Death in the Age of Steam (27 page)

He laid his long whip on the animals' flanks, and the coach came another ten degrees nearer capsizing.

Harris, his hand quickened by anger, took possession of the whip. “Now we'll have to pull the coach back before we lay the logs. Unhitch the team.”

“Here, I know my business . . .”

“Do it,” said Harris.

While the team was being unhitched, he set the insurance salesman to identifying likely looking timber along the gully. In the lee of the coach, he got a tin lantern lit and gave it to the preacher and his wife so they could alert any oncoming traffic to the obstruction. The one favourable circumstance was twilight's
incipient dilution of the inky sky. The rain fell hard as ever.

The ground behind the coach was appreciably less firm now than when they had first got stuck. Harris and the driver hastened to attach the traces to the rear axle and the horses dragged the vehicle back, if not out of the mud, at least onto a more even keel.

Just then a woman's shouts rang out. Harris looked up to see the preacher's wife waving her lantern at a waggon coming west over the brow of the rise. A square, flat load stood out against the paler clouds.

The insurance salesman meanwhile sauntered up complaining that he could find no logs large and sound enough to bear the coach's weight. Whether he had looked at all was not evident from the cleanliness of his checked suit.

“Never mind,” said Harris, mud from cuffs to collar. “Here's something better. Look on the waggon.” To the carter he called, almost cheerfully, “Good morning there! Can you lend us ten feet of road?”

The waggon was carrying pine planks, eight inches wide. The carter, his assistant, Harris, and the coach driver laid them crosswise, three deep in front of each pair of wheels and as far as the bridge. After that it was easy. With the water-logged team back in front, the stage coach rolled to firmer ground. The lumber waggon drove over the planks in the opposite direction before they were pried out of the mud and returned to the load.

“You won't find any more bad patches before Kingston,” the carter called as he drove off.

Harris waved and climbed up on the box.

“Before we start,” he said, “let me have the whisky bottle.”

The other three soaking passengers had already resumed their seats.

“Empty,” grunted the driver. “You better ride inside.”

“Show me.”

Harris was shown. A tantalizing last half ounce swirled around the dimple at the bottom of the bottle. Harris emptied it into the mud.

“How is the road from here?” he said.

“All plank again in another quarter mile. Horses drive themselves. Ride in the coach, mister, dry yourself off.”

Carrying enough rain water in his clothes to fill a magnum, Harris suppressed a laugh. The man was hours from sobriety in either direction, but not belligerent, and there was no reason not to let him save a little dignity.

“What's the holdup?” called the insurance agent.

“No holdup,” replied Harris, jumping down and taking his place inside.

The coach moved on up the rise into a soggy dawn.

Under the circumstances, the canvas flaps seemed pointless. Harris furled the nearest one. He wanted light to see his travelling companions. Any delay was irksome, but the recent activity had lifted his spirits and—tired as he was—sharpened his interest.

The salesman struck him as handsome in a gipsyish way, a minor dandy, and avid of whatever comforts would make bearable a life of perpetual motion. He was again amusing himself by nudging the woman's slipper.

This time she ignored him, as she was devoting her full energies to drying her husband's face. Plainly its maze of furrows was not stage makeup. His years had not stooped his proud shoulders, however, nor did palsy shake him, and the wet hair that Mrs. Postlethwaite's comb lifted off his brow was thick and dark. Paying her no heed, the old man sat staring straight at Harris.

“Have you got it?” he asked abruptly.

“Got what?”

“Got religion,” the wife explained.

“No,” said Harris.

“It's never too late,” the wife said kindly. She looked to be a country girl, full-figured and used to heavy work. Once done with her husband, she adjusted the suitcase and wiped the moisture from her own downy blond moustache.

“Have
you
got it?” the preacher asked the salesman, who nonchalantly slid back his foot.

“I've got it.”

“Hang on to it,” said the wife.

The preacher again fixed his eye on Harris. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” he said. “We were sunk in the Slough of Despond and He chose an Unbeliever to lift us thence and send us on our way rejoicing.”

“Oh, you would have got where you're going without me.” Harris hoped to stifle theological controversy, on the one hand, and envy, on the other.

The salesman nonetheless felt slighted. Smiling tightly, he disavowed any knowledge of God's ways, but savagely deprecated the state of the provincial highway—on which subject he begged leave to claim some hard-earned experience. Mr. Weller ought to get after the politicians or do the work himself if necessary to keep his coaches running. And the coaches themselves wanted replacing. This derelict must be thirty years old!

That no banker in this age of steam would advance a farthing for such a project Harris took care not to point out.

“You know not whereof you speak,” said the preacher.

The salesman fell silent, but Harris was the one addressed.

“They are hanging a boy this morning,” the old man continued, “an inmate of the Provincial Penitentiary. I must not be late, for without me
he
won't get where he's going.”

“Amen,” said the wife.

Harris opened his eyes wide, then narrowed them in thought. He was surprised to find himself so near the Penitentiary and tried to remember what inmate there he had heard referred to in the past fortnight.

“What has he done?” asked the salesman.

Looking younger than ever, the wife leaned forward and dropped her voice. “They say he beat a keeper senseless.”

“He must not leave this life,” boomed her husband, “without a chance to repent of his hot temper, which has been his besetting sin almost since his infancy.”

“My husband made the unfortunate's acquaintance when he last visited the Penitentiary in February. That was before our marriage.”

“Allow me to congratulate you—both,” said the salesman. “I've seen for myself, reverend, what an invaluable support your bride is.”

“It's God's work Mr. Postlethwaite does,” she said proudly.

“Amen to that. For its sake, Mr. Postlethwaite, may I ask if you've yet had the opportunity to insure Mrs. Postlethwaite's life?”

The preacher blinked.

Slowly, it seemed to Harris, who had a question of his own. Murdock had mentioned a prisoner. It had not seemed important at the time.

“
My
life?” Mrs. Postlethwaite stifled a laugh.

“I don't wish to alarm you, ma'am, but the way is uncertain, the premiums modest, and with the Colonial's system of bonuses your coverage increases automatically.”

“The boy that's to hang,” said Harris, “what's his name?”

“His name?” The mix of subjects may have confused the preacher.

“Charles Martin, isn't it, my dear? My husband really must rest now to prepare himself for the task of redemption that lies before him.”

“Not Crusher Martin?” asked Harris. Here possibly was a link to Sibyl, a very perishable link.

“He told me he has been so vilified,” said Postlethwaite, revived by indignation.

“I'll go with you then. I have to speak to him.”

“I don't think—”

The preacher cut his wife short. “On what subject?”

“The recent disappearance from Toronto of his twin sister, Sibyl Jane Martin. Her life is feared for.”

“I see.” Postlethwaite pursed his lips judiciously. “I cannot well refuse you as without your exertions I should not be in time to see him at all. May this encounter show you the necessity of Divine guidance and open to you the path of Salvation.”

“Amen,” said the wife.

“Amen,” said the salesman before circumspectly resuming his own campaign for proselytes.

In another five hours, Postlethwaite and Harris were set down under a drizzly sky in the ship-building village of Portsmouth. From banking days, Harris knew Kingston, but had never visited this western suburb. Before him rose the largest structure he had ever seen.

The uniform pale grey limestone of which it was constructed made the Penitentiary look even vaster. Four fifths of the façade was wall—buttressed, blind, twenty-five feet high. Into the middle of this fortress had most ingeniously been spliced something resembling a county courthouse, complete with cupola. Two magisterial columns bore up a gently sloping pediment. Through this the most elegant entrance a cage ever had, Harris trotted after the eager old soul-saver.

He almost hoped to be refused admission. He had a trail to follow. This was a distraction. He was suddenly afraid too of trespassing with his questions on Charles Martin's last hour. No, truly, it was Crusher Martin he feared. The prison stones and mortar made vivid the violent tempers they were fashioned to contain, gave weight to the girl-wife's breathless words, “beat a keeper senseless.”

It was too late, however, to withdraw. Mrs. Postlethwaite had parted from her husband only reluctantly and on the understanding that Harris would look after him while she went on to arrange lodgings. There was in any case no difficulty about getting
in
, the unsmiling porter assured them. Had he come as a tourist rather than the bearer of a dry suit for the preacher, Harris would simply have had to pay 1s. 3d.

“Women and children half price,” said the porter. “Makes a
nice family outing.”

Harris smeared the mud more uniformly into his trouser cuffs while Postlethwaite was changing in the porter's lodge. Then they crossed the limestone-walled entrance court and climbed a grand limestone staircase to the door of the limestone cell block—where a clerk not quite up to the dignity of his surroundings pulled a face at Postlethwaite's letter of authorization. The Penitentiary had its own chaplain, he grumbled. He didn't see the need for some “circuit rider” to go sticking his nose in. Postlethwaite began fulminating about freedom of conscience in the Canadas.

“Step smartly then,” the clerk interrupted. “You're late.”

A young French-Canadian keeper, lent extra years by a thick brown moustache, escorted the two visitors through the iron grill into the central rotunda. From it, cell ranges radiated like the arms of a cross. An outbreak of the shivering ague had confined a few unfortunates to their cots, but most of the cells he led them past were empty. During daylight hours, he explained, the seven hundred convicts were kept busy either directly maintaining the institution or earning revenue for it in the neighbouring limestone quarry and in the penitentiary workshops.

Martin was a melancholy case, he said, and it sounded to Harris as if he meant it. The convict's quiet industry had earned him special employment. One day he had apparently been weeding the warden's garden when it came time to return to his cell. Out he hit with his rake handle. Whang!—to the front of a keeper's head. Whang!—to the side. What had enraged him was not being allowed to complete his task. His death sentence had seemed certain to be commuted, but then just three days ago the keeper attacked had—despite the most attentive nursing—died of his injuries.

This news lengthened Postlethwaite's stride. In his wife's absence, his decrepitude seemed to have dropped away. Every couple of paces now, Harris noted, carried them past one of the cells, which were scarcely large enough to lie down in.

They came abruptly to a cell that wasn't empty. A heavy man
sat slumped on the end of the sleeping shelf. His face was lined and putty-coloured. Although the Penitentiary air held no heat, he wore only the convict uniform trousers, brown in the right leg, yellow in the left. The hair on his bare, sagging chest was as grey as the stubble on his head. Everything about his appearance spoke to Harris of defeat, but nothing more so than his not looking up when the iron lattice door was opened.

“Now, I don't need to warn you he's a hothead, reverend,” said the keeper, not dropping the “h” as French speakers often do. “I'll be handy if you need me.”

Postlethwaite insisted on speaking to Martin first while Harris paced the areas in front of and behind the cells, shivered in his water-logged tweeds, and listened to the echoes from a multitude of hard, flat surfaces. Every door that closed or opened sounded like a dozen, and yet there seemed to be more locks than keys. Harris had no words to fit the condemned man's ears. Their worlds touched at no point—except that Harris had wished Martin's twin sister dead so that the life of another missing woman might be hoped for.

And yet Harris had come too close now not to see what Martin knew. Being spared no longer tempted him. With the execution less than half an hour away, each ebbing minute left him less composed.

The preacher finally summoned Harris at twenty to eleven. Martin raised no objection to an interview, but the keeper would be preparing him at the same time. Postlethwaite was going to see the warden about his clerk's high-church bias.

“Mr. Martin,” said Harris, standing before the open cell door, “I was a friend of your sister Sibyl's late employer.”

The convict stared at him with red, bulging eyes. He was in the process of being dressed in his own clothes, a farm labourer's coarse cottons.

“Forgive my intruding at a time like—at this time. Do you know where Sibyl is?”

Martin stared. “It broke her heart,” he said at last. “She heard I was to swing. It must have broke her heart.”