Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Three sheets of Cytherean letterhead were wasted on false starts.

  “My dear J.,” Harris scribbled at last. “Hope you’ll excuse brevity—this written in great haste. Hot on Th.’s trail but shall soon want funds. Can you undertake to liquidate real estate holdings named below? If too busy, pls. advise. Am. Hotel will forward mail. Yours always, I.”

  Once the three sealed envelopes were in his coat pocket, he removed the coat and closed the shutters against the last hour of daylight. He intended only a short nap, for he wished to be awake when they docked and able to take advantage of any opportunity to escape detention ashore. His body betrayed him, however. He slept until someone rapping on his door announced their arrival in Port Hope.

  Having no light, Harris groped his way towards the sound. The door opened before he reached it. In the reduced glow of the dining salon lamps, stood not one of the Negro stewards but the captain himself, accompanied by a crusty old blue jacket with handcuffs at the ready.

  Unmanacled promptly on reaching his cell, Harris completed his night’s rest on a straw pallet from which the mice obligingly decamped. When he awoke, he reflected that—while not at liberty—he was at least in the right town. “Nelson in Port Hope,” Oscar had said.

  With Constable Pitt, Harris maintained the pretence of wanting to leave it. No deep cunning was required. If, in the black of night, this official had appeared seasoned, the light of day showed him to be positively elderly. The conditions of detention were not onerous, apart from the tedium of endless cribbage games. The longer the two men played, the more trouble Pitt seemed to have reading his cards.

  “My eyes were getting weak,” he confided, “before I took to bathing them in rock salt melted in brandy. French brandy mind. Would you care for the exact receipt?”

  “No need at present.” Harris stifled a smile and a yawn. “I was wondering how often steamers leave for Kingston?”

  “For the eyes, by the way, some swear by wild violet tea.”

  “There’s the early morning one I came on,” Harris suggested.

  “Every day but Sunday—and another at four thirty in the afternoon. Except on Sunday of course.”

  Harris was about to ask the present time when the clock in the cupola three storeys above them struck four.

  It was Saturday afternoon, and Port Hope was humming. No less construction mad than Hamilton or Toronto, the small town danced to the song of saw and hammer. Behind the new Town Hall, meanwhile, the market raised its dust and voice. Bushels of grain, hogsheads of whisky, miles of lumber were offered, declined, accepted at scarcely lower prices, and carted to the docks. Waggon wheels and manure-stained boots rushed past the basement window of the police lock-up.

  Only inside did life assume a pastoral gait. “Miss the four thirty today,” said Pitt, “and you’ll be cooling your heels till Monday.”

  Feigned horror at this prospect gave Harris the excuse to ask who in Port Hope might have a horse to sell. Pitt, who had been about to play a card on Harris’s five, put it back in his hand while he rhymed off livery stables plus a couple of local breeders, though on reflection they raised mostly plough horses.

  His catalogue was interrupted by the approach of light, brisk steps. They stopped at the police station door. An envelope was pushed under it. Then they faded back down the corridor and up the basement stairs.

  This door Pitt had locked before letting Harris out of his cell to play cards. Why, though, had the messenger not knocked? Telegrams were to be personally delivered. Harris vainly watched the window for feet to fit those steps. There was in any case no necessity for anyone leaving the Town Hall to pass this way.

  “A very crabbed hand,” said Pitt. He was standing by the window too, turning the envelope’s contents to the light. “Of course, Sager’s Hotel has a horse left by one of their guests, but I believe they are holding it for a Toronto gentleman. Ah, is your name—”

  “Yes, yes,” Harris blurted. After so many empty hours, everything seemed to be happening at once.

  Pitt gave him the paper to read. It wasn’t a telegram but a note signed by John Vandervoort, Detective Inspector of Police: “You may loose Mr. Isaac Harris to continue his travels where he will. Any breach of the public peace he may have caused on leaving Toronto can be dealt with at a later date.”

  “I don’t suppose you would care just to finish the hand,” said Pitt. “You’re too late now to make that boat.”

  “I must try.” Harris suspected that on leaving the Town Hall he would be followed by Vandervoort’s messenger. “Could you mail these letters for me, constable? Here’s nine pence for the postage.”

  The quarter hour chimed as Pitt was unlocking the door.

  “Now I don’t need to tell you,” he said, “that those of us that have to keep a sharpish look-out need something stronger than violet tea. Salted brandy is what I recommend. There you are. Free to go. Don’t worry about those letters. I’ll see to them.”

  Swallowing his apprehension, Harris thanked him on the way out.

  “Wait.”

  “I cannot.”

  Pitt shoved into Harris’s hand an envelope identical to the three he was leaving. “Your bond, Mr. Harris. The captain of the Kith ’n’ Kin asked me to return it to you.”

  Harris nodded and ran. Early this morning he had counted three blocks north, one west, two north. Reversing the sequence, he turned down Queen Street with the river on his left and the west side of the frame and red brick town climbing the hill to his right. He dashed between the towering, still growing, brick piers of a future railway viaduct. Then he was over Smith’s Creek onto Mill Street, of which the steamer dock formed an uncommonly commodious extension. Harris found three vessels moored there.

  Confusion was momentary. Harris was advised to follow a lad in a shako cap and baggy jacket, who was running for the farthest ship and glancing back over his shoulder as if expecting a companion even later than himself. Hurrying after, Harris looked back too. He still thought it possible he was being followed but could not make out by whom.

  Ahead a black wall loomed. He recognized the Crane-built Triumph—a vessel he had in fact sailed on before. She had a sleek, iron-plated hull driven by underwater screws. For efficiency, she had Cytherean beat. Nor, Harris noted approvingly as he crossed the gang-board into the hold, would this steamer’s sheer sides tempt dinghy sailors to folly.

  “You’re cutting it fine, sir,” remarked a steward. The whistle had not yet blown.

  Call this fine? Harris thought—but he lacked breath to answer with more than a smile.

  Just as the departure signal sounded, a cab came clattering down the dock with two passengers who were cutting it finer. One was heavy-jowled and laden with luggage including a birdcage. The other man appeared tall, weaselly, and just like the sort of informant Vandervoort might recruit in the Dog and Duck. Perhaps too like.

  Harris bought his ticket. Kingston was Triumph’s next port of call, and as he didn’t anticipate going that far, he economized by taking deck passage. His morning coat he again left with the stewards for pressing.

  In the pungent privacy of a w.c., he loosened his boot laces. He then transferred to his oilskin moneybelt the portrait tracing plus all his coins and banknotes, including the fifty dollars from the Cytherean envelope. This useful sum he had not written off. At the same time, he had not truly expected to see it again until he had leisure to present his receipt at the steamship office in Toronto. All credit to the captain and the constable!

  Triumph had cast off. The water in the bowl was jiggling with the distinctive high-frequency vibration of a propeller under steam. Not wanting to get too far from shore, Harris hastened to the promenade. He chose a free stretch of rail about two thirds aft on the starboard side, away from the receding docks.

  Yesterday’s clouds still had not cleared. The cold grey water streaming by looked a long way down. On the other hand, there was little wind. Harris’s half-mile run had doubtless taken something out of h
im, but for the moment he felt limber rather than tired.

  He took a last look left and right. Since leaving the purser’s wicket, he had seen none of the late arrivals. A thin, light-haired woman in a low-necked dress was his nearest neighbour, and she seemed absorbed in following the swoop of the seagulls through a pair of gold opera glasses.

  Stepping over the rail, Harris sprang head first into the lake. As soon as he felt the water—icy even in August—sting his eyelids, he doubled up to slow his plunge. Deeper meant colder. More importantly, he didn’t want to risk getting sucked into the steamer’s whirling screws.

  Triumph slid past him as he surfaced. Bobbing in her wake, he heard a surprised shout and thought he saw a pair of gold opera glasses trained on him from the promenade. As he had hoped, no one followed him over the rail.

  To business then. Harris yanked off his hand-crafted boots and let them sink. He would find factory-made replacements ashore. From the water, the beach looked twice as far as it had from the deck. Hand over hand, he pulled it towards him.

  Chapter Nine

  Horse Power

  At about seven in the evening of July 15, 1856, an Englishman with pink cheeks and greying hair presented himself at Sager’s Hotel on the Port Hope waterfront. He signed the registry, “Enoch Henry and Dog.” He also had a bay horse he wanted fed and stabled. As for his own dinner, he said with simple pride that he had already got “that little chore” out of the way.

  At breakfast next morning, he told a fellow guest that a sentimental novel by one George MacFarlane had induced him to see Canada for himself. He had sailed directly from Bristol to Toronto, where he had stayed a week with distant cousins. He planned to push on to Fenelon Falls. He thought he would just inspect the railway construction first.

  Work was proceeding on the Port Hope, Lindsay and Beaverton line, but the stir of the moment was the Grand Trunk, which in a matter of weeks would complete the first rail link ever between Toronto and Montreal. The last obstacle was the valley in which Port Hope nestled.

  After breakfast, Enoch Henry and Dog, a pampered but mannerly black retriever, went strolling among the fifty-six piers of the Grand Trunk’s Prince Albert Viaduct. High on a scaffold, an inattentive workman let a brick slip from his hand. Enoch Henry fell dead. He was buried in his straw hat, for not even the doctor could stomach picking it out of his stove-in skull.

  Nothing in his effects identified his relations, on either side of the Atlantic. Only some days later was the underside of his saddle found to be stamped, “HENRY M. CRANE.” Might this be Enoch Henry’s Toronto cousin? The hotel manager wrote to Crane, whom he knew to be a man worth pleasing, and on July 28 received from his butler a terse reply.

  Crane was said to be out of town. He was expected home on August 3, if animal and harness could be held till then. The late Enoch Henry wasn’t mentioned.

  This omission made the hotel manager wonder if the horse were stolen. There might still be a reward. He suspected not his deceased guest, but rather someone who had imposed on him to buy it.

  “Mr. Henry was,” he said, “that green.”

  He was speaking to Isaac Harris, freshly outfitted after his swim by a Port Hope haberdasher.

  Harris looked down at the crisp black straw wide-awake in his hands. He had recently run close under two of those scaffolded piers himself. On the sunny morning of the sixteenth, as the brick was falling, he seemed to remember he had been counting new banknotes.

  At some time before that, but later than anyone else Harris knew of, Enoch Henry had likely seen Theresa. The detective’s thoughts hardened. Where, he wanted to know, and when?

  On the pretext of helping locate Mr. Henry’s people, he got permission to inspect the luggage. Two men had removed to an attic lumber room a steamer trunk full of clean shirts and romantic fiction. When Harris got back downstairs, he asked to see the beast supposed to have borne all this plus a rider the seventy miles from Toronto. He believed it would have taken nothing less than one of P.T. Barnum’s elephants.

  Despite dusk’s approach, a lantern was supplied only grudgingly. What that horse had already cost the establishment over the past two and a half weeks! And did Harris think Crane’s butler had sent money for feed? Nothing of the kind.

  Harris’s boots creaked as he followed the manager’s young daughter across the stable yard. “Nelson,” he muttered sotto voce, “I believe we did meet once or twice in ’53, not that I should expect you to remember, and I have heard something of your recent exploits . . .”

  The stiffness of his new tweeds added to the sense of occasion. They were a uniform tan, not the large checks favoured by the shop proprietor, but not banker’s clothes either. With them he felt he had assumed more fully his new identity. The small girl held the lantern up at the level of his new factory-minted watch chain.

  Inside the stall, Harris took the light from her and quickly found what he had not been meant to see, fresh spur gouges in the animal’s dark reddish-brown flanks. The girl admitted it was earning its keep and more through rental to hotel guests.

  It had the short, wide head of a quarter horse and many characteristics that would make for a comfortable ride—a long neck, long sloping shoulder, knees and hocks set low, and well-rounded hind quarters. It stood roughly sixteen hands and was, Harris judged from the triangular tables of the teeth, over twelve years old. All this was consistent with what he knew of Nelson. So too was the good nature with which it submitted to his inspection.

  And now his guide had to help serve the guests’ dinner if the gentleman had seen what he had come for.

  He had. This might well be the horse Henry Crane had ridden the first time he had called on William Sheridan and met his daughter. Plainly, though, Enoch Henry’s trunk had reached Port Hope by other means.

  What they were no one at Sager’s had remarked. Could it have come later? Oh, yes. Earlier? Perhaps.

  The steamer office was able to confirm for Harris that trunk, dog and man had all arrived on the four p.m. boat. Sans horse. That left Mr. Henry three hours in which to acquire one and to feed himself. After tramping around to all the downtown stables, restaurants and hotels, Harris rented Nelson to ride to those farther out.

  Eventually he came to a prepossessing inn at the eastern limit of Hope Township. Glimpsing the sparkle of its table settings from the Kingston Road, he congratulated himself on not having dined sooner. When he had seen both, however, he would rather have touched his tongue to the floor of the stable than to the food from the kitchen. Never had he encountered so violent a contrast between cleanliness of premises and foulness of cuisine. The great consolation for Harris was to find he had a companion in misery: the English traveller had eaten here too.

  “There you are, sir, a lovely bit of pork. Now soon as I have a minute I’ll tell you about that gentleman from back home.”

  The pork set before Harris was swimming in its own grease, where it had the company of potatoes fried black on one side. A side dish contained peas boiled till they burst, then half drained. Over them floated a buttery scum. Small wonder Enoch Henry had referred to dinner as a chore.

  Harris nibbled at his cider, trying to make of it a meal.

  “Now why aren’t you eating, sir? Drink on an empty stomach might not harm you so much if that were our own cider, but I won’t lie to you. It’s from a bottle . . .”

  Harris instantly resolved to order more whenever the proprietress gave him the opportunity. She never did. She was a stout, scrubbed woman in an apron vast and white as a snowbank. Before it she held for presentation a slimy, yellow object about ten inches long.

  “. . . It’s the season, sir. No applesauce for your meat either, I’m afraid, but I have brought you a nice pickled cucumber. You’re from the paper, I expect. Well, just eat up then while I take the weight off my feet and tell you . . .”

  She told him first about the black dog. She didn’t let dogs in the room as a rule, but this one was so well schooled, it never bothered the guests
for a taste of their dinners. Imagine. Its master—she never knew his name—had brought it some dry biscuit of its own he claimed was good for its teeth. He was an original and no mistake.

  He had tired himself walking. The Northumberland Inn looked respectable, he said, reminded him of home—though he was from Somerset himself. Then he unbent enough to tell a story on himself that was laughed at still. In town, he had asked the first railway worker he saw what time the next train left for Lindsay—which a map he supposed reliable indicated was only twelve miles from the goal of his pilgrimage, the storied Fenelon Falls. He was told he was early by a full year.

  None of the other diners could help hearing. One who had just been persuaded to sit down was an anxious young woman in a travel-stained green riding habit. She apologized for her appearance. You could tell she had had a gentle upbringing. Said she had fallen while trying to ride side on a man’s saddle. No injuries, she was sure. She said she was taking a deceased uncle’s horse to Cobourg to sell.

  She spoke to the Englishman before he left. He left on horseback.

  Harris tried to imagine the transaction. The animal she was offering was not fast, but would do useful work for a humane master. She spoke of oat-to-hay ratios and of root vegetables. And Enoch Henry, who had just been making public resolve to be less gullible in future, would have been dazzled, even if the subject had been of less intrinsic interest. For he was listening to MacFarlane’s heroine Flora. She spoke to him with the accent and intensity of the New World. Perhaps too he saw her chestnut hair flying as she skipped from log to log across the swift Fenelon River to bring medicine to a sick shantyman. Theresa saw a man who was good to his dog. She would have taken little of his money. Of herself she may have told him nothing at all.