Of all the things that Betsy had told him, this was the worst — that she had been unable to unburden herself to him, to tell him what she knew, all because he had deliberately chosen not to hear her. So much for the honesty he prized. He knew she was right, he had refused to listen, even when he knew full well that she was often far more astute than he, and more in Sarah’s confidence. He had let her shoulder the burden of her knowledge alone. Like Renwell, he felt that he had betrayed everything that meant the most to him. At that moment he would have welcomed a return to the blackness, such was his sense of utter failure. He closed his eyes but, like the devil, insensibility never came when you needed it.
He forced a small smile instead. “Is that all, or are there other things you haven’t said to save me from myself?”
“Oh, no, that’s it,” she said placidly. “There’s not much I don’t say to you Thaddeus, and when I don’t it’s usually for your own good.”
“Oh, Betsy, I am so sorry, sorrier than I can say. I was blinded by hate. I know that now, and not only have I done a disservice to you and Francis both, but to the women who died as well, for I’m no closer to discovering the culprit than I was at the beginning. Francis has forgiven me, and I hope you will as well. I just don’t know whether I can forgive myself.”
“We’ll put it behind us. Just get well again.”
As always, Lewis was astounded at the practicality of this woman he had had the good fortune to marry. He tried to follow her counsel, but during the weeks of his convalescence his mind would return to one nagging thought: someone was killing, wantonly and without consequence, and his own self-absorbed obstinacy had jeopardized the likelihood of ever finding out who it was.
PART IV
Bath 1841
I
It was evident to everyone, including Lewis himself, that he was not fit to ride a circuit in his present state and that it would be some time before he could return to it — if ever.
However, had he been able to choose a time in which to be an invalid, he could scarcely have picked better. The Methodist Episcopal Church had finally grown weary of wrangling with the Wesleyans, and the union had fallen apart. After years of labouring hard to keep the Episcopal discipline alive, the ranks of the faithful had been joined again by its main body of ministers. Lewis felt vindicated by this — he had felt from the beginning that the union was unwise, but the extent of the folly became all too evident as time went on. It was clear that although the Episcopals had arrived at the union with a substantial portion of property, they would leave with none of it. The Wesleyans intended to keep it all, and had ensured the legalities that would allow them to do so. This blow might have been devastating to any other denomination, but for the Methodist Episcopals it was merely another challenge. They had arrived in this colony with little more than a horse and a Bible and had built a congregation from the back of a saddle. If they must return to preaching in kitchens and dooryards, then so be it. The loss of the churches they had built rankled, but in the grander scheme of things these were merely material trappings and they would do without until they could rebuild.
Lewis felt more optimistic than he had in a long time, but he was still faced with some serious personal challenges. He needed to find something to do while he mended, something that was not too physically strenuous — he still had days when the fever flared and his hands shook — but that was absorbing enough to keep his mind active and his interest alive, not to mention providing some means of support for himself and his family.
According to Betsy, little had changed at the farm. He wondered briefly if he should go there and spend his time setting it right, but she suggested that it would only make matters worse.
“Maybe you landed Will with too much. If it were just he and Nabby, they’d have only themselves to sort out. I don’t think it helped that he had all the rest of us to try to please as well.”
“That wasn’t my original intention,” Lewis said. “I thought it would be easier for him that way, if he had help in the fields and in the house.”
“I know you meant it well,” she said. “It’s just that he didn’t take it well. I thought it was a good idea at the time, just as you did. I guess we were both wrong.”
Lewis was beginning to seriously wonder if he had any good judgment at all when it came to his family. This time he would listen to Betsy and stay out of it.
In the end, he went back to one of his old professions, that of schoolteacher. He even went back to his old school in Bath. Upon his inquiry, he had been told that the trustees were looking for a man with experience who wasn’t afraid to use the leather on the older boys who got rowdy when they were forced to attend. The previous schoolmaster had left quite suddenly. He was a young and rather frail-looking man, marked as a victim as soon as he started. The boys reduced him to tears one day when during recess they locked him in the outhouse and then tipped it over. Lewis would need to start right away, as the masterless school had some months to run until the summer break, and the trustees needed the students’ fees to maintain the building. The situation would do for a time, until he was well, but if he was going to be settled he was determined to have his wife with him.
When they returned to the farm, Lewis managed to get Will alone while Betsy and Luke were packing up for the move. “Look, boy, I understand that you want to stand by your wife, and I can admire that, but you need to take a firmer hand here. I’ll give you a year on your own. If you haven’t sorted things out by then, there’s no help for it, I’ll have to give up the farm and you’ll be on your own. I can send you no money, for a schoolmaster’s pay is barely enough to keep my own household.”
He could only hope that Will would reflect on his words, and take some action that would remedy things. Perhaps, given time and space, he and Nabby could make it work.
Lewis had just enough money to move their things to Bath, though their household goods were far fewer in number than they had been, having left a great many useful items and much of the furniture behind. He had found a tiny house that would accommodate them without much expense and which would be easy for Betsy to keep. Martha was big enough now to run and fetch, a small help at least. She remained an active, bubbly little girl who often made him laugh, and intensified his recollections of her mother. Luke came with them. He, too, had had enough of his older brother and his wife. The boy quickly found after-school work at the livery stable and willingly brought his entire wages home to his mother. Moses seemed quite happy at the tannery in Picton and, when informed of the new family arrangements, opted to stay where he was. He was courting a girl, Lewis suspected, figuring that before long he would be attending, maybe even officiating, at another wedding. He knew that this middle son would do nothing without a great deal of consideration and forethought and would make a success of anything he turned his hand to. He need not worry about Moses.
It felt odd to be in the classroom at Bath again. It didn’t seem so long ago that he had shepherded small children with slates in hand into a crowd in the front row, or chided one of the bigger boys at the back who had neglected to shovel the path or keep the stove filled with wood. But when he stopped to reflect, he counted back twenty-five years to a time in his life before he had a wife, a time before he had taken up his land grant. It was strange to be a teacher again, to attempt to pound a few facts into obtuse heads while forever on the lookout for mischief in another part of the room. After the first few days he settled in and found he still enjoyed it. The older boys who had been so problematic for the previous instructor took one look at their new teacher and decided not to try their luck. The days proceeded smoothly from there.
As always, he found the most eager pupils to be the girls, especially the small ones who had not yet realized that their destinies were, by and large, tied up with children and household occupations. Their minds were quicker than the boys’ and they worked harder. He wondered, not for the first time, whether or not their quick minds were wasted by so limiting their opportun
ities.
Some of the parents sent their girls for only a short time, pleading lack of money or the need of help at home. The same considerations applied to the boys, and often they would be absent for the entire harvest, but they would be sent back sooner than their sisters. When only some of the children in a family could be schooled, it was always the boys. They were future breadwinners, after all, and any sacrifice was made for them.
Some of the parents were dubious about the benefits of educating girls at all.
“I suppose they need to know how to do sums and read a little bit,” one of them said. “But beyond that, what’s the point? It’s not like they’re going to do anything but have babies, is it?”
Lewis thought of Eliza Barnes, who had preached to thousands and influenced so many lives, whose voice had been silenced by the mere fact of her marriage. And, surprisingly, of Kate Johnston, who had taken matters into her own hands and spirited her father out of a jail cell.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said to the beefy red-faced farmer who had expressed this opinion. By all accounts this man kept his wife and daughters in a state of abject subservience, enforced by the strength of his fists. “I find their minds quite fine, if you give them half a chance. I’m not sure why the Lord would have made them so, if He didn’t intend them to do something with it.”
The farmer had snorted, and Lewis knew that the conversation would be repeated, and that the suitability of the new schoolmaster could well be called into question. He didn’t care. In spite of the fact that the work was so much less physically demanding and that he was enjoying the regular hours and the fact that he could spend more time with Betsy and Martha, the old hankering to ride the circuit resurfaced within a few months. He felt he was doing the Lord’s work, at least in a small degree, by shaping young minds, but it didn’t compare with the comfort he could bring to those who struggled with the task of living a moral life whilst all around them the devil’s work prospered.
Morgan Spicer came to see him from time to time. Visiting the sick was something that he considered his duty, and whenever his round brought him close to Bath he would drop by the school or the house and make polite inquiries as to how Lewis was getting on. He had not yet achieved an appointment, but was continuing to preach wherever he could find someone to listen. It wasn’t always easy for him. Now that the Episcopals had taken control of their own church again, the front was well-serviced by bona fide ministers. People in the towns viewed the brash young man with suspicion when he began to speak of the
Lord, and often questioned his affiliations. Even in the backcountry, where so often any religion was welcomed, the settlers looked askance at this ugly little preacher who garbled his sentences and misquoted so many passages.
“It’s the Wesleyans that are the problem,” he said to Lewis with an air of great certainty. “They continue to spread their vile rumours about us.”
Lewis might have taken issue with Spicer’s use of the word “us,” but he didn’t. He was tired of squabbling over these matters. He had seen too much of it over the past few years and had no energy for it in his present state. He was too fragile. Physically, he was mending, although it was a long, slow process. Mentally he found it difficult to come to terms with the shift in thinking that had resulted from his encounter on the ice. His ill will toward Renwell had festered for so long that its absence created a hole where the hate had been, and he had yet to find anything to fill it. He now understood that the Lord had forced him to con–front his own shortcomings and, having seen them, it was up to him to address them. He spent much time in prayer and contemplation trying to understand what it was he was supposed to do, but try as he might, plead as he might, no soul-cleansing burst of illumination came to him.
He set this aside for a time in the hope that perspective might come to him at some future date, and turned his thoughts instead to the more temporal problem of the murders themselves. If Renwell had not committed them, then who had? He remained convinced that one hand had slain them all. He decided that it had to have been someone who was a traveller like himself, someone who had licence to ride the country, who would draw no comment as they made their rounds, whose presence would never be commented on or remembered. And therein lay the problem — if no one marked the presence of a stranger, how could his wanderings be tracked? No, not a stranger, someone familiar — someone everyone was used to seeing.
There were the saddlebag preachers, who rode long distances as a matter of course and whose circuits varied from year to year. He wanted to immediately reject this notion, to protest that no man of God would commit such heinous deeds, but he knew he could not. Anyone who had opportunity must remain suspect. He thought of the many ministers he knew, both in the Methodist Episcopal faith and otherwise, but many of those had been appointed to distant circuits, well beyond reasonable riding distance to the locations of the crimes. No one really supervised where any of them were at any given moment, but he felt certain that he could eliminate the farthest-flung. Who, then, was closer, and could have ridden, killed, then returned home again? And then he realized with a start that the only preacher who had been indisputably present on or near the circuits where the murders occurred was he himself. He felt as though he had boxed himself into a corner with this logic, until he stopped to consider Morgan Spicer. He had no idea whether or not Spicer had been anywhere near when Sarah was murdered, but he had certainly been present in both Demorestville and Prescott. Two out of three. And he was such an odd, unpleasant boy that it would be easy to believe him capable of killing. He would mark Spicer as a possibility and try to keep a closer eye on him.
Soldiers often travelled through the colony, but most often with their regiments unless they were on leave. This group consisted of such a large number of people that it was impossible for Lewis to assess the possibility. Besides, there had been no soldiers in Demorestville when Rachel was murdered. Soldiers wore uniforms, even the militia regulars had insignia that marked them, plus they had all been ordered to report for duty during that time, even the old soldiers like him.
Almost any crime along this part of the front was automatically attributed to Bill Johnston in spite of the fact that the old pirate had somehow managed to obtain a pardon from the Americans. He had approached the outgoing Van Buren with a petition, but the president had replied that he’d far sooner see him shot or hanged. Johnston simply waited in Washington for ten days until President Harrison took office and tried again. Harrison obligingly signed the necessary papers and Johnston returned triumphant to the Thousand Islands. He was back to his old tricks again by June.
Just as the steamer Great Britain was preparing to leave Oswego, New York, on her journey to the Canadian shore, a man boarded with a small box — not an unusual item for a passenger to bring aboard. The box was placed with other baggage in front of the door to the ladies’ cabin. A few minutes after the boat left the wharf, the box exploded. It had contained three jars of gunpowder packed in wool, with a lighted slow match underneath. The explosion did not have the desired effect, the injury being confined to the breaking of a few windows in the ladies’ cabin and the blowing out of the skylight above. Nor did the perpetrator have the sense to leave the boat in a timely fashion; he was arrested and immediately denounced another man he claimed was the chief instigator of the diabolical attempt. As this second man, Benjamin Lett, was a well-known associate of Johnston’s, he was at once taken to the Auburn County Gaol, whereupon he promptly escaped, with or without help, it wasn’t known. It appeared that Johnston was annoyed by the Canadian steamer owners who rushed to American ports to offer pleasure excursions on the Fourth of July, taking advantage of the many celebrations offered on the republic’s Independence Day.
In a widely printed proclamation Johnston thundered his wrath:
It is well-known that the owners of this boat are violent British Tories and bitter enemies of American Democratic institutions, but in order to fleece American citizens and fill their coffers with half
-dollars at their expense, they pretend to aid in the celebration of a day they abhor and detest.
The inhabitants of New York were warned not to patronize these excursions “if they value life.”
It was clear that Johnston had reassembled some of his old crew and that they were quite prepared to continue a vendetta against anything representing British authority. Lewis found it interesting that the old scoundrel had sent his underlings to carry out the deed, rather than leading the expedition himself. Maybe he was finally getting too old to do his own plundering.
He remained unconvinced that the pirate was connected with the murders in any way. Johnston preferred political targets for the most part. There was no profit in attacking lone women, and in the course of the majority of his crimes, he had always made sure that there was booty involved — a financial reward that could be split with the ruffians who followed him. No, Bill Johnston made no sense, and yet, could he be discounted entirely? He had no discernible motive as far as Lewis could see, but what did he know of pirates and their reasoning? His logic had proved faulty when it came to Francis Renwell. Could he now trust this conclusion? Perhaps the old man had a private taste for blood, or one of his men was operating without his knowledge.
And then there were the peddlers, Isaac Simms’s ilk. They travelled long distances and were such a common sight that few would remember having seen them on the road, and even those who had made a purchase would be unlikely to recall exactly when the transaction had taken place. He knew that Simms had been in Demorestville, and in Prescott, but again he could not place the man anywhere near Sarah’s cabin — neither Simms nor another like him.
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