Death in the Age of Steam (18 page)

Would Theresa have lain with him on that bed of leaves? Seductive as the scene was in fantasy, he still believed he had been right not to let it come to that.

What he regretted was his cowardice before her green eyes' ardent query. Right then he should have told her not that it was time to take her home, but that he wanted to be with her always. That regret grew fresh teeth every day.

Crane an adulterer.

Many wives put up with hypocrisy and betrayal their whole marriage through, but nothing strained credulity in Theresa's
frank heart choosing not to. She could have been planning her escape for months. To spare her father pain, she had waited till after his death, but only just. Jealousy of Sibyl might have underlain the dispute Small reported the two women having had the Friday afternoon and explain Theresa's having the housekeeper questioned by police the following night.

No, Theresa would not have been that vindictive. More likely it was Crane who had tried to cast suspicion on Sibyl—had tried to dispose of someone he no longer had any use for.

Unwilling to speculate further, Harris shaved and dressed. In fiery haste, he framed a letter to Marthe Laurendeau as Theresa's closest current companion. Had she seen the missing woman since noon on the thirteenth? Was Theresa at this moment with her? Or likely to join her? Had Mlle Laurendeau any idea where else Theresa might have gone? Harris loaded the page with assurances that Theresa's safety and happiness were his only concerns. He was inquiring in the interest of neither the police nor Henry Crane.

Once this appeal was sealed and addressed, he spent the remaining hours before opening in the less absorbing dray-work of clearing bank business from his desk. Up and down Bay Street, harbour traffic quickened with its clops, jangles, groans and shouts. Nothing, however, caused his pen or eye to pause, except from time to time, always just out of sight, the buzzing of a small winged insect.

At last, Dick Ogilvie brought in the morning papers. The board of the Provincial Bank of Canada had met in Kingston to find a replacement for the director lately incapacitated by highwaymen. All deplored the necessity for such an election. They nonetheless took pleasure in announcing that their choice had fallen on Mr. Joshua Newbiggins of Toronto, in recognition of that gentleman's particular talents and of his city's remarkable rise to commercial pre-eminence in Canada West.

Harris rubbed his eyes.

Joshua Newbiggins, Pennsylvania coal importer, promoter of Conquest Iron Works, dispenser of fifty-dollar bills, admirer of
somnambulistic sopranos. He said he had come north the week Miss Jenny Lind sang at the St. Lawrence Hall.

Newspaper records placed her Toronto appearance in October 1851. After consulting also the government records at King Street West and John, Harris wrote a letter to the president of the bank. Its charter, he pointed out, as enacted in 1844 and renewed in 1854, required that directors be natural born subjects of Her Majesty, or naturalized, or have resided seven years in the province. None of these conditions fit the present case. Harris went on to report Newbiggins's unsuccessful attempt to inspect the branch's books.

“It would appear,” he wrote, “that Mr. Newbiggins has sought a directorship to obtain the information denied him as a shareholder. I cannot think that the bank would be served by any director's using his position against the interest of the bank's own clients, of whom Conquest's rival, York Foundry, is one of the most prominent.

“I am confident that the board selected Mr. Newbiggins in all innocence both of his statutory ineligibility and of his motives. In fact, if even one board member had been party to his scheme, it would have been an easy matter for that member to obtain for Mr. Newbiggins the intelligence he seeks.

“My purpose in writing is twofold: (1) to lay the above facts before you and (2) to advise you that if Mr. Newbiggins again presents himself to the Toronto branch with a request to see our books I shall—”

Harris had been about to write
refuse
but softened it.

“—delay compliance until I have your reply in hand.”

Serving the bank was his only thought as he sealed the envelope. Not until it was bobbing its way down Lake Ontario on the noon steamer did he reflect on the contents' potential to simplify his life.

Dark clouds were congregating above the millpond. Before the village church bells had quite stopped ringing, thunder rumbled in from the west and a squall of wind hastened the pond waters towards the race. Beside it towered the fieldstone mill, a waiting grey sentinel.

Isaac Harris had not communicated with his family for nearly three weeks and didn't want to stray far from Toronto without doing so. He was not looking forward to explaining himself.

Crossing the race, he climbed the plank steps towards the open door. From inside floated his father's tender baritone. The sound made his own throat tighten around his unwelcome news. Under his hand, the wooden stair rail, sweat-oiled, smooth with use, felt as familiar as everything else about the mill, and like everything else, no longer his.

“The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone,

In the ranks of death you'll find him . . .”

Young Alexander Harris
had
gone to war. He had followed Major General Sir Isaac Brock up Queenston Heights and—through no fault of his own—survived. Among Harrises, the charge's futility was a taboo subject. Queenston was still Canadian, after all, and Isaac bore the slain quixote's name.

“His father's sword he has girded on,

And his wild harp slung behind him . . .”

After battle, Isaac thought, business must have held no terrors. Years of thrift and toil had earned Alexander a half-interest in a grist mill, then a whole mill, then a much bigger mill—the present one—built to his own specifications. Wildness might still be recalled in song, but in his own boys, industry had always been preferred.

Isaac stepped across the threshold. Misgivings receded as he smelled this community hub that had been his home. Wood, water, cotton sacks, beeswax and tallow lubricants, leather belts to drive the machinery, and grain—grain in every state from kernel to dust. The empty room still echoed with farmers' weekday talk of prices and Reform politics.

In theory retired now, Isaac's father had moved out too. He had turned his flour fortress over to one of Isaac's brothers, but he still came back with his set of picks to dress the French quartz millstones. From the Marne Valley, he was fond of pointing out, champagne country.

He was kneeling by one of them as he sang, his old frock coat folded into a pad beneath his knees, white shirt sleeves turned precisely back above the elbows. He worked by touch, fingering furrow edges too fine now for him to see. He dropped the minstrel boy mid-stanza when he realized he wasn't alone. His son felt grit in his welcoming handshake.

“Taking the country air, Isaac?” he said. “Pull yourself up a stool.”

“How are you, sir?”

Well, replied the elder Harris, except for the cough that kept him from joining the family at church. Flour dust in the lungs most likely. He gave a demonstration so unconvincing they both laughed.

Alexander did look well, his flesh firm, his shoulders square. They spread wider than Isaac's, and it was a shorter lift to get a sack of flour onto them. Among the features father and son shared were a long nose, eyes sloping gently away from it, a lumpy chin and a terrier-like attachment to the task at hand.

“Fellow across the river was in Toronto on July 12,” said Alexander, bending again over his bed-stone. “Told me you cut a fine figure at the Peninsula Hotel dance.”

“I was there briefly.”

“Too briefly for the ladies, doubtless. I hear you run a good bank too.”

The only stool was so low that when Isaac sat on it, his knees
all but brushed his ears. Mention of the bank made him feel more awkward still.

Joshua Newbiggins had come to see him Wednesday with questions about York Foundry—how much their loan was for, whether they had been late with any payments, where they got their coal, what they were paying for it. Canada had no hard coal. If Newbiggins could get control of York's American supplier, he would have his rival under his pudgy little thumb.

“Your brothers are doing all right here, Isaac, but the railway has killed Holland Landing dead. No freight goes by water between Toronto and Lake Huron. The city is the place to be, and you're the only one of us to make a name down there.”

Isaac lifted a hand against the words. He had put Newbiggins off, but on Thursday a ciphered telegram had confirmed his election. Resignation had become inevitable.

“Modesty aside,” Alexander was saying, “the only one. But what I still can't fathom is you're also the only one that has not started a family.”

They had played this scene before. Isaac changed the script.

“Father,” he said, “I've left the bank.”

There, it was out. He felt again the keys leave his hand as they had Friday morning after he had moved his effects to the American Hotel. The jangling ring had nearly slipped through Murdock's agitated fingers.

“Found a way of doing better on your own?” Alexander was beaming. “I thought you would once you had had a chance to look around. Man should be in business for himself. So what's it to be, Isaac? Shipping? Manufacturing? You'll want to marry in any case.”

Alexander understood Isaac's putting the law and his clients' interests before a whim of the directors. He understood without pressing for details, which Isaac could not in conscience give. Matter of principle—of course. What the retired miller found incomprehensible was that his son had no
other
business in view, except for the rescue of Theresa Crane. Isaac tried several times to explain it.

“I'm baffled,” said Alexander, getting to his feet at last. “What do you propose to live on?”

“I've savings enough for now and a property or two I can sell.”

“You're too young to be drawing on your capital.” A sacred axiom, delivered with the categorical gruffness that just yesterday—it seemed—had ended all family disagreements.

“It will only be temporary,” said Isaac.

Alexander walked away in disgust. He went as far as the low-silled window overlooking the eighteen-foot wheel. The worst birching he had ever given Isaac was for putting his young life and bright future at risk by riding that wheel on a dare. A loving chastisement, doubtless. And yet, in the rigidity of the back now turned to him, Isaac recognized a fear for which he had no sympathy. His tolerance even was ebbing fast. Career and fortune be damned!

“It will just be till this disappearance is resolved,” he said in a nonetheless cool, bankerly voice as he came to his father's side.

“I know you were fond of the Sheridan girl,” Alexander murmured, “and she would have made a good match. Your taking time to help her husband look for her does you credit, but mark this—as an outsider, you can't neglect your own affairs indefinitely.”

“He's not a fit husband.”

“So, if you do find her, what then?”

This rather fundamental question Isaac glanced at, then brushed aside. If Theresa had run away, as he now believed, resolving her disappearance meant more than simply finding her. It meant protecting her from whatever had driven her from her home. A task of unknown size.

“She still won't be yours,” said Alexander, unconsciously echoing Small's reminder.

“I accept that she will not.” It was Isaac Harris's bargain with fate,
not
to have Theresa on condition that he could save her, but it would be some time—at least—before his acceptance would be tested, and there were more urgent matters to discuss.
“William Sheridan was your M.P. Can you think of anywhere she might have gone? Any family friend or refuge?”

Alexander seemed taken off guard. “In York County?”

“Possibly. She was last seen in Thornhill. With a bay gelding.” Isaac had confirmed this on his way north from the city. “That was the evening of the thirteenth. Later than that, no one I have met has seen her.”

“You must know other well-connected young ladies,” said Alexander, back on his hobby horse. “Doesn't George MacFarlane have daughters?”

“MacFarlane? His oldest unattached girl is twelve.”

“That fellow across the river sells him timber. Talk is MacFarlane is to be knighted for contributions to the Crimean campaign. Troop carriers, hospital ships and the like.”

Patriotic verse, Isaac added under his breath. “Please, Father, think. Did you ever see Theresa in the company of anyone besides her father and Crane? Did either of them mention anyone she might have visited?”

“Let it go, Isaac. ‘. . . When we're far from the lips we love, we've but to make love to the lips we are near.'”

Isaac had always disliked hearing cited this couplet of Thomas Moore's, which he believed did scant justice to his parents' feelings for each other.

“I can't,” he said.

Outside the window where they still stood, a bolt of lightning split the noon sky. Rain was peppering the Holland River before the thunder reached their ears. A chill wind blew between them.

“It will blight your career,” Alexander prophesied grimly.

“Father,” said Isaac, reaching out to him, “I should like to oblige you, but in this one matter I can't.”

“Leave then. Don't wait to see your mother.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You would only cause her pain. Go quickly, Isaac, and never breathe a syllable of this to her.” The words poured out so fine and smooth as to leave no doubt they represented a finished thought.

“I don't see how you can ask me to—”

“Oblige me,” said Alexander, compact and immovable. “Go now.”