by Mel Bradshaw
A shoe and harness maker simply assumed he had lost something and stopped to offer assistance. The searcher’s physiognomy impressed him favourably. What he would remember was the long, straight, narrow nose and a particularly sympathetic downward curve to the upper eyelids. Age? That was hard to judge. The cobbler thought he walked like a young man, raised in the country but wearing city boots. At the same time, the grey in his dark side-whiskers, even if no more than the effect of roadside dust, did not appear out of place. Then again, his bloodshot eyes burned bright. And his complexion showed not age lines but recent strain.
The tweedy man had not just lost a gold sovereign. He was seeking a lady, and it truly was amazing in what detail he could describe her. The cobbler asked question after question. Able to offer no help at all, he at least went his way with a story to tell.
Increasingly, when such stories were told at taverns along the northern shore of Lake Ontario, one or more of the hearers would recognize the subject.
“Nose like a greyhound? The very party that came pestering me in Cobourg!”
“And didn’t he stand the entire Kith ’n’ Kin on her ear last week?—though I’m not sure he meant to.”
“This week he has been all over Kingston and no mistake. You can’t move without that emerald breast of his hitting you in the eye.”
He made for a spot of colour in the landscape. No one was seriously annoyed with him.
No one but Harris himself.
He was by two o’clock repeating himself, going back over ground already covered, revisiting bushes he had looked under half an hour before, endlessly checking his own earlier work as if it were that of a subordinate he no longer trusted. He could not believe he had lost the trail completely. There had to be a dropped button, a swath of flattened grass, a footprint not quite washed away, a thread, a hair, a breath. Something had to have been missed. Yet even as he audited, Harris’s mistrust spread to the auditor. His eyes were useless. He almost stopped bothering to look as he dragged his body up and down beneath a dull, damp sky.
Recollections of his morning smugness made him like himself no better. His glee on eluding Nan Hogan especially galled him now as he stopped by the side of the road to wipe the sweat from his foolish face. She would find him out again before he had learned a thing. He had scarcely been making himself inconspicuous.
As if he expected to see her coming, he looked back east across a shingle beach. The lap of wavelets steadied him. Even under clouds, the lake shimmered. He let his eyes slide over it away from the road out to the two promontories that closed the bay. On the nearer, shorter one stood an orchard and a farm Harris had already visited. The further, longer one he had supposed uninhabited, belonging as it did to a family settled north of the road. Now, though, against the grey sky he thought he discerned the faintest pencil line of smoke rising from a clump of trees down by the water’s edge.
It was gone. No, there it was, a thickening brown smudge.
Harris’s senses quickened. An entire layer of dead skin seemed to fall away. A ten-minute run brought him around and away from the bay to where the road bridged a stony creek. He had noted this feature previously, but not the extent to which the stones were shaped and spaced to form steps leading downstream—out towards the further point. By discreetly extending a natural peculiarity, human hands had provided a path that left vegetation undisturbed. Harris sat on the edge of the low, railingless bridge. His feet easily reached the first stone. He stood on it.
It wasn’t quite the first. Upstream from it lay a larger, flatter rock the bridge timbers had hidden. Part of this stone’s surface was not grey but rust. Iron ore, thought Harris, and was about to hasten on when he noticed the colour was flaking off. He crouched and lifted some of the caked red substance with his thumb nail. It looked like blood.
Anxiously, he followed the stepping stones towards the plume of smoke. Around a bend in the stream, the stones became sporadic, while the path climbed the right bank and cut into the trees. Harris crept forward along it. He resented the extra seconds he had to take, but didn’t want a snapping twig to alarm the fire tender.
Might not that person be Theresa? If the blood on the rock weren’t hers, it might—or if her injuries were light. Four days was a long time to hurt, but a short one to heal. Harris prayed for her to a heaven he believed empty. Let her be safe. Let her be whole.
Theresa’s feet in any case had not created this well-worn path. One or more squatters’ likely had.
On a smaller farm, this land—though damp—might have been cleared of its stands of cedar, elm and silver maple. As yet, however, the owners’ appetites appeared not to have grown into their holdings. Nature here for now was permitted to take its course.
Just at first, tree trunks hid the lake, which presently twinkled between them as through a grill. Leaving the path, Harris stole along parallel to the shore. Then he saw it. Out on a patch of sand quivered the flame’s pale light. Over it, a cauldron hung from a log tripod.
To the right, nestling against the rocks that marked the drop from the forest floor to the beach, a low shack had been laced together from odd logs, loam and driftwood. Harris’s survey of this beaver lodge was cut short by the emergence from it of a woman in an emerald green dress.
Harris caught his breath. He tried also to rein in his imagination, to hold it back from hasty inferences.
The dress’s wearer was of medium height and thin. She kept her back to Harris as she bent to add wood to the fire. A walnut-brown rag covered her head. When she stood up, she winced and kneaded the small of her back with her right hand. Whether from sun or dirt, the skin of that hand was very dark.
Harris’s heart ticked off the suspenseful seconds. His vision blurred. When she bent over again, he approached—almost not daring to look. This was no Mrs. Fitzroy. Two such dresses could not conceivably turn up within the space of a week in the same square mile of country.
He could picture Theresa’s face now, precisely, the line of her nose, the parting of her lips.
He didn’t want to alarm her by creeping too close. He waited till he was just close enough that she could not run away without recognizing him.
“Theresa?” he called out, softly first then louder. “Theresa.”
The woman turned towards him a startled, ancient face. They stared at each other a long, still moment till the greedy screeching of a seagull seemed to break the spell.
“Who’s Tree-sa?”
“Beg your pardon—a woman I’m looking for.” Harris tried to clear his throat. Speech came slowly. “I—took that for her dress.”
“It’s my dress,” said the squatter woman, wiping her crooked nose on its cuff.
He saw he had exaggerated her age. The lack of teeth gave her mouth a collapsed look, and ingrained grime accentuated the lines etched by rough living. Her figure remained firm and shapely inside the fitted bodice.
“May I,” he said, “ask where you got it?”
“Bought it,” she sniffed. “Are you a constable?”
He shook his head. “From whom did you buy it?”
“Because if you’re a constable, I can show you the bill of sale.” Her voice, hitherto flat and dull, rang with triumph. “I knew I’d be suspected. As if such as me never came by anything honest.”
“I should like to see the bill of sale.”
“You’re not a constable, though.” She stuck a discoloured finger in the cauldron.
Drawing closer, Harris saw that the water whose temperature she was testing contained several pounds of wildflowers. Queen Anne’s lace, he guessed.
“Are you,” he asked, “a dyer by trade? That’s honest work to be sure.”
“I may be. Was there something you wanted done in that line?”
“I should like a piece of cloth the colour of the dress you exchanged for the one you’re wearing.”
The dye woman looked at him narrowly. The raw onions on her breath, of which they contributed the least putrescent element, fla
yed his nostrils. She asked his name and who he worked for.
He told her.
“I’m Etta Lansing. Mrs. Lansing to you. You would do better to tell me you’re Henry.”
“I’m not,” Harris blurted, his heart racing, but convinced as it raced that it was avoiding a trap. Theresa could never have expressed a preference that Crane find her—Crane the faithless bully, so slow to look for his missing wife, so quick to believe her dead.
“You do sometimes go by that name,” coaxed the woman in green.
“Never. I’m not Henry. I don’t serve Henry. I won’t tell Henry the lady in question was here or where she went. Now—was she injured?”
“She came to no harm with me . . . Something for your thirst?”
While pursuing his interrogation, Harris diplomatically accepted from Mrs. Lansing a tin cup of some bitterly resinous infusion.
“That’s sweet fern,” she said. “You find it by the edge of the road. It’s good for the ague.”
Harris let his cup be refilled.
“It will be five cents by the way. I can’t afford to give nothing away. Much obliged. Sassafras makes a nice tea too, and a nice orange dye, but it doesn’t grow in these parts. Stoke up that fire a bit, will you?”
“The water is turning yellow,” said Harris. “Was this the colour?”
“That wild-carrot yellow was my favourite hue, until I saw the green.” She smoothed the skirt of Theresa’s dress, already stained with splashes from various dye pots—if with nothing worse. “You’re supposed to get a bright green from dying your yarn first in goldenrod, then in indigo. Indigo’s dear—and has to be fermented with urine. In the end, you do get a good strong green, but not like this.”
“Does Theresa Crane have your yellow dress?”
“Who? The lady didn’t mention that name.”
“Mrs. Lansing—”
“Ooh, not so hot. I did keep a scarf the same, if you’ve time enough to wait while I get it.”
Harris followed her to the square door of the shack. “The bill of sale too, please.”
She supposed there was no harm. It was produced from somewhere under her garments and held for his inspection. The name signed in pencil was not Theresa’s. The hand, despite a tremor, was. Harris didn’t know how much acute distress to read into this distortion, as whatever her physical and emotional state, she might also have been trying to cover her tracks.
“How did she seem?” he asked.
“You wait outside.” Having tucked the precious paper away, Etta Lansing darted into her hovel.
Harris stuck his head through the doorway but could see nothing in the windowless interior. The air besides made him gag. From some vomitous corner accessible only by touch, the squatter emerged with the yellow scarf.
The colour was clear and bright enough in what was coming to seem a rural way, but dull beside a brand new synthetic dye like that of the riding habit. In the yellow dress, a traveller would attract less notice. Theresa’s change of clothes, her shaky writing, her mention of Henry by name all suggested to Harris—independent of the blood stain—that between Portsmouth and this beach something had happened to increase her sense of alarm.
“Look here, Mrs. Lansing, you’ve still told me nothing of her physical health or state of mind.”
“Mind? She was half out of it, I should say. What you would expect of a woman who had just been robbed.”
“She had been robbed?” The word did not slip gently into the place Harris’s premonitions had tried to prepare for it.
“It’s a lonely stretch of road like you get when so much land belongs to one house. I don’t complain, mind. The deed-holders leave us alone, and we leave them likewise. It’s lonely road, though. I wouldn’t go myself except to collect plants for my colours, and then I have a good sharp knife—”
“But was she hurt?” asked Harris in a misery of suspense.
“She had no broken bones that I could see. She might have caught some bruises, but they wouldn’t have flowered till after she left me. Stoke up the fire again, will you?”
“Never mind the fire,” said Harris, tormented by thoughts of hurts he could not ask about. “She was robbed, so when she left here she had nothing but the four shillings and six pence that bill of sale says you gave her.”
“And my yellow dress.” Mrs. Lansing’s puckered face clouded over with indignation. “That wasn’t just a shift, I’ll have you know. It had a waist and full sleeves like the modern style is. There was a deal of yarn in that dress.”
“But in terms of actual coin and paper, she left here with under five shillings.”
“She was welcome to take her goods elsewhere,” sniffed Mrs. Lansing, “if she thought she could have got a better price. And as for her hair . . .”
“What about it?”
“She just threw it in the fire. Nice brown tresses, foot and a half of them. She asked me first if I could change the colour. I said, ‘Certainly, missus, if you want to stick your head in that there cauldron for an hour.’ So—snip, snip—off they come and into the flames. I got them out right smart.”
Harris turned away. He couldn’t bear not knowing Theresa’s suffering and couldn’t bear knowing the fraction of it which the described act of self-mutilation expressed. Then, with a self-command that astonished him, he turned back to look the hag in the eye.
“What did you do with the hair?”
“Do? Why, it’s worth money, I’m telling you. If she don’t need it, I do. Mr. Lansing is making an ornamental wreath of it to sell to a professor at the Queen’s University.”
“How much?”
“I can’t say I’m partial to the tone you’re taking. I’ve been more than obliging, and Mr. Lansing won’t like to hear how I’m took advantage of in his absence. There now. I’ve said all I’m going to say until my fire gets tended.”
Harris could not remember having made a more distasteful bargain. He paid four dollars for the wreath and scarf and threw his emerald waistcoat in to appease the possibly apocryphal Mr. Lansing.
And how much else of what the dyer said was true? Harris’s fingers held a three-year-old memory of Theresa’s hair, to which “nice brown tresses” were as tarred rope. He doubted that the lifeless filaments handed him came from his darling’s head. He nonetheless wrapped them in a clean handkerchief before sliding them into his breast pocket.
Their transaction made Mrs. Lansing more trusting. All at once, she could see by his firm chin and high, smooth forehead that Harris was a man of good faith. Her pot was permitted to cool.
The lady, she said, had come by land but insisted on leaving by water and would on no consideration go into Kingston, which she called “Henry’s city”. By water how? In Mr. Lansing’s boat to be sure, same as he was fishing from at this moment.
Harris looked south and east. Just here the lake became river. The water began not just to move but flow, down to the Atlantic Ocean, no turning back. The shores closed in. Yonder sat Wolfe Island like a pipe in the mouth of the St. Lawrence, its ten-mile stem affording a portage around Kingston.
Suppose, though, Theresa had suspended her flight. Nearer to hand lay other islands, two large enough to have been ruled into farms. Harris dared to imagine one of these had taken her in and lent her haven, far from the highway, surrounded by the waves. There she would regather her strength and spirits. He would find her in a room with fresh air, clean sheets and pillows to arrange.
“And did your husband take her over to Amherst Island?”
“Oh, no.” Etta Lansing shook her head so hard she had to retie the brown rag under her chin. Vindicated pride again rang in her voice. “He put her—by her own wish, mind—in an Indian canoe headed down the river.”
“I don’t believe that,” Harris retorted. “These days Indians travel by steamer like anyone else, not in birchbark canoes.”
He had seen them at the rail, both sexes smoking their clay pipes.
“There was never anything as fancy as birchbar
k.” The squatter woman took more pleasure in the occasion to gloat than offence at Harris’s doubts. “Those two young bucks?” she crowed. “Dirt-poor, without the price of deck passage between them. Paddling a hollowed-out log like they make up there.” She pointed west, towards Shannonville. “Your Treesa spoke their lingo too. How’s that for strange? She arrived a lady and left a savage!”
Try as he might, Harris couldn’t shake her from this story. Eventually, he drew apart to consider. His resistance started to waver.
He had passed through a Mohawk reserve Monday morning on the coach, had heard of other settlements downstream at Cornwall and Montreal. His mother had mentioned Theresa’s attending a Mohawk funeral. Although her colouring was not such as to let her pass for an Indian, perhaps she thought she could lose herself among them.
A chill blew off the lake. The opaque sky heaved and spread to reveal new depths of cloud.
Two images flashed through Harris’s consciousness. A woman of gentle breeding, far from home, alone and without luggage, running down a country road at night—this was desperate enough. That same woman, Theresa, still fleeing, but now destitute, ill-clad, shorn of every badge of social respectability, and riding in a red man’s dugout—Harris had no words to express his fear for her. He didn’t positively expect her conductors to mistreat her, but could not feel confident that they would not.
His father had had Six Nations Mohawks as allies in 1812. Alexander had always spoken highly of them. In the counter-attack after Brock’s death, they had proved so intimidating that Americans had thrown themselves off Queenston Heights sooner than face Mohawk flint.
