Читать книгу Death in the Age of Steam - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 9

Well-established habits carried Harris through Thursday afternoon’s routine business—interviewing loan applicants, authorizing replacement of a cracked window pane, reprimanding a chronically unpunctual teller, perusing economic reports. Canadian wheat production for 1856 was expected to reach twenty-six million bushels. An impressive figure, probably still on the low side—although the new peace with Russia and the consequent reopening of trade to the east could not but depress the price those Canadian bushels would fetch in England and France. The fat years might well be ending.

Harris found it impossible to care, preoccupied as he was with what act of friendship Theresa had required. He had kept Small standing on his office steps and asked him that question in various ways, but—beyond sympathetic companionship during William Sheridan’s indisposition—Small had no ideas at all.

“No,” Harris was explaining to a chemistry professor, “our charter prevents us from accepting your house as the principal security for a loan. Do you have any bonds you could pledge? Or is there anyone at all that owes you money?”

The squat Yorkshireman replied that the University of Toronto owed him an increase in emolument. As this was a moral rather than a legal obligation, however, Harris could only recommend that the man get whatever influential friends he had to speak for him to his employers. Best wishes and good day.

Then the afternoon mail brought a matter that was far from routine. Out of an envelope addressed to Harris personally fell four of his branch’s brand new fifty-dollar notes.

He stared a moment in amazement at the harbour scene depicted on the backs. A classically draped female figure, spilling bounty from a cornucopia, sat at the water’s edge while a train steamed towards her from one side, a ship from the other. Both billowed clouds of smoke, intricately engraved for the discouragement of forgers.

These were not forgeries. They were a bribe, equivalent to an even tenth of the cashier’s yearly pay. He pulled from the envelope a letter to the effect that Joshua Newbiggins recognized Isaac Harris’s abilities and would work to ensure they received wider recognition.

The absence of a stamp showed the envelope had come by private messenger. Even so, Newbiggins must have stepped lively. The money he had picked up at noon he was already putting to work. Harris had suspected its first use would be as gifts, but the likeliest recipients had seemed the railways that Conquest Iron Works hoped to supply or Conquest’s influential Front Street neighbours. Not Harris.

He knew, though, why he had been so honoured. One of his branch’s major borrowers was York Foundry, an established manufacturer in Conquest’s line. Information the bank held regarding York’s costs, suppliers and clients would help Conquest overcome the handicap of a late start.

Harris had been offered bribes before, but so discreetly that he had always been able to decline without either taking or giving offence. Newbiggins’s crudeness raised questions about his judgement and, unhappily, about that of the president who had recommended him. Re-enclosing the bills and letter in a fresh envelope, Harris entrusted their return to Dick Ogilvie and instructed his staff to say he was occupied if Mr. Newbiggins should call.

Thursday evening and every free minute of the next day were spent on the kind of inquiries Harris had outlined to Vandervoort. Neither the ticket agencies nor the city hotels admitted to having seen Theresa. A proper detective job was going to require something Harris had not yet worked out how to get, Crane’s cooperation or that of someone in his establishment.

Gatekeepers at Crane’s home and office kept offering polite excuses. A personal letter went unanswered. Friday noon Harris did manage to intercept him on King Street. Crane cut him off before Harris could speak.

He had been about to ask what funeral arrangements Crane had made on Sunday. The undertaker denied having seen him. So did the priest and the pallbearers.

Harris got a little further with Dr. Hillyard—who appeared in every respect the dotard Small had represented. The opening of his surgery door late Friday afternoon sent dust balls scurrying. Throughout the interview, the doctor’s trembling hands wandered between the buttons of a food-stained waistcoat and a high, scabby forehead bracketed by cobwebs of hair.

He said he had last seen Sheridan alive on Saturday morning. At that time he had administered no medicine. He had left none. He had recommended none. The symptoms of inflammation having subsided, no medicine was indicated.

But the annals of physic were full of unforeseen reverses. Sheridan’s demise that very evening was regrettable, but not so surprising as to arouse suspicion. “We are not God, sir.” A messenger from Mrs. Crane had reached Hillyard’s just before nine p.m. and had been sent on to where he was celebrating the Glorious Twelfth. By nine thirty, he was at Sheridan’s villa. There he observed nothing to suggest the death had been anything but natural and, indicating that he would report it as such, took his leave some twenty minutes later.

That was all he would say. Further questions should be put to Mrs. Crane. No, Hillyard had no idea where to find her. Was she not at home? Mr. Crane then.

For Friday evening, Harris had a supper engagement he could not decently get out of. After leaving Hillyard, he found he didn’t want to. He craved a few hours’ relaxation. Last Saturday’s laughter and polkas seemed to belong to a summer long past.

The MacFarlanes’ up on Queen Street West was a household with artistic aspirations. Singing rather than cards accordingly followed the meal. Harris had the voice of a crow but could sight read at the piano well enough to be a useful accompanist. Well enough, but not perfectly. The twelve-year-old daughter of the house broke into such fits of giggles when he hit a wrong note that he began making mistakes deliberately just to provoke her. Elsie’s mother was the most provoked, however, and the two clowns were driven from the pianoforte in disgrace.

Elsie took this opportunity to corner Harris and show him her sketch book. Managing the crinoline cage her voluminous dress required was plainly giving her the difficulty of a novice helmsman on a broad-beamed steamer, and Harris barely managed to catch a cherrywood teapoy toppled by her passage.

“The thing I don’t like about these skirts,” she said, patting the wire-supported dome of pink taffeta below her waist, “is you can’t sit in armchairs.”

“And the thing you do like?” Harris took the book from her hands.

“Is you can’t be ignored. You must start at the beginning now and not just go flipping through.”

A sprightly child but very earnest too, Harris realized as he turned the pages and found one excruciatingly literal drawing after another. The birds seemed to be sketched from a taxidermy shop. The houses might have been of great use to a builder. Then there were parts of a cat that, even in sleep, moved around too much ever to have its portrait completed.

It was high time Harris made an appreciative remark. “You know, Elsie, I like these bits. They leave something to your imagination.”

Then he turned the page and saw a cloud of cat, a sketch so furious and unconsidered it might all have been done in five seconds. It wasn’t what Harris thought of as artistic. The pencilled swirls better suited a storm at sea than a dozing pet. He wondered if Elsie, frustrated by her own caution, had swung to the opposite extreme.

“That’s not mine,” she said.

“Whose is it then?”

“Mrs. Crane’s . . .”

Elsie had Harris’s full attention. Here was a connection he had not guessed at.

“She said that unless I was illustrating an anatomy textbook, I should not worry so much about the details. I do like her. Do you think she will be found?”

A quick, false yes would not do. If Elsie’s parents had trusted her with news of the disappearance, rather than pretending Theresa was out of town on some cosy visit, then Harris didn’t want to spew easy reassurance either. At the same time, he honestly could not imagine living the rest of his life with this mystery unresolved.

“I think she will,” he said slowly. “Did you ever sketch her?”

“I surely did.” The girl’s long face brightened. “Don’t skip now. You’ll come to it.”

“Come on back, Mr. Harris,” some one called from the piano. “It seems we can’t do without you.”

“In a moment,” he answered.

Elsie’s drawings, still highly detailed, did become looser and livelier. Theresa’s portrait was easily the best thing in the book. Affection for the sitter must have helped, on top of which Theresa had given Elsie a pose it would have been hard to make static. Her head was turning as if her attention had just been caught by the glimpse of a person long absent, and her lips were parting as if she were about to speak. The drawing was dated the first of the current month.

“What do you think? Am I improving?” Elsie wanted to know.

“You are indeed. Could I borrow this and make a tracing?”

“I should want it back. Do you really think it’s good?”

Harris’s musical services were again being called for.

“I do, but remember I’m not an art critic, Elsie, just a banker.”

“And a dazzling pianist,” she reminded him merrily.

“Plug your ears,” he warned her on his way back to the keyboard.

After a sufficiency of Mendelssohn and Schubert, the music party broke up for refreshments. Harris watched his chance to get a word with Elsie’s mother, who but for darker eyes and a stronger chin greatly resembled her contemporary the Queen. Kate MacFarlane was for some time occupied ordering staff and guests about in a quick, sharp voice. Her folded fan pointed directions. Harris had never seen her wear anything but tartan—a general fad since the completion of the royal residence at Balmoral. Her timber-baron husband—an older man, very tall and substantial—left to her the duties of general hospitality, while he remained towering in the background in conversation with the comeliest of the young sopranos.

Harris had only recently been introduced to the family, which explained his not knowing of their acquaintance with Theresa. And yet he felt quickly at ease. Mrs. MacFarlane’s brusqueness had a way of breaking down reserve.

Speak to her? Certainly. Making sure he had a plate of cakes, she drew him out through French doors onto a vaulted loggia overlooking the garden. Gothic arches added to the picturesque appeal of this villa scaled like a castle. Theresa Crane, said the chatelaine, disliked large gatherings and would have wiggled out of this one even if she had been in town. And what did Harris think had become of her anyway?

He said he intended to find out—but confessed he had lost touch with her. He lacked current information regarding her interests, character and friends.

Mrs. MacFarlane stared out at the shadowy carpet of grass. “That’s not a good start,” she said softly.

“Do you know any old schoolmates she went on nature rambles with?”

“Not one. She may have mentioned a name or two, but as they married, those friendships seemed to wither . . .”

“What current friends do you know of?” asked Harris.

“I couldn’t see that she had any, or family either apart from her father and husband.”

Other guests were coming out to escape the heat of the lamps, but remained beyond earshot.

Harris dropped his voice anyway. “Was there discord between her and Mr. Crane?”

It was too dark to read Mrs. MacFarlane’s face. When she didn’t speak, he repeated the question.

“I’m not sure I should tell you if I had noticed anything of the sort, but the fact is I didn’t.”

“How often did you see her?” Perhaps, thought Harris, not often enough to tell.

“Once a week or so. She made quite a friend of Elsie.”

Harris said he understood. “And when did you see her last?”

“Sunday morning at church,” replied his hostess, “at the Cathedral.”

“Two hours at most before her disappearance!” Harris exclaimed. “Did she say anything that casts light on that event?”

“Well, she—her father had died just the night before, remember. You could tell it affected her deeply. You’ll want to know when she first came here. I believe it was soon after her marriage. Our husbands had business dealings—to do with ships or trains, I suppose. Isn’t it always one or the other? Or telegraphs.” The mistress of the house was back in stride, one thought briskly pulling the next. “As for Theresa Crane, she and I shared cultural and charitable interests, though I believe she regarded art as a minor recreation, something to do when your brain is tired. Even botany began to seem frivolous to her. Medicine attracted her more.”

“Was she ill?” asked Harris.

“No, indeed. Not that I could see, at least, but she felt for those that suffer. We discussed the institutions Toronto is having to build to cope with its prosperity. The casualties of prosperity, that is. You know the places I mean. The new General Hospital, the Roman Catholic House of Providence, the Lunatic Asylum—”

“There you are, Kate,” an elderly lady called from the doorway. “Our carriage is out front, but I couldn’t leave without . . .”

While Mrs. MacFarlane was saying good night to the early leavers, Harris waited to see if there would be an opportunity to resume the interview. Under the circumstances, it was difficult to show even polite interest in other topics. He pretended to inspect the oil paintings that lined the reception room.

“Are you an admirer of Mr. Paul Kane?” Kate MacFarlane was again beside him, pointing out features of an eighteen-by-thirty-inch canvas he had taken in only as tepees and canoes. A Lake Huron encampment, she said. Such and such reclining figure could of course be traced to classical models, but no one who had lived on the upper lakes ever questioned the scene’s essential truth.

Crane had lived there once. Harris asked if she could think of anything that might have drawn Theresa in that direction.

“No. Nor in any other. I’m baffled.” She glanced around in case she were needed elsewhere. “Look, Mr. Harris, I do approve of your trying to find her. Private initiative is the only way anything gets done, but Mr. MacFarlane has just this instant been called away on business, and we still have guests. Why not come back tomorrow? Give me till then and I’ll see if I can’t think of something useful to tell you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Harris, “but so much time has passed already. By tomorrow she may have spent six nights in the open.”

Kate MacFarlane glared at him. “There’s nothing I can do about that.”

“No, of course not,” he quickly assented. He didn’t want to risk losing his one supporter. “What I’m thinking,” he added, “is that if I start at dawn and ride in the right direction, perhaps I can make sure it’s not seven.”

“Briefly then.”

“What was her favourite ride?”

“The only one I have heard her mention particularly was the Rouge Valley, but then her husband thought it was too far and forbade her to ride there alone. I suppose that’s why it didn’t occur to me before. Now—if you want more of my company, Mr. Harris, you’ll have to come and meet some young men who have been to New York to hear Signor Verdi’s latest opera.”

Harris left. On the walk home, it started to rain. He tucked Elsie’s sketch book inside his tail coat and quickened his pace.

Three quarters of an hour later, Theresa’s face traced onto tissue paper stared up from the writing surface of the secretary desk in Harris’s drawing room. The likeness was crude, but still—he felt—more helpful than a description on its own.

He tried to compare this face to the one he remembered. Did she look older because three years had passed or because of some particular experience? Or was it because to a child artist every adult looks old? He couldn’t even decide if her face had narrowed or filled out until he realized she had simply changed the style of dressing her hair. While it had been puffed at the crown to either side of the centre part, it now lay flat on top and fell smoothly to where it turned under in a loose roll secured at the nape. That rich, reddish brown roll of hair mere pencil lines had no hope of capturing. It must look glorious, thought Harris.

He turned off the gas and found his way to bed by the glow of the street lamps below his windows. Having already removed his wet clothes, he had only to slip out of a light dressing gown. Stretched on his back with the sheet thrown off, he listened to the rain drumming on the plank sidewalks and to the passage of a couple of pedestrians. Well-spaced, heavy treads accompanied by quick and light. Through the moist air rose the clear tone of a woman’s laugh. The double set of footfalls ceased sounding in the mud of Bay Street, then resumed on the far sidewalk and faded away to the west. Harris rolled onto his side and felt, as he had not allowed himself to feel for years, the weight of his loneliness.

Always he had contrived to be busy with work, or with superficial social engagements and exhausting recreations—long rides, billiards, card parties, curling and ice boating in winter, sailing and swimming in summer, hunting in fall. Or, if all else failed, voracious reading with the lights turned up full. He had managed never to lie down till he was too tired to remember. Too tired to miss her.

In the darkened room, he rolled over several times more, dozed, and fell more or less asleep.

He was awake again by dawn but far from certain in which direction to ride. No horsewoman herself, Kate MacFarlane said she had never accompanied Theresa to the Rouge Valley and didn’t know which part of it she favoured. The Rouge River rose some twenty miles north of town, but didn’t begin to carve out anything Harris believed could be called a valley till it had passed Markham. He decided, without much conviction, to start there and follow the stream south to the lake. This had not been a haunt of Theresa’s when Harris had known her. The whole area did seem too remote for a spot of Sunday afternoon exercise, and for a refuge not remote enough.

Pond-sized puddles sprawled over the ungraded dirt streets, but were no longer growing—the rain having tapered off to something between a drizzle and a mist. Harris let it settle on the shoulders of his fustian hunting jacket as he strode towards the livery stable. The oilskin cape he had brought was too hot to wear in anything less than a downpour.

He was presently trotting up Yonge Street, which was surfaced with crushed stone on the Macadam system and cambered to shed the water. North of Yorkville, progress was slower because he had not yet made inquiries at the numerous inns and taverns. Nor, of course, had anyone else.

Harris now had the tracing to show, though he began to doubt its utility when a market gardener at Gallows Hill said he definitely knew the subject—a Negress in her sixties, was she not? Then a Thornhill ostler thought he had seen the lady a week ago. She had been dressed in bright green and riding north, but not on a black palfrey with one white hind foot. Harris turned east and galloped on.

On joining the river, he began asking at mills, which at first were nearly as frequent as the inns on Yonge Street. Sawmills predominated, though the white pine had mostly been logged out. Forward-looking owners were also having their wheels grind corn or card wool. Shrubs and trees of no commercial value still lined the riverbanks, but this was far from wilderness. One surmised that Crane’s opposition to Theresa’s visits was based on the lengthy absences they entailed rather than on anything sinister or threatening about the valley.

Towards eleven a.m., Harris reached a place in the fourth concession of Scarboro Township where the stream flowed east, sharply south, then sharply west again. Over this peninsula, the homey smell of damp sawdust lay thick as porridge. Picking his way between piles of fresh lumber, he dismounted at the open end of a long frame shed. Inside, the rising and falling blade was tearing through a log so clamorously that—rather than speak—he simply touched the elbow of the older of the two men at the machinery and with an interrogative hoist of his eyebrows gestured to the doorway.

The bearded miller nodded and followed agreeably enough, but once outside responded to every question with a noncommittal grunt. An unproductive morning had its disheartening cap.

But wait—what if the man could not hear, if his saw had ruined his ears? Harris unfolded the portrait.

“Mrs. Crane,” said the miller with surprising force. “She used to ride here often. In the concession road and down the valley or up the valley and out the concession.”

“Last Sunday?” Harris bellowed.

“She had a black mare, skittish, but a treat to look at. I tried to buy it for my daughter.”

“Was Mrs. Crane here last Sunday?”

“Um.”

Harris found a stub of pencil in his jacket and wrote the question on a corner of the tissue paper.

“No, like I said. In the spring, she and another lady, but not since May or April.” The miller gave the coins in his pocket a wistful, indiscreet rattle of which he was doubtless unaware. “I would have paid sterling too,” he said, “no paper money.”

Continuing the interview would have been awkward enough even if the man had been willing to acknowledge his deafness. Harris approached the helper.

A young immigrant working to bring his betrothed out from Cork, he became cooperation itself on learning that Mrs. Crane’s parents had come from that very county. Of her mount’s markings he gave a detailed description. It fit Spat exactly. In declining the miller’s offers, Theresa had reportedly said the animal was too old and nervous to change stables. The other lady was remembered as dark and fine-featured. The Irishman had not caught her name, nor had he understood anything the horsewomen said to each other. They seemed not to be speaking English. Not Gaelic either. Neither had been seen for weeks.

Harris accepted a slice of pork pie and a glass of cider for his lunch before pursuing an old settlers’ road down the east brink of the river. Thirty-foot cliffs shut out any glimpse of the wheat fields and orchards he knew lay to either side and above him. On occasion he would clamber out of the valley to ask well-rehearsed questions at farm houses. Then he would rejoin the Rouge none the wiser. What kept him going was that no one south of the fourth concession could swear that Theresa had not ridden this way last Sunday.

Afternoon passed into evening. He had just left the last mill on the river when the rain began again, tentative and caressing at first. By the time he thought of his cape, his clothes were soaked through.

The valley grew swampy and desolate in its final mile. Enormous steps carved at one point into the cliffs from top to bottom constituted the only sign of human passage. These Harris recognized as the terraced graves of a long-abandoned Seneca Indian village. They were not a comforting omen. Nearer Lake Ontario, the aggrieved shrieks of gulls began to drown out the patter of raindrops on willow leaves.

Then Harris turned the last bend and found himself facing a wall of earth, a great hand pressed over the river’s mouth. This must be the embankment of the Grand Trunk Railway. In fact, a narrow outlet spanned by a trestle had been left for the Rouge water to escape to the lake, but the flow was too great and the river had backed up into a lagoon. Its waters had drowned a frame factory building labelled, “COWAN’S SHIPYARD: 2 & 3 masted schooners built to order.”

So, another blind alley. Wet and saddle-sore, Harris concluded that the best place for him now was in front of his own fire with a glass of something warming at his side. First, though, he stopped to mop the water from his face and pull his hat brim lower. Standing a moment in the stirrups, he stretched his legs and redistributed his weight. Before his inattentive eyes, two gulls picked and tore at a long white fish that lay on a patch of sand at the foot of the railway trestle. The G.T.R. wasn’t yet accepting passengers or freight west of Brockville, but this section of the line seemed to be complete.

Harris settled back in the saddle, preparing to move on. Which end of that fish, he wondered, was the head and which the tail? No, the head must be missing. That end was ragged and torn.

Wearily he tried again to make sense of what he was seeing. It was long and pale, but it was not a fish. Where the tail fins should have been were fingers.

The inside of his stomach began to twitch. Harris was daring enough in a physical sense and not too squeamish to clean and dress the game he killed, but that was a sportsman’s courage—not a soldier’s—and he had no practice in dealing with severed human limbs.

Only by ignoring this twitching was he able to urge Banshee forward into the water and across the lagoon’s sandy bottom. The scolding gulls hoisted themselves into the air and spiralled tightly over their interrupted meal.

Harris could bear to look at it only in glances. Bone seemed to be exposed below the elbow as well as at the shoulder. His first thought was to stop further pillage by burying the remains, but perhaps the topography should be disturbed as little as possible until seen by official eyes. At the water’s edge he dismounted and unrolled his oilskin. As he covered the arm, he glimpsed clinging to it green shreds of cloth and circling the wrist a bracelet of silver medallions. The edges of the cape he weighted down with stones.

He did not believe it was Theresa’s arm. There were thousands of miles of green cloth in the world. The bracelet . . .

Remounting a little queasily, he picked his way up the valley in the fading light. If he could only get away from this place, he should be able to think. The place went with him, however. The barest whiff of something rancid and waxy seemed to have rooted in the back of his throat and to be growing there. His nausea made even Banshee’s gentlest gait insupportable.

He got down and vomited. The waxy taste was still there, but he felt steadier—steady enough, at least, to realize that he had no idea where to report his discovery.

The last mill was shut this Saturday evening and empty. In the taverns at the east end of the Kingston Road bridge, advice would flow like stagger juice, but anyone asking for a constable would face insistent questions. Harris accordingly turned west at the bridge, back towards Toronto. A talk with the Rouge Hill toll collector some half a mile later did nothing to deflect him from his course.

The toll booth consisted of a faded, two-storey frame house with a roof that extended north across the highway to a blank supporting wall on the other side. The collector had had enough experience with sneaks and bullies to appreciate the difficulty of finding the police. The nearest lived in Highland Creek, but that was Scarboro and this was Pickering. The Pickering lock-up might as well have been on the moon. You would never get a constable out at night anyway.

Harris continued townwards. The pine-planked surface of the Kingston Road clattered horribly beneath the horse’s hoofs—an ear-splitting amplification of the agitation in Harris’s breast. He quickly switched over to the dirt shoulder. The panic followed him, merely growing more stealthily in the dark and lonely night.

The remains were not Theresa’s. Someone must tell him that. He feared, with a fear approaching a certainty, that no one would.

When he reached Market Square, mad fiddle music was spilling out of taverns and breaking against the austere face of Toronto’s dark and all-but empty City Hall. Down in Station No. 1, an unfamiliar constable kept vigil. He denied any knowledge of Inspector John Vandervoort. Harris could try coming back on Monday.

Harris tried the Dog and Duck. The taproom was so dimly lit that the elk and whitetail trophy heads along the wall were mutually indistinguishable. Indeed, gloom seemed to clothe the few women present more effectually than their gowns which, as far as Harris could see when he began moving from table to table, all had buttons undone if not actually missing. Overheard conversations between them and their companions often touched on “going upstairs.” Impeded by modesty, but more by the dark, Harris completed his tour of the room without finding his man. He applied to the proprietor.

Vandervoort was known to that individual as a dedicated drinker, though by no means a troublesome one. Indeed, his patronage was an asset at licence-renewal time. This was as candid as Harris could wish, but when he asked about tonight in particular, the bluff hotel-keeper turned smarmy.

“Don’t see him, I’m afraid. He’ll be sorry to have missed you.”

“Where’s he live?”

“Couldn’t say, sir. I might just get a message to him, though, if it’s urgent.”

“It’s urgent that I see him,” said Harris—but he was again assured that a message was the most that could be undertaken.

At the stable of the less furtive-looking hotel next door, Harris left his horse to be watered and fed. Returning to the bank on foot, he changed into dry clothes and wrote a letter detailing the discovery of the arm. He asked the inspector to meet him as soon as possible under the Rouge River G.T.R. trestle, where Harris promised to remain until Sunday noon. He then packed a knapsack for a night in the open. Nagged by doubts as to whether the letter would be received or acted upon, he next proceeded to the Union Station at the foot of York Street and sent the Pickering constable a telegram, a copy of which he added to the envelope for Vandervoort.

Back in the Dog and Duck, a leering fiddler was scraping out “Pop Goes the Weasel.” One of the pudgier of the unbuttoned women was using her right index finger and left cheek to sound the pops, more or less on cue, and to show her freedom from constraint. These moist little explosions did nothing to revive Harris’s long-dead appetite. Notwithstanding, he providently bought some dark stew of unknown composition to take with him and, dodging the murky dancers, managed to place his sealed envelope in the hotel-keeper’s hands.

Once outside, he waited twenty minutes in the shadows across the square on the chance of being able to follow the courier. When none emerged, he rode—teeth gritted—back out King Street towards the Kingston Road.

Memories of the gulls’ yellow beaks, a fish with fingers, the smell, the waxy taste pushed against him as he advanced. He saw nothing of the countryside. This time he barely heard Banshee’s hoofs hammering upon the plank road. He felt he could not go back there, to the beach beneath the railway trestle—but he had to.

The arm must not be disturbed. This was the one sure beacon in a night of doubt.

Whose arm? Where was the rest? As horse and rider trotted on, the wind of their passage whispered unanswerable questions into Harris’s too-willing ear. Whose arm? How severed?

He found himself wondering too who was the fine-featured dark lady, the one that used to ride in the valley with Theresa, the one he had heard of at the mill. A cruel hope tempted him. Perhaps not Theresa, but she . . .

He rode on, still doubting that he could go back to that shrouded lump of torn and soggy flesh.

He was back.

The rain had stopped, though clouds still hung over the mouth of the Rouge. Frogs and crickets whined and belched into the gloom. Harris bit the glass head off a Promethean match, which exploded into flame. He lit the paraffin candle in the tin lamp he had brought and approached the weighted oilskin. It was just as he had left it.