Death in the Age of Steam (25 page)

Stepping over the rail, Harris sprang head first into the lake. As soon as he felt the water—icy even in August—sting his eyelids, he doubled up to slow his plunge. Deeper meant colder. More importantly, he didn't want to risk getting sucked into the steamer's whirling screws.

Triumph
slid past him as he surfaced. Bobbing in her wake, he heard a surprised shout and thought he saw a pair of gold opera glasses trained on him from the promenade. As he had hoped, no one followed him over the rail.

To business then. Harris yanked off his hand-crafted boots and let them sink. He would find factory-made replacements ashore. From the water, the beach looked twice as far as it had from the deck. Hand over hand, he pulled it towards him.

At about seven in the evening of July 15, 1856, an Englishman with pink cheeks and greying hair presented himself at Sager's Hotel on the Port Hope waterfront. He signed the registry, “Enoch Henry and Dog.” He also had a bay horse he wanted fed and stabled. As for his own dinner, he said with simple pride that he had already got “that little chore” out of the way.

At breakfast next morning, he told a fellow guest that a sentimental novel by one George MacFarlane had induced him to see Canada for himself. He had sailed directly from Bristol to Toronto, where he had stayed a week with distant cousins. He planned to push on to Fenelon Falls. He thought he would just inspect the railway construction first.

Work was proceeding on the Port Hope, Lindsay and Beaverton line, but the stir of the moment was the Grand Trunk, which in a matter of weeks would complete the first rail link ever between Toronto and Montreal. The last obstacle was the valley in which Port Hope nestled.

After breakfast, Enoch Henry and Dog, a pampered but mannerly black retriever, went strolling among the fifty-six piers of the Grand Trunk's Prince Albert Viaduct. High on a scaffold, an inattentive workman let a brick slip from his hand. Enoch Henry fell dead. He was buried in his straw hat, for not even the doctor could stomach picking it out of his stove-in skull.

Nothing in his effects identified his relations, on either side of the Atlantic. Only some days later was the underside of his saddle found to be stamped, “HENRY M. CRANE.” Might this be Enoch Henry's Toronto cousin? The hotel manager wrote to Crane, whom he knew to be a man worth pleasing,
and on July 28 received from his butler a terse reply.

Crane was said to be out of town. He was expected home on August 3, if animal and harness could be held till then. The late Enoch Henry wasn't mentioned.

This omission made the hotel manager wonder if the horse were stolen. There might still be a reward. He suspected not his deceased guest, but rather someone who had imposed on him to buy it.

“Mr. Henry was,” he said, “that green.”

He was speaking to Isaac Harris, freshly outfitted after his swim by a Port Hope haberdasher.

Harris looked down at the crisp black straw wide-awake in his hands. He had recently run close under two of those scaffolded piers himself. On the sunny morning of the sixteenth, as the brick was falling, he seemed to remember he had been counting new banknotes.

At some time before that, but later than anyone else Harris knew of, Enoch Henry had likely seen Theresa. The detective's thoughts hardened. Where, he wanted to know, and when?

On the pretext of helping locate Mr. Henry's people, he got permission to inspect the luggage. Two men had removed to an attic lumber room a steamer trunk full of clean shirts and romantic fiction. When Harris got back downstairs, he asked to see the beast supposed to have borne all this plus a rider the seventy miles from Toronto. He believed it would have taken nothing less than one of P.T. Barnum's elephants.

Despite dusk's approach, a lantern was supplied only grudgingly. What that horse had already cost the establishment over the past two and a half weeks! And did Harris think Crane's butler had sent money for feed? Nothing of the kind.

Harris's boots creaked as he followed the manager's young daughter across the stable yard. “Nelson,” he muttered
sotto voce
, “I believe we did meet once or twice in '53, not that I should expect you to remember, and I have heard something of your recent exploits . . .”

The stiffness of his new tweeds added to the sense of
occasion. They were a uniform tan, not the large checks favoured by the shop proprietor, but not banker's clothes either. With them he felt he had assumed more fully his new identity. The small girl held the lantern up at the level of his new factory-minted watch chain.

Inside the stall, Harris took the light from her and quickly found what he had not been meant to see, fresh spur gouges in the animal's dark reddish-brown flanks. The girl admitted it was earning its keep and more through rental to hotel guests.

It had the short, wide head of a quarter horse and many characteristics that would make for a comfortable ride—a long neck, long sloping shoulder, knees and hocks set low, and well-rounded hind quarters. It stood roughly sixteen hands and was, Harris judged from the triangular tables of the teeth, over twelve years old. All this was consistent with what he knew of Nelson. So too was the good nature with which it submitted to his inspection.

And now his guide had to help serve the guests' dinner if the gentleman had seen what he had come for.

He had. This might well be the horse Henry Crane had ridden the first time he had called on William Sheridan and met his daughter. Plainly, though, Enoch Henry's trunk had reached Port Hope by other means.

What they were no one at Sager's had remarked. Could it have come later? Oh, yes. Earlier? Perhaps.

The steamer office was able to confirm for Harris that trunk, dog and man had all arrived on the four p.m. boat. Sans horse. That left Mr. Henry three hours in which to acquire one and to feed himself. After tramping around to all the downtown stables, restaurants and hotels, Harris rented Nelson to ride to those farther out.

Eventually he came to a prepossessing inn at the eastern limit of Hope Township. Glimpsing the sparkle of its table settings from the Kingston Road, he congratulated himself on not
having dined sooner. When he had seen both, however, he would rather have touched his tongue to the floor of the stable than to the food from the kitchen. Never had he encountered so violent a contrast between cleanliness of premises and foulness of cuisine. The great consolation for Harris was to find he had a companion in misery: the English traveller had eaten here too.

“There you are, sir, a lovely bit of pork. Now soon as I have a minute I'll tell you about that gentleman from back home.”

The pork set before Harris was swimming in its own grease, where it had the company of potatoes fried black on one side. A side dish contained peas boiled till they burst, then half drained. Over them floated a buttery scum. Small wonder Enoch Henry had referred to dinner as a chore.

Harris nibbled at his cider, trying to make of it a meal.

“Now why aren't you eating, sir? Drink on an empty stomach might not harm you so much if that were our own cider, but I won't lie to you. It's from a bottle . . .”

Harris instantly resolved to order more whenever the proprietress gave him the opportunity. She never did. She was a stout, scrubbed woman in an apron vast and white as a snowbank. Before it she held for presentation a slimy, yellow object about ten inches long.

“. . . It's the season, sir. No applesauce for your meat either, I'm afraid, but I have brought you a nice pickled cucumber. You're from the paper, I expect. Well, just eat up then while I take the weight off my feet and tell you . . .”

She told him first about the black dog. She didn't let dogs in the room as a rule, but this one was so well schooled, it never bothered the guests for a taste of their dinners. Imagine. Its master—she never knew his name—had brought it some dry biscuit of its own he claimed was good for its teeth. He was an original and no mistake.

He had tired himself walking. The Northumberland Inn looked respectable, he said, reminded him of home—though he was from Somerset himself. Then he unbent enough to tell a story on himself that was laughed at still. In town, he had asked
the first railway worker he saw what time the next train left for Lindsay—which a map he supposed reliable indicated was only twelve miles from the goal of his pilgrimage, the storied Fenelon Falls. He was told he was early by a full year.

None of the other diners could help hearing. One who had just been persuaded to sit down was an anxious young woman in a travel-stained green riding habit. She apologized for her appearance. You could tell she had had a gentle upbringing. Said she had fallen while trying to ride side on a man's saddle. No injuries, she was sure. She said she was taking a deceased uncle's horse to Cobourg to sell.

She spoke to the Englishman before he left. He left on horseback.

Harris tried to imagine the transaction. The animal she was offering was not fast, but would do useful work for a humane master. She spoke of oat-to-hay ratios and of root vegetables. And Enoch Henry, who had just been making public resolve to be less gullible in future, would have been dazzled, even if the subject had been of less intrinsic interest. For he was listening to MacFarlane's heroine Flora. She spoke to him with the accent and intensity of the New World. Perhaps too he saw her chestnut hair flying as she skipped from log to log across the swift Fenelon River to bring medicine to a sick shantyman. Theresa saw a man who was good to his dog. She would have taken little of his money. Of herself she may have told him nothing at all.

“. . . I was just surprised she didn't stop the night here after.” The proprietress sounded unexpectedly wistful as she rose from Harris's table and straightened her white cuffs. “There were not two hours of daylight. That dress besides was miles long for walking. If she had stopped with me, she could have unburdened her spirit, as I've been bereaved myself—but, no, she slipped away. Suspicious, don't you think? I wonder now if I wasn't as credulous as that gentleman we were speaking of . . .”

To be thorough, Harris had her step out and identify Nelson. The purchaser's death came as sad news.

“So far from his mother's hearth.” She stared across her well-swept,
lamplit inn yard at the plank road winding into darkness. “I've the St. George's Society expecting their monthly supper here at ten thirty, so I had best get my dining room set to rights. My, they are a splendid crew. It would have eased that poor man's heart to hear the toasts.” A smile lifted her full cheeks. “You can say that in your obituary.”

Harris explained that he was not a journalist but a friend of the lady in green. “Did her habit have both sleeves?” he asked.

“Sleeves? Yes, of course, but why—”

“Could any of your establishment,” he hurried on, “have seen which way she went?”

“I asked, sir—no. What is it she's running away from?”

“Help me find out,” he begged.

So she let him ask again, from stable hand to scullery maid. The latter tugged at her red fingers, scuffed her shoes, glanced at the floor and confessed at last. She had no notion where the lady went, but behind Mistress's back she had let the lady use kitchen shears to cut a swath from the bottom of her bright skirt. In return the girl had been given the surplus fabric for her granny to make a waistcoat.

Electricity moved Harris's legs without his choosing. By the calendar eighteen days behind Theresa, he nonetheless felt as close now as to the next tree.

He rode straight to the grandmother's and bought the waistcoat.

After a few hours sleep at Sager's Hotel, Harris set out on foot. As August 3 was the day the butler had named for Crane's return, Nelson had to be available and rested.

Harris's course lay through long-settled agricultural land, the lake on his right. Soon after five, the sun climbed from the water to fire the corn fields and set aglow farm windows. It felt like a new dawn in a long season. Last night, for the first time, Harris had spoken to people who remembered having spoken
to Theresa later than July 13. If not at ease, she had at least been whole and active. Although no one so far could quote to him any of her actual words, she and he had ridden the same mount, and a piece of the fabric she had worn now girded his chest.