Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “By the crossroads—Day’s Road is it?—I couldn’t walk for shivering, so down I crouched. The tramp must have been sleeping in the ditch. I suppose he was a tramp, or had just drunk too much on Saturday night to return home. He had on one boot and one shoe with no sock. He just appeared at first light . . .”

  Harris had a guess as to the mismatched man’s identity but refrained from interrupting.

  “He took the pouch with my valuables,” Theresa continued. “I had brought what coins and notes were left from the housekeeping and had a few pounds from the sale of a horse.” A sudden query broke the trancelike surface of her narrative. “Do you know, Isaac, what became of Nelson?”

  “Returned home, I believe. Crane’s name was on the saddle.”

  “Mr. Henry is too honest,” sighed Theresa. “I hope he will forgive my selling him what wasn’t mine, since the proceeds are all gone.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t blame you,” said Harris, now the one to blur his meaning. He saw Enoch Henry in his coffin with his hat on.

  “I didn’t haggle with him over Nelson. And Spat? I suppose Oscar takes good care of them both.”

  “Oscar?” A blossom of white spray opened behind Harris’s eyes. Again he measured his words. “I don’t know who is taking care of them. Had you spent much?”

  “Nothing except for coach fare and a week’s food. I had not been sleeping in inns, and for two weeks the Taggarts fed and lodged me. I also had my wedding ring and other trinkets to sell as necessary. The man got all that.”

  She sounded dismissive. Where she was going, she would need no money.

  “Did he offer you any violence?” said Harris.

  “Not at first.” Theresa looked around to satisfy herself the workers’ noisy gossip and disputes had their full attention. “I was too sick to resist or even to be much afraid, but he took my shaking for fear, and that seemed to—Isaac, I don’t think I can go on . . . The idea of my fear excited him. He began kissing and stroking my hair. He had black nails and broken teeth. He said—he told me what he was going to do, and he began to tear open my dress. Then I resisted, when I felt the cool air.” Her chin tilted defiantly. She had gone on with her narrative and resented it, not knowing if the pressure came from without or within. “Of course, my strength was nothing to his. Is this what you wanted me to say?”

  “That will do.” Harris moved his chair to her side of the table. Wanted no, but he had suspected. He would make someone pay for this violation, anyone but her, and would take as much as he could on himself. If only he had found her a few days sooner. “You needn’t,” he added huskily.

  “Hear the story out,” she replied, suddenly angry. “What happened is not what you think.”

  “I’m sorry—or rather, I’m glad.” Harris lowered his eyes. “What did happen?”

  “I vomited blood. It fell on his hands as he tried to fondle me. He dropped me with a yelp that I was trying to kill him and pushed me away with his one boot.” Theresa’s large eyes fixed on Harris’s horrified face. She seemed at that instant to forgive him, and the bitterness went out of her voice. “His exit had a comic side. Off pelts the bold outlaw at a lopsided run, as if a fiend hung from his coattails. I didn’t laugh at the time, you understand. I hid under a bridge . . . There, after I had thrown up again, Etta found me. My condition mercifully didn’t scare her, and she was taken with the colour of my dress, which I was able to exchange for shelter.”

  “She paid you nothing then,” said Harris. “The receipt was bogus.”

  “I didn’t mind. She did keep her bargain, which considering how she lives is almost saintly.”

  Harris relaxed a little, enough to notice the homely fragrance of the bake oven, whose associations chafed him fresh. Theresa had no home. Her principles forbade Harris to give her one. He would have given her one this moment in his arms, which ached to be about her. A mere inch yawned between her sleeve and his.

  “What happened,” he asked, “to your hair?”

  “Both the dress and my hair felt defiled—but there was more. Remember, I was light-headed with fever. Foolish as it sounds, I couldn’t help believing the tramp was from Henry in some way—don’t ask me how—and would report back to him.” She shuddered before spitting out, “Maybe it was just that both were men whose touch I loathed.”

  In all but name, Harris realized, she had been raped after all, perhaps as early as her wedding night, perhaps as often as—he dared not calculate.

  “How long have you felt that way about your husband?” he said.

  “Long enough to be persuaded I needed different, drabber plumage that would attract no one’s interest . . . Take that woman, for example, the first things you notice are her hair and costume.”

  Harris followed her gaze to an unnaturally violet taffeta walking dress on a girl just then emerging from the Grey Nuns’ gate.

  “Come back from the window,” he snapped. He led Theresa by the hand past the startled waitress into the kitchen.

  “Isaac, what is it?”

  “Attention aux brioches!” cried a chef, sweeping a tray of cooling pastries from their path.

  “Police spy,” said Harris. “You won’t still want to go in.”

  “Yes,” Theresa insisted, “as soon as she is gone. I’ll be protected.”

  “Elle est toute petite, ma cuisine. Monsieur, madame, s’il vous plaît . . .”

  “He’s askin’ if you’d be so good as to return to your table,” put in the Irish waitress as sarcastically as possible.

  “Write soon then,” said Harris. “I’ll stay at . . .” He didn’t know the city well and was momentarily at a loss for the name of a hotel.

  “Rasco’s,” said Theresa, “opposite the Bonsecours Market. I’ll write—depend upon it.”

  Harris dropped a couple of coins on the only clean corner of a table and ushered Theresa by way of back alleys around the nunnery’s perimeter to one of the less conspicuous entrances. Their knock brought someone eventually. Admitting the sanctuary-seeker involved a reference to authority and more delay. Harris kept expecting to see Nan Hogan come tripping around one corner of the rough grey wall or another. In the end, there was no time for more than a quick squeeze of the hand before the Church of Rome swallowed Theresa whole.

  “My book, Isaac” were her last words. It had been left behind in the coffee house.

  “I’ll get it for you,” said Harris to a door already shut.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Recall

  Twenty minutes had passed. To avoid a broken flag in the sidewalk, Harris stepped warily out into the traffic on St. Paul Street. Waggons delivering Molson’s beer and Redpath’s sugar rattled by, all but grazing his elbow. Hawkers, buyers, priests and soldiers jostled and swarmed on.

  Harris was coming from the Grey Nuns and was in no hurry. Indeed, it seemed to him the ideal course would have been to watch the convent-hospital around the clock, lest Theresa be removed to one of the Sisters’ other establishments. They had one in Ottawa, according to the portress. Another, of which she spoke with especial pride, was at St. Boniface, north and west some fifteen hundred miles.

  The news had been communicated through a slide in the main door. There he also learned that, while there was no possibility of his placing the book he had retrieved for Theresa in her own hands, he might pass it in on the understanding that the mother superior would dispose of it entirely as she saw fit. “Que le Seigneur vous bénisse!”

  Until our next quasi-meeting, Harris translated loosely, and may it not be soon. He was now wondering how likely it was that a letter should ever escape this sanctuary and how best to occupy himself while waiting.

  Ahead, the potholes lay in the road. He regained the sidewalk—uneven brick—in front of a shop bursting with Modes Parisiennes, which French and even more English speakers were stopping to admire.

  Montreal’s thoroughfares might be less well maintained than Toronto’s, but business was evidently flourishing. In the two years si
nce he had last come down for the Provincial Bank, Harris had seen lithographs of the metropolis’s most notable new factories and churches and factories and public buildings and factories. Lithographs, however, never show the crowds. One and a half times Toronto’s population, nearly seventy thousand persons, had squeezed into residential terraces on a strip of land between the still wooded mountain and the St. Lawrence River. There looked to be more money than places to put it. Harris decided that anyone who had missed his chance to invest in real estate here might be in the market for a detached house or three in the go-ahead Queen City of Canada West. He would advertise.

  His father’s hoard was dwindling, and he wanted money. Of course, all his savings would not have bought sufficient watchers to encircle the convent day and night, all sharp enough to pick from among any number of identically dressed women a particular one they had never seen. At the same time, he had to be able to retain the best lawyer available in case Crane should sue for his “conjugal rights”. The phrase made Harris shudder. It blandly covered a dreadful sentence and made it sound as if the verdict were decided in advance. Even so, Theresa must be represented.

  He hoped the hotel she had picked out for him was not too grand. Then he was upon it, all five storeys of it, extending ten bays down the north side of the street. Rasco’s could have tucked the American in its back pocket with room to spare.

  Harris entered. He got no further than a plaque commemorating the 1842 visit of Mr. Charles Dickens, beloved author of . . . when he felt his sleeve tweaked.

  “Here’s your man, constable,” said a husky female voice.

  Harris wheeled about to be confronted by an unsmiling individual with a black mole on his upper lip. The constable appeared altogether serious in white trousers, a high-collared blue jacket and a black top hat—to the front of which the tin numeral eight was affixed. Nan Hogan’s tigerish eyes beamed the satisfaction of the hunter, while her jaw looked squarer than ever and her dress more improbably purple. Only in a riot of fashion could Harris have failed to see it coming.

  “Mr. Isaac Harris?” said Constable 8.

  “Yes, of course.”

  Harris was subpoenaed to appear and give evidence “on behalf of our Sovereign Lady the Queen” touching the death of a person or persons whose remains had been found near the village of Highland Creek and at the mouth of the Rouge River. The inquest would be held at the dwelling house of Edward Wilson in the first concession of Scarboro Township at one o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, the 14th day of August instant. Christopher Hillyard, M.D., Coroner, County of York, had signed the summons.

  “To avoid a charge of contempt,” said the constable when Harris had finished reading, “I am to advise you that you will have to take passage on a westbound steamer sailing no later than noon today.”

  “To be paid no doubt from public funds,” said Harris grimly, though the expense was not at the top of his mind. Did the police, he wondered, now know where Theresa was? Was that why the axe had been allowed to fall?

  “Public funds, sir? Not that I’ve heard.” Constable 8 touched his stick to his hat brim and turned on his heel.

  “Smart, ain’t he?” Nan Hogan followed the man—or perhaps his uniform—with covetous glances. “Says he used to be a fireman. Oh yes, it’s all one department here. And—for your information, Mr. Isaac Harris—it’s quartered in the market right across the street!”

  Harris heard just enough to realize he had been careless, dreadfully so. He would have to go. Cat and mouse with Vandervoort was all very well, but to refuse a summons issued under the authority of the Crown would, he feared, quite destroy his credit and impair his usefulness to Theresa in the legal battles to come.

  Nan Hogan was still at his elbow. “I could take that annoying paper back,” she said, “convince him we got the wrong gent after all.”

  “And why,” asked Harris, “would you do that?”

  “Save you travelling all that way to tell the world where and when you last saw Mrs. Crane. You might tell me instead.”

  “And if I said it has been three years?”

  “An innkeeper outside Kingston says otherwise.”

  Nan Hogan’s gravelly chuckle irritated Harris, but her efficiency exasperated him.

  “Why should Mrs. Crane’s name even come up at the inquest?” he demanded. “The remains are Sibyl Martin’s.”

  “That’s for the jury to say, ain’t it? Now don’t be coy. If you’re in Montreal, the lady’s stowed here somewhere. Beneath a veil perhaps. I’ve remarked your interest in the Church of Rome.”

  “Travel is no hardship to me,” said Harris bravely. She might, after all, be referring only to his passage through the cathedral in Kingston. “You’re welcome to look where you please.”

  She tried again. The girl in violet and man in tweeds formed one of several conversational groups standing about the oak-panelled lobby of the large hotel. The province’s police departments, she said slyly, were swapping little favours all the time. Toronto’s wanted the credit for finding Mrs. Crane. The alternatives offered Harris were, one, to reveal Theresa’s hidy-hole on the spot and be permitted to stay in Montreal or, two, to keep mum now and be forced to tell all in Toronto.

  Without terminating the interview, Harris continued to affect indifference. Inwardly, he was torn. If he left, he risked missing any letter from Theresa. Suppose that tomorrow, while his steamer carried him every moment farther from her, she had conveyed to Rasco’s Hotel an urgent appeal for him to remove her from the convent. Harris’s stomach knotted at the thought. On the other hand, if he accepted Nan Hogan’s offer, police surveillance would complicate any such removal. Moreover, the sooner Vandervoort knew where Theresa was, the sooner Crane would know, and the sooner he might interfere with her.

  But the decisive defence against temptation was remembering the character of the temptress. While this thieving, coquettish, tomboy spy showed initiative far surpassing what Harris had regretfully come to expect of the constabulary, he had no confidence that Nan Hogan would honour her bargain if she could.

  In her presence, he took care not to register at Rasco’s. He would have a telegram sent back from Lachine. He would have to count on Theresa to weather the few—he hoped—days of his absence.

  The lobby tall clock struck the half.

  “I’ve almost a mind to come home with you,” said Nan, wistful, then brightening, “but there’s sport and duty here.”

  If the duty was looking for Mrs. Crane, Harris tacitly wished Vandervoort’s agent ample occasions for the other, even at some cost to property and morals.

  To be quite certain he left, she walked him to the docks. She waved him off from the top of the harbour’s vast limestone revetment wall, and was quickly lost in the port traffic. Vessels from as far away as New South Wales choked the river. As the quays fell astern, Harris could barely see the city’s forest of church and convent steeples for a screen of schooner masts.

  He thought of Theresa with a blank page before her. “My dear Isaac,” he mentally dictated.

  The Grey Nuns he picked out at last from its location alone. He could not say he recognized the lantern, high tin cone and cross, having seen them first through such different eyes. Earlier, the spire had seemed poised to puncture his hopes. Now it was beckoning him back.

  The frame house on Parliament Street north of Duchess appeared to have started life in the Georgian style, compact and symmetrical, but to have sprawled and rambled over its lot since. Every part, however, had been kept up. An active-looking man was applying a fresh coat of serviceable blue-grey paint even as Harris approached to confirm the name on the gatepost. A brass plate was discreetly engraved, “E. Vale.”

  Since disembarking, Harris had looked in vain for Jasper Small at the lawyer’s office and then his rooms. It was now ten thirty on an overcast Thursday morning, the day of the inquest.

  The painter looked down from the ladder.

  “There’s an electric bell,” he bragged
, “right side of the door.”

  If the door had no slide in it, there were plainly other ways to inspect callers. Harris pushed the bell control and knocked for good measure. Batteries could run down.

  The serving woman who opened was in conversation with Mrs. Vale herself, on this occasion fully dressed. She wore a burgundy skirt and jacket, trimmed with braid and businesslike. On her head she was placing a wide-brimmed straw hat grotesquely loaded with feathers, ribbons and artificial flowers. She was speaking of cosmetics.

  “Lard, rosewater and coconut milk—that’s all it is. I never wash my hands without applying it. Mr. Harris! I was just on my way to the bank, but you are not there.”

  “No, I’m here,” said Harris awkwardly enough, but with no time today for embarrassment. “In which room will I find Mr. Small?”

  “It’s too early to disturb him,” she protested, “but some of the girls are up. There’s a Mexican señorita I’m sure you would—”

  “Your own apartments?” Harris had noted costly lace curtains at the upper windows of one of the additions. He started past Mrs. Vale towards the stairs.

  The servant had not shut the outside door. “Shall I call Sampson, ma’am?”

  “No need.” Her mistress’s larded and rosewatered hands deftly disarranged Harris’s cravat. “This way to sugar lump, if you please.”

  At the risk of being led astray or into an ambush, Harris followed Mrs. Vale’s over-ornamented bonnet down a back passage, past a pantry full of empty wine bottles and oyster shells, down two steps, through the kitchen and the middle of a dispute in two languages on the proper preparation of cocoa, up two steps, and around a corner. He was beginning to fear, as if sleeping in a bordello were not humiliation enough for his friend, that Small had been lodged in the servants’ quarters, or in the woodpile. Then Mrs. Vale led the way into another wing. She crossed a card room with four tables, its own wine cooler, and its own door to the yard. At the far side she opened without knocking the door to an office.