“Then I can’t say I blame them for objecting,” Thaddeus said. “What did the mayor do?”
“Why, he shut the circus down, of course. Silly entertainment anyway, if you ask me, with their plantation songs and fast-talking Yankees. Actors should all be hanged. I hope nothing of the sort comprised the repertoire of last evening.”
Luke was startled at the sudden shift of focus to his own activities. “No … it wasn’t like that at all,” he stammered. “It was a singer and a pianist. They performed a number of songs — popular ones, I’m guessing, although I had no familiarity with them.” He hesitated for a moment while he tried to recall the music he had heard. “There was one about a sweet rose of somewhere.”
Christie’s face lit up. “Sweet Rose of Allendale?”
“Yes, that’s it,” Luke said.
“Excellent choice of material!”
Christie suddenly burst into song.
“Sweet rose of Allendale
Sweet rose of Allendale
By far the sweetest flower there
Was the rose of Allendale.
“Reminds me of home, don’t you know!” he said jovially before continuing.
“Oh the sky was clear, the morn was fair
No breath came o’er the sea
When Mary left her Highland home
And wandered forth with me …”
And he continued to hum happily around mouthfuls of buttered toast all the way through breakfast.
Chapter 10
Thaddeus turned the events that had occurred at the Burying Ground over and over in his mind as his pony plodded up Yonge Street against the steady stream of traffic headed in the opposite direction. All on their way to the city, he assumed, to watch the parade march by. He doubted that many of them knew anything about the Orange Lodge or the significance of July 12, but the lure of a marching band was enough to draw them down from the outlying regions to the north. They would line the street and cheer for whoever was walking by.
He himself was not in a cheering frame of mind. The hot, suffocating heat of an Upper Canadian summer had settled over Toronto in the middle of June and now extended its hold into July. The muddy ruts on unimproved sections of road crumbled into dust with every step the pony took and swirled a cloud of fine particles into Thaddeus’s face. He pulled his hat lower as a shield, but then he could feel the hot sun burning the back of his neck. His discomfort made it hard to think.
He could see little connection between the two corpses, other than the fact that they had both been men buried by charity. There was no clue to be found in their relative positions in the graveyard. One was on one side, one on the other. There were roughly two weeks between occurrences. The moon had been waning the night before, which meant that it had been a half moon, or close to it, on the first occasion. Thaddeus supposed that partial illumination was a better camouflage than a dark night. Any light that spilled from a shuttered lantern would be less noticeable under the veil of the shifting graveyard shadows. No help in determining the cause of the desecrations, but it might well be an indication of when the next might occur. Utilizing the phase of the moon would be dependent on the weather, of course, but he resolved to discuss this possibility with Morgan upon his return to Yorkville. Perhaps they could circumvent a third incident.
Poor Morgan, he thought, his ambition to join the ministerial ranks thwarted by his inability to wrestle the English language to the ground. This lack was difficult for Thaddeus to comprehend. Language and its efficacious use had always been one of his strengths as a preacher and his best tool as a teacher. He had been sure that he could bring Morgan along, and was distressed that he had apparently failed in this. On the other hand, he reflected, Morgan seemed resigned to his current position. No, not resigned, happy almost — and who wouldn’t be happy with a girl like Sally and four fine children to spend his days with? Thaddeus was suddenly hit with a wave of grief at the loss of his wife. Hurriedly, he shoved the pain away, before it could take hold of him, but no sooner had he put this thought away than he realized with a start how much he missed his granddaughter Martha. She had always been good company for him and Betsy. She had a lively curiosity about everything and at times her observations were so shrewd that she took Thaddeus aback. When he had completed his duties on Yonge Street, he must speak to her father about her future. She should be educated beyond the basic rudiments offered at a village school.
When, dirty, thirsty, and bemused, Thaddeus finally reached his host’s house in Davisville, he was only momentarily encouraged to discover that the women’s class had attracted two new faces, both wives of men who worked at the potteries.
“I was brought up in the old Methodist Episcopal Church,” one of them said. “I remember hearing you preach at a camp meeting near Napanee. When I heard it was you taking the class, I was curious to come along. I thought you’d retired ages ago.”
“So had I,” Thaddeus allowed, making light of the comment. “But when the Lord calls, I have to answer.”
The exchange cast him down again and made him feel old, and he suddenly realized why he was taking so much delight in helping Morgan Spicer discover who was responsible for the raids on the Toronto Burying Ground — it made him feel like he was in the thick of things again, and that made him feel young, in spite of the fact that his arthritic knee still hurt from his misstep of the night before. Vanity, he knew, and the words from Ecclesiastes came to him: Remove vexation from your heart and put away pain from your body, for youth and the dawn of life are vanity. He could cast away the vexation, he knew, but putting away the pain of his body was proving far more troublesome.
When he reached York Mills a number of people were lining up along the street. There was to be a small march, one of them said when he asked, to celebrate the glorious victory of King William at the Battle of the Boyne. Local Orangemen would parade through the street carrying banners. No band, of course, but an entertaining diversion nonetheless.
Even here, so far out of the city, they subscribe to this nonsense, Thaddeus thought, although he did not share this thought out loud. The Methodist Episcopal Church apparently had few adherents in this place as it was, and he would not attract any more by criticizing out of turn. He couldn’t resist a small piece of mischief, however, and asked a red-faced man which King William had been victorious, and where exactly was Boyne.
The man looked at him with suspicious confusion.
“Well, you know, good King William. And he put down the Catholics.”
When Thaddeus persisted in his questioning, the man had no answer but to say that he, for one, had no intention of being ruled by the Pope, and if that august personage should ever happen to wander into York Mills, he’d be given the pummelling he deserved.
Shaking his head at the ignorance of men, Thaddeus made his way to the cottage where he was to lead a women’s class, only to discover that no one was there. Lined up along the street to watch the Orangemen, he supposed.
There was no one to meet him in Lansing either.
He was to preach the next day’s sermon at Cummer’s Chapel, so with relief he continued on to the Settlement. Again a number of Cummers were waiting at the meeting house for the men’s class, among them Daniel, who as usual extended a dinner invitation and the offer of a bed for the night. The meal was excellent, and Thaddeus was cheered up a little by the unwavering support shown by the Cummer family.
After dinner he and Daniel sat out on the spacious farmhouse veranda to watch the setting sun, unmolested by the swarms of mosquitoes that would have pestered them earlier in the year.
“It’s too dry for them,” Daniel said. “The bugs all seem to wither away as soon as the streams do. We desperately need some rain, but if it comes the skeeters will, too, no doubt.”
“How are the crops holding up?” Thaddeus knew that many of the Cummers had farms in the area.
“The wheat is definitely looking peaked. I’m not sure it matters. There’s no market for it anyway. At least
here we can keep the livestock and the kitchen garden watered — we have a spring-fed well and it has yet to run dry in the summer. ‘Look for willow trees, that’s where you find the water’ my father always said. Of course if wells go dry, people can draw from the mill pond, but even it’s getting low.”
“Your father was a wise man.”
“He was. Sometimes I think it’s as well he didn’t live to see all this Orange Society nonsense that seems to have gripped the province. He was no supporter of the Pope, but he was always willing to accept the fact that there could be many ways to approach God.”
“There was a march in York Mills, of all places,” Thaddeus said.
“Ironic, given Prime Minister LaFontaine’s close connection with York County.”
It was a Quaker sect, the Children of Peace at Sharon, who had led the way in 1841, Thaddeus recalled, when Robert Baldwin formed a coalition of reformers with Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine. The two men shared a vision of a Canada where French and English could flourish together under a government that was guided by the will of the people. When LaFontaine ran into difficulties in his Quebec riding, Baldwin asked the farmers and villagers of the fourth riding of York to elect him to a seat in the legislature. The local reform-minded voters, urged on by the leader of the Sharon Temple, had obliged. Later, LaFontaine returned the favour and found Baldwin a safe seat in Rimouski, a French riding east of Quebec City.
“Are the Reformers going to be able to hold the union together, or do you think it will fall apart after all?” Thaddeus asked.
Daniel took a few moments to answer. “I mislike the amount of influence Orangemen have in Toronto, but if the province was going to fall apart it would have happened when the Parliament buildings were torched.”
“My young lad was in Montreal when it happened,” Thaddeus said. “He doesn’t talk about it much. Apparently it was an ugly scene.”
“And could have been much uglier if LaFontaine had been heavy-handed. I, for one, will put my faith in him and Mr. Baldwin. And God, of course, who surely must approve of their tolerant approach.”
Thaddeus wasn’t sure he agreed with Daniel Cummer’s assessment. It seemed to him that there were too many divisions in Canada. Protestant against Catholic; English against French. Everybody, it seemed, against the Irish. Even the Methodist Church, never united in the first place, continued to splinter into fragments. Methodist Episcopals, Wesleyan Methodists, Protestant Methodists, New Connection Methodists, Primitive Methodists, Bible Christians, African Methodists.…
Perhaps it would be better if they were all one, he reflected — if they could all put our differences aside and concentrate on the work at hand. Methodist schisms were odd things, in many cases ruptures occurring not due to different interpretations of the scripture, but along the fault lines that opened over political and organizational considerations. Maybe it would make more sense to take a page from the Baldwin-LaFontaine book and work toward a common goal.
It was an ironic conclusion to reach, given the fact that he had toiled so steadfastly for the Methodist Episcopals in the past and was now working so hard to lure people into their fold. If the Methodists ever became one church, he would no longer need to trot his pony along Yonge Street preaching to an ever-diminishing handful of people. He found that he was not in the least distressed by this notion.
In light of these ruminations and the events of the previous day, he chose to base his Sunday sermon on the subject of tolerance. It wouldn’t be a popular choice, he knew, but he had followed his conscience before and, no doubt, he would do so again. He noted that there were several new faces in the congregation. Perhaps he could do some good work on this circuit after all.
He drew from Matthew for his text: “Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”
Here and there he saw a downcast face, which told him his words had hit the mark, but if he had to sum up the general response to his sermon, he would say it was one of puzzlement and disinterest. Maybe it was a mistake after all.
His mood darkened even further when he reached Newtonbrook to discover only three people waiting to hear his service, delivered in the yard of a local farmer. It was as though the clock was cranked back fifty years, to when the Methodist Episcopal circuit riders travelled from farm to farm, cabin to cabin, buffeted by intemperate weather, indifference, and hostility.
He hoped for a breeze as he travelled northward. Yonge Street climbed steadily uphill from the city, taking him away from the steamy heat near Lake Ontario; but even though he reached a greater elevation, the wind died away to nothing. He was soon boiling from the sun and thirsty from the dust. Daniel Cummer had provided him with a jug of water to speed his travels, but when Thaddeus reached for it, he realized that it was already empty.
He looked in vain for a stream where he could stop and fill it. Here and there brooks and rills had dried away to stagnant puddles and he could find no fresh-running creek that invited him to scoop up a palmful of water. Best to wait, then, until he reached Thorne’s Hill.
His knee was paining him badly, as well, from the effort of bracing his legs against the footboard of the buggy as it rumbled over the more poorly graded sections of the road. It was with relief that he finally reached the wagoner’s house at Thorne’s Hill, where he hoped to hold a men’s class.
When he stepped down from the buggy he felt a sharp pain in his knee, as if there was a shard of glass embedded in the joint, and at the same time his leg gave way. He was saved from a tumble in the dust only by reaching out at the last moment and steadying himself on the buggy’s dashboard. He waited for a few moments and then took a tentative step on his bad leg. The pain was still there. He limped over to the front door of the house and knocked, but no one answered. He knocked a second time and waited, but with the same result. There appeared to be no one at home. He peeked in through the windows, but it was clear that the man had forgotten that he was to host a meeting. Either that or he had changed his mind, Thaddeus thought, and was too embarrassed to say so directly. The class promised to be sparsely attended anyway, as there was no one else waiting to gain entry.
His throat felt scratchy and parched and he knew that he had to find a drink before he could continue on his way to Langstaff. He returned to the main street, but the only public well he could find appeared to be the one that attracted a line of supplicants — Holy Ann’s Well — the well that was said to be the site of a miracle. He didn’t believe in miracles of that nature, but surely the water itself would be good enough, he thought. He would get his drink there and be on his way.
The woman waiting in front of him was inclined to be friendly and struck up a conversation with Thaddeus as soon as he joined the line.
“I’m hoping Holy Ann water will cure my goiter,” she said. She had a huge lump at the front of her throat that bulged past the scarf she had wrapped around her neck to hide it. “It just keeps getting bigger and bigger and nothing seems to work. I’ve been taking Syrup of Naptha and Oriental Balsam for years, but it just keeps growing. My sister-in-law said that maybe Holy Ann could help.”
“Did you travel far?” Thaddeus asked.
“Yes. All the way from Brockville. It was a tiresome journey, but I’m at my wit’s end with this thing.”
By the time they reached the wellhead, Thaddeus had learned nearly everything there was to know about this woman. The most interesting development in her life, however, was the growth of the ugly tumour at her throat. He heard about the opinions of the various doctors she had seen and the pieces of advice given by various members of her family, both of which were numerous, and a history of the affliction as it pertained to the aforesaid family, several of whom were similarly stricken. It was with a sigh of relief that he watched her dip an old mug into the bucket o
f water and drink. Then he stepped forward for his own turn.
The water was cool, clear, and sweet, and he drank his fill. He replenished his jug and poured several mugfuls into his hat for his pony to drink. Then he boarded the buggy and trotted out of town with a farewell wave from the chatty woman.
For the first half mile or so he mentally grumbled about the folly of believing in miracles from anyone but God, the growing stridency of the Orange Lodge, and his own lack of success on the circuit thus far, but as he headed farther north, he found that his mood lifted. Even though the sun was now high overhead, the relief of his thirst and the cooling effect of the damp hat on his head improved his outlook immeasurably. Even the pain in his knee started to ease off.
As he trotted into Lansing, he felt better than he had at any point during the previous two days.
Chapter 11
Over the course of the next few days three elegantly written notes were delivered to Dr. Christie’s house, two of them addressed to Luke directly. In the first, Lavinia Van Hansel thanked Luke for attending her soiree and expressed regret that she had not had time to say goodbye to him at the end of the evening. Luke knew that it had been ungracious of him not to send a letter of thanks the day after the party, but he was determined not to have anything more to do with the Van Hansels and he was reluctant to provide any opportunity for further communication. He burned the note in the office grate and hoped that his lack of response would mark an end to the matter.
Two days later another letter arrived, in the same elegant handwriting that had graced the first. Luke carried it upstairs to his rooms and laid it, unopened, on his bureau, where it stayed until it was time for him to retire for the night. Then curiosity got the better of his caution and he ripped it open.
Dear Dr. Lewis, the letter read. We enjoyed your company the other evening and look forward to furthering our acquaintance. I know you are under an obligation to attend to the needs of your practice, but is it possible that you might be free for tea next Tuesday? I know our attractions are poor to an up and coming young man as yourself, but as an enticement to your attendance, I have also invited Peregrine Biddulph, the young man with whom you seemed to hit it off so nicely at our party. Please let me know if Tuesday is convenient — if not, I would be happy to select another time.
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