by Mel Bradshaw
Harris set down the extinguished lamp. In the hall stood a prie-dieu chair, which he lifted by the legs. It was a heavy brute of a thing, but he managed with its tall, ornately-carved back safely and quietly to push the bedroom door open wider.
“Who’s there?” The voice—Crane’s voice—was tight and startled, but still commanding.
Harris considered posing as the carriage driver, to gain access to the room, but was no mimic or any good with accents. He would be seen through at once.
“It’s Isaac, Henry. That gun you have is more ticklish to use than you would think. Throw it out here. Uncocked.”
“Stay out or I’ll shoot.”
Harris wanted to stay out, for he was afraid. Feeling himself on the brink of a new life, he particularly did not want a bullet to prevent it. At the same time, the new life could not begin with Crane at large.
“You won’t get away now,” said Harris. “You’ve been discovered.”
“I’ll shoot you anyway.” Crane muttered something about its being a pleasure.
Then came the dry, mechanical noise of the sear locking into the tumbler as the hammer was drawn back. Back it would stay, poised to detonate the cap and to send the projectile flying, poised only until Crane applied pressure enough to the trigger to release this particular sear. How good a sense of that would he have?
Harris waited till the apprehensive trembling in his jaw and arms subsided. The chair was too heavy for more delay. Stepping forward into the doorway, he hurled the piece of furniture on top of the bed, under which he immediately dived. The air cracked open with an enormous sound and filled with the smell of burned powder. The bullet had presumably passed over Harris’s head. Heaving the chair off him to his left, Crane fired a second shot. From the sound of floorboards splintering, he must have shot straight down through the mattress and ropes, but Harris was already rolling out the other side.
Now Harris was close enough to seize Crane’s right arm before Crane could again cock the six-shooter. While Harris had thought to leap on top of Crane, pinning him to the bed, at close quarters Crane appeared too massive for that, so instead he seized Crane’s gun arm in both hands. Crane’s wrist felt thick and hard. Harris swung it so Crane’s knuckles cracked against the bedpost. Crane cried out, but maintained his grip. The bed-ropes creaked. Crane’s left fist slammed into the side of Harris’s head. Blinded and dazed, Harris stepped back without releasing the wrist, pulling for all he was worth, hauling Crane clear off the bed.
Crane’s bulk hit the carpet with a moan. The moan trailed into sobs, unfit to be heard from a man’s throat and at the same time supplicating. It seemed Crane did indeed have a wound, which the fall had made smart.
“Give it up, Henry,” Harris panted, recovering his sight but still tender from the head blow, still dragging Crane across the carpet to keep out of his left arm’s reach. He was crushing Crane’s right thumb so it could not move the pistol hammer. “Let go of the gun.”
Crane persisted in whimpering, still grasping the weapon that was quite useless to him. The gunpowder stench was clearing. Into its place seeped the warm odour of blood. Harris lost patience.
Bleed to death if you like, he thought, but quick! I’m not giving an accomplice time to rescue you.
Harris bit Crane’s hand, breaking a tooth and—mercifully—Crane’s grip.
“What other weapons have you?” Harris asked sternly, to disguise his relief at scooping up the Colt.
It was more than a foot long, but lighter than he might have expected, perhaps under three pounds. Harris had never fired a revolver and did not much look forward to firing this one, which it was too dark for him even to inspect properly. He cocked it.
While breathing noisily, Crane had stopped crying. He lay supine, feet together, right arm outflung, below the more westerly of the two south windows on the checkerboard of watery moonlight that now fell through its panes. He was dressed for business, except that his shirt was outside his trousers and bore a dark stain.
“Well?” said Harris. He considered whether the greater risk lay in personally searching or not searching Crane’s clothes.
“No others,” Crane replied, catching his breath. “You’ve more go than I thought, Isaac.”
“I want your hands accounted for, Henry. We’ll say behind your head—both hands.”
Crane complied. “When I first met you,” he said, “downstairs here at Sheridan’s table, I thought you would do well enough by the standards of—where was it? Holland Landing?—but you would never make a fortune.”
The house remained connected to the gas main, as Harris discovered when he lit a pair of sconces to either side of the hearth. Crane’s complexion was grey. For all the control he exerted over his voice, horror lurked behind his hazel eyes. His face strained away from the region between his legs. The blood on his shirt placed the wound in the lower part of the range Vandervoort had indicated, about the groin or just below.
“You could make one, though,” Crane continued. “A fortune, that is. Choose your projects and backers well, and a man with your perseverance could make history.”
“Now comes the bribe,” said Harris. It was annoying how his tongue kept returning to the fresh stump of that lower incisor. “How much do you have?”
“Thirty-five hundred U.S. dollars, gold and notes. Consider, for example, steam generators of electrical current, for those submarine telegraph cables of the future.”
It was the third piece of investment advice Harris had received today, though the only one to come with funds attached.
“Would you have the strength to reach New York state?” he asked. “The Triumph will not sail.”
“I’m bandaged well enough to hold together over plank roads.” Crane’s voice gathered its old persuasiveness. “You’ll let me go then and say nothing.”
“I’ve already lit lights. The police will have seen them and be on their way.” Harris realized he was exaggerating.
Crane tried his offer twice more and gave it up.
“You’re a fool after all,” he sighed, his small mouth taking an aggrieved, self-pitying turn. He seemed in less actual pain than before. Apparently his bandage was preventing further loss of blood.
Harris looked down at Crane with a distaste that no number of steamship keels or miles of track laid down could mitigate. A man of such talents should have seen further, done better.
“You don’t want to pay for my silence, Henry, you who hate blackmail and blackmailers. Didn’t you kill Harvey Ingram?”
“He killed himself,” Crane replied. “Never did a case of liquor do such good, and I only wish I had sent it three years ago, when his extortionate demands began.”
“Don’t get up!” said Harris sharply.
Crane subsided. “The floor is cold and hard. Let me lie on the bed.”
Harris might have acquiesced had the bedstead been anyone else’s. It was a warm cherrywood, wide and high-posted in the style of the twenties—the time of William and Emily’s marriage. Emily and William. For each upon this bed death had come too early. Harris noticed that the light, netted summer canopy had not been replaced, although the season was long past. Just beyond, on a wall parallel to the bed, the lively watercolour portrait of Theresa’s mother hung above a maple and cherrywood chest of drawers.
A sense of fitness apart, moving Crane onto the bed would be risky. It might precipitate another struggle or more bleeding. Now that Crane was his prisoner, Harris felt responsible for keeping him alive—and was curious as well. There were questions only Crane could answer. Harris spread a brown checked blanket over Crane where he lay and slid a pillow cautiously beneath his head.
“Why did you kill Sheridan?” he demanded, standing over him.
“Some people cannot be reasoned with,” said Crane in disgust. “You. William Sheridan. I gave him every chance to return MacFarlane’s scrap of paper, but he had his ‘principles’. I never intended to harm him. That’s not my way. Everything I’ve achieved
has been through finding grounds of mutual advantage, but his great snowy head shaking so righteously among the snowy pillows finished by making me angry.”
Having seen Crane’s temper, Harris could believe the murder had not been premeditated. It appalled him no less.
“Did you even know what that scrap of paper was?” he asked.
“Sheridan said it implicated MacFarlane in the cholera epidemic that killed my father . . . What does it matter? That’s twenty-four years ago. My father left his wife and boys a sound enough hardware concern, which I more or less ran from the time I was twelve. I’m grateful, but there’s nothing I can do for him now.”
It sounded to Harris as if any gratitude Crane felt was towards the epidemic, for starting him in business so young.
“What did MacFarlane pay you, Henry?”
“There is cause for regret, if you like. What he did for me was to buy my share of Conquest Iron Works. I had invested too heavily in them, and it looked as though they would never get their foundry up.”
“Conquest?” said Harris, surprised to hear this name from Crane’s lips. Then he recalled what he had read in August of MacFarlane’s involvement with the project. “Bricks and mortar are all in place, and they will be casting rails in a month or less. Could you not have held on?”
“Isaac, I had too much to hold on to it all, and that bloodsucker Ingram on top. So George has a great bargain at my expense.”
“And Theresa?” said Harris. “Have you no regrets about her?”
“Many.” Crane covered a cough with his fist. “For one, I wish I had looked under the bed.”
The October night was cold and dank, the chamber dusty from neglect.
“Keep your hands behind your head,” Harris insisted. “Go on.
He began to wonder if Crane had anyone to wait for after all. Or perhaps the light had scared the accomplice off. Traffic could be heard on Front Street, but still Theresa had not signalled any penetration of the house itself.
Crane, both hands behind his balding head, stared at the ceiling. His face looked dry and grey as ash, and deep vertical lines marked the region between his brows. He went on. Maybe the sound of his own flat voice soothed his fear, or perhaps he egotistically believed he could impress the other man with his worldly philosophy and his unwonted candour.
Harris stood between the two windows, the revolver in his hand and one eye on the door. Crane’s confession amazed him. He needed to hear it.
“I thought,” said Crane, “my position required a wife to ornament it.”
“You had a wife.”
Crane took no notice. “I soon learned, however, that educated women are not to my taste.”
“You made Theresa believe you once loved her.”
Crane shrugged or winced. It was hard to say which.
“Then when she disappeared,” Harris continued, “you did not want her found.”
“Frankly, no. Her sudden departure suggested she knew what had happened to her father, and I could never have made her see that these men of principle have no place in an era of progress and expansion. Just look at today’s politicians. Young John A. Macdonald has a far more convenient conscience than old Robert Baldwin or the late William Sheridan, and the generation after Macdonald’s will have more convenient consciences still—and less sentimental baggage. Commerce and industry will flourish. There will be no white knights like you to call them to account.”
“So—a tidy suffocation in the name of progress.” Harris pulled his tongue away from the broken tooth and Crane back from the impenetrable future to his own dark past. “What does not seem in character, Henry, is the dismemberment of cadavers, and I wonder you had the stomach for it.”
“Sibyl, you mean.” Crane became wistful. “I found I did not. That Sunday afternoon, once I had the arm off, I knew I could not follow my original plan . . .”
“Which was to reduce her to pieces too small to be recognized.”
“I couldn’t do it. So—I packed the poor woman in ice. Tuesday night I contrived to burn her, a more thorough measure in any case.”
“By then you had questioned me about Theresa,” Harris said. He remembered the Tuesday—July 15—and the feel of the new upholstery in the gently rocking brougham, the desolating sound of the word disappeared.
“I could endure Theresa’s death,” Crane continued, “but not her turning to you, a former suitor. You satisfied me that she had not. Then, however, I was afraid I had set on a bloodhound. Since I had Sibyl’s arm off, it seemed I might save it from the flames and use it to stop your searching for Theresa. A mistake . . .” Crane reached under the blanket.
“Let’s see your hands, Henry. Both hands.”
Harris’s composure was more willed than felt. He was squinting past the revolver’s drawn-back hammer over the cylinder, and down the barrel at a brown square of blanket eight inches below Crane’s chin. Harris’s right index finger curled around the trigger for the first time, just touching it. He had never before aimed a gun at a man.
“Fortunately,” Crane gasped, “one becomes less squeamish. Shoot if you like, Isaac. It’s all one.”
Harris was Crane’s keeper, and did not shoot. Crane was fumbling with something around his waist, another gun it might be, and still Harris did not tighten his trigger finger. He crouched and with his left hand pulled away the blanket.
There was no weapon. Crane had his trousers pushed down to his knees and was tearing linen dressings from his left thigh near the groin.
“Steady there,” Harris stammered. “What—?”
“Opening—the—wounds.” Crane sounded at this moment to be in the most exquisite and terrifying pain. Fresh blood pumped up darkly from the artery, soaking bandages, trousers, underclothing, and the rose-patterned carpet—and the chamber reeked of slaughter. “That’s better,” Crane panted.
From the bed, Harris seized another pillow to press down over the well of blood, but Crane would not let him. He would have to be clubbed insensible first. Harris uncocked the Colt and, grasping the barrel, raised the butt like a hammer above Crane’s head.
“No, Isaac. Can’t face a public hanging, not after having—the fall is too great . . .”
Harris hesitated. For murder confessed and unrepented, Crane owed his life—but he was not asking for his life. Did he owe society a spectacle as well?
Crane breathed laboriously. “Ever seen a man hanged, Isaac?” he asked.
Harris had. Perhaps one was enough.
The quantity of blood was frightful. While strength remained, Crane actually rubbed and worked the leg to keep blood flowing. The smell alone should have been enough to drive Harris from the room. He crouched instead beside Crane’s pillow.
Outside in the moonlight the Triumph lay quietly at her berth, her twin black funnels empty and cooling.
Crane’s fringe of hair was cut too short to be disordered by his struggle. His neckcloth remained tightly knotted. The fear had not left his face, but he was mastering it. His mouth worked dryly. While his thirst must be extreme, he knew there was no water and asked for none.
“Strange, Isaac,” he said with effort. “In the end—I don’t regret marrying Susan, even—” He paused for breath. “Even though marriage brought on all my troubles... She wanted it. I was happy in her arms—and not much since . . .”
His voice trailed off, and Harris was alone in the room. Henry Crane had made his mess and moved on, this time out of reach of bloodhounds.
The contest was over. So deadly earnest had it been, in nowise like a game, and yet Harris was reminded of his talk of chess with Vandervoort. Harris had cornered and overpowered the enemy. He had won, even though it was not his hand that had removed Crane from the board. Well, no one could say this victory had been bloodless.
Lurid in the gaslight, the viscous lake radiated out from the severed vessel over the carpet a yard and more, carried only by its own slow momentum now the pressure was gone. Harris surprised himself by not feeling nauseate
d. Anxious thoughts of Theresa in her garden shed crowded in on him—but before he properly knew how to think, glass splintered in the back bedroom next door.
She must have thrown the brick or a stone to warn him. Harris rose and stepped to the door.
“Henry?” a female voice called from deep inside the house. “Henry, what are those lights? Answer me.” The voice was closer, clearer, not Theresa’s, but possibly familiar. A woman’s running steps sounded on the stairs.
Harris decided against using the revolver, which he stuck inside his belt. Waiting against the wall to the south of the door, he pinned the woman’s arms from behind as she rushed in. A heavy, hooded cloak hid her face. Young and sturdy, she kicked fiercely until the sight of Crane lying in his blood stunned her into stillness.
“What have you done to him?” she cried.
“He has died of his wounds, miss.” Harris might have known Crane’s accomplice would be a serving girl he had made fond of him. “Are you armed? Show me your empty hands, and I’ll let go.”
“He can’t be dead, not after I bound him up and found him a carriage.” She started to struggle again.
But Theresa was in the room. The kindled expression of sympathy in her face told Harris she knew this woman, whose shoulder she solicitously touched.
“Stop it, Miss Webster,” she said. “Quiet now.”
Miss Webster was quiet. Theresa loosened the girl’s cloak and took the girl’s hands in her own. Upon releasing her, Harris saw it was the seamstress he had let in front of him at William Sheridan’s funeral—Vandervoort’s quondam informant—Marion Webster.
“Oh, Mrs. Crane, he’s not dead, is he?” In all simplicity, Miss Webster appealed to the woman she believed her rival.
“If you’ll remain calm,” said Theresa, “we shall see. Won’t you sit down?”
“Theresa,” said Harris, “you need not look. John Vandervoort will soon be here.”
He had to speak, but knew her answer in advance. She was battle-hardened. No less than the Crimean nurses, she could look on scenes once thought unfit for woman’s eyes. She had come through the wars. Now she must see the peace.