Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “Could you, Jasper?” said Harris.

  “I was referring,” Mrs. Vale corrected, “to the professional eye. As I say, though, Henry turned out to have other interests.”

  “Sibyl Martin?”

  “He’s a man the waves part for. Good-natured too. Women enough would have taken her place.”

  Good-natured? Selectively perhaps. Harris recalled the relentless optimism with which William Sheridan had been lobbied in ’53—first for the Northern Railway, then for Theresa’s hand.

  “Women enough,” Small echoed. “Why bother then with his father-in-law’s faded drudge?”

  Harris silently wondered if it might not have been, at least in part, Sibyl’s position that had won for her Crane’s favour. Suppose Crane wanted some new benefit from Sheridan, conceivably some information. A spy might well earn her keep in flattering attentions.

  Mrs. Vale, however, would allow for no motives but perverse desire.

  “Taste, my cherub,” she cooed. “Disgustibus nonny-nonny.”

  Small struck a magisterial pose. “De gustibus non est—”

  “Exactly.” She adjusted her peignoir to reveal six pale inches of leg. “Mr. Harris, I understand that you are looking for the wronged wife.”

  Harris didn’t know where to look or what to say. To think of Theresa as injured in this way pained him, and—while no avenue could be neglected—to discuss her with Mrs. Vale must be to expose the wound to fresh insult.

  “Have you any idea,” he asked, “where she might be?”

  “If you pay me a call on Parliament Street, I’m sure I can connect you with a girl who will help you.”

  Perhaps another of Crane’s paramours, Harris naïvely thought.

  “Help him forget the lady, you mean,” said Small, “not help him find her.”

  “Now, sugar lump, isn’t it past your bedtime?”

  “Mrs. Vale,” said Harris, “with which women has Henry Crane to your knowledge committed adultery?”

  “You’re stern, Mr. Harris. I’ve no head for names, you know, just numbers. Tell me, what rate do you charge when you lend my money out again?”

  His glass in pieces, Small drank from the bottle. “Are you suggesting that Isaac lives off the E. Vales of harlotry?”

  In a flutter of pink silk over uncorseted flesh, the individual so named swept up behind Small’s chair and—leaning over the back—blew in his ear.

  “Bedtime,” she murmured. “Bedtime, bedtime, bedtime.”

  “I did oblige you by being here at nine,” Small told Harris with a helpless shrug. “You could hardly expect me to change the whole evening’s schedule.”

  Harris picked up his top hat and nodded. No comradely farewell came to his lips. He was thinking about the schedule, speculating as to how it might be written up. Nine o’clock: Isaac, on matters of life and death. Nine thirty: p. and c.

  “Good night, banker dear.” Over Small’s shoulder, Mrs. Vale watched Harris’s retreat. “It’s Parliament just north of Duchess.” Her snowy cheek brushed Small’s. “If you’re an early riser,” she added archly, “you can even come before breakfast.”

  Theresa had not gone for a ride. Of all the day’s revelations, that was the one that kept bobbing to the surface of his mind. To that life preserver Harris’s fatigued brain clung as his fingers automatically loosened shoelaces, waistcoat buttons, the bow of his tie. Everything else he had learned swirled for the moment out of reach.

  The horse she had taken was not the one she rode for exercise. She must have wanted one she could ride hard, sell perhaps along the way. After carefully training the new coachman, she could not have endured the thought of her temperamental Spat among strangers. She had anticipated a long journey, so no wonder she had not been found near town—the town Harris was chained to. She had planned to leave. Whether because of Crane’s infidelities or on account of some even graver crime Harris could not yet make out, but he now knew she had fled intentionally.

  And gone where?

  In nightshirt now, Harris turned back the bedclothes. He expected he would think more clearly once he was lying down. A breath of air off the lake was nudging the muslin curtains into the room. The night seemed cooler, but possibly the cashier’s suite just had a better location and better ventilation than Small’s apartment. Small could have done better for himself. But the question was . . .

  Sleep took Harris quickly and for some time held him fast, but eventually his ankle must have caught as he rolled over. The twinge woke him. While unable to remember his dream, he found himself in a state of sexual excitation.

  By design, this happened rarely. Quack remedies he avoided, but he had developed habits that so tired his body and occupied his mind as to leave Eros no room or sustenance. He was of too empirical a bent wholly to believe moralizing doctors on the horrors of spermatorrhoea—blindness, madness, consumption, dyspepsia, epilepsy, curvature of the spine—though there was so little untainted data on the subject that it was hard to know what to believe. Harris’s aversion to physical arousal was more particular to himself and lay in its invariably focusing his thoughts on one bitter-sweet experience, which he now found himself living again.

  He rose and bathed to no avail. The erection did not subside.

  It was late October ’52, a freakishly mild Sunday afternoon in the Don Valley. Spat and Banshee had drunk from the river and were tethered to a pair of oaks, hoofs crunching the parchment-dry leaves as they shifted their weight. Theresa was standing close. There was something about the lanceolate leaves of an aster Harris was to see. She squinted against the slanting sun, which spilled its warm tones over her face. He kissed her.

  They had kissed before, briefly, at parting, never in the midst of something else.

  Only after he had bent his lips to hers did he think this might startle her, but she didn’t recoil. She let herself be kissed, then returned the pressure. Her hands went around his waist under his fustian jacket.

  The perfection of the moment pierced him through. To a critical mind like his, every object had its limits. Every transaction with nature, art or humankind left something to be desired. Everything but this. She was so exquisitely fresh and pure and trim. Heaven on his lips and in his arms. No more beyond.

  She untucked the wool shirt from the back of his trousers. Her cool fingers electrified his spine. She shivered with pleasure when he stroked the nape of her neck.

  The kiss ended. She breathed his name, took his hand from her waist and held it against the pleated bodice of her dress. Above the stays her small round breast shaped itself to the pressure of his touch.

  His loins’ machine-like answer to this new perfection stunned him. He was out of his depth. He turned so as not to brush against her.

  When she released his hand, he took it away. Her eyes sought and searched his face, where they could only have read confusion. Perhaps, he stammered, it was time to return to town. She looked startled, then lowered her gaze and nodded. She said just to give her a moment by herself first, as she was in no condition to ride. He watched her stroll off through the ankle-deep lake of rustling leaves while a crow brayed and flapped its way across the sunlit valley. Harris picked up the purple flower which had slipped from Theresa’s hand. Lanceolate leaves.

  They went on one more ride together, but she didn’t try to show him anything. Autumn turned cold and wet after that. By spring she was Crane’s.

  It was still dark night outside Harris’s window. He rubbed himself to a joyless climax, dozed briefly, then lay and watched for dawn.

  Would Theresa have lain with him on that bed of leaves? Seductive as the scene was in fantasy, he still believed he had been right not to let it come to that.

  What he regretted was his cowardice before her green eyes’ ardent query. Right then he should have told her not that it was time to take her home, but that he wanted to be with her always. That regret grew fresh teeth every day.

  Crane an adulterer.

  Many wives put up with hyp
ocrisy and betrayal their whole marriage through, but nothing strained credulity in Theresa’s frank heart choosing not to. She could have been planning her escape for months. To spare her father pain, she had waited till after his death, but only just. Jealousy of Sibyl might have underlain the dispute Small reported the two women having had the Friday afternoon and explain Theresa’s having the housekeeper questioned by police the following night.

  No, Theresa would not have been that vindictive. More likely it was Crane who had tried to cast suspicion on Sibyl—had tried to dispose of someone he no longer had any use for.

  Unwilling to speculate further, Harris shaved and dressed. In fiery haste, he framed a letter to Marthe Laurendeau as Theresa’s closest current companion. Had she seen the missing woman since noon on the thirteenth? Was Theresa at this moment with her? Or likely to join her? Had Mlle Laurendeau any idea where else Theresa might have gone? Harris loaded the page with assurances that Theresa’s safety and happiness were his only concerns. He was inquiring in the interest of neither the police nor Henry Crane.

  Once this appeal was sealed and addressed, he spent the remaining hours before opening in the less absorbing dray-work of clearing bank business from his desk. Up and down Bay Street, harbour traffic quickened with its clops, jangles, groans and shouts. Nothing, however, caused his pen or eye to pause, except from time to time, always just out of sight, the buzzing of a small winged insect.

  At last, Dick Ogilvie brought in the morning papers. The board of the Provincial Bank of Canada had met in Kingston to find a replacement for the director lately incapacitated by highwaymen. All deplored the necessity for such an election. They nonetheless took pleasure in announcing that their choice had fallen on Mr. Joshua Newbiggins of Toronto, in recognition of that gentleman’s particular talents and of his city’s remarkable rise to commercial pre-eminence in Canada West.

  Harris rubbed his eyes.

  Joshua Newbiggins, Pennsylvania coal importer, promoter of Conquest Iron Works, dispenser of fifty-dollar bills, admirer of somnambulistic sopranos. He said he had come north the week Miss Jenny Lind sang at the St. Lawrence Hall.

  Newspaper records placed her Toronto appearance in October 1851. After consulting also the government records at King Street West and John, Harris wrote a letter to the president of the bank. Its charter, he pointed out, as enacted in 1844 and renewed in 1854, required that directors be natural born subjects of Her Majesty, or naturalized, or have resided seven years in the province. None of these conditions fit the present case. Harris went on to report Newbiggins’s unsuccessful attempt to inspect the branch’s books.

  “It would appear,” he wrote, “that Mr. Newbiggins has sought a directorship to obtain the information denied him as a shareholder. I cannot think that the bank would be served by any director’s using his position against the interest of the bank’s own clients, of whom Conquest’s rival, York Foundry, is one of the most prominent.

  “I am confident that the board selected Mr. Newbiggins in all innocence both of his statutory ineligibility and of his motives. In fact, if even one board member had been party to his scheme, it would have been an easy matter for that member to obtain for Mr. Newbiggins the intelligence he seeks.

  “My purpose in writing is twofold: (1) to lay the above facts before you and (2) to advise you that if Mr. Newbiggins again presents himself to the Toronto branch with a request to see our books I shall—”

  Harris had been about to write refuse but softened it.

  “—delay compliance until I have your reply in hand.”

  Serving the bank was his only thought as he sealed the envelope. Not until it was bobbing its way down Lake Ontario on the noon steamer did he reflect on the contents’ potential to simplify his life.

  PART TWO:

  Farther Afield

  Chapter Seven

  Great Western

  Dark clouds were congregating above the millpond. Before the village church bells had quite stopped ringing, thunder rumbled in from the west and a squall of wind hastened the pond waters towards the race. Beside it towered the fieldstone mill, a waiting grey sentinel.

  Isaac Harris had not communicated with his family for nearly three weeks and didn’t want to stray far from Toronto without doing so. He was not looking forward to explaining himself.

  Crossing the race, he climbed the plank steps towards the open door. From inside floated his father’s tender baritone. The sound made his own throat tighten around his unwelcome news. Under his hand, the wooden stair rail, sweat-oiled, smooth with use, felt as familiar as everything else about the mill, and like everything else, no longer his.

  “The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you’ll find him . . .”

  Young Alexander Harris had gone to war. He had followed Major General Sir Isaac Brock up Queenston Heights and—through no fault of his own—survived. Among Harrises, the charge’s futility was a taboo subject. Queenston was still Canadian, after all, and Isaac bore the slain quixote’s name.

  “His father’s sword he has girded on,

  And his wild harp slung behind him . . .”

  After battle, Isaac thought, business must have held no terrors. Years of thrift and toil had earned Alexander a half-interest in a grist mill, then a whole mill, then a much bigger mill—the present one—built to his own specifications. Wildness might still be recalled in song, but in his own boys, industry had always been preferred.

  Isaac stepped across the threshold. Misgivings receded as he smelled this community hub that had been his home. Wood, water, cotton sacks, beeswax and tallow lubricants, leather belts to drive the machinery, and grain—grain in every state from kernel to dust. The empty room still echoed with farmers’ weekday talk of prices and Reform politics.

  In theory retired now, Isaac’s father had moved out too. He had turned his flour fortress over to one of Isaac’s brothers, but he still came back with his set of picks to dress the French quartz millstones. From the Marne Valley, he was fond of pointing out, champagne country.

  He was kneeling by one of them as he sang, his old frock coat folded into a pad beneath his knees, white shirt sleeves turned precisely back above the elbows. He worked by touch, fingering furrow edges too fine now for him to see. He dropped the minstrel boy mid-stanza when he realized he wasn’t alone. His son felt grit in his welcoming handshake.

  “Taking the country air, Isaac?” he said. “Pull yourself up a stool.”

  “How are you, sir?”

  Well, replied the elder Harris, except for the cough that kept him from joining the family at church. Flour dust in the lungs most likely. He gave a demonstration so unconvincing they both laughed.

  Alexander did look well, his flesh firm, his shoulders square. They spread wider than Isaac’s, and it was a shorter lift to get a sack of flour onto them. Among the features father and son shared were a long nose, eyes sloping gently away from it, a lumpy chin and a terrier-like attachment to the task at hand.

  “Fellow across the river was in Toronto on July 12,” said Alexander, bending again over his bed-stone. “Told me you cut a fine figure at the Peninsula Hotel dance.”

  “I was there briefly.”

  “Too briefly for the ladies, doubtless. I hear you run a good bank too.”

  The only stool was so low that when Isaac sat on it, his knees all but brushed his ears. Mention of the bank made him feel more awkward still.

  Joshua Newbiggins had come to see him Wednesday with questions about York Foundry—how much their loan was for, whether they had been late with any payments, where they got their coal, what they were paying for it. Canada had no hard coal. If Newbiggins could get control of York’s American supplier, he would have his rival under his pudgy little thumb.

  “Your brothers are doing all right here, Isaac, but the railway has killed Holland Landing dead. No freight goes by water between Toronto and Lake Huron. The city is the place to be, and you’re the only one of us to make a name
down there.”

  Isaac lifted a hand against the words. He had put Newbiggins off, but on Thursday a ciphered telegram had confirmed his election. Resignation had become inevitable.

  “Modesty aside,” Alexander was saying, “the only one. But what I still can’t fathom is you’re also the only one that has not started a family.”

  They had played this scene before. Isaac changed the script.

  “Father,” he said, “I’ve left the bank.”

  There, it was out. He felt again the keys leave his hand as they had Friday morning after he had moved his effects to the American Hotel. The jangling ring had nearly slipped through Murdock’s agitated fingers.

  “Found a way of doing better on your own?” Alexander was beaming. “I thought you would once you had had a chance to look around. Man should be in business for himself. So what’s it to be, Isaac? Shipping? Manufacturing? You’ll want to marry in any case.”

  Alexander understood Isaac’s putting the law and his clients’ interests before a whim of the directors. He understood without pressing for details, which Isaac could not in conscience give. Matter of principle—of course. What the retired miller found incomprehensible was that his son had no other business in view, except for the rescue of Theresa Crane. Isaac tried several times to explain it.

  “I’m baffled,” said Alexander, getting to his feet at last. “What do you propose to live on?”

  “I’ve savings enough for now and a property or two I can sell.”

  “You’re too young to be drawing on your capital.” A sacred axiom, delivered with the categorical gruffness that just yesterday—it seemed—had ended all family disagreements.

  “It will only be temporary,” said Isaac.

  Alexander walked away in disgust. He went as far as the low-silled window overlooking the eighteen-foot wheel. The worst birching he had ever given Isaac was for putting his young life and bright future at risk by riding that wheel on a dare. A loving chastisement, doubtless. And yet, in the rigidity of the back now turned to him, Isaac recognized a fear for which he had no sympathy. His tolerance even was ebbing fast. Career and fortune be damned!