It was enough — only just enough — to keep his loneliness at bay, although he still felt a pang of loss every time he returned to the cabin at the end of the day. He never really became used to the idea of Betsy’s death, but he seldom let this be known. He kept his sorrow to himself and mumbled over it late at night when he had nothing else to distract him. It became a treasure of sorts that he guarded jealously and shared with no one.
And then his routine began to fall apart. Business dwindled to a standstill in Canada West. Britain’s Free Trade policies had destroyed Canada’s markets and there were now no ready buyers for the timber that grew so plentifully or the wheat that sprouted out of the ground. Mr. McFaul’s affairs were not as complicated as they had once been. He had less business to conduct and less correspondence to see to. The businessman reluctantly informed Thaddeus that his services were no longer needed. He had hopes, McFaul said, that economic times might improve in the future, especially if trade continued to grow with the United States, but for the time being, financial prospects were dim.
“If some of these railways they’re proposing actually mater-ialize, that will help,” McFaul said. “But in the meantime my business has contracted along with everyone else’s. I’m sorry, Thaddeus, but there just isn’t enough work to keep you on.”
Things changed at the hotel as well. Custom fell off. There was still plenty of work to get through every day — especially since Sophie, the genius in the kitchen, was once again expecting, and after several disappointments hoped this time to complete the process of birthing a child. Her brother, Martin, though, was let go from the Wellington planing mill, and he was immediately, and quite rightly, offered a place at Temperance House. The hotel belonged, after all, to his mother.
Martin was young, and far more help than Thaddeus had ever been. Nothing was said, no hints were dropped, but it was clear that the hotel was trying to support far too many people, even with Thaddeus working for nothing more than room and board.
He was far more receptive to the notion of being a preacher again when Bishop Smith returned a second time and repeated his urgent request that Thaddeus ride Yonge Street in the name of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
The decision was made easier for him by the arrival of Luke’s letter, with the news that he was considering a situation in Yorkville. Thaddeus hoped that the advice he gave his son was based on Luke’s best interests and not his own, but it was extraordinarily convenient all the same. When he was tired of congregational hospitality, of lumpy mattresses and kitchen beds, when he had completed his circuit and needed dry socks and a clean shirt, he could go to Luke’s. He wrote to Bishop Smith at once to accept the appointment.
Now, as his pony pulled him along Yonge Street, Thaddeus marvelled at how much the circuit had changed in the course of just a few years. He’d first come here in 1834, when he finally gave in to the siren call of the preaching life. He was received into the travelling connection at the Methodist Episcopal Church’s annual conference at the chapel at Cummer’s Settlement. Yonge Street was little more than a track at the time, muddy and perilous with holes and fallen brush. Now he found that whole sections had been macadamized, improvements paid for by the tollgates that halted travellers and demanded fees for passage.
Little villages clustered around mills and the inevitable taverns that lined the road on its long march toward Lake Simcoe. These inns had been the breeding ground for Mackenzie’s doomed rebellion in 1837. Every grievance, every complaint was trotted out on the taproom floor and catalogued until the stolid farmers of North York rose up and formed a pitchfork army. They marched down Yonge Street only to be ambushed and overpowered. Too few of them had marched home again. But now all was forgiven, apparently. Even the rebel leader, Mackenzie, was beckoned home, and the villages themselves had settled into a pattern of slow, sleepy growth until the collapse of the wheat market threw them into crisis again.
These settlements were beads on the string of road as it led north. Yorkville with its breweries; Drummondville, famous for the Deer Park estate; Davisville and its potteries; Eglington and the infamous Montgomery’s Tavern where the Rebellion had faltered so badly. And so on north to York Mills, Lansing, and Cummer’s.
He had returned to Cummer’s Settlement only once since he’d been appointed as a circuit rider. It had been a few years later — 1838 if he remembered correctly. He was a seasoned campaigner by then and was asked up onto the platform to preach at a camp meeting that had lasted three days. And when he finished exhorting the crowds to a frenzy of conversion and confession, he had been invited to share a meal with Jacob Cummer and his family.
Cummer was a German from Pennsylvania who had built a mill on the Don River and opened a tinsmith’s on Yonge Street, but in those rough and ready days when the area was far from civilization, he had also trained himself to be the local doctor and veterinarian. Like Luke had done up in the Huron, Thaddeus reflected, except that Jacob had never bothered to acquire any formal credentials. The Cummers were Lutherans when they arrived in Canada, but when Jacob built his log meeting house he had invited all denominations to use both the church and the campground. Later the Cummer family formally joined the Methodist Episcopals. The old man died a few years after that shared meal, but the majority of his fourteen sons and daughters still lived either in the village or nearby and, in particular, the oldest son Daniel was proving to be a stalwart supporter of the church. Of all the villages on the Yonge Street Circuit, Cummer’s Settlement was the place where Thaddeus would receive the surest welcome.
He looked forward to seeing Daniel Cummer again and was pleased that the man was waiting for him in front of the meeting house. He was far less pleased when he realized that nearly all the men present for the class meeting were Cummers, sons of Cummers, or married to Cummers. But then, he reflected, Yonge Street was never as rich a ground for the Methodist Episcopals as other parts of the province, and too many Methodist adherents had been drawn off by the Wesleyans, or by one of the other numerous versions of the doctrine.
When he completed the meeting, Daniel, as Thaddeus had hoped he would do, invited him to share a meal at his house. He confirmed that the Methodist Episcopals had lost ground on the Yonge Street Circuit.
“As you know, the Presbyterians and the Anglicans have always done well here,” Daniel said as he dipped into the savoury stew his wife served up, “but there are a lot of New Connection and Primitive Methodists as well. And, of course, Wesleyans.”
The British arm of John Wesley’s church had attempted a union with the Methodist Episcopals some years previously. The partnership soon fell apart, but the Methodist Episcopals suffered greatly by the Wesleyans’ claim on all of the property that had been brought to the merger at the time.
“It’s an uphill battle to keep the old church alive,” Thaddeus said. “Otherwise I doubt you’d be seeing me today. Bishop Smith must have been desperate to ask an old man like me to take a circuit again.”
“I expect he is desperate, there are so few of you left. I dare say there are no more than a handful between here and Cobourg. And your work is made all the harder by the times. The fall in wheat prices has badly affected the farmers of York, although here and there you can see signs that things are stirring again. John Hogg has started to lay out lots at York Mills, I hear.”
“If I remember correctly, most of the land there is swamp, isn’t it? Swamp, and a murderous steep hill.”
“Your memory is good,” Daniel said. “No one can fathom what he’s up to. People have started calling it Hogg’s Hollow, which doesn’t make