“It did. And on further examination, it was evident that its laundering had not been sufficient to remove a large stain on the skirt.”
“In your opinion, what was the cause of the stain?”
Thaddeus felt, rather than heard, the crowd’s sudden intake of breath.
“It looked to me for all the world like blood.”
A gasp, and then an eruption of comment from the crowd, as though this was proof of guilt indeed. The bailiff called for order and gradually the chatter died away.
The prosecutor thanked the witnesses, signalling that the presentation of his evidence was at an end.
One of the justices turned to Mrs. Howell, asking if she cared to cross-examine any of the witnesses. She didn’t look up, only declined with a quick shake of her head.
The deliberation took little time. The clamour of the crowd was deafening when one of the justices announced that evidence in the case was sufficient to proceed.
Ellen Howell would be tried for murder.
Thaddeus remained in his seat, deep in thought, while the courtroom emptied. He would have to find some way to help her.
PART ONE
The Hope Circuit, Summer 1853
I
Thaddeus shifted his weight into a more comfortable position as he waited impatiently for his assistant, James Small, to find a way around the knot of construction that blocked the road ahead. Upper Canadian summers could certainly be steamy at times, but August had ushered in an unusually long stretch of very high temperatures, making travel uncomfortable and enclosed spaces unbearable, and there was no sign of any relief to come.
The aggravation and discomfort of heat and travel were made worse by the delays he encountered whenever his route took him near the rail line construction. It was tempting to believe that the surveyor had deliberately laid the route out in such a way as to cross Cobourg Creek as many times as it possibly could, solely for the purpose of annoying travellers, but Thaddeus knew that the route had been designed to skirt along the bottoms of hills and run as levelly as possible for as far as possible before it had to tackle the steep climb to Rice Lake. The local newspaper had been full of breathless articles detailing the route, the method of construction, and the extraordinary benefits the Cobourg to Peterborough Railway would bring to the entire community.
For the umpteenth time that day Thaddeus pulled out his handkerchief and mopped away the sweat on his face. He was beginning to wonder if he had made the right decision when he’d accepted this appointment. He had been of two minds about taking any posting at all when Bishop Smith offered Hope as a reward for having been so obliging about the Yonge Street Circuit.
“The meetings are already well established on Hope,” the Bishop had said in his usual persuasive manner. “There’s strong support in the whole district. It’s not nearly the challenge that Yonge was.”
Thaddeus knew it was a plum, but he was also familiar with the geography of the district. The villages along the shore of Lake Ontario were easily reached, but a rolling landscape climbed steeply from the swampy ground around Cobourg to the oak plains at Rice Lake. There would be an endless progression of steep rises and deep valleys, sudden descents into little dales followed by precipitous climbs up a series of never-ending hills. If he took the posting, he would have to cover it on horseback rather than in the buggy he had grown so used to on Yonge Street.
He protested that he couldn’t stand up to that kind of punishment anymore. He was old and had grown soft after two years of riding in a cart and dining a little too well at his son’s table in Yorkville. Bishop Smith listened to him politely, and then offered the enticement of an assistant, a man named James Small, a young probationer not experienced enough for his own circuit yet, but certainly qualified enough to lead prayer meetings.
“You can limit your appointments, if you like,” Smith said. “Take as many rest days as you need and let your assistant do the bulk of the work.”
And then he threw out the clincher. The circuit came with a comfortable manse, a four-bedroom house with a garden and a good barn for his horse.
In the end, Thaddeus agreed, but only for a year. He had no other prospects in sight anyway, and he wasn’t entirely sure what he would do instead if he turned the appointment down.
Now, as heavy lumber carts clogged the roads and churned up the dust, he was becoming exasperated and wondered if he had made a mistake. He was in a hurry. He and Small had agreed that it would be best to make an inaugural tour of the circuit together, and circumstances played nicely into this plan when a farmer in Haldimand Township offered the use of an enclosed field for a camp meeting. Given the continuing fairness of the weather, it was likely to draw a large crowd. All of the Methodist Episcopal ministers within riding distance had been invited to speak, and as an old hand at camp meetings, Thaddeus was offered four stints on the platform. It was a splendid opportunity for an initial introduction. But only if he could get there.
He shifted in the saddle again and fanned his face with his hat. He wondered how the men on the railway crews could bear such hard physical labour in such high temperatures. They were well paid, he knew. There had been an advertisement in the Cobourg Star offering a dollar a day in wages. Even so, most of the workmen were immigrant German or Irish, and Thaddeus could hear guttural tones clashing with Celtic lilts as the workers called to one another. Few local men were willing to put in the ten or twelve hours a day of back-breaking effort required to build the railway. They could make better coin from supplying the enormous quantity of timber and gravel that was needed, or from selling food to the store that fed the crews. But the one thing they all agreed on was that, once built, the railway would bring them enormous riches, whether it was from working on it, supplying it, or investing in it.
As annoyed as he was by the delay, Thaddeus had to admit that he was fascinated by the construction. While he waited for Small, he watched a work crew scrape away at the roadbed, levelling the soil in preparation for a second crew who would lay down wooden ties to cushion the iron rails. It was not unlike the way a plank road was built, he realized. One of these ran from Cobourg to Gores Landing to connect with the steamers that crossed Rice Lake to Peterborough, but there was constant complaint about the condition it was in. The planks that had been laid across the boggy lowland parts of the road refused to stay put. Every winter the frost heaved and twisted them and every spring the road was found to be nearly unusable. No one seemed able to say for certain that the same thing wouldn’t happen to the rail line, but if the amount of soil that was being moved was anything to go by, it should be able to withstand the worst of winters.
Off to the east, Thaddeus could see a crew of workmen excavating a small hill. They shovelled piles of earth into wagons that lumbered their loads over to the sides of the roadbed to reinforce the abutments. Half the hill had been hauled away, and the men were still digging. Thaddeus wondered if he and Small should try to pick their way through the excavation, but just then a wagon finally got itself turned around and out of the way, and one of the workers waved at Thaddeus to ride through the small gap that opened as a consequence. He was relieved. If they made good time from here, they could still arrive at their destination with a few minutes to spare.
By the time Thaddeus and James Small finally arrived at the farmer’s field, the entrance laneway was jammed with carts, horses, and pedestrians, a circumstance that boded well for the success of the meeting. There were some within the church who maintained that camp meetings were a thing of the past, that the day of the circuit-riding preacher was over, and that people were settling into a pattern of staying put and looking to their own neighbourhoods for their spiritual sustenance, but the presence of so many people so early on the first day seemed to belie these naysayers. In Thaddeus’s experience, camp meetings started slowly and gained momentum as they went on, finally reaching a crescendo on the third day.
And when he mounted the speaking platform later that afternoon, he could see knots of tents and campfires around the entire