As soon as his wife paused for a breath, Mr. Varney jumped in. “Aye, there are good Methodist families here you can rely on. There are a lot of newcomers in the area, as well. Of course, one can never be sure how they lean, but I would expect a few of them to swing our way. They may still call the place Sodom, but we’re doing our best to change that.”
At that moment, the shop door opened, and two older women came in, shortly followed by a younger woman with a small boy in tow. Separate class meetings were held for women and men, with the women’s most often held during the day, and the men’s in the evenings, after their day’s labour was done. Simms rose and nodded to Lewis. “Good to see you, sir. I’ll get out of your way now.”
“Will you be coming to the men’s meeting tonight?” Lewis asked.
Simms smiled. “Sorry, Preacher. I’m heading north from here.”
Mrs. Varney disappeared into what Lewis assumed was the kitchen to get extra chairs as more women arrived. They all settled down with expectant looks.
“We’re so pleased to have a minister from the Methodist Episcopals again,” one of them said. “The Wesleyans never made us feel welcome.”
The women all seemed quite sincere in their beliefs and joined in the spirit of the gathering enthusiastically. Lewis made an effort to speak to each of them individually, although he was certain that it would take him some time to remember all their names.
Afterward, he took his supper with the Varneys, and the welcome he received at the afternoon meeting was repeated at the evening one. In spite of the strange beginning to his visit, he was well satisfied with his reception in the village of Demorestville, and looked forward to returning.
The Varneys offered him a bed for the night, but he declined. His plan had him scheduled for another meeting in the morning and he was anxious to meet his contact on the Big Island, which lay across a marshy stretch to the north. Besides, he found Mrs. Varney’s gossipy tongue quite wearisome.
As he rode out of the village, he noticed that some wag had installed a sign at the bottom of the hill pointing to a lane that led along the millpond. GOMMORAH ROAD the sign said. He made a mental note to check whether or not they had spelled it correctly.
II
It took Lewis a week to cover the northern part of his circuit, and when he returned home, Betsy was low again. He had hoped that the move might help her — a different place, a milder climate. But she had found the disruption of moving their household effects exhausting. She had kept going as long as she could, with all the washing of crockery and packing and unpacking of goods to do, but when he returned, she was once again lying on the kitchen bed, the makings of an evening meal only half-prepared on the table. The stove was nearly out and the child crying. He got the fire going and set the kettle on, then settled young Martha down with a crust of bread.
“I brought some chamomile,” he said. “Can I make you some tea?” Chamomile was one of the few things that gave Betsy any relief. That and the laudanum that was far too expensive to use unless the need was dire.
“Fever,” was what the doctor said, and it was true enough that fever had felled her. But Lewis knew that far more was weighing on his wife. Sarah’s death had dragged them both down. You would have thought that they would be used to losing children by now — they had lost so many.
But the others had been so young when fever, or accident, or just plain difficulty in living had taken them away — Sarah had survived where all his other daughters had perished. She had been a young woman with a daughter of her own. God could choose to take you at any time, he knew that full well, but it was the manner of Sarah’s death that had so disrupted them — lying there on her bed with those strange marks on her neck, the swell of another babe rounding the cloth that covered her.
Sarah had been a sweet seventeen-year-old with a laughing, teasing manner that made the most sombre of people brighten. She had always made friends easily — something that was an advantage for a circuit rider’s daughter, since they moved so often.The only surviving girl in a family of younger boys, she had ruled them with a combination of charm and intelligent wit. Sarah had only to speak a word to her brothers and they would do her bidding. All too often her magic worked on Lewis as well. He supposed that he had spoiled her. Betsy often accused him of it, but for him she was the embodiment of all his other daughters who had perished before her.
As a young woman she had had many admirers. Any number of young men would have wed her gladly — good, solid young men with excellent prospects. But they had all drifted away soon after Sarah first laid eyes on Francis Renwell. It was clear that she wanted no one else.
Lewis had been uneasy about the match from the first; though Renwell could match Sarah’s spirit, and they made a handsome pair, there was something about the man that he didn’t like. Betsy claimed that he wouldn’t have liked anyone his daughter picked, and that he’d better get over it, because she was going to marry regardless. But Renwell, in his opinion, was unsteady, perhaps even feckless, and was given to sudden enthusiasms and unconsidered outbursts of opinion.
He had tried to keep these thoughts unuttered, since doing anything else would only subject him to jokes from his daughter and scathing looks from his wife. He just wanted his daughter to be happy, to be safe, to be cared for. And it appeared at first that Renwell was willing and able to do just that. The young couple took up a farm near the lower end of Rice Lake and together they sowed and chopped and reaped and built.
They rejoiced at the safe delivery of their first child, Martha, but whether it was the arrival of the baby, or just a general boredom with the hard lot of a farmer, soon after that Renwell began to pay less attention to his work and his family. He started frequenting the many taverns that were within a day’s riding distance. Sarah did not confide this information to Lewis, but rather to her mother, who wisely kept her counsel. It was only afterward that he found out, but by then it was too late.
When Sarah had written to tell them that she was expecting another child, Lewis had asked for a posting nearby, close enough that Betsy could be a help when the babe arrived. It was not new life that claimed their attention, however, but an unexpected death. It was to them that the task fell of preparing the body and arranging the burial after they had found Sarah in the cabin, Martha screaming in her cradle, her father nowhere to be found. Lewis was convinced that there had been argument, an altercation, and that Renwell had killed her and fled into the night. The doctor could find no evidence of foul play, and in his opinion Sarah had died of “natural causes” — just what those causes might have been, he couldn’t say.
Renwell had disappeared that night and not a whisper had been heard of him since. What had transpired between them that would have caused him to choke the life out of his beautiful wife, Lewis’s only daughter? For who else could it have been but Francis Renwell? If Lewis had not been a man of God, he would have cursed the name.
Betsy was stirring, trying to rise. “Tea?” he asked again. “It won’t take long.”
He always tried to adopt a cheerful tone when Betsy was down. It struck a false note, he knew, but he wasn’t sure what else to do, and at least then one of them sounded cheerful. Sometimes she didn’t answer him at all when he made these simple inquiries, but this time she leaned up on one elbow, groaning as her weight shifted onto inflamed joints.
“I’ll get it.”
“No, no, I’m fine. You stay where you are. I’m on my way again tomorrow and you’ll have to get your own tea then.”
It would take him four weeks to ride the entire circuit, he figured — four weeks of meetings,