Death
in the
Age of Steam
Mel Bradshaw
Text © 2004 by Mel Bradshaw
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
Cover art: Edward Burne-Jones (British, 1833-1898), Portrait of Caroline Fitzgerald, 1884, oil on canvas, 32 1/2 × 20 1/2 in. (82.9 × 52.1 cm). Collection/courtesy of the University of Toronto, University of Toronto Art Centre. Photograph: Brenda Dereniuk, Art Gallery of Ontario.
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National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bradshaw, Mel, 1947-
Death in the age of steam / Mel Bradshaw.
ISBN 1-894917-00-6
I. Title.
| PS8553.R2315D43 2004 | C813'.6 | C2004-900042-X |
For Carol Jackson, with all my love
Strange, and passing strange, that the relation between the two sexes, the passion of love in short, should not be taken into deeper consideration by our teachers and our legislators. People educate and legislate as if there were no such thing in the world; but ask the priest, ask the physician—let them reveal the amount of moral and physical results from this one cause. Must love always be discussed in blank verse, as if it were a thing to be played in tragedies or sung in songs—a subject for pretty poems and wicked novels, and had nothing to do with the prosaic current of our every-day existence, our moral welfare and eternal salvation? Must love be ever treated with profaneness, as a mere illusion? or with coarseness, as a mere impulse? or with fear, as a mere disease? or with shame, as a mere weakness? or with levity, as a mere accident? Whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness; mysterious, universal, inevitable as death. Why then should love be treated less seriously than death? It is a serious thing . . .
—Anna Brownell Jameson,
Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)
Prologue: The Departed
Now he had to face her.
A last hymn had been sung. The organ continued playing “Holy, Holy, Holy” at a reflective tempo while the mourners edged into the aisles.
Isaac Harris held back a moment before joining the stream jostling its way to the front of the church to pay its condolences. The young bank cashier exceeded average height by some inches, but not by enough to see the dead man’s family over the sea of black bonnets. How did she look? Harris would have liked to have caught at least a glimpse of Theresa before their meeting. Normally impatient of crowds, he was grateful today for their shuffling slowness—grateful even for their distracting aromas of rosewater, sweat, stain remover, insect repellent and hair oil. He had no idea what he was going to say.
He inched forward on feet that felt too big and out of step, all the more awkward because he had had so little experience of funerals. Just last week, his subordinate at the Toronto branch of the Provincial Bank, a gloomy man of riper years, had told him he had “a brow untouched by sorrow”—his good fortune made to sound like a reproach. Harris had been pleased, though. He had reported his accountant’s words to Jasper Small, who liked to twit Harris on his long, earnest face.
Even had he been as inured to death as an old undertaker, however, and as well-stocked with platitudes to send sliding off the tongue, Harris would have had to think about whether to come today. He had thought, at some length.
It would have been shabby not to come, of course. Since Reform statesman Robert Baldwin had retired, there was no one in public life Harris respected more than William Sheridan. Not only had Sheridan been a Member of Parliament up until his death, but he had held cabinet rank in 1849 when the Great Ministry of Baldwin and Lafontaine had finally established the principle of responsible government. “So decisive has been the Reformers’ victory,” a eulogist had observed during the service, “that today in 1856 it feels like much more than seven years since Canada put the constitutional issue behind her, once and for all.”
Since boyhood, Harris had known Sheridan by reputation, but the link between them was much closer than that. In adult life he had taken him legal work, dined at his table, courted his Theresa. He had seen Sheridan’s massive, snowy head nod in approbation of a well-argued point, and seen it tremble with rage at corruption or callousness.
Sheridan had all his life stood up against oligarchy, yet never abandoned his faith in British institutions. He would have nothing to do with the Rebellions of 1837. His weapons had been reason and invective, not pikes and muskets. A passionate but essentially orderly man, and still needed.
Plainly, the place for Harris this Tuesday afternoon was the Church of the Holy Trinity. There were not only his personal feelings of grief and admiration to consider, but also the need for as strong a demonstration of support as possible for the integrity Sheridan had stood for.
On the other hand, if he went, Harris would have to meet Theresa for the first time since her marriage. It had not been easy in a city of a mere forty thousand to avoid her without calling too much attention to the fact. To avoid her at her own father’s funeral would be impossible.
He would have to comfort her. Though resolute enough in most emergencies, he could not begin to think how he would manage. The three-year separation would have made them strangers, and bereavement have made her a stranger to herself. Even as mistress of her own separate establishment, she must feel the death as an amputation—for, whatever his public virtues, the deceased had been no less a devoted and adored father. His wife and son having died in Theresa’s infancy, William Sheridan had in fact been both parents to his only child. And she had been to him not just daughter but companion.
Harris did not know how to meet her in such circumstances, and yet, rehearsing the circumstances awakened in him the protectiveness that would draw him to her. Her rejected champion, but her champion all the same.
When he reached the south transept, however, Theresa was not there. Henry Crane—florid, portly and imposing—stood alone by the carved stone baptismal font, receiving expressions of sympathy on behalf of the family.
Harris could not help stiffening in the presence of Theresa’s husband and was about to introduce himself when the other said, “Isaac, very good of you to come.”
“Is Mrs. Crane not here today?”
“She wasn’t equal to this, poor woman.” Crane dropped his voice, which was marked like Harris’s own with the native Canadian flatness. “I must have a word with you. Ride with me to the interment if you’re free.”
Harris hesitated, but it seemed too odd a request to have been made without compelling reason. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
Harris left the church somewhat dazed. From what one read, death had