Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  To read the letter from his mother, he had to light an oil lamp. It was too hot really, but his inexpensive new room above a Princess Street coffee house had no gas or other luxuries—just a few sparse furnishings and a view of the hind-side of a brewery. All there was black and quiet now. Harris left open the sooty curtain so as not to discourage the least current from stirring the soupy air.

  Then he slit open the envelope from Holland Landing. Paper money tumbled out.

  Some notes were crisp as starched cuffs, most cobweb soft and veined. They bore promises of payment by banks, governments, railways and assorted other commercial ventures, including the Niagara Suspension Bridge. A vignette depicted the tangle of wires and cables.

  Harris scarcely recognized them. He was too amazed. The family sometimes commissioned him to buy in the city a tool, a book, or a pair of shoes, but this looked like enough to outfit an arctic expedition.

  Denominations ranged from five shillings to fifty dollars. A few bills were better tinder now than tender, their issuers bankrupt. Others to Harris’s knowledge would be subject to ruinous discounts if presented anywhere but at a head office in Sarnia or Halifax. The ragtag collection nonetheless represented something close to thirty pounds.

  1 Aug.

  My dear Isaac,

  I deliberated all of fifteen seconds as to whether to tell Father of your letter. The enclosed treasure is from him. He either has been calling in old debts or had this tucked away in odd corners. Of the mill, not the house. My establishment’s dusting and scrubbing would not have missed it. I am instructed to tell you he is most anxious you not sell any of your assets so long as prices continue to climb. (Whether he thinks it better to wait till they have fallen I dare not ask.)

  If this loan reaches you without mishap, I urge you to avail yourself of it rather than tempt the carriers’ honesty by mailing it back.

  Neither of us understands what you are about. It is so outside normal experience—although I am reminded of a businessman named Capreol who some dozen years ago chased a friend’s murderers across Lake Ontario in the middle of the night when police refused to act. He was called impetuous, but I thought it rather fine. No married woman was involved.

  Although Mrs. Crane’s disappearance distresses us, we can think of no one particularly likely to shelter her. It is years since she has been here. She was to have come up with the Hon. William at the time of the last election, but went instead to represent him at a Mohawk funeral in Brantford.

  Now her own dear father has died. She must feel it dreadfully, having in a way lost both parents at one blow.

  If your quest brings you this way, you shall not be forgiven for again slighting our dinner table.

  Yours, Mamma

  Harris grinned wryly. The family rift, it seemed, was healed.

  Gratitude to his parents then passed into sharpened anxiety for Theresa. Mention of Brantford would have meant more to him a week or ten days ago, when all directions seemed equally open. He would have been there like lightning. Having come this far east, however, Theresa surely would not double back to the other side of Hamilton.

  As for the money, of course he would keep it. Borrowing from his father was infinitely to be preferred to delivering houses he believed respectable into the clutches of a bawd. Not that he would have done that, but he had not yet devised an alternative.

  He slipped the re-packed envelope into the pocket of his jacket, which he folded over the foot of the bed. In lodgings of this class, sleeping with the window open was risky. Closing it, though, meant suffocation. Before it, he placed the room’s one chair—an armless, straight-backed affair. On the seat he balanced the tin pitcher and basin in such a way that they would be sure to fall and wake him if anyone tried to climb down a rope and in over the sill. Having doused the light and undressed, he began to fear he might sleep too soundly for this noise trap to work. He lay down gingerly.

  For the first time since his resignation, he dreamed of the bank. He and Murdock were closing the vault. The sigh of the key turning and the clunk of oiled bolts springing together into their sockets sounded vesper-sweet as always. Everything was secure.

  But no, something had been forgotten this time, and the locks had to be opened. A ledger had not been deposited. Was that it? No, Dick Ogilvie—the bank messenger—was stuck in the vault and had to be saved. Only now the keys could not be found. Harris patted his pockets again and again while a chill crept down his neck. His hearing meanwhile became morbidly acute. He seemed to perceive the noiseless shuffling of poor Ogilvie beyond the iron door.

  The door, Harris realized, was open. His hotel room door. Through it he felt a breath from the corridor. Fully awake now, he saw—not twenty inches from his pillow—a form gliding out. He rolled off the bed into a low crouch and dived. He caught a left shoe.

  The shoe came off in his hands. A boy in a shako and baggy jacket skipped off towards an open window at the end of the dark passage. His stride, however, was broken and his stocking slipped on the oilcloth floor covering. Harris’s bare feet gave him better traction.

  He caught the boy by the waist and carried him back into the room. Strange as it felt, he didn’t hesitate. All he knew was that after his losses at Niagara, he wasn’t disposed to let anyone rob him a second time and make away with the spoils.

  Closing and locking the door, he stood his captive against it. The boy was slight. He slipped around like quicksilver, though, and almost managed to duck under Harris’s arm. Harris threw the room key under the bed. He tried to sound calm.

  “What did you take, puppy?”

  “Nothing.” It was a hoarse, husky voice, feigning indignation well. “You’re dreaming.”

  It was too dark to see his face. Harris pinned him by the throat while feeling his loose linen jacket. Something was weighing down the right-hand outer pocket.

  “What’s this?” It felt, when Harris pulled it out, like a pair of pointed pliers. “Don’t pretend you’re choked.”

  “Tool of my trade,” said the boy. “Here, let go.”

  “Which trade? Thief?”

  “Tinker. I fix things.”

  “Like locks that won’t open because the keys have been put in from the other side of the door? What did you take from this room?”

  “Never been in it.”

  Harris thrust his hand inside the boy’s jacket. Brushing the shirt front, he felt beneath it and about the chest something like a bandage. Perhaps it was a hiding place. Its wearer was too agile to be badly hurt and in need of a dressing. Then Harris’s fingers closed on a wad of papers in the inside breast jacket pocket.

  “What are these?” he asked none too gently.

  “Go ahead and have a fine old grope, why don’t you? Do you a power of good.”

  Harris’s world tilted. The throat beneath his fingers felt smoother. The words from it sounded husky as before, but in a higher register. He dropped what he believed to be his letters, dragged his prisoner to the window, and pulled off the boy’s high cap. Hair the colour of ochre fell about her face.

  “What on earth—”

  “Were you wanting to undress me altogether?” she said and, before Harris could answer, kissed him on the mouth.

  Harris prised her face away from his, but kept hold of her wrists. He didn’t know what to do with her. He wanted light, and at the same time recognized that he was wearing nothing but his new undervest and drawers.

  “Would you rather I scream for help?” she asked.

  He would of course not, but didn’t leap at the bait. It was already easy enough for her to keep him off balance. Before he had recovered from the shock of her sex, he realized she was the very woman he had seen Monday outside the City Hospital. She had been wearing lace mittens.

  “A naked man confining a girl in his room,” she taunted. “What will the decent folk say?”

  Harris found his voice. “Dressed as a boy, you brought my release to Port Hope. On Triumph, you changed into a dress. You saw me jump in
the lake, but you had to sail on to Kingston.”

  “They’ll lock you up for raving alone.”

  “You couldn’t get a ship back on Sunday,” Harris persisted. “Then two days ago you saw me in a cab on King Street, and in one disguise or another you’ve kept track of me ever since.”

  “All for love, I suppose.”

  “No, I was to lead you to Mrs. Crane. You stole my letters because you hoped they would say where she is.”

  “Pooh!—to put it ladylike. I just wanted your cash, since you were simple enough to count it with the curtain open.”

  “A common thief then.”

  “I don’t admit to nothing.” She tried to rub her trouser leg against Harris’s thigh. “We could do business, though—a little trade and commerce.”

  “Stop it!” Angrily he shook her, once. “I may be easy to embarrass, but embarrassment does not make me sweeter to deal with.”

  She seemed to think about that. “So,” she said, “are we going to hold hands like this all night?”

  “If I turn you over to a constable, I suppose he’ll just let you go. You’re in the pay of John Vandervoort.”

  “There’s little enough of that to be in, exactly.” A chuckle rumbled like gravel in her throat. “Look, Mr. Harris, if you want to chat, let me have one of those cigars I smell.”

  Wanting to see rather than chat, Harris nonetheless welcomed her change of ground. “No more tricks then,” he said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Just light the lamp, will you, without setting fire to us both.”

  With no drain spout this time and no rope, she would have difficulty leaving by the window. She might throw the letters out, though. As soon as he let her go, he scooped them up instead of reaching for his clothes. Modesty yielded to prudence, but not bloodlessly.

  “You’re pink as rare meat,” said the police spy when the light came up. She might have been nineteen or twenty. “Is Nan Hogan the first of her sex then to see you in your underclothing?”

  Harris glanced at the papers. They were his and appeared intact. Fumbling a little, he passed Nan Hogan a cigar to distract her while he was dressing.

  When she lit it, holding her hair back from the lamp, her smoking struck him as oddly natural. She seemed a woman framed with few curves. Her narrow, rectangular face ended in a thin, tight mouth and small, square jaw. Her remarkable yellowish eyes were oblong slits.

  At Toronto’s Royal Lyceum, Harris had seen women in breeches swagger coquettishly in male rôles, but never one as free and natural with male ways as this. Nan Hogan’s arsenal certainly included coquetry. When she played a boy, however, it was not to pique interest, but rather—it seemed to Harris—to enjoy a boy’s liberty of action. She was welcome to it, out of his room.

  As soon as he had on his tweeds and had patted every pocket to ascertain that nothing was missing, he pulled the bed from the wall, retrieved the key and opened the door. Nan ignored it.

  “I’m letting you off, Miss Hogan. Go on.”

  “You mentioned Mrs. Crane. Is she in Kingston?”

  “You’ve had time to look.” He was pointing Nan’s way, but let his arm fall to an attack of curiosity. “What did they tell you at the hospital?”

  Nan cleared the chair and sat on it reversed, her folded arms resting on the back. “Time, yes, but I’ve only a wretched description—slender build, brown hair, etc. Who doesn’t have brown hair? I’m better off sticking to you . . .”

  Harris threw her bodily out.

  When he was again in bed, with key and money under his pillow, Nan came back and called softly through the door for her “outsiders,” as she termed the pointed pliers. He didn’t answer. She was too deadly stealthy, even on these creaking floors, and the next poor devil might have his throat slit as well as his purse lightened. She would find other ways to supplement her spy’s wages.

  After she had stopped calling, Harris lay listening to the sparse night traffic of a port city in decline. Perhaps the lake had simply drained away down the St. Lawrence River. His mouth felt dry as sand. Then in the penumbra of consciousness his lips tingled with the memory of Nan’s kiss—a mocking, brackish droplet of moisture.

  He thought deliberately of Theresa, but her face was blank. It worried him not to see her face.

  He tried to count. Always he had known exactly how long she had been missing. At 3:14 a.m. on August 7, he fell asleep before working out that this was the twenty-fifth night.

  His first waking thought was of Nan Hogan. By now she would have communicated with the authorities, and he would be served with a subpoena before he was on his feet.

  He dressed—and it didn’t come.

  He shaved undisturbed.

  After downing a breakfast chop and a large cup of coffee, he was beginning to feel invulnerable. Vandervoort would evidently rather have him continue looking for Theresa than give evidence at an inquest likely in her absence to prove inconclusive. This plan suited Harris, except that he didn’t intend to find Theresa for Vandervoort to interrogate. He had therefore to keep Nan from following him.

  He assumed she would try. To draw her out he strolled down Princess Street to the harbour and back up Brock. It was her build and eye colour he had to watch for. The saucy freak could be wearing anything. He rather hoped to see her in a crinoline, for then he would simply have to hire a horse.

  It wasn’t to be that simple. In Market Square he became suspicious of a slight figure in top hat and a man’s short paletot cloak with slit sleeves. A few blocks later, suspicion became certainty.

  They spoke. They might as well walk together, she said in her deepened husky voice. She laughed at his offer of a bribe. He entertained dark thoughts of tying her up or knocking her unconscious. Then they came upon the new Roman Catholic cathedral, still towerless but some two hundred feet long and bristling with limestone buttresses. On an impulse, Harris ducked into a side entrance off Clergy Street.

  He found himself near the altar rail, practically in front of two dozen kneeling papists. A priest was saying prayers in Latin. Harris felt the blood of his Presbyterian ancestors rise to his face. His straw hat in his hand, he edged down a side aisle, his discomfort lightened only by the realization that his stratagem was working.

  Nan had not followed him into the sanctuary. There was no question of her doing so with her head covered. Had she bared it, however, and let her tresses reveal her sex, she would have been expelled for wearing trousers. She had no choice but to wait outside—and outside there was no point from which all entrances of this great hall of worship could be simultaneously surveyed.

  Harris crossed the nave along an empty rank of pews. He waited until the pious began filing to the rail to receive the sacrament before advancing towards the door opposite the one by which he had come in. Now the guessing game began. He was certain to win eventually, and the most he risked losing was time.

  The coast when he looked out was clear. His opponent must be at the far corner. He committed minor trespass by dashing between two houses on Brock Street, leaping a fence, and slipping in through the back door of a Princess Street wine merchant. (“Purveyors to Regiopolis Seminary” read a discreet sign.) In propitiation, Harris bought a corkscrew he had no use for, meanwhile congratulating himself on his own deviousness. He had won first time.

  His victory would have meant no more than the fleeting pleasure it gave him if he had not already concluded that Theresa had never been in Kingston. He could find nothing of her here and had almost come to believe he could sense her absence. Oscar’s disease in reverse. A cab carried him west past the commercial buildings on King Street, back out of town the way he had come.

  Confidence in his decision grew when out the cab window he saw a sign. From the eastern end of a warehouse, an enormous padlock appeared to leap, and the black letters encircling this trompe l’oeil painting spelled, “CRANE’S PAINTS & HARDWARE.”

  Of course. This must have been in the back of Harris’s mind. He had forgotten that
Henry had been born in Kingston, and that his younger brother still ran their deceased father’s business. Theresa might have feared her brother-in-law would recognize her. By inquiry, Harris learned that Mr. Arthur Crane had in fact been out of town all this past week, but Theresa could not have been expected to know that. If she meant to continue east, to Marthe’s perhaps, she could well have thought to bypass the grey city by land or water.

  Harris sprang back into the waiting cab. With something more now than wishful thinking to support his course of action, he felt as cocky as a heartsick man can feel on four hours’ sleep.

  From the first farm house past Portsmouth he proceeded west on foot. In Theresa’s place, he would have been looking at first light on Sunday for a boat and boatman to take him around Kingston. No road hugged the curving shore, but he followed the one closest to the water, on his left for once, and asked whomever he could collar if they had seen her four mornings ago. Memories should still be fresh.

  A farmer who had been up before dawn repairing a thresher had noticed a solitary woman hurrying west along the Front Road. He could not at that hour make out the colour of her costume. It was certainly no one he knew. His own affairs cut short any speculation as to the nature and wisdom of her errand, but he did recall checking the mercury and being surprised to find it stood above seventy Fahrenheit degrees. She had been hugging herself as if for warmth.

  Feeling fortune’s wind strengthen in his sails, Harris prepared to hear of further, confirmatory sightings. He was disappointed—all the way to Collins Bay. From this dead end he retraced his path, looking for the point at which Theresa’s had diverged from it. Even if no one had seen her, there might be some physical evidence.

  And so it was that on the afternoon of Thursday, August 7, a lean and hungry-looking man in tweeds, straw hat and startlingly green vest was observed prowling the verge of the Front Road four miles west of Kingston. He was too well turned-out for a tramp. He was too indifferent to dirt and burrs to pass as a professional gentleman. Some children thought he might be searching the ditches for weeds from which to make quack medicines and looked in vain for his circus waggon inscribed with promises of miraculous cures. A dairymaid averted her gaze from the suspicious character and quickened her pace. A harmless lunatic perhaps, but one never knew.