Filling the sun-drenched square, choking it almost, stood a hearse like none Harris had seen. It appeared to be a shop window rather than a conveyance of the dead, for its sides were broad sheets of costly plate glass, uncurtained, untinted, and bare of frosting or incised design. Through the glass could be seen a bed of sable carpeting. There the decoratively carved casket would presently lie naked to public admiration like an exhibit at the Crystal Palace. By contrast, the two pair of horses harnessed to it stood swathed in blankets of black velvet, invisible save for their eight black ears. A dozen undertaker’s mutes with flowing black silk scarves tied around their top hats kept the curious at a distance from every polished surface of the rolling conservatory. No one could say this degree of ostentation was out of place at the passing of so public a figure, and yet the equipage was more St. James Cathedral than Holy Trinity Church, less Sheridan than Crane.
Harris reflected how hard it was for him to do justice to his former rival. Crane was not just a spender, after all, but a builder. Son of a Kingston hardware merchant, he had from the 1840s built steamboats, starting on the upper Great Lakes where the need was greatest. Although accidents had occurred, one fatal to his then partner, Crane had learned from each turn of events.
He had early championed propellers over paddles, which did poorly in rough water. He would supply either, though, of course, not actually making the boats himself but finding people to fashion them for any taste. You might have called him a steamboat promoter who in the fifties switched naturally to being a railway promoter. Personally or through subcontractors, Henry Crane could lay track, throw up bridges, secure government subsidies—anything you wanted in the railway department, and all in jig time. Nor had he given up on steamboats, which complemented the new lines. Toronto to Collingwood by rail, Collingwood to Chicago by water. He would soon find a way to put trains on steamboats. That would be the ultimate. Across the Detroit River, for example, or from his home town of Kingston to Cape Vincent, New York. It was just a matter of persuading politicians to put money into transportation and to pass laws creating the right atmosphere.
Three years after Harris had last heard Crane expound his ideas, they still sounded prophetic. Like the steam-pump fire engine that would become practicable as soon as the city mains could be made to supply enough water.
Harris had met Crane at William Sheridan’s Front Street villa. Sheridan had been in the cabinet at the time, and Crane badly wanted his support for a measure affecting the Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Railway. Sheridan preferred to entertain him than to incur obligations by letting himself be entertained. “Convince me your bill serves the public interest,” he said after dinner. Crane tried. Such was Sheridan’s prestige that Crane tried on several occasions. He spoke of the public interest. He spoke also, as Harris heard later, of resurveying the line of rail to make it run through Sheridan’s York County riding to the benefit of Sheridan’s constituents. Sheridan remained courteous, but unpersuaded. So Crane’s strategy changed. Such was Sheridan’s prestige, after all, that any alliance with him would reflect credit on Crane. Sheridan’s daughter, moreover, was a lively and most ornamental young woman. Having come to lobby, he stayed to woo—and, unhappily for Harris, Crane’s powers of persuasion didn’t fail him twice running.
About some things Harris was hypothesizing, but of Theresa’s youthful vitality he could not have been more certain were she standing before him on the stove-hot gravel of Trinity Square. He could visualize her wild with grief. He could not begin to imagine her too overcome to see her Papa to his grave. Never. Crane could say what he liked.
The coffin was at last being carried from the church. Among the pallbearers, Harris recognized a granite-faced former mayor of Toronto, a Superior Court judge, two Reform Members of Parliament, and even one Conservative—as well as Sheridan’s young law partner, Jasper Small, whose blank expression suggested that he was numbed by his loss and was there in body only. Crane supported the right rear corner.
There was an awkward moment when, possibly owing to pressure from behind, the forward bearers seemed to lose control of the steering. The ornate casket, which from what he had seen of its finish Harris had supposed to be rosewood, clanged metallically when it touched one of the hearse’s steel tires. The onlookers gasped.
Aware of a rustle at his flank, Harris turned to find that a pert, round-faced young woman in a plain but neatly stitched black dress was straining to see past him. Straining perhaps to see Crane, the living son-in-law, rather than the resonant box of Sheridan’s remains. Thick, jet-black curls seemed to push the mourning bonnet back off her head. There was something familiar about the avidity of her gaze, the jut of her elbow, the moustache of perspiration above her full upper lip.
“Come in front of me, miss,” he suggested, “for a better view.”
She did so with noisy thanks. Suddenly he thought he could place her.
“Did I not see you at the Peninsula Hotel on Saturday night?”
“My parents are in service there,” she threw back over her shoulder. “But I don’t remember you there, sir. You can’t have stayed long.”
Three evenings ago, Harris had attended a July 12 dance on the far side of the bay, and the service was as assiduous as Orange Toronto could have required. He had indeed left early, however. He had no particular reason to celebrate the rout of Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne. He endured quite as many toasts to “Our Protestant Sovereign” as any freethinker could endure. The best of the evening was standing with a cheroot on the deck of the steam ferry that carried him home across the malodorous harbour and watching the city draw near.
“Not long,” he said.
While the young woman returned her full attention to the movements of Henry Crane, Harris lingered with the memory of that ferry crossing—of the last moments before the hammer fell.
Twenty years earlier, when his father had first brought him here as a boy of eight, Toronto had been a city only in name. No longer York, but still muddy. Still lit by smoky tallow. Twenty years from now, the community might well be choking on the soot from factory chimneys, the first of which were just making their appearance.
But on this summer Saturday in 1856, Toronto was a string of pearls reflected in the still water. Gas jets shone from the docks, from the new Union Station, from the luxurious American Hotel, and from the Georgian-style villas along Front Street, dwellings which for the most part still enjoyed an unobstructed view of the bay. Harris’s delight was enhanced by the thought that two of these brightly illuminated residences belonged to Robert Baldwin, although he no longer lived there, and to William Sheridan.
On disembarking from the ferry after the dance, he had found that William Sheridan no longer lived there either. There was black crape on his door.
A cast iron coffin was still a costly rarity—Crane’s taste again. Once it was securely stowed, the double glass doors at the back of the hearse were closed upon it, and the funeral procession began forming up. Two attendants wearing black capes and carrying black-dyed ostrich plumes were to walk ahead of Sheridan’s remains. From James Street, plumed coaches and fours inched into the crowded square. The dignitaries took their time climbing aboard.
“Get on with it,” exclaimed the round-faced woman. Then, aware she had been overheard, she turned to Harris and asked if he could see all right.
“Perfectly.”
He too was impatient. Fear for Theresa had powerfully seized upon him. He itched to know also what Crane wanted.
“Were you acquainted with the deceased, miss?” he added, conscious of having answered her rather curtly.
“I