Death in the Age of Steam (62 page)

Harris decided against using the revolver, which he stuck inside his belt. Waiting against the wall to the south of the door, he pinned the woman's arms from behind as she rushed in. A heavy, hooded cloak hid her face. Young and sturdy, she kicked fiercely until the sight of Crane lying in his blood stunned her into stillness.

“What have you done to him?” she cried.

“He has died of his wounds, miss.” Harris might have known
Crane's accomplice would be a serving girl he had made fond of him. “Are you armed? Show me your empty hands, and I'll let go.”

“He can't be dead, not after I bound him up and found him a carriage.” She started to struggle again.

But Theresa was in the room. The kindled expression of sympathy in her face told Harris she knew this woman, whose shoulder she solicitously touched.

“Stop it, Miss Webster,” she said. “Quiet now.”

Miss Webster was quiet. Theresa loosened the girl's cloak and took the girl's hands in her own. Upon releasing her, Harris saw it was the seamstress he had let in front of him at William Sheridan's funeral—Vandervoort's quondam informant—Marion Webster.

“Oh, Mrs. Crane, he's not dead, is he?” In all simplicity, Miss Webster appealed to the woman she believed her rival.

“If you'll remain calm,” said Theresa, “we shall see. Won't you sit down?”

“Theresa,” said Harris, “you need not look. John Vandervoort will soon be here.”

He had to speak, but knew her answer in advance. She was battle-hardened. No less than the Crimean nurses, she could look on scenes once thought unfit for woman's eyes. She had come through the wars. Now she must see the peace.

Harris righted the
prie-dieu
chair, still firm enough in the joints for all its rough treatment—although a bullet hole through the seat admittedly made it less than inviting. In any case, Marion Webster ignored it.

“See to Henry, missus,” she insisted, advancing a step. “Do be quick about it. You have to save him.”

She clasped her hands to her round cheeks and pressed her long, full lips quiveringly together. Plainly, she wanted to run to Crane, but was also scared.

Crane lay where Harris had dragged him, under the further window, equidistant from the bed and the hearth. Theresa went to him. Kneeling on a dry patch of carpet by his head, she held
two fingers to a blood vessel in his neck. She had to feel his stillness. It amazed Harris how slight, even in her quilted mantle, Theresa appeared next to Crane.

She had to hear his silence too. In another moment, with steady hands, she undid his tie and shirt—her every movement quick, gentle, cool, precise. She removed her bonnet and set it behind her. A gasp escaped Marion Webster, whether at the state of Theresa's hair or at the directness with which Theresa laid her ear to Crane's chest. Theresa listened in three different places, about five seconds each time, then sat up.

“Yes, Miss Webster,” she said. “He is dead.”

The seamstress slumped down without regard to the chair, which Harris slid under her.

“And how are you, Theresa?” he said. “Have you any hurt?”

“Not so much as a scratch.” She rose and came to him, her eyes bright upon him. “And you, Isaac? I can't tell what happened here. Are you injured?”

“A little bruised, perhaps. Nothing more. That was a fine throw you made.”

“Wasn't it?” Tenderly her fingers brushed the side of his face Crane had struck.

After so long and uncertain a voyage, he touched the verge of bliss at last, although the taste of blood lay thick still in his throat. Then, over Theresa's shoulder, he caught Marion Webster looking up at them, her round face miserable with grief.

“Did he mention me?” she said. “Before he—you know, Mr. Harris—at the end? Mrs. Crane here didn't love him at all, so she won't mind. I practically carried him up here. Just tell me what he said about Marion Webster.” Her voice kept getting louder, as if she feared they were receding from her into their own private realm. “He could be quite romantic, you know.”

Before midnight, Vandervoort did see the light in Sheridan's window. He stifled an oath on entering the room and put a tin
flask to his lips. After the most cursory examination of the mutilated carcass, he flung open a window and shouted down into the street for a constable to stand guard at the scene and for anyone to call off the volunteer searchers. The prisoner was dead.

One effect of this roaring was to scare away the cabman Crane's accomplice had posted in the back lane. Honest use might otherwise have been made of his vehicle, although it wasn't a long walk to Police Station No. 1. Theresa accompanied Marion Webster, Harris and the red-haired inspector following just behind.

Crane's escape had cost Vandervoort any chance of early promotion—he said, draining his flask—so he was not persisting in a course of stubborn and fruitless temperance. One day Toronto would have a well-ordered police force, one day soon. It could be done. Look at Montreal.

Harris was still too steeped in blood to look so far.

“You'll be wanting this,” he said. He pulled the Colt Navy revolver from his belt and by the street lamps read the serial number—40099. “It's the one you took from Ingram, John. I don't suppose it was locked up.”

“I told Morgan. I told Devlin.”

The inspector explained that Crane had that day been brought in from the Berkeley Street Gaol to City Hall in anticipation of his appearance at the Sheridan inquest. Guard duty fell to Devlin and Morgan.

“Of the two,” Harris said, “Morgan struck me as being slightly less muddled. Did he fire the fatal shot?”

“No,” said Vandervoort. “Crane may have killed him by accident, if not in blind panic. Morgan took a bribe and turned his back.”

“And carried forbidden letters too, I suppose, to the
Triumph
captain and this Miss Webster.”

“She's a poor simpleton if I saw one,” said the policeman, dropping his voice. “Crane would not have stayed two minutes with her if he had made it out of the country, but he wanted an accomplice here in case things went awry, as they did. I've made
some use of the piece myself. I'll keep her clear of the Penitentiary if I can.”

“He certainly won her loyalty.” Harris marvelled at such universal persuasiveness. “So Devlin,” he added hopefully, “refused Crane's bribe.”

The name Devlin brought to mind a wharf rat never quite dressed, his angular face never completely shaved, his limp black hair never absolutely combed, his whining demands never totally met, his knowing look never remotely justified. Yet Devlin and his carbine had held out.

“Wrong again,” laughed Vandervoort. “Devlin took Crane's money and shot him anyway. As you say, the boy is muddled.”

Despite the lateness of the hour, eight or ten of the civilian volunteers who had helped search the docks were gathered outside City Hall to commiserate on Crane's demise. What a cheat! What a sell! They had rolled on Crane's rails or helped lay them. They had sailed his steamers for pay or paid to sail in them. They had looked forward to seeing the mighty brought low and were now to be most cruelly denied a public figure's public indictment for murder. Was Crane really dead or being spirited away by powerful friends? Rich men never swing. Show him to us then. When can we see him with our own eyes?

Harris and Vandervoort fended off their questions while making a path for Theresa and Marion Webster. They had reached the City Hall portico at last when out of its shadows into the lamplight stepped an Indian woman in a green taffeta dress.

“Inspector Vandervoort,” she said without haste or hesitation, “I am Mrs. Henry Crane. When may I have my husband's body?”

The onlookers fell silent. They could not have known she was there in the dark doorway where beggars sat.

She did not stare while being stared at. Her strong, deep voice made Harris think she dropped her eyes from politeness rather than timidity. A long, straight nose dominated her copper-coloured face. Her shawl had fallen back off her wavy black hair, and she showed no sign of chill in her unseasonably flimsy
gown. Her age appeared to fall between Theresa's and Crane's, late twenties.

Here then at last, thought Harris with quickened pulse, was the individual on whose strength of character so much had turned. She must have arrived from the Northwest this very night, expecting to find her errant husband alive—and must have heard otherwise from those clamouring to see his head on a pole. What now were her intentions? A hard-eyed Métis man in buckskin and ragged beard stood at her side, clutching a buffalo rifle, ready to second her will. To her reasonable demand, Vandervoort was responding most sluggishly.

“Well, John?” Harris prompted.

“
Your
body?” said the policeman at last. “That's as the coroner in his wisdom finds. You'll wait a week at least.”

The buffalo hunter bristled at this tone.

Susan Crane perceived Vandervoort was tipsy and ignored him. Instead she addressed Marion Webster, who was gaping as if she beheld a chimera.

“Are you this Theresa who got my leavings?”

One bystander guffawed. The seamstress quailed and shook her head.

“Mrs. Crane,” said Harris, “the lady in question deserves your sympathy sooner than your contempt.”

Theresa now stepped forward and spoke with feeling. “I am the unfortunate woman your husband pretended to marry, and I can only wish you had made known your prior claim.”

“A close race, these redskins,” said Vandervoort. “Stand back there!” he admonished the volunteers, who were getting something of a show after all.

“Did you agree to keep your marriage secret?” Harris asked above the rattle.

“Secret?” the widow scoffed. “It was in the book and witnessed. I've always used his name.”

The name Crane, Harris reflected, sounded Ojibway enough and would excite no suspicion. Possibly she thought that the white man kept only one book.

“He offered money to close my mouth,” she continued, “but I said, ‘Provide for your wife or don't. It's beneath me to make mischief in the South.'”

“Why talk to them now?” snapped her companion, speaking for the first time. “Let's go.”

“Mrs. Crane,” said Theresa, “I'm sorry you've come so far to hear hard news. Will you take my hand?”

“You're skinny for Henry's taste.” Susan Crane glanced again at the ampler Miss Webster, who was still too terrified to speak, then took Theresa's hand. “He was sober and fine-looking, and he fancied me, but he only married for a moment's comfort. I soon saw that no knot holds weak rope.”

“But you did come here,” Theresa insisted, “expecting to see him again.”

“Word of his trials reached the Red River. Is it true he killed your father?”

Theresa's throat caught. “And my father's housekeeper.”

“And a constable,” added Vandervoort, properly regretful. Morgan had been more use to him than most.

“No!” Marion Webster found her voice. “I don't believe it. It's all lies and mistakes—”

But the spectators' denunciations drowned the young seamstress out.

“—a proper seraglio, I tell you.”

“—ran roughshod over everyone.”

“—almost got away with it too.”

“—five good pennies I'd pay to look on his worthless hide.”

“—a
prize
specimen, that husband of yours.”

Now a shiver seemed to pass over the Indian woman, if not of cold then of revulsion against this alien place. She might have pointed out that when she knew Henry Crane he was no murderer, no bigamist.

“I still want to bury him,” was all she said.

“We'll help if we can,” offered Harris and read in Theresa's eyes that he had spoken her thoughts as well.

The shortness of that night saved him from dreams of Crane
floating in his red lake. Head had barely touched pillows when a hotel servant arrived with shaving water and the news that Miss Sheridan had already left her room.

Harris found her in the breakfast parlour with black coffee before her. The dead black of her dress made her face pale, softening none of its tiredness, and still she glowed with purpose through her mourning weeds, straining towards nine o'clock and the convening of the inquest on her Papa.

“I've had no chance to mark his passing,” she pointed out. “It seems a poor ceremony, this tribunal, but Papa would not have thought so. I'm sure he would have had some reminder for me of the Magna Carta pedigree of the coroner's court.”

Harris smiled assent and said little.

The prospect of Theresa's accusing Crane to his face of her father's murder had until now overshadowed all other facets of the inquest, which this morning—with Crane absent—appeared in a quite different light. What loomed largest now was the imminent opening of that ornate coffin. The jurors must be sworn in the presence of William Sheridan's remains, whose condition after sixteen weeks Harris could not guess. The hermetic cast-iron casket must have retarded putrefaction—but by how much?