Lewis nodded.
His grin grew a little broader. “I forgive you, Thaddeus. That’s the Christian thing to do, isn’t it?” And then his voice grew wistful. “Give Martha a kiss for me, will you?”
Renwell led him to the doorstep of the house, gave a quick rap on the door, and disappeared into the darkness. Lewis sank to his knees and scratched at the wood. He fell into the room when the door opened, this he remembered, but then all went black.
III
There was a long period of blackness of which Lewis was aware only by virtue of the fact that when he floated near the threshold of consciousness, he could feel his body — hot, stiff, aching. After that came the dreams, the mind’s effort to assemble events and emotions into a coherent story. He dreamt not, however, of his ordeal on the ice, but of his daughters. Sarah, lying on the bed with the open book in her hands — a dream he had had many times before. But it was his other daughters, the little ones lost to fever and accident, who came to him most often now. One by one they called to him — Grace and Ruth and Anna, none of whom had reached their third birthdays; the babies, each one succumbing to death before they had tasted more than a few days of life; and Mary, most of all, poor Mary. She visited him often — his first daughter, their first child. Memories of he and Betsy happy in the cabin back in the clearing, Mary toddling around after him, curious, laughing.
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