It was obviously a sore subject, Luke realized, for Spicer quickly went on. “So where is your father now?”
“Here as well. More or less. He’s gone back to the preaching business, at least on a temporary basis.”
Spicer seemed excited by this intelligence. “Here? On Yonge Street? I would like very much to see him, and not only to renew our acquaintance. I have a difficulty I would appreciate his advice on.”
“I’ll tell him I met you,” Luke said. “He will have completed his circuit in a few days, I expect and then he’ll come back here. Could I give him any indication of the nature of your difficulty?”
He had no idea if his father would be happy to see Morgan Spicer or not, especially if the man required advice. Although, he supposed, that was what a preacher was for, really.
“It’s to do with the Strangers’ Burying Ground,” Spicer said. “There has been a very odd occurrence there, and I can make no sense of it. I’d like to ask Mr. Lewis what he thinks. Tell him he can find me at the Keeper’s Lodge by the front gates.”
Luke’s first thought was that Spicer must be referring to ghosts or hauntings or some other nonsense that people associate with graveyards. He knew that his father would be quick to dismiss anything of this nature as a trick of the imagination, but then Spicer peered up at him anxiously. “Tell him it’s important. Tell him it’s a puzzle.”
No request would bring his father running faster, Luke figured, whether he was personally interested in seeing Spicer again or not. Thaddeus loved a puzzle.
“I’ll tell him,” Luke said, and then he tipped his hat and went on his way, wondering if anything that happened in a graveyard could possibly be any stranger than a skeleton whose finger followed you around the room.
Chapter 3
Thaddeus Lewis had given up horseback riding, and now made his rounds in a hired trap pulled by a rib-thin pony. The provision of a horse and cart was one of the conditions that he had insisted upon when he’d been approached by Philander Smith to take temporary charge of the Yonge Street Circuit. He was too old to ride, he pointed out to the bishop, and his aching joints plagued him too badly.
He was reluctant at first to agree to do even that much. He was settled into a comfortable routine in Wellington, after he’d got over the initial shock of his wife Betsy’s death. His son Luke kept him distracted for a while. Luke called upon him to unravel a mystery that had arrived on Canada’s shores with the great influx of sick and starving Irish three or so years before. They chased up and down the shore of Lake Ontario from Kingston to Toronto and back again and eventually found the truth of the affair. But at the conclusion of the excitement, Luke went on to Montreal to study medicine, and Thaddeus was faced with the unappealing prospect of returning to his small cabin behind the Temperance Hotel where he spent his days alternately helping out with the routine drudgery of looking after guests and assisting one of Wellington’s leading citizens, Archibald McFaul, with his complicated business affairs.
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
