Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “By Orangemen.”

  “His fellow Orangemen—to whom in their intoxicated state, it now appears, he had denied more drink. In all of this how are Catholics more victims than any of the rest of us who value a civilized community?”

  Murdock shook his heavy head. “We’re intimidated, Isaac. Remember, we’re in the minority. There are three of you to every one of us.”

  “Oh, I hardly count as a Protestant,” Harris protested weakly. Geology and zoology had by painless increments displaced his ancestral faith, such as it had been—but he knew that made him no less alien to Murdock, who continued as if Harris had not spoken.

  “The thugs need not attack us directly. We have eyes to see that anyone opposing their power can become a victim. Even a Member of Parliament.”

  “You mean William Sheridan?”

  “Perhaps a rising man of business is right to court their favour and—and help them hide their crimes, but it saddens me all the same to see you do it. I must get home to dinner.”

  “Just a minute,” said Harris. “A week ago, the very first time I saw you after the event, you hinted there was sinister significance to William Sheridan’s dying on July 12.”

  “I knew it then, and I’ve got the details since. You’ll never read them in the press.”

  “Would you mind eating here?” Last night’s visit to Front Street had sharpened Harris’s hunger for such details. He had previously made three or four such requests, when reports from their branch had been commanded at short notice. Each time Murdock had nodded dutifully. Today—in the absence of bank business—the accountant hesitated, sighed and nodded. Orange roguery? A futile topic, his dumb show implied—but, to his shame, irresistible. As usual, Dick Ogilvie was sent to advise Mrs. Murdock and bring back from a neighbouring café sliced ham, meat pie and a jug of ginger beer.

  “Septimus,” said Harris, on returning to his office, “you admit the daily papers are unreliable.”

  Murdock shrugged as if the thing were obvious.

  “Then please don’t judge me by what you read there. They say I found Mrs. Crane’s arm. That’s false. I found an arm, which remains to be identified.”

  “They say nothing at all about William Sheridan. What a great heart that was! I would have attended his funeral myself if it had been at the Cathedral.”

  “Yes, well, Mr. Sheridan found St. James with its reserved pews too plutocratic for his liking. What should they be saying?”

  “Holy Trinity is in the most Protestant ward in the city, and the way things are, a Roman like myself would not have felt particularly welcome.”

  Harris did not stop to list the French Canadian mourners, Murdock’s co-religionists to a man. “Septimus, what should the papers be saying?”

  The repetition of the question gratified the accountant and unnerved him. “Ask Sibyl Martin,” he stammered.

  “Who is she?”

  “For the last three months of his life, William Sheridan’s housekeeper.”

  Harris had been pacing. Now he went dead still, though his pulse was off at a gallop. He felt as if he had been tracking through deep woods a quarry he might have seen by no more than a quarter turn of the head.

  “Where,” he asked carefully, “will I find her?”

  “That’s a question, isn’t it?”

  “Septimus.”

  “I don’t know, Isaac. No one seems to know, and no one seems to have been looking.”

  The housekeeper’s arm? A fearful joy tickled Harris’s throat. To cover his unsettling eagerness for a human sacrifice, he said, “You think after killing him she fled.”

  “Or is being hidden,” said Murdock. “If you ask me, she killed them both.”

  “Sheridan and . . .”

  “Exactly. Father and daughter.”

  The theory was breath-catching, but quickly fell apart when the accountant could give no account of what Sibyl might have done with Theresa’s body. Burn it? Where? Not in Scarboro, surely. How was she to have got it there? Sheridan kept no carriage.

  Murdock postulated accomplices—as many as necessary. He had never actually clapped eyes on the housekeeper and could give no indication as to her height or build. “Sluttish and sullen” was how rumour described her.

  By the time their meal arrived, Harris had heard several more jeremiads, but no new facts.

  “Look here,” he said once young Ogilvie had set two places at a gate-leg table and withdrawn, “what besides her disappearance makes you accuse this woman of murder?”

  “She has a twin brother in the Provincial Penitentiary. Crusher Martin they call him.”

  This detail made a stronger impression on Harris than he was willing to acknowledge. “I must say, Septimus, I don’t see much of my own brothers and sister. Should they hang for my crimes?”

  “If you had killed a man, as Martin has, a less open-hearted individual than William Sheridan might well shy away from taking your twin into domestic service. Then again, Isaac, the woman herself worked until this past March in the house of the Orange Grand Master. Whose crime is that?”

  “No one’s, as far as I know.”

  Harris felt all the more need to defend Sibyl because of wishing her dead. He had to admit, however, that the man she would have been used to hearing reviled at the Grand Master’s as an apostate had indeed been a singularly unprejudiced employer. How had she come in contact with Sheridan? Murdock suspected intrigue, but perhaps the imprisoned brother had simply chanced to be a client. There was one person Harris would know where to find.

  “Open your eyes, my young friend,” Murdock advised between mouthfuls. “This woman with criminal relations and an Orange past prepared William Sheridan’s last meal.”

  “Poison? But Dr. Hillyard says he died of his old complaint, inflammation of the bowels.”

  “And is Dr. Hillyard above suspicion?”

  “Over the years he has had more opportunities to poison Sheridan than anyone. He would not have needed a servant’s help.”

  “Then Sibyl Martin administered an irritant of some sort that brought on the fatal attack. Police were sent for the night he died.”

  Harris dropped his fork. Drunk or sober, Vandervoort had never so much as hinted at this.

  “To apprehend Sibyl Martin?” he said.

  “Why else?”

  “But how do you know?”

  The clock ticked. A carter’s whip cracked outside the window as his team plodded by. Harris held his breath.

  “A St. Michael’s altar boy carried the note.”

  “Why didn’t you say so sooner?”

  “For the boy’s sake,” said Murdock. “Did you know that William Sheridan bought a hundred iron bedsteads for the new House of Providence? Now don’t ask me for his name.”

  “Mrs. Crane gave him this note?” Harris didn’t mention that the altar boy might have to testify at a coroner’s inquest.

  “‘To the police with this as fast as you can,’ she said.”

  “Who is this boy?” Harris demanded.

  “Please, Isaac, I can’t—at least, not without leave from his father.”

  “By all that’s just, get it!”

  “I can’t at this moment,” Murdock spluttered. “He’s—”

  “Tonight then,” Harris cut in. “For now tell me this—did the boy say how she seemed?”

  “Not crazy or wild. Firm and angry, as she had every right to be. They had to kill her too.”

  “I’m not convinced of that—but, Septimus, when you learn more, you must tell me. And in return—” As Harris spoke, he could see the fatalistic twist Murdock’s mouth was settling into. “In return, Septimus,” he said, “if I find Orange wrongdoing, I won’t keep it mum, come fire or flood.”

  Murdock’s pastry-flecked goatee trembled, then his large head shook. “You don’t know what you’re undertaking, Isaac. Truly you don’t.”

  Little bank business got Harris’s attention in the early part of the afternoon. His ears were still ringing
from what Murdock had said.

  If William Sheridan had been murdered, it was a tragedy not just for his friends and admirers but for all Canadians—the country’s first political assassination. Moreover, with agents of such butchery at large, was Theresa not in all the greater danger?

  Eight days she had been missing. Harris had been looking for six, and she seemed farther away than ever. He would continue. He still had to write to Marthe Laurendeau. At the same time, bound to this office, how much could he do in the few hours a day it left him?

  He needed help. The rest of the world had to continue to regard Theresa as missing, not settle back in the belief that her remains had been found. This was what Sibyl meant to him. He doubted that she had killed William Sheridan—a hard man to hate personally and, in opposition, little threat as a Member of Parliament. Harris wasn’t cool enough to put aside all speculation on the subject. The servant’s first interest, though, was as a missing person, not as a murderess. The presence of the unwashed cloth suggested that she had left the house abruptly. Left or been removed from it. If the bones Lamb held were accepted as most probably Sibyl’s, the search for Theresa would go on.

  What was needed was a description, and Jasper Small seemed the readiest source. Harris was just writing his friend a note when Dick Ogilvie knocked and entered with a sealed envelope.

  “On that pile,” said Harris, re-dipping his steel-nibbed pen.

  Dick set it down quickly, trying to make his intrusion as brief as possible. The towering pile of unopened correspondence toppled across the polished surface of the desk, shooting its topmost member very nearly into Harris’s lap. His hand closed on the envelope just below the sender’s name, H. M. Crane. Small could wait.

  July 21, 1856

  Dear Isaac,

  Have just identified bracelet as Mrs. Crane’s and fabric as that of the green habit she left home in. Professor Lamb may have further revelations. Still, am compelled to fear the worst.

  Kindly overlook any incivility. I realize that only through your persistent and unselfish exertions has truth come to light. Thank you for that. Finding what you found Saturday must have been can’t have been easy. Yet better to know.

  The loss of both father—for so I regarded William Sheridan—and wife has made this the hardest week of my life. Shall spare no effort to find her murderer. At the same time, business will not stand still. Leave for Chicago tonight.

  Faithfully yours,

  Henry Crane

  The hasty scrawl with scratchings out breathed the same sincerity as Crane’s halting reading at the funeral. Whatever conclusions Harris had reached wavered. Theresa might have had a reason for wearing the cities-of-Europe bracelet on her right wrist. Finding her murderer could be all that was left.

  Harris was reluctant to lay the letter down. The paper itself, he discovered, was agreeable to hold, thick and creamy between his fingers. The watermark was English, like the builder of Crane’s brougham. The stationery of a successful man.

  Crane’s success carried all the more weight on an afternoon when Harris had allowed his own and his employers’ business to stagnate. He pictured Crane’s private railway carriage. Tonight it would be coupled to a train bound for the Collingwood dock, where Crane’s steamer would be waiting. Crane would rise above grief to get on with making money. The Board of Trade approved such dutifulness. Harris fell short.

  Moodily, he flicked the creamy paper. Losing to Crane in love forced him to acknowledge the other man’s persuasiveness, but a lingering resentment, of which Harris was not in general proud, made him at the same time partially immune. “Spare no effort”—where then, just to start with, were the handbills?

  From an inside pocket, Harris eased his flimsy portrait tracing and unfolded it carefully. With a pencil stub, he tried to darken a smudged line, the eager curve of Theresa’s upper lip. The paper tore. Crane’s stationery was instantly crumpled into as small a ball as the rich vellum would allow and dropped into a drawer. All the letter meant was an opening from the man Harris had most questions for.

  The Ontario, Simcoe and Huron had no train till ten. Before turning to his bank correspondence, Harris sent Crane word that he would call on him at his office at four unless Harris heard otherwise.

  At three fifty, he was passing through the heavily-columned entrance to the block Crane had built for himself on a part of King Street East recently levelled by fire.

  “Mr. Crane is expecting me.”

  “Mr. Crane has gone out of town, sir,” replied the porter. “Not five minutes since, his carriage was by to take him to the station.”

  Scared him off, thought Harris without satisfaction.

  “When will he be back?”

  “See me in a fortnight, I believe he said. His secretary will know, sir. Second floor, first door on your right.”

  Harris fled without wasting time on the secretary. King Street was the best in the city for hailing a cab, but by the same token the worst for making speed. To cover the half mile to the Union Station, Harris had the driver drop down to the Esplanade, where he could whip his horse up to a brisk trot.

  They raced up beside a Great Western passenger train that stood straining for departure, steam up and nose to the sun. No private car was attached, but Crane himself stood on the front platform of one of the canary yellow carriages, in conversation with a conductor on the ground below. If Chicago still beckoned, it seemed the trip was to be overland via Detroit.

  Harris had paid the driver and was climbing the carriage steps before Crane saw him.

  “Why, Isaac . . .” Polite surprise, a tight smile.

  “I wanted to catch you if I could,” said Harris, unhurried now that he was aboard. “One or two matters in connection with your note.”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t time.” Over Harris’s head, Crane’s eyes flicked towards the conductor, who with a raised hand signalled the driver. “Next month, let us say.”

  “I’ll ride as far as Hamilton with you,” said Harris. “That will give us an hour and a quarter.”

  The engine’s whistle sounded two short strokes.

  Crane still didn’t make room on the platform. The step gave him a height advantage of eight or ten inches.

  “August,” he said, “would be better. I’ll be back in time for the inquest.”

  The train was starting to move.

  “When did your wife break her arm?”

  “As a girl—didn’t you know?”

  “You can’t ride there, sir.” The conductor, walking at a pace with the train, touched Harris’s elbow.

  “He’s right, Henry. May I join you?”

  Crane looked as if he regretted having broken his silence by writing. Perhaps he had done so only under pressure from MacFarlane and had feared more questions would follow.

  “Excuse me, no,” he said. “I have an address to prepare, besides which, the subject of my letter is too painful for me to discuss just now.”

  They had cleared the station, but were still travelling slowly enough for Harris to have jumped down safely. He did not jump down.

  “What did you do, Henry, that Sunday afternoon when Theresa went out for her ride?”

  Crane hesitated, then turned sideways to let Harris pass. “Perhaps you had better come in,” he said.

  It seemed an awkward, over-courteous manoeuvre when the natural thing would have been for Crane to lead the way into the carriage. Squeezing by, Harris was aware of an untrimmed tuft of sandy hairs in Crane’s pink ear. Temptation seized him.

  “Where,” he dropped into the ear, “is Sibyl Martin?”

  He used the door frame to brace himself against being pushed back. That was presumably why Crane chose the opposite or lake side of the train to throw him off. Had Crane been able to get his full fourteen stone behind the shove, the distance across the platform been a half-foot less, or Harris’s wits a fraction of a second slower, the cashier’s chin would have been the first part of him to hit the gravel shoulder—which was
now jogging by at more than ten miles per hour.

  As it was, his right hand caught and briefly held the stair rail, or rather the iron newel. This swung him out facing the direction of travel. He got his feet under him, but was in too much of a crouch to run properly when he fell. He tumbled forward. Tucking in his head, he managed a somersault which made his spine feel as if it were being driven out through the back of his neck. When his feet came lowermost once again, he tried to get up. His left ankle twisted in the loose gravel. He pitched sideways and rolled over twice more. Coming to rest with a head-to-toe suit of bruises and with blood seeping through his shredded trouser knees, he looked for the train. Some hundred yards ahead it swung right past the water works and began to put on speed.

  Harris wondered if he might have hung on, pulled himself back up the steps. Doubtful. Of doubtful value too. Did he think he could have bullied further revelations from Crane? Harris might be the more athletic of the two, but he was no wrestler, and Crane—having built much of the railway—was far likelier to have friends aboard.

  Harris stood and dusted off his clothes as well as he could with the backs of his lacerated hands. A sewage-scented breeze off the harbour cooled his face. Where the gravel ended, a ribbon of oily sand caught whatever the wavelets deposited—a fish carcass, barrel staves, cabbage leaves, a broken doll. Nothing that a brush with death could not beautify. Thanking his stars, Harris limped off towards the cashier’s suite as briskly as his sprained ankle would let him.

  Chapter Six

  St. David’s Ward

  Forty minutes later, Harris entered Crane’s gates, but avoided the house. He wasn’t trying to be furtive—a ludicrous proposition with this ankle. Although he had bound it up when he had washed and changed, his ornamental walking stick was too slender to take much of his weight as he made for the stables. Flitting from tree to tree was out of the question, and yet he was hoping to escape the frosty butler’s notice. The coachman seemed his likeliest informant.