Death in the Age of Steam (35 page)

She stammered and turned pale. She couldn't tell him, couldn't bear to live it again.

“The nuns,” said Harris, “unless you become one of them, will want you to return to Henry.”

“I won't, ever.”

“But if he fights to get you back, he will have wealth, law and religion in his camp. Give me some tools with which to help you!”

Across the table, she took his hand, trustingly, and took courage from the contact. “When Papa died,” she said, “I thought many dreadful thoughts, among them that warmheartedness had gone out of the world—that I should never meet it again, affection without reserve. I now believe—I see more clearly every day—that I have it from you, Isaac.”

“You do.” Moved but undistracted, Harris returned her fingers' pressure as he urged her forward. “You also have enemies. What is it that haunts you? What's threatening you?”

“I saw him—I watched him . . .”

“Yes?”

“Oh, I'm a fool!
I can't say it
.” She pulled her hand back in a flash of irritation before clearing her throat and repeating in her most matter-of-fact voice, “I can't say it. I'll write it for you in a letter—within the week.”

“You saw Henry kill Sibyl, is that it?” Harris had tried not to prejudge, but this way all she had to do was nod, and they would be
in medias res
.

“Not now,” she said. “I'll find a way to get a letter out.”

Harris doubted. Once, after an expedition to identify wildflowers, she had written him a note of correction, which read in full, “Not lobelia. Bugloss. Expect you Wednesday at seven. T.” It was touching that she had not wanted him to go so much as a day with a false idea in his head, but he had never known her to write at much more length.

“Start your story now,” he insisted. “Start at the end if that's easier. You were robbed.”

How easy she would find the robbery to relate depended on what she had suffered from her assailant. Harris had been deferring this question. He wondered, though, if the memory of the assault might not be making it more difficult to speak of earlier crimes.

Railway workers in earth-stained fustian were by now streaming past and into the shop. Talk was of the Grand Trunk's Victoria Bridge. Above the din, an Irish serving girl could be heard announcing that if the bridge-builders wanted buns, they
would have to wait.

“I left the Taggart house around three thirty,” Theresa abruptly began.

“A week ago Sunday morning?” Harris asked.

“Sunday, yes. I forget which.”

“Why were you at the Taggart house?”

“That is another story. When I left there, my head and joints ached. My limbs felt like lead. I thought it was because I was tired and in low spirits.”

Harris perceived that she was deliberately using bland phrases to swath jagged pain. Having for an entire fortnight wrestled with a delirious patient and his soiled bed linen, only to lose him after all, she must have suffered unutterably worse than “low spirits.” Such inaccuracies notwithstanding, she kept up the pretext of a scientific tone.

“What it was,” Theresa continued after a fortifying mouthful of coffee, “was a warning of the onset of malarial fever. That's not something you expect in the long-settled areas. Etta Lansing says someone must have cut a stand of trees and let the sun in on stagnant water. I don't know if that's the cause.”

She reached for her medical text, but Harris—impatient of diversions—covered it with his hand.

“You were walking west,” he suggested, “when the first fit began.”

“By the crossroads—Day's Road is it?—I couldn't walk for shivering, so down I crouched. The tramp must have been sleeping in the ditch. I suppose he was a tramp, or had just drunk too much on Saturday night to return home. He had on one boot and one shoe with no sock. He just appeared at first light . . .”

Harris had a guess as to the mismatched man's identity but refrained from interrupting.

“He took the pouch with my valuables,” Theresa continued. “I had brought what coins and notes were left from the housekeeping and had a few pounds from the sale of a horse.” A sudden query broke the trancelike surface of her narrative. “Do you know, Isaac, what became of Nelson?”

“Returned home, I believe. Crane's name was on the saddle.”

“Mr. Henry is too honest,” sighed Theresa. “I hope he will forgive my selling him what wasn't mine, since the proceeds are all gone.”

“I'm sure he doesn't blame you,” said Harris, now the one to blur his meaning. He saw Enoch Henry in his coffin with his hat on.

“I didn't haggle with him over Nelson. And Spat? I suppose Oscar takes good care of them both.”

“Oscar?” A blossom of white spray opened behind Harris's eyes. Again he measured his words. “I don't know who is taking care of them. Had you spent much?”

“Nothing except for coach fare and a week's food. I had not been sleeping in inns, and for two weeks the Taggarts fed and lodged me. I also had my wedding ring and other trinkets to sell as necessary. The man got all that.”

She sounded dismissive. Where she was going, she would need no money.

“Did he offer you any violence?” said Harris.

“Not at first.” Theresa looked around to satisfy herself the workers' noisy gossip and disputes had their full attention. “I was too sick to resist or even to be much afraid, but he took my shaking for fear, and that seemed to—Isaac, I don't think I can go on . . . The idea of my fear excited him. He began kissing and stroking my hair. He had black nails and broken teeth. He said—he told me what he was going to do, and he began to tear open my dress. Then I resisted, when I felt the cool air.” Her chin tilted defiantly. She
had
gone on with her narrative and resented it, not knowing if the pressure came from without or within. “Of course, my strength was nothing to his. Is this what you wanted me to say?”

“That will do.” Harris moved his chair to her side of the table.
Wanted
no, but he had suspected. He would make someone pay for this violation, anyone but her, and would take as much as he could on himself. If only he had found her a few days sooner. “You needn't,” he added huskily.

“Hear the story out,” she replied, suddenly angry. “What happened is not what you think.”

“I'm sorry—or rather, I'm glad.” Harris lowered his eyes. “What did happen?”

“I vomited blood. It fell on his hands as he tried to fondle me. He dropped me with a yelp that I was trying to kill him and pushed me away with his one boot.” Theresa's large eyes fixed on Harris's horrified face. She seemed at that instant to forgive him, and the bitterness went out of her voice. “His exit had a comic side. Off pelts the bold outlaw at a lopsided run, as if a fiend hung from his coattails. I didn't laugh at the time, you understand. I hid under a bridge . . . There, after I had thrown up again, Etta found me. My condition mercifully didn't scare her, and she was taken with the colour of my dress, which I was able to exchange for shelter.”

“She paid you nothing then,” said Harris. “The receipt was bogus.”

“I didn't mind. She did keep her bargain, which considering how she lives is almost saintly.”

Harris relaxed a little, enough to notice the homely fragrance of the bake oven, whose associations chafed him fresh. Theresa had no home. Her principles forbade Harris to give her one. He would have given her one this moment in his arms, which ached to be about her. A mere inch yawned between her sleeve and his.

“What happened,” he asked, “to your hair?”

“Both the dress and my hair felt defiled—but there was more. Remember, I was light-headed with fever. Foolish as it sounds, I couldn't help believing the tramp was from Henry in some way—don't ask me how—and would report back to him.” She shuddered before spitting out, “Maybe it was just that both were men whose touch I loathed.”

In all but name, Harris realized, she had been raped after all, perhaps as early as her wedding night, perhaps as often as—he dared not calculate.

“How long have you felt that way about your husband?” he said.

“Long enough to be persuaded I needed different, drabber plumage that would attract no one's interest . . . Take
that
woman, for example, the first things you notice are her hair and costume.”

Harris followed her gaze to an unnaturally violet taffeta walking dress on a girl just then emerging from the Grey Nuns' gate.

“Come back from the window,” he snapped. He led Theresa by the hand past the startled waitress into the kitchen.

“Isaac, what is it?”

“Attention aux brioches!”
cried a chef, sweeping a tray of cooling pastries from their path.

“Police spy,” said Harris. “You won't still want to go in.”

“Yes,” Theresa insisted, “as soon as she is gone. I'll be protected.”

“Elle est toute petite, ma cuisine. Monsieur, madame, s'il vous plaît . . .”

“He's askin' if you'd be so good as to return to your table,” put in the Irish waitress as sarcastically as possible.

“Write soon then,” said Harris. “I'll stay at . . .” He didn't know the city well and was momentarily at a loss for the name of a hotel.

“Rasco's,” said Theresa, “opposite the Bonsecours Market. I'll write—depend upon it.”

Harris dropped a couple of coins on the only clean corner of a table and ushered Theresa by way of back alleys around the nunnery's perimeter to one of the less conspicuous entrances. Their knock brought someone eventually. Admitting the sanctuary-seeker involved a reference to authority and more delay. Harris kept expecting to see Nan Hogan come tripping around one corner of the rough grey wall or another. In the end, there was no time for more than a quick squeeze of the hand before the Church of Rome swallowed Theresa whole.

“My book, Isaac” were her last words. It had been left behind in the coffee house.

“I'll get it for you,” said Harris to a door already shut.

Twenty minutes had passed. To avoid a broken flag in the sidewalk, Harris stepped warily out into the traffic on St. Paul Street. Waggons delivering Molson's beer and Redpath's sugar rattled by, all but grazing his elbow. Hawkers, buyers, priests and soldiers jostled and swarmed on.

Harris was coming from the Grey Nuns and was in no hurry. Indeed, it seemed to him the ideal course would have been to watch the convent-hospital around the clock, lest Theresa be removed to one of the Sisters' other establishments. They had one in Ottawa, according to the portress. Another, of which she spoke with especial pride, was at St. Boniface, north and west some fifteen hundred miles.

The news had been communicated through a slide in the main door. There he also learned that, while there was no possibility of his placing the book he had retrieved for Theresa in her own hands, he might pass it in on the understanding that the mother superior would dispose of it entirely as she saw fit.
“Que le Seigneur vous bénisse!”

Until our next quasi-meeting, Harris translated loosely, and may it not be soon. He was now wondering how likely it was that a letter should ever escape this sanctuary and how best to occupy himself while waiting.

Ahead, the potholes lay in the road. He regained the sidewalk—uneven brick—in front of a shop bursting with
Modes Parisiennes
, which French and even more English speakers were stopping to admire.

Montreal's thoroughfares might be less well maintained than Toronto's, but business was evidently flourishing. In the two years
since he had last come down for the Provincial Bank, Harris had seen lithographs of the metropolis's most notable new factories and churches and factories and public buildings and factories. Lithographs, however, never show the crowds. One and a half times Toronto's population, nearly seventy thousand persons, had squeezed into residential terraces on a strip of land between the still wooded mountain and the St. Lawrence River. There looked to be more money than places to put it. Harris decided that anyone who had missed his chance to invest in real estate here might be in the market for a detached house or three in the go-ahead Queen City of Canada West. He would advertise.

His father's hoard was dwindling, and he wanted money. Of course, all his savings would not have bought sufficient watchers to encircle the convent day and night, all sharp enough to pick from among any number of identically dressed women a particular one they had never seen. At the same time, he had to be able to retain the best lawyer available in case Crane should sue for his “conjugal rights”. The phrase made Harris shudder. It blandly covered a dreadful sentence and made it sound as if the verdict were decided in advance. Even so, Theresa must be represented.

He hoped the hotel she had picked out for him was not too grand. Then he was upon it, all five storeys of it, extending ten bays down the north side of the street. Rasco's could have tucked the American in its back pocket with room to spare.

Harris entered. He got no further than a plaque commemorating the 1842 visit of Mr. Charles Dickens, beloved author of . . . when he felt his sleeve tweaked.

“Here's your man, constable,” said a husky female voice.

Harris wheeled about to be confronted by an unsmiling individual with a black mole on his upper lip. The constable appeared altogether serious in white trousers, a high-collared blue jacket and a black top hat—to the front of which the tin numeral eight was affixed. Nan Hogan's tigerish eyes beamed the satisfaction of the hunter, while her jaw looked squarer than ever and her dress more improbably purple. Only in a riot of
fashion could Harris have failed to see it coming.

“Mr. Isaac Harris?” said Constable 8.

“Yes, of course.”