Death in the Age of Steam (19 page)

No more was said. Isaac's boots beat a brisk tattoo out the door, despite his misgivings. For his mother to learn of his joblessness, he thought, would pain his father more than her. Then again, not all battles could be fought at once. His visit had at least shown him where he stood, as well as relieving his father of any temptation to brag about him. His ultimate success must be his justification.

He walked out into the rain, around the millpond to the paddock where he had left Banshee. He barely limped now from his sprained ankle and found he could ride if he mounted from the right side instead of the left. The horse had been surprised but accommodating.

The doors of the stuccoed Presbyterian church opened as he rode by. He didn't look back, at least not until he was too far away to be identified by any of the worshippers. He had never felt more utterly alone. For now, no remedy.

From thoughts of his family he distracted himself by scouring half a dozen townships that filthy afternoon. Evening brought more rain. Not until every innkeeper and stable hand had gone to bed did he return, saddle-sore and empty-handed, to the city. The bay gelding Nelson and his lady rider had dissolved.

Downtown, the American Hotel boasted a night clerk, a preened young heron with a dazzling white neckcloth and a precise eye. Whatever the night clerk might or might not think of the mud on the guest's trousers, he knew the guest had a letter, hand delivered at 9:26 p.m. To avoid soiling the lobby chairs, Harris opened it where he stood.

Sun. 27 July

Dear Isaac,

Had to write tho' quite done in. Much work occasioned by yr. resig. Let that pass.

Lad we spoke of lodged out of town for his safety. After
mass today, praised yr. honesty & discretion till family consented to yr. seeing him. Come to me for letter of intro., but not tonight. Must rest.

Faithfully, Septimus M.

Murdock was sleeping above the bank. Until a watchman could be hired, he felt someone had to—though, as acting cashier only, he did not propose to move his large family there. Harris roused him from the mahogany canopy bed at seven on an already sultry Monday morning.

“Right, Septimus, what's the name of this altar boy?”

“Who?” Murdock pulled a paisley dressing gown about him and yawned.

“The boy,” Harris stammered. “The boy Theresa sent to summon the police on the night of the twelfth. The one you wrote to me about last night.”

“Oh, you mean Nicky Gunn. He's staying with his uncle, a baggage master for the Great Western Railway.”

“Which station, Septimus?”

“Pardon.”

“Your note said he was lodged out of town. Where?”

“Hamilton. Didn't I say? Here, Isaac, off so soon? Let me give you the father's letter to his brother first. Just so the Hamilton Gunns know who you are. Won't you have some tea?”

Harris grabbed the letter, refused the tea.

The first Great Western train of the day was just starting to roll as at 8:10 he climbed aboard. The feel of the iron handrail and a glimpse of the accelerating gravel shoulder beneath the steps made week-old bruises tender, but he didn't linger on the carriage platform.

For the short run, he had taken a second-class ticket. German-speaking emigrants occupied most of the sixty wooden seats. On the side away from the lake, however, he found one empty and slid his portmanteau beneath it. After declining a
slice of the thick sausage on which his neighbour was breakfasting, he was left to such reflections as the incessant clanging of rails, wheels and couplings permitted.

Lurching towards Hamilton, he ground his teeth at the lack of speed. He doubted whether, after more than two weeks, a meeting with Theresa's messenger would repay the time it cost.

The car sizzled. It bounced on its tracks like fat on a glowing griddle. Harris found no relief in the shade of the slate-grey clouds, none in the air pouring through the open windows at twenty miles per hour. When the train stopped at Oakville, ice cream vendors swarmed to the windows. Harris bought a dish and found it already softened to the consistency of bacon grease.

It was all nonsense. In the light of day, even Murdock was inclined to see Nicky's sojourn less as a precaution against Orange reprisals than as an opportunity for the boy to visit his young cousins. Perhaps—Murdock's parting suggestion—Harris would like to wait until Nicky returned.

Harris hadn't waited even to reply.

The locomotive slowed for the last time, dragging its tail on wheels through a timber bridge trestle at little more than a brisk walk. Sixty feet below, a canal and marsh gleamed dully. In the eight months that the Toronto spur of the G.W.R. had been open, Harris had come to Hamilton once on bank business and once to shoot ducks. From today's irritable perspective, both seemed to him like pleasure jaunts.

Just after nine thirty, with a clapping of the wooden buffers at either end, the carriage came to rest in the midst of three dozen other canary yellow cars. At half Toronto's population, Hamilton seemed to be suffering from twice the railway fever.

In his corner of the throng and bustle, the lanky baggage master, Nicky's presumed uncle, wore his heavy spectacles and railway cap as if they constituted part of his head. Distraught passengers in line ahead of Harris each received forms to fill out. With no one was this complete official peevish or surly, for no one did he much exert himself. The loss of other people's trunks and suitcases was evidently a misfortune Mr. Gunn had
learned to endure.

Harris reached the counter at last. Gunn had not the pleasure of knowing Murdock, but responded agreeably enough to his own brother's written request that Harris be granted an interview with young Nick. This could not, however, be arranged before the noon dinner hour, no, not by any means.

On the chance that Theresa had come west, Harris filled the interval with his standard inquiries of ticket offices, stables and hotels. By noon he had fruitlessly tramped through much of the town. Two of the main streets had been dug up for the installation of sewers, muddy planks across muddier moats providing the only access to some of Hamilton's proudest shops and homes. Fine structures, Harris guessed. After Toronto's surfeit of brick, the local sandstone would have been soothing to a less impatient eye.

The Gunn house was situated two blocks north of the railway tracks on MacNab Street. In this the port area, dwellings were frame. Inquiry of the children playing tag in the dirt street resulted in Harris's being directed to a house loyally painted in the G.W.R.'s canary yellow.

The baggage master arrived from the station as Harris approached the door. They found Nicky Gunn making candles for his aunt, who had no girl old enough to be entrusted with the task. The boy was between ten and twelve, neatly dressed, quiet and steady-looking. Straight blond hair fell over his heat-flushed forehead. Before pouring the hot tallow, he wanted his aunt's opinion as to whether he had the wicks quite straight in the moulds. He protested at having his task interrupted. At second asking, he nonetheless accompanied his uncle and Harris to the cramped and airless guest parlour.

What qualities were looked for in an altar boy Harris did not know, but he could see why Theresa might have picked Nicky above other passersby for an errand of moment. Questioning at first elicited no more than was known from Murdock. A lady had called out to Nicky from the gate of one of the villas facing the Esplanade, a red-brick villa with nine big windows in front
and a round roof over the front stoop. This could only be Sheridan's. And the lady? The conscientious boy described her in such a way as to convince Harris of her identity. Slender, younger than Nicky's mother or even his aunt, brownish hair, green eyes, mouth in the shape of—here the boy drew a low-pitched gable in the air.

As for her mental state on that night of her father's death, she had been in full control of herself as far as the boy could see, strong and confident of purpose. There was nothing broken or disconnected in her speech, although he believed she had been crying.

Harris, who had never seen Theresa in like condition, suffered a fresh, hot pang of pity for her loss.

“Now, Nick,” he said, leaning forward, “I want you to think most particularly, and tell me every word Mrs. Crane spoke to you, first to last, as much as you can remember.”

Taken somewhat aback, the boy looked to his uncle, who nodded.

“She said, ‘Here, take a message.' I didn't want to at first. I heard there were to be fireworks down the beach at nine o'clock, and I didn't want to miss them.”

“July 12,” his uncle scolded. “You should not have been out at all, with all that rabble about—making your mother grieve.”

“Go on,” said Harris. “You were reluctant to take a message. What next?”

“She said, ‘You must take this to the police at City Hall as fast as you can.' I knew the house belonged to people of consequence. They all do along Front Street. The word
police
caught my notice.”

“And the penny,” the uncle irritatingly added. In his own parlour, he was still wearing his railway cap. “I'll bet there was money in it.”

“What then?” said Harris. “What else was said?”

“That's all, sir,” the boy replied after a pause. “That was when I saw the tear on her cheek. I took the sealed up envelope—and the money . . . It wasn't a penny either, but sixpence,” he added, as if to demonstrate his honesty.

“Now think, Nick,” Harris insisted. “I'll tell you why I'm asking.”

“Mr. Sheridan was a prominent man, as you say,” the uncle put in, “a friend of Catholic and Protestant alike. That's why all the questions.”

“What's more,” Harris pursued, “Mrs. Crane disappeared the day after you saw her, Nick, and neither her husband nor any of her friends has seen her since. She may be in danger. We don't know if she has come to any harm. I am working with the police to find her, which is why I need to know as much as I can of what she did and said just before she vanished.”

The boy pushed off his face his shock of fair hair, which fell immediately back.

“I've told everything,” he said. “May I go now?”

“Nick,” said Harris before the uncle could again intervene, “was there something she asked you not to tell? Perhaps some indication as to what she needed police for? The present exceptional circumstances release you from any obligation you may feel to keep silent. You may speak before your uncle and myself. Well, Nick?”

“She . . . she said, ‘Don't breathe a word of this to anyone, but I have the woman that murdered my father. You must help me.'” The boy squirmed a little under the gravity of this communication, but his eyes held steady.

“That's all right, Nicky,” his uncle soothed. “We already knew there had been villainy. Mrs. Crane just didn't want you gossiping along the way. With all that Orange mob loose in the streets, she didn't want you telling them their game was up.”

“Anything else?” said Harris, considerably more excited than he could in kindness show. “Did Mrs. Crane give that woman a name?”

She had not. The boy had nothing more to communicate, and this time was immovable. Harris thanked him.

So—prior to Dr. Hillyard's examination at least—Theresa had shared the view of Murdock and his co-religionists that her father had been murdered. Give the uncle credit. His explanation of Theresa's request for silence was as plausible as
any. The unnamed suspect must be Sibyl Martin. How did so physically slight a woman as Theresa manage to hold her? Harris wondered whether the ancient physician's subsequent finding of death by natural causes had seemed as compelling to Theresa as to the authorities. If, as Murdock claimed, Sibyl had been locked up Saturday night only to be released Sunday morning, might Theresa not have fled because she feared for her own life with this murderess—as she believed—at large?

“Of course,” added Nicky's uncle, “Mrs. Crane did not disappear on July 13.”

“Her husband says she did,” Harris retorted.

“I saw her with her husband a week ago today.” The baggage master removed his spectacles to wipe them on a large red handkerchief. His naked, concave face looked as guileless as a saucer. “They were passengers on the 5:45 p.m. westbound express.”

As if to see whether he had been tricked into betraying a confidence, the boy watched Harris closely.

“I find this difficult to believe,” Harris stammered, tasting perspiration on his upper lip. The parlour was close and warm as a greenhouse. “May I ask if you were wearing your spectacles?”

“Uncle always wears them,” Nicky asserted.

“That's so.” Gunn curled the wires around his ears, and the glasses fell back into his face.

“You saw both Mr. and Mrs. Crane quite clearly, Mr. Gunn?”

“Through the window of a first-class carriage, no farther than across this room. Oh, yes. Everyone on the Great Western knows Mr. Crane, and that was his wife all right, just as my nephew describes her.”