“Come now,” said Lamb. “The dress is female, but we must no more base our conclusions on such externals than you bankers do when you decide to extend credit, or to refuse it.”
Still digesting Lamb’s revelation, Harris did not rise to this bait.
“Incidentally,” the professor added, “I took your good advice.”
“Oh?” Harris was starting to wonder who besides Theresa, male or female, had disappeared in recent weeks.
“I approached the Hon. Robert Baldwin. He has agreed to petition the regents of the university to pay me more.”
“You couldn’t have made a sounder choice,” said Harris, remembering his manners. “Not only did Mr. Baldwin’s government found the university, but he is the one man in Toronto who never breaks his word.”
“Present company excepted, I hope.”
“Professor Lamb,” Harris pleaded, “could you not hasten or somehow expedite your examination of these remains? So long as any chance remains that Mrs. Crane is still drawing breath, every moment is precious.”
The green shoulders under Harris’s nose shrugged unencouragingly.
Soon after, the end gable and two-storey verandah of the Half Way House came in view on the right of the plank road. When Banshee and her riders stopped for refreshment, Lamb slid from the saddle unaided.
“The chemistry laboratory,” he said, brushing sweat from his straight upper lip, “is at present housed in a far from weatherproof pig shed in behind the Provincial Observatory. Look in on me this evening if you like.”
On reaching the cashier’s suite in the early afternoon, Harris moved from room to room like a man who can’t remember what comes next. He took a bottle of brandy from the dining room sideboard. He left the bottle in the pantry. He opened wardrobe doors, then instead of hanging up his clothes threw them over chairs. Perplexed by this behaviour, he supposed it had something to do with having passed a night in the open on top of five anxious days. Presently he wandered down the corridor to his bedroom, fell on his bed and slept.
He plunged straight into the deepest slumber and ascended gradually. Anxiety returned before fatigue lifted. Waking took forever. Thrashing about the middle ground, he found himself buffeted by more extreme emotions than blew through either his workaday mind or his dreams. He had schooled himself since entering on a business career, and more particularly in the past three years, to give his feelings play within a range not much wider than the arc of the pendulum in his tall mahogany clock. Now, while the wind outside made noisy sport with an ill-secured shutter, his pendulum swung full circle.
Through 180 degrees, he conceived of Theresa as dead. He walked behind the glass-doored hearse, his gaze fixed on the floral tributes piled on her casket. Panicled dogwood, trailing arbutus . . . His sobs shook bricks loose from houses of the quick. Even if he never saw her, he couldn’t bear the thought of her large, green eyes not turning towards a new sight—her soft lips not parting to utter a fresh thought. Or perhaps behind reason’s back, he had hoped to see her again, and now he couldn’t.
Lost, dead, worse than dead. Butchered. Thoughts of the pain and terror this imaginative young woman must have suffered—his Theresa—made him want to eat glass.
Grief needed no addition, and yet the casket he followed was William Sheridan’s too. Tears for each flowed together. Harris mourned a fiery old lion together with a child of energy, grace and light. Fate had dashed what was best in the age, its reforming heart, its questing spirit. The world was left to vermin. Harris fancied he felt them crawling through the mattress beneath him.
At the limit of misery, his spirits would begin to lift. Through the other half circle, someone else had been dismembered. Theresa lived. Amid the clamour of the wind, her footsteps sounded on the stair, her crisp tap at the door—which, try as he might, he could not rise to answer. What if she went away? No, there it was again—tap, tap. Now somehow she was inside the door, in the hall, in the room, on the bed. The nape of her neck nestled in his hand. Her smooth cheek pressed against his, and he was breathing the sunny scent of her hair. They were each other’s, no one else’s. For the first time in all his months of inhabiting the Provincial Bank’s string of opulent, empty rooms, he was at home.
Then men with black scarves wrapped around their hats came to lay her in a box.
He kept hoping for something like a thunderclap over Bay Street to wake him fully, but after an hour or two his inner storm simply played itself out. When he sat up, it was still Sunday afternoon. The blue and white porcelain wash stand looked cheerful enough against the yellow wallpaper. He poured water from the pitcher into the basin. He brushed his teeth with Atkinson’s Parisian tooth paste. Refreshed and on his feet, he knew the world contained decent people and his bed no bugs to speak of.
While water was heating for his bath, he answered bank correspondence. At the same time, part of him wanted to rush back to the edge of town and scour the landscape in broadening rings until he dropped. Somewhere, in one or more pieces, was the rest of a body.
Efforts to establish an agency of the bank in the city of Hamilton seemed frivolous by comparison. For the first time, Harris considered resignation. He would still have the rents from his real estate holdings in addition to his savings. On the other hand, neither his bank nor its competitors could be counted on to understand. Leaving one employer might foreclose his future with any. He tried believing that, whatever its origin, Vandervoort’s new interest in the case made drastic action on his own part unnecessary.
It was a hypothesis, at least.
The moment might still come for a prolonged, out-of-town search. Then Harris would have to decide. In the meantime, there were things he could do in Toronto.
Not all could be done on a Sunday. Harris wanted to ask the undertaker if he had buried William Sheridan with both his arms. From what bank messenger Dick Ogilvie had said Wednesday, there would be no point trying to raise the matter with his father today. The Sabbatarian mood was on the rise. Harris took care to date his letters as of Monday, July 21.
The MacFarlanes, he trusted, would receive him. Bathing and dressing quickly, he managed to reach their Queen Street West villa before the end of the tea hour. The servant showed him through to the garden.
Surrounded by three of her children and a pair of spaniels, Kate MacFarlane sat in the shade of a shrubbery. A viewer with stereoscopic photographs of Niagara Falls was being passed around. These were solemnly pronounced to be arresting and sublime, though the water was a woolly blur.
Harris returned Elsie’s sketch book, avoiding mention of his grisly discovery, and asked if anyone knew who Theresa’s fine-featured companion might be. A French-speaking lady, he suggested, recalling that the miller’s assistant had not been able to understand her.
“Mademoiselle Marthe!” Elsie exclaimed. “She was teaching Mrs. Crane French.”
“Yes, more of a teacher than a friend,” Mrs. MacFarlane briskly concurred. “We don’t really know her.”
“She came here once. I wanted to sketch her, but there wasn’t time.”
“Elsie, dear, take the viewer from your brother and show him how to put that stereoscope in properly before he bends it.”
No one seemed to know Marthe’s family name. Elsie had heard and forgotten it. Her mother suggested that Harris speak to Mr. MacFarlane, who was in his study.
Harris finished his tea before going in. Communicative and attentive on other subjects, Kate MacFarlane appeared to have cooled towards his search. He asked again about her last glimpse of Theresa. She would not speak of it. As he ambled across the scythe-cut lawn, he wondered what had happened to change her mind.
Above the loggia in the centre of the garden façade