Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “That’s my job, Mrs. Crane,” said Sibyl, reaching forward and dropping the lighted match into the stove.

  I jumped back with I don’t recall what exclamation. As soon as I had ascertained that I wasn’t on fire, I gave Sibyl the day off and insisted she leave the house before breakfast, which I made myself. I intended once Papa had rested to ask him to dismiss her altogether.

  Towards noon, a knock at the front door awakened him. It was not Jasper, whom he had been expecting, but Henry, who was usually too busy to appear during the day or for that matter the evening either.

  Henry and his father-in-law were not bosom friends. Having married freely, I never complained of my choice, but if my marriage had been conspicuously happier, I suppose Papa would have found it easier to warm to Henry. He sincerely admired Henry’s initiative. Both were self-made men, albeit with a difference characteristic of their generations. Papa required a competency. Henry has always hungered for a fortune. Papa believed good government would as a matter of fact be good for business. Henry thinks the sole measure of whether a government is or is not good is whether it advances business interests.

  Perhaps the two could never have been close. In argument, Henry kept making the practical mistake of invoking profits rather than ideals. You observed justly, Isaac, when years ago you said that Parliament itself was Papa’s El Dorado, its civilizing rituals his streets of gold. A man’s right to elect his legislators or stand himself for election, the legislators’ right to topple a ministry in which they lack confidence—these were his spoils of office.

  William Sheridan and his gang fought the constitutional battles of the age. Henry Crane’s attitude is: now that that’s settled, let’s get rich.

  He was cordial with Papa but never seemed to succeed in interesting him in his schemes and rarely called unless he had a scheme in which he wished to interest him. This Friday, I asked Henry to keep his visit short.

  I went to get him after fifteen or twenty minutes, and the two of us spoke for a moment in the upstairs hall. He looked grave but calm, and tall and pink as ever. I caught a whiff of the sandalwood soap I had once liked so well on him. He never smells of liquor or tobacco.

  “Your father seems out of the rough water,” he began stiffly.

  I assented, hoping he would go now.

  “It has been a trying time,” he rushed on. “Very hard on you. On the housekeeper as well.”

  “Has she told you this?” I asked. It typified relations between us that my feelings meant no more to him than Sibyl’s.

  Henry shrugged. “Better leave the cooking to her.”

  “On the contrary,” I said, “Sibyl has shown she’s not to be trusted with fire. I’ll fill her place.”

  “Papa tells me he’s not dissatisfied with her. As for you, you are too little at home, our home, as it is.”

  You can guess how I resented this appropriation of my father against me. In aversion rather than submission, I dropped my eyes. From where I stood squeezed between Henry and the topmost stair, the freshly waxed banister spiralled down in a long, graceful oval. Its normally pleasing curve dizzied me. Mastering my tongue, I suggested we pursue our talk below, farther from the sickroom. Henry said he had not time. Business would not stand still. His last words to me before shutting the front door on any chance of rebuttal were an injunction to compose my differences with Sibyl.

  Jasper arrived mid-afternoon. As I came down to answer his knock, I was astonished to see Sibyl had already let him in and was busy brushing his bowler hat. He was late, he knew. He had just come from successfully defending an illiterate nine-year-old girl against the enforcement of an indenture. He thought, rightly, his senior partner would be pleased. I sent him up to wait for Papa to waken while I had words with the unsheddable housekeeper. What did she mean by returning so soon?

  She professed anxiety for her master. As soon as ever he was on his feet, she would gladly leave for Kingston. Meanwhile, idle hours were torment to her. What with “the Honourable” indisposed and her brother under sentence, she had passed a weary night of it and risen in a fog. She professed herself contrite for her carelessness at the stove. Henceforth, she would submit to my orders. I made her no promises, but neither did I throw her out the door, and presently she served Jasper and me tea in the parlour.

  He found me in more distress than Papa’s condition seemed to warrant. I hesitated to explain.

  I have known Jasper since girlhood, of course. Our fathers did business before he thought of a legal career. He was my first dance partner. He used to tell people whom he didn’t think it would shock that our courtship never went farther because his limbs would not fit over a horse and mine would not fit under a card table. The truth is he’s so easy and pleasant with everyone that I could never imagine him forming any restrictive attachment.

  This afternoon he had papers for Papa he wished he could tell me about. Toronto’s social order might be shaken, but the implications reached beyond that, much. I thought such excitement best deferred till Papa was stronger. Jasper fidgeted and remarked on my agitation. He had sworn secrecy. I didn’t press him. Nonetheless, he insisted on advising me, as an old playmate, to see less in future of the MacFarlanes. He could not say more.

  To change the subject, I complained of the hot sun beating in and made some adjustment to the curtains.

  He had said enough to make me quite lonely. I had fallen away from all the girls I had gone to school with. They had married well or supposed I had. My friends would be few indeed without Kate MacFarlane and her daughter Elsie. In whom could I confide regarding the mad-seeming housekeeper? Jasper? Confidences plainly weren’t safe with him.

  I thought then to ask him about you, Isaac, hoping his indiscretion this time might work in my favour. It did, in the end. I could not approach you directly when you had made such a point of keeping away. You certainly owed me nothing. What I was hoping was that, if you had stopped thinking about what might have been, I should be able to stop too, and together we could solve the riddle of Sibyl’s behaviour.

  A moment later I glimpsed around the door jamb a twitch of brown worsted in the hall. The mirror didn’t need polishing, the pictures straightening, the clock winding. I rushed straight out to see what reason other than eavesdropping Sibyl could have for being there. Jasper doubtless thought me mad.

  Sibyl had “meant no disrespect” by loitering in the hall. On the contrary, she said. She had not wanted to anger me, either by interrupting my conversation with Jasper, or by failing to consult me regarding Papa’s supper menu. Did I not think a suet pudding would lift his spirits?

  I rejected the suggestion firmly. Intestines which barely twelve hours earlier had been so excruciatingly inflamed would rebel afresh, perhaps fatally, at such a greasy mass. A glass of buttermilk was the most that should be thought of. Buttermilk, yes, missus. How fortunate, said Sibyl, she had come upstairs to ask my wishes before proceeding!

  Again that night I sat up with Papa. He slept well and, not having been to bed for several days, I dozed from time to time myself. On the morning of the “Glorious Twelfth”, I brought him from his own garden a bouquet not of orange lilies but of white English daisies and made as unalarming a case as possible for helping the housekeeper to another situation. He had often employed charitable cases before, but never, I pointed out, in such a position of trust.

  “I’m sure you have your reasons, my dear terrier,” he said, “but her brother’s last trial seems to have been such a rushed business, and the sentence too harsh for a simple assault. I should hate to lose sight of Sibyl until I’ve done what I can in the way of appeal. Brother love runs strong in their family, too strong, I’m afraid.”

  I asked what he meant.

  “Did you not hear why their parents couldn’t marry?” he said. “Not to put too fine a point on it, their uncle was their father, their mother their aunt.”

  This news made Sibyl more pitiable in my eyes: guiltless, she must bear not only the shame of illegitimacy
but the more intimate taint of inbreeding. Justice herself must weep. Pity, however, was beside the point I was urging. Let the poor woman be treated with exemplary kindness, let her be lodged with every comfort in the American Hotel, so long as she was removed from the possibility of doing harm in this house. Not as a punishment, but as a precaution.

  Papa nonetheless hesitated at this anxious time to add to her burdens by any show of want of confidence. The matter remained unresolved when Dr. Hillyard arrived.

  Some think Christopher Hillyard should have retired from the practice of medicine years ago. In fact, he did and went to live abroad, but he pined for his city and his profession and last April returned to both. (That he also lost his savings in a railway stock swindle is a rumour he won’t confirm.) Dr. H. attended my birth and my mother’s death. As a family friend, he is supposed to be above censure, but I should frankly have wished a different physician for Papa this summer.

  I do not share Jasper’s objections to the porriginous eruptions on the doctor’s scalp. These are not communicable. What I do regret is the doctor’s refusal to speak to me in anything but platitudes. The practitioner’s traditional reticence towards the laity has in his case been reinforced by prejudice against any female who interests herself in indelicate subjects, especially one he recalls and still thinks of as an infant.

  On 12th July I asked if, now that Papa’s pains had subsided, the danger of an abscess could be ruled out. Dr. H. would not say. I asked if I might attend his examination of Papa. Dr. H. refused.

  The two were alone together so long that after forty minutes, I tapped on the bedroom door and entered. I overheard Papa say, “Never fear, Chris. I have the document here safe in my box.” When he saw me, Papa begged I would excuse them a little longer and assured me the consultation was no longer medical but legal. His words were cheerful. And yet the weight of grief in his eyes convinced me they were discussing that society-shaking lawsuit on which I partially blamed his attack. I gave them the time it would take me to fetch the doctor a dram of my father’s best whisky. After that, business talk must wait till Monday.

  On his departure, Dr. H. authorized his patient to get out of bed for an hour or two. Wrapped in a pearl grey dressing gown, Papa went straight to a window overlooking the harbour. As you know, Isaac, no house in town has windows the size of his, as his bills for heating fuel each winter can attest. This day, however, no window would have been large enough. He must throw up the nine-pane sash, stick his great white head out into the street and have a proper look around.

  The panorama he commanded was of Toronto on semiofficial holiday. Orangemen in a position to do so seemed to have given themselves a Saturday off work, while the rest made work as little burdensome as possible. Stevedores passed whisky bottles between lifting bales. More pleasure craft than usual sat with limp sails on the glassy bay, and the steam ferries to the peninsula wove less certainly than usual between them. At the foot of Bay Street bathers waded into the foul harbour waters for some relief from summer’s heat. Behind them on the Esplanade, an impromptu horse race almost bowled over wearers of the newest and brightest hoop skirts, while a locomotive lazily shunting cars into the semblance of a train counterpointed with its puffs and clangs a brass band marshalling for the parade.

  When at last I coaxed Papa inside and combed the smuts from his mane, his thick eyebrows were bristling gloomily. He fretted that the open view his house enjoyed would not be open much longer. When the aldermen had allowed railway track to be laid along the water’s edge, he said, the Esplanade’s fate had been sealed. It was axiomatic. Where railways ran, warehouses and factories would cluster. City Council, dominated though it was by railway men, would have to move their City Hall uptown just to escape the stench. Villas such as Bishop Strachan’s and Papa’s would become uninhabitable, valuable only for the land beneath them.

  I reminded Papa he was not in Parliament and need not repeat himself.

  “Well, terrier,” he replied, “I’ve constituents with more pressing problems. I had best look to my long-neglected correspondence.”

  “I’ll be your amanuensis,” I said, fetching his lap desk. “Answer a pleasant letter first.”

  He replied that pleasant letters rarely required the quickest answers, but that here at least was a diverting tragedy, a constituent’s complaint against his neighbour’s goat. We were both laughing when Sibyl came up with an urgent message for me. She took the opportunity of asking, now her master was sounding so much improved, whether he had yet asked the Governor to pardon her brother.

  “Not yet, my dear,” he said, wiping a tear of mirth. It plainly embarrassed him that he couldn’t quite stop smiling. “Come back in half an hour, Sibyl. We’ll speak of it then.”

  She glided out in sullen silence, her eyes on the floor.

  My envelope contained Henry’s summons home. I doubted it was urgent but could not disobey. I prepared Papa a light lunch, obtained his promise to rest after eating it, and left him for Queen Street East.

  I never heard his voice again.

  Hours later

  Ague chills compelled pause. I’m now in fever stage. Thoughts tumbling, but hand steadier.

  Don’t expect me to remember all the pretexts Henry had for detaining me that Saturday afternoon. Believe I was to organize a 12-course dinner for 20 princes of capital, or perhaps the other way round. He was jealous. I suspected no further motive.

  While he was home, I kept up the charade. I clipped roses for his table from trellises running the length of the south verandah. And I dragooned Oscar into cleaning French windows. The dining room is lined with them. Ten minutes after Henry left (for his office, he said) so did I, although our butler tried to detain me with every vexatious excuse.

  At Front Street, I found Papa napping: his pulse strong and steady. Sibyl served me tea in the parlour. Bitter taste, but did not complain. Very tired after nights of watching and struggles with Sibyl, doctor, Henry. Reclined on sofa for five or ten minutes as I intended. The hall clock had just struck five.

  Awoke mildly nauseous. Perspiring heavily, although sun no longer beat in through south windows. Knew it must be late. Bestirred myself. Through twilight saw room door closed, unlike before. Not locked. Went out into hall and found clock hands stood after eight. Three hours gone.

  No whisper from anywhere in the house, just a cooking smell that seemed out of place.

  Run upstairs felt like snail’s crawl. Papa lay peacefully on his back, not a characteristic sleeping posture for him. Skin clammy, no pulse. I lit a lamp and one by one lifted his cooling eyelids. Neither pupil reacted to light. No breath clouded a mirror held under his nostrils.

  My Papa lay dead, and I still suffered from a drugged intoxication that kept my tears from flowing. It was a special hell. All I could think was how magnificent he looked, his features neither delicate nor rugged, but boldly, clearly sculpted. Chiselled by a Master.

  I felt no swelling in his abdominal region, nor did I anywhere find a wound. What had caused this wreck? Presently I saw on the far night table the supper tray, the all but empty soup bowl, the dessert dish half covered with suet pudding. The other half clean but for a shiny smear and a stray, solitary, darkly gleaming raisin.

  I opened the night table drawer: Dr. Hillyard’s morphine salts were missing. Thought, breath came slowly. The opiate. Had it been divided between us? One large, deadly dose. One smaller and merely stupefying. The amount that I had been fed dulled feeling, but did not quite obliterate memory. Sibyl was answerable for something. I took the poker from the hearth, and I began to look for her.

  I met her on the stairs from the ground floor down to the kitchen. She was climbing as I descended. My lamp showed her coarse features pulled to one side of her face in an unfamiliar expression of anxiety. She said something about going up to fetch Papa’s tray.

  “You can leave that, Sibyl.” My head burns as I write the words, but it didn’t when I said them. My voice was drowsy, soothing. If my thoughts too
rolled sluggishly, they were in compensation preternaturally clear. “Have you anything for me to eat?” I asked.

  She stepped back into the kitchen and took a bowl from a dresser. I held the poker behind me. She was no taller than I, but sturdier and, given my present state of torpor, quicker. She might bolt out the kitchen door and up the outside steps to the back yard or, if I moved to block that exit, up the stairs I had just descended and out the front.

  “Oyster soup?” I said. “That will do very well.”

  My long sleep had tousled my hair. While Sibyl was dipping her ladle in the pot, I removed pins to cause further havoc.

  “I’ll eat at the table here. No need for ceremony. Just lend me a hairbrush before I sit.”

  She looked at me askance. The request was so unlike me, and she didn’t know for how much eccentricity her doctored tea could account. The fearful grimace twisted her mouth higher into her left cheek. Her eyes slid towards the back way out.

  “My hair wants brushing,” I said blandly. “I’ll just help myself, shall I?”

  I counted on her to protect her nest and was not disappointed: Sibyl bustled into her room. Now I had only one hole to plug. I stood in it.

  “Give me your keys, Sibyl.”

  She turned and made to rush me. I held the poker in both hands, aimed it up and towards her breast like a bayonet. I held it short so there was very little but the point left for her to grab. She might still have prevailed, but something held her back. I’ve often wondered what. Physical fear, consciousness of guilt, the habit of a servant, a sense of fatality stronger than her panic, perhaps a combination of the four.

  “Missus,” she pleaded, “what has happened?”

  “You’ve killed your master, Sibyl. That’s what has happened.”