remonstrate with her, right here in the front hall of the hotel? Send her away; tell her she was nothing but a foolish woman? But he merely nodded and showed her up the stairs to Mrs. Elliott’s sitting room. She and Harriet were invited to take a seat at the table and the door was firmly shut in the preacher’s face.
Lewis didn’t know either of the two women who disappeared into the sitting room, but Daniel passed them in the hall and was quick to fill him in.
“One of them is Ezra Sprung’s wife,” he informed him. “They lost their little girl a while back. I expect that’s why she’s here, to see if Mrs. Elliott can help. The other is Mrs. Sprung’s sister. Sad, isn’t it?”
With the arrival of a paying customer, Lewis’s dilemma regarding Clementine Elliott’s activities had suddenly moved from the theoretical to the actual. He tried again to persuade Daniel to put a stop to it. “Do you really think we should be subscribing to this?” he insisted. “It can’t be anything more than party tricks, and she’s using your premises to perform them in.”
Daniel was having none of it. “I don’t see that it’s any of our concern what she does in her rooms as long as it’s not illegal or outright immoral. If she wants to carry on her business while she’s here, who are we to stop her?”
Lewis felt that this statement was on extremely shaky ethical ground. “But if it’s fraudulent in any way, that would be neither legal nor moral. And you could be held culpable in the consequences.”
“I don’t see how,” Daniel scoffed. “Besides, who’s to say that she doesn’t have a genuine ability to communicate with the afterlife? God has wrought greater miracles. Think of Daniel in the lion’s den, or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace.”
Lewis was at a loss as to how he should counter this argument. God had indeed wrought many miracles in the Bible, but the preacher had a great deal of difficulty believing that the same agency was at work in a hotel room in Canada West. But as Daniel pointed out, it was a difficult argument to uphold. How could you convince people of the miracle of God’s grace if you denied them what they perceived as evidence of that grace, especially when it was impossible to prove it otherwise?
It was obvious that Daniel was not to be persuaded. For now, all Lewis could do was keep his eyes and ears open. When he had collected enough information to make his case, and he was certain that he would, he would once again ask Daniel to put a stop to the nonsense.
Lewis made sure to be standing near the landing when the two women descended the staircase two hours later. Tears were running down Mrs. Sprung’s face and she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Whatever had happened upstairs must have been upsetting, indeed, he thought, but then he realized that her sister wore a puzzled expression that was tinged with more than a little awe.
“There, there, Clara,” she said, patting the woman on the back. “It’s what you wanted, after all.”
“I know, I know, it was wondrous to see her again. It’s just that it’s given me such a turn.”
Lewis stepped back into the dining room before the women spotted him. He was puzzled. Whatever had happened in the upstairs room had affected Mrs. Sprung profoundly. Her sister less so, perhaps, but she had obviously been impressed. How had Mrs. Elliott convinced them that a dead girl was communicating from beyond?
Chapter Five
Clara Sprung might well have remained Clementine’s only client if it hadn’t been for the early winter storm that blew in the next evening.
Lewis had known it was coming. One of the enduring effects of his wife’s prolonged struggle with ill health was her ability to foretell the weather. All would appear to be fine until, in the middle of cooking dinner or sweeping the floor, she would suddenly stand stock-still with a preoccupied expression on her face. The next moment she would be clutching the table, her legs barely able to support her weight, and it would be a struggle for her to make it even as far as the kitchen bed, where she would collapse in agony. This pain was merely a herald. After an hour or so of lying immobile she could often get up again and resume her chores, but she would know that the respite was temporary, for as soon as the wind started to blow in from the east she would have to return to her bed.
He found her there when he carried in the supper Susannah had made for them. Martha, like the good girl she was, had fed the fire to boil up some tea, but was struggling to lift the heavy kettle off the stove without spilling it on herself.
“Storm coming?” he asked, and Betsy’s groaned reply was all the answer he needed.
By the time they finished eating, the wind was pounding in great gusts against the house, making the pottery rattle and setting up a multitude of draughts that whistled through the windows and sought out even the coziest corners of the room. Lewis chased Martha off to bed and got an extra quilt to cover Betsy. He would spend the night in the chair by the stove, both to keep an eye on his ailing wife and to feed the fire. It was no hardship for someone who had spent many years on horseback in all weathers, with many a night passed huddled under just a cloak in a barn somewhere or in an indifferent bed provided to him by some well-meaning but indigent Methodist supporter.
He dozed off for a while, but was awakened by the sound of ice pellets pattering on the roof. This was a nasty one, he reflected, and he sent up a prayer for anyone caught in the open country, or on a ship out on the lake. He slipped another log into the stove and glanced out the window. He couldn’t see a thing. The small pane of glass was completely glazed over with a layer of ice. He felt Betsy’s hand under the covers. She seemed warm enough, so he returned to his chair and had soon dozed off again.
He slept heavily until morning, when he woke to the sound of Martha filling the kettle from the water bucket. Betsy seemed better now that the storm appeared to have blown itself out.
“Could you run up to the hotel and ask Susannah for a couple of biscuits?” he asked the little girl. Betsy’s recovery would be faster if he could get her to eat a little biscuit softened in her tea.
Martha ran to the door and pulled at the latch, but nothing happened. She pulled harder, but still it remained stubbornly closed.
She turned back to Lewis. “Can you help me, Grandpa? I can’t get the door open.”
“What? Have you gone all feeble all of a sudden?” he teased, but when he pulled at it he could get it to budge no more than she could.
He doubled his efforts, but the door remained stubbornly fast.
“Well now, there’s a conundrum,” he said, as Martha’s eyes grew wide.
“Are we stuck here forever?”
“Oh, no, don’t worry. I think it’s just frozen shut. The ice will melt in the spring and then we’ll be able to go outside.”
For a moment her eyes betrayed the fact that she considered this a real possibility, but since her grandpa had teased her in this way often, her brow quickly wrinkled as she dismissed his assertion and considered other possibilities.
“Oh! I wonder if the shed door will open,” she said.
There was a woodshed off the kitchen, with a door leading to the outside. It had been in the lee of the storm and was not nearly as iced up. With a smart tug, Lewis was able to jerk it open. He was astonished at what he saw. Thick layers of ice coated every surface, and the weight of it had bent the trees over
