Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Small spoke collectedly, but Harris could sense his loneliness. Society was Small’s oxygen. His need for others made him want to be loyal, but also made it hard for him to be unflinchingly reticent—and, open-hearted as he was, Small must have felt the strain of bearing unassisted and unconsoled the full weight of his ailing chief’s ideals.

  “On July 11,” said Harris, bringing them to the eve of Sheridan’s murder, “you were in court regarding an indenture.”

  “Gratifying that someone noticed. The employer had flouted the educational provisions, wantonly stunting a young girl’s mind. My pleading would determine her future. I had by the same date to draft a letter to the highest Imperial authorities on behalf of all the victims of the ’32 cholera. Thursday and Friday I neither ate nor slept.”

  “Then on Friday afternoon you didn’t even get a chance to show Sheridan your draft,” said Harris. “Did he tell you Crane had come calling that morning?”

  Small shook his head. “On MacFarlane’s business?”

  “Presumably.” Harris didn’t try to hide his disappointment. Significant and shocking as Small’s revelations had been, they had not so far yielded anything of immediate use to Theresa.

  “All I know of Crane’s involvement,” Small confirmed, “is what you pieced together in the coach. The idea that he took the Katherine letter by arrangement with MacFarlane—that relieved my mind of even less congenial hypotheses.”

  “You suspected,” Harris said bluntly, “that Emily Sheridan’s daughter took it to protect a spreader of the plague.”

  Knowing the letter’s contents made this suspicion monstrous—but Small hastened to deny that those contents could have been known to Theresa.

  “She would have recognized MacFarlane’s hand and nothing more. The first three letters she would have read are qlb. How could she have known they stand for put—as in, ‘Put ashore . . .’? Because of my warning, she might have thought it a document harmful to her friends without realizing its gravity. Without further inquiry, she likely would not have either destroyed this paper or returned it to its author, but her own disappearance put it just as effectively beyond my reach. I confess I came to Montreal hoping to recover it from her.”

  “And you meant to use it as her father would have,” Harris added.

  MacFarlane would by now have burned this compromising manuscript. Harris regretted its loss. The smoke of the fire stung his nostrils. It was a minor loss compared with the loss of a man like Sheridan, and yet Harris understood how Sheridan—as legislator, democrat and widower—could have defended the letter with his life.

  “Deuce knows what I should have made of it, Isaac,” said Small. “Perhaps nothing. With William Sheridan gone, perhaps MacFarlane didn’t need the letter. Hillyard had given up. I was so distracted I didn’t even open Sheridan’s strongbox for a week after his death. Then, when I did, I felt—well, you know the rest.”

  Small supposed a sense of culpability gave some people the will to do better in future, but he had in the past six weeks discerned no such improving effect on himself. He was as happy without the shame and expected to be more productive as well.

  Harris acknowledged his point, ungrudgingly but briefly. Now what evidence might they produce against the actual remover of the Katherine letter—a double murderer and Theresa’s pursuer? Was there anything they could take to the inquest when it resumed in six days?

  Small considered. The old set of summer migrants had long since left the lounge, and a new set was arriving for a last smoke before facing afternoon tea. Harris was restless from too much sitting. Small continued to consider.

  “I wonder,” said Harris, “if Crane knew the letter’s contents. From what you say, the key to the cipher was not in the box.”

  “It applied to all communications for the year. The sailor told Hillyard, and no one who has once heard it has ever found it necessary to write down—‘Britons never will be slaves.’”

  “Expressing heroic resistance to health regulation. Delightful!” Harris saw MacFarlane planted on his Queen Street battlements, untroubled victim of his own charades. “He’ll have schooled himself to find Sheridan’s death surprising. I don’t see how we could get him to rat against Crane, do you?”

  “Sir Rat, you mean? He would have to incriminate himself.”

  “If only your damned law would let Theresa testify . . . Look, Jasper, I’ll just put a bullet in Crane’s head, and you can defend me after.”

  It surprised Harris to hear bubble from his lips a daydream unacknowledged in his darkest thoughts. Some dank fold of his brain must have been secreting it, though, for with the words the act presented itself complete to his senses.

  Next Thursday he could be in Wilson’s farm yard. He would have a clean shot just after one p.m., when Crane stepped down from his brougham. Wait till Matheson the lawyer was clear. Crane’s chest would make a better target than his head, of course, keep the bullet lower too, reduce the risk to Farmer Wilson’s livestock. Harris felt his Sharps hunting rifle steady against his shoulder. No anger shook his aim. It would be as easy as cancelling a cheque. In fact, he was always at his calmest with a firearm in his hands. You had to be.

  While Harris was dreaming only, and by no means planning Crane’s death, still the absence of any plan to free Theresa drew the dream into its vacant place, as lungs will draw foul air when denied fresh.

  What was Small saying?

  “I should be better qualified for my part, Isaac, than you for yours. One does not become a man-slayer all at once. Degeneration takes time . . . Come to think of it, why not look back over Henry Crane’s life for another felony?”

  “How’s that?” said Harris. “Are you saying a man can’t break necks without having picked locks, or kill without having coined? I should have thought that crimes of choler such as Crane’s proceeded not from a sky prepared with clouds, but rather from the blue.”

  “And was Crane never in high temper before 12th July?”

  Harris saw Small’s point, yet doubted. “We have to keep him from Theresa. Have you heard rumoured any misdeed grave enough to meet that need? Adultery, you said this morning, is not enough?”

  “Quite insufficient,” Small airily replied, “and in Toronto he is such a public figure that any meatier scandal would have been difficult to keep hidden. However, he was not always so well known.”

  “His early career,” observed Harris, still far from sanguine, “lies buried far away in the Northwest.”

  “Along with his first partner—who died, I understand, a violent death.”

  “An accident.”

  “Perhaps.” Small retreated into his Buddha smile, then straightened his cuffs, seeming to recall his new-found sense of purpose. “Perhaps an accident,” he said. “Would it be heartless to hope not?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Steadfast

  To give himself and his horse a stretch, Harris parted from Small for a couple of hours. He wanted as well to reflect upon Small’s advice.

  Banshee’s sides were plainly sleeker than a week ago, her eye brighter. When Harris mounted, the animal wobbled her head, expressing readiness for action. Instead of taking her up the mountain as usual, he rode south and west through the factory district. Despite the city clatter, he felt himself just as effectively alone.

  Jasper was no help. Willing as he now professed himself to be of service, his best thoughts amounted to no more than wishes. Harris had no idea under what circumstances Crane’s unfortunate partner had perished—not so much as whether he had been burned, crushed or drowned—and Small knew nothing more. Inquiries could be made, yes, but were they worth the time?

  How much simpler, Harris told himself, how much more expeditious in view of Crane’s imminent arrival in Montreal, to simply remove Theresa from the jurisdiction! She must see that too. Crane would leave her in peace in New Brunswick, or New England, or New Zealand, or . . .

  Harris couldn’t quite persuade himself to this course either. Steam
power had so abridged distance that no place on earth seemed quite far or new enough.

  The cotton and cordage mills behind them, Harris had his mount pick up her gait. They were following the tow path of the Lachine Canal, up which chugged paddle-wheelers Harris had last seen four hundred miles away. There went the gleaming Cytherean. Her banners tumbled on the late summer breeze, and her Botticelli goddess rose on a clam shell from the pilot house. Time and space shrank.

  They must have been shrinking for Crane as well. The part of Crane’s life that he had left on Lake Superior, perhaps in the belief he was leaving it forever, his own steamships and railways had been bringing closer every year. Somewhere between Sault Ste. Marie and Fort William might lie a youthful shame he had counted on never to overtake him.

  A shrinking world penalized the fugitive, but benefited the pursuer. Better at these odds to pursue.

  At the instant it formed, this insight struck Harris as pivotal. He felt its heft and shapeliness. It fell into his dialogue with himself like a greased pin into a hinge. In truth, however, without having made any conscious decision to do so, he was already pursuing Small’s suggestion. He was already proceeding full gallop towards the Lachine offices of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the likeliest place on the island of Montreal to obtain information regarding Crane’s northern years.

  Eight miles west of the city’s heart, the Lachine Canal drank in the St. Lawrence River through a trio of mouths, each of a different age, before blending the water and sending it east to turn the wheels of industry. By five o’clock, Harris was tying Banshee to the rail of a bridge that spanned the oldest and narrowest of the three channels. Stone banks and shade trees sheltered the waters that no vessel larger than a canoe could have ruffled. Two brown ducks, mallard hens, paddled tentatively from beneath the bridge. To either side in park-like calm stood the Canadian headquarters of the company that owned half the continent.

  Harris turned first to a massive, dressed-stone villa on the north bank. Thick columns and balustrades hung about the entrance. Thick mutton chops hung about the face of the immaculate porter. The visitor was briefly conscious of his own dusty riding clothes.

  He was led to an office which, in the late afternoon, exhibited as much spruceness and bustle as if the work day were just beginning. Bookkeepers’ and copyists’ pens scratched briskly across the pages of neatly bound ledgers. Harris had heard that Governor Simpson kept long hours, rousing his voyageurs as early as one a.m. when travelling in the Northwest. Evidently a similar regime applied at home. The governor lived upstairs, but was currently absent on just such a northwestern tour of company trading posts, a clerk briefly intimated. No one familiar with Lake Superior in the forties was just now in the office. Perhaps if Harris would step across to the warehouse . . .

  Outside, he crossed the bridge and made for a long, low fieldstone building on the south bank of the old canal. The door was open.

  “Pack ’em tight, curse you,” someone inside was grumbling. “You can get six or eight more in that piece, up to a hundredweight—but snug, mind.”

  Harris entered the dim and mostly empty storeroom to find a lad of perhaps fourteen struggling to tie a tower of blankets into a bale compact enough to be transported by canoe or portaged.

  “Bear down on it with your knee there. Press out the air . . . Who are you?”

  The speaker, noticing Harris, stepped forward out of the shadows. He wore a ragged, salt and pepper beard and an old-fashioned brown frock coat startlingly patched in blue, green and red. His right hand rested on the butt of an old single-shot pistol tucked into his belt.

  The boy was all but standing on the blankets now and seemed paralyzed for fear the jack-in-the-box would spring rafter-wards once more. Before this could happen, Harris seized the encircling rope and knotted it tight.

  “I’ve some questions regarding the Northwest,” he told the parti-coloured warehouseman. “The office referred me to you.”

  Considering that the region alluded to extended twenty-five hundred miles, all the way to the Pacific Ocean, Harris prepared to be laughed at.

  “I know the Northwest body and soul. Anything worth knowing about its commerce, its redskins, its fur-bearing animals, its rocks and rivers, its storms and freezes I can tell you without your even asking. Now I’ll thank you to undo that bale you’ve been meddling with. The brat has to learn for himself.”

  “Mamma will be looking for me, Uncle,” the boy quickly interposed. Taking advantage of the distraction Harris had provided, he grabbed a shotgun from beside the door and left with a promise to come again tomorrow.

  The uncle grunted scornfully. He was a powerfully built, apparently once vigorous man, who now moved stiffly and carried a paunch. The face behind the beard was weathered but no longer firm. Long service on rougher ground had presumably earned him this custodial position, which if it made few demands afforded little in the way of society—no captive ear for his counsel, no permanent target for his ire.

  Having by now had some practice questioning strangers, Harris bet this one would talk. Whether to the point remained to prove.

  “Well, state your business now you’ve spoiled my lesson,” he said, taking the only chair. “I’ve leisure enough till October, when the canoes come back down river with the furs, and there’ll be plaguey few of those. The land this depot serves is all trapped out. Who wants beaver hats now anyway? I suppose silk’s the thing in Europe, although where the warmth in silk is you tell me. Has fashion done away with winter there?”

  “Excuse me, Mr.—”

  “Cuthbert Nash. I thought the scribblers yonder told you. They know me. Marten you can sell and arctic fox, but they go out through Hudson’s Bay, not Montreal . . .”

  In time, Harris extracted the admission that, while he had never been as far as the Pacific, Nash had from 1830 to ’49 managed a trading post north of Lake Superior, the only barrier to his attaining higher office being his lack of formal education. Not lack of shrewdness, mind. The mid-forties had seen a copper rush on the U.S. side of the lake and the arrival of steamships. The first were side-wheelers, but Nash had made a young boat-owner’s fortune by convincing him that the lake was too rough for paddles, and that he and his partner should build a vessel powered by screws instead. A sandy-haired fellow from Kingston, son of a deceased hardware merchant.

  Harris, who had been pacing about the warehouse, glancing at the piles of blankets, guns, kettles and hatchets used in trade, stopped in his tracks.

  “Was it Henry Crane? What more can you tell me about him?”

  Nash expressed irritation. He wanted to talk about his own solid success as post manager and what a capital chief factor he would have made, not about some here-today, gone-tomorrow speculator.

  “He left suddenly?” said Harris. “What were the circumstances of his departure?”

  “I know nothing about it. I thought you wanted to hear about the Company’s activities in the Northwest. The key is managing the Indians. Your Ojibway is unpredictable, but my experience taught me just when to extend credit and when to come down hard.”

  “You did say ‘here-today, gone-tomorrow,’” Harris persisted. “Why did you use those terms?”

  “He was gone the last time I came through Sault Ste. Marie, wasn’t he? That would have been in November ’49.”

  “Gone where?” said Harris.

  “South, damn you,” Nash exploded. “Where else? The canal around the rapids there still hadn’t been built and kept getting delayed, so you couldn’t run your ships down into Lake Huron. He must have got tired of waiting.”

  This hardly sounded to Harris like a guilty departure. “What exactly happened to his partner?”

  “No, you tell me now—what’s your interest in Crane?” said Nash, tugging at the greasy lapels of his harlequin frock coat as if it were a barrister’s gown.

  Harris looked for an answer he could give with some show of conviction.

  “The truth, mind,” Nash scolded. “The Ojib
way will bear witness I’ve a sure nose for any sort of lie.”

  “I’m making inquiries on behalf of a lady,” said Harris.

  “Go on. What inquiries?”

  “My object is to discover whether there is anything in his past to indicate that Henry Crane would make an unfit husband.” Harris wished he had had this mission years ago.

  “Not married yet?” Nash snorted. “I had a country wife, three children too, but Governor Simpson would not let me bring them to Montreal. He left two families in the Northwest himself before he married Lady Frances that’s dead. Now we’re both alone.”

  “I see,” said Harris, pausing briefly in acknowledgement of these domestic upheavals. “What became of Crane’s propeller ship?”

  “Last I saw, it was sailing under the Stars and Stripes, so he must have sold it to the Michiganders once his partner died. Now don’t go asking his fool name or how the deuce he got so scalded up. I had my own affairs to think of.”

  “Scalded by the ship’s boiler?” Harris doggedly inquired.

  “After nineteen years,” said Nash, “I was at last to receive advancement, all the way to Hudson’s Bay House in Lachine.”

  “I understand, but as for Crane—”

  “For Crane I didn’t give a—look, Mr. Question Mark, there used to be a lighthouse keeper up there who knew the story. Anything you want to ask about Crane you ask Harvey Ingram.”

  “Harvey Ingram?”

  A gunshot close outside underscored the repeated name. Window glass rattled. Banshee snorted.

  “My sister’s brat is shooting ducks again!” exclaimed Nash, pushing Harris towards the door. “He’ll blacken my name with the Company if I don’t put a stop to it once for all. Get along. Time for me to lock up here anyway.”