Death in the Age of Steam (11 page)

“Even if he had,” Lamb replied, “the shock and loss of blood must have been fatal.”

So further explorations could wait. The broad, blind expanse of the professor's back was suddenly irksome. Harris ungratefully considered bundling his companion into a stagecoach in order to nurse alone the cooling embers of his hope.

Lamb half turned in the saddle. “You referred to the deceased as a woman,” he said. “We can't assume that.”

Harris begged his pardon.

“I may not be able to say for sure even after I get a chance to weigh the bones. I'll certainly want to scrutinize those hairs under a microscope.”

“How soon can you do all that—all that weighing and scrutinizing?”

“The coroner would normally give me a week to ten days.”

“The sleeve and bracelet could be a disguise,” Harris admitted without conviction. Ten days was a long time to go on searching in a state of uncertainty.

“Come now,” said Lamb. “The dress is female, but we must no more base our conclusions on such externals than you bankers do when you decide to extend credit, or to refuse it.”

Still digesting Lamb's revelation, Harris did not rise to this bait.

“Incidentally,” the professor added, “I took your good advice.”

“Oh?” Harris was starting to wonder who besides Theresa, male or female, had disappeared in recent weeks.

“I approached the Hon. Robert Baldwin. He has agreed to petition the regents of the university to pay me more.”

“You couldn't have made a sounder choice,” said Harris, remembering his manners. “Not only did Mr. Baldwin's government found the university, but he is the one man in Toronto who never breaks his word.”

“Present company excepted, I hope.”

“Professor Lamb,” Harris pleaded, “could you not hasten or somehow expedite your examination of these remains? So long as any chance remains that Mrs. Crane is still drawing breath, every moment is precious.”

The green shoulders under Harris's nose shrugged unencouragingly.

Soon after, the end gable and two-storey verandah of the Half Way House came in view on the right of the plank road. When Banshee and her riders stopped for refreshment, Lamb slid from the saddle unaided.

“The chemistry laboratory,” he said, brushing sweat from his straight upper lip, “is at present housed in a far from weatherproof pig shed in behind the Provincial Observatory. Look in on me this evening if you like.”

On reaching the cashier's suite in the early afternoon, Harris moved from room to room like a man who can't remember what comes next. He took a bottle of brandy from the dining room sideboard. He left the bottle in the pantry. He opened wardrobe doors, then instead of hanging up his clothes threw them over chairs. Perplexed by this behaviour, he supposed it had something to do with having passed a night in the open on top of five anxious days. Presently he wandered down the corridor to his bedroom, fell on his bed and slept.

He plunged straight into the deepest slumber and ascended gradually. Anxiety returned before fatigue lifted. Waking took forever. Thrashing about the middle ground, he found himself buffeted by more extreme emotions than blew through either his workaday mind or his dreams. He had schooled himself since entering on a business career, and more particularly in the past three years, to give his feelings play within a range not much wider than the arc of the pendulum in his tall mahogany clock. Now, while the wind outside made noisy sport with an ill-secured shutter, his pendulum swung full circle.

Through 180 degrees, he conceived of Theresa as dead. He walked behind the glass-doored hearse, his gaze fixed on the floral tributes piled on her casket. Panicled dogwood, trailing arbutus . . . His sobs shook bricks loose from houses of the quick. Even if he never saw her, he couldn't bear the thought of her large, green eyes not turning towards a new sight—her soft lips not parting to utter a fresh thought. Or perhaps behind reason's back, he
had
hoped to see her again, and now he couldn't.

Lost, dead, worse than dead. Butchered. Thoughts of the pain and terror this imaginative young woman must have suffered—his Theresa—made him want to eat glass.

Grief needed no addition, and yet the casket he followed was William Sheridan's too. Tears for each flowed together. Harris mourned a fiery old lion together with a child of energy, grace and light. Fate had dashed what was best in the age, its reforming heart, its questing spirit. The world was left to vermin. Harris fancied he felt them crawling through the
mattress beneath him.

At the limit of misery, his spirits would begin to lift. Through the other half circle, someone else had been dismembered. Theresa lived. Amid the clamour of the wind, her footsteps sounded on the stair, her crisp tap at the door—which, try as he might, he could not rise to answer. What if she went away? No, there it was again—tap,
tap
. Now somehow she was inside the door, in the hall, in the room, on the bed. The nape of her neck nestled in his hand. Her smooth cheek pressed against his, and he was breathing the sunny scent of her hair. They were each other's, no one else's. For the first time in all his months of inhabiting the Provincial Bank's string of opulent, empty rooms, he was at home.

Then men with black scarves wrapped around their hats came to lay her in a box.

He kept hoping for something like a thunderclap over Bay Street to wake him fully, but after an hour or two his inner storm simply played itself out. When he sat up, it was still Sunday afternoon. The blue and white porcelain wash stand looked cheerful enough against the yellow wallpaper. He poured water from the pitcher into the basin. He brushed his teeth with Atkinson's Parisian tooth paste. Refreshed and on his feet, he knew the world contained decent people and his bed no bugs to speak of.

While water was heating for his bath, he answered bank correspondence. At the same time, part of him wanted to rush back to the edge of town and scour the landscape in broadening rings until he dropped. Somewhere, in one or more pieces, was the rest of a body.

Efforts to establish an agency of the bank in the city of Hamilton seemed frivolous by comparison. For the first time, Harris considered resignation. He would still have the rents from his real estate holdings in addition to his savings. On the other hand, neither his bank nor its competitors could be counted on to understand. Leaving one employer might foreclose his future with any. He tried believing that, whatever its origin, Vandervoort's new interest in the case made drastic action on his own part unnecessary.

It was a hypothesis, at least.

The moment might still come for a prolonged, out-of-town search. Then Harris would have to decide. In the meantime, there were things he could do in Toronto.

Not all could be done on a Sunday. Harris wanted to ask the undertaker if he had buried William Sheridan with both his arms. From what bank messenger Dick Ogilvie had said Wednesday, there would be no point trying to raise the matter with his father today. The Sabbatarian mood was on the rise. Harris took care to date his letters as of Monday, July 21.

The MacFarlanes, he trusted, would receive him. Bathing and dressing quickly, he managed to reach their Queen Street West villa before the end of the tea hour. The servant showed him through to the garden.

Surrounded by three of her children and a pair of spaniels, Kate MacFarlane sat in the shade of a shrubbery. A viewer with stereoscopic photographs of Niagara Falls was being passed around. These were solemnly pronounced to be arresting and sublime, though the water was a woolly blur.

Harris returned Elsie's sketch book, avoiding mention of his grisly discovery, and asked if anyone knew who Theresa's fine-featured companion might be. A French-speaking lady, he suggested, recalling that the miller's assistant had not been able to understand her.

“
Mademoiselle
Marthe!” Elsie exclaimed. “She was teaching Mrs. Crane French.”

“Yes, more of a teacher than a friend,” Mrs. MacFarlane briskly concurred. “We don't really know her.”

“She came here once. I wanted to sketch her, but there wasn't time.”

“Elsie, dear, take the viewer from your brother and show him how to put that stereoscope in properly before he bends it.”

No one seemed to know Marthe's family name. Elsie had heard and forgotten it. Her mother suggested that Harris speak to Mr. MacFarlane, who was in his study.

Harris finished his tea before going in. Communicative and
attentive on other subjects, Kate MacFarlane appeared to have cooled towards his search. He asked again about her last glimpse of Theresa. She would not speak of it. As he ambled across the scythe-cut lawn, he wondered what had happened to change her mind.

Above the loggia in the centre of the garden façade rose a broad semicircular tower reminiscent of engravings of Windsor Castle. Money could scarcely have bought more in the way of aristocratic pedigree. Transparent in intention, the trappings nonetheless had their effect. Although he had exchanged pleasantries with George MacFarlane at half a dozen soirées, Harris felt suddenly diffident. He followed a servant down an unfamiliar tapestry-lined hall with a sense that he was about to intrude on momentous deliberations.

Or perhaps the hall's length simply allowed time to reflect that MacFarlane didn't need the medievalism to inspire awe. Harris flattered himself that he knew how one became a Crane, the deals and compromises one made. Not so in the case of MacFarlane, who as early as 1840 had allegedly been worth £200,000 and who today could doubtless buy five or six Henry Cranes. To become a MacFarlane there weren't enough business days in a lifetime.

A carpenter's son, he had started trading sticks of wood. With each trade he acquired more cutting rights or property in what became Victoria County. Timber export made him a ship-owner, then a ship-builder. Some ships were simply dismantled in Britain for their timbers. Others returned with cargoes of textiles or of people he could settle on the land he had cleared. Rumour had it that he was either about to establish spinning mills in the Toronto area or about to buy a newspaper. He had contributed articles on business or culture to a variety of periodicals and, to lure immigrants, had written the novel
Flora of Fenelon Falls
, as well as a statistic-laden
Guide to Canadian Opportunities
. Mining and whaling also figured among his interests. Many more ventures he likely kept to himself, though he made no secret of financing and captaining his own company of militia.

A pair of gargoyles guarded the study door. Beyond it, Harris found an ample room lined with overflowing black oak bookcases. Behind the refectory table that served as a desk, the more than ample George MacFarlane rose from an ecclesiastical looking chair with a high, pointed back.

A senior member of William Sheridan's generation, MacFarlane was tall, broad-shouldered and corpulent. His nose resembled an inverted ship's prow. His offered hand was so large that Harris could barely grasp enough of it to shake. Blue saucer eyes gave him a deceptively ingenuous expression.

“Sit down, sit down. I was just scribbling a bit of verse on the Treaty of Paris for one of those competitions, nothing that can't wait ten minutes.” His voice was both soft and gruff, like sawdust with splinters scattered through it.

He had been interested to hear that Harris believed he could find “our friend” Mrs. Crane and had asked his wife to refer any further inquiries to him. Above all, he didn't want Elsie upset. In fact, the more quietly they worked the better. There were Henry Crane's feelings to consider as well as those of society.

“I'm only doing,” said Harris, “what her own brother would do if he had lived.”

“Her brother?”

“A child cholera victim in '32. You knew, surely.”

MacFarlane looked momentarily befogged. “The smaller the patient, the more fallible the diagnosis. I believe there was little of the disease you mention
that
year—or this far west.”

Harris knew better, and knew better than to point out that the cholera MacFarlane made light of could well have reached Canada's shores aboard his own ships. He might have taken every precaution known to physic and still not have been able to stop it.

“In any case, Harris,” the older man resumed, his tone benevolent and admonitory, “a brother may do what other men may not. Consider the lady's reputation. Consider your own. I need not remind you that people want only men they believe to be of the highest character to have control of their money.”

In Fenelon Falls, Harris silently wondered, did men of the highest character not look out for their friends?

“Believe me, Harris. In sixty years, no one has ever faulted me for excessive caution. Now let's see what we can do within the limits of discretion.”

The French teacher was identified as Marthe Laurendeau, daughter of a cabinet minister from Canada East. MacFarlane didn't know whether she had returned there or was still in Toronto. As for Theresa, he professed optimism, but his confidential view resembled the lighthouse keeper's.