Death in the Age of Steam (32 page)

“How did she seem?” he asked.

“You wait outside.” Having tucked the precious paper away, Etta Lansing darted into her hovel.

Harris stuck his head through the doorway but could see nothing in the windowless interior. The air besides made him gag. From some vomitous corner accessible only by touch, the squatter emerged with the yellow scarf.

The colour was clear and bright enough in what was coming to seem a rural way, but dull beside a brand new synthetic dye like that of the riding habit. In the yellow dress, a traveller would attract less notice. Theresa's change of clothes, her shaky writing, her mention of Henry by name all suggested to Harris—independent of the blood stain—that between Portsmouth and this beach something had happened to increase her sense of alarm.

“Look here, Mrs. Lansing, you've still told me nothing of her physical health or state of mind.”

“Mind? She was half out of it, I should say. What you would expect of a woman who had just been robbed.”

“She had been robbed?” The word did not slip gently into the place Harris's premonitions had tried to prepare for it.

“It's a lonely stretch of road like you get when so much land belongs to one house. I don't complain, mind. The deed-holders leave us alone, and we leave them likewise. It's lonely road, though. I wouldn't go myself except to collect plants for my colours, and then I have a good sharp knife—”

“But was she hurt?” asked Harris in a misery of suspense.

“She had no broken bones that I could see. She might have caught some bruises, but they wouldn't have flowered till after she left me. Stoke up the fire again, will you?”

“Never mind the fire,” said Harris, tormented by thoughts of hurts he could not ask about. “She was robbed, so when she left here she had nothing but the four shillings and six pence that bill of sale says you gave her.”

“And my yellow dress.” Mrs. Lansing's puckered face clouded over with indignation. “That wasn't just a shift, I'll have you know. It had a waist and full sleeves like the modern style is. There was a deal of yarn in that dress.”

“But in terms of actual coin and paper, she left here with under five shillings.”

“She was welcome to take her goods elsewhere,” sniffed Mrs. Lansing, “if she thought she could have got a better price. And as for her hair . . .”

“What about it?”

“She just threw it in the fire. Nice brown tresses, foot and a half of them. She asked me first if I could change the colour. I said, ‘Certainly, missus, if you want to stick your head in that there cauldron for an hour.' So—snip, snip—off they come and into the flames. I got them out right smart.”

Harris turned away. He couldn't bear not knowing Theresa's suffering and couldn't bear knowing the fraction of it which the described act of self-mutilation expressed. Then, with a self-command that astonished him, he turned back to look the hag in the eye.

“What did you do with the hair?”

“Do? Why, it's worth money, I'm telling you. If she don't need it, I do. Mr. Lansing is making an ornamental wreath of it to sell to a professor at the Queen's University.”

“How much?”

“I can't say I'm partial to the tone you're taking. I've been more than obliging, and Mr. Lansing won't like to hear how I'm took advantage of in his absence. There now. I've said all I'm going to say until my fire gets tended.”

Harris could not remember having made a more distasteful bargain. He paid four dollars for the wreath and scarf and threw his emerald waistcoat in to appease the possibly apocryphal Mr. Lansing.

And how much else of what the dyer said was true? Harris's fingers held a three-year-old memory of Theresa's hair, to which “nice brown tresses” were as tarred rope. He doubted that the lifeless filaments handed him came from his darling's head. He nonetheless wrapped them in a clean handkerchief before sliding them into his breast pocket.

Their transaction made Mrs. Lansing more trusting. All at once, she could see by his firm chin and high, smooth forehead that Harris was a man of good faith. Her pot was permitted to cool.

The lady, she said, had come by land but insisted on leaving by water and would on no consideration go into Kingston, which she called “Henry's city”. By water how? In Mr. Lansing's boat to be sure, same as he was fishing from at this moment.

Harris looked south and east. Just here the lake became river. The water began not just to move but flow, down to the Atlantic Ocean, no turning back. The shores closed in. Yonder sat Wolfe Island like a pipe in the mouth of the St. Lawrence, its ten-mile stem affording a portage around Kingston.

Suppose, though, Theresa had suspended her flight. Nearer to hand lay other islands, two large enough to have been ruled into farms. Harris dared to imagine one of these had taken her in and lent her haven, far from the highway, surrounded by the waves. There she
would regather her strength and spirits. He would find her in a room with fresh air, clean sheets and pillows to arrange.

“And did your husband take her over to Amherst Island?”

“Oh, no.” Etta Lansing shook her head so hard she had to retie the brown rag under her chin. Vindicated pride again rang in her voice. “He put her—by her own wish, mind—in an Indian canoe headed down the river.”

“I don't believe that,” Harris retorted. “These days Indians travel by steamer like anyone else, not in birchbark canoes.”

He had seen them at the rail, both sexes smoking their clay pipes.

“There was never anything as fancy as birchbark.” The squatter woman took more pleasure in the occasion to gloat than offence at Harris's doubts. “Those two young bucks?” she crowed. “Dirt-poor, without the price of deck passage between them. Paddling a hollowed-out log like they make up there.” She pointed west, towards Shannonville. “Your Treesa spoke their lingo too. How's that for strange? She arrived a lady and left a savage!”

Try as he might, Harris couldn't shake her from this story. Eventually, he drew apart to consider. His resistance started to waver.

He had passed through a Mohawk reserve Monday morning on the coach, had heard of other settlements downstream at Cornwall and Montreal. His mother had mentioned Theresa's attending a Mohawk funeral. Although her colouring was not such as to let her pass for an Indian, perhaps she thought she could lose herself among them.

A chill blew off the lake. The opaque sky heaved and spread to reveal new depths of cloud.

Two images flashed through Harris's consciousness. A woman of gentle breeding, far from home, alone and without luggage, running down a country road at night—this was desperate enough. That same woman, Theresa, still fleeing, but now destitute, ill-clad, shorn of every badge of social respectability, and riding in a red man's dugout—Harris had no words to express his fear for her. He didn't positively expect her
conductors to mistreat her, but could not feel confident that they would not.

His father had had Six Nations Mohawks as allies in 1812. Alexander had always spoken highly of them. In the counter-attack after Brock's death, they had proved so intimidating that Americans had thrown themselves off Queenston Heights sooner than face Mohawk flint.

But the wars were over and the fur trade too, and now the races lived apart. Literature of the noble savage was no longer being written. Today, it seemed, it was the whisky merchants that best knew Indian ways.

And Theresa, did she know and trust them? No answer brought her closer. If Harris found her with them—by her own choice sharing their longhouse or their farmhouse or whatever it was they shared—would he know
her
, know how to keep her safe? This was his father's “what then?” question, which Isaac had always contrived to push back. Find her first, he had thought.

Very well. He would find her. He tried again to focus his every power on the search. Its field had never appeared so vast.

Harris felt the size of the land and, though it was his by birth, his ignorance of it. He knew one corner of a clearing in the endless forest. You scurried back and forth across your corner. You began to feel at home. But every grain of soil you had passed over could vaporize, and the continent would not be a thousandth part of one per cent the smaller. Harris came of island peoples. For warmth in the new world they had encircled their hearths with coastlines in the dirt, in the air. To accept the Indian story was to step out into the deep.

Before accepting it, Harris must question Lansing. There was always the chance that he'd contradict his wife. And, if not, he'd still have more immediate intelligence than she as to where the dugout was headed and what its occupants intended. When, he asked, would Mr. Lansing be back?

Mrs. Lansing, who had begun to busy herself sorting and folding rags from a heap by her doorstep, gave a grunt expressive of the impossibility of knowing. Harris said he would
wait, but this didn't suit the squatter woman. Rather than have her hospitality so imposed upon, she confessed that her husband was not fishing but would most likely be found at a tavern in Portsmouth.

“Your quickest way is along the beach here as far as the big rock, look,” she said, her stained fingers plucking Harris by the sleeve. “Then straight up the path to the creek.”

“Good day then,” he answered impatiently.

In the way of beaches, sand had managed to get inside Harris's boot, but he entertained no thought of stopping to remove it. Too many steps remained before him not to make a start.

So eager was Harris to get away that it wasn't until he had gone a dozen paces that he wondered if Mrs. Lansing wasn't just a little too eager that he go. He glanced back. She nodded and waved him on from where she stood watching.

His boots crunched more slowly through the sand. He realized something had changed. But if an occurrence in the last three minutes had made him less welcome, it was nothing he could see. No vessel was approaching. Sloops and dinghies bobbed out on the bay just as before. His eye fastened on the windowless shack. Unfit, he thought, for pigs.

Suppose, in acknowledging one lie, Mrs. Lansing had told another. Suppose her husband were not jauntily if fecklessly raising a glass at the Portsmouth Arms, but rather sleeping off the effects of drink in his own unclean bed. She had her pride. She would not want it known. Perhaps she feared also that he would be abusive if wakened. Hearing him stir, she had hastened to dispense with Harris.

He walked back.

“Go on,” she said. “You'll see it, by the rock.” She had begun feeding twigs to the fire and, before she grasped his intentions, had permitted Harris to get between her and her dwelling. “Here!” she called. “Where do you think you're going?”

Ignoring her, Harris knocked on the low plank door. He got no answer. His hand went to the door handle. There was no lock.

“You're sure Mr. Lansing is not at home?” he said.

“With shillings I earned in his pocket?” Mrs. Lansing came scuttling over the sand, her voice shrill and scornful. “No chance of that.”

She sounded convincing, but her demeanour overall was too equivocal to warrant withdrawal just yet.

“All the same,” said Harris, “would you fetch a light and show me inside?”

“You mean to plunder me.” Mrs. Lansing threw her weight against the door. “Get away or you'll smart for it!”

She leaned against the hinged side where she had not much leverage. Harris pulled the door fully open, careful not to stand in the aperture in case Lansing were armed. It promised to be an awkward interview.

“By what right—”

“Mrs. Lansing, I've no time to lose if I'm to find Mrs. Crane. Hallo in there! Mr. Lansing, can you hear me?”

Inside no one answered. No furniture creaked under an occupant's shifting weight. While Harris listened, Etta Lansing darted around him and into the shack. Her weapon must have been waiting just inside. Now she stood blocking the doorway, forbidding entrance with swipes of her plant-cutting knife's discoloured crescent blade. It grew from her discoloured fist like a claw.

“What the—” Harris gaped, astonishment overmastering prudent fear. It surely couldn't be her husband she thought needed such desperate protection. “What are you hiding?” he asked.

The sentry said nothing, but—

“Isaac—is it? Isaac?” A thin, compelling voice inside.

At the sound, Mrs. Lansing slackened her guard. Harris wrested the knife from her—before he knew if she still intended to use it—and in the same motion flung it up onto the hovel's patched-together roof. Without reflection of any kind, into the dark room he plunged.

This was the moment of moments.

“Keep talking,” he called to the voice in the darkness. “I can't see you.”

“Over here, back and—left. In the corner.”

“Theresa?” Her voice was thin as ether.

But it
was
her voice. Three steps, not a continent, away.

“Thank God it's you,” Theresa said.

Harris tripped over what felt like a chair, a sea chest and a nest of pots, then bit the head off a match. It flared to show a left back corner full of rags. Across three bales of rags trailed a sodden-looking coverlet with wrenchingly little in human shape beneath it. Where the blanket stopped lay Theresa's starveling face. She raised it towards Harris. Her eyes threw back the flame.

Love consumed him. The love he had tightly packed for long storage and rough transport expanded through him like bursting fireworks. His heart beat a drum roll. Trumpet fanfares blared.

“‘Thank God it's you' indeed,” huffed Mrs. Lansing, righting the furniture. “Told me she would see
nobody
, not at any cost. Would have saved me trouble if—”

“A lantern quick!” Harris could make nothing of her words. “A candle—anything—”