Death in the Age of Steam (3 page)

“Have there been any ransom demands?”

Crane shook his head.

“Did she take any luggage then—any things she might want if she contemplated being two nights away from home?”

“Nothing as far as we can make out.”

Harris wondered if the plural, which rang with such authority, included more than Crane and his domestic staff. “Have you engaged a detective?”

“Detective? No-o.” Crane shuddered at the neologism. “It's my wife that's missing. I should set a
detective
to find where pilfered construction materials had got to. No—I had thought she might be with friends and would return in time for the funeral.”

“And now?”

A wasp was buzzing against the inside of the front window. Crane seemed not to notice.

“I'll speak to Chief Sherwood this evening about police action,” he said. “You'll understand, Isaac, I wanted to spare Mrs. Crane the embarrassment of any public hue and cry, particularly in view of her bereavement.”

Hue and cry? That had not been Harris's suggestion—though it might come to that. “Which of her friends have you spoken to?”

“I see you take this matter to heart,” said Crane, newly suspicious. “Which friends would
you
speak to?”

“Women she went to school with, I suppose. Guests in your home. People she called on. As I think I've made clear, I'm hardly in a position to know.”

Crane squirmed in his seat. His irritation was starting to show.

“Can't you do anything about that bug?” he asked.

Harris lunged at the wasp with his folded handkerchief and missed. Wings whining and clattering, the yellow jacket rose to the upholstered ceiling, dived to the thick-pile burgundy carpet, bounced against the door panels, flew everywhere except out the open side windows to safety, and settled at last on Harris's striped trouser leg, where he caught it up in the linen pad and crushed it.

“Thank you,” said Crane.

“Don't mention it.”

“I'm uncommonly squeamish about killing things, you know.” Crane sounded neither proud nor ashamed of his squeamishness and had more or less recovered his composure.

Whether by accident or design, the wasp hunt had filled the time necessary to bring Crane's carriage up Parliament Street to the cemetery gates. The land beyond them resembled a burial
ground less than it did a gently undulating park. Although winding roads and paths had been laid out, there were still few monuments of any size and no chapel.

Up ahead, the hearse could be seen turning left just past an elegant grey granite mausoleum with fluted columns—resting place of a distiller—then climbing towards the squat Sheridan obelisk. William Sheridan had said he wanted it built on a broad base, hard if not impossible for Orange ruffians to push over. He had had the rosy stone brought by horse and waggon from the Credit Valley in the mid-forties, when his wife and son's remains had been moved from the old Anglican graveyard in town.

The procession straggled to a halt. Footmen trailing black scarves folded the steps of the two mourning coaches down to the ground, and the pallbearers emerged blinking into the sunlight. Harris scanned the landscape in case Theresa, having missed the church service, might nonetheless show herself at the interment.

“When last seen,” he asked, “was she wearing black?”

Crane's coachman was already holding open the door.

“She had nothing black,” Crane replied. “Nothing that she could ride in.” He climbed out.

“What colour was her outfit?”

Crane was striding ahead towards the open grave. When Harris caught up, he repeated the question.

“Isaac, I appreciate your having granted me an interview.”

“Most welcome. Was she wearing blue?”

“I'm sure your interest is kindly meant.”

“Green?”

Crane stopped dead. “Yes, green. Now I appeal to your sense of delicacy to pursue this matter no further.” The rail baron's face was pinker than before, his voice stern and commanding. “Assure yourself I shall take every measure appropriate to securing the safe return of
my
wife.”

Harris saw the futility of asking further questions. Crane was the deceased's only relative at the funeral, and the rector of Holy Trinity was approaching for a consultation. Before turning to
Dr. Scadding, Crane gave Harris's hand a dismissive shake.

But Harris held Crane's hand firm until he had said, “I should like to be informed of any fresh developments.”

A sharp, appraising glance was the only reply he got.

There and then Harris made his decision. He was not about to tailor his sense of delicacy to fit Henry Crane's convenience. Not this time.

After the interment, Harris sorted quickly through the afternoon's messages at his desk, then changed into cord breeches and riding boots and made for the Richmond Street livery stable where he boarded his horse. Banshee was a dapple-grey five-year-old with large eyes and lots of stamina. He found her picking at her bedding straw. Not for the first time, he asked if the liveryman was spending enough on feed, but avoided threats to take his business elsewhere. Randall's was the cleanest establishment within walking distance of the bank and had the biggest stalls.

Harris saddled up without waiting for the boy's help. He intended to spend the evening running over what he recalled as Theresa's favourite rides to see if he could find any trace of her—someone who had seen her perhaps, or some physical sign of an accident.

The sun at five o'clock was still three hours high and scorching, the air motionless. Only by cantering through it could he obtain the semblance of a breeze on his damp forehead. Unbothered by the heat, the horse whisked him out to Gooderham and Worts's windmill at the eastern extremity of the Toronto bay, and from there onto the peninsula.

While he rode, he forced himself to put some order into the thoughts and questions spawned by Crane's shockingly cool announcement. Respectably married women had never been known to just disappear from this city. Accident apart, what could have happened to Theresa? Harris began listing possibilities in his head:

1. mental disorder

2. voluntary flight

3. abduction

4
.

He left 4 blank for the moment.

The least likely alternative was 1. Harris expected grief to shake Theresa hard, but not to shatter her. She had a history of steadfastness in crises. When a drunken cook had hacked her own thumb off with an eight-inch cleaver, sending the housemaid into hysterics, Theresa had dressed the stump without flinching. More to the point, during an earlier—and to all appearances fatal—bout of William Sheridan's intestinal ailment, she had brushed tears aside to discuss funeral and testamentary arrangements with him. It would surely have taken more than his death to unhinge her reason.

And yet, Harris had to admit, much could have happened to change her in the past three years. If he were to reach any meaningful conclusions, he would have to question someone like her father's partner Jasper about her marriage. This topic he had always avoided.

Suppose—possibility 2—Theresa were hiding from her husband. In that case, Harris didn't want to be too helpful to the official search until he had a better idea of her reasons.

They had to relate to her father's death. That couldn't be a coincidence. Perhaps as he faced eternity William Sheridan had told her something that made continuing her life with Henry Crane impossible. Perhaps some youthful shame that Crane had thought safely buried in the forests of the Northwest had, against all his calculations, come to his father-in-law's knowledge. Alternatively, Theresa might some time ago have decided to leave Crane. She might only have refrained from doing so during her father's lifetime to spare him the scandal—though if she had been able to wait for his death, why not wait two days more for the funeral?

Harris stopped at the Peninsula Hotel, situated on the
narrowest part of the sandy isthmus. Neither staff nor guests could tell him anything of Theresa, and his own observations were nothing to the point. Today in daylight he noticed, as on Saturday night he had not, that a couple more of the low dunes had recently been dug away. New city regulations were not stopping businessmen like Joseph Bloor from helping themselves to this sand for their brick works. One good storm now would wash the hotel out and make the peninsula an island.

Riding on, he approached the hexagonal spire of the Gibraltar Light. Its grey stone glowed warmly in the late afternoon sun. He halted to speak to the keeper, a grizzled bachelor familiar to excursionists for his outlandish costumes, though not yet personally known to Harris. Discovered on his doorstep, Harvey Ingram proved more hospitable than informative.

Sit down, he urged in a drink-slurred burr. Have a dram. He shifted a jug from the other half of the rough bench he occupied. Surely, he knew Susan—he meant Theresa—Crane, by sight at least. He had not seen her Sunday or since. Had she bolted then? What had got into her? While he sounded sincerely anxious, his confusion over her name did little to raise Harris's hopes. He wore a Turkish headdress and bits of military gear in apparent tribute to the recently concluded Crimean campaign—dispensing with any stock or collar, however, as he had no appreciable neck to encircle.

The banker at first declined the invitation on the pretext of making the most of the remaining daylight. Only on his darkened way back to town, after the most thorough examination of every beach and thicket, did the prospect of refreshment tempt him. By then the light was lit atop the eighty-two-foot tower and beckoned him over.

Ingram had walked out onto the sward before the tower door. He did not mark Harris's approach. Hands on hips, the lighthouse keeper was shuffling his feet and from time to time essaying a modest kick or hop. Not falling down, at least, thought Harris.

“I came back, Mr. Ingram,” he called out as soon as he was close enough to be confident of being heard.

Ingram spun around.

“Who's that?” he cried in a tone both peremptory and apprehensive, as if he could expect nothing good of any that came back.

“No ghost, I assure you.” Harris dismounted and walked forward into the rectangle of lamp light spilling from the tower door. “I thought I'd ask if your offer still stands.”

“Ah, you, sir. See anything? No? Fortunate perhaps.” Ingram's round eyes, whisker-hidden mouth and short neck gave him a fixed owlish expression, or rather lack of expression, which an alcoholic glaze made even harder to read. “I was just doing a bit of a hornpipe—the solitary man's dance, as they say. Well, let's sit down, and I'll tell you how I expect they'll find this Mrs. Crane of yours.”

“You know of someone I might ask?”

“I know men's sins. Now you take the cup. I've only sipped from the one side of it.”

The drink made Harris's eyes water. A little went a long way.

“Hear the wisdom of a seasoned campaigner,” said his host. He was fingering an epaulet, of which the distinctly unmilitary adornment appeared to consist of gold sleeve-links. “They'll find the lady only as a corpse.”

“It's too soon to say that!” Harris exclaimed. “No more, thank you.”

“Just a drop.” Ingram poured. “I wish no harm to anybody, but there are men it doesn't do to tempt. A beautiful woman riding alone—she's with the angels now.”

From the deep melancholy in Ingram's Scottish voice it was clear that this prophecy gave him no pleasure, but its authoritative and unvarying repetition with each application of the jug to his lips ended by driving Harris home to a sleepless bed. He had achieved nothing. He had not even managed to tire himself out.

“She's with the angels now!”

Doubtless solitude and sixpence-a-gallon whisky had made the man morbid. By his own admission, old shipwrecks and unsolved
murders also weighed upon his mind. Every allowance made, however, Harris still found his down mattress a bed of thistles.

Tuesday passed into Wednesday. When he rose at five, the morning was already hot, but he still had to light the Prince of Wales wood stove for coffee.

Harris lived in lavish simplicity. Lavish in that he enjoyed sole occupancy of the cashier's suite on the upper floor of his place of work. The Toronto branch of the Provincial Bank of Canada was Greek revival in style and made of cleanly fitted pale Ohio sandstone—for, although locally produced red brick would have served just as well, people expected more opulence from banks. And the opulence extended to Harris's apartments, which included two damask-hung salons, one large enough to serve as a ballroom. Harris thought the building reckless and admired it. Prudently, however, he dispensed with any domestic staff. It seemed more sociable, as well as better husbandry, to take his dinners at hotels than to keep a cook just for himself, and breakfast he could manage on his own.