Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Interviewing Crane’s staff was something he would gladly have left to the police, who could have gone about it in an above-board way. Too late for that. If Harris’s finest sensibilities still recoiled from what felt like espionage, the rest of him literally ached with the conviction that Crane need no longer be treated as a gentleman.

  The long, low villa took some circumnavigating. Girdled with white trellised verandahs in the regency style, it sprawled over one of the park lots on the north side of Queen Street East. Around a final corner, the brougham—with horse still harnessed—stood in a shaded stable yard. As Harris approached, a man in shirtsleeves and a yellow waistcoat came out of the summer kitchen with a square of gingerbread in his thin, pale hand. He looked at the sweet with a shudder and tossed it onto the manure heap before realizing he was observed.

  Harris introduced himself. “You’re Oscar, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “That’s right.” The voice was lifeless and incurious. The skin of Oscar’s long, angular face was uncommonly dry for that of a man who otherwise appeared not more than twenty-five.

  Harris mentioned riding with him to the Sheridan interment and added something about helping Mr. Crane investigate Mrs. Crane’s disappearance.

  “Master’s out of town. I just took him to the station.” Oscar began with trembling hands to unhitch the horse. The mention of Theresa seemed to agitate him.

  Harris stood with the black carriage between himself and the house. “I’ve missed him then,” he said lamely. “I thought he was leaving tonight.”

  He produced Crane’s crumpled letter, which he had smoothed out and brought along, then didn’t know what to do with. Oscar would think him both liar and fool.

  “Mr. Harris,” said the coachman, turning the name over. “You’re the gentleman who found—” He stopped what he was doing and searched Harris’s face. “That horrible thing in the valley. We were just reading the papers and talking it over at tea, but Cook and I can’t make sense of it. Can you?”

  Here was a lucky opening. The man’s sudden intensity surprised Harris, but then again, to any healthy nature, the news must come as shocking.

  “It’s the Mistress, they say. I can’t eat for thinking of it, and sleep won’t come any easier . . .”

  “The remains may be of another woman,” said Harris. “Do you know what became of Mr. Sheridan’s housekeeper, for example?”

  “Miss Martin? Left town on the Sunday.” Oscar’s voice went dead again.

  “Where did she go?” Harris asked.

  “Another posting, I heard. I don’t see how she could have got hold of the Mistress’s bracelet and riding dress.”

  “What posting? Where?”

  “Master would know.”

  “To be sure,” said Harris, with as little disrespect as possible. The manner in which Crane had reacted to mention of the housekeeper’s name suggested he knew something well worth knowing about Sibyl Martin, including perhaps how her arm might have been mistaken for Theresa’s. “And has no one seen her, Oscar, since Sunday, July 13?”

  “None of us has.” Oscar shrugged and resumed his work. “Some thought she should have stayed for her master’s funeral, but then she might have lost this other position, and besides . . .”

  “Yes, Oscar?” Harris hoped it didn’t show too much that he wanted to turn the man upside down and shake everything out of him at once.

  “I don’t know if I should mention it, seeing it was kept out of the papers, but she must have been put out by that night in the lock-up.”

  “Saturday night?”

  Oscar nodded. “Police were taking her away when Master and I arrived. He told her they would not put her on trial—and of course they didn’t.”

  “For murdering William Sheridan, you mean?” Harris was impressed by how closely this story matched Murdock’s.

  The idea of murder, however, Oscar put deprecatingly aside. Within half an hour the doctor had come and made his finding, but the police would not let Sibyl Martin go until morning. Being suspected like that must have been hard on her. Oscar didn’t blame her for wanting to slip away afterwards.

  She had been agreeable enough to Oscar in terms of offering him cool drinks on a hot day. She hinted men had ill-used her, but never complained of William Sheridan. Then again, she was no longer nineteen. A morose sort of woman, Oscar thought her—not that he had any need to go prying into other people’s troubles.

  He had not, he admitted, worked long for the Cranes. He had come with the brougham, his first position of this sort and his first of any sort since recovering from an illness he did not care to specify. Before his arrival, the household’s only carriage had been a two-wheeled chaise, which Crane had driven himself—and still kept for occasions when Oscar was not available or not wanted. A groom, since dismissed, had sufficed. Now Oscar did it all.

  Harris followed him into the stable when he led the carriage-horse to its stall.

  “What can you tell me about Miss Martin’s appearance, her size especially?”

  “Can’t say I noticed. Like any woman in service, I suppose. Not slight like the Mistress. I can’t believe she won’t come tripping through that door, Mr. Harris, and ask when I last changed the bedding straw.” Oscar again began leaning on his words. “She was very particular—not scolding, you understand. The past she left alone, but she wanted everything done right in future. Some writer—I read a lot, Mr. Harris, more than you would think—this man speaks of the soul looking steadily forward, creating a world always before her. That reminded me of the Mistress . . .”

  It seemed a strange, rambling speech. Harris lost the continuation, for his attention had been caught by the animal in the next stall, a black mare with a white left hind foot.

  “When was Spat found?” he asked.

  “Found?” Oscar returned to earth.

  “I understood Mrs. Crane’s mount had disappeared too.”

  “She was riding Nelson.” The coachman gestured towards a third stall, which was empty.

  Harris stared stupidly at it. He should perhaps have been less surprised to have again caught Crane out. In fact, when Harris rehearsed that drive to the cemetery, he realized Crane had not lied to him, merely neglected to correct Harris’s assumption that Theresa had been riding her own horse.

  “Spat was indisposed then?” he said. “Unfit for exercise?”

  “Look her over for yourself if you like.” Oscar sighed as if accusations that he had neglected his charges were no more than he could expect. “I warn you, though, she doesn’t take to strangers.”

  “Forgive my questions, Oscar, but this could help us find your mistress. Was it usual for her to ride Nelson?”

  “Not usual, no. Her friend, the French lady, took him out more often.”

  Harris edged in between Spat and the rough boards. He had no illusions that the horse would remember him, but found that his hand remembered the touch on the withers she found most reassuring. She nickered a greeting.

  “Oscar,” he called over the partition as he stroked the black muzzle, “did she give you any reason for choosing Nelson?”

  “I had the day off. I wasn’t even here when she left.” The coachman came around into Spat’s stall. “I blame myself for that . . . You got on the right side of that animal dashed quick. How is it you know the Mistress anyway?”

  Clouds of jealousy—dark and sullen with no lightning spark of anger—overcast the stable. Oscar’s mention of reading, in combination with his yellow vest, put Harris in mind of Goethe’s Young Werther and the melancholy of loving an unattainable woman.

  “Oh,” he stammered, “I—I used to help her with her study of plants—years ago, before she was married.”

  Oscar helped Harris to inspect the frogs of Spat’s hoofs for thrush, and then to go over her inch by inch to find the reason Theresa had left her behind. No defect turned up anywhere.

  Harris turned his attention to the missing Nelson and found Oscar better at describing horses than p
eople. Nelson was said to be more quarter horse than anything, but tall, sixteen and a half hands, dark brown with a drop of red, black points, fourteen years old, and not a nervous bone in his body. How long Crane had owned him neither man knew.

  Presently Oscar recalled that he had promised Cook to bring in some firewood, and Harris walked him to the pile.

  “Do you always have Sunday off?”

  “Only when I’m not needed. Master told me Saturday night, and I set out at dawn Sunday for my brother’s home in Weston. If I had been here, I might have saved her. I can’t help thinking I let her down.”

  “We must hope she’s alive,” Harris said in parting.

  “Hope, yes! You sound like an Archer, Mr. Harris. Are you familiar with astrology?”

  Harris smiled, shook his head, and hobbled away. He wondered if Oscar might be a tradesman’s son, reduced to service by misfortune or by his own peculiarities. Modern superstitions abounded. No one need look to anything as medieval as horoscopes. At the same time, the man appealed to Harris, who had not expected to find such candour anywhere at Crane’s establishment. Oscar’s devotion to his mistress was also touching.

  And the upshot of it all was that Harris had seen Spat, although what exactly that meant he had not yet the leisure or serenity to work out. Every step on his left foot sheared painfully through his web of thought. His foremost wish was that beyond the villa’s screening lilac bushes the cab that had brought him would still be waiting as instructed.

  It was. He promptly engaged it for the rest of the evening.

  Gas street lamps were less closely spaced along this stretch of King Street east of the market, and Jasper Small considered himself unlucky to have one right outside his door. The glare left him no privacy, he said. On the other hand, access to the upper floors of the yellow brick building where he rented bachelor quarters lay between a wine merchant and a haberdashery, which could hardly have suited him better.

  Tonight it would have suited Harris to have Small installed in a sensible bungalow like Crane’s. The two steep flights of stairs felt like ten.

  Although only a few blocks separated Crane and Small’s residences in the city’s northeast ward, Harris had not followed the shortest path between them. He had wasted some minutes calling on people that were out. Leaving Small word that he would come to the lawyer’s rooms at nine, he spent the remaining daylight being driven over the dusty roads between Highland Creek and Port Union. He had found Vandervoort’s shed, and in the embers something more—a second charred scrap of cloth.

  Hobbling up the last few steps, he rapped briskly at Small’s door. Eventually, a languid male voice said something like “Come in.”

  Papered in red, the gaslit salon under the roof looked as hot as it felt. Most of the subjects of the framed engravings had shed their clothes, and Small—sitting barefoot at a secretary desk—seemed to be following their example. A braid-trimmed dressing gown slipped off his shoulders as he turned towards Harris.

  “She wants—this client of mine—to leave her property to her daughter in such a way that a future son-in-law won’t be able to touch it. Can’t be done, Isaac. Oh, the husband won’t be able to sell it, but he could run it into the ground and gobble up all the revenue.”

  “You’re working late,” said Harris. “Have you thought of taking a new partner to share the load?”

  Small said nothing, his ghost-grey eyes focusing somewhere beyond the walls. Likely it was too soon after Sheridan’s death for Harris to be suggesting such a thing, but Small’s distracted state looked nothing like anything Harris recognized as grief. Well, to business. Perhaps that would bring him round.

  “Jasper, what was the housekeeper Sibyl Martin wearing when you saw her a week ago Friday?”

  “The housekeeper? Homespun—why?”

  “Tell you in a moment. What colour?”

  “No colour in particular. Conceivably an onion-skin brown. Yes, something like that.” Small was looking with the mildest possible interest at the grimy scrap in Harris’s hands. “Has something happened to her?”

  Scrutinizing the cloth under a hot lamp in the vain hope of further revelations, Harris voiced his suspicions. Small knew nothing to allay them. He had no idea what had become of Sibyl after Sheridan’s death, had never even thought of the matter till now. Strange, wasn’t it, how one could take servants for granted? Urged to assemble his scattered recollections, he found none relating to a fracture in the lower right arm of either Sibyl or Theresa, but he did think them “very much of a height.”

  These words affected Harris like the unstringing of a bow long kept under tension. He sank onto a thickly-upholstered sofa.

  “The thing is,” he said, “if I’m to keep the search alive, I must account for the remains that have been found.”

  “Account away then. How did Sibyl come to be in that shed?”

  “Crane knows something about her. When I mentioned her name to him, he threw me off a train.”

  “The devil!” A look of horror tinged with amusement rippled over the hitherto serene disk of Small’s face. “A train in motion?”

  Harris nodded. “A guilty response, would you not say?”

  “The bandage on your foot then—is there much pain?”

  Harris glanced at Small’s half-open bedroom door, which he almost thought he had seen move. He could not recall if his friend kept a cat, but all was still, and he was too hot and weary to be bothered.

  “Not when I rest it,” he said. “Do you think there could have been something between Henry and Sibyl—of a man-woman sort, I mean?”

  With a musical laugh, a woman in a pink peignoir appeared at the bedroom door. “Of a prick and cunt sort, Mr. Harris? Is that what you have in mind?”

  Harris took his feet off the sofa and jumped up in confusion, forgetting his ankle for the moment. He had never heard such words in mixed company, let alone from female lips. These lips were moist and pouting.

  “If that is what you mean,” the woman continued, “I should say that nothing is more likely.”

  “She was past all that surely,” Small objected in a tone of mild reproof. He avoided meeting Harris’s eyes. “Sibyl had nothing left in the way of freshness or girlish shape.”

  “No matter. From what I hear, Mr. Crane’s palate runs very much to seamstresses and serving women. He doesn’t mind them young and sparkling, but he’ll also take the older potatoes with a little dirt for seasoning. Don’t go, Mr. Harris. We were expecting you.”

  “I didn’t realize . . .” Harris’s voice trailed off.

  He wondered if his friend—bereft, overworked—had lost his mind. First, to let Harris come and talk freely without warning him they were not alone. And then, for the other guest to be a woman so intimately attired, so provocative in her speech—plainly Harris could only be in their way. He hesitated, though. Here at last was someone wading into the subject he had never got respectable tongues to broach—namely, what kind of marriage Theresa had had. Perhaps a detective could not afford to be too particular.

  “Jasper,” he said, “what’s this about?”

  “Esther Vale.” Distractedly, Small hunched his dressing gown back on. “The client I was referring to.”

  Harris knew the name. He had the troubling impression that it figured somewhere in the records of his branch.

  “You might say we are each other’s clients.” Esther Vale glided to a chair and sat, back straight, plump hands folded.

  She looked familiar too. Physically, she could almost have been an older relation of Small’s, with her round white cheeks and pale grey eyes. Unlike Small’s, hers were watchful eyes. They seemed to appraise what balance she should at every moment strike between the vulgar and the demure. Beneath her henna-red hair hung bulbous earrings. Presently, she took them off.

  That was when Harris recognized her as the complainant in the police station, and a second later as a depositor as well.

  “I lend Mr. Harris my ill-got gains, some of them,�
�� Mrs. Vale told Small.

  “So everyone knows everyone,” he replied, smiling as if his own position had thereby been made less awkward. Small was drifting on the tide of events and, but for the other man’s scrutiny, would apparently have been quite content to do so. “Here,” he said, exerting himself as host, “let’s have some cognac. Isaac?”

  Harris took a glass. Over £650, he reflected, on long-term deposit at four per cent. He had wondered how a barber’s widow had amassed this much and was not sure he was happier knowing.

  “Is Henry Crane a client of yours too?” he forced himself to ask, his face prickling with embarrassment.

  “Not for me, sugar lump,” she instructed Small. “Spirits poison the complexion. Mr. Crane? Oh, no, he doesn’t like to pay for female companionship.”

  “He doesn’t have to?” Theresa’s husband, Harris thought.

  “No gentleman has to if a scuffle with a rough-chapped slavey is all he wants.”

  Harris winced, as he had been intended to.

  “Last October, my dear banker, when I opened my account, I may have neglected to mention that for a dozen years I have run a sporting house in Kingston, Montreal, Quebec and Toronto—wherever the provincial capital happens to be.”

  “She sticks,” said Small, “to the seat of government.”

  Mrs. Vale threw her chair cushion, which toppled Small’s brandy over the draft of her will. Harris attended closely. Plainly in this world anything could happen.

  “Let us say I keep track of the honourable members. If they spend under my roof, it’s not for want of other opportunities, but because lawgivers appreciate smart, clean girls with soft skins and saucy notions. Ditto your Napoleons of commerce.”

  “Except for Crane.”

  “I tried to land him, I will admit. A railway man that size, with a pretty, young wife to betray—he would have been a trophy to hang over my hearth. He seemed ripe for it too. To see them together, you could tell they slept apart.”