insist that its hegemony be upheld.
There were some who protested that Kingston was too small and too lacking in the necessary amenities needed for a capital, and that its southerly location made it vulnerable to attack. The recent events at Prescott had made the last a valid argument, although the same reasoning could well be applied to Toronto.
Still, there was an excitement about the place, and generally its inhabitants looked forward to the future with more optimism than they had felt in a long time. All they needed now was a period of peace, a reasonable harvest, and a steady influx of immigrants to help the city grow.
Lewis enjoyed this circuit. Although Kingston boasted a variety of churches, his rounds included the settlements east to Adolphustown, an area that included the first Canadian Methodist house of worship. The old church at Hay Bay, built with love and hoarded pennies by the first Loyalist settlers, appealed to his sense of what a meeting place should look like — plain, austere, nothing expended on unnecessary ornamentation — just a wooden building housing a people determined to worship God in their own way. He felt privileged to follow in the footsteps of William Losee, who had battled the elements and a broken heart to bring the Word of God to a people cast into the wilderness.
Losee was the first itinerant minister to leave the more settled Methodist circuits of the United States. He had arrived at the Bay of Quinte in 1790, galloping from place to place, setting a blistering pace for himself, seemingly indefatigable in spite of the fact that a childhood accident had left him with a withered, useless arm. “Oh, God, I call upon you to smite sinners,” was his cry, and often the sinners in question would fall to the ground, or so it was reported. Lewis wished it were that simple, that all he had to do was ask, and the terrible crimes and sinful passions of Upper Canada could be corrected at a word.
Losee was soon followed by others of his ilk. Their willingness to leave the settled areas for the lonely and isolated cabins and shanties of the clearings spread Methodism in a way that could not be countered by the faiths whose proponents preferred the comforts of a warm fire and a stout roof over their heads. Losee’s success was also his downfall, however. He fell in love with a local woman who not only rejected him as a suitor, but chose instead a more popular and far handsomer fellow preacher who had followed him into the wilds. He gave up his travels then, and went home a broken man, never even having been fully ordained as an elder in his church. The travelling connection took its toll, Lewis reflected, one way or another.
Kingston enjoyed a lively farmer’s market in the centre of town. “The Shambles,” as it was called, consisted of a series of wooden sheds, built to provide at least a modicum of shelter to the farmers who brought their goods in to supply the townsfolk. These shelters were flimsy affairs and a constant fire hazard. In fact, they had burned down twice already, but each time they were hastily thrown up again and The Shambles quickly returned to being a place of diverse scents and sounds as farmers’ wives hawked fresh eggs and vegetables, Natives brought their beautifully woven baskets to sell, and everything from fish to joints of beef were displayed at the stalls for passing buyers to pick over. There was some talk of building a new, more lugubrious marketplace along with a new town hall, but so far it was only talk, and the farmers were against the notion anyway.
“So where am I supposed to sell my pork while they’re buildin’ their fancy new meetin’ hall?” one farmer commented. “Typical, ain’t it? The last thing they ever think of is what happens to the regular folk.”
Lewis thought the man might be forgiven for holding this point of view, given the total lack of consideration displayed by the powers-that-be over the years. He could only hope that things would change now that the colony had been re-invented as the exalted-sounding “Province of Canada.”
The market also served as a sanctuary of sorts for a number of transients and rogues. Although the local constabulary attempted to rout them out every night, there were many desperate men, women, and sometimes even children who would find a night’s shelter amongst the crates and boxes that were left piled up beside the sheds. These people had been blamed for the previous fires —with good reason. They built small campfires after the sun went down, and in the attempt to shelter these from the eyes of the prying constables, they built them in out-of-the-way places, far too close to the piles of flammable material that surrounded them.
When he was in Kingston, Lewis often poked around the market in the evening, on the lookout for the sick, the hungry, and the spiritually bankrupt. It was only in this last area that he felt he was of much help; he could sometimes find aid for the ill, especially if they were children, and some members of the local Methodist Society might be persuaded to provide food for the truly starving, but there was little or no organized charity for the anonymous beings who had fallen on such hard times. Lewis found it difficult to talk to them about the state of their souls when he knew how cold and hungry they were, but occasionally he ran across a derelict who had drunk his way to a pitiful condition and wanted to turn over a new leaf.
It was a cold, raw December afternoon and Lewis could smell the snow that promised to fall that evening. There were few people in The Shambles. The farmers and their families had packed up early and gone home — it was too cold for customers to linger over their purchases and the farmers had no wish to stand all day for no return. As Lewis walked through the market, shifting crates and lifting boxes, he realized that there were very few of the other kind of regular inhabitants either. With any luck, they had all found warmer places to sleep on so cold a night.
As he turned to retrace his steps, Lewis heard a faint scuffling sound behind one of the empty crates. He assumed it was a rat — they were common enough in a place where foodstuffs were so easy to snatch — and continued walking until a nagging voice inside his head told him to go back. What if it wasn’t a rodent but a small child? Or a woman, or a drunk, curled up behind a box and in danger of freezing to death? He turned around and approached the crate warily. He shoved it aside and found, not an animal, as he expected, but a dirty and unshaven man, his clothes tattered rags, his face sunken.
It was Francis Renwell!
“You!” Lewis bellowed, feeling an unreasonable rage come over him. This man, this beast, had taken Sarah from him. Suddenly Lewis was certain that he had done more than that. Renwell had been close enough to commit the other murders, as well, hadn’t he? Having tasted blood, his appetite must have grown for it. Lewis didn’t stop to consider any of the other details that had puzzled him so. He was convinced that it had to have been Renwell. How many other young women had he killed? How many other families had he ripped apart?
Renwell shot one frightened glance at Lewis, leapt up, knocked him out of the way, and ran. He ran down the length of The Shambles and headed for the nearby shore. Lewis was surprised by the sudden shove. He fell heavily, but righted himself and quickly gave chase.
Renwell didn’t stop at the shore’s edge, as Lewis expected, but ran down a dock that jutted far into the water. There he hesitated. Lewis thought that he surely had the culprit now, for the ice was still too thin to hold a man. Instead, Renwell took one look over his shoulder at Lewis and leapt the three feet to the river below. The ice held, and he began to run across the river toward Wolfe Island. Lewis paused for only a moment — long enough to utter a brief prayer — then leapt down after him.
Renwell had a minute or two on him, and was a much younger man who, in spite of his apparent sorry condition, wasted little time in opening up a lead. Lewis pursued doggedly, his breath soon raspy and his chest aching. His quarry headed slightly off to the east, not toward the quay at Marysville, but farther down the shore where a point of land jutted out into the river.
The ice boomed and cracked under their feet as they ran. There were many places where several inches of frigid water lay on top of a layer of half-frozen ice and others that remained open to the water entirely. They avoided these, zigging and zagging across the surface, between and around
