Death in the Age of Steam by Mel Bradshaw

they rode it to where it turned east along King Street. Then they ran and slid the two remaining blocks to Weller’s Stage Office on Front Street. Sheridan already had his ticket to Montreal. Harris took one as far as Pickering, which he judged would give him time and to spare to explain his problem.
    As the coach runners skimmed over the frozen roads, Sheridan relaxed inside his furs. He understood what the York Millers wanted and saw no particular difficulty in doing it. He said something about the beauty of the Canadian winter and how much he enjoyed sleighing—not as far as Montreal, to be sure, which was where Parliament happened to be sitting—but in short spurts. Did Harris have a horse and sleigh of his own? No? Then he must take Sheridan’s out for a turn sometime, out on the bay, with a team in tandem.
    Harris smiled at the extravagance.
    â€œI mean it,” the lawyer protested. “You’ll see. Life’s so full of pleasures, my young friend. I’m a jackass to let my temper get the better of me the way it did back there. It will be the death of me.”
    â€œI don’t know about that, sir,” said Harris, crossing several degrees of intimacy at a bound, “and I don’t know much about law—but if the flea of a client had opened that door instead of me, I suppose there might have been another libel suit in the offing.”
    â€œSlander, Mr. Harris, for verbal insults. I’d have put nothing so damaging in writing.”
    The young lawyer Sheridan had left gasping on the doorstep that day later became his partner and Harris’s closest friend.
    Today Jasper Small was to be found in Sheridan’s room rather than his own, ostensibly cleaning up Sheridan’s affairs. Letters and documents covered both the open front of the writing desk by the door, and a fully extended gate-leg table in the bay window. A wavy-haired man of roughly Harris’s age was moving these papers about without appearing to sort them in any way. Small’s fleshy moon of a face and pale grey eyes made him look the dreamer even when delivering an elegantly conclusive argument in court. Whether his present task absorbed him Harris found hard to tell.
    â€œDine with me, Jasper.”
    â€œI can’t,” said Small. “Oh, hang it, I shall. The Trafalgar House has received a shipment of the most amazing claret.”
    The firm of Sheridan and Small having a progressive reputation, Jasper felt at liberty to wear a bowler in place of a top hat. His morning coat was impeccably cut and pressed, as were his matching loose trousers. An extra-elaborate tie knot was his only real touch of dandyism.
    Harris had no criticism to make of Small, and yet as the two emerged onto the plank sidewalk, he realized he had come expecting too much. While more composed than on his return Wednesday night from the Humber Valley, he felt as tense as a drawn bow. He wanted Small to provide all the answers and reassurances that had so far eluded Harris himself.
    â€œSorry for your loss,” he mumbled, to at least get that out of the way. “There was no chance to speak at the funeral.”
    Small shook his head as if he could not believe what he was about to say. “I took the old man papers to sign Friday afternoon. He was on the mend. No more pain in the gut, he says. The next day off he pops.”
    â€œOh? You don’t think his death was natural?”
    Harris had heard no suspicion of this—none, that is, but Septimus Murdock’s. And what did the accountant
not
suspect? Belonging to the Roman Catholic minority in a Protestant towncould only reinforce the apprehensiveness of his temperament, and his noting the “significant coincidence” of Sheridan’s death with the Glorious Twelfth was all the easier for Harris to dismiss in that Murdock had so far refused to be more explicit.
    Orangemen did have reason to dislike Sheridan. Although a Protestant Irishman