On the Head of a Pin (20 page)

It had been summer, too hot to light a fire inside, but Betsy had insisted that both her child and her clothes be scrubbed and clean. Lewis had boiled the water outside, in the big iron pot that they used for almost everything, then carefully placed it inside the cabin door. Mary was just behind him, and he thought she was still behind him, following in the hopes that she might be allowed to help him harness the big draught horse, but knowing she would be chased to the safety of her mother's side. But she was too curious. Wondering what was in the big pot her father had carried so carefully, she peered over the side….

Lewis and Betsy heard her screams and arrived at the cabin door at the same time. Together they reached for the writhing little body, scalding their hands to pull her out. Betsy ripped the dress off the little girl and bundled her in a blanket.

“Get the grease!” Lewis ran to the dry sink and fished underneath for the jar. Together they anointed the burns that ran from just below Mary's shoulders to her small toes, knowing as they did so that it was futile. No amount of the cold, clammy substance could undo this amount of damage.

The child was strangely quiet as they did this, her eyes wide, her breathing shallow. It was only later that her screams filled the space inside the small cabin. Together they slathered her and tried to soothe her, not daring to pick her up for fear of further damaging the scalded tissue. They sat with her as she sank into a stupor, as the wailing subsided to whimpers. At last that, too, stopped.

Lewis had buried her himself, under a white oak tree that he'd left standing for the shade.

It was then that he had decided to leave farming and ride the circuits. He would have given anything to have had a word of comfort during that time, to have had someone else there to help him endure the sound of a small child's agony, to assure him that she had left worldly woes behind and had gone to a better place. To tell him that it had been God's plan, and not his own carelessness, that had taken her life. He would have given up his own soul in a moment to have had her back with him, he knew he would, although that wasn't a sentiment he shared, not even with Betsy. But it doesn't work that way, does it? No accommodating devil ever appears when you want him the most.

His only hope was that his life would find favour in the eyes of God, so that he could be reunited with her in Heaven, to see for himself that she was well and happy and whole again. She had been baptized in the Lord, but too young for understanding. Surely she would have been admitted without question, otherwise it would mean that God was a cruel old man and that the gospel of Jesus Christ a joke, and where would that leave him? Cursing his life with no hope of ever seeing Mary again? Or the babies? Or Grace or Ruth or Anna? Or Sarah?

He had thought for a brief time out there on the ice that perhaps he had got it wrong, that perhaps you could bargain with God after all. He had been only too willing to put his own life first. It shocked him that he had been so open to this, that he had even considered it, if only momentarily. But God, in his infinite wisdom, had spared him — not to let a murderer go free, but to point out the error of his thinking. There must be a reason for this, but as much as he had been able to force his feet to keep moving out on the ice, he was unable to force his mind into the steps that would lead him to a coherent conclusion as to what that reason might be. Instead, he surrendered himself to dreams of his lost girls.

When the fog in his mind finally cleared, he became aware of Betsy bending over him.

“Finally,” she said, as she wiped his face with a wet cloth. “I didn't think you were ever going to wake up.”

He felt very hot. He wanted to ask Betsy what had happened, why she was there, but he couldn't get his cracked lips to move.

She realized what he wanted to know. She could, after all these years, read him better than he could himself.

“You went through the ice. Mrs. Madigan found you at her door, half frozen. She got you into the house and warmed you up. You've been here ever since.”

It turned out that “ever since” amounted to three weeks time. His lungs had been affected, and he had spiked a high fever for days, and a low fever ever since. A Methodist on the island had identified him, and Betsy had been sent for. Everyone had been sure that he would die.

On the third day of his return to the world, Lewis asked what had happened with his appointments.

The lay preachers had taken over the class meetings, he was told, although Betsy snorted and shook her head as she told him. “You have far greater worries than your appointments, Thaddeus. Stop fussing about it.”

Morgan Spicer had visited, apparently to offer his services, and seeing that Lewis was too insensible to give any sort of permission, had gone ahead and preached in his place a few times. Lewis still felt uneasy about Spicer, but there was nothing he could do about it. His circuit would be too much for any of the other itinerants to add to their own rounds. The arrangement would have to do.

After five days, his fever started to abate and it looked as though he would live after all. Betsy pulled up a chair and sat down beside the bed. She looked at him for a few moments, as if considering how best to approach this husband she had nearly lost. Finally, in a way that was so characteristic of her that Lewis almost laughed, she blurted out the question that must have been plaguing her all these weeks: “What were you doing out there? You're a better judge of ice than that.”

Her tone would have sounded harsh to anyone listening, but Lewis knew how to take her meaning. All of her worry, the anxiety of the days when she believed that she would soon be a widow, had boiled down to the question of how he could have been so careless when he meant so much to her. He found this lack of sentimentality one of the things he prized in her most. It reaffirmed the strength of their partnership and demanded honesty in return.

“It was Renwell. I followed him.”

There was that look of impatience. He had shared his suspicions many times with her but he knew that she had never subscribed to his theory that Renwell was a killer and that she had long since ceased to blame anyone for Sarah's death.

“I know, I know. I ran across him quite by accident in The Shambles. He ran as soon as he saw me, and I took that as an admission of guilt. I followed him across the ice, but it opened up where the current was the strongest and I went through. I couldn't get out, Betsy. It was Francis who saved me. He came back and pulled me out.”

“Of course he did. He's not a cold-blooded murderer, Thaddeus. I never believed that of him.”

“You always said that. You must remind me from now on to listen to you more.”

She shot him a withering glance, then folded her hands in her lap, appearing to study them as she deliberated. Finally, she spoke.

“I knew he was at the taverns, for Sarah told me so, but he wasn't there for the drink. He was there for the talk. You and I are too old to understand the lure of rebellion, Thaddeus, too old and settled to know how a call to arms can so easily stir a young man to action. There was talk of glory, talk of a new order, and all the things that rubbed and chafed for so long came bubbling up and threatened to choke them with their injustice. Francis was never meant to be a farmer. Oh, he tried. For the sake of Sarah and Martha both, he tried. But Mackenzie beckoned and he couldn't help but answer. None of them could. In their eyes it was such a noble cause, and the fine words disguised the truth of the affair — that it was nothing more than the wish to have a little excitement in their lives.”

Lewis thought of himself as a young man in 1812, marching so readily off to the horrors of battle; of the young American boy whose hand he had held while the surgeon chopped away his future; of Matthews and Lount hanged and many more sent across an unfathomable distance to an unimaginable fate, and he knew Betsy was right. A high-flown phrase could set in motion a series of events whose disastrous culmination was impossible to see.

“Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“At first because Sarah asked me not to. She was afraid that you would confront Francis and make it worse. Then later, when she died, I tried to talk to you about it, but you weren't prepared to listen.” She hesitated, worrying a callus on one finger. “After a time,” she said slowly, “it came to such a pass that I was loathe to even speak the name Francis Renwell, for it would set you off again. I was sure that if you knew where he'd been that night, you would see that he was hunted down like so many of the others were, not because you have anything against the rebels particularly, but as revenge for Sarah. But she was gone, and no act of yours would ever bring her back. To my mind it was a choice between the living and the dead. I chose to tend the living as best I knew how.”

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

I
t 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.