had nothing black,” Crane replied. “Nothing that she could ride in.” He climbed out.
“What colour was her outfit?”
Crane was striding ahead towards the open grave. When Harris caught up, he repeated the question.
“Isaac, I appreciate your having granted me an interview.”
“Most welcome. Was she wearing blue?”
“I’m sure your interest is kindly meant.”
“Green?”
Crane stopped dead. “Yes, green. Now I appeal to your sense of delicacy to pursue this matter no further.” The rail baron’s face was pinker than before, his voice stern and commanding. “Assure yourself I shall take every measure appropriate to securing the safe return of my wife.”
Harris saw the futility of asking further questions. Crane was the deceased’s only relative at the funeral, and the rector of Holy Trinity was approaching for a consultation. Before turning to Dr. Scadding, Crane gave Harris’s hand a dismissive shake.
But Harris held Crane’s hand firm until he had said, “I should like to be informed of any fresh developments.”
A sharp, appraising glance was the only reply he got.
There and then Harris made his decision. He was not about to tailor his sense of delicacy to fit Henry Crane’s convenience. Not this time.
Chapter One
The Provincial Bank
After the interment, Harris sorted quickly through the afternoon’s messages at his desk, then changed into cord breeches and riding boots and made for the Richmond Street livery stable where he boarded his horse. Banshee was a dapple-grey five-year-old with large eyes and lots of stamina. He found her picking at her bedding straw. Not for the first time, he asked if the liveryman was spending enough on feed, but avoided threats to take his business elsewhere. Randall’s was the cleanest establishment within walking distance of the bank and had the biggest stalls.
Harris saddled up without waiting for the boy’s help. He intended to spend the evening running over what he recalled as Theresa’s favourite rides to see if he could find any trace of her—someone who had seen her perhaps, or some physical sign of an accident.
The sun at five o’clock was still three hours high and scorching, the air motionless. Only by cantering through it could he obtain the semblance of a breeze on his damp forehead. Unbothered by the heat, the horse whisked him out to Gooderham and Worts’s windmill at the eastern extremity of the Toronto bay, and from there onto the peninsula.
While he rode, he forced himself to put some order into the thoughts and questions spawned by Crane’s shockingly cool announcement. Respectably married women had never been known to just disappear from this city. Accident apart, what could have happened to Theresa? Harris began listing possibilities in his head:
1. mental disorder
2. voluntary flight
3. abduction
4.
He left 4 blank for the moment.
The least likely alternative was 1. Harris expected grief to shake Theresa hard, but not to shatter her. She had a history of steadfastness in crises. When a drunken cook had hacked her own thumb off with an eight-inch cleaver, sending the housemaid into hysterics, Theresa had dressed the stump without flinching. More to the point, during an earlier—and to all appearances fatal—bout of William Sheridan’s intestinal ailment, she had brushed tears aside to discuss funeral and testamentary arrangements with him. It would surely have taken more than his death to unhinge her reason.
And yet, Harris had to admit, much could have happened to change her in the past three years. If he were to reach any meaningful conclusions, he would have to question someone like her father’s partner Jasper about her marriage. This topic he had always avoided.
Suppose—possibility 2—Theresa were hiding from her husband. In that case, Harris didn’t want to be too helpful to the official search until he had a better idea of her reasons.
They had to relate to her father’s death. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Perhaps as he faced eternity William Sheridan had told her something that made continuing her life with Henry Crane impossible. Perhaps some youthful shame that Crane had thought safely buried in the forests of the Northwest had, against all his calculations, come to his father-in-law’s knowledge. Alternatively, Theresa might some time ago have decided to leave Crane. She might only have refrained from doing so during her father’s lifetime to spare him the scandal—though if she had been able to wait for his death, why not wait two days more for the funeral?
Harris stopped at the Peninsula Hotel, situated on the narrowest part of the sandy isthmus. Neither staff nor guests could tell him anything of Theresa, and his own observations were nothing to the point. Today in daylight he noticed, as on Saturday night he had not, that a couple more of the low dunes had recently been dug away. New city regulations were not stopping businessmen like Joseph Bloor from helping themselves to this sand for their brick works. One good storm now would wash the hotel out and make the peninsula an island.
Riding on, he approached the hexagonal spire of the Gibraltar Light. Its grey stone glowed warmly in the late afternoon sun. He halted to speak to the keeper, a grizzled bachelor familiar to excursionists for his outlandish costumes, though not yet personally known to Harris. Discovered on his doorstep, Harvey Ingram proved more hospitable than informative.
Sit down, he urged in a drink-slurred burr. Have a dram. He shifted a jug from the other half of the rough bench he occupied. Surely, he knew Susan—he meant Theresa—Crane, by sight at least. He had not seen her Sunday or since. Had she bolted then? What had got into her? While he sounded sincerely anxious, his confusion over her name did little to raise Harris’s hopes. He wore a Turkish headdress and bits of military gear in apparent tribute to the recently concluded Crimean campaign—dispensing with any stock or collar, however, as he had no appreciable neck to encircle.
The banker at first declined the invitation on the pretext of making the most of the remaining daylight. Only on his darkened way back to town, after the most thorough examination of every beach and thicket, did the prospect of refreshment tempt him. By then the light was lit atop the eighty-two-foot tower and beckoned him over.
Ingram had walked out onto the sward before the tower door. He did not mark Harris’s approach. Hands on hips, the lighthouse keeper was shuffling his feet and from time to time essaying a modest kick or hop. Not falling down, at least, thought Harris.
“I came back, Mr. Ingram,” he called out as soon as he was close enough to be confident of being heard.
Ingram spun around.
“Who’s that?” he cried in a tone both peremptory and apprehensive, as if he could expect nothing good of any that came back.
“No ghost, I assure you.” Harris dismounted and walked forward into the rectangle of lamp light spilling from the tower door. “I thought I’d ask if your offer still stands.”
“Ah, you, sir. See anything? No? Fortunate perhaps.”
