The Last Crossing (58 page)

“It is my wife, Marjorie. Her mother named her after a beloved sister.”

Charles saw what had thrown him. A puffed-sleeve blouse, high-necked collar. Clothes of very recent fashion.

The reporter said, “Mrs. Straw maintains that Marjorie is the spitting image of her Aunt Madge.”

“She is very beautiful,” Gaunt softly said, riveted by the image.

“Yes. Of course, I agree.”

Gaunt sat with the picture gripped in his hands. Harkness was afraid the metal frame might buckle, the glass crack. “I am sorry to have imposed on you, but Mr. Straw exacted a promise from me in his final days. I could not refuse him. He died of cancer. My father-in-law met a very painful end with the utmost dignity and resolve.”

“I am very sorry to hear it,” said Gaunt.

“He thought you must know.”

“Why now?” said Gaunt, so softly Harkness had to strain to hear him.

“From what I can gather Mr. Straw always felt you should be informed. Mrs. Straw was against it. You see, Marjorie worshipped the ground her father walked on. They were very close. She was the apple of his eye, the light of his life. Mrs. Straw believed it better if certain matters not be aired that might imperil their loving relationship.”

“And why has she reversed her stance?”

“She has not. This is entirely Mr. Straw’s doing. He was very distressed you did not answer his message. He feared the truth would die with him. One day he took me aside and divulged it. Custis Straw was a man of honour. He believed you had a right to know. Knowing of our plans to honeymoon in England, he said I must meet with you.”

“And your wife … Marjorie, did he speak to her?”

The reporter shook his head. “No. My father-in-law was a very old-fashioned man. He thought this a matter to be dealt with gentleman
to gentleman. He wished me to weigh how you received the news- and go from there.”

“And where do we go? From here.”

“I see the justice of both Mr. and Mrs. Straw’s positions. And my wife took her father’s death very hard. I believe now is not the time to confuse her grief with such a revelation. And I have Marjorie’s mother to consider. For her the subject remains closed.”

“I would like to see my daughter,” said Gaunt.

The young man gave no reply for a time. His fingers toyed with the crease of his trousers. At last, he said, “We pay a visit to St. Paul’s Cathedral tomorrow. Between one and two o’clock. If you were there, on the steps, watching the visitors come and go, I would have no objection. But I ask you to promise that you shall not reveal yourself or your relationship to my wife.”

“I shall do as you wish. I give you my word.”

Harkness dropped his eyes to the carpet. “Someday, no doubt, all this will be known to Marjorie. Perhaps her mother will relent in her opposition.”

“She is well, Mrs. Straw?”

“Yes, very well, very busy. After a stay in California, Straw established a ranch outside of Calgary at a propitious time, just before the influx of settlers. He prospered selling horses and cattle to them, roamed about the countryside like a vagabond making trades and deals. He had a gift, money seemed to drop in his lap. But it was Mrs. Straw who really built up the ranch, saw to the day-to-day running of it. The neighbours used to say that when it came to work, Custis Straw was not half the man his wife was. She has always led the hired hands by the example of her energy. Each morning, she is first out of bed and each night last into it.”

“I am not surprised to hear her character is unchanged. To me, she seemed a force of nature.”

“You might pay a visit,” said Harkness. “Mr. Straw was relying on your presence to change his wife’s mind on the question of Marjorie. It is why he wrote you. He said if she were to see you again things would come right.”

Gaunt restlessly turned over the photograph. “If you would excuse me –” he began.

“Of course,” said the reporter, leaping to his feet, ready to oblige.

Gaunt glanced up at Harkness. “You write poetry of your own, do you not?”

The young man coloured. “I am discovered. How did you know?”

“Because you demonstrate such zeal for it.” Then he added, “And you are young.” Gaunt hesitated. “When you asked why I chose to write my heroine rather than to paint her, I did not give you a truthful answer. The reason is this. Never once did I paint a picture prompted by desire or love. The praise my verse has won is not due to its excellence as poetry, but rather because of the genuine passion it so awkwardly expresses. The reviewers have never realized that. Follow your passion, Mr. Harkness, when you put pen to paper.”

“I shall remember.”

The two men shook hands and parted. Gaunt’s gaze followed Thomas Harkness until he had passed through the lobby doors. Then he carefully rewrapped the photograph of his daughter in its paper, tucked it under his arm, and left the hotel. There were hansom cabs waiting for fares outside, but he did not engage one. He wished to walk. Night had fallen while he and Harkness sat in the brilliantly lit lobby. He thought of how Harkness had said Potts was never given his due. Now it appeared that he had never given Custis Straw the credit that was his.

Nostalgic for stars, Charles glanced up to the heavens, but the coal smoke of London and an overcast sky let not so much as a glint of light reach him. He strolled on, trying to remember the prairie stars, their subtle, sidereal motions, the drift of constellations, the little fiery cogs comprising a vast, intricate, indifferent chronometer of earthly life. He had requested to see his daughter, but would he go? He was not certain. But if he chose to, tomorrow he would see a child of his own body climbing the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

It made him think of the final poem of his book, the one that had provided him with its title. The one in which the woman who had haunted the other poems – appearing in hillside towns, in vineyards
and olive groves, by a shimmering canal in Venice, gliding through the sepia light of a church in Florence, crossing a sun-spattered piazza in Naples – makes a last, visionary appearance in Rome, poised on the top of the Spanish Steps before the Trinita dei Monti, fiery-headed, sloe-eyed. And the poet stands peering up at her, hand shielding his gaze from the piercing sunshine.

It seemed that Custis Straw was urging him to cross over one more time.

Gaunt imagined a different ending for his book. The man at the foot of the stairs takes one step, then a second, then a third. He lacks the courage to look up during his slow ascent, afraid to see that once again she has disappeared. But still, is it not better to make the climb, whatever the outcome? And what if, on gaining the top, he lifts his eyes and finds her still standing there, waiting, despite how very long it has taken him to reach her?

Under a gaslight he paused to check his pocket watch. The hour was later than he thought. Charles Gaunt walked on quickly to his house in Grosvenor Square.

T
he works I relied on in researching this novel are too many to list, but I would like to note a number of them. George Bird Grinnell’s
Blackfoot Lodge Tales: The Story of a Prairie People
(University of Nebraska Press, 1962); Marjorie Wilkins Campbell’s
The Saskatchewan
(Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1982); Walter L. Williams’s
The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture
(Beacon Press, 1992); James M. McPherson’s
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
(Oxford University Press, 1997); Philip S. Long’s
Jerry Potts: Scout, Frontiersman and Hero
(Bonanza Books, 1974); Ronald Pearsall’s
The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality
(Penguin Books, 1983); William Gaunt’s
The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy
(Cardinal, 1975);
The Last Great Indian Battle
, Occasional Paper no. 30, Lethbridge Historical Society, 1997. As well, I would like to make mention of two articles, Hugh A. Dempsey’s “Jerry Potts: Plainsman” in
Montana: The Magazine of Western History
, Autumn 1967, and Gord Tolton’s “Battle on the Belly River” in
True West
, September 2000.

I also wish to acknowledge the generous, unstinting assistance of Richard Shockely, Doran Degenstein, Malcolm Greenshields, and Gord Tolton of the Fort Whoop-Up Interpretive Society, and, above all, my late brother-in-law, Norman Nagel, who taught me so much about Chesterfield House and showed me so many wonderful historical sites.

I thank my editor, Ellen Seligman, and my agent, Dean Cooke, for their invaluable advice and assistance.