Death in the Age of Steam (40 page)

On 12th July I asked if, now that Papa's pains had subsided, the danger of an abscess could be ruled out. Dr. H. would not say. I asked if I might attend his examination of Papa. Dr. H. refused.

The two were alone together so long that after forty minutes, I tapped on the bedroom door and entered. I overheard Papa say, “Never fear, Chris. I have the document here safe in my box.” When he saw me, Papa begged I would excuse them a little longer and assured me the consultation was no longer medical but legal. His words were cheerful. And yet the weight of grief in his eyes convinced me they were discussing that society-shaking lawsuit on which I partially blamed his attack. I gave them the time it would take me to fetch the doctor a dram of my father's best whisky. After that, business talk must wait till Monday.

On his departure, Dr. H. authorized his patient to get out of bed for an hour or two. Wrapped in a pearl grey dressing
gown, Papa went straight to a window overlooking the harbour. As you know, Isaac, no house in town has windows the size of his, as his bills for heating fuel each winter can attest. This day, however, no window would have been large enough. He must throw up the nine-pane sash, stick his great white head out into the street and have a proper look around.

The panorama he commanded was of Toronto on semiofficial holiday. Orangemen in a position to do so seemed to have given themselves a Saturday off work, while the rest made work as little burdensome as possible. Stevedores passed whisky bottles between lifting bales. More pleasure craft than usual sat with limp sails on the glassy bay, and the steam ferries to the peninsula wove less certainly than usual between them. At the foot of Bay Street bathers waded into the foul harbour waters for some relief from summer's heat. Behind them on the Esplanade, an impromptu horse race almost bowled over wearers of the newest and brightest hoop skirts, while a locomotive lazily shunting cars into the semblance of a train counterpointed with its puffs and clangs a brass band marshalling for the parade.

When at last I coaxed Papa inside and combed the smuts from his mane, his thick eyebrows were bristling gloomily. He fretted that the open view his house enjoyed would not be open much longer. When the aldermen had allowed railway track to be laid along the water's edge, he said, the Esplanade's fate had been sealed. It was axiomatic. Where railways ran, warehouses and factories would cluster. City Council, dominated though it was by railway men, would have to move their City Hall uptown just to escape the stench. Villas such as Bishop Strachan's and Papa's would become uninhabitable, valuable only for the land beneath them.

I reminded Papa he was not in Parliament and need not repeat himself.

“Well, terrier,” he replied, “I've constituents with more pressing problems. I had best look to my long-neglected correspondence.”

“I'll be your amanuensis,” I said, fetching his lap desk. “Answer a pleasant letter first.”

He replied that pleasant letters rarely required the quickest answers, but that here at least was a diverting tragedy, a constituent's complaint against his neighbour's goat. We were both laughing when Sibyl came up with an urgent message for me. She took the opportunity of asking, now her master was sounding so much improved, whether he had yet asked the Governor to pardon her brother.

“Not yet, my dear,” he said, wiping a tear of mirth. It plainly embarrassed him that he couldn't quite stop smiling. “Come back in half an hour, Sibyl. We'll speak of it then.”

She glided out in sullen silence, her eyes on the floor.

My envelope contained Henry's summons home. I doubted it was urgent but could not disobey. I prepared Papa a light lunch, obtained his promise to rest after eating it, and left him for Queen Street East.

I never heard his voice again.

Hours later

Ague chills compelled pause. I'm now in fever stage. Thoughts tumbling, but hand steadier.

Don't expect me to remember all the pretexts Henry had for detaining me that Saturday afternoon. Believe I was to organize a 12-course dinner for 20 princes of capital, or perhaps the other way round. He was jealous. I suspected no further motive.

While he was home, I kept up the charade. I clipped roses for his table from trellises running the length of the south verandah. And I dragooned Oscar into cleaning French windows. The dining room is lined with them. Ten minutes after Henry left (for his office, he said) so did I, although our butler tried to detain me with every vexatious excuse.

At Front Street, I found Papa napping: his pulse strong and steady. Sibyl served me tea in the parlour. Bitter taste,
but did not complain. Very tired after nights of watching and struggles with Sibyl, doctor, Henry. Reclined on sofa for five or ten minutes as I intended. The hall clock had just struck five.

Awoke mildly nauseous. Perspiring heavily, although sun no longer beat in through south windows. Knew it must be late. Bestirred myself. Through twilight saw room door closed, unlike before. Not locked. Went out into hall and found clock hands stood after eight. Three hours gone.

No whisper from anywhere in the house, just a cooking smell that seemed out of place.

Run upstairs felt like snail's crawl. Papa lay peacefully on his back, not a characteristic sleeping posture for him. Skin clammy, no pulse. I lit a lamp and one by one lifted his cooling eyelids. Neither pupil reacted to light. No breath clouded a mirror held under his nostrils.

My Papa lay dead, and I still suffered from a drugged intoxication that kept my tears from flowing. It was a special hell. All I could think was how magnificent he looked, his features neither delicate nor rugged, but boldly, clearly sculpted. Chiselled by a Master.

I felt no swelling in his abdominal region, nor did I anywhere find a wound. What had caused this wreck? Presently I saw on the far night table the supper tray, the all but empty soup bowl, the dessert dish half covered with suet pudding. The other half clean but for a shiny smear and a stray, solitary, darkly gleaming raisin.

I opened the night table drawer: Dr. Hillyard's morphine salts were missing. Thought, breath came slowly. The opiate. Had it been divided between us? One large, deadly dose. One smaller and merely stupefying. The amount that I had been fed dulled feeling, but did not quite obliterate memory. Sibyl was answerable for something. I took the poker from the hearth, and I began to look for her.

I met her on the stairs from the ground floor down to the kitchen. She was climbing as I descended. My lamp showed
her coarse features pulled to one side of her face in an unfamiliar expression of anxiety. She said something about going up to fetch Papa's tray.

“You can leave that, Sibyl.” My head burns as I write the words, but it didn't when I said them. My voice was drowsy, soothing. If my thoughts too rolled sluggishly, they were in compensation preternaturally clear. “Have you anything for me to eat?” I asked.

She stepped back into the kitchen and took a bowl from a dresser. I held the poker behind me. She was no taller than I, but sturdier and, given my present state of torpor, quicker. She might bolt out the kitchen door and up the outside steps to the back yard or, if I moved to block that exit, up the stairs I had just descended and out the front.

“Oyster soup?” I said. “That will do very well.”

My long sleep had tousled my hair. While Sibyl was dipping her ladle in the pot, I removed pins to cause further havoc.

“I'll eat at the table here. No need for ceremony. Just lend me a hairbrush before I sit.”

She looked at me askance. The request was so unlike me, and she didn't know for how much eccentricity her doctored tea could account. The fearful grimace twisted her mouth higher into her left cheek. Her eyes slid towards the back way out.

“My hair wants brushing,” I said blandly. “I'll just help myself, shall I?”

I counted on her to protect her nest and was not disappointed: Sibyl bustled into her room. Now I had only one hole to plug. I stood in it.

“Give me your keys, Sibyl.”

She turned and made to rush me. I held the poker in both hands, aimed it up and towards her breast like a bayonet. I held it short so there was very little but the point left for her to grab. She might still have prevailed, but something held her back. I've often wondered what. Physical fear, consciousness
of guilt, the habit of a servant, a sense of fatality stronger than her panic, perhaps a combination of the four.

“Missus,” she pleaded, “what has happened?”

“You've killed your master, Sibyl. That's what has happened.”

“No. He can't be dead.”

“Poisoned by your hand.”

“Never!” She advanced upon me so that the point of my poker actually touched the bodice of her gown. “If I had done such a thing,” she wailed, “I should never have waited here.”

“You'll explain that to the constables,” I replied, standing my ground. “You'll deny poisoning me as well.”

“A sleeping powder, Mrs. Crane, for your good. Anyone could see you needed rest.”

“I'm rested now, Sibyl, and I'll take charge of the keys.”

I locked her in her room, then sat at the kitchen table. Sickly, I pushed aside the bowl of oyster soup. I still smelled pudding: the cloth it had been steamed in hung over the back of the opposite chair. I put my head down on my arms and wept. The excitement of the late encounter must have helped flush the blunting morphine from my blood.

I wept at first for every selfish reason. Also for the loss to Papa himself of a life he kept finding, for all its sorrows, pleasure-full. But the longer I lay there, the more the public character of the tragedy overcame me, the loss to the voters of York County, to Parliament and to the country, to Catholics and Protestants, to the accused and impoverished, and to the miserable woman in the next room (I didn't care if she heard me), who with her employer's death, had lost the best friend she ever could have had.

And she the author of her loss. Here truly was insanity, worse than that which condemns many a poor woman to the harsh, stone cells of this convent's lunatic wing. How cunning did Sibyl's previous fits now seem! Her efforts to drive me from the house by words and fire were to make way
for the grand insanity of destroying her good angel.

What sense could one make of such things? I shed fresh, baffled tears.

A musket
feu de joie
along the Esplanade finally roused me, together with shouted insults of the Pope. I wrote to summon doctor and police. Henry had left standing orders to advise him should Papa's condition alter for the worse. My note enjoined him send whatever black cloth we possessed. Although I didn't expect badges of mourning to chasten Orange tongues, I wanted the revellers to know, howl as they might, that William Sheridan had no more to fear from their malice.

From Papa's doorstep I engaged a neat, respectful boy to bring the constables. I used the word murder. The other two commissions went to a likely runner.

Two constables arrived soon after nine. When I opened to their knock, the one calling himself Devlin did up a button on his tunic. He was all angles but for his limp black hair. His more compact, blond companion, introduced as Morgan, was already buttoned up and looked in every way more reliable, but said very little. Constable Devlin thought it unfair that he should be on duty when the whole town was celebrating, but murder was murder, the public had to be protected, and where was the deceased? He slapped Papa's cheeks and pronounced him dead. Constable Morgan turned down the bedclothes, put his ear to Papa's chest and nodded. Neither wished to touch the supper tray, which might be evidence. Better leave that till the doctor arrived.

Of greater interest was the suspect in the basement. Morgan for once seemed to speak for both of them when he admitted he had never laid eyes on a murderess. Devlin wanted to lay hands on Sibyl as soon as possible and remove her to the cells of Station No.1, where she could be watched at every hour of the day and night. I might think her secure enough in a locked room with barred windows. But could I swear she had no second key? No means to harm or even
make away with herself before she could be properly questioned? I could not.

I didn't (and don't) have enough faith in human justice to wish Sibyl preserved for the scaffold, but for examination yes. I needed to understand. They led her from her room with hands chained together and hanging in front of her loose brown dress. She didn't raise her eyes to meet mine.

“Why did you do it, Sibyl?” I asked.

She didn't answer.

“Sibyl Martin,” said Devlin knowingly. “You were discharged from Grand Master Gowan's four months since for loose behaviour.”

“The goings-on were none of my doing,” she muttered. “I left because I had a better place to go.”

“And look what you've made of it!” I said.

Such perversity beggared belief. What I had been considering a private act of madness appeared now in the light of a political assassination. Plotters could not have furnished their Corday with a story apter to secure access to her victim. Papa was a notoriously celibate widower. Mr. Gowan is a widower
tout court
. Allegations that improper advances had been made to Sibyl or to anyone else under the Grand Master's roof would have disposed Papa to offer his client's sister employment where such indignities were impossible.

My hope of understanding dimmed. Such police as I had so far seen might not be competent to solve a murder, however much they wished to. To expose an Orange conspiracy they would have no wish at all.

“I'll see she minds her tongue, ma'am,” said Devlin, pushing Sibyl towards the stairs. “Constable Morgan will wait here for the doctor.”

But Morgan didn't want to miss his chance to walk beside a woman in shackles. I saw what I must do. Whatever her desserts, parading Sibyl along the Esplanade as part of the evening's spectacle ill became a society that long ago abandoned the public pillory. I pinned about her shoulders
a shawl long enough to cover the handcuffs. I placed her most concealing bonnet on her head. No one thanked me. I didn't mind.