Death in the Age of Steam (43 page)

A night in Toronto remained to endure. Remembering Jasper's warning that Crane would want him questioned, Harris avoided the address he had given the coroner and bedded down instead at Randall's stable in Banshee's stall. This nest proved even less restful than expected. Ribs showed through the mare's dapple-grey coat, from which the gloss had all but vanished.

Next day, although the horse made him more conspicuous, Harris secured a stall for her on the cargo deck of the steamer that bore him down lake. Starting to undo the liveryman's neglect would occupy some portion of the weary voyage.

Another portion he spent anxiously perusing Toronto newspapers from the fortnight since his August 1 flying visit. Had anything been published prejudicial to Theresa's name or safety? While he looked, three articles on other subjects caught Harris's irritable and restless eye.

One from the
Leader
of a week earlier coincidentally concerned an inquest. Harvey Ingram, of Aberdeen, Detroit, Presque Isle and latterly Toronto, aged forty-six years, had been found at the foot of the Gibraltar Light, which he kept. The jury said he had not fallen, but been killed by drink alone. Beside him lay a partially consumed case of champagne, which reminded Harris of the dropped smuggling charges. Stricter treatment might have lengthened Ingram's life. It seemed remarkable that one inured to bad whisky should die of good wine, but perhaps the pleasing taste
made stopping harder and the knowledge that it was only wine made stopping seem less urgent.

Harris thought of all the champagne bottles in Mrs. Vale's sprawling establishment and of lives poured grossly or languidly away.

The next story to engage his attention was one of progress and enterprise. The
Globe
reported the mayor's ceremonial removal of the first shovelful of earth from the foundations of the future Conquest Iron Works. Company president and Provincial Bank director Mr. Joshua Newbiggins had spoken on the occasion to warm applause. “Our friends at York Foundry,” he warned, “will soon feel the bracing winds of competition whistle through their forges whenever railroads tender contracts for track.” Other engagements had prevented the attendance of Conquest's newest and most prestigious backer, Mr. George MacFarlane—but that Titan of timber and other ventures innumerable was said to have been instrumental in reassuring aldermen that an iron foundry would in no way compromise the residential character of Front Street.
Sir
George, as the next honours list must have it.

The addition would not change the fact that MacFarlane had questionable taste in partners.

Harris turned finally to the papers dated August 15. He had been avoiding these for fear of seeing his own disreputable name in print. He found in the end only one item, alarmingly headed, “Infidel's Testimony Rejected,” but mercifully short and hidden away near the bottom of a middle column on page four. The writer slyly asked if Mr. Harris's barrister anticipated trouble collecting his fee after exposing his client to public obloquy. Traced to an address he preferred not to make public, Mr. Jasper Small replied that he liked to think even atheists had some sense of honour and that he, for his part, looked forward to representing Mr. Harris for many years to come.

Small, it seemed, was offering his services. Good.

Nothing in print gave any hint as to Theresa's location. Better yet.

Harris proceeded immediately to a writing desk in the steamer's lounge. With Ingram's fate as well as Theresa's needs in mind, he scrawled a note to be mailed back to Toronto when they next touched land.

Friday

On Lake Ontario

Jasper,

If in truth open to new commissions, borrow against whichever of my properties the mortgage brokers like best and come at once to Montreal. The ornate house by the Parliament buildings, e.g., would make a very serviceable horse-nail factory. The secret you so ingeniously saved yesterday is bound to leak out soon, and then legal manoeuvres will begin in earnest. Find at Rasco's your faithful, if godless, client—

Isaac

The next six days passed in waiting. The steamer crawled down the St. Lawrence and through its locks, delivering Harris at last to the metropolis. At last! But in thriving Montreal, nothing had happened. Nothing continued to happen. The public clocks at long intervals announced one empty hour after another.

The saving of Harris's sanity, meanwhile, was seeing to Banshee's recovery. As with gradually increased rations of oats and hay she put on weight, he stretched her legs with longer rides, up the orchard-covered mountain and down past the limestone quarries on the other side. Then he would trot her back to his hotel to find the clock hands a little advanced—and no messages.

Small neither came nor wrote. Nor did Harris see anything of Nan Hogan or the police, though he was careful whenever he ventured near the convent to make sure he was not followed. They seemed not to need him.

Tuesday morning, the promised week passed without a letter from Theresa. Inquiries availed Harris nothing.

He felt helpless. He needed to hear from her both some reassurance as to her present condition and some information he could use to protect her. Crane's crimes might be guessed at, but guesses have no public standing. Harris resembled a knight who, hearing rumblings from the forest, can execute no plan of attack or defence until he establishes the nature of the beast. For her chains to be broken, Theresa had to break her silence. He saw no other way.

Two days later, with dense cloud pressing on the island city, uncertainty had so paralyzed him that even distressing news came as a clarifying mercy. Without touching his fried eggs, he sprang from his seat at the breakfast table. Thursday's
Montreal Herald
reported that Mrs. Henry Crane, missing from her Toronto home since July 13, had found her way to the Grey Nuns' hospital, where she was receiving care until she could be reunited with her husband, the well-known etc., etc. The announcement originated with Postmaster General Armand Laurendeau, whose family had long supported the sisters' charitable work.

Article in hand, Harris rushed out of the hotel. What deprived him of breakfast was the need to take measures rather than any overwhelming sense of shock or betrayal. In her letter to Theresa, Marthe had undertaken that her family would not volunteer information to Crane, but suppose that Crane—knowing of Theresa's connection to Marthe—had eventually made an approach to Mlle Laurendeau's father. Perhaps the two men had business dealings, negotiating agreements for the transport of mail. No venal motive need be imputed to the postmaster general. Crane's quite natural wish to find his wife must have overborne the wife's unexplained wish not to be found. Could Laurendeau in conscience have refused Crane's blunt request? Most unlikely.

These thoughts, however, occurred to Harris only now that the secret was out. He had expected it kept somewhat longer.

He was hastening to the Anglican diocese, where he presently asked for any priest who might have known Theresa or William Sheridan when Parliament sat in Montreal in the late forties. He was told he wanted Philander Bray. Besides his duties at Christ Church Cathedral, Philander Bray taught dead
languages every morning at McGill College.

Harris hastened up the sapling lined, dirt avenue north of St. Catherine Street towards a square, stone hall surmounted by a thick lantern. Cowed young men were filing out after Bray's lecture. The cleric had no charm of person or manner and remembered no Sheridan girl. With the father he had disputed the relative importance of faith and works, he recalled with asperity and a marked New England accent. St. James
versus
St. Paul—deeds versus piety.

Harris could imagine Theresa's benevolent father holding each one severally sufficient to save a soul. Likely neither would find favour in Bray's eyes, which were too deep-set and thickly shaded ever to feel the warmth of the sun. Nipped by their frost, Harris stumbled frequently in explaining his errand.

“Let me understand you, Mr. Harris.” Philander Bray rolled his lecture notes and tied them with a black ribbon. “You are a family friend, who allowed this Protestant Episcopalian woman to enter a Roman Catholic convent, from which you naturally find yourself barred. You now fear
inter alia
that she may be forced to return to an adulterous husband.”

Harris noted the particular distaste with which his interlocutor alluded to adultery. A spark of hope flickered before yielding to the next icy blast.

“As her late father's former pastor,” Bray continued, “I am to insist on seeing her, to persuade her to leave the Grey Nuns if I can, and to otherwise convey from her a letter.”

“An account of her husband's crimes.” Harris was saying what he wished rather than what he knew Theresa's letter to contain. “Which document,” he added, “must not fall into unfriendly hands.”

“Legally,” Bray retorted, “his crimes are little to the point. In this very city, a judge recently ordered a woman back to a husband convicted of assaulting her.”

“I don't know the law, sir, but even if I make my case badly, please do not refuse me your help.”

Bray sniffed noisily. “And what religion do you profess? Are you a churchman?”

“My mother is a Presbyterian.”

“I have no motive for helping you and no authority. Your request would have to pass through Bishop Fulford to his homologues in the Church of Rome.”

The professor-priest set off at a brisk strut down the college avenue towards the city. Beyond it dully gleamed the swift St. Lawrence, highway and sewer. Harris let him go and wished him drowned—for all of fifteen seconds—then caught him up and tried again.

Bray didn't turn his head, which Harris observed for the first time in profile. Its prominent parietal and occipital lobes would have spoken to a phrenologist of such unencouraging traits as self-esteem, firmness and conjugality. It was all charlatanism anyway, Harris reminded himself.

“There isn't time for bishops,” he said.

“For Miss Sheridan's sake then, I must see what can be done. Don't thank me.”

Harris was too surprised by this apparent reversal either to thank or to correct him. Here was one man Crane's name did not impress.

“Show her the article, Mr. Bray.”

The gentleman addressed sniffed again, evidently suffering from hay fever.

The two men proceeded straight to Foundling Street, where Harris said he would wait. From a window table at the coffee house, he watched Philander Bray, in flapping black tail coat, approach the Grey Nuns' gate. For some minutes Bray faced the slide in the door, then turned away. He remained nearby, however, which kept Harris from despair.

After twenty minutes, Bray spoke again through the slide, and Harris wished the clergyman all the firmness his head shape was supposed to signify. The slide closed. Bray paced the plank sidewalk another quarter hour before—without a backward glance—he was admitted to the convent.

Now the real waiting began. As the lunch hour arrived and faded into afternoon, it became tempting to fear that Bray had
removed Theresa, or left without her, by another door. Clouds drifted lower across the square. Harris tried to make each cup of strong black coffee last an hour, and had just drained the final chilly drops from his third cup when he realized the fog had become too thick for his watering eyes to make out the urn-shaped adornments on the convent gateposts. He settled his account and went to shiver on the sidewalk where Bray had been pacing. The temperature had dropped with the clouds.

Eventually Bray emerged alone and—but for his own lecture—empty-handed. Harris bit back the keenest disappointment. Having just taken a short turn to keep warm, he hastened towards the clergyman through the mist. Might not his tailcoat pocket contain a few pages from Theresa at least? A line even in her hand? Impossible to imagine that Bray had spent so many hours in the convent without seeing her.

“Mr. Bray—”

Bray halted all questions with a raised hand and looked back towards the Grey Nuns' door, which was still open. Presumably after some parting words with the portress, Theresa herself stepped out.

Seeing her made the dank air summer sweet. Although thinner than nine days ago, indeed painfully thin, she greeted Harris with a smile from the heart. He felt his own face kindle at her flame. She wore the same plain gown and white bonnet as when she had entered the convent, and she carried a roll of papers she declined to let Bray relieve her of.

“Isaac, did you send me Mr. Bray?” she asked cheerfully.

Bray sniffed at the suggestion of having been sent.

“I approached him, yes,” Harris managed to say, his pulse racing with coffee and emotion. Her presence in any form enraptured him. “Are you well?”

“Well enough,” said Theresa. “I didn't recognize Papa's old friend at first, nor he me, but I remembered Mr. Bray's preaching when I heard his voice. My father valued your support, Mr. Bray, on the disposition of the Clergy Reserves.”

“
Tempus fugit
,” said Bray. “Let's be off.”

He takes no pains to appear congenial, thought Harris, recalling that at the college the priest had chosen to speak of his disagreements with William Sheridan rather than of shared causes and common ground. Now he took two or three steps west on Foundling Street and beckoned Theresa irritably. She did not follow immediately, but when she spoke again sounded wearied, as if by a long and uncertain purgatory.

“Mr. Bray has offered to let me stay with him and his family. That's best, Isaac, I think. We don't know what Henry may do.”

“A great improvement,” said Harris, giving her his arm. Whatever his misgivings about such a berth, his first task was to remove her from the doorstep of the convent now famous for sheltering her. “Where to?”

“St. Peter Street to Craig,” said Bray. “Your company is not required.”

“It's freely given.” Harris walked north with them on the fog-filled street indicated, keeping himself between Theresa and the carters driving blind.