Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  But the wars were over and the fur trade too, and now the races lived apart. Literature of the noble savage was no longer being written. Today, it seemed, it was the whisky merchants that best knew Indian ways.

  And Theresa, did she know and trust them? No answer brought her closer. If Harris found her with them—by her own choice sharing their longhouse or their farmhouse or whatever it was they shared—would he know her, know how to keep her safe? This was his father’s “what then?” question, which Isaac had always contrived to push back. Find her first, he had thought.

  Very well. He would find her. He tried again to focus his every power on the search. Its field had never appeared so vast.

  Harris felt the size of the land and, though it was his by birth, his ignorance of it. He knew one corner of a clearing in the endless forest. You scurried back and forth across your corner. You began to feel at home. But every grain of soil you had passed over could vaporize, and the continent would not be a thousandth part of one per cent the smaller. Harris came of island peoples. For warmth in the new world they had encircled their hearths with coastlines in the dirt, in the air. To accept the Indian story was to step out into the deep.

  Before accepting it, Harris must question Lansing. There was always the chance that he’d contradict his wife. And, if not, he’d still have more immediate intelligence than she as to where the dugout was headed and what its occupants intended. When, he asked, would Mr. Lansing be back?

  Mrs. Lansing, who had begun to busy herself sorting and folding rags from a heap by her doorstep, gave a grunt expressive of the impossibility of knowing. Harris said he would wait, but this didn’t suit the squatter woman. Rather than have her hospitality so imposed upon, she confessed that her husband was not fishing but would most likely be found at a tavern in Portsmouth.

  “Your quickest way is along the beach here as far as the big rock, look,” she said, her stained fingers plucking Harris by the sleeve. “Then straight up the path to the creek.”

  “Good day then,” he answered impatiently.

  In the way of beaches, sand had managed to get inside Harris’s boot, but he entertained no thought of stopping to remove it. Too many steps remained before him not to make a start.

  PART THREE:

  Indian Country

  Chapter Twelve

  Refuge

  So eager was Harris to get away that it wasn’t until he had gone a dozen paces that he wondered if Mrs. Lansing wasn’t just a little too eager that he go. He glanced back. She nodded and waved him on from where she stood watching.

  His boots crunched more slowly through the sand. He realized something had changed. But if an occurrence in the last three minutes had made him less welcome, it was nothing he could see. No vessel was approaching. Sloops and dinghies bobbed out on the bay just as before. His eye fastened on the windowless shack. Unfit, he thought, for pigs.

  Suppose, in acknowledging one lie, Mrs. Lansing had told another. Suppose her husband were not jauntily if fecklessly raising a glass at the Portsmouth Arms, but rather sleeping off the effects of drink in his own unclean bed. She had her pride. She would not want it known. Perhaps she feared also that he would be abusive if wakened. Hearing him stir, she had hastened to dispense with Harris.

  He walked back.

  “Go on,” she said. “You’ll see it, by the rock.” She had begun feeding twigs to the fire and, before she grasped his intentions, had permitted Harris to get between her and her dwelling. “Here!” she called. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Ignoring her, Harris knocked on the low plank door. He got no answer. His hand went to the door handle. There was no lock.

  “You’re sure Mr. Lansing is not at home?” he said.

  “With shillings I earned in his pocket?” Mrs. Lansing came scuttling over the sand, her voice shrill and scornful. “No chance of that.”

  She sounded convincing, but her demeanour overall was too equivocal to warrant withdrawal just yet.

  “All the same,” said Harris, “would you fetch a light and show me inside?”

  “You mean to plunder me.” Mrs. Lansing threw her weight against the door. “Get away or you’ll smart for it!”

  She leaned against the hinged side where she had not much leverage. Harris pulled the door fully open, careful not to stand in the aperture in case Lansing were armed. It promised to be an awkward interview.

  “By what right—”

  “Mrs. Lansing, I’ve no time to lose if I’m to find Mrs. Crane. Hallo in there! Mr. Lansing, can you hear me?”

  Inside no one answered. No furniture creaked under an occupant’s shifting weight. While Harris listened, Etta Lansing darted around him and into the shack. Her weapon must have been waiting just inside. Now she stood blocking the doorway, forbidding entrance with swipes of her plant-cutting knife’s discoloured crescent blade. It grew from her discoloured fist like a claw.

  “What the—” Harris gaped, astonishment overmastering prudent fear. It surely couldn’t be her husband she thought needed such desperate protection. “What are you hiding?” he asked.

  The sentry said nothing, but—

  “Isaac—is it? Isaac?” A thin, compelling voice inside.

  At the sound, Mrs. Lansing slackened her guard. Harris wrested the knife from her—before he knew if she still intended to use it—and in the same motion flung it up onto the hovel’s patched-together roof. Without reflection of any kind, into the dark room he plunged.

  This was the moment of moments.

  “Keep talking,” he called to the voice in the darkness. “I can’t see you.”

  “Over here, back and—left. In the corner.”

  “Theresa?” Her voice was thin as ether.

  But it was her voice. Three steps, not a continent, away.

  “Thank God it’s you,” Theresa said.

  Harris tripped over what felt like a chair, a sea chest and a nest of pots, then bit the head off a match. It flared to show a left back corner full of rags. Across three bales of rags trailed a sodden-looking coverlet with wrenchingly little in human shape beneath it. Where the blanket stopped lay Theresa’s starveling face. She raised it towards Harris. Her eyes threw back the flame.

  Love consumed him. The love he had tightly packed for long storage and rough transport expanded through him like bursting fireworks. His heart beat a drum roll. Trumpet fanfares blared.

  “‘Thank God it’s you’ indeed,” huffed Mrs. Lansing, righting the furniture. “Told me she would see nobody, not at any cost. Would have saved me trouble if—”

  “A lantern quick!” Harris could make nothing of her words. “A candle—anything—”

  The match went out, but Harris was kneeling by the makeshift bed. His fingers found Theresa’s hair. Perspiration had plastered the short strands to her scalp. He pressed his lips to them.

  “What do you need first?”

  “The fever . . .” She seemed to choke on the cabin’s stench, then spoke in a rush. “The fever has broken, just don’t take me back.”

  “If you have no injuries that prevent it,” he said, “I’m taking you out for air.”

  “Did you,” she whispered, “come alone?”

  “Yes, quite alone.”

  Her arm went round his neck. He lifted her effortlessly. Just behind them stood Etta Lansing, bewildered still by the revolution in her lady guest’s attitude towards being found.

  “If missy wants to see you,” she muttered, “well . . .”

  Theresa in his arms, Harris brushed past her protectress towards the square of light and out into the day. He laid her on the beach by the languishing fire.

  “Wait,” she said, “I’ll sit up.” Blinking against the light, she accepted his help without reserve. “No need for the blanket. I’ve—got all the good I can from it till it has been dried.”

  Harris crouched before her, suddenly diffident. Seeing in daylight just how little of her there was threw him. So did a malignant-looking black sore on he
r sweet mouth. She wasn’t shivering and sounded amazingly collected, but his misting eyes gave him no faith yet in her recovery.

  There was the further shock, just now catching up to him, of Theresa’s presence in any form for the first time in over forty-one months. The search was over. “What then?” had become “what now?” She had so inhabited his recent thoughts that he had assumed he would be prepared. He had forgotten just how different in texture such thoughts must be from the breathing woman herself. Here she sat, weak from illness, but looking at him with thoughts of her own, an autonomous being he could no longer claim to know.

  “Am I too frightening to talk to?” she asked.

  Too beautiful, thought Harris, remembering Weller’s stable boy in Cobourg—and too miraculous.

  “She said you had gone away in an Indian canoe,” he said.

  “I meant to. I . . .”

  “What happened to you?” He fought to keep the panic from his voice. “There was blood under the bridge.”

  She seemed about to answer, then looked away towards lake and sky. “Aren’t the birds late flying south this year?”

  “Not too late. It’s only August 7.”

  Plainly she lacked the strength to tell him anything about her harrowing journey and was iller than she wanted him to know. He expressed sympathy on her father’s death. She seemed not to hear. Besides the blanket, the full sleeves of her yellow dress were drenched with sweat. Harris hung his jacket around her shoulders.

  “It’s the ague, isn’t it?” he said. “It was in the Penitentiary, and I believe Taggart’s father had it too. Have you any medicine?”

  “Sweet fern tea.” She attempted a characteristic grimace he had quite forgotten. “Milk would be better.”

  “Should you not be lying down?”

  “Not yet.”

  Harris moved closer. “Rest against me then.”

  “The keeper of this inn believes in starvation—as a cure.” Theresa rested against him. “It was all I could do to keep her from bleeding me.”

  This prospect stood Harris’s hair on end. Theresa was in no fit state to survive amateur surgery.

  “You would have been out of my way before now if you had let me drain the poison out of you,” said Mrs. Lansing, who appeared clutching a now superfluous wand of lumpy tallow. “Do you more good than milk, which I don’t have.”

  “You’ve been very patient,” said Theresa without irony.

  Harris found her a knot of driftwood to lean on while he built up the fire and tried to dodge the horns of a dilemma. He had immediately to obtain food and quinine. On the other hand, looking back towards the shack, he could see Mrs. Lansing’s hideous knife lying up among the unmatched roof shingles. It was not permanently out of reach. Even if he took it with him, she would have others, and he feared exposing Theresa to any further risk of bloodletting, however therapeutically meant.

  Taking Theresa with him offered no solution. The evening promised rain. The noisome den he had just delivered her from afforded the surest, most discreet, and most convenient refuge. She plainly could not walk any distance. If he were to carry her, she risked catching a chill and attracting attention with no guarantee of his finding a farm willing to take her in.

  Commissioning Etta Lansing to fetch supplies also lacked appeal. She might take too long, talk too much, and in the end not bring what was wanted.

  “Is there a Mr. Lansing?” Harris asked Theresa in an undertone.

  “I have not seen him. Perhaps my fever keeps him away.”

  “Will you be able to manage on your own with her for three or four more hours?”

  Anxiety rippled across her wan features. “We’ll manage splendidly,” she said.

  “I don’t see another way. Do you?”

  “Expect you at seven.” It had been her telegraphic style of inviting him to dine with her and her father at William Sheridan’s Front Street villa.

  Harris smiled.

  “You’ll want your jacket,” she said, clasping it tighter around her.

  He left it with her, plus a few dollars for contingencies. From the big rock, he looked back down the beach to where she was sitting. All these weeks, he had never dreamed that when he found her he would have to leave her again so soon and trust she would still be there when he got back. He didn’t think he could.

  Then he saw her rise and, taking Mrs. Lansing’s arm, walk slowly back into the shack. He ran down the path into the woods.

  “Your friend found but health poor. Will not return home. Can you give safe haven? Please reply soonest and tell no one outside your family.”

  Such was Harris’s message to Marthe Laurendeau, Coteaudu-Lac, C.E. He imagined the stone manor house had a long verandah overlooking the St. Lawrence—the very place for Theresa to seclude herself and convalesce.

  But it was a gamble in every way. Never having answered his letter, the shy and serious demoiselle had given him no reason to count on her—and his unciphered telegram set her a poor example of discretion. Even coming into Kingston to send it risked attracting the attentions of Vandervoort’s agent.

  Harris took care to avoid his hotel, which he thought Nan Hogan might be watching, but for the rest a lack of alternatives made him bold. Farm families were devoting every effort to the harvest and balked at taking in an ague-sufferer. They recommended the Kingston Hospital. So did the physician who had attended Paul Taggart and praised Theresa’s nursing skills. So did the sympathetic keeper Vaillancourt, now feverish himself. The hospital, however, was not to Harris’s mind sufficiently out of the way. Coteau-du-Lac was, provided Theresa were well enough to travel and Postmaster General Laurendeau willing to take her under his protection.

  She had been found at least. As he went from house to house, Harris kept reminding himself. If finding her were possible, he reckoned anything might be—though in itself the discovery amounted to no more than crossing the moat of her troubles. The walls were still to scale, and allies far from certain.

  Waiting for an answer to his telegram unluckily meant an additional night at the shack, which it would have taken more money than Harris was carrying to make habitable. He resisted the temptation to buy bedding. Instead he added to his other purchases a change of clothes for Theresa and oilskins.

  Rain was blowing wildly enough to warrant them by the time he left the Front Road at the creek. For speed he kept to the bank this time, ignoring the stones. It was well past seven.

  He almost expected not to find her. So often he had not, and part of him had not learned to stop searching. The elusive Mr. Lansing worried him. So did having spent as yet no more than twenty minutes in Theresa’s company. As he pushed towards the storm-whipped beach, he couldn’t help reviewing her manner to see if any of it admitted the least possibility of her having left again on her own.

  Considering her debilitation, she had behaved quite naturally. Her attempts to minimize her distress ran true to character, as did her practical references to milk and blanket drying. The nurse as patient accepted a physical proximity that—considering the painful tenor of their last previous meetings—might otherwise have made them both awkward. Least like her was her incuriosity. How Harris had reached that hovel door she seemed to take for granted.

  Her gratitude for his arrival he couldn’t doubt. Would she, though, accept his ongoing assistance? Trusting him, him or anyone—that might be difficult, thought Harris, for a woman who had chosen a husband she could no longer bear to see. Henry had disappointed her; therefore . . .

  Or possibly it was his own disappointment that was making Harris suspicious. Could he trust Mrs. Crane? The name still rasped his tongue and spirit. He believed Theresa capable of again, for some undisclosed reason, renouncing whatever comfort Harris’s company gave her. She had spurned him once; therefore . . .

  Harris’s boots slipped on the muddy path down to the beach. Wind off the lake stung his face. However he twisted it, the conclusion came out the same. Suppose his suspicions of her groundless. Her per
ception of them could still drive her from him. His very presence could appear to reproach her for a marriage she had already cause enough to regret. Harris might not seem a possible confidant, however desperately she needed to confide. And had she not grounds to reproach him too? Unable to win her as a suitor, Harris had for three years abandoned her as a friend. With justice might she hesitate to trust him now. Therefore . . .

  Therefore, he would find her gone—never mind that she could barely walk.

  On the sand, he was able to quicken his step. Rain clouds brought early twilight. If Theresa were without shelter and her fever returned, Harris doubted if she would see another dawn. The shack at last emerged from the dusk. He had bought a kerosene lamp, which he lit immediately upon entering.

  Inside he tasted mould and filth. Mrs. Lansing stood before him with a bowl of black potatoes.

  “You came back, did you?” she said, as if she had bet the contrary.

  “Where is she?”

  The woman stepped aside. Swathed in rags, Theresa sat huddled as compactly as possible on her bale, hugging herself and rocking. Her forehead burned Harris’s hand, from which she shrank as if from ice.

  “Cost you two dollars, mister, if you plan to stay the night. I had food enough for her, see?”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Lansing.”

  The legitimate landholders, Harris reflected, were providing no better. He drew a bottle of quinine wine from his bag of provisions and looked around him.

  “Corkscrew,” Theresa stammered between chattering teeth. “Jacket pocket.”

  As he tried to get some of the liquid down her throat, she coughed blood into the tin cup. Harris unwillingly remembered seeing his grandmother do this during her last bout of ague. Marsh fever some grown people had called it. He would have been seven. Or perhaps he had only heard from an older sibling about the thick black stain on the vacated bedclothes, but the nightmares had been his. With sinking heart, he scrubbed out the cup and tried again.

  In two hours, Theresa had stopped shivering. Her temperature continued to climb, and she started throwing off her wraps. Harris fed her barley water before trying the milk. Having something to do helped him master his fear. As her head twisted restlessly, he watched her face and caught heart-piercing glances of recognition from her restless eyes. In a low, clear voice he kept telling her how important it was for her to rest and take nourishment, how much too he needed her, with her superior medical knowledge, to direct her own recovery and instruct him in what she needed.