Death in the Age of Steam

by Mel Bradshaw

  Harris righted the prie-dieu chair, still firm enough in the joints for all its rough treatment—although a bullet hole through the seat admittedly made it less than inviting. In any case, Marion Webster ignored it.

  “See to Henry, missus,” she insisted, advancing a step. “Do be quick about it. You have to save him.”

  She clasped her hands to her round cheeks and pressed her long, full lips quiveringly together. Plainly, she wanted to run to Crane, but was also scared.

  Crane lay where Harris had dragged him, under the further window, equidistant from the bed and the hearth. Theresa went to him. Kneeling on a dry patch of carpet by his head, she held two fingers to a blood vessel in his neck. She had to feel his stillness. It amazed Harris how slight, even in her quilted mantle, Theresa appeared next to Crane.

  She had to hear his silence too. In another moment, with steady hands, she undid his tie and shirt—her every movement quick, gentle, cool, precise. She removed her bonnet and set it behind her. A gasp escaped Marion Webster, whether at the state of Theresa’s hair or at the directness with which Theresa laid her ear to Crane’s chest. Theresa listened in three different places, about five seconds each time, then sat up.

  “Yes, Miss Webster,” she said. “He is dead.”

  The seamstress slumped down without regard to the chair, which Harris slid under her.

  “And how are you, Theresa?” he said. “Have you any hurt?”

  “Not so much as a scratch.” She rose and came to him, her eyes bright upon him. “And you, Isaac? I can’t tell what happened here. Are you injured?”

  “A little bruised, perhaps. Nothing more. That was a fine throw you made.”

  “Wasn’t it?” Tenderly her fingers brushed the side of his face Crane had struck.

  After so long and uncertain a voyage, he touched the verge of bliss at last, although the taste of blood lay thick still in his throat. Then, over Theresa’s shoulder, he caught Marion Webster looking up at them, her round face miserable with grief.

  “Did he mention me?” she said. “Before he—you know, Mr. Harris—at the end? Mrs. Crane here didn’t love him at all, so she won’t mind. I practically carried him up here. Just tell me what he said about Marion Webster.” Her voice kept getting louder, as if she feared they were receding from her into their own private realm. “He could be quite romantic, you know.”

  Before midnight, Vandervoort did see the light in Sheridan’s window. He stifled an oath on entering the room and put a tin flask to his lips. After the most cursory examination of the mutilated carcass, he flung open a window and shouted down into the street for a constable to stand guard at the scene and for anyone to call off the volunteer searchers. The prisoner was dead.

  One effect of this roaring was to scare away the cabman Crane’s accomplice had posted in the back lane. Honest use might otherwise have been made of his vehicle, although it wasn’t a long walk to Police Station No. 1. Theresa accompanied Marion Webster, Harris and the red-haired inspector following just behind.

  Crane’s escape had cost Vandervoort any chance of early promotion—he said, draining his flask—so he was not persisting in a course of stubborn and fruitless temperance. One day Toronto would have a well-ordered police force, one day soon. It could be done. Look at Montreal.

  Harris was still too steeped in blood to look so far.

  “You’ll be wanting this,” he said. He pulled the Colt Navy revolver from his belt and by the street lamps read the serial number—40099. “It’s the one you took from Ingram, John. I don’t suppose it was locked up.”

  “I told Morgan. I told Devlin.”

  The inspector explained that Crane had that day been brought in from the Berkeley Street Gaol to City Hall in anticipation of his appearance at the Sheridan inquest. Guard duty fell to Devlin and Morgan.

  “Of the two,” Harris said, “Morgan struck me as being slightly less muddled. Did he fire the fatal shot?”

  “No,” said Vandervoort. “Crane may have killed him by accident, if not in blind panic. Morgan took a bribe and turned his back.”

  “And carried forbidden letters too, I suppose, to the Triumph captain and this Miss Webster.”

  “She’s a poor simpleton if I saw one,” said the policeman, dropping his voice. “Crane would not have stayed two minutes with her if he had made it out of the country, but he wanted an accomplice here in case things went awry, as they did. I’ve made some use of the piece myself. I’ll keep her clear of the Penitentiary if I can.”

  “He certainly won her loyalty.” Harris marvelled at such universal persuasiveness. “So Devlin,” he added hopefully, “refused Crane’s bribe.”

  The name Devlin brought to mind a wharf rat never quite dressed, his angular face never completely shaved, his limp black hair never absolutely combed, his whining demands never totally met, his knowing look never remotely justified. Yet Devlin and his carbine had held out.

  “Wrong again,” laughed Vandervoort. “Devlin took Crane’s money and shot him anyway. As you say, the boy is muddled.”

  Despite the lateness of the hour, eight or ten of the civilian volunteers who had helped search the docks were gathered outside City Hall to commiserate on Crane’s demise. What a cheat! What a sell! They had rolled on Crane’s rails or helped lay them. They had sailed his steamers for pay or paid to sail in them. They had looked forward to seeing the mighty brought low and were now to be most cruelly denied a public figure’s public indictment for murder. Was Crane really dead or being spirited away by powerful friends? Rich men never swing. Show him to us then. When can we see him with our own eyes?

  Harris and Vandervoort fended off their questions while making a path for Theresa and Marion Webster. They had reached the City Hall portico at last when out of its shadows into the lamplight stepped an Indian woman in a green taffeta dress.

  “Inspector Vandervoort,” she said without haste or hesitation, “I am Mrs. Henry Crane. When may I have my husband’s body?”

  The onlookers fell silent. They could not have known she was there in the dark doorway where beggars sat.

  She did not stare while being stared at. Her strong, deep voice made Harris think she dropped her eyes from politeness rather than timidity. A long, straight nose dominated her copper-coloured face. Her shawl had fallen back off her wavy black hair, and she showed no sign of chill in her unseasonably flimsy gown. Her age appeared to fall between Theresa’s and Crane’s, late twenties.

  Here then at last, thought Harris with quickened pulse, was the individual on whose strength of character so much had turned. She must have arrived from the Northwest this very night, expecting to find her errant husband alive—and must have heard otherwise from those clamouring to see his head on a pole. What now were her intentions? A hard-eyed Métis man in buckskin and ragged beard stood at her side, clutching a buffalo rifle, ready to second her will. To her reasonable demand, Vandervoort was responding most sluggishly.

  “Well, John?” Harris prompted.

  “Your body?” said the policeman at last. “That’s as the coroner in his wisdom finds. You’ll wait a week at least.”

  The buffalo hunter bristled at this tone.

  Susan Crane perceived Vandervoort was tipsy and ignored him. Instead she addressed Marion Webster, who was gaping as if she beheld a chimera.

  “Are you this Theresa who got my leavings?”

  One bystander guffawed. The seamstress quailed and shook her head.

  “Mrs. Crane,” said Harris, “the lady in question deserves your sympathy sooner than your contempt.”

  Theresa now stepped forward and spoke with feeling. “I am the unfortunate woman your husband pretended to marry, and I can only wish you had made known your prior claim.”

  “A close race, these redskins,” said Vandervoort. “Stand back there!” he admonished the volunteers, who were getting something of a show after all.

  “Did you agree to keep your marriage secret?” Harris asked above the rattle.

&nb
sp; “Secret?” the widow scoffed. “It was in the book and witnessed. I’ve always used his name.”

  The name Crane, Harris reflected, sounded Ojibway enough and would excite no suspicion. Possibly she thought that the white man kept only one book.

  “He offered money to close my mouth,” she continued, “but I said, ‘Provide for your wife or don’t. It’s beneath me to make mischief in the South.’”

  “Why talk to them now?” snapped her companion, speaking for the first time. “Let’s go.”

  “Mrs. Crane,” said Theresa, “I’m sorry you’ve come so far to hear hard news. Will you take my hand?”

  “You’re skinny for Henry’s taste.” Susan Crane glanced again at the ampler Miss Webster, who was still too terrified to speak, then took Theresa’s hand. “He was sober and fine-looking, and he fancied me, but he only married for a moment’s comfort. I soon saw that no knot holds weak rope.”

  “But you did come here,” Theresa insisted, “expecting to see him again.”

  “Word of his trials reached the Red River. Is it true he killed your father?”

  Theresa’s throat caught. “And my father’s housekeeper.”

  “And a constable,” added Vandervoort, properly regretful. Morgan had been more use to him than most.

  “No!” Marion Webster found her voice. “I don’t believe it. It’s all lies and mistakes—”

  But the spectators’ denunciations drowned the young seamstress out.

  “—a proper seraglio, I tell you.”

  “—ran roughshod over everyone.”

  “—almost got away with it too.”

  “—five good pennies I’d pay to look on his worthless hide.”

  “—a prize specimen, that husband of yours.”

  Now a shiver seemed to pass over the Indian woman, if not of cold then of revulsion against this alien place. She might have pointed out that when she knew Henry Crane he was no murderer, no bigamist.

  “I still want to bury him,” was all she said.

  “We’ll help if we can,” offered Harris and read in Theresa’s eyes that he had spoken her thoughts as well.

  The shortness of that night saved him from dreams of Crane floating in his red lake. Head had barely touched pillows when a hotel servant arrived with shaving water and the news that Miss Sheridan had already left her room.

  Harris found her in the breakfast parlour with black coffee before her. The dead black of her dress made her face pale, softening none of its tiredness, and still she glowed with purpose through her mourning weeds, straining towards nine o’clock and the convening of the inquest on her Papa.

  “I’ve had no chance to mark his passing,” she pointed out. “It seems a poor ceremony, this tribunal, but Papa would not have thought so. I’m sure he would have had some reminder for me of the Magna Carta pedigree of the coroner’s court.”

  Harris smiled assent and said little.

  The prospect of Theresa’s accusing Crane to his face of her father’s murder had until now overshadowed all other facets of the inquest, which this morning—with Crane absent—appeared in a quite different light. What loomed largest now was the imminent opening of that ornate coffin. The jurors must be sworn in the presence of William Sheridan’s remains, whose condition after sixteen weeks Harris could not guess. The hermetic cast-iron casket must have retarded putrefaction—but by how much?

  “Will I be required to see Papa?” Theresa suddenly asked.

  “No.”

  “I’d rather remember him chuckling over his mail,” she said.

  She and Harris were soon breakfasted and walking back west past Sheridan’s villa along Front Street. Autumn temperatures kept pedestrians up to a military gait. Septimus Murdock, short of breath as always, was heaving himself along eastward at an even brisker rate, dragging a well-scrubbed boy of six or seven by the hand.

  “Hallo, Septimus,” called Harris with pleasure. “How are you?”

  “Isaac!” exclaimed his old associate. “I’ve been reading of your exploits in the papers. Bravo. Miss Sheridan I know of course by sight, but won’t you introduce us?”

  Harris did so. He believed he had mentioned to Theresa his highly industrious accountant and successor. Privately, Harris thought Murdock’s new responsibilities must suit him, for the man seemed so much more at ease.

  Murdock proclaimed himself delighted at Theresa’s safe return.

  “Like all my co-religionists,” he said, “I greatly admired your late father and sincerely feel your loss. For compassion, for integrity, we’ll never see his like.”

  Harris felt this to be so. However young, the country was old enough to have an irreplaceable past as well as a beckoning future.

  “Tributes such as yours are solid comfort,” Theresa answered. “And is this intelligent-looking gentleman your son?”

  Shyly flattered, the boy dropped his satchel in confusion.

  “One of many, I thank God, but the aptest scholar. I must get him off to the cathedral school.” Murdock’s goateed chin quivered as if he were about to say something quite bold. “I do believe he’ll live to see a new harmony between Christian and Christian.”

  Here was a change, thought Harris. He wondered what could be the cause.

  “I pray so,” Theresa assented.

  “Yes,” Murdock continued, “Orange Grand Master Gowan himself has made some most conciliatory statements, and at today’s ceremony, both Catholic and Protestant bands are to play. Call on me at the bank, Isaac, soon.”

  “Gladly,” said Harris. “Which ceremony is that?”

  “Why, to mark the early completion of Conquest Iron Works!” Murdock gestured towards a new brick chimney towering incongruously above the Front Street villas. “Think of it this afternoon when you hear the horns bray—Roman and Orange brass sounding as one. Come along, Decimus! Ah, Miss Sheridan, if only your father had lived . . .”

  “If only,” Theresa said dryly when their haste in opposite directions had carried Murdock out of earshot.

  Harris thought to himself how Conquest’s erratic fortunes came into that hypothesis. Newbiggins’s venture had made Murdock a cashier, liberated Harris to be a full-time detective, and to some extent tempted Crane to become a murderer.

  Sword’s Hotel lay just ahead on the right. The older villas like William Sheridan’s were set back behind gardens, but in the forties the experiment had been made towards York Street of building a row of four attached houses flush with the sidewalk. They did not sell. After ten years’ service as Knox Presbyterian College, they had just been renovated and—with the addition of a new wing behind—opened to paying guests. By contrast to the more commercial American Hotel, Sword’s was styling itself the choice of parliamentarians. It was into Sword’s modern ballroom that Reform statesman William Francis Sheridan’s disinterred casket was carried on the morning of Saturday, November 1, to be opened in the course of the inquest and in the presence of the jury.

  Theresa arrived to find the spectators’ seats already largely occupied by her father’s constituents and admirers. The constable had not yet called them to order. A spontaneous and sympathetic hush nonetheless fell upon them as, with Harris at her side, she approached the coffin. It rested on low trestles and had been brushed clean of mud except in the deepest recesses of the abundant scrollwork. Theresa rested her hand upon the box’s metal lid, so lately weighted down with earth.

  “Here I am,” she murmured.

  Harris could imagine no words more consoling in the voice of her who had disappeared and was returned. For him, this would always be the memorable moment of a proceeding whose formal results could only be confirmatory, and which Friday’s events had drained of any urgency.

  Later, when the lid was lifted and the jurors sworn, they considerately uttered no gasps or exclamations, nor let any sign of the cadaver’s condition appear in their faces. It transpired that Theresa’s testimony would not be heard until after Professor Bernard Lamb had performed his post-mortem examina
tion. This delay seemed for the best. Another week would give her time to recover from recent shocks before publicly relating Sibyl’s death.

  The inquest adjourned for the day before noon. Theresa looked in the assembly for Dr. Hillyard, but was told her Papa’s old friend had been excused from appearing on the grounds of ill health and had again betaken himself to the West Indies.

  Jasper Small had also been unexpectedly absent. He greeted Theresa and Harris at the door with inexplicit apologies and an invitation to lunch. He wore a new suit and bowler hat. He ordered Sword’s best wine. Plainly his dishevelled state on meeting the train last night had reflected his anxiety alone and not his current fortunes. Had he a new client? After recounting as much of Crane’s end as sorted with appetite and digestion, Harris resumed his inquisitor’s rôle.

  “The Garrison was not required after all, Jasper, but since when have you been on such intimate terms with the Attorney General as to approach him on the subject?”

  “In truth, it’s my senior partner who has the influence there,” said the lawyer with his enigmatic smile. He then answered his own riddle by adding, “Lionel Leonard Matheson.”

  Harris put down his fork.

  “Is he not Henry’s lawyer?” asked Theresa in surprise.

  “He was,” Small gently corrected. “It seems my prosecution of the bigamy case impressed the old fox. When he lost, Henry discharged him—and Matheson felt at liberty to approach me.”

  “I know him socially,” said Harris, “and believe he’s honest, but he’s a Conservative. Won’t that mean quite a change in your work?”

  “A John A. Macdonald Conservative, nothing like the hidebound old Tories that Willie Sheridan spent his life battering and educating.” Not seeing what he wanted in their eyes, Small looked into his wine glass. He didn’t see it there either. “The fact is,” he admitted, “I’m no good on my own.”

  “You did the right thing then,” said Theresa. “Now will you represent Henry’s widow?”

  Small brightened immediately. By not dying on the scaffold or under sentence of death, Henry had improved Susan Crane’s claim on his estate and saved his remains from perhaps being offered to medical students.