Death in the Age of Steam (44 page)

“Mr. Bray prefers I not have callers yet,” she said, “but we can write. That is, if you like . . .”

Through his shirt and jacket sleeves, Harris felt her grip tremble.

“Count on my liking,” he said. “Is that for me?”

Two steps ahead, Bray turned east on Craig Street towards the Champ de Mars.

“Is that the letter?” Harris asked.

“I wrote it for you.” Theresa pressed the roll of papers into his hand. “I have to give it to you, I suppose, but you won't like me better after. It can't be helped. Goodbye.”

“Don't say that,” said Harris. Her resignation told him she was not “well enough”—perhaps not well enough to be left with comparative strangers. “Let me take a hotel room for you instead,” he urged. “I'm afraid you'll starve yourself.”

She smiled then. “Under Mrs. Bray's roof, I understand, I'm as likely to be trampled by wild buffalo.”

“Take your leave, sir.” Bray stood sniffling before the door to
a narrow house in a neat stone row. If only he would blow his nose and be done.

“I
shall
thank you now, Mr. Bray,” said Harris, taking his hand. “As long as you have anything to do with this lady, you will have to do with me. I should like her seen by a physician.”

“So I intend,” replied the clergyman, “this very evening. The city's most knowledgeable attend Christ Church, as I trust will you.”

“You are most kind.”

To Theresa, Harris mumbled a ragged, unsustaining farewell. It almost choked him. As soon as she went indoors, he returned to Rasco's and wrote Bray with an offer to pay her keep as well as any medical bills she might incur. Then he read her letter.

Harris read with growing consternation. The evidence of ague in Theresa's very handwriting all but sent him back to Craig Street. He had just sense enough to realize he was too overcome by the rest of the letter to speak coherently to anyone. He did believe also that the gruff Philander Bray would without further prompting call in as good a medical man as any Harris could find in equal time. Finally, the regularity of Theresa's script in the most recently written passages kept him in his room, if not his chair.

He washed his face and started again from the beginning.

A second reading complete, he went back out into the fog and walked at random until after nightfall. Through his mind, meanwhile, ran a rope of many strands. Sometimes it ran, sometimes inched. It knotted up at others or reversed itself. It started independent of his volition, burning and binding as it would. Harris walked until he had it enough under his control to pick the strands apart and look at them.

One strand was awe—dread mixed with wonder at what Theresa had experienced. He would never know her as he felt he once had, for since then she had lived horrors closed to him. Sheridan's assassination grieved him, but what must be
her
grief?
He would never be obliged to submit to a brutal husband, to watch him murder and still to sit at his table. Harris remembered Sibyl's room. He could picture the low bed, the space between the yellow-brown coverlet and the brick floor—but, through no deficiency of Theresa's manuscript, the most vivid images it gave rise to could encompass no more than a fraction of her ordeal. Imagine being kicked by a woman in her death throes and being unable to move a muscle to help her. Imagine living with that memory. Harris couldn't imagine. The contemplation of such a moment humbled him. He could presume neither to blame Theresa nor to tell her not to blame herself.

His own conduct was another matter. She had mistaken him and married elsewhere because he had not made himself plain. She couldn't approach him when she needed a friend because he had “made such a point of keeping away.” Guilt was the second strand in his rope.

The third was sympathy, harder to pick apart because of its breadth and strength. It moved Harris that Theresa had so generously and unassumingly opened herself to him, had indeed been dissecting the tenderest corners of her conscience at the very moment Bray had reached the convent. Even more moving was her courage. “Don't call me brave,” she had begged him during their second night together outside Kingston. She
was
brave, though, tremendously. She had struggled alone not only against Sibyl, the treacherous Dr. Hillyard, and Crane, but also with Small and her father himself for his protection. After Sheridan's death, she had not collapsed. She had shown extraordinary initiative and run enormous risks to find out its cause. Harris thought of her, groggy from morphine, calculating the deadliest grip on a poker. He thought of her beneath the bed, willing Crane and Sibyl to come where she could hear them, discovery in the end dependent on with which ear Crane listened for Sibyl's heartbeat. Theresa's need to understand was one Harris both admired and shared.

It was more than sympathy. From the extent to which he recognized his world in her depiction—the constables, Kate
MacFarlane, Jasper Small, William Sheridan—it was manifest how far the two of them saw and thought in harmony. There was no one on earth with whom Harris could ever be as certain that he belonged. Her letter confessed that she too had dreamed of life with him.

At present, however, justice and safety for Theresa had to take precedence over softer musings on “what might have been.” Through Harris's rope twisted the revelation of Crane's crimes. The forest foliage parted. Harris had the beast in view.

Crane's murder of Sibyl had been half suspected, although the manner in which Theresa had witnessed and been marked by it went beyond anything nightmare could have foretold. And there was more.

Harris forced himself to sift the facts coolly. That Crane had also killed Theresa's father, medical evidence had previously seemed to preclude. Here, though, were grounds to doubt Hillyard's findings: (1) a fatal relapse would have required more time, (2) the doctor's examination—confirmed by Lamb's inspection of the pudding cloth—had excluded poisoning but not suffocation, and (3) Hillyard had a motive for pronouncing Sheridan's death natural. Namely, he had conspired to administer the drug that had left his friend unprotected.

And Crane's motive? Might he, rather than Sibyl, have been the agent of political vendetta? Harris scarcely knew how to think about these questions yet. He was still accustoming himself to the unprecedented fact that a leading industrialist had slain a parliamentary hero. In such a world, anything could happen. Crane could kill again. One consolation was that he apparently did not know he had been seen breaking his mistress's neck—another that, when the hangman snapped Crane's own, Theresa would be free.

The contrast between Crane's victims could hardly be starker. Harris wondered if the supposed Master who had chiselled Sheridan's features had had any hand in shaping Sibyl's. Her lack of family and position had apparently not been offset by any personal attractiveness, and yet she had been mocked with
what she called “a carnal nature.” A masterful jest indeed! Sheridan's assassination amounted to a national tragedy, but his servant's was tragic too. While she should have acted better, someone who did not find it easy to be kind might have acted worse. She had made sure she was not giving Theresa a fatal dose of morphine. She had seen Theresa and not given her away.

Once separately examined, these lines of thought and feeling did not stay separate but continued to cross and intertwine. The heart-swelling vision of a girl writing to her mother in heaven might be followed by the desolating one of a man resting his head on his victim's lifeless breast.

Still Harris walked. Eventually the gas jets in the street lamps ahead burned more distinctly. The fog had lifted. The streets were better lit than in Toronto, and Harris began to take note of the life around him. He was by the river. To his right waggons and drays loaded with barrels laboured up ramps from the piers to the street. To his left the Old Countryman Inn was turning away passengers slow to disembark. Not a bed left. People were everywhere. The evening's steamers had arrived.

When he returned to Rasco's, he found Jasper Small sipping port in the lobby. A scuffed but elegant portmanteau turned on end sat by the lawyer's chair and served him as drink stand.

“Just the man!” cried Harris, sated with his own company. “Pour me some of that and let me tell you—” He noticed that Small was sipping rather briskly, and that the bottle was already half empty. “Did you—ah—have a tolerable journey down?”

“I don't know why I came,” Small confided. “I have cases in Toronto I'm neglecting, including that of a mechanic disabled by . . . I forget by what exactly, but it's just the sort of suit for damages the old bear would have taken to heart.
Garçon!
Another glass.”

“His daughter's case,” said Harris, “would hardly have left him indifferent.”

But Small was in no state to reason, and serious consultation would maddeningly have to wait.

The waiter brought another glass. Harris filled both. The fortified wine was agreeable—warm and celebratory. Yes, Harris
had had grim news of Crane's deeds, but tomorrow began the campaign to bring their author to justice. Here was cause to celebrate. Theresa would not be returning to Crane. It wasn't altogether in order to prevent his friend's finishing the bottle alone that Harris enjoyed a further three ounces of port before bed.

He gave Small the couch in his room and roused him from it as soon as the first two breakfasts could be ordered up. Small's heavy-lidded eyes made him look morose and sleepy even when he was not. This morning he confessed he was both—but no, he had not drunk heavily on the steamer, where he had found ladies enough with whom to promenade, play cards, and in the evening, polka. A capital dance, the polka—lively as an Irish jig, intimate as a waltz. Only the want of society while awaiting Harris last evening had made him think of toasting his fair-skinned bawd.

Harris moved him off this topic by asking for news of the inquest. Small had none, but had heard from a passenger embarked at Kingston that a squatter named Lansing had been arrested. He had apparently raped a farm girl at the very crossroads where Theresa had been attacked. A broken-toothed fellow whose shoes didn't match.

“No mystery then,” said Harris, “why Etta's husband didn't show his face at their shack while Theresa was there. We must get Crane locked up too.”

“Aren't you missing a few steps?” said Small. “I don't think you had better have any more of that French coffee.”

Harris read or summarized for Small the parts of Theresa's letter he believed supportive of a murder indictment. At the suggestion that a pillow had been held over his partner's face, Small shook his head.

“The letter's genuine? You're sure?”

“Absolutely,” said Harris.

“A pillow—what a strange, soft, dreadful death! Poor bear.” Small again shook his head while absently smoothing his dressing gown over his folded knees. All natural emotion in him seemed muffled, muted. “Then I was unjust to Hillyard, the old quack. No wonder Theresa fled.” He cleared his throat. “Still, where's your case?”

“Jasper, she didn't just hear Crane kill Sibyl. She saw it.” Thinking to jolt Small out of his melancholia and to prepare him for battle, Harris read on to the breaking of the housekeeper's neck.

“Henry Crane?” said Small. “‘Iron-hull' Crane?” He gazed out the fourth-floor window at a dull patch of sky while groping for an adequate response. “This is news indeed—but as I believe I told you, Isaac, it doesn't help in the least. Wife and husband are one flesh, not permitted to testify against each other.”

“Surely not in a case like this!” Harris exclaimed.

“In any case except when the spouse is him or herself the victim.”

“She can't be one with a murderer!” Harris set his cup down noisily. “What of the other evidence, Jasper? Sibyl's letter—”

“—is the undated and uncorroborated allegation of a serving woman that Crane had the opportunity to murder William Sheridan, when the death certificate says there was no murder at all. Theresa was right not to let that pathetic scribble fall into official hands.”

“A serving woman is negligible, of course,” Harris retorted. “Your late partner had more confidence in her than that.”

Small said nothing. His expression became very distant. Harris reflected that Sheridan's faith in Sibyl would not necessarily communicate itself to judge and jury.

“Forgive me, Jasper. I should not have used him to reproach you.”

“You know that pyramid he has in St. James's Cemetery? One side should be engraved THE PEOPLE'S CHAMPION, and around the corner WHETHER THEY DESERVED ONE OR NOT.” Small had been touched on a tender spot. His voice gathered pain as he continued. “Who would be so trusting? Not you, Isaac. By God, not I. And yet trust as ample and generous as William Sheridan's would be part of any paradise we could imagine. He was irreplaceable because one cannot even quite
want
to be like him. Oh, hell.”