Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  “And that one Talent which is death to hide,

  Lodg’d with me useless . . .”

  Not blind like Milton, she would not pity herself overmuch, though she could not help thinking with envy of Sister Saint-Jacques in the Grey Nuns’ pharmacy. Theresa craved employment as never before. Her inaction she felt had killed Sibyl. She simply couldn’t believe what Mr. Bray preached, that faith alone would justify her before God. Or perhaps she hoped by good works to demonstrate the strength of her faith—to prove it to others and to herself. Besides, even if God doesn’t need man’s work, God’s creatures do.

  From an end of sailcloth, she irritably cut a patch strong enough to hold several dozen gold coins.

  The pharmacy was closed to her, for the Grey Nuns thought she belonged with Henry. She must wait. To make her yoke bearable, she tried telling herself that Isaac would be back soon. He had been gone nine days already.

  She did not truly wish to be a pharmacist—much less a physician, which was why she did not find herself pining for the Female Medical College in Boston. What healed the sick, she thought, was not appearing briefly at a hundred bedsides, but rather sustained personal attendance at one or two. Admit it freely: to physic she owed her life. But no less beneficial than quinine had been the tender nursing she had received from Isaac and the nuns. What good were the most ingenious medicines absent such simple restoratives as clean linen, warm blankets, appropriate nourishment, a kind word and a reassuring touch? Indeed, not a few sufferers would with less risk forego the former than the latter.

  Theresa’s thoughts and hands stopped dead. Listen!

  Out of the more or less regular beat of hoofs along Craig Street, the sound of a horse slowing distinguished itself, as if the driver were seeking a particular house. The shadow of a carriage stopped outside the Brays’ closed shutters. Through their louvers, Theresa smelled the dust from its wheels. She held her breath.

  She heard the latch of the carriage door disengage, boots cross the plank sidewalk to the house door, and then six-quick-knocks-in-a-block. She had teased her suitor once for sounding so eager and insistent. Most gentlemen found a double knock sufficient. Crane’s touch never changed.

  From it, through walls and air, Theresa’s flesh shrank with a will of its own. Insistence is just his habit, she told herself consolingly. He doesn’t care. This was the first time she had heard from him since his telegram of 22nd August. The promised letter had not appeared.

  The six knocks came again, louder and slower. The Brays’ maid-servant worked for them afternoons only, so Theresa was quite alone. She had no reason to panic, though. Henry would not try to break in, certainly not in daylight and with no direct evidence she was here. She had only to wait quietly. She had only to avoid capsizing the sewing table or dropping her scissors, which felt perversely slippery in her grip.

  Henry left without knocking a third time.

  Next day she received his letter announcing his arrival in Montreal, expressing conventional concern for her welfare, and asking when he might call. With Philander’s concurrence, she sent no answer. She had been going out only to attend services at Christ Church. Now she stayed in altogether.

  On Thursday, 4th September, while the family was at dinner, she again recognized Crane’s knock. She urged Philander to ignore it. He said that his own vocation made this impossible, but that she was to take the children and lock herself in a bedroom.

  “Shall I still have my pudding?” the boy shrewdly demanded.

  Assured that he would, and the livelier he stepped the sooner, he raced his sister upstairs, where Theresa had little trouble interesting the two of them in a picture book. She read to them of Moses in the bulrushes. Above her own somewhat mechanical voice, she picked out by snatches those of the two equally imperious men on the doorstep below, the baron of steam and the shepherd of souls.

  “I told him you would not see him,” Philander reported to her later. “I declined to give reasons. When he threatened to speak to my bishop as well as to the commissioner of police, I said he might do whatever his conscience prompted, short of trespassing further on my family’s peace.”

  “Such a big man!” Charlotte added with emphasis. “Perhaps he would try to push past Philander and come inside, if he had not seen me behind in the hall. I stood behind with in my hands a musket.”

  “Calm yourself, my dear,” Bray enjoined. “You forget your English when you allow occurrences to excite you.”

  Theresa wished he would not say “my dear” in that peculiarly flinty tone that had nothing endearing about it. Charlotte’s excitement was natural, her taking up a weapon extraordinary. Theresa put her arms around the stalwart woman, who misconstrued this expression of gratitude as one of fear for Henry.

  “I would not shoot your Mr. Crane,” Charlotte hastened to say, enfolding her guest in turn. “I showed the gun only to keep him from foolishness. When he is reasonable, he will leave you alone, I am sure.”

  These words made Theresa flinch back from the embrace, for they reminded her under what a grave misapprehension she had left her hosts and to what risks she was exposing them. She had thought for her own safety to tell as few people as possible what she had witnessed from under Sibyl’s bed. To the Brays she had accused Henry of unfaithfulness only. For that crime alone, they were prepared to drive him off at gunpoint, but Charlotte plainly thought Henry no worse than her own inconstant first husband.

  “My first husband is a reformed man,” Charlotte had recently said, with a touch of pride, as if by divorcing him she had set his reform in motion.

  How easily she referred to him! With how little animosity or resentment! She even entrusted to him the education of their son. Surely she and Philander had a right to know that in Henry they faced something much more dangerous.

  Theresa told them now. Philander sniffed and said this was where fornication led. Charlotte coloured, bit her tongue, and finally scolded Theresa for not speaking sooner.

  “You’re right!” Theresa blurted out. “I’ve betrayed everyone my life has touched, and now you two, you four.” Bray’s scowl steadied her. “I don’t mean to,” she said more softly. “I try to even the scales, and every time I tilt them more askew. Send me away before I bring you more misfortune. I’ll go tonight.”

  “We will not hear of it!” Charlotte exclaimed, truly alarmed. “Sweet heaven, now we understand what griefs and shocks you have had to suffer. Would we expose you to new ones?”

  Philander concurred, advising Theresa against vain self-reproach. The Brays’ protection would without question continue, though some different arrangements would have to be made. From now on, either the servant or Charlotte would be in the house at all times. No stranger’s knock would be answered unless by Philander. The children would be sent away.

  “No, please don’t divide your family,” Theresa entreated. “I’ll go to Boston now.”

  “Madam,” said Philander, “you are in no state to say what you should do. Be wise enough to accept guidance.”

  “Wait until your Mr. Harris returns.” Charlotte’s eyes were still red, but her characteristic good-humour began to reassert itself. “Just another week or so. The change of scene will do my babies no harm, and the days will fly by fast enough, you’ll see.”

  The days flew like snails. The very seconds crawled. Once the boy had been parcelled off to one vicarage and the girl to another, Theresa was left with even less occupation. She mended clothes, dried fruit, pickled and preserved. As a great favour, Philander let her catalogue his library, which contained nothing more scientific than Browne’s two-century-old Religio Medici.

  She wrote to Marthe, without ill-will. Having enlisted her parents’ help in lodging Theresa with the Grey Nuns, Marthe would have been helpless to prevent their publishing this address when they judged fit. Theresa, moreover, had never revealed to the Laurendeaus the principal argument for silence. Her lonely confinement on Craig Street made her all the more conciliating.

  “
Dear Marthe,” she urged, “dragoon one of your brothers into escorting you down the St. Lawrence from your belle seigneurie and bring me all the country news, or any news.”

  Astonishingly, Henry did not return. Where was he? What was he doing? Perhaps he had gone back to Toronto. Days passed. He sent neither message nor representative. No legal papers were served, and no alteration in Philander gave grounds to suspect that Bishop Fulford had censured the priest’s conduct. The continuous suspense hung further clogs upon the clock.

  Theresa began having suffocation nightmares. Because of its associations, she slept without a pillow. Now she removed stuffing from her mattress till she was lying on little more than a double sheet over the supporting ropes. Nothing soft must come near her nose or mouth.

  To avoid thinking of Henry, she thought of Isaac, with whom she would have liked to find fault. He was too fond of her, for one thing. Furthermore, he was neglecting her.

  It distressed her not to know what he was doing. As the week wore on, however, it became clearer that the bare fact of his absence was what distressed her most. She began to catch herself in daydreams. Her imagination elaborated recent memories of his hand in hers, his cheek close to her own.

  His long face had become sharper over the years, less boyish, though his mouth had kept a contour of youthful sweetness, neither bitter on the one hand nor complacent on the other. Since they had ridden together, she reflected, Isaac Harris had known some worldly success. Unlike worldly men, he had remained trim and lithe. If he had, at least since embroiling himself in her affairs, become less fastidious about his appearance, still his appearance had not suffered. And through his eyes, through the pores almost of his skin, shone unmistakable new purpose. This time he would approach as close as she would permit.

  How close was that?

  Needle and thread could not shut out temptation. To tame her fancy, Theresa threw herself into the most physically taxing chores, practically depriving the serving girl of occupation.

  A visit from Jasper Small on the following Tuesday drew her thoughts another way. His previous calls had been brief. Thanks to Henry’s inaction, there had been no legal threats to discuss with him. Philander’s puritan strain of episcopalianism seemed moreover to scare Jasper off. This evening, by contrast, the volume of his inconsequential talk made Theresa suspect he had something to delay saying. She interrupted one of his racetrack anecdotes to ask him straight out whether Dr. Hillyard’s leave had at last been obtained to reveal what document had cost her Papa his life. Small nodded and collected himself.

  “It dated from 1832,” he began. He knew he need not explain the significance of the year. “It was George MacFarlane’s order to a ship’s captain to evade the quarantine, as captains often did on their own initiative.”

  Jasper’s account included all essential facts, though it left the anguish the letter had occasioned Theresa’s father as much as possible to her own memory and imagination.

  “You’ve understood what I needed to hear,” she said calmly when he had done, “and told it most considerately.”

  Later, though, when he had gone, disillusionment seeped quite through her, poisoning any friendliness she felt towards human beings.

  She had known George MacFarlane as her friend’s husband, an elderly plutocrat who lived in a castle, a patron of art and charity, and a payer of harmless compliments to women little older than his daughters. She had assumed that in his various commercial dealings, he must have cut a few corners—but not this. Nothing like this.

  Cholera was no abstract term to Theresa. In ordering its victims abandoned, George MacFarlane had not killed her mother directly, but together with other venal or merely reckless men, he had made his contribution to the hecatomb. Suppressing the documentary evidence had cost more lives, but what of that? Castle life must be protected. If Theresa called on the MacFarlanes next week, the laird would take her in to dinner on his arm, calling her his muse and inspiration.

  Having been wrong about Henry, wrong about George, she began wondering if everyone were not worse than he seemed.

  “All is vanity,” she thought, “and vexation of spirit.” Fear and love alike.

  She reread Ecclesiastes. Thursday afternoon of the third week of Isaac’s absence, the bleak phrases tumbled through her brain as she washed the pine kitchen floor. Theresa was alone in the house. Charlotte was on a charitable errand, Philander on episcopal business in Three Rivers and not expected home until midnight. With Theresa’s permission, Janet the serving girl had stepped next door to borrow something. Presumably, Janet had stopped there to gossip.

  “God hath made men upright; but they have sought out many inventions.”

  Like a fury, Theresa bore down with soapy brush on some obstinate, tarry stain and, when that failed to remove it, picked at it with her thumb nail. Stung by splinters, she lifted the filth with a knife and resumed scrubbing.

  She had not been pleasant company for Janet and could, for her part, well do without people just now, all and each. Charlotte resented separation from her children, however she struggled to hide it. Marthe had not come, and in today’s mood was not missed. Jasper had been neglecting to see that Banshee was tended and exercised. While rinsing her bucket and drying her hands, Theresa recalled Jasper’s confessing that except for betting purposes he and horses were “outside each other’s spheres.” He had seemed unconcerned.

  “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work in the grave, whither thou goest.”

  Theresa went to the front door and opened it a crack. The street was empty. When she closed the door, the house air felt sluggish and dense. How long had it been since she had been outside, in health and mistress of her own footsteps? Weeks past counting. She tied a scarf of Charlotte’s over her head. She again opened the door. A butcher’s cart was passing—driven by a meat-fed boy of complacent mien and pulled by a nag with flanks raw from whipping. When the street was again empty, Theresa went out.

  A chill breeze from the factory district followed her towards Rasco’s Hotel. Coal smoke notwithstanding, freedom tasted heady.

  Harris stayed on deck throughout the storm, though in the dark night he saw nothing beyond the next mountainous wave and a few feet of slippery rail. To the latter clung a soggy fellow passenger who in shouts told him they were crossing the mouth of Saginaw Bay. The Lady Elgin, a fast side-wheeler, creaked and groaned on the heaving water. Mindful of Father Gouin’s account of Steadfast, Harris listened through the shriek of the wind for the sound of splitting timbers. He had no time for mishaps.

  None occurred. By dawn, the gale had exhausted itself, and presently they approached the fuel stop of Presque Isle, Michigan, three fifths of the way from Detroit to Sault Ste. Marie. The recently violent Lake Huron caught slivers of light in smiling wavelets, ruffling the reflection of autumn’s first yellow foliage along the shore. Sun kindled the landscape without taking the clean, crisp edge from the morning air.

  It seemed a promising day. The storm had after all been little fiercer than ones Harris had known on Lake Ontario. The northern landscape too was, so far, much less desolate than he had feared—and there across the bay rose the lighthouse formerly manned by Harvey Ingram. Harris was the first passenger to step from the gang-board onto the dock.

  Yesterday in Detroit, he had had some luck. A steamship company had permitted him to inspect the old passenger lists, and there he found the name of Henry Crane. Crane had sailed from Detroit on October 10, 1849 with fare paid as far as Sault Ste. Marie—where he should have disembarked two days later. He should have disembarked on October 12, one full week before the date Father Gouin gave for Crane’s arrival at the Sault. Presumably Crane had learned something en route to change his plans. A glance at the schedules assured Harris that Ewing’s scalding on October 9 could well have been reported at Presque Isle by the time the vessel bearing Crane had stopped here for fuel on the eleventh. From seasoned sailors among the Lady Elgin’s crew he learned
that it had been lightkeeper Ingram’s custom to meet refueling vessels with cheap whisky and the latest gossip.

  Now Harris’s own boots were crunching over Presque Isle’s shingle beach. While the Lady Elgin was taking on cordwood, the detective meant to see what more he could learn at the lighthouse itself.

  Atop a cone of rough stone sat a brick cylinder, both sprucely whitewashed, the whole rising less than half the height of Toronto’s Gibraltar Light. The red door stood open. Down the spiral stairs trailed a string of whistled notes, which Harris followed unhesitatingly to its source. The timbre and intensity led him to expect a hale individual of roughly sixty.

  That presently was whom he saw at work polishing the eight sides of the cast iron lantern. The keeper was closely shaved and mostly bald, his head gleaming with perspiration in the greenhouse warmth of his glazed crow’s nest. He greeted Harris and continued plying his cloth. He did stop whistling, however, which Harris took as sufficient invitation to seat himself on the top step—the only place there was room—and ask if he had the honour of addressing the immediate successor to Harvey Ingram.

  “Can’t say I thought much of him,” the lightkeeper declared in a New World voice without overtones of Europe. “Ingram left a shambles here. Premises in disrepair. Drunk when he handed me the keys. Said he was celebrating his new appointment to—I forget where.”

  “Toronto,” said Harris, pleased to encounter such candour. “It seems odd he should get postings in two different countries.”

  “He was a U.S. citizen—but from Scotland, and with that burr, I guess he seemed British enough. Good riddance, if you ask me. And he had a backer there, in Toronto.”

  “Who would that be?” asked Harris. “I’m from Toronto myself.”

  “A railway and steamship man of some size, I believe he said.” The American grinned wryly. “Some size for the place, at least.”

  Harris wondered with amusement whether the other half dozen residents of Presque Isle would be equally contemptuous of a city of forty-four thousand.