in engineering—should have wanted to come here when so much else claimed her attention. Then he saw she had turned away from the bridge towards three apparently unremarkable rows of mostly open sheds. He joined her.

  “Don’t lose heart,” he advised. “We’re not done picking Jasper’s brains yet.”

  “I admit I can’t quite shake Henry out of my thoughts,” she replied, “but this is what I wanted to see. This must be where emigrants were quarantined during the typhus nine years ago.”

  Harris noticed that the sheds, many of which now held building supplies, were fitted with plank bunks. He shuddered. This was evidently nothing Small wanted to see, as he promptly wandered off to inspect the works. Theresa made no attempt to detain him.

  “I told Jasper some of what you wrote in your letter,” Harris confided, “whatever I thought might be legally useful in keeping Crane away from you, and in bringing him to justice.”

  He watched Theresa’s face in profile, the thoughtful curve of her forehead, the unblinking gaze under soft brows. She was perhaps seeing the bunks loaded with bodies—in place of lumber—and courageous nurses passing among them.

  “I hope you approve,” he added.

  “I don’t mind—if you think he can help.”

  “He wants to, I’m positive, and he’s capable enough, only Jasper doesn’t stand very high in his own opinion right now.”

  “Doesn’t he?” said Theresa, suddenly attentive. “Is that what the condition looks like? Isaac, what you wrote in your letter this morning about your regard—even though I could not wholly believe it, I was grateful, and pleased, until this telegram . . .”

  Harris was starting to stammer back some tender reassurance when—

  “Stone dust dries the throat,” Small called out, approaching. “We should go somewhere for a glass of wine.”

  “Work first!” Harris replied somewhat tartly, even though he was unsure how to proceed now that hanging and divorcing Crane had both been ruled impracticable. “We’ll continue our deliberations as we roll.”

  But Theresa wasn’t quite ready to climb back into the coach. She asked a succession of labourers the location of the emigrants’ burial ground and was eventually told that the road they were standing on had been laid over top of it. The graves had not been marked in any case.

  On the drive back down Wellington Street, Harris thought about the shiploads of Irish who had fled famine in the old world only to die of fever in the new. Something from early in Theresa’s letter came to mind, and he rapidly put it together with other miscellaneous facts.

  “In his last days,” said Harris, “William Sheridan railed against ship-owners for bringing not the typhus of ’47 but the cholera of ’32. In that epidemic, he lost his wife and son, Theresa her mother and brother. I think, Jasper, it’s time you told us about William Sheridan’s last case.”

  Alone this time on the backwards-facing seat, Small looked questioningly from Harris to Theresa.

  “That case didn’t touch Crane,” he said at last.

  “But just before his death,” Harris rejoined, “your partner was arguing with Crane about something. Sibyl says voices were raised.”

  “I don’t see that it could have been about—”

  “I know you don’t, Jasper, but let’s spread out all the cards first and play what hand we can with them after. That is, if Theresa doesn’t mind.”

  Far from minding, Theresa at Harris’s side leaned forward and joined the inquisition.

  “You told me, Jasper, the case touched the MacFarlanes,” she prompted.

  Small squirmed. “A mistake.”

  “But not a misstatement!” Harris raced on. He might be racing down a blind alley. Still, the detective muse had so neglected him lately that no inspiration could be thrown away. “Now George MacFarlane was only one of many ship-owners in 1832, so to become the focus of legal action after twenty-four years, and to warrant his family’s being seen less of by Theresa, he must have done something especially discreditable. Come to think of it, I can believe his conscience chafes him, for when I mentioned the death of Theresa’s brother to him on July 20, he pretended the 1832 epidemic had never happened. Theresa’s disappearance had me t
oo distracted to dwell on his words at the time, but they seem amazing now. Six thousand deaths conjured away!”

  “Done what, Isaac?” Theresa demanded. “Don’t spare my feelings. Knowing what I’m married to, I can bear anything.”

  “You must ask Jasper. The evidence is or was a document, which you heard your father assure Dr. Hillyard was safe in William Sheridan’s strongbox. Following his death, Jasper told Inspector Vandervoort that items were missing from that box. Facetiously or otherwise, Vandervoort suggested to me that you, Theresa, had removed them, but it didn’t occur to you to open the box—did it?—until you were no longer in a position to do so.”

  “No—not until Sunday noon. Papa’s body went to Ogilvie’s Saturday night with the key around his neck.”

  “Well, Jasper?” said Harris. “Was the MacFarlane document taken?”

  “Why, yes. I thought . . .” Small uncrossed his legs and studied Theresa with a look of inscrutable wonder.

  Harris was still arranging the cards. “You said, Jasper, that Crane had had business worries. Was that so, Theresa?”

  “He never talked about business, but he did start asking me to economize, whereas previously he had scolded me for not making enough of a show.”

  “Yet by July 20, MacFarlane was pronouncing him ‘sound as a board.’” Harris paused and nodded. “I think,” he said, “that we have stumbled upon the motive for murder, and that it has to do with the transport of emigrants rather than with religious zealotry or the Orange Lodge. What was it, Jasper? William Sheridan’s fortune couldn’t have saved Crane, but George MacFarlane’s could. What was the piece of paper he sold MacFarlane—the paper that didn’t touch him, but for which he suffocated Theresa’s father, your partner, the People’s Champion?”

  The coach had stopped at Bray’s door. No one got out. Drawing a plain white handkerchief from her sleeve, Theresa blew her nose.