Death in the Age of Steam (52 page)

A visit from Jasper Small on the following Tuesday drew her
thoughts another way. His previous calls had been brief. Thanks to Henry's inaction, there had been no legal threats to discuss with him. Philander's puritan strain of episcopalianism seemed moreover to scare Jasper off. This evening, by contrast, the volume of his inconsequential talk made Theresa suspect he had something to delay saying. She interrupted one of his racetrack anecdotes to ask him straight out whether Dr. Hillyard's leave had at last been obtained to reveal what document had cost her Papa his life. Small nodded and collected himself.

“It dated from 1832,” he began. He knew he need not explain the significance of the year. “It was George MacFarlane's order to a ship's captain to evade the quarantine, as captains often did on their own initiative.”

Jasper's account included all essential facts, though it left the anguish the letter had occasioned Theresa's father as much as possible to her own memory and imagination.

“You've understood what I needed to hear,” she said calmly when he had done, “and told it most considerately.”

Later, though, when he had gone, disillusionment seeped quite through her, poisoning any friendliness she felt towards human beings.

She had known George MacFarlane as her friend's husband, an elderly plutocrat who lived in a castle, a patron of art and charity, and a payer of harmless compliments to women little older than his daughters. She had assumed that in his various commercial dealings, he must have cut a few corners—but not this. Nothing like this.

Cholera was no abstract term to Theresa. In ordering its victims abandoned, George MacFarlane had not killed her mother directly, but together with other venal or merely reckless men, he had made his contribution to the hecatomb. Suppressing the documentary evidence had cost more lives, but what of that? Castle life must be protected. If Theresa called on the MacFarlanes next week, the laird would take her in to dinner on his arm, calling her his muse and inspiration.

Having been wrong about Henry, wrong about George, she
began wondering if everyone were not worse than he seemed.

“All is vanity,” she thought, “and vexation of spirit.” Fear and love alike.

She reread Ecclesiastes. Thursday afternoon of the third week of Isaac's absence, the bleak phrases tumbled through her brain as she washed the pine kitchen floor. Theresa was alone in the house. Charlotte was on a charitable errand, Philander on episcopal business in Three Rivers and not expected home until midnight. With Theresa's permission, Janet the serving girl had stepped next door to borrow something. Presumably, Janet had stopped there to gossip.

“God hath made men upright; but they have sought out many inventions.”

Like a fury, Theresa bore down with soapy brush on some obstinate, tarry stain and, when that failed to remove it, picked at it with her thumb nail. Stung by splinters, she lifted the filth with a knife and resumed scrubbing.

She had not been pleasant company for Janet and could, for her part, well do without people just now, all and each. Charlotte resented separation from her children, however she struggled to hide it. Marthe had not come, and in today's mood was not missed. Jasper had been neglecting to see that Banshee was tended and exercised. While rinsing her bucket and drying her hands, Theresa recalled Jasper's confessing that except for betting purposes he and horses were “outside each other's spheres.” He had seemed unconcerned.

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work in the grave, whither thou goest.”

Theresa went to the front door and opened it a crack. The street was empty. When she closed the door, the house air felt sluggish and dense. How long had it been since she had been outside, in health and mistress of her own footsteps? Weeks past counting. She tied a scarf of Charlotte's over her head. She again opened the door. A butcher's cart was passing—driven by a meat-fed boy of complacent mien and pulled by a nag with flanks raw from whipping. When the street was again empty, Theresa went out.

A chill breeze from the factory district followed her towards Rasco's Hotel. Coal smoke notwithstanding, freedom tasted heady.

Harris stayed on deck throughout the storm, though in the dark night he saw nothing beyond the next mountainous wave and a few feet of slippery rail. To the latter clung a soggy fellow passenger who in shouts told him they were crossing the mouth of Saginaw Bay. The
Lady Elgin
, a fast side-wheeler, creaked and groaned on the heaving water. Mindful of Father Gouin's account of
Steadfast
, Harris listened through the shriek of the wind for the sound of splitting timbers. He had no time for mishaps.

None occurred. By dawn, the gale had exhausted itself, and presently they approached the fuel stop of Presque Isle, Michigan, three fifths of the way from Detroit to Sault Ste. Marie. The recently violent Lake Huron caught slivers of light in smiling wavelets, ruffling the reflection of autumn's first yellow foliage along the shore. Sun kindled the landscape without taking the clean, crisp edge from the morning air.

It seemed a promising day. The storm had after all been little fiercer than ones Harris had known on Lake Ontario. The northern landscape too was, so far, much less desolate than he had feared—and there across the bay rose the lighthouse formerly manned by Harvey Ingram. Harris was the first passenger to step from the gang-board onto the dock.

Yesterday in Detroit, he had had some luck. A steamship company had permitted him to inspect the old passenger lists, and there he found the name of Henry Crane. Crane had sailed from Detroit on October 10, 1849 with fare paid as far as Sault Ste. Marie—where he
should
have disembarked two days later. He should have disembarked on October 12,
one full week
before the date Father Gouin gave for Crane's arrival at the Sault. Presumably Crane had learned something en route to change his plans. A glance at the schedules assured Harris that
Ewing's scalding on October 9 could well have been reported at Presque Isle by the time the vessel bearing Crane had stopped here for fuel on the eleventh. From seasoned sailors among the
Lady Elgin
's crew he learned that it had been lightkeeper Ingram's custom to meet refueling vessels with cheap whisky and the latest gossip.

Now Harris's own boots were crunching over Presque Isle's shingle beach. While the
Lady Elgin
was taking on cordwood, the detective meant to see what more he could learn at the lighthouse itself.

Atop a cone of rough stone sat a brick cylinder, both sprucely whitewashed, the whole rising less than half the height of Toronto's Gibraltar Light. The red door stood open. Down the spiral stairs trailed a string of whistled notes, which Harris followed unhesitatingly to its source. The timbre and intensity led him to expect a hale individual of roughly sixty.

That presently was whom he saw at work polishing the eight sides of the cast iron lantern. The keeper was closely shaved and mostly bald, his head gleaming with perspiration in the greenhouse warmth of his glazed crow's nest. He greeted Harris and continued plying his cloth. He did stop whistling, however, which Harris took as sufficient invitation to seat himself on the top step—the only place there was room—and ask if he had the honour of addressing the immediate successor to Harvey Ingram.

“Can't say I thought much of him,” the lightkeeper declared in a New World voice without overtones of Europe. “Ingram left a shambles here. Premises in disrepair. Drunk when he handed me the keys. Said he was celebrating his new appointment to—I forget where.”

“Toronto,” said Harris, pleased to encounter such candour. “It seems odd he should get postings in two different countries.”

“He was a U.S. citizen—but from Scotland, and with that burr, I guess he seemed British enough. Good riddance, if you ask me. And he had a backer there, in Toronto.”

“Who would that be?” asked Harris. “I'm from Toronto myself.”

“A railway and steamship man of some size, I believe he said.” The American grinned wryly. “Some size for the place, at least.”

Harris wondered with amusement whether the other half dozen residents of Presque Isle would be equally contemptuous of a city of forty-four thousand.

“Henry Crane?” he asked. “Have you ever heard that name?”

The lightkeeper folded the cloth he had been using on the ironwork and from the pocket of a blue jacket took a softer one for polishing the lens.

“Never have,” he said after a period of reflection. “Ingram mentioned no name. An unwilling backer, he said—and he offered me some advice I never asked for. Powerful friends, he said, are no substitute for a well-stocked mind.”

“What do you think he meant?”

“Underhand dealings—if a bamboozling fool like that means anything at all. I don't know what your interest in Ingram is, mister, but even if you are his friend, I can't tell you anything different. I served with the U.S. navy till '53. I got this post because the Lighthouse Board said I was the best man to fill it. That Ingram of yours knew nothing of shipping or navigation, not that I could see—but then there was no Lighthouse Board when he came here.”

“Harvey Ingram is dead,” said Harris. It seemed unnecessary to disown friendship with the deceased. “I should just like to know what claim he had on the backer you mention.”

“He didn't say. I didn't press him, wanting no more of his foul breath than necessary. If he's dead, it's of drink, I suppose.”

No more could Harris learn, however his questions were phrased. In '49, the lightkeeper had been sailing the Atlantic Ocean, and so had never heard of Colin Ewing.

On resuming his voyage north, Harris felt justified in making certain suppositions.

Suppose that on October 11, 1849, Lightkeeper Ingram sees Henry Crane at Presque Isle and tells him what
Steadfast
's mate is putting about—namely, that Colin Ewing is hideously burned and will last no more than a week. For that week, Crane
hides. Later, Ingram learns the date of Crane's tardy arrival in the Sault. Ingram starts the rumour that business in Detroit was not what kept Crane from Ewing's death bed. Because of its disreputable origin, this rumour is ignored, and Crane moves south before he can be much embarrassed by it in any case. In Toronto, Crane's fortune and influence grow.

Further, suppose that eventually Lightkeeper Ingram learns the more-than-embarrassing secret of Henry Crane's delay, the where and why. This time he tells no one but Crane. Now he has enough power over Crane to get himself appointed lightkeeper in Toronto. Crane would have had to call in some favours for that, considerable favours as Ingram is an American, but still Ingram wants more. Pressed for ever larger payments, Crane eventually turns for help to MacFarlane.

So much it seemed safe to assume, but to the secret itself Harris felt no closer than when he had left Montreal. What had taken Ingram from '49 to '53 to find, Harris must uncover in three weeks, most of them necessarily consumed by weary travel.

What card had Ingram held? What tool or device had worked the extortion? Still, after all these miles, the only guess was Small's. At parting, the lawyer still clung to his idea that Crane had risked wrecking
Steadfast
in order to kill Ewing. That was no way to make money.

From the deck of the
Lady Elgin
, Harris once more sent his eyes around the horizon. The shore behind was now a hazy thread, the shore ahead not that even. He wondered if Crane might have had a non-pecuniary motive for wanting Ewing dead.

Harris had previously discounted Crane's lechery as the source of blackmail. Crane must at the Sault have had at least one mistress, if not what Cuthbert Nash called a country wife—but what of that? Even a plurality of country wives had taken nothing from the prestige of Sir George Simpson, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company. These were Indian women, after all.

Of course, a Theresa Sheridan contemplating legal marriage could be expected to hold less worldly views. During courtship, Crane might have paid to keep word of his paramours and any
children by them from Theresa's ears. Coincidentally, it did seem that Ingram's blackmail had commenced in the year of that courtship, 1853. Later, though, when Crane's bride was securely bound to him and her good opinion of no further value or interest, and when the favours expected from his father-in-law were not forthcoming, Crane would have been less spendthrift in concealing what no one else would hold against him. Ingram must have been paid to hide something else. By the same token, discovering a concubine or even an unofficial family would not give Harris the bargaining power he needed over Crane.

For these reasons, as well as from aversion to the subject, Harris had thought little of Crane's northern amours. Suppose, however, Crane had killed his partner over a woman both wanted. To this woman Ewing might have been expected to surrender his claims after becoming engaged to a girl in Chicago. Suppose he had not. He still had a month or six weeks before his marriage in November. Having counted on being left in sole possession of the field, might Crane not have become jealous? Certainly.