Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Less than slender. There was no chance really that it was Theresa. If it were, her disappearance would have been mere theatre, a trick in which she and Crane had colluded for some dark purpose. Crane’s approach to Harris at the funeral would lack rhyme or reason. No, Harris knew Theresa’s character to be too frank and direct for such plotting, and she must in any case loathe Crane too deeply to so collude with him.

  Or was that merely Harris’s dislike, which he wanted her to share? He knew nothing of her feelings. His wish that she no longer be able to abide Crane’s company might, he reluctantly admitted, be distorting his assessment of possibilities. What, after all, was his warrant that Crane was unfaithful? The sportive chatter of a bawd. Harris winced. If Theresa’s father had fallen victim to a violent conspiracy, Theresa might surely be excused for in turn conspiring—for her own protection—to drop from view. Perhaps she had genuinely disappeared from Crane’s house on July 13. Perhaps she had returned to enlist Crane’s aid only after her father’s funeral and after Crane’s ride to the cemetery with Harris. Harris couldn’t explain the grisly arm or other remains, but from Theresa’s presence at Crane’s side, it didn’t follow that she knew of them.

  So which ticket to buy? A train tooted twice and left for Toronto without Harris. He took another turn around the rail yards.

  Two Saturdays ago, an ostler had seen Theresa in Thornhill, and Harris had failed to credit this authentic sighting because of his mistaken preconception as to which horse she had been riding. He didn’t want to repeat that mistake. It seemed he could not yet afford to turn towards the home of Marthe Laurendeau in Canada East. He must at least find someone who had seen this companion of Crane’s from closer quarters than had Gunn, someone who could render Gunn’s identification either more probable or less.

  Wearily Harris booked his passage on the 5:45 westbound express. He still thought Gunn’s clue chimerical and did not mention it in the letter he wrote while awaiting his train’s departure.

  Afternoon, July 28, 1856

  G.W.R. Station

  Stuart St.

  Hamilton, C.W.

  My dear Mother,

  Toronto, as you can see, is doing without me and will have to for some days more. When I do return, it will be to the American Hotel at Yonge and Front Sts.

  I have left the bank. Between the two of us, I think the directors were galled that a mere cashier should have been reading the charter. I am disappointed in them, but not much put out, and have no fear for my future. In this prosperous time and province, opportunities abound.

  I do not, however, propose to take up any just yet. All my energies are absorbed in the search for your late M.P.’s daughter, Theresa Crane, missing now for fifteen days and nights. Some garbled account of the matter you may have seen in the Toronto papers. Contrary to them, I believe there’s a good chance she is alive and that she left home of her own volition.

  My present intention is to ride the Great Western Rwy. between the Niagara and Detroit Rivers, stopping to inquire at stations, hotels, stage offices and livery stables. I am somewhat hampered by having no photographic likeness to show.

  If you can think of any place she might have gone, please let me know. Her husband is of no help. With me he acts as if he would be just as happy if she were never found.

  It may surprise you to hear I was at the mill yesterday morning. My circumstances appeared to upset Father, and it was at his request that I left without greeting you. Owing to the difficulty he has reading, the fact that I have written you would be easy enough to conceal from him, but I do not desire it. Preferring rather to keep everything above board, I nonetheless leave the matter of disclosure to your judgement. You best know his moods.

  Love to you all from the Head of the Lake. Hamilton’s motto is, “I advance.” Amen to that.

  Yours always, Isaac

  For the next three days, Harris kinked his neck muscles sleeping on railway carriage seats and ulcerated his stomach with railway station food. It took this long to convince him that Theresa had not gone west. It took this long to bring him face to face at last with Mrs. Fitzroy, whose husband had left her for the California gold fields in ’49, and whose wistful favours Crane had purchased with a twenty-dollar washing machine and a considerably costlier cashmere shawl. Apart from her colouring and a very approximate resemblance around the mouth, she was to Harris’s eye nothing like Theresa. She it nonetheless was whom Gunn must have glimpsed through the glass. The preceding week she had kept Crane company as far as Detroit, then returned alone to her home in Port Dalhousie.

  Her single room was hung with other people’s drying bed linen and children’s diapers. Believing her a loose woman, those who brought her their soiled bundles addressed her churlishly, and she replied with as much spirit as she could. Harris trod softly over what was for him unfamiliar ground. Mrs. Fitzroy had had little enough joy in her life for the past seven years and had very little more now, living as she did for Crane’s occasional summons. Her brother was a railway conductor who acted as pander. Of Mrs. Crane she knew nothing and preferred not to think, while of Crane himself she would say only that he was a good man with much on his mind. All Harris got from her was a heavier heart and evidence independent of Esther Vale that Crane had broken his marriage vows.

  When he left her, it was with no clear sense of direction. For a time he continued his inquiries through the Niagara peninsula. Crossing the new half-million-dollar Suspension Bridge, he fared as poorly in the States as at home.

  On Friday morning, a new month began, badly. At Table Rock overlooking Niagara Falls, he had his pocket picked of fourteen pounds and a not particularly valuable watch he had used since he was nine. A constable assured him that by the standards of the resort, he had nothing to complain of. Many visitors were beaten as well as robbed, and had Harris any idea of the number that came to the Falls only to do away with themselves? In the summer months especially—sucked into the gorge as if by mesmerism.

  Scarcely more cheerful was the abrupt realization that the first of August was Theresa’s birthday. It caught him while he was scouring the Front for a tolerably honest and not dangerously intoxicated hack driver to take him to the station. Into the gorge beside him hurtled walls of water, their spray cool on his cheek. At the same time, he was ringed by a scum of thimbleriggers, photographers, vendors of Indian bead work and touts for everything from scenic towers and menageries to excursions on the new Maid of the Mist steam ferry—all of whose voices combined to outroar the cataracts. Theresa was twenty-four today. Harris decided to walk.

  From the Falls themselves he felt no fatal tug. A quarter mile downstream, however, past the verandahs of the last hotel, the river racing far below appeared deceptively calm and inviting. Theresa, though, he insistently told himself, whatever her circumstances, had too much character to contemplate . . .

  Besides, did an act as momentous as suicide not require a more tasteful mise en scène? Harris quickened his pace to avoid one more Irishman with goose feathers in his blackened hair, war paint on his face, and machine-basted moccasins to sell.

  Just ahead, the Suspension Bridge smiled a grotesque eight-hundred-foot-wide smile in cables hung from stone towers in two nations. Scowling back, Harris made his way to the bridge’s upper deck along which the Great Western as well as pedestrians crossed the Niagara River. He intended to ask how soon he could expect a Hamilton-bound train. It was time to return to Toronto and start over, from zero.

  The young toll collector posted at the Canadian end of the bridge was staring at a coin in his hand, too lost in wonder to pay Harris’s question any heed.

  “It’s a real gold eagle,” he said. “See where I bit it? Ten U.S. dollars. Said he wouldn’t be needing any change.”

  A party of sightseers had come up behind Harris and were clamouring for admittance to what a sign advertised as a “Panoramic View of the Falls from the Greatest and Safest Bridge in the Engineering History of the Planet!”

  “Who said?
” Harris asked the boy above the din.

  “Fellow that just walked out there. Doesn’t dress rich either. Craziest thing I ever saw to pay a twenty-five cent toll with a ten-dollar gold eagle.”

  “Eagle, hey?” cried stout Daddy Sightseer, his hand describing a broad arc over the wood lattice railing towards the depths of the gorge. “When he’s done flying, he won’t miss it . . .”

  Harris didn’t hear any more. Reflexively he ran out onto the bridge to rescue whatever unseen figure the boy was pointing towards. The plank walkway was no more than a yard wide and encroached on at every step by braces for the railing and by the suspension wires connecting the span to the swooping cables overhead. Harris had also to dodge the men and women—some in full skirts—who were negotiating this obstacle course in the opposite direction.

  At last he could pick the individual out. The closer he got, the more familiar appeared the yellow waistcoat and the long head—turning now in sharp-featured profile as the man stopped above the middle of the river. He peered down at the green water marbled with foam, then consulted a pasteboard rectangle in his right hand. So as not to alarm him, Harris slackened his pace as he came up.

  “Hallo, Oscar,” he said.

  The coachman took an instinctive step away as he looked up, tottering against the railing, which came only to his mid-thigh. Harris got a steadying grip on his right arm. Oscar’s eyes were red and showed no sign of recognition. Vapours too sweet for whisky swirled around him. Cherry brandy perhaps.

  “It’s Isaac Harris, Oscar. We were speaking ten or twelve days ago at Mr. Crane’s.” To find Oscar entertaining desperate thoughts surprised Harris more than perhaps it should, given the symptoms of neurasthenia he had noted on that earlier occasion. No great blow would have been required to confound so ill-ballasted a bark.

  “I remember,” said Oscar. “The butler saw us in conversation at the woodpile that afternoon and gave me notice. No room for gossips. Who tends her horse now I don’t like to think.”

  “That’s disgraceful!” Harris rejoined with feeling. “Let me help you find another position.” He owed the coachman that much, though Oscar’s present demeanour would scarcely recommend him to anyone looking for a smooth drive.

  “Don’t blame yourself, sir. The things that are meant for us gravitate to us.”

  “How is that?” The diction suggested a third party speaking through the coachman.

  “We cannot escape our good. You gave me hope of finding the Mistress—and I have.”

  “You have found Mrs. Crane?” Harris fought to keep a modicum of calm in his voice. “Where?”

  “‘A light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson. That’s the writer I was trying to remember. I re-read his essay. I’m a simple man, but I do read. Some nights I don’t sleep for reading.”

  “You look as if you would benefit from some rest.” Harris tried to guide him away from the railing, but the man would not move. “Tell me about Mrs. Crane,” Harris added.

  “The Over-soul.”

  “The which? Step this way, please.”

  Oscar stayed put. “The Mistress, I tell you. We see the world piece by piece, but the whole is the soul. I marked what you said about her feeling for plants and growing things, and then I read there’s a kind of botanical park up here, apart from the tawdry glitter. A Garden of Eden!” He flung his free arm out towards the land between the Canadian and American Falls. His fingers moved to gather up the rocks and trees and unseen wildflowers as he would a set of reins. “That’s why I borrowed from my brother and came up here, Mr. Harris. I thought I should find her in that sylvan paradise.”

  “Let us go there then,” said Harris. “Let’s go now.” He had of course already searched Goat Island and interviewed both naturalists and custodians.

  “No, sir. I was wrong. Man is a stream whose source is hidden. As soon as I saw those mighty cataracts, I knew I had misread the Revelation.”

  “Oscar—is that a photograph?”

  His eye darting to a party of passing strollers, Oscar clasped the sepia-toned pasteboard tighter and dropped his voice to a frenzied whisper. “The landscapes, the figures are fugitive as mist. That’s how Mr. Emerson puts it. As mist. The soul advances not in a straight line but by meta—like a butterfly. I heard her voice in the waters, Mr. Harris. She is done with earthly gardens.”

  “She is alive, Oscar. We just have to look harder.”

  “No, listen.”

  “We have to keep on looking.”

  “Listen to the waters. She’s calling me over to the other side.”

  “Wait.”

  “One blood flows through us.”

  “Wait a day at least. See how you’re shaking. You’re not yourself.”

  “I’m blasted with light. Read Mr. Emerson—the soul is giving herself to me. Did you not know the Mistress was born this very day under the sign of the Lion? A sign of fire! And I—I am a Crab.”

  “A which?”

  “Yes, yes, a Crab, native of the water sign Cancer. She had to pass through fire, but I must pass by water.”

  “She wants you to live, Oscar.” Harris heard a desperate passion in his own voice now. As he went on fumbling for any key to slacken the strain on the coachman’s wits, he felt the taut wires of his own purpose vibrate in sympathy. “I know her character,” he pleaded. “Live for her.”

  “Mr. Harris knows better than poor Oscar Eberhart?” Oscar shook his long head pityingly. “The soul gives herself to the simple man as to the scholar. We are all dreamers of spirits.”

  “Wait, man, and see which of us is right.”

  “No need. The power to see is not separated from the will to do. Look, I took this from the Master’s bedroom.” For the first time he showed Harris the carte-de-visite his right hand had been clutching to his chest. “See how the Deity shines through her.”

  Harris tried to hold Theresa’s trembling portrait steady so he could look.

  “Master may be in Chicago, Nelson in Port Hope, Mr. Emerson in Massachusetts, but she brought me here.”

  “Port Hope?” cried Harris. “When and where did you hear that?”

  “See her lips move,” commanded Oscar, entranced.

  “Tell me about Nelson.”

  “‘O, Oscar,’ she’s saying, ‘come Over.’”

  “No—”

  Suddenly Harris’s left hand, which all this time had been on the coachman’s right sleeve, was clutching air. Harris lunged. He threw Oscar back from the railing down onto the deck of the bridge. As he moved to pin him there, thick arms encircled his own chest from behind and a voice of nightmare was growling in his ear.

  “Steady there, my fine thug.”

  “Let go. He’s going to jump.”

  In no longer than it took to say the words, Oscar had found his feet and stepped over the railing. He fell at attention, feet together, hands at his sides. Harris and his captor saw the spray blossom as the coachman’s body entered the river 250 feet below.

  “We have to get a boat out,” said Harris. “He may be alive.”

  “He was alive enough before you got to him. I saw everything.”

  Fully expecting to be freed, Harris instead found other strollers laying hands upon him. Around him sputtered male and female voices.

  “This one pushed the other.”

  “Hold him.”

  “An accident, you could see.”

  “But if they had not been fighting—”

  The whistle of an eastbound train ran over the conclusion. So crowded had the narrow walkway become that there was now a real danger of someone’s going over the edge by accident, or else onto the tracks.

  “It was a suicide,” said Harris.

  Daddy Sightseer agreed, but—as he had only just come up from the toll collection point—he was given little credit.

  “The poor beggar that fell,” put in someone else, “he had been knocked on the head.”
r />   “Just so. He was reeling and—”

  “Not a bit of it. I saw everything.”

  “He was tripped.”

  “In any case,” said the growling man who had first caught Harris, “I’m making a citizen’s arrest.” It sounded as if part of his tongue were missing.

  “Take him into custody.”

  “Not that way. It happened on the Canadian side.”

  “Not a bit of it. This is the United States of America.”

  “Stand back there while they take him off.”

  “No, this way.”

  Harris was being pulled in both directions now. Space opened around him. Between the red silk or white muslin bonnets of the women and the men’s felt or straw wide-awakes, he noted that the black face of the oncoming locomotive was no more than twenty yards away. If it were observing the bridge limit of five miles per hour, he calculated, he had a chance.

  He drove a boot into the stomach of the growling citizen. His bare head butted that of another tormentor. By diving under the bowed legs of a third and between the suspension wires, he managed to clamber across the tracks inches ahead of the advancing iron beak of the cowcatcher. The G.W.R. drew a curtain between him and his pursuers.

  He ran west. Seeing the curtain was only four cars long, he allowed himself no more than a glance into the gorge as he made for the Canadian end of the bridge. No sign of Oscar. Some bodies never were recovered, allegedly revolving forever in the Whirlpool three miles below the Falls.

  At the toll booth, the young collector was rummaging through the portmanteau Harris had dropped. Twenty-five cents was owing. Squaring the debt with some small coins the pickpockets had left him, Harris instantly reclaimed his possessions. He still had a customs inspector to face.

  In vain, Harris insisted he had not been out of the country. Regulations required an interrogation regarding contraband, and what—incidentally—was the blood on Harris’s forehead? Just above the hairline, Harris’s fingers discovered a warm wetness. He wondered if there would be blood and hair on the belt buckle of the man he had butted. If he submitted to questioning until the mob from the bridge caught up, he could find himself facing assault charges as well as having to explain Oscar’s fall. The loss of hours, if nothing worse, would be unendurable.