Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Mrs. Henry Crane would not be appearing either. It was curious. On her existence everything depended, like the letter π in an equation, but she was known only very approximately. Harris had not in fact seen her on his recent travels.

  At the straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan, he had found the principal settlement and county seat situated on Mackinac Island. Susan Iwatoke was not there. This community, however, differed from the Sault in that at Mackinac—or Mackinaw, as residents seemed to call it—she was not wholly a stranger to the white population. Seven years ago, she had cooked for officers of the garrison, without references. She claimed to have left a previous situation to escape an employer’s advances. One obliging United States Army major—in ’49 a captain—described her for Harris. Instead of falling straight in the usual Indian manner, her hair reportedly waved softly. Her features, by contrast, were accounted less comely than forceful. She permitted no liberties. In her first months at Mackinac, she had had visits from a Canadian suitor no soldier particularly remembered, but when these attentions stopped, she discouraged all male company. Soon after, she had moved away, returning only for a brief visit last winter, then removing farther west.

  Farther west than it was in Harris’s power to follow—but it did not matter, for now at last the grain had been added that tipped the balance. The drop had fallen that set the mill wheel in motion. The major’s circumstantial account had been enough to give Harris the idea of inspecting the marriage registers. And there he found Crane’s secret—as Ingram must have found it before him. Suddenly it seemed obvious. What had blocked Harris was his preconception that what he sought was an illegal rather than a legal act.

  He would always remember sitting overwhelmed by gratitude before that Mackinac County ledger. Here was Theresa’s release. Here was justification for so many miles travelled on such vague and slender hope.

  What had Crane done on hearing of Ewing’s accident? Rather than face his mortally injured partner, he had come to Susan Iwatoke and married her. He must have felt horrified and afraid, and in desperate need of consolation. When the moment of need passed, his new wife was abandoned, likely because he could not see her in the illustrious future he pictured for himself.

  Harris had blessed Susan Crane. Praise be to her rectitude in holding out for legal union, in holding out against the seducer’s charms to which so many women had yielded. Thanks be to firmness of principle, as well as to any lucky stars that had brought Harris at last into the presence of this wondrous book.

  Finally, he had bestirred himself to the tasks that remained. First, note the names of the witnesses. Then, before racing back to Montreal, find one willing to be brought to testify in a Canadian court. A shopkeeper named McCann filled the additional requirement that he had seen Susan Crane in robust health as lately as the turn of the year. No, he had not talked to his neighbours about the marriage or kept track of what became of the husband—but, if Crane was a bigamist, McCann would testify all right. He had great respect for Mrs. Crane.

  Mr. McCann’s passage and all other arrangements Harris had in the end delegated to Jasper Small, who had demonstrated such trustworthiness on the night of Harris’s return and of Theresa’s near immurement.

  In Crane’s trial for bigamy, Small himself acted for the Crown. The city’s more cautious barristers little sought the office of prosecuting so influential a defendant, all the less so when that defendant was represented by L.L. Matheson. Under oath, the shopkeeper answered both lawyers’ questions soberly and to the point. He convinced a jury of shopkeepers that Susan Crane was no mere country wife, but as validly married to the accused as was Mrs. Franklin Pierce to the President of the United States. Small telegraphed to Harris a sixty-word account, including verdict and sentence—guilty, two years.

  This was the minimum term allowed by law and the only one short enough to be served outside the Provincial Penitentiary.

  Notwithstanding, Crane’s partisans roared in protest. Next day’s Montreal Gazette reported the launch of a petition to have him pardoned in recognition of his service to the country. Meanwhile, he was to occupy the least dismal cell in Toronto’s Berkeley Street Gaol.

  Theresa took the news calmly. Now, Harris begged her, now—while Crane remained in custody—was the time to proceed with the murder charges. She saw no necessity. For Sibyl’s sake, he urged. She appeared to waver, but would not make up her mind.

  He spoke to Marthe. His acquaintance with her dated from the moment he had heard a steward on the Montreal steamer address a passenger as Mlle Laurendeau. Handed Jasper Small’s note on disembarking, he had brought her and her brother by cab—not a moment too soon—to the Grey Nuns’ gates. Since that rescue, Marthe’s mistrust of Harris had dissolved. She now heard attentively what he had to say regarding Theresa’s state of mind.

  Unluckily, though, her own quiet and reserved temperament blinded her to her guest’s distressing torpor. Theresa looked well—did she not?—béatifique même, walked a mile a day, ate what the city-trained cook prepared, attended mass with the family, and taught the younger children English.

  “When herself,” Harris suggested, “she likes to be of use. Give her more employment if you can.”

  Towards mid-October, he encountered a change. For the first time, Theresa was not in when at the end of the hour-long ride from Vaudreuil he knocked at the manor house door. She had gone with Marthe’s mother to visit the neighbourhood sick.

  The next day on his return, Theresa told him without animation but at some length about a farmer with lockjaw. While temperatures no longer permitted sitting out on the verandah, tall casement windows and pastel striped upholstery made the front parlour almost as bright. Mme Laurendeau presided—a handsome and articulate lady of fifty—but left the story to Theresa.

  It was feared this poor habitant would starve. A Saint-Polycarpe widow who dabbled in medicine was on the point of knocking out some of his teeth, that he might be fed. The proposal horrified the man’s wife. She would, however, acquiesce if no less drastic measures would save him.

  After ascertaining how long the sufferer had been without food or drink, Theresa sat by him and asked if he could nod his head. He nodded stiffly from the shoulders, bowed rather. She asked if he could swallow. Again he bowed.

  “He was in no imminent danger of starvation, but I thought lack of fluids might be aggravating the cramps.” Theresa fell silent, afraid perhaps of boasting.

  “Racontez donc à monsieur ce que vous avez fait,” Mme Laurendeau softly prompted.

  “By all means,” said Harris with quickening interest. “Tell me.”

  For too long, he was thinking, Theresa had not only been acted upon to her disadvantage, but had seen most of her own best intentions miscarry. The experience must be paralyzing. It was time for her to become the heroine of her own life.

  “I simply had him recline at various angles and with a teaspoon introduced water between his lips until we got it to flow around and between his clenched teeth.”

  “Two hours she sat with him!” exclaimed madame.

  “In the evening his wife got him to swallow some beef tea,” Theresa added.

  “Using your method,” said Harris.

  “Whose else but hers? And this morning, gently, gently, his mouth was beginning to open.”

  “With all his ivory still in it,” Harris observed. “Not a bad day’s work.”

  “It could not have been a serious case,” said Theresa, glowing a little with the compliment in spite of herself. “Truly, Isaac. I believe four in five tetanus victims do not recover.”

  Ten days later, days full of similar work, she told him that she thought it was time she went home to Toronto.

  As the morning of October 31 took hold, the season’s first sprinkling of snow melted away, leaving the fields around Coteau station smelling fresh and fertile again. The iron rails, which stretched at last unbroken to Toronto, glistened dully. Banners hung to inaugurate the line just four days ago shook the damp
from their still crisp block letters:

  VIVE LE GRAND TRONC

  VOIE DE LA PROSPÉRITÉ

  27 OCTOBRE 1856

  Eastward across the level countryside, a slanting column of wood smoke already stood out against the lighter grey of the sky. The train was coming.

  Its approach brought that long track to life. Harris caught his breath like any sightseer at the scale of the enterprise, while his thoughts centred on the grim business awaiting at the journey’s end. Impatient on all counts to be off, he was no more than half listening to Marthe’s father, who was genteelly boosting his riding as a place to invest—now that Coteau-du-Lac was “served by rail!” Down the platform, Theresa was strolling in conversation with Marthe.

  “Parliament won’t remain forever in your delightful city of Toronto,” the postmaster general was saying. “No—size and racial balance make Montreal by far the likeliest choice for a permanent capital, although little Ottawa is beginning to be spoken of as a compromise. Either way would make this county’s fortune.”

  The honourable member was two yards tall with an imposing French nose and an excellent English tailor. Harris’s Port Hope suit was freshly pressed, but loose and worn. His largest recent investment had been twenty dollars for two first class tickets to the delightful city where he would have to sell his last real estate holdings.

  He thought little of them. In that city next day was supposed to start an inquest into the death of William Sheridan. Harris still secretly doubted it.

  In the past week, he and Small had spent freely on telegrams. Theresa, Harris reported, was now willing to give evidence. Under the combined pressure of Crane’s bigamy conviction and her murder allegations, Chris Hillyard at last ceased defending the death certificate he had signed. He ordered Sheridan disinterred. The autumn assizes had ended just the day before. The surest way to hold Crane now was to have a coroner’s jury arraign him—a finding, said Small, equivalent to a grand jury indictment. Bail would be denied, and the petition for pardon on the bigamy conviction would be rejected, if not first withdrawn.

  The smoke pillar was rising straighter. Beneath it, a crow-black locomotive had rounded the last bend and was gliding towards the waiting four, the long beak of its cowcatcher ready to dispose of all obstacles of flesh and blood. The baron of steam was about to find himself in its way. His accuser would be on its back.

  Perhaps, thought Harris—but by the same token, Crane would know better than most how to wreck a train and who to get to do it. Harris would give odds that Henry had another one or two cards, at least, up his sleeve. It was too soon to be feeling quite snug and secure.

  “Monsieur Laurendeau,” he said in parting, “although my business plans remain . . . unsettled, I shall always think warmly of Coteau-du-Lac. Here as nowhere else, Miss Sheridan has been safe.”

  “If only we had known that Crane had over her no moral or legal right . . .” sighed the postmaster general, then added with gratifying directness, “Her father was my mentor in politics, monsieur. I regret deferring to his assassin.”

  Marthe shook Harris’s hand and promised to care for his horse until he had leisure to fetch it. Six carriages and a mail car constituted the entire train. Harris did his comically inadequate best to see that the wheels were attached to the axles. Then the two passengers climbed aboard.

  “It’s hard to believe we’ll sleep in Toronto tonight,” Theresa called down through the window in the pause before starting.

  Her words might have made Harris suspect she too was apprehensive—had her tone not expressed rather the agreeable wonderment everyone felt at the newly-opened line. Theresa was entitled to her share of wonder. Often enough had she accompanied her father between the Canadas by the more leisurely conveyances of steamer, coach and sleigh.

  “Don’t forget to set your watches back twenty-three minutes,” Laurendeau called up, as if neither Harris nor Theresa had ever ventured so far before. “When you travel west, you see, the sun reaches its zenith later and . . .”

  His further explanations were lost as the train rolled away from the station, and the journey began.

  Harris closed the window before sitting down. He squirmed in his seat. Mixed with his vague forebodings was the excitement of spending the next thirteen and a half hours at Theresa’s side, her sole companion. A black quilted carriage mantle hid nine tenths of her. From under a matching bonnet, chestnut brown hair—three inches longer than in August—spilled out over her forehead in a freakishly ravishing sheepdog fringe. Harris’s fingers yearned to be among the wisps.

  Aware of his eyes upon her, she looked up, smiled slightly, and bent again over her book. Whether or not she would in fact sleep the night before facing Crane in coroner’s court, she showed no anxiety yet. The volume she held was a journal. In it she pencilled sentences as the motion of the train allowed. Harris wondered if the composition of that harrowing letter had not had the delayed consequence of showing her she was capable of assembling her thoughts on paper, rather than merely keeping lists.

  “It amazes me,” she said, reading his mind, “how much time I spent cataloguing wildflowers. You must have been bored.”

  “Not at the time. What are you writing now?”

  “An essay on the sickroom. Listen: ‘The name is apt. Too often it is a tight box to contain and reinforce disease rather than a light and open place where the sick may mend.’”

  “We must see that it’s published,” said Harris.

  “The observations are my own, but from the late war Miss Nightingale draws the same lessons. True originality would be putting them in everyday practice.”

  Even as he applauded this goal, Harris judged the admirable Miss Nightingale too monogamously wedded to nursing to make a reassuring model. How soon might he broach the subject of his place in Theresa’s future? Not today, not tomorrow. He tried to look no further than the next telegraph pole, then the next, then the next.

  The poles appeared to pass the window slowly. A boy on horseback confirmed Harris’s impression by easily overtaking the train. Only after six or seven minutes did the rider again come in sight and fall behind, sparing his mount spurs and whip to save its life. A lordly passenger threw him a coin.

  By staging a hundred such horses between the metropolises of Canada East and West, one might arrive sooner, though exhausted. The appetite for speed grew with feeding, speed over comfort. The Cytherean and all “floating palace” steamships on Lake Ontario and the upper St. Lawrence were superseded, and the train still took too long. Soon passengers would resent any slackening of pace. They would even want to bolt down their meals in the jolting carriages. Harris wanted to.

  Lunch was served briskly enough at the station restaurant in Brockville, dinner at the one in Cobourg. By now night had fallen, and drizzle beaded the carriage windows. Theresa, however, was becoming more aware of her surroundings, which began to remind her of her flight. East of here she had slumped inattentively in a stage coach. Cobourg was where she had spoken to a bucktoothed horse named Jupiter and a big-eared stable boy whose name she did not know.

  “Asa,” said Harris.

  “What did happen to Enoch Henry?” she asked when the train slowed to cross the Prince Albert Viaduct at Port Hope. “I should like to repay him what he gave me for Nelson.”

  “You need not worry about that. He’s dead.”

  “Of what?” Her lovely lamplit features expressed concern rather than alarm.

  “A head injury,” said Harris to test her nerve, and hoping too by frankness to cut the distance that remained between them. “A brick fell on him—from this very bridge.”

  While the town spreading out below them lacked gaslit streets, individually illuminated house windows defined the valley sides and floor.

  “An accident then. People suffer such misfortune.” To these commonplace words Theresa looked as if she expected some rejoinder.

  Harris nodded. He found he could not after all tell her how the Englishman’s misfortune ha
d contributed to her rescue—nor yet did it seem timely to apprise her of Oscar’s drowning at Niagara. To slice away all misunderstanding was too brutal a surgery. Either they must go on forever as companionable strangers or peel truth like an onion one layer at a time. In a speed-drunk age, a task of infinite patience.

  Theresa spoke again. “Death followed . . .”

  “Instantly.”

  “A mercy there. Tell me something, Isaac, since you persuaded me to testify for Sibyl’s sake. Why does this subpoena mention only Papa?”

  Harris explained that a prior inquest had identified Sibyl’s remains, but not named her killer. On Sibyl, no second inquest was permitted. Nevertheless, so long as Crane could be kept in view, he would be indicted for her murder at the same spring assizes, where Theresa’s evidence would convict him.

  “But I didn’t see him smother my father,” Theresa objected. “How can I speak to that?”

  “You heard him confess,” said Harris, “and witnessed a demonstration that gives his confession credence. If in performing his post-mortem examination Professor Lamb finds William Sheridan was smothered, Jasper believes Crane’s fate is sealed.”

  “Poor Papa . . . I wish it were spring and we were done with Henry.”

  The final portion of the journey was plainly trying for Theresa. Just past Port Union, as the locomotive began struggling up the steep incline to Scarboro, a pair of new passengers let their eyes rest on her while passing down the car.

  “When will this hair grow?” she cried. “It attracts notice—and tickles my forehead.”

  “Let me tuck it up for you.”

  “Don’t.” She pushed his hand away. “This near the city, someone is bound to recognize me.”

  He touched her arm. She shook him off.

  “I suppose,” she added, “because I’m neither widow, maid nor wife, I have no reputation to lose. Kind of you to remind me! Well, everyone knows what sort of women most nurses are, so it seems I’ve chosen the perfect occupation.”

  “That’s enough,” said Harris. “I had no such thoughts.”