an alcoholic glaze made even harder to read. “I was just doing a bit of a hornpipe—the solitary man’s dance, as they say. Well, let’s sit down, and I’ll tell you how I expect they’ll find this Mrs. Crane of yours.”
“You know of someone I might ask?”
“I know men’s sins. Now you take the cup. I’ve only sipped from the one side of it.”
The drink made Harris’s eyes water. A little went a long way.
“Hear the wisdom of a seasoned campaigner,” said his host. He was fingering an epaulet, of which the distinctly unmilitary adornment appeared to consist of gold sleeve-links. “They’ll find the lady only as a corpse.”
“It’s too soon to say that!” Harris exclaimed. “No more, thank you.”
“Just a drop.” Ingram poured. “I wish no harm to anybody, but there are men it doesn’t do to tempt. A beautiful woman riding alone—she’s with the angels now.”
From the deep melancholy in Ingram’s Scottish voice it was clear that this prophecy gave him no pleasure, but its authoritative and unvarying repetition with each application of the jug to his lips ended by driving Harris home to a sleepless bed. He had achieved nothing. He had not even managed to tire himself out.
“She’s with the angels now!”
Doubtless solitude and sixpence-a-gallon whisky had made the man morbid. By his own admission, old shipwrecks and unsolved murders also weighed upon his mind. Every allowance made, however, Harris still found his down mattress a bed of thistles.
Tuesday passed into Wednesday. When he rose at five, the morning was already hot, but he still had to light the Prince of Wales wood stove for coffee.
Harris lived in lavish simplicity. Lavish in that he enjoyed sole occupancy of the cashier’s suite on the upper floor of his place of work. The Toronto branch of the Provincial Bank of Canada was Greek revival in style and made of cleanly fitted pale Ohio sandstone—for, although locally produced red brick would have served just as well, people expected more opulence from banks. And the opulence extended to Harris’s apartments, which included two damask-hung salons, one large enough to serve as a ballroom. Harris thought the building reckless and admired it. Prudently, however, he dispensed with any domestic staff. It seemed more sociable, as well as better husbandry, to take his dinners at hotels than to keep a cook just for himself, and breakfast he could manage on his own.
While the kettle was heating, he chewed a day-old crust of bread and looked out one of the front windows. Below, at the intersection of Wellington and Bay Streets, the dust lay still and dry. It had not rained, a blessing if Theresa had no shelter. If what Crane said were true, and unless she had been found since they spoke, she had now been away from home three nights. The barking of a watchdog in the yard of the piano manufactory next door reminded Harris of a rumour that a rabid fox was at large in the Humber Valley. What if Theresa . . .?
Stop, he told himself. He was speculating to no purpose.
As soon as the water was steaming, he shaved and—though it was still early—began to dress for work. He had a branch to run with obligations to a staff of four, to thirty-six major borrowers, each of whom he knew personally, to 297 depositors most of whom he could at least recognize, to unnumbered purchasers of specie and bills of exchange, and through head office to thirteen directors and upwards of thirteen hundred shareholders. He could not in conscience give every waking thought to Theresa. There would have to be a balance.
With barber’s scissors he trimmed his side whiskers to just below his ear lobes. Beards and moustaches were becoming fashionable since the war, but not for bank cashiers. Harris’s work clothes, mostly black, differed little from what he had worn to the funeral—a morning coat replacing the full-skirted frock coat. And for the office he usually put on a coloured waistcoat, a dark blue watered silk this morning. He tied a matching cravat in a loose bow around the high collar of his white shirt.
What shade, he wondered, was that riding habit she had worn? A muted, vegetable-based green or one of the vivid new chemical dyes?
His toilet made, he carried his coffee down the elliptically spiralling staircase and managed to answer the most pressing of yesterday’s correspondence before his staff, all but Septimus Murdock, arrived at eight thirty. The accountant had been instructed to go straight to the docks to meet a shipment of money from head office.
Arrangements had been negotiated with Kingston in ciphered telegrams. Security from theft and punctuality of delivery were Harris’s two overlapping concerns. He wanted the notes, coins and bullion in the vault well before the branch opened its doors to the public at ten. As the steamer chosen had been due this morning at seven, this requirement should have posed no problem.
And yet the two-horse, iron-plated van didn’t pull up in front of the bank until ten past nine. The police constable engaged as a guard had been late, a winded Septimus Murdock explained as he lowered himself cautiously from his seat between the driver and his boy.
“But where is the constable?” asked Harris.
The burly accountant’s chin quivered, as did the timid imperial that adorned it. Harris waited for him to speak.
“Isaac, he insisted on being locked inside with what he called the loot.”
Sure enough, when the padlock was removed from the heavy rear doors, a sharp-featured young man leaped out, pointing his single-shot Enfield carbine in all directions. Handled this way, the short rifle was a sufficient threat to the life of any individual bystander. For the purpose of fending off a raid, however, Harris would have preferred to see a double-barrelled shotgun. While the president of the Provincial Bank liked to repeat that there had never been a daytime bank robbery in North America, Harris knew it was just a matter of time. In tandem with Toronto’s prosperity, its crime rate was on the rise.
Constable Devlin, whose school had been the city’s docks and alleys, understood the situation perfectly. As a public servant, however, he was not at liberty to say what his understanding of the situation was. It was no part of his job to spread panic. Reaching inside his unbuttoned blue tunic to scratch his chest hair, he did explain—in a tone both knowing and aggrieved—that a shotgun was too heavy to carry about in this heat. Harris smelled no fresh whisky on the constable’s breath and noted that at least one of his boots had been recently polished. This was by no means the dregs of the force.
Under Devlin’s sporadically watchful eye, it took over an hour to get the money unloaded, counted, recounted and signed for. The bars of precious metal were few and quickly weighed, but the gold coins were the usual jumble of French five-francs, British sovereigns and American eagles, plus the new Canadian pounds and twenty-five-shilling pieces. The silver coins were even worse.
The bulk of the shipment consisted of new banknotes of all denominations. When van and constable had left, Septimus Murdock gave sixteen-year-old bank messenger Dick Ogilvie one of the crisp, clean bills to hold.
“Ever have as much as fifty dollars in your hands, Dicko?” he asked.
Ogilvie admitted this was the first time, but swore it would not be the last. One of the tellers laughed.
“But if this is fifty dollars,” said the boy, puzzlement clouding his freckled face, “why does it say, ‘The Provincial Bank of Canada, Kingston, promise to pay to bearer on demand twelve pounds, ten
