Death in the Age of Steam (14 page)

“It's an old house,” Harris murmured. “In the twenties—”

“Yes, yes—always a servant,” Vandervoort rejoined quickly, showing he was quite familiar with aristocratic ways. “We'll try the back.”

At the back, a sunken flight of stone steps led to the basement. Although it was much darker here away from the street, Vandervoort hurtled down them and got the key into what Harris remembered as the kitchen door. The lock would not move.

“Speaking of servants,” said Harris, wondering that the house had been left untended, “ought we not to have a word with them?”

“You find 'em first.” Vandervoort was losing patience with the key, which he continued to twist and jiggle in the lock. “The fire must have bent the metal out of—there!”

The door swung inward.

“The key to her father's house! Now you'll have to believe she's dead.”

In the back of Harris's mind, it registered that Vandervoort did feel the need to convince him. Later he would be flattered. Right now he was too busy castigating himself for not having sooner sought out the testimony of Sheridan's housekeeper.

No one ever mentioned her. He knew of her existence only from that latest talk with Small. There had been no such person at the period when Harris had been a visitor here, Theresa having filled the office. There had of course been other servants—whose supervision, he recalled, had occasioned some friction between father and daughter.

“Papa, the man's a thief!” Theresa had burst out one evening when a new gardener's praises were being sung before Harris, and sung again. Eyes twinkling with reasonableness, her father asked what harm it did if the odd turnip went astray. Theresa, exasperated to the point of laughter, said it wasn't that. She had found two silver watches freshly buried between the strawberry plants. Sheridan's brow darkened only briefly. “I wonder,” he said, “if he thought he could grow grandfather clocks.” The gardener's tenure was as brief as his predecessor's, and his successor's, but Sheridan liked to point out that the rate of job change was high everywhere in this restless decade. He had felt he was made a monkey of no oftener than anyone else.

Now there appeared to be neither gardener nor housekeeper, neither a maid to air the rooms nor even a watchman to protect all those panes of glass until the estate could be settled. No one. Vandervoort led the way inside as if he didn't expect the house to be anything but deserted.

Harris followed by the light of a lung-searing Promethean match. A second, no less pungent, lit the gaselier that hung above the long centre table. Only then did the pent-up domestic perfumes of laundry, plaster, dried herbs and wood embers begin to impose themselves. Comforting enough aromas normally, but not tonight. Was Harris's nose not yet recovered from the laboratory, or was he possibly letting the recent death two floors above colour his sense of smell? Neither explanation quite satisfied him.

The kitchen occupied the entire western half of the basement, except for a narrow servant's bedroom at the front. Harris went to have a look at it while Vandervoort rummaged inexplicably through the cupboards.

There was no gas in the servant's room. Harris lit an oil lamp that stood on an otherwise bare pine chest. Its drawers were empty. So were a row of pegs on the back of the door. So were the wide sills of the two windows that gave into wells directly below the drawing room windows. He flicked the curtains back in place.

Rooms like this were often furnished with a cot no wider than a ladder. Sheridan had provided a full-width bed, its head tucked for winter warmth into the corner nearest the bake oven. Wide as it was, the bed did seem unusually low. Perhaps to correct a wobble, pieces had been sawn from each leg in turn, to the point where the yellow and brown coverlet all but swept the uneven brick floor. Harris looked under the coverlet at the bare straw tick and then under the bed. He found not even a stray thimble.

When he turned back into the kitchen, Vandervoort wasn't there, but could be heard stirring in one of the storage rooms in the other half of the basement. Looking for liquor more than likely. Harris bristled briefly, then took a deep breath. Being pilfered—“involuntary charity”—seemed almost to amuse the Sheridan he had known.

He took another breath. After the tidy bedroom, the kitchen truly did smell wrong. Behind the domestic odour lurked a sourness. Approaching the massive black cooking stove that had been set into the original fireplace, he lifted the lid of each of the pots and kettles. He worked his way around the room, inspecting crocks and churns and all the dishes in the floor-to-ceiling dresser. Everything was clean. When he looked up to see what food or laundry might be hanging from the ceiling, he stepped backwards into a slat-backed chair. He felt tired and clumsy and out of ideas.

Turning to straighten the chair, he saw he had knocked off its back a discoloured square of material that had been draped there. He picked it up. It was sticky. A sniff confirmed it was the source of the sour odour.

The housekeeper had cleared out so thoroughly and left the
kitchen so generally shipshape. Why, Harris wondered, had she not washed this pudding cloth before she went?

He sniffed again, more searchingly. His nose could detect nothing beyond the week's development of mould already noted. Suet pudding, he thought. He folded the grey and viscous rag inside a clean dishtowel for ease of carriage back to Lamb's laboratory. He might just have a look upstairs first.

Vandervoort—his flask topped up with imported whisky—intercepted Harris on the bottom step. “No warrant, you understand.”

When the accountant Septimus Murdock reported next morning to help open the vault, he seemed not just his normally gloomy self but a man in pain. His chin with its smudge of Napoleonic whiskers was trembling more than usual. Out of his pasty, pear-shaped face, his moist brown eyes cast Harris what could only be interpreted as reproachful glances.

With coaxing, Murdock admitted a newspaper story had upset him. There for the moment Harris left it.

He had been alarmed himself to read—once he got past the advertisements that monopolized the front page of the
Globe
—that over the weekend one of the bank's directors had been robbed and beaten on the road between Kingston and Brockville. Crippling head injuries made the man unfit for further business. Since it was nearly ten months until the next shareholders' meeting, the remaining directors would be choosing a replacement.

The bank had been attacked. Its officers naturally felt threatened. Then again, the accountant rarely dealt with the directors. Perhaps it was the story of the Rouge Valley arm that had Murdock rattled.

Sunday night Harris had returned home from Front Street to find stuck under his door some journalist's request for an
immediate
interview on the subject, whatever the hour. This
request he ignored. He was a little out of sorts at Lamb's reluctance to receive—or even smell—his latest discovery, but most of all he was exhausted.

Harris's refusal to be interviewed did not of course keep his name out of the papers. It just resulted in the publication of less accurate information. “Mr. Isaac Harris, head cashier of the Provincial Bank of Canada”—that would sit well in Kingston. The cashier of the Toronto branch had better write them an explanatory note.

Probing the matter further at the noon dinner hour, he discovered it was neither the exaggeration of his credentials nor the grisly nature of his discovery that Murdock held against him. Rather it was his cooperation with those “Orange rogues” on the police force.

“Better have a seat, Septimus. Not there. The armchair is more comfortable.”

“You think I'm an old woman, but you don't know what it's like to have your children taunted in the street. I'm afraid almost for them to leave the house.”

Aware that no child escapes taunting on some score, Harris nonetheless felt his heart tugged. He took another of the green leather chairs in front of the desk and tried to be rationally reassuring.

“There is Orange violence in Toronto,” he said. “Remarkably little of it is directed against the city's Catholics. Now wait before you answer. Let us look at the facts. Last summer two volunteer fire companies fought each other on Church Street and attacked the police. That was Orangeman against Orangeman. Twelve days later, as a result of some bawdy-house
mêlée
, a fire brigade demolished an American circus. A week ago, merchant-publican Luther Casey had his wharf and warehouse burned—”

“By Orangemen.”

“His
fellow
Orangemen—to whom in their intoxicated state, it now appears, he had denied more drink. In all of this how are Catholics more victims than any of the rest of us who value a civilized community?”

Murdock shook his heavy head. “We're intimidated, Isaac. Remember, we're in the minority. There are three of you to every one of us.”

“Oh, I hardly count as a Protestant,” Harris protested weakly. Geology and zoology had by painless increments displaced his ancestral faith, such as it had been—but he knew that made him no less alien to Murdock, who continued as if Harris had not spoken.

“The thugs need not attack us directly. We have eyes to see that anyone opposing their power can become a victim. Even a Member of Parliament.”

“You mean William Sheridan?”

“Perhaps a rising man of business is right to court their favour and—and help them hide their crimes, but it saddens me all the same to see you do it. I must get home to dinner.”

“Just a minute,” said Harris. “A week ago, the very first time I saw you after the event, you hinted there was sinister significance to William Sheridan's dying on July 12.”

“I knew it then, and I've got the details since. You'll never read them in the press.”

“Would you mind eating here?” Last night's visit to Front Street had sharpened Harris's hunger for such details. He had previously made three or four such requests, when reports from their branch had been commanded at short notice. Each time Murdock had nodded dutifully. Today—in the absence of bank business—the accountant hesitated, sighed and nodded. Orange roguery? A futile topic, his dumb show implied—but, to his shame, irresistible. As usual, Dick Ogilvie was sent to advise Mrs. Murdock and bring back from a neighbouring café sliced ham, meat pie and a jug of ginger beer.

“Septimus,” said Harris, on returning to his office, “you admit the daily papers are unreliable.”

Murdock shrugged as if the thing were obvious.

“Then please don't judge me by what you read there. They say I found Mrs. Crane's arm. That's false. I found
an
arm, which remains to be identified.”

“They say nothing at all about William Sheridan. What a great heart that was! I would have attended his funeral myself if it had been at the Cathedral.”

“Yes, well, Mr. Sheridan found St. James with its reserved pews too plutocratic for his liking. What should they be saying?”

“Holy Trinity is in the most Protestant ward in the city, and the way things are, a Roman like myself would not have felt particularly welcome.”

Harris did not stop to list the French Canadian mourners, Murdock's co-religionists to a man. “Septimus, what should the papers be saying?”

The repetition of the question gratified the accountant and unnerved him. “Ask Sibyl Martin,” he stammered.

“Who is she?”

“For the last three months of his life, William Sheridan's housekeeper.”

Harris had been pacing. Now he went dead still, though his pulse was off at a gallop. He felt as if he had been tracking through deep woods a quarry he might have seen by no more than a quarter turn of the head.

“Where,” he asked carefully, “will I find her?”

“That's a question, isn't it?”

“Septimus.”

“I don't know, Isaac. No one seems to know, and no one seems to have been looking.”

The housekeeper's arm? A fearful joy tickled Harris's throat. To cover his unsettling eagerness for a human sacrifice, he said, “You think after killing him she fled.”

“Or is being hidden,” said Murdock. “If you ask me, she killed them both.”

“Sheridan and . . .”

“Exactly. Father and daughter.”

The theory was breath-catching, but quickly fell apart when the accountant could give no account of what Sibyl might have done with Theresa's body. Burn it? Where? Not in Scarboro,
surely. How was she to have got it there? Sheridan kept no carriage.

Murdock postulated accomplices—as many as necessary. He had never actually clapped eyes on the housekeeper and could give no indication as to her height or build. “Sluttish and sullen” was how rumour described her.

By the time their meal arrived, Harris had heard several more jeremiads, but no new facts.

“Look here,” he said once young Ogilvie had set two places at a gate-leg table and withdrawn, “what besides her disappearance makes you accuse this woman of murder?”