Читать книгу Death in the Age of Steam - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 8

Harris remained anchored to his desk through the noon hour, interrupting work only for a taste of cold pigeon pie and a glance at the day’s papers. In addition to Sheridan’s funeral, the disappearance of his daughter was at last being reported. Police were said to be investigating. Harris thought he would stop by the chief’s office after four to see what headway was being made.

When Harris and Murdock deposited the ledgers in the vault at closing time, the cashier asked his accountant to be particularly on guard in future against any attempt at unauthorized inspection of them.

Earlier in the afternoon, as every Wednesday afternoon, those of the bank’s directors resident in Toronto had met to decide who might borrow from the branch. Harris’s duty was simply to present the applications. The Toronto directors murmured approval of Newbiggins’s guarantors and granted him his loan—despite doubts as to whether, during its term, construction of Conquest Iron Works could even begin. On his way downtown after work, Harris walked past the Front Street site. As he had suspected, it lay between a church and the villa of an influential alderman. A more promising source of dandelions than of stoves and rails!

East of Yonge Street, Harris approached the busiest part of the Esplanade. There the principal docks and markets clustered, not to mention the principal beggars and eccentrics. At the entrance to the new south St. Lawrence Market, which to spare the public purse was also made to serve as City Hall, sat a vacant-eyed individual with a placard reading, “Veteran of Waterloo.” Harris bent over and placed a sixpence in the hat by his side. The man might have lost his legs forty-two years ago to a French cannon ball, or more recently in a Toronto construction accident. The exposed pink stumps were real enough.

The portico under which he sat, like the building as a whole, followed the Italianate fashion as far as could be squared with Protestant parsimony. Inside, a compact entrance hall led straight to the police office. Neither the chief nor his deputy was there. Harris proceeded downstairs to Station No. 1, which because of the slope of the land towards the lake looked out on the courtyard of the fruit and poultry market. The only windows, at the far end of the prisoners’ airing room, admitted a dulled but insistent odour of sun-ripened chicken guts.

The near end of the basement housed, on the one hand, the building’s central heating apparatus in a closet of its own and, on the other, the policemen’s room. Stretching roughly parallel to the west or right wall of the latter, an eight-foot-long table served as a counter. Behind it sat hunched a fair young constable, clinging to an unsteady steel pen and holding the tip of his tongue between his teeth. He did not look up. With painstaking deliberation, he was recording a woman’s complaint regarding her neighbour’s privy. She wore a bolt of cloth in skirts alone, which vied in splendour with the abundant plumes and ribbons on her hat. She insisted, in a voice both affected and familiar, that she was known to the lawmakers. Harris had more than enough time to look around.

Although the station was not five years old, cracks were already opening in the walls as the building settled into the wet clay and sand of the harbour beach. Some of these fissures had been whitewashed over but not filled. Others had been patched with a conspicuous grey-green paste. From a rack of guns on the west wall, an expensive padlock—one Harris knew to be pick-proof—hung open and useless. As for the pine plank floor, it was swept remarkably clear of dust and littered with cherry pits. Everything was halfway right. The place was fairly cluttered with good intentions.

Presently Constable Devlin with his one polished boot emerged from the farthest lock-up cell. Harris tried to catch his eye. Appearing not to recollect their morning encounter, the constable crossed the airing room to the table and seated himself in front of a pile of fresh cherries. These he placed in his mouth one after another, expelling the pits in the direction of a tin spittoon.

“Hi, Devlin,” Harris called with more energy than hope. “Is your sergeant around at all?”

Devlin looked up quizzically, but was spared answering when two other men came clattering down the stairs into the room. One was the melancholic lighthouse keeper from the peninsula. He wore a navy jacket and army trousers. The other was John Vandervoort, yesterday’s bogus procurement officer, frowning as if he had just been found out.

The light keeper cleared his throat, presumably to make a formal charge of fraud before the constables. But what was this? A plainly unrepentant Vandervoort clapped him on the back, knocking the breath out of him before he could speak.

“Lock this man up, Devlin,” said Vandervoort, shoving his winded companion behind the table. “The charge is smuggling and trafficking in smuggled goods. Morgan, write it up.”

“Two Gs or one, inspector?” said the blond constable, turning to a fresh page in his book.

Inspector. Harris wondered if he had heard correctly.

“It ain’t smuggling, John.” The accused wiped the sweat from his forehead with a shaky hand. “On my word as a seasoned campaigner, we’ve got this treaty with the States now. A recip—reciprostity treaty.”

“You mean, ‘reciprocity,’” the female complainant corrected self-importantly. Haughty grey eyes cast icicles from under her hat brim in the light keeper’s direction. “Now I really must ask you to wait your turn.”

Vandervoort reached inside his frayed check jacket and pulled a six-shooter from his belt. Everyone but the seated constables took a startled step back. Morgan’s pen froze in the air with a drop of ink quivering at its tip. Gunfire seemed imminent. As soon as Vandervoort had the weapon out, however, he let it swing by the trigger guard from his thick forefinger.

“Harvey Ingram,” he said calmly, “I ask you before witnesses here—Constables Morgan and Devlin—ma’am—ah! Mr. Harris—I ask you whether this item which I purchased from you is grain, coal, timber, pork, or any other product of the earth such as falls under the terms of the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854? Just shake your head now. That’s right. You all saw that?”

“I see nothing,” pouted the female complainant. “I didn’t come here to be a witness to anything.” So saying, she decided to postpone her business to a quieter occasion, lifted her copious skirts and swept up the stairs out of sight. No one begged her to stay.

“This is—rather—a manufactured product,” Vandervoort continued, thrusting the gun under the lighthouse keeper’s nose. “In point of fact, it is a thirty-six calibre Colt Navy revolver made in Hartford, Connecticut, and as such subject to import tariffs under the laws of Canada. Have you any proof that such tariffs have been paid? I didn’t think so.”

“You’ll never make it stick, John,” said Ingram in a vague, quite unthreatening voice.

Perhaps he too believed he had friends among the lawmakers. Otherwise, Harris thought, he was unlikely to be found at the Gibraltar Light for some time. Vandervoort was making a convincing case.

“This gun and its fellows didn’t come ashore through the port of Toronto where tariffs are levied, did it?” asked the inspector. “Oh, no—no indeed! Instead it was landed Monday night at a signal from your light on the south beach of the peninsula. Why there and then? Precisely to avoid the attentions of Her Majesty’s customs office. Think that over while you sit in your cell.”

Of course, if Ingram were a criminal, his opinion of Theresa’s fate might have to be reconsidered. Perhaps, thought Harris, the lightkeeper had been speaking from something besides drunken morbidity.

“Now, Devlin,” the inspector went on, “this gun is evidence, so you’re to keep it under lock and key.”

“Absolutely, John.” Devlin’s shifty eyes went hard and serious with understanding of the necessity.

“We’ll just let Morgan here copy down the serial number first—40099.” Vandervoort laid the pistol on the table and glanced over Morgan’s shoulder. “Yes, two Gs. That’s it.”

Harris continued to follow the proceedings closely, flabbergasted to find that the warty intruder from the funeral—who turned himself out like a dealer in second-rate horse flesh—was a senior policeman. To say that Vandervoort’s present briskness contrasted favourably with the previous rhythm of Station No.1 was small praise.

Still, any evidence of official competence boded well for finding Theresa. Although Harris had disliked the man on first acquaintance, he readily presumed on that acquaintance in approaching him.

Vandervoort’s willingness to be congratulated on his coup made him more approachable still. The business of the arrest concluded, he invited Harris upstairs, where fresh paint covered the walls, and poultry odours barely penetrated. The inspector had city-wide responsibilities, but no desk of his own, so he made free with the deputy chief’s. Sitting on it, he waved Harris into the chair and railed against contraband. A flood of discount revolvers was of course a threat to public peace, but he expected no thanks on that score. What scared the politicians was lost revenue, for without the tariffs they could not subsidize their railways.

“I’ve saved the public purse ten miles of track,” crowed the inspector, “with the help of a certain sharp-eyed miss . . .”

Harris guessed the seamstress Marion Webster was meant. She was familiar with the peninsula and might have noticed any irregular flashing of the Gibraltar Light used to bring in the smugglers’ ship. Why Miss Webster, whose clientele included the Cranes, should confide her suspicions to someone as disrespectful of her person as John Vandervoort was a mystery to Harris, but would have to remain one for now, as he had more urgent inquiries to pursue.

“I came,” he said, “to see how the search for Mrs. Crane is progressing.”

Vandervoort at first resisted the change of subject. “Railway men in politics—nothing wrong with them. Not a thing. Her father was something more, though. I admired him, which makes me somewhat of an exception on the force—but then, as the only plainclothes detective, I’m an exception most ways. When is the last time you saw her?”

“The first of March, 1853.”

“You’re amazingly precise.”

“I’ve had no communication with her since. I take it she has not been found.”

“Not by me, but then I’ve had other game to snare. Do you know where she is?”

“No, inspector, I don’t. She may be at the mercy of kidnappers or lying hurt in the bush. It’s seventy-five hours since, according to her husband, she left home. She may be facing her fourth night without shelter.” Harris cleared his throat. He felt the fears he had kept in check all day come crowding back. “It would be some reassurance to know what your department has discovered so far, what steps are being taken.”

Vandervoort opened a drawer in the deputy chief’s desk, found a half-smoked cigar and lit it. “What steps would you take?” he asked.

“Circulate her likeness and description together with a description of her attire and mount to the railway, steamship and stagecoach offices, as well as to every hotel in and within half a day’s ride of Toronto. The Home District, in short. Find out her favourite rides from Mr. Crane. Go over each one inch by inch. Apply to her friends, everyone she saw socially, and every domestic or tradesperson she had business with. Examine her personal effects to determine what she took with her.”

Vandervoort’s heavy-lidded eyes were for once wide open. “I believe you would,” he said. “Do you happen to have a picture of her?”

“Of course not. Surely Mr. Crane can provide you with a daguerreotype from which an engraving might be made. Excuse me, Inspector. I feel I’m talking to a mirror. Every question is turned back on me. While I’m happy to assist you, I should like some answers too.”

From the floor below came a murmur of erratic singing, on which some municipal clock broke in with brief authority to sound the hour of five.

“I see you take a great interest in Mr. Crane’s wife—but police work has its confidences, Mr. Harris, just like banking. You live alone.”

“That’s no secret.” It was not, however, something Harris had mentioned.

“Do you have anyone in to keep house on a daily basis?”

“A cleaning woman comes on Thursdays. I bring in other help only when I entertain. In the past six days, no one but me has been in the apartment. You’re welcome to inspect it.”

“Do you know any reason Mrs. Crane might have had to leave her husband?”

“None, but as I say I’ve had no communication—”

“Yes, yes, since that sad day in ’53.” After a last mouthful of smoke, Vandervoort flattened the cigar end to the floor with his heel. “You had proposed marriage to her yourself. The sight of another man’s ring on her slender finger would have galled you.”

In one flash of anger, Harris left his seat and strode to the door. There his brain cleared enough to frame the hypothesis that Vandervoort had agreed to see him from the sole motive of determining whether he and Theresa were adulterers. The policeman’s latest crudeness might have been calculated to provoke an unguarded admission, or guilty flight.

“Gin a body kiss a body,” the inebriate below kept asking, each time louder, “Need a body cry?”

Harris turned. A sharp rebuke might work with tellers, but he saw no profit here in giving his feelings the run of his tongue. “Your information is faulty, inspector,” he said quietly. “I never proposed.”

“A great mistake.”

Would it, Harris silently wondered, have made a difference? Perhaps he had only spared himself the humiliation of a refusal. She had unnecessarily returned every book of which he had ever made her a present—not love poetry or sentimental novels either, but works of natural science, in which subject she had shown an early and tenacious interest.

“Forgive my impertinence,” said Vandervoort. “Was her finger slender?”

“Yes.”

“How would you describe her otherwise, as of the date named?”

“Five foot four inches tall—nearer eight stone than nine—eyes green, hair chestnut brown.” The trick was not to remember the details, but to keep them sufficiently objective. “Creamy, clear complexion.”

“Any distinguishing marks?”

Harris hesitated to mention the sweet, dark mole on her neck to the left of the nape, though it had been plainly visible whenever she wore evening dress and her hair was up. Asking himself what Theresa would say settled the matter. She would never have seen the point of withholding such information where a life might be at stake. Harris answered the question.

Vandervoort, who was neither taking nor consulting notes, heard about the mole with a smile. “Go on,” he said.

“Mr. Crane must have told you all this.”

“What about her nose?”

“Straight and strong.”

“Mouth?”

“Of course, she has a mouth. If it helps to know, there’s a slight gap between her upper central incisors.”

“Have mercy, Mr. Harris. I only got three years of school.”

“Front teeth. The mouth itself appears to turn down somewhat at the corners.”

“Ah. A discontented expression.”

“It doesn’t appear so. She’s not conventional-looking, bu . . .”

“A beauty for all that.”

“By common accord, yes—a radiant, spirited one.”

“Impetuous?”

“Impatient at times perhaps,” said Harris, “like all of us. Have you any more questions?”

“No,” Vandervoort replied. “You’re free to go.”

Harris stayed. “How many men are assigned to this case?”

“I’m not at liberty—”

“Are any policemen devoting their full attention to the search?”

“This I will tell you. We have in this city fifty constables, under the immediate supervision of five sergeants. Each constable has to look after the policing needs of eight hundred citizens. Now depend on it, every man is aware of Mrs. Crane’s disappearance and can be counted on to keep his eyes open.”

Every Morgan, thought Harris, every Devlin. “And what provision has been made for the possibility that she has already left the city?”

“You can address any further enquiries to Mr. Henry Crane.” Vandervoort’s grin unravelled. “Now you’ll have to excuse me. I’m wanted elsewhere.”

“Just a moment. The lighthouse keeper you arrested—yesterday he was positive that Mrs. Crane had been killed. Ask him if he saw her.”

“You can’t be thinking the contrabandists killed Mrs. Crane?” The inspector opened the door and held it for Harris.

“If she had stumbled on their activities—”

“I know my felons, sir. These are businessmen, not murderers.”

When Vandervoort left the building, Harris went back down to Station No.1 and asked again for the sergeant. Morgan answered evasively. Devlin let slip that the sergeant was under lock and key and not able to be seen, though plainly to be heard.

“All the girls they smile at me,” rang out from the farthest lock-up cell, “a comin’ through the rye.”

Harris escaped onto the scorched yellow dust of the square. The heat beat down on his shoulders and rose through the soles of his shoes. Holding his top hat between the sun and his eyes, he stared down Wellington, Front and Palace Streets and up Nelson to where Jarvis began north of Queen. Vandervoort had vanished, but the Waterloo veteran still sat in the shade of the portico. Perhaps those moist eyes were not as empty as they seemed.

“Two minutes ago a tall, red-haired man in checks came out this door,” said Harris as he put another coin in the high shako hat.

“Flemish name—I forget what.”

“Did you happen to notice which way he went?”

“He’s gone for a glass at the Dog and Duck, same as every day at five.” The veteran pointed to a hotel entrance on West Market Square.

Shame on Vandervoort! He was late this afternoon, a disappointment to his friends. But sarcasm would not do. Harris’s indignation and anxiety required release in action. He decided against the Dog and Duck and started home to change into clothes he could ride in. The veteran called him back.

“Take that second sixpence of yours,” he said. “I ain’t a paid spy.”

Banshee was put through her paces, culminating in a three-mile gallop west along the lakeshore. The seven minutes and a half it took her wasn’t her best time, but close to it. Harris had bought her for endurance and disposition, not speed.

He stretched in the saddle and wiped his forehead as the horse picked her way through the scrub pine at the mouth of the Humber River. Their approach sent a brown-and-buff wader flying off in a zigzag with a rasping cry. Less easily distracted than the snipe, an osprey continued to hover on beating wings just above the water’s surface.

The birds and—more particularly—the variety of wildflowers had drawn Theresa to the Humber Valley often before her marriage. Harris began to work his way upstream, if not inch by inch then yard by yard. In less than three hours, night would fall.

Where the banks were too spongy to ride, he guided Banshee over the shale and limestone stream bed. He stopped to question fishermen. He dismounted to inspect footprints, bread crusts, paper scraps, and every other sign of human passage.

The vale north of Bâby Point had provided most of the items for Theresa’s botanical inventory, so he took extra time to survey this ground on foot. Names he could no longer match to plants ran unbidden through his head—painted cup, viburnum, helleborine.

Suddenly, he heard the leaves rustle behind him. He grabbed a fallen tree branch and spun around just in time to see the retreating red-brown back of a snowshoe hare.

As the shadows lengthened, Harris left the valley. He rode back to Toronto in the dark, making fruitless inquiries at every inn along Dundas Street. During the intervals, he reflected that such random leisure-time excursions stood no chance of leading him to Theresa. He would willingly have left the search to others—to the authorities, to the experts. If only such people existed.

He had prolonged this afternoon’s interview with Vandervoort in the continually frustrated hope of receiving some assurance of official diligence or competence. For all his professional discretion, the inspector had revealed that his department lacked any procedure for finding people, that they had as yet no likeness of Theresa, that no one was actively looking for her, that suspicious circumstances were not even to be investigated. Nor was it evident that Crane was making up for police deficiencies. Crane seemed content to throw suspicion on Harris.

The horse trotted on, hoofs as regular as a heartbeat. Farmland was giving way to town. The houses drew closer to the road and to their neighbours. Burghers taking the night air on their stoops could call to each other and to passersby, though gas-fuelled street lamps didn’t yet come out this far.

One day Toronto would be well lit and well policed. So much stood to reason. What baffled Harris was the weight of obligation he felt settling upon himself in the meantime. His normally reliable good sense counselled him to flinch, to shrug the burden off, but his pulse was beating louder than such counsels. Harris had never known the imperiousness of his own heart. He was afraid he was about to.

When he had delivered Banshee to Randall’s boy for grooming and made sure her manger was full, he went to look for Jasper Small. At nine p.m., however, Small could not really be expected to be home, still less at his law office. At an oyster bar, more likely, the resort of men of fashion. As it happened, no oyster bar had seen him, nor had his favourite billiard parlours, nor indeed was he to be found in any public establishment that could be reached by closing time.

Back in the cashier’s suite, another night passed, slowly. Next day at noon, Harris tried again, walking north of Queen Street on Yonge to the end unit of a short row of Georgian yellow-brick houses.

He had first come here nine years ago in the winter of 1847, before he had been employed by the bank. At his father’s instigation, he had been working to establish the York County Millers’ Association and had needed advice on a matter of legal incorporation. He had heard that William Sheridan was one of the best lawyers in the province, and by no means the most expensive, but that Sheridan might not be available, as he was devoting more and more of his time to politics.

On that January morning, the first thing the eighteen-year-old Harris had heard when he opened the street door was a cascade of angry abuse.

“If you would make a supreme mental effort, Mr. Small,” a deep Irish voice thundered, “you would realize that I have a coach to catch to Montreal. What bloated idea of your own importance could have made you think that I have so much as a second to spare on your flea of a client’s libel action?”

Harris had leaped back down the steps, flagged down a horse-drawn omnibus descending Yonge Street, and held it the thirty seconds more it took a chunkily handsome man in his mid-forties to burst into the street. A second, boyish figure, vapour ballooning from his startled mouth, followed as far as the top step. Sheridan was waved a farewell he didn’t look back to see with a handful of the papers he had not had time to read.

Returning the salute on his behalf, Harris bundled his quarry aboard the omnibus. Together they rode it to where it turned east along King Street. Then they ran and slid the two remaining blocks to Weller’s Stage Office on Front Street. Sheridan already had his ticket to Montreal. Harris took one as far as Pickering, which he judged would give him time and to spare to explain his problem.

As the coach runners skimmed over the frozen roads, Sheridan relaxed inside his furs. He understood what the York Millers wanted and saw no particular difficulty in doing it. He said something about the beauty of the Canadian winter and how much he enjoyed sleighing—not as far as Montreal, to be sure, which was where Parliament happened to be sitting—but in short spurts. Did Harris have a horse and sleigh of his own? No? Then he must take Sheridan’s out for a turn sometime, out on the bay, with a team in tandem.

Harris smiled at the extravagance.

“I mean it,” the lawyer protested. “You’ll see. Life’s so full of pleasures, my young friend. I’m a jackass to let my temper get the better of me the way it did back there. It will be the death of me.”

“I don’t know about that, sir,” said Harris, crossing several degrees of intimacy at a bound, “and I don’t know much about law—but if the flea of a client had opened that door instead of me, I suppose there might have been another libel suit in the offing.”

“Slander, Mr. Harris, for verbal insults. I’d have put nothing so damaging in writing.”

The young lawyer Sheridan had left gasping on the doorstep that day later became his partner and Harris’s closest friend.

Today Jasper Small was to be found in Sheridan’s room rather than his own, ostensibly cleaning up Sheridan’s affairs. Letters and documents covered both the open front of the writing desk by the door, and a fully extended gate-leg table in the bay window. A wavy-haired man of roughly Harris’s age was moving these papers about without appearing to sort them in any way. Small’s fleshy moon of a face and pale grey eyes made him look the dreamer even when delivering an elegantly conclusive argument in court. Whether his present task absorbed him Harris found hard to tell.

“Dine with me, Jasper.”

“I can’t,” said Small. “Oh, hang it, I shall. The Trafalgar House has received a shipment of the most amazing claret.”

The firm of Sheridan and Small having a progressive reputation, Jasper felt at liberty to wear a bowler in place of a top hat. His morning coat was impeccably cut and pressed, as were his matching loose trousers. An extra-elaborate tie knot was his only real touch of dandyism.

Harris had no criticism to make of Small, and yet as the two emerged onto the plank sidewalk, he realized he had come expecting too much. While more composed than on his return Wednesday night from the Humber Valley, he felt as tense as a drawn bow. He wanted Small to provide all the answers and reassurances that had so far eluded Harris himself.

“Sorry for your loss,” he mumbled, to at least get that out of the way. “There was no chance to speak at the funeral.”

Small shook his head as if he could not believe what he was about to say. “I took the old man papers to sign Friday afternoon. He was on the mend. No more pain in the gut, he says. The next day off he pops.”

“Oh? You don’t think his death was natural?”

Harris had heard no suspicion of this—none, that is, but Septimus Murdock’s. And what did the accountant not suspect? Belonging to the Roman Catholic minority in a Protestant town could only reinforce the apprehensiveness of his temperament, and his noting the “significant coincidence” of Sheridan’s death with the Glorious Twelfth was all the easier for Harris to dismiss in that Murdock had so far refused to be more explicit.

Orangemen did have reason to dislike Sheridan. Although a Protestant Irishman himself, he had joined Robert Baldwin in trying to outlaw the Orange Order back in the days of Governor Metcalfe. Sheridan’s rhetoric at the time, moreover, had been far less temperate than Baldwin’s. But dislike was one thing, murder another. Besides, this dispute was thirteen years old. Drunken brawls might be a Toronto Orange tradition. Long-nurtured grudges and stealthy vendettas, as far as Harris knew, were not.

Nor did Small appear to have foul play in mind.

“Natural to be sure,” he replied. “As natural as quack medicine. I’m just not convinced it resulted inevitably from his illness.”

Harris asked who had been Sheridan’s physician.

“An old friend,” said Small through clenched teeth. “Hell, Chris Hillyard was already old in ’23 when Willie Sheridan first came to this country.”

“I’m surprised Sheridan never made us acquainted,” Harris observed.

“Well, in fact Hillyard did retire for a few years, disappeared to the Indies, and then committed the capital error of coming back. He likely gave Sheridan a purgative thinking it was a sedative.”

Such bitterness, not typical of his pleasure-loving friend, Harris attributed to the sudden weight of sole responsibility for the affairs of the partnership. Feeling oppressed, Small required an oppressor—which did not of course mean he was wrong about Hillyard. In any event, Small’s frown melted away when a girl with sleeves pushed up to her elbows showed them from the inn door to a white-clothed table and set a bottle of red Bordeaux before them.

The Trafalgar House was a small hotel with an oenophilic owner and an indifferent cook. Harris contented himself with bread and cheese to accompany his glass of wine, while it took Small the rest of the bottle to wash down his portion of boiled beef.

“Could anyone else have killed him?” said Harris as soon as they were alone. “Possibly not by accident.”

“Whoa, what kind of question is that?” Small took a steadying drink.

“Well—had he received any threats? Did anyone come to the office—I don’t know—brandishing a revolver?”

“There were times I came close to brandishing one myself,” Small replied. “And he certainly made enemies, but apart from the Orangemen—which is to say, apart from the police, the fire department, the carters, the innkeepers and the politicians—any enemies he made he made into friends again right after. My money stays on the medico. But what’s your interest, Isaac? Why so keen?”

Harris shrugged stiffly.

“That’s what I thought,” said Small, wiping his mouth on a corner of his napkin. “Then what’s this about threats against her father?”

The two seldom spoke of Theresa, whom Small had courted for eight weeks and Harris for considerably longer—so much longer as to not seem a fit subject for raillery.

After two false starts, Harris explained his belief that Sheridan’s death and Theresa’s disappearance must be linked. He spoke also of his own researches to date and of his unsatisfactory interviews with Crane and Vandervoort.

Small leaned forward. “You won’t take advice on this subject, I know.”

“Likely not.” Jasper’s most recent advice—only half facetious—had been that to circulate the blood and reset his compass what Harris needed was to visit a whorehouse, a good one. Jasper knew just the place. On the whole, Harris found he dreaded Small’s advice.

“Let me just say, Isaac, that involving yourself in the search for Theresa can do you no good.”

“That’s not the—”

“No, listen—”

“She has been missing four days,” Harris in turn broke in. “All I want is to know she’s safe.”

“We all want that,” said Small with murderous mildness, “and then again, suppose you desert your bank and kill your horse galloping it all over the continent. I won’t speak of the worst outcome—but take the best case. Even if you find her safe and whole, you’ll be bringing her home to Henry. Can you swallow that?”

“If she wishes it.”

Small studied his friend’s face. “Given the state of your feelings for her, you can’t be serious.”

“Yes, certainly, of course—but Crane is not above suspicion in all this. Why isn’t he looking for her himself?”

“Business preoccupations, I would guess.”

Harris took this as a further instance of Small’s contempt for sentiment. “You be serious, Jasper. Any normally affectionate husband would leave his immense wealth to look after itself for a week.”

“Not so immense as all that. Have you not heard?”

Harris had not. He had got in the habit of paying no more attention to Crane’s activities than he could help. Crane took his business to the Commercial Bank, and their ways seldom crossed. References to Crane in the press were generally laudatory.

Railways he had built in the southwestern part of the province had, to be sure, suffered mishaps. Bridges had collapsed. Iron rails had split in the severe Canadian winter. Stoves had set fire to passenger coaches with fatal results. Deaths had resulted from the lack of gates at level crossings. By then, however, the customer had always paid and taken delivery of the line. Crane had fulfilled his contract and never seemed to come out the loser, not even in terms of reputation.

But Small knew more than was in the papers.

“He has overreached himself,” the lawyer announced authoritatively. “He has committed too much of his personal capital to risky or long-term ventures.”

The Kingston to Cape Vincent railway car ferry was a case in point, said Small—who had sat at the same piquet table as the treasurer’s daughter. Loading trains on boats was to cost less than bridging the St. Lawrence. Wolfe Island did stand in the path of navigation, but Crane had allegedly taken up shares with both hands on the mistaken assumption that a canal across the obstructing land mass would soon be completed. Such miscues weren’t like him. Nevertheless . . . Untypically, also, he had undertaken railway contracts east of Toronto for shares instead of bonds or cash. That meant higher construction standards and worries about rising costs.

“His shrewdness has deserted him,” Small declared, “and—whether cause or effect—he’s desperate for funds. There are even rumours that he has touched friends for loans.”

“Next you’ll be telling me he has lost money at the race track,” said Harris. “How long is he supposed to have been feeling the pinch?”

“A year,” said Small, “fourteen months. And he never bets on horses—or drinks, or smokes, or swears. So much for the wages of virtue!”

Harris thought back to Tuesday. The exquisite carriage in which Crane had taken them to the graveside was so new that the ship that had brought it from England might still be in the harbour. A bold purchase. And yet the most distinguished mourners had seemed to avoid Crane as they would not have done if he still smelled of success.

“Whatever his difficulties,” said Harris, “he should still be more concerned about his wife.”

Small smiled like a Buddha. Plainly, he thought Harris biased.

Harris was, of course. “Are they happy together?” he asked.

“Like any couple. I rarely see them together.”

“When did you last see Theresa?”

“Friday at her father’s. She had more or less moved down there from Queen Street East while he was ill. I was sitting in the old boy’s room, waiting for him to wake up from a nap, when she came in and shooed me out. She said I could tell the housekeeper to serve tea to her and myself in the parlour. She let me back upstairs later on, but only on condition I not bother her Papa with business. So the papers never did get signed.”

“Anything important?” said Harris.

“Everything I do is important, Isaac. My God, I wish we had time for another bottle of this.”

Small was mooning over the wine label, ostensibly dreaming of the château where it had been pasted on.

“A new will perhaps?” said Harris.

“Nothing I intend to blab about. Not a will, though. His will is no secret. His daughter gets the villa and its contents. Most everything else, no great hoard, goes to charity. Oh, and I inherit his share of the practice, which at present seems a very mixed blessing.”

“But would the estate be large enough to restore Crane’s fortunes,” asked Harris, “assuming he could get his hands on it?”

“Not nearly.” Small pushed back his chair, which the innkeeper’s daughter took as a signal to bring the two hats.

Harris ignored his and remained seated. “How did Theresa seem?”

“In the sickroom, quite under control. She knew just how far open she wanted the windows and what covers should be on the bed. When her Papa woke up, she took his temperature with a thermometer, which is more than I’ve ever heard of Christopher Hillyard’s doing.”

“And downstairs at tea?”

“Agitated,” said Small, evidently choosing a word softer than the one he felt appropriate. “She complained of the stifling heat and of want of air. At one point, she excused herself, and I heard her cross-questioning the housekeeper in a most dogged and ferocious manner such as a judge would hardly let you get away with in court.”

“On what subject?”

“Couldn’t hear. It just seemed indicative of what state her nerves were in. No wonder they snapped when—you know . . .”

“That’s how you explain her disappearance?” Having ruled out this possibility himself, Harris rose impatiently from the table. “After a calm Sunday dinner, she just ran wild. Well, if she has lost her wits, she can’t have hidden herself too cunningly.”

“I imagine someone has seen her,” said Small.

“You can imagine anything you like. If you really want to set your mind at ease, Jasper, you can imagine some Christian soul has taken her in and is plying her with roast goose.”

Harris walked Small back to his law office, though he was already likely to be missed at the bank. Irresolution gnawed him. His momentary hesitation before attending Sheridan’s funeral was but a love bite to this. In the Holland Landing of his boyhood, there would have been no question. Everyone would have helped beat the bush for the missing woman. Urban cynicism might colour Small’s advice, and yet Harris lived in the city now too. If Toronto’s neighbours were not to be counted on, it wasn’t because they lacked hearts, but because they by and large worked for others and were not masters of their own time. No more was Harris. He would likely have to act alone if at all and turn his life upside down to do it.

And then again, the circumstances remained so clouded—everything from Sheridan’s death to the state of Theresa’s nerves. If there had been some cry for help, some unmistakable plea, the path ahead would have been plainer.

On the steps where Harris had first heard Sheridan’s voice, Small turned.

“She mentioned you, Isaac,” he said. “I didn’t know whether to tell you.”

“Please do.”

“She asked did I think enough time had passed that you could regard her now as just a friend.”

Pain rippled through Harris’s stomach, chest, and throat. “And you answered?”

He knew he had given Small no reason to believe he was over his disappointed love. Time and again Small had introduced him to charming young women that he had danced with for part of an evening and gratefully seen whisked out of his arms by enthusiastic young men. As lately as Saturday, he had danced the polka—which was taking ballrooms by storm, and which Methodists found so lewdly suggestive. For better or worse, Harris was not very open to suggestion, he guessed. He nonetheless would have found it hard to forgive if Small had said anything that might have deterred Theresa from seeking his aid.

“I said, ‘Try him.’”

“Good.” Harris let out a breath he had scarcely been aware he had been holding.

“I gather she didn’t,” said Small.

“No. I wish I had known.”

“Well, she didn’t tell me she was about to vanish.”

“Of course not,” said Harris gently. “Thanks.”