Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “Jasper?” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “Who is the author of this document?”

  “I thought,” said Small, “you knew.”

  “I know no more than Isaac has said.”

  Small sat up straight. He seemed to grow half an inch. The look of surprise passed from his pale grey eyes, leaving them clear and steady, expressive of thought. Harris was too preoccupied to take much notice, and even if he had been inclined to see a positive change in his friend, he would have had his hopes restrained by the apparent irrelevance of Small’s next remark.

  “Christopher,” said the lawyer. “I believe I heard that was the little boy’s name.”

  “After the doctor.” Theresa grimaced to show how deserving she thought Hillyard of that honour, then spoke in simple sadness of her brother. “Our lives overlapped by four days, but Papa says we were never in the same room. He used to say.”

  The poignancy of this quiet correction only intensified Harris’s feeling that she was owed an answer. Even if this document’s secret didn’t help protect her from Crane, which protection must be their principal object, still she needed it to satisfy her vow—the vow that had taken her to Sibyl’s room and under Sibyl’s bed, the vow to find out how her father had died.

  “Was it a letter, Jasper?” Harris demanded. “A signed confession? What?”

  “I should have to get Scabby Hillyard’s permission first,” said Small.

  More obstructions, Harris thought and gritted his teeth to keep from saying. Small might as well be working for the enemy.

  “Open the door then,” Theresa said, disappointment palpable in her face and voice.

  Harris opened it and jumped out, ready to hand her down.

  “Can’t you dine with us?” Small asked, disappointed in turn, as if her company on this occasion truly mattered more to him than the meal itself.

  “No, Jasper. Mr. Bray will be home directly, and I do not intend that he should turn me out. He has promised to bar his door against Henry.”

  Well said, thought Harris. He undertook to write her that evening at the latest. She surprised him by kissing his cheek. With Small she set an example of graciousness, taking his hand and warmly thanking him for coming as far as Montreal on a hopeless case.

  “Oh, I’m glad to find you didn’t—that is, to find you so much recovered, and I look forward to being of some use, somehow or other . . .” Her first dance partner seemed caught on the wrong foot. “You can tell the Brays I’m C. of E. at least.”

  So, the secret of the strongbox was Hillyard’s to disclose. Very well. Harris directed that the two remaining passengers be driven straight to the telegraph office.

  Then—as the coach pulled away from Theresa’s lodging—he tried to get back in humour with Small, whose features beneath the rim of his black bowler hat appeared commendably grave and alert. This Small, Harris saw, differed markedly from the depressed individual that had accompanied him to Craig Street.

  “Jasper,” he inquired, “why does it make such a difference that Theresa did not remove the MacFarlane paper?”

  “Because of my indiscretion,” Small promptly replied. “You see, as Theresa says, I mentioned the MacFarlanes to her, and I was desperately afraid that slip of the tongue had cost me any chance of completing William Sheridan’s last project. I’ve cursed myself black and blue over that. A bad conscience has made it tremendously hard for me to pull myself together.”

  “You thought she might have taken the document to protect her friends—but would she really have put her friends before her father?”

  “Her father was dead, remember. No, Isaac, I should not have expected her to feel the same obligation to pursue the matter as I did. For one thing, she couldn’t have read the letter. It was in cipher, much like the telegrams your branch used to exchange with head office. Theresa would have seen only an unpronounceable and—without the key—meaningless handwritten sequence of characters.”

  Tantalized and encouraged, Harris rubbed his palms over the knees of his trousers. A ciphered letter then. If Small could be led on at this rate, they might not have to wait for uncertain permission to arrive by wire from Toronto after all.

  “Tell me, Jasper, can MacFarlane be sued for what he did or neglected to do twenty-four years ago?”

  “By no means. Every action shall be commenced within twelve calendar months.”

  “Then,” Harris reasoned, “perhaps Dr. Hillyard isn’t strictly speaking your client and needn’t be consulted.”

  “The case is more complicated than you imagine,” said Small, but not discouragingly. “Let’s consider the matter while we eat.”

  Harris made sure a telegram to Hillyard was sent first.

  Small planned the lunch, but in the interests of health and economy acquiesced to Harris’s veto of three of the courses. Apples from the mountain were in season and formed the theme of what remained. They came steamed with the roast goose, baked and served with custard in the tart, while John McIntosh’s Reds took pride of place in the fruit bowl. Harris would happily have drunk cider as well. He compromised, however, on a Beaujolais at a fraction of the cost of the Clos de Vougeot his friend was urging.

  While they ate, Small talked. He started at some distance from the secret. It was less than clear, perhaps least of all to Small himself, where he intended to stop.

  He spoke first of Theresa’s mother. As a bride of eighteen, she had accompanied William Sheridan to the New World in 1823. Harris had perhaps noted in her husband’s office Emily Sheridan’s watercolour likeness—showing a narrow, animated face like Theresa’s, but with a merrier cast and her auburn hair curled six inches out either side of her head. Harris might not know that whenever he saw that portrait in Sheridan’s office, there was in Sheridan’s bedroom an empty nail waiting to receive it. It had gone to Yonge Street with him every day and returned to Front Street every night.

  Emily loved games and entertainments of all kinds, especially cards. Small wished he had known her. The couple’s new friend Chris Hillyard had considered her the most enchanting whist player since Mrs. Simcoe left town in ’96. By the twenties, Hillyard was already an old bachelor, but he never made any secret of the fact that in all his long and undistinguished medical career, Emily was the patient he most regretted losing.

  Late in the 1840s, Hillyard began to feel his years and moved south. Which of the Caribbean colonies he settled in Small couldn’t say, but in Bridgetown or Georgetown or Port of Spain, the septuagenarian one day found himself at the bedside of a feverish sea captain. A less superstitious patient might have thrown the malady off. This sailor, however, believed he was being punished for his part in bringing Asiatic cholera to Canada. Hillyard dug the wax out of his ancient ears and attended closely.

  Small supposed he was being indiscreet, so he had best say no more—unless Harris would be sworn to secrecy. Harris barely nodded before Small was off again.

  Hillyard’s patient had in ’32 been master of the brig Katherine, carrying timber east across the Atlantic and emigrants west. In May she was bound for Quebec City, but contrary winds had kept her at sea more than fifty days, and many of the passengers had used up all their food. She accordingly put into New Brunswick’s Miramichi Bay for supplies before sailing on up the St. Lawrence. Because of the cholera scare and the master’s report of ten deaths at sea “from a bowel complaint,” the Katherine was kept offshore and under guard. No one was allowed to disembark.

  Now it happened the owner was in New Brunswick looking for more trees to cut. When he heard of the Katherine’s situation, he had a letter carried out to her master, along with the requested food. George MacFarlane had far fewer ships then than now, and he made it clear he wanted none of them tied up in red tape for any part of the short navigation season. The Katherine had already lost enough time.

  “Have you a copy of this letter?” Harris broke in. He had stopped eating and was anxious to see the exact words that might have cost Christopher, Emily, and—ultim
ately—William Sheridan their lives.

  “I have a reference copy in the vault at the office—not here.” Small uncharacteristically let the waiter take the wine bottle with a last half glass still in it. “The gist of it, though, was this: as the Katherine approached Quebec, she was to put any ill passengers ashore under cover of darkness and to sail past the quarantine station at Grosse Île without stopping.”

  Harris blew a breath out slowly. He was picturing men, women and children writhing with cramps on the inky strand of an unknown continent while their ship, now purged of them, sailed serenely on.

  “I knew individual captains acted to frustrate the quarantine,” he said, “but I had never heard it was a policy of any of the owners. Poor Kate MacFarlane, having that vessel named for her.”

  “She won’t feel it,” Small rejoined, “and MacFarlane will be spared the loss of her esteem. Neither she nor the public will ever know.”

  “Go on, Jasper. Finish the story.”

  The dining room was closing, so Small bought two Havanas and finished the story in the smoking lounge. There three men with Carolina drawls were commenting on the autumnal coolness in the air and agreeing it was time to collect their wives and daughters and go home. The room’s only other occupants slept soundly in their chairs, far removed this year from any fear of plague.

  And had the captain followed his instructions? From what Hillyard heard at that tropical bedside, he had. He had had misgivings, certainly, on account of the cannon at the quarantine station, but MacFarlane had vouched for its being no more than a toy and for the impossibility in any case of British troops firing on British ships.

  At night and with the blessing of a following breeze, the Katherine slid up the broad St. Lawrence three miles off Grosse Île. Four blue-skinned passengers were meanwhile spewing fluids from both ends. Below Quebec there remained some thirty miles of river, and for two dozen of them the master procrastinated, hoping some or all the sufferers would expire before dawn. When it became clear none would, he had them and their inseparable friends rowed to a farmer’s jetty. Two hours later, the Katherine reached port without a health certificate but presentable enough to brazen out any attempt to make her retrace her wake all the way back to Grosse Île. The long-confined emigrants cooperated fully in concealing evidence of the cholera. Who could blame them?

  As of that date, 5th June 1832, no case of the disease had been diagnosed anywhere in British North America. Within the week, it had taken two hundred Canadian lives. The Katherine crossed the ocean twice more that summer, and by the time she was back in Quebec in September, thousands more were dead, as far west as Hamilton and London. In York—later renamed Toronto—Emily Sheridan and twenty-six others succumbed on 9th August, five days after her eldest child.

  That winter the captain sailed for an Argentinian owner, whose niece he in time married. After the briefest twinge of remorse, he forgot MacFarlane and wasn’t even aware of having kept the fateful letter until his wife’s death fifteen years later obliged him to clean house.

  Grief and guilt now reinforced each other. When in the next port he fell ill, he wanted a confessor no less than a physician. Hillyard filled both rôles. Whether the patient-penitent was Scot or Swede, ample or compact, white-haired or red—Small couldn’t say. His account derived from William Sheridan’s memorandum of several conversations with Hillyard, and perhaps neither older man cared to put a human face on this cog of destiny.

  Before dying, he had given the letter to Hillyard, who now saw whose hand had upset his whist table. Never mind that other vessels had evaded the quarantine. Never mind that even those that passed through it often brought cholera ashore. MacFarlane was an assassin.

  For some years, even after returning to Toronto, Hillyard did nothing with this knowledge. He told no one. He saw no legal means to call MacFarlane to account and lacked any stomach for scandal-mongering. Only when it appeared that MacFarlane was to be knighted for service to the Empire did the doctor break his silence by writing to the Governor General.

  Sir Edmund Head was in this case ill-served by a functionary, who improperly told MacFarlane what was being alleged and by whom. The intent was not apparently to have the damning evidence refuted but to have it suppressed. MacFarlane threatened Hillyard with an action for defamatory libel. The same day—late June this would have been—Hillyard took the entire story together with the 1832 letter to Sheridan.

  “MacFarlane sued Hillyard and lost?” said Harris.

  “No, Isaac. Listen . . .”

  Harris had been listening, but restlessly, with frequent prods and queries to hasten the narrative. After barely a puff, he had let his cigar go cold. He was too disgusted to taste it. He was thoroughly disgusted.

  He had once admired George MacFarlane as the supreme exemplar of energy and enterprise. And now? MacFarlane was clearly not a murderer as Crane was a murderer, but now it seemed that to save a week in port—one week—the shipping magnate had recklessly gambled with the health and lives of his own family, of every family in his country.

  Harris’s imagination leaped ahead to the state in which Dr. Hillyard would have found Theresa’s father two months ago. By her account, the latter was at the time torn between the solicitations of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald and those of oppositionist George Brown, and the strain was settling as usual in his stomach.

  “I have,” Small resumed, “traced the cholera letter’s effect on, firstly, the sea captain and, secondly, Christopher Hillyard. Now this flimsy sheet of paper passes to a third reader, William Sheridan, whom it hit—his very words—‘like a kick in the gut.’”

  The old bear had left Parliament early that day, too sore and sorry for acrimonious debate. He had gone home to rest. While resting, he had deliberated.

  A righteous urge to denounce the timber baron tickled his throat, but the MacFarlanes were Theresa’s friends, and more innocent parties would suffer than guilty. Little Elsie had sketched the harbour from Sheridan’s window. Kate had played his piano. The other pan of the balance held Sheridan’s own wife and child. Were they not past suffering, though, the angels?

  When he found himself weeping, he realized he was not the man to advise Hillyard. All the same, some maggot of inquisitiveness made him stagger to a bookcase and take down MacFarlane’s novel Flora. He read the inscription.

  “Let me see if I recall it,” said Small, looking for words up among the pendants of a crystal gaselier. “Yes, more or less—‘To Theresa Crane, a refreshing young friend, who may discern in her lively self some resemblance to the heroine of this simple tale. In doing so, she would confer the greatest honour on journeyman author’—large signature here and flourish—‘George MacFarlane.’ Henry thought his wife was being called a backwoods bumpkin. He refused the volume houseroom.”

  “Sheridan compared the hand with that of the Katherine’s instructions,” Harris suggested.

  “Those instructions,” said Small with a sigh. “How Willie cursed their author for not using a secretary!”

  “Perhaps there was no time to collar one before the brig left New Brunswick.”

  But Sheridan had hoped the scripts would differ. Their congruence had made it harder to put the matter out of his mind. Besides, Hillyard was always there to put it back in as through the ensuing fortnight the stomach pains repeatedly dimmed and flared. “Iliac passion,” Hillyard had muttered by way of diagnosis. Small thought the later attacks as much due to a misguided over-prescription of laxatives.

  MacFarlane’s lawyer was asking Hillyard for a withdrawal of the allegations made to the Crown’s representative concerning his client, for an unqualified written apology to his client, and for an immediate return of any property of his client’s, including any documents or correspondence pertaining to his client’s vessels or former vessels. How, Hillyard persisted in asking, should he treat these demands?

  After a number of unavailing recommendations that his friend seek other counsel, Sheridan suggested there was no immediate
need to do anything. If MacFarlane sustained no injury, Hillyard would pay no damages. In his defence, moreover, the doctor might plead that he had written to Sir Edmund neither falsely nor maliciously, but in all honesty and for the public benefit. Finally, the Katherine letter was its recipient’s property, not its sender’s.

  Hillyard calmed down sufficiently to leave his scabs undisturbed, for a day or so. Then, on the night of July 8, he woke Sheridan up to announce that his house and surgery had been broken into. Nothing had been taken, but everything had been disarranged. Yes, he could tell. He had left his effects in an informal order very different from the shambles in which he had found them. Locked drawers had been forced.

  As to motive, physicians were widely—if baselessly—reputed to be rich. Then again, the less educated relatives of patients whom no medicine could have saved sometimes fancied they had scores to settle. The object of this crime, however, Hillyard believed to be neither booty nor vengeance.

  “The letter,” he said. “Good thing I gave it to you.”

  Suspicion that he was right made Sheridan no friendlier to the prospect of “Sir” being prefixed to George MacFarlane’s name. Ultimate responsibility in the matter rested in England with the Secretary of State for the Colonies. To him Sheridan began to think of applying. If he got no satisfaction before the start of the next session, he might even have the matter raised in Parliament.

  While briefing Small on these subjects, Sheridan began vomiting freely, hideous bilious matter such as Small had never seen, and promptly took to his bed with his worst attack of abdominal pain ever. When Small visited on 10th July, he was instructed to prepare a letter to the Colonial Office. Sheridan would decide the next day whether to sign and send it.

  “None of us,” said Small, “was thinking rationally. From declining to represent Hillyard, the old bear had almost reached the point of taking on Hillyard’s crusade himself, risking his life in ways at least some of which should have been clear to him. Hillyard? He was not trying to kill his friend. He just couldn’t bring himself to forget MacFarlane and practise medicine. As for me, my senior partner was a second father—more hot-blooded certainly but also more affectionate than my own. I feared for his life. I feared for mine without him. I’ve always seen myself as loyal Second-in-Command rather than as Officer Commanding. Now I was doing Sheridan’s work as well as mine, an unwanted promotion seemed imminent, and I was expected to confide in no one.”