Death in the Age of Steam (17 page)

These words affected Harris like the unstringing of a bow
long kept under tension. He sank onto a thickly-upholstered sofa.

“The thing is,” he said, “if I'm to keep the search alive, I must account for the remains that have been found.”

“Account away then. How did Sibyl come to be in that shed?”

“Crane knows something about her. When I mentioned her name to him, he threw me off a train.”

“The devil!” A look of horror tinged with amusement rippled over the hitherto serene disk of Small's face. “A train in motion?”

Harris nodded. “A guilty response, would you not say?”

“The bandage on your foot then—is there much pain?”

Harris glanced at Small's half-open bedroom door, which he almost thought he had seen move. He could not recall if his friend kept a cat, but all was still, and he was too hot and weary to be bothered.

“Not when I rest it,” he said. “Do you think there could have been something between Henry and Sibyl—of a man-woman sort, I mean?”

With a musical laugh, a woman in a pink peignoir appeared at the bedroom door. “Of a prick and cunt sort, Mr. Harris? Is that what you have in mind?”

Harris took his feet off the sofa and jumped up in confusion, forgetting his ankle for the moment. He had never heard such words in mixed company, let alone from female lips. These lips were moist and pouting.

“If that is what you mean,” the woman continued, “I should say that nothing is more likely.”

“She was past all that surely,” Small objected in a tone of mild reproof. He avoided meeting Harris's eyes. “Sibyl had nothing left in the way of freshness or girlish shape.”

“No matter. From what
I
hear, Mr. Crane's palate runs very much to seamstresses and serving women. He doesn't mind them young and sparkling, but he'll also take the older potatoes with a little dirt for seasoning. Don't go, Mr. Harris. We were expecting you.”

“I didn't realize . . .” Harris's voice trailed off.

He wondered if his friend—bereft, overworked—had lost his mind. First, to let Harris come and talk freely without warning him they were not alone. And then, for the other guest to be a woman so intimately attired, so provocative in her speech—plainly Harris could only be in their way. He hesitated, though. Here at last was someone wading into the subject he had never got respectable tongues to broach—namely, what kind of marriage Theresa had had. Perhaps a detective could not afford to be too particular.

“Jasper,” he said, “what's this about?”

“Esther Vale.” Distractedly, Small hunched his dressing gown back on. “The client I was referring to.”

Harris knew the name. He had the troubling impression that it figured somewhere in the records of his branch.

“You might say we are each other's clients.” Esther Vale glided to a chair and sat, back straight, plump hands folded.

She looked familiar too. Physically, she could almost have been an older relation of Small's, with her round white cheeks and pale grey eyes. Unlike Small's, hers were watchful eyes. They seemed to appraise what balance she should at every moment strike between the vulgar and the demure. Beneath her henna-red hair hung bulbous earrings. Presently, she took them off.

That was when Harris recognized her as the complainant in the police station, and a second later as a depositor as well.

“I lend Mr. Harris my ill-got gains, some of them,” Mrs. Vale told Small.

“So everyone knows everyone,” he replied, smiling as if his own position had thereby been made less awkward. Small was drifting on the tide of events and, but for the other man's scrutiny, would apparently have been quite content to do so. “Here,” he said, exerting himself as host, “let's have some cognac. Isaac?”

Harris took a glass. Over £650, he reflected, on long-term deposit at four per cent. He had wondered how a barber's widow had amassed this much and was not sure he was happier knowing.

“Is Henry Crane a client of yours too?” he forced himself to ask, his face prickling with embarrassment.

“Not for me, sugar lump,” she instructed Small. “Spirits poison the complexion. Mr. Crane? Oh, no, he doesn't like to pay for female companionship.”

“He doesn't have to?” Theresa's husband, Harris thought.

“No gentleman has to if a scuffle with a rough-chapped slavey is all he wants.”

Harris winced, as he had been intended to.

“Last October, my dear banker, when I opened my account, I may have neglected to mention that for a dozen years I have run a sporting house in Kingston, Montreal, Quebec and Toronto—wherever the provincial capital happens to be.”

“She sticks,” said Small, “to the seat of government.”

Mrs. Vale threw her chair cushion, which toppled Small's brandy over the draft of her will. Harris attended closely. Plainly in this world anything could happen.

“Let us say I keep track of the honourable members. If they spend under my roof, it's not for want of other opportunities, but because lawgivers appreciate smart, clean girls with soft skins and saucy notions. Ditto your Napoleons of commerce.”

“Except for Crane.”

“I tried to land him, I will admit. A railway man that size, with a pretty, young wife to betray—he would have been a trophy to hang over my hearth. He seemed ripe for it too. To see them together, you could tell they slept apart.”

“Could you, Jasper?” said Harris.

“I was referring,” Mrs. Vale corrected, “to the professional eye. As I say, though, Henry turned out to have other interests.”

“Sibyl Martin?”

“He's a man the waves part for. Good-natured too. Women enough would have taken her place.”

Good-natured? Selectively perhaps. Harris recalled the relentless optimism with which William Sheridan had been lobbied in '53—first for the Northern Railway, then for Theresa's hand.

“Women enough,” Small echoed. “Why bother then with his father-in-law's faded drudge?”

Harris silently wondered if it might not have been, at least in part, Sibyl's position that had won for her Crane's favour. Suppose Crane wanted some new benefit from Sheridan, conceivably some information. A spy might well earn her keep in flattering attentions.

Mrs. Vale, however, would allow for no motives but perverse desire.

“Taste, my cherub,” she cooed. “Disgustibus nonny-nonny.”

Small struck a magisterial pose. “
De gustibus non est
—”

“Exactly.” She adjusted her peignoir to reveal six pale inches of leg. “Mr. Harris, I understand that you are looking for the wronged wife.”

Harris didn't know where to look or what to say. To think of Theresa as injured in this way pained him, and—while no avenue could be neglected—to discuss her with Mrs. Vale must be to expose the wound to fresh insult.

“Have you any idea,” he asked, “where she might be?”

“If you pay me a call on Parliament Street, I'm sure I can connect you with a girl who will help you.”

Perhaps another of Crane's paramours, Harris naïvely thought.

“Help him forget the lady, you mean,” said Small, “not help him find her.”

“Now, sugar lump, isn't it past your bedtime?”

“Mrs. Vale,” said Harris, “with which women has Henry Crane to your knowledge committed adultery?”

“You're stern, Mr. Harris. I've no head for names, you know, just numbers. Tell me, what rate do you charge when you lend my money out again?”

His glass in pieces, Small drank from the bottle. “Are you suggesting that Isaac lives off the E. Vales of harlotry?”

In a flutter of pink silk over uncorseted flesh, the individual so named swept up behind Small's chair and—leaning over the back—blew in his ear.

“Bedtime,” she murmured. “Bedtime, bedtime, bedtime.”

“I did oblige you by being here at nine,” Small told Harris with a helpless shrug. “You could hardly expect me to change the whole evening's schedule.”

Harris picked up his top hat and nodded. No comradely farewell came to his lips. He was thinking about the schedule, speculating as to how it might be written up.
Nine o'clock: Isaac, on matters of life and death. Nine thirty: p. and c
.

“Good night, banker dear.” Over Small's shoulder, Mrs. Vale watched Harris's retreat. “It's Parliament just north of Duchess.” Her snowy cheek brushed Small's. “If you're an early riser,” she added archly, “you can even come before breakfast.”

Theresa had not gone for a ride. Of all the day's revelations, that was the one that kept bobbing to the surface of his mind. To that life preserver Harris's fatigued brain clung as his fingers automatically loosened shoelaces, waistcoat buttons, the bow of his tie. Everything else he had learned swirled for the moment out of reach.

The horse she had taken was not the one she rode for exercise. She must have wanted one she could ride hard, sell perhaps along the way. After carefully training the new coachman, she could not have endured the thought of her temperamental Spat among strangers. She had anticipated a long journey, so no wonder she had not been found near town—the town Harris was chained to. She had planned to leave. Whether because of Crane's infidelities or on account of some even graver crime Harris could not yet make out, but he now knew she had fled intentionally.

And gone where?

In nightshirt now, Harris turned back the bedclothes. He expected he would think more clearly once he was lying down. A breath of air off the lake was nudging the muslin curtains into the room. The night seemed cooler, but possibly the cashier's suite just had a better location and better ventilation than
Small's apartment. Small could have done better for himself. But the question was . . .

Sleep took Harris quickly and for some time held him fast, but eventually his ankle must have caught as he rolled over. The twinge woke him. While unable to remember his dream, he found himself in a state of sexual excitation.

By design, this happened rarely. Quack remedies he avoided, but he had developed habits that so tired his body and occupied his mind as to leave Eros no room or sustenance. He was of too empirical a bent wholly to believe moralizing doctors on the horrors of spermatorrhoea—blindness, madness, consumption, dyspepsia, epilepsy, curvature of the spine—though there was so little untainted data on the subject that it was hard to know what to believe. Harris's aversion to physical arousal was more particular to himself and lay in its invariably focusing his thoughts on one bitter-sweet experience, which he now found himself living again.

He rose and bathed to no avail. The erection did not subside.

It was late October '52, a freakishly mild Sunday afternoon in the Don Valley. Spat and Banshee had drunk from the river and were tethered to a pair of oaks, hoofs crunching the parchment-dry leaves as they shifted their weight. Theresa was standing close. There was something about the lanceolate leaves of an aster Harris was to see. She squinted against the slanting sun, which spilled its warm tones over her face. He kissed her.

They had kissed before, briefly, at parting, never in the midst of something else.

Only after he had bent his lips to hers did he think this might startle her, but she didn't recoil. She let herself be kissed, then returned the pressure. Her hands went around his waist under his fustian jacket.

The perfection of the moment pierced him through. To a critical mind like his, every object had its limits. Every transaction with nature, art or humankind left something to be desired. Everything but this. She was so exquisitely fresh and pure and trim. Heaven on his lips and in his arms. No more beyond.

She untucked the wool shirt from the back of his trousers. Her cool fingers electrified his spine. She shivered with pleasure when he stroked the nape of her neck.

The kiss ended. She breathed his name, took his hand from her waist and held it against the pleated bodice of her dress. Above the stays her small round breast shaped itself to the pressure of his touch.

His loins' machine-like answer to this new perfection stunned him. He was out of his depth. He turned so as not to brush against her.

When she released his hand, he took it away. Her eyes sought and searched his face, where they could only have read confusion. Perhaps, he stammered, it was time to return to town. She looked startled, then lowered her gaze and nodded. She said just to give her a moment by herself first, as she was in no condition to ride. He watched her stroll off through the ankle-deep lake of rustling leaves while a crow brayed and flapped its way across the sunlit valley. Harris picked up the purple flower which had slipped from Theresa's hand. Lanceolate leaves.

They went on one more ride together, but she didn't try to show him anything. Autumn turned cold and wet after that. By spring she was Crane's.

It was still dark night outside Harris's window. He rubbed himself to a joyless climax, dozed briefly, then lay and watched for dawn.