Death in the Age of Steam (31 page)

The coast when he looked out was clear. His opponent must be at the far corner. He committed minor trespass by dashing between two houses on Brock Street, leaping a fence, and slipping in through the back door of a Princess Street wine merchant. (“Purveyors to Regiopolis Seminary” read a discreet sign.) In propitiation, Harris bought a corkscrew he had no use for, meanwhile congratulating himself on his own deviousness. He had won first time.

His victory would have meant no more than the fleeting pleasure it gave him if he had not already concluded that Theresa had never been in Kingston. He could find nothing of her here and had almost come to believe he could sense her absence. Oscar's disease in reverse. A cab carried him west past the commercial buildings on King Street, back out of town the way he had come.

Confidence in his decision grew when out the cab window he saw a sign. From the eastern end of a warehouse, an enormous padlock appeared to leap, and the black letters encircling this
trompe l'oeil
painting spelled, “CRANE'S PAINTS & HARDWARE.”

Of course. This must have been in the back of Harris's mind. He had forgotten that Henry had been born in Kingston, and that his younger brother still ran their deceased father's business. Theresa might have feared her brother-in-law would recognize her. By inquiry, Harris learned that Mr. Arthur Crane had in fact been out of town all this past week, but Theresa could not have been expected to know that. If she meant to
continue east, to Marthe's perhaps, she could well have thought to bypass the grey city by land or water.

Harris sprang back into the waiting cab. With something more now than wishful thinking to support his course of action, he felt as cocky as a heartsick man can feel on four hours' sleep.

From the first farm house past Portsmouth he proceeded west on foot. In Theresa's place, he would have been looking at first light on Sunday for a boat and boatman to take him around Kingston. No road hugged the curving shore, but he followed the one closest to the water, on his left for once, and asked whomever he could collar if they had seen her four mornings ago. Memories should still be fresh.

A farmer who had been up before dawn repairing a thresher had noticed a solitary woman hurrying west along the Front Road. He could not at that hour make out the colour of her costume. It was certainly no one he knew. His own affairs cut short any speculation as to the nature and wisdom of her errand, but he did recall checking the mercury and being surprised to find it stood above seventy Fahrenheit degrees. She had been hugging herself as if for warmth.

Feeling fortune's wind strengthen in his sails, Harris prepared to hear of further, confirmatory sightings. He was disappointed—all the way to Collins Bay. From this dead end he retraced his path, looking for the point at which Theresa's had diverged from it. Even if no one had seen her, there might be some physical evidence.

And so it was that on the afternoon of Thursday, August 7, a lean and hungry-looking man in tweeds, straw hat and startlingly green vest was observed prowling the verge of the Front Road four miles west of Kingston. He was too well turned-out for a tramp. He was too indifferent to dirt and burrs to pass as a professional gentleman. Some children thought he might be searching the ditches for weeds from which to make quack medicines and looked in vain for his circus waggon inscribed with promises of miraculous cures. A dairymaid averted her gaze from the suspicious character and quickened
her pace. A harmless lunatic perhaps, but one never knew.

A shoe and harness maker simply assumed he had lost something and stopped to offer assistance. The searcher's physiognomy impressed him favourably. What he would remember was the long, straight, narrow nose and a particularly sympathetic downward curve to the upper eyelids. Age? That was hard to judge. The cobbler thought he walked like a young man, raised in the country but wearing city boots. At the same time, the grey in his dark side-whiskers, even if no more than the effect of roadside dust, did not appear out of place. Then again, his bloodshot eyes burned bright. And his complexion showed not age lines but recent strain.

The tweedy man had not just lost a gold sovereign. He was seeking a lady, and it truly was amazing in what detail he could describe her. The cobbler asked question after question. Able to offer no help at all, he at least went his way with a story to tell.

Increasingly, when such stories were told at taverns along the northern shore of Lake Ontario, one or more of the hearers would recognize the subject.

“Nose like a greyhound? The very party that came pestering me in Cobourg!”

“And didn't he stand the entire
Kith 'n' Kin
on her ear last week?—though I'm not sure he meant to.”

“This week he has been all over Kingston and no mistake. You can't move without that emerald breast of his hitting you in the eye.”

He made for a spot of colour in the landscape. No one was seriously annoyed with him.

No one but Harris himself.

He was by two o'clock repeating himself, going back over ground already covered, revisiting bushes he had looked under half an hour before, endlessly checking his own earlier work as if it were that of a subordinate he no longer trusted. He could not believe he had lost the trail completely. There had to be a dropped button, a swath of flattened grass, a footprint not quite washed away, a thread, a hair, a breath. Something had to have been missed. Yet
even as he audited, Harris's mistrust spread to the auditor. His eyes were useless. He almost stopped bothering to look as he dragged his body up and down beneath a dull, damp sky.

Recollections of his morning smugness made him like himself no better. His glee on eluding Nan Hogan especially galled him now as he stopped by the side of the road to wipe the sweat from his foolish face. She would find him out again before he had learned a thing. He had scarcely been making himself inconspicuous.

As if he expected to see her coming, he looked back east across a shingle beach. The lap of wavelets steadied him. Even under clouds, the lake shimmered. He let his eyes slide over it away from the road out to the two promontories that closed the bay. On the nearer, shorter one stood an orchard and a farm Harris had already visited. The further, longer one he had supposed uninhabited, belonging as it did to a family settled north of the road. Now, though, against the grey sky he thought he discerned the faintest pencil line of smoke rising from a clump of trees down by the water's edge.

It was gone. No, there it was, a thickening brown smudge.

Harris's senses quickened. An entire layer of dead skin seemed to fall away. A ten-minute run brought him around and away from the bay to where the road bridged a stony creek. He had noted this feature previously, but not the extent to which the stones were shaped and spaced to form steps leading downstream—out towards the further point. By discreetly extending a natural peculiarity, human hands had provided a path that left vegetation undisturbed. Harris sat on the edge of the low, railingless bridge. His feet easily reached the first stone. He stood on it.

It wasn't quite the first. Upstream from it lay a larger, flatter rock the bridge timbers had hidden. Part of this stone's surface was not grey but rust. Iron ore, thought Harris, and was about to hasten on when he noticed the colour was flaking off. He crouched and lifted some of the caked red substance with his thumb nail. It looked like blood.

Anxiously, he followed the stepping stones towards the plume of smoke. Around a bend in the stream, the stones became sporadic, while the path climbed the right bank and cut into the trees. Harris crept forward along it. He resented the extra seconds he had to take, but didn't want a snapping twig to alarm the fire tender.

Might not that person be Theresa? If the blood on the rock weren't hers, it might—or if her injuries were light. Four days was a long time to hurt, but a short one to heal. Harris prayed for her to a heaven he believed empty. Let her be safe. Let her be whole.

Theresa's feet in any case had not created this well-worn path. One or more squatters' likely had.

On a smaller farm, this land—though damp—might have been cleared of its stands of cedar, elm and silver maple. As yet, however, the owners' appetites appeared not to have grown into their holdings. Nature here for now was permitted to take its course.

Just at first, tree trunks hid the lake, which presently twinkled between them as through a grill. Leaving the path, Harris stole along parallel to the shore. Then he saw it. Out on a patch of sand quivered the flame's pale light. Over it, a cauldron hung from a log tripod.

To the right, nestling against the rocks that marked the drop from the forest floor to the beach, a low shack had been laced together from odd logs, loam and driftwood. Harris's survey of this beaver lodge was cut short by the emergence from it of a woman in an emerald green dress.

Harris caught his breath. He tried also to rein in his imagination, to hold it back from hasty inferences.

The dress's wearer was of medium height and thin. She kept her back to Harris as she bent to add wood to the fire. A walnut-brown rag covered her head. When she stood up, she winced and kneaded the small of her back with her right hand. Whether from sun or dirt, the skin of that hand was very dark.

Harris's heart ticked off the suspenseful seconds. His vision
blurred. When she bent over again, he approached—almost not daring to look. This was no Mrs. Fitzroy. Two such dresses could not conceivably turn up within the space of a week in the same square mile of country.

He could picture Theresa's face now, precisely, the line of her nose, the parting of her lips.

He didn't want to alarm her by creeping too close. He waited till he was just close enough that she could not run away without recognizing him.

“Theresa?” he called out, softly first then louder. “Theresa.”

The woman turned towards him a startled, ancient face. They stared at each other a long, still moment till the greedy screeching of a seagull seemed to break the spell.

“Who's Tree-sa?”

“Beg your pardon—a woman I'm looking for.” Harris tried to clear his throat. Speech came slowly. “I—took that for her dress.”

“It's my dress,” said the squatter woman, wiping her crooked nose on its cuff.

He saw he had exaggerated her age. The lack of teeth gave her mouth a collapsed look, and ingrained grime accentuated the lines etched by rough living. Her figure remained firm and shapely inside the fitted bodice.

“May I,” he said, “ask where you got it?”

“Bought it,” she sniffed. “Are you a constable?”

He shook his head. “From whom did you buy it?”

“Because if you're a constable, I can show you the bill of sale.” Her voice, hitherto flat and dull, rang with triumph. “I knew I'd be suspected. As if such as
me
never came by anything honest.”

“I should like to see the bill of sale.”

“You're not a constable, though.” She stuck a discoloured finger in the cauldron.

Drawing closer, Harris saw that the water whose temperature she was testing contained several pounds of wildflowers. Queen Anne's lace, he guessed.

“Are you,” he asked, “a dyer by trade? That's honest work to be sure.”

“I may be. Was there something you wanted done in that line?”

“I should like a piece of cloth the colour of the dress you exchanged for the one you're wearing.”

The dye woman looked at him narrowly. The raw onions on her breath, of which they contributed the least putrescent element, flayed his nostrils. She asked his name and who he worked for.

He told her.

“I'm Etta Lansing. Mrs. Lansing to you. You would do better to tell me you're Henry.”

“I'm not,” Harris blurted, his heart racing, but convinced as it raced that it was avoiding a trap. Theresa could never have expressed a preference that Crane find her—Crane the faithless bully, so slow to look for his missing wife, so quick to believe her dead.

“You do sometimes go by that name,” coaxed the woman in green.

“Never. I'm not Henry. I don't serve Henry. I won't tell Henry the lady in question was here or where she went. Now—was she injured?”

“She came to no harm with me . . . Something for your thirst?”

While pursuing his interrogation, Harris diplomatically accepted from Mrs. Lansing a tin cup of some bitterly resinous infusion.

“That's sweet fern,” she said. “You find it by the edge of the road. It's good for the ague.”

Harris let his cup be refilled.

“It will be five cents by the way. I can't afford to give nothing away. Much obliged. Sassafras makes a nice tea too, and a nice orange dye, but it doesn't grow in these parts. Stoke up that fire a bit, will you?”

“The water is turning yellow,” said Harris. “Was this the colour?”

“That wild-carrot yellow was my favourite hue, until I saw the green.” She smoothed the skirt of Theresa's dress, already
stained with splashes from various dye pots—if with nothing worse. “You're supposed to get a bright green from dying your yarn first in goldenrod, then in indigo. Indigo's dear—and has to be fermented with urine. In the end, you do get a good strong green, but not like this.”

“Does Theresa Crane have your yellow dress?”

“Who? The lady didn't mention
that
name.”

“Mrs. Lansing—”

“Ooh, not so hot. I did keep a scarf the same, if you've time enough to wait while I get it.”

Harris followed her to the square door of the shack. “The bill of sale too, please.”

She supposed there was no harm. It was produced from somewhere under her garments and held for his inspection. The name signed in pencil was not Theresa's. The hand, despite a tremor, was. Harris didn't know how much acute distress to read into this distortion, as whatever her physical and emotional state, she might also have been trying to cover her tracks.