Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Small, it seemed, was offering his services. Good.

  Nothing in print gave any hint as to Theresa’s location. Better yet.

  Harris proceeded immediately to a writing desk in the steamer’s lounge. With Ingram’s fate as well as Theresa’s needs in mind, he scrawled a note to be mailed back to Toronto when they next touched land.

  Friday

  On Lake Ontario

  Jasper,

  If in truth open to new commissions, borrow against whichever of my properties the mortgage brokers like best and come at once to Montreal. The ornate house by the Parliament buildings, e.g., would make a very serviceable horse-nail factory. The secret you so ingeniously saved yesterday is bound to leak out soon, and then legal manoeuvres will begin in earnest. Find at Rasco’s your faithful, if godless, client—

  Isaac

  The next six days passed in waiting. The steamer crawled down the St. Lawrence and through its locks, delivering Harris at last to the metropolis. At last! But in thriving Montreal, nothing had happened. Nothing continued to happen. The public clocks at long intervals announced one empty hour after another.

  The saving of Harris’s sanity, meanwhile, was seeing to Banshee’s recovery. As with gradually increased rations of oats and hay she put on weight, he stretched her legs with longer rides, up the orchard-covered mountain and down past the limestone quarries on the other side. Then he would trot her back to his hotel to find the clock hands a little advanced—and no messages.

  Small neither came nor wrote. Nor did Harris see anything of Nan Hogan or the police, though he was careful whenever he ventured near the convent to make sure he was not followed. They seemed not to need him.

  Tuesday morning, the promised week passed without a letter from Theresa. Inquiries availed Harris nothing.

  He felt helpless. He needed to hear from her both some reassurance as to her present condition and some information he could use to protect her. Crane’s crimes might be guessed at, but guesses have no public standing. Harris resembled a knight who, hearing rumblings from the forest, can execute no plan of attack or defence until he establishes the nature of the beast. For her chains to be broken, Theresa had to break her silence. He saw no other way.

  Two days later, with dense cloud pressing on the island city, uncertainty had so paralyzed him that even distressing news came as a clarifying mercy. Without touching his fried eggs, he sprang from his seat at the breakfast table. Thursday’s Montreal Herald reported that Mrs. Henry Crane, missing from her Toronto home since July 13, had found her way to the Grey Nuns’ hospital, where she was receiving care until she could be reunited with her husband, the well-known etc., etc. The announcement originated with Postmaster General Armand Laurendeau, whose family had long supported the sisters’ charitable work.

  Article in hand, Harris rushed out of the hotel. What deprived him of breakfast was the need to take measures rather than any overwhelming sense of shock or betrayal. In her letter to Theresa, Marthe had undertaken that her family would not volunteer information to Crane, but suppose that Crane—knowing of Theresa’s connection to Marthe—had eventually made an approach to Mlle Laurendeau’s father. Perhaps the two men had business dealings, negotiating agreements for the transport of mail. No venal motive need be imputed to the postmaster general. Crane’s quite natural wish to find his wife must have overborne the wife’s unexplained wish not to be found. Could Laurendeau in conscience have refused Crane’s blunt request? Most unlikely.

  These thoughts, however, occurred to Harris only now that the secret was out. He had expected it kept somewhat longer.

  He was hastening to the Anglican diocese, where he presently asked for any priest who might have known Theresa or William Sheridan when Parliament sat in Montreal in the late forties. He was told he wanted Philander Bray. Besides his duties at Christ Church Cathedral, Philander Bray taught dead languages every morning at McGill College.

  Harris hastened up the sapling lined, dirt avenue north of St. Catherine Street towards a square, stone hall surmounted by a thick lantern. Cowed young men were filing out after Bray’s lecture. The cleric had no charm of person or manner and remembered no Sheridan girl. With the father he had disputed the relative importance of faith and works, he recalled with asperity and a marked New England accent. St. James versus St. Paul—deeds versus piety.

  Harris could imagine Theresa’s benevolent father holding each one severally sufficient to save a soul. Likely neither would find favour in Bray’s eyes, which were too deep-set and thickly shaded ever to feel the warmth of the sun. Nipped by their frost, Harris stumbled frequently in explaining his errand.

  “Let me understand you, Mr. Harris.” Philander Bray rolled his lecture notes and tied them with a black ribbon. “You are a family friend, who allowed this Protestant Episcopalian woman to enter a Roman Catholic convent, from which you naturally find yourself barred. You now fear inter alia that she may be forced to return to an adulterous husband.”

  Harris noted the particular distaste with which his interlocutor alluded to adultery. A spark of hope flickered before yielding to the next icy blast.

  “As her late father’s former pastor,” Bray continued, “I am to insist on seeing her, to persuade her to leave the Grey Nuns if I can, and to otherwise convey from her a letter.”

  “An account of her husband’s crimes.” Harris was saying what he wished rather than what he knew Theresa’s letter to contain. “Which document,” he added, “must not fall into unfriendly hands.”

  “Legally,” Bray retorted, “his crimes are little to the point. In this very city, a judge recently ordered a woman back to a husband convicted of assaulting her.”

  “I don’t know the law, sir, but even if I make my case badly, please do not refuse me your help.”

  Bray sniffed noisily. “And what religion do you profess? Are you a churchman?”

  “My mother is a Presbyterian.”

  “I have no motive for helping you and no authority. Your request would have to pass through Bishop Fulford to his homologues in the Church of Rome.”

  The professor-priest set off at a brisk strut down the college avenue towards the city. Beyond it dully gleamed the swift St. Lawrence, highway and sewer. Harris let him go and wished him drowned—for all of fifteen seconds—then caught him up and tried again.

  Bray didn’t turn his head, which Harris observed for the first time in profile. Its prominent parietal and occipital lobes would have spoken to a phrenologist of such unencouraging traits as self-esteem, firmness and conjugality. It was all charlatanism anyway, Harris reminded himself.

  “There isn’t time for bishops,” he said.

  “For Miss Sheridan’s sake then, I must see what can be done. Don’t thank me.”

  Harris was too surprised by this apparent reversal either to thank or to correct him. Here was one man Crane’s name did not impress.

  “Show her the article, Mr. Bray.”

  The gentleman addressed sniffed again, evidently suffering from hay fever.

  The two men proceeded straight to Foundling Street, where Harris said he would wait. From a window table at the coffee house, he watched Philander Bray, in flapping black tail coat, approach the Grey Nuns’ gate. For some minutes Bray faced the slide in the door, then turned away. He remained nearby, however, which kept Harris from despair.

  After twenty minutes, Bray spoke again through the slide, and Harris wished the clergyman all the firmness his head shape was supposed to signify. The slide closed. Bray paced the plank sidewalk another quarter hour before—without a backward glance—he was admitted to the convent.

  Now the real waiting began. As the lunch hour arrived and faded into afternoon, it became tempting to fear that Bray had removed Theresa, or left without her, by another door. Clouds drifted lower across the square. Harris tried to make each cup of strong black coffee last an hour, and had just drained the final chilly drops from his third cup when he realized the fog had become too thick for his watering
eyes to make out the urn-shaped adornments on the convent gateposts. He settled his account and went to shiver on the sidewalk where Bray had been pacing. The temperature had dropped with the clouds.

  Eventually Bray emerged alone and—but for his own lecture—empty-handed. Harris bit back the keenest disappointment. Having just taken a short turn to keep warm, he hastened towards the clergyman through the mist. Might not his tailcoat pocket contain a few pages from Theresa at least? A line even in her hand? Impossible to imagine that Bray had spent so many hours in the convent without seeing her.

  “Mr. Bray—”

  Bray halted all questions with a raised hand and looked back towards the Grey Nuns’ door, which was still open. Presumably after some parting words with the portress, Theresa herself stepped out.

  Seeing her made the dank air summer sweet. Although thinner than nine days ago, indeed painfully thin, she greeted Harris with a smile from the heart. He felt his own face kindle at her flame. She wore the same plain gown and white bonnet as when she had entered the convent, and she carried a roll of papers she declined to let Bray relieve her of.

  “Isaac, did you send me Mr. Bray?” she asked cheerfully.

  Bray sniffed at the suggestion of having been sent.

  “I approached him, yes,” Harris managed to say, his pulse racing with coffee and emotion. Her presence in any form enraptured him. “Are you well?”

  “Well enough,” said Theresa. “I didn’t recognize Papa’s old friend at first, nor he me, but I remembered Mr. Bray’s preaching when I heard his voice. My father valued your support, Mr. Bray, on the disposition of the Clergy Reserves.”

  “Tempus fugit,” said Bray. “Let’s be off.”

  He takes no pains to appear congenial, thought Harris, recalling that at the college the priest had chosen to speak of his disagreements with William Sheridan rather than of shared causes and common ground. Now he took two or three steps west on Foundling Street and beckoned Theresa irritably. She did not follow immediately, but when she spoke again sounded wearied, as if by a long and uncertain purgatory.

  “Mr. Bray has offered to let me stay with him and his family. That’s best, Isaac, I think. We don’t know what Henry may do.”

  “A great improvement,” said Harris, giving her his arm. Whatever his misgivings about such a berth, his first task was to remove her from the doorstep of the convent now famous for sheltering her. “Where to?”

  “St. Peter Street to Craig,” said Bray. “Your company is not required.”

  “It’s freely given.” Harris walked north with them on the fog-filled street indicated, keeping himself between Theresa and the carters driving blind.

  “Mr. Bray prefers I not have callers yet,” she said, “but we can write. That is, if you like . . .”

  Through his shirt and jacket sleeves, Harris felt her grip tremble.

  “Count on my liking,” he said. “Is that for me?”

  Two steps ahead, Bray turned east on Craig Street towards the Champ de Mars.

  “Is that the letter?” Harris asked.

  “I wrote it for you.” Theresa pressed the roll of papers into his hand. “I have to give it to you, I suppose, but you won’t like me better after. It can’t be helped. Goodbye.”

  “Don’t say that,” said Harris. Her resignation told him she was not “well enough”—perhaps not well enough to be left with comparative strangers. “Let me take a hotel room for you instead,” he urged. “I’m afraid you’ll starve yourself.”

  She smiled then. “Under Mrs. Bray’s roof, I understand, I’m as likely to be trampled by wild buffalo.”

  “Take your leave, sir.” Bray stood sniffling before the door to a narrow house in a neat stone row. If only he would blow his nose and be done.

  “I shall thank you now, Mr. Bray,” said Harris, taking his hand. “As long as you have anything to do with this lady, you will have to do with me. I should like her seen by a physician.”

  “So I intend,” replied the clergyman, “this very evening. The city’s most knowledgeable attend Christ Church, as I trust will you.”

  “You are most kind.”

  To Theresa, Harris mumbled a ragged, unsustaining farewell. It almost choked him. As soon as she went indoors, he returned to Rasco’s and wrote Bray with an offer to pay her keep as well as any medical bills she might incur. Then he read her letter.

  Harris read with growing consternation. The evidence of ague in Theresa’s very handwriting all but sent him back to Craig Street. He had just sense enough to realize he was too overcome by the rest of the letter to speak coherently to anyone. He did believe also that the gruff Philander Bray would without further prompting call in as good a medical man as any Harris could find in equal time. Finally, the regularity of Theresa’s script in the most recently written passages kept him in his room, if not his chair.

  He washed his face and started again from the beginning.

  A second reading complete, he went back out into the fog and walked at random until after nightfall. Through his mind, meanwhile, ran a rope of many strands. Sometimes it ran, sometimes inched. It knotted up at others or reversed itself. It started independent of his volition, burning and binding as it would. Harris walked until he had it enough under his control to pick the strands apart and look at them.

  One strand was awe—dread mixed with wonder at what Theresa had experienced. He would never know her as he felt he once had, for since then she had lived horrors closed to him. Sheridan’s assassination grieved him, but what must be her grief? He would never be obliged to submit to a brutal husband, to watch him murder and still to sit at his table. Harris remembered Sibyl’s room. He could picture the low bed, the space between the yellow-brown coverlet and the brick floor—but, through no deficiency of Theresa’s manuscript, the most vivid images it gave rise to could encompass no more than a fraction of her ordeal. Imagine being kicked by a woman in her death throes and being unable to move a muscle to help her. Imagine living with that memory. Harris couldn’t imagine. The contemplation of such a moment humbled him. He could presume neither to blame Theresa nor to tell her not to blame herself.

  His own conduct was another matter. She had mistaken him and married elsewhere because he had not made himself plain. She couldn’t approach him when she needed a friend because he had “made such a point of keeping away.” Guilt was the second strand in his rope.

  The third was sympathy, harder to pick apart because of its breadth and strength. It moved Harris that Theresa had so generously and unassumingly opened herself to him, had indeed been dissecting the tenderest corners of her conscience at the very moment Bray had reached the convent. Even more moving was her courage. “Don’t call me brave,” she had begged him during their second night together outside Kingston. She was brave, though, tremendously. She had struggled alone not only against Sibyl, the treacherous Dr. Hillyard, and Crane, but also with Small and her father himself for his protection. After Sheridan’s death, she had not collapsed. She had shown extraordinary initiative and run enormous risks to find out its cause. Harris thought of her, groggy from morphine, calculating the deadliest grip on a poker. He thought of her beneath the bed, willing Crane and Sibyl to come where she could hear them, discovery in the end dependent on with which ear Crane listened for Sibyl’s heartbeat. Theresa’s need to understand was one Harris both admired and shared.

  It was more than sympathy. From the extent to which he recognized his world in her depiction—the constables, Kate MacFarlane, Jasper Small, William Sheridan—it was manifest how far the two of them saw and thought in harmony. There was no one on earth with whom Harris could ever be as certain that he belonged. Her letter confessed that she too had dreamed of life with him.

  At present, however, justice and safety for Theresa had to take precedence over softer musings on “what might have been.” Through Harris’s rope twisted the revelation of Crane’s crimes. The forest foliage parted. Harris had the beast in view.

  Crane’s murder of
Sibyl had been half suspected, although the manner in which Theresa had witnessed and been marked by it went beyond anything nightmare could have foretold. And there was more.

  Harris forced himself to sift the facts coolly. That Crane had also killed Theresa’s father, medical evidence had previously seemed to preclude. Here, though, were grounds to doubt Hillyard’s findings: (1) a fatal relapse would have required more time, (2) the doctor’s examination—confirmed by Lamb’s inspection of the pudding cloth—had excluded poisoning but not suffocation, and (3) Hillyard had a motive for pronouncing Sheridan’s death natural. Namely, he had conspired to administer the drug that had left his friend unprotected.

  And Crane’s motive? Might he, rather than Sibyl, have been the agent of political vendetta? Harris scarcely knew how to think about these questions yet. He was still accustoming himself to the unprecedented fact that a leading industrialist had slain a parliamentary hero. In such a world, anything could happen. Crane could kill again. One consolation was that he apparently did not know he had been seen breaking his mistress’s neck—another that, when the hangman snapped Crane’s own, Theresa would be free.

  The contrast between Crane’s victims could hardly be starker. Harris wondered if the supposed Master who had chiselled Sheridan’s features had had any hand in shaping Sibyl’s. Her lack of family and position had apparently not been offset by any personal attractiveness, and yet she had been mocked with what she called “a carnal nature.” A masterful jest indeed! Sheridan’s assassination amounted to a national tragedy, but his servant’s was tragic too. While she should have acted better, someone who did not find it easy to be kind might have acted worse. She had made sure she was not giving Theresa a fatal dose of morphine. She had seen Theresa and not given her away.

  Once separately examined, these lines of thought and feeling did not stay separate but continued to cross and intertwine. The heart-swelling vision of a girl writing to her mother in heaven might be followed by the desolating one of a man resting his head on his victim’s lifeless breast.