Sowing Poison (7 page)

By the middle of November snow had begun to fall, not in a blizzard, but gently and intermittently over the course of several days, blanketing the roads and fields with an obliterating white. The mud froze into ruts on the road, and horses were harnessed to sleighs instead of to wagons. Instead of hurrying to the constant round of toil that claimed them in good weather, farmers indulged in second cups of breakfast tea and dreamed of next year's crops. The hectic pace of summer business slowed in the towns, as well, and there was time for meetings and lectures, dances and dalliance. The gentle inward-looking respite gave everyone a chance to catch their breaths and prepare for the quickening that would come with the spring.

Lewis became aware that Martha had somehow won over the Elliott boy and that for some inexplicable reason she called him “Horatio Joe.”

“Because it rhymes,” she had said when he asked her about it, and she seemed to have no better answer than this.

Lewis had been convinced that she would never get the boy away from his mother. Clementine liked to keep him close, and usually he was in their rooms with her whenever she had visitors. The boy functioned as a sort of chaperone for her, he figured. Horatio was so small and pasty-faced that Lewis wasn't sure how well he would tolerate Martha's boisterous activities anyway. He seemed to be a boy more suited to drawing rooms and the company of his elders. Lewis found him sitting at the bottom of the stairs one afternoon, however, and when Martha arrived after school, she hastily deposited her slate in the kitchen and the two scurried outside.

Martha hesitated on the front step. The snow presented opportunity for an abundance of activities, but daylight disappeared so rapidly in the late afternoons at this time of year that there would be little time to do much before darkness descended and they would have to go back inside.

“Do you want to toboggan?” she asked him.

Mr. Henderson at the general store had given her an old piece of board that had been worn smooth on one side, and showed her how to drip some wax over its surface to decrease the friction.

Horatio scowled. “What's a coboggan?”

“You know, going down a hill on a board.”

“Oh, sledding,” he said. “I've done that!” Then he reddened. “At least, I've heard about it. We don't have much snow in Carolina, you know.”

She was puzzled. “What do you do in the winter then?” Horatio only shrugged.

Martha was in a lather to try her new plaything, but was uncertain where to do it. There had not yet been enough snow to heap up into the huge mounds by the side of the roads that would serve well enough for a slide later in the winter. There were some gentle slopes here and there in the village, but there would be older children playing there, including some of the bullies from her school who would be sure to wrest her toboggan away from her and use it roughly. She had no confidence in Horatio Joe's ability to protect her from these boys; in fact, his presence would certainly only intensify their unwanted attentions.

“Let's go down to the lake,” she finally suggested. “We can walk to the dunes and go down the banks and onto the ice.”

Wellington's situation was peculiar in that it stretched along the shores of two nearly separate bodies of water, with only a narrow channel to connect the two. One part of the village fronted on the vast expanse of Lake Ontario. This was where the bigger ships docked and where wharves and piers had been built to accommodate the lake traffic. From this harbour everything from grain and peas to flour and huge quantities of fish were shipped across the lake to New York State or down the St. Lawrence River to Montreal. The eastern part of Wellington was built along West Lake, virtually an inland body of water, although it had probably once been a bay. The far end of this small lake was covered in acres of reedy marsh, but the water deepened near the village and was usable to small craft. A long bar of sandy hills formed the boundary between the two, it's width so narrow in places that it was a wonder that the pounding waves from Lake Ontario did not some stormy night break through it and merge the waters again into one. Quite the opposite appeared to be happening, however. If anything, the sand piled up higher every year. This thin thread of sand was but an outcropping of the massive dunes that lay farther south. Unsuitable for farming, these sand hills were covered with a vast, undisturbed forest of cedars. The trees thinned as the dunes marched toward Wellington, however, and the sandbar that Martha proposed to play on sported only scrubby poplars and a blanket of marram grass.

These small hills formed a steep slope with a short run, not ideal for tobogganing purposes, but Martha figured they could at least test their makeshift sled. They poked along the bar, looking for the best place. They finally found one that was relatively free of trees, but it was on the Lake Ontario side. Martha tested the skim of ice that had formed in the shallow water along the shore, and it appeared to be solid enough to hold them just in case.

“Do you want me to go down first, just to show you?” She was concerned about Horatio's apparent lack of experience.

He shrugged, so she leapt on the homemade toboggan and pushed herself off. There were still patches of ice under the snow that sped her downward to where the slope levelled out, at which point she hit a frozen rut and spun crazily around, until finally the board slowed and stopped. Laughing, she hauled it back up the hill.

It was Horatio's turn next. He opted to fly down the bank on his stomach, which distributed his weight a little more evenly so that he had a far smoother ride, and was carried farther, out to the edge of the lake. In spite of what he said, Martha was certain that he had done this before.

When he arrived back at the top of the bank, he suggested that they go down together.

“There will be more weight on the board and we'll go farther,” he said.

“Is there room for both of us?” Martha asked doubtfully. “It's not that big.”

“Well, let's try it. If one of us falls off, we'll only land in the snow anyway.”

So Horatio scrunched himself up at the front while Martha knelt at the back. She was unable to find any piece of the sled to hold on to, so her only option was to grab the back of Horatio's coat. That meant that if one of them toppled off, the other would probably follow.

With two of them on board, the sled was slower going down the bank, but halfway down it again rammed against a lump of frozen snow that sent them off in a crazy direction, and they went skidding onto the lake ice, and directly toward the open water. Martha responded to this peril in the only sensible way she could think of — she threw herself off the board. The sudden lightening of the load seemed to make the sled, with Horatio still aboard, go faster, and she watched it skew around and come to a stop just short of where the water lapped against the thin shelf of ice. As Horatio attempted to rise, the edge of the ice broke away and he plunged into the water.

“Horatio Joe! Are you all right?” Martha yelled. She hoped he wasn't about to drown — that would require an awful lot of explaining. But as she watched, he hauled himself upright, and she realized that he had landed in only a couple of feet of water. He was soaking wet from the waist down, though, and she judged that tobogganing was over for the day. They needed to go home right away and get him some dry clothes; otherwise his trousers would freeze to his legs, chilling him to the bone.

They had wandered quite far from the harbour, however, and she realized that it would take some time before they could even reach the wharves where someone might let them stand inside a building for a few minutes to get warm.

“I'm okay,” Horatio said. “Let's go down again.”

But Martha had been warned too often of the perils of getting wet and cold and was determined that she wasn't going to lose her new friend to pneumonia after only their first adventure.

“No, we have to go
now
. You'll be sorry later if you don't.”

He protested some more, claiming that a little cold water couldn't hurt him. Nevertheless, he followed her as she marched determinedly back along the sandbar.

If they hadn't been arguing, they might have noticed the strange apparition far sooner. As they wound their way through the line of poplars that crested a dune, Martha suddenly stopped and screamed. At first she was unsure whether it was a man that stood in front of her. His coat was made of animal skins of every description; she could see muskrat, fox, raccoon, and rabbit pelts, greasy and matted, many of them with the tails and feet still attached. She could tell that they must have been bush-cured, for a gamy, rotting smell emanated from this eccentric cloak. For some reason, the toes of the man's boots had been sliced open and she could see his bare feet poking through them. It was this fact that helped her decide it was, indeed, a man.

His attire was by no means the most remarkable thing about him, however; those were only the things she noticed once she was able to tear her gaze away from the hideous sight that was his face. The creature's upper lip was split in two, the cleft running jaggedly upward to slice into his right nostril. A runny puss dripped from this, down onto the blackened stumps of teeth that she could see in what she thought must be his mouth, for his lower jaw sloped away to meet his neck, the two nearly indistinguishable. The rest of his face was flat under drooping lower eyelids rimmed with red.

Martha screamed again as the figure moved a step closer, gesturing with one hand. Through the tattered bit of fur that served as his mitten, she could see that some of his fingers appeared to be webbed.

She jumped when she felt a hand on her arm, but it was only Horatio trying to pull her away.

“Ah-oo-oo?”

The voice that came from the man was high-pitched and nasal.

“What?” Martha knew that the thing was attempting to communicate with her, but she was at a loss to make out his words.

“Huh-oo-oo-ee?”
He screwed his eyes up as he said this, as if it were painful to speak.

“He's asking if we're all right, I think.” Horatio had stopped pulling at her, although one hand still firmly grasped the sleeve of her coat.

“I don't think so,” Martha said. “Who are you?” she finally asked.

“Huh-oo-oo-ee?”
he repeated.

With the repetition, the sounds began to make a little sense to Martha. “You want to know what we're doing?”

The man nodded.

“We're sliding down the bank.” She pointed to their piece of board.

“Oh … ack.”
The man waved toward Wellington, then turned and trudged off down the sandbar with a peculiar shuffling gait.

They waited until he had disappeared into the distance before they dared to turn their backs and walk in the other direction.

“What was
that
?” Horatio asked as they walked.

“I don't know. I've never seen him before.”

“Was it a man?”

“I think so,” Martha said. “It must have been. Either that or it was a goblin.”

“That's not what goblins look like.”

“How do you know?”

Horatio ignored this. “He was nothing but holes. He had holes in his boots and holes in his face. Holes everywhere you looked.”

“Maybe he was a wildebeest.” She had read that word somewhere and it seemed to describe perfectly the thing they had just seen.

“I think a wildebeest is some sort of deer or something,” Horatio said. “That was no deer. It was just a man with a lot of holes in him.”

After that, whenever they spoke of the strange figure they had seen, they referred to him simply as the Holey Man.

To Martha's enormous relief, Horatio suffered no ill effects from his frigid dip. Although his teeth were chattering by the time they returned to Temperance House, he was able to slip upstairs and change into dry clothes without anyone noticing, and Martha merely entered by the back door and wordlessly started setting the tables for dinner.

In the wake of the miraculous salvation of the crew of the
Anthea
, however, Horatio's presence soon became required in the upstairs sitting room far more frequently than before. Peter Spencer had done what he promised and spread the news of Clementine's prediction far and wide. He needn't have bothered telling more than a person or two; after the details of the dramatic shipwreck had been fully digested, the whole village and most of the surrounding countryside could barely talk about anything but Mrs. Elliott's miraculous talents. Several days after the news of the
Anthea
became general knowledge, two more women came to the hotel asking for her; the next day there were four. Clementine held sessions each morning for the next several days, and added two afternoon sittings, as well.

Horatio still managed to slip out in the late afternoon to play with Martha, though. They crossed the channel to the dunes looking for the Holey Man, and glimpsed him twice in the distance, but he never seemed to come close to where they were playing.

The increased traffic at the hotel resulted in more work for Daniel and Lewis, without contributing much to their fortunes. Occasionally, one of Clementine's customers might linger for a cup of tea and a biscuit in the hotel's dining room after they had visited upstairs, but not often. Most of them were distraught and shaken when they emerged from a session and anxious to ponder their experiences in private.

They left hurriedly, almost surreptitiously, unable to look Lewis in the eye or return his polite greeting. This was, he knew, because he was a preacher and they were afraid, quite rightly, that he disapproved of the whole enterprise. They tracked in an enormous amount of dirty snow, which melted in puddles in the hall, and left muddy footprints on the stairs and in the upstairs hall. He and Daniel had barely been able to keep up with the work prior to this influx of visitors; now they were falling farther and farther behind. Betsy helped whenever she could, but Lewis kept a close eye on her, and whenever it appeared that she was tiring, he sent her to lie down or to sip yet another cup of tea with Susannah.

So Lewis wrestled with this dilemma while traffic to the upstairs rooms continued to increase, but then, a couple of days later, there seemed to be a change in the clientele. An older couple, well-dressed and prosperous-looking, arrived asking for rooms — a welcome inquiry, for even though it would mean yet more work, it also meant more money. Lewis gave them the largest of the third-floor rooms, well away from the mysterious rappings and thumpings that frequently echoed along the second-floor hall. The rapping, however, appeared to be what they had come for.

“We're from Cobourg,” the man said. “We heard about Mrs. Elliott from an aunt who has attended her with most excellent results. We're anxious to consult her.”

Lewis expected that they would stay but one night. After all, they had only to see Clementine, be given the answer they were looking for, and depart for home again. To his surprise, they made no move to leave the next day. That afternoon a man from Belleville arrived, and on his heels a well-dressed woman who declined to announce where she hailed from, although Lewis checked the register after she had signed it and it said
Napanee
.

“We'll have to move you into the kitchen if this keeps up,” Lewis joked with Susannah.

“Aye, this is grand, isn't it?”

It would be a great deal grander if there weren't so much mud on the stairs
, Lewis thought sourly, and then he chided himself for being so uncharitable. It wasn't Susannah's fault that she had broken her leg, or that Daniel seemed to be so good at disappearing just when he was wanted most.

Even so, they should have been able to manage the rush of customers themselves, but the tasks were so unfamiliar to Lewis that they took him far longer than they should have to complete. He worked long into the evening, washing up the supper dishes and bringing in firewood, while Betsy and Daniel prepared as much as they could for the following day's meals.

Lewis kept a worried eye on Betsy, and when her limp became more and more pronounced as the day wore on, he took Daniel aside.

“We can't go on like this, you know. I'm quite willing to do whatever work needs to be done, but I'm useless in the kitchen and you're not much better.”

Daniel wrinkled his brow. “I hadn't counted on having to hire help. I thought we could do it ourselves.”

“We could if we hadn't lost Susannah, but if we keep on at this pace we'll lose Betsy, too, and then it'll just be you and me trying to cope. I think you should hire someone before that happens.”

He knew that Daniel was worried about what it would cost, but he truly could not see an alternative.

“Look, the people who came here over the last couple of days came because of Mrs. Elliott. There's apt to be even more tomorrow. That's more business than you've seen in the last six months. Take a little of the money and hire some help.”

“I guess you're right,” Daniel grumbled. “I just don't know if we can find anyone suitable. There's not many will come to a hotel to work.”

The problem, Lewis knew, was that too many of the families in Wellington were Quakers. No Quaker girl would wait on tables, and this severely limited the pool of available help. The Society of Friends were a sober and industrious lot, but they made peculiar distinctions when it came to working for others. An honest exchange of labour for wages was acceptable; anything that implied that they were subservient in any way was firmly declined. It was something the better class of English immigrants had complained of bitterly in the past, for this Quaker attitude had spread to others who, had they been in England, would have been little more than scullery maids and happy enough to tug their forelocks to their self-proclaimed betters. Here, the attitude of hirelings was summed up in the one word:
help
. It was no disgrace to move in with a family and “help,” but the help expected to be spoken to civilly and to sit at the same dinner table as her employers. And no girl of good family, Quaker or not, would ever be allowed to work at an inn that had a tavern; but surely an inn that boasted temperance in its name might be more acceptable?

Susannah, who was well aware of just exactly how much work was entailed in looking after so many guests, readily agreed that some help was required. “I don't know of anyone offhand,” she said, “but I do know who might. Go talk to the Scully girl. She seems to know everything about everybody, including half the things they don't know themselves. Surely she'll be able to think of somebody who would be willing to work for us.”

Lewis knew that if he left it to Daniel the conversation would never take place, so the next morning he set off for Scully's store.

“You're Mr. Lewis, are you not?” Scully asked as he entered the shop. “You're over at the Temperance with your sister, isn't that right?” Lewis nodded his agreement. “What could we do for you today, sir? I can only hope that you're so busy over at the hotel that you've worn out the linen already and are looking for more.”

“It's not the linen that's worn out, it's me,” Lewis said. “I expect you know that my sister broke her leg. What you may not know is that my wife is not well either. That leaves me and my brother-in-law to manage things … and we're not doing a very good job of it, I'm afraid.”

“Oh, dear, that does sound dire,” Scully said, “but how can
we
help you?”

“I was wondering if I might speak with your daughter. I've been told that she tends to have a finger on the pulse of the village, and that she might be able to point me in the direction of some industrious person who could take up some of the slack.”

He had rehearsed his very diplomatic statement, not wanting to imply that Meribeth Scully was a busybody, although as far as he could ascertain, that was exactly what she was.

“Mr. Lewis! How
is
your sister? Recovering, I hope.” The voice came from the corner of the store. Lewis hadn't seen the girl behind the huge oak table. She was so short she nearly disappeared when she sat behind it.

“She's as well as can be expected, I suppose. Thank you for asking.”

“You must have your hands full over there. I hear the inn is nearly booked up now that Mrs. Elliott is so famous. I don't know what to think of her, to be perfectly honest. It all seems so odd, but it certainly is good for business.”

Lewis knew that she was fishing for more information about the mysterious sessions that Clementine held in her rooms, but he knew little more than she did, and even if he had, he wouldn't have said a word. She had, however, given him an opportunity to jump directly to the matter at hand.

“It's busy, that's the truth. And that's why I thought I'd consult you.”

“Oh, if there's anything I can do, just say, Mr. Lewis.”

“I'm wondering if you would know of anybody in the neighbourhood who might like to earn a little money. We can't keep up with the work over there.”

She screwed up her face in thought. “Well, there might be one or two. It would depend on what you were asking them to do.”

“The cooking, mostly,” he replied. “Maybe a little cleaning. It's too much for us. My brother-in-law and I can manage to get the food to the table all right, but it's the business in the kitchen that we're having the most difficulty with.”

She laughed at this. “I don't think there's a man alive that truly knows his way around a cookstove,” she said. “Well, you might ask Sophie Carr, that's Fred Carr's daughter. You know, her brother Martin went with you when everyone was looking for Nate Elliott.”

After Lewis recovered from his astonishment that Meribeth knew, much less remembered this small detail of such a wide search, he considered her suggestion. Martin had seemed like an intelligent boy, and if his sister was in any way similar, she could be a good choice.

“She's free at the moment, do you think?”

“I expect so,” Meribeth said. “She spent the last year nursing her father, but he died three months ago. The family could probably use the money. They've been living on what Martin makes at the sawmill.”

“Excellent. I'll go along and ask Martin about it right now.”

“It's a funny thing, though, isn't it? About Mrs. Elliott, I mean.”

“I don't understand.” She was still fishing, but she'd get nothing from him. “If she is so good at communicating with the spirit world, you'd think she could tell us whether or not her husband is dead.”

As he walked along the street to the mill, he had to reflect that, although Meribeth was a dreadful gossip, she was by no means a stupid girl, for he had been wondering about that very same point. Surely if Nate Elliott was dead, and at this point it was almost certain that he was, Clementine would be in constant communication with his spirit. After all, she seemed to be able to summon up everyone else's dear and departed practically on demand.

Her activities at the inn had nettled him from the start. “Treating with the devil” would be the church's objection, and one that would easily explain his unease to anyone who asked, although no one else seemed to make any connection between the tenets of their faith and table-rapping or spirit-calling, or whatever it was she did. In all honesty, his objections were far more practical; he was convinced that she was a fraud.

He considered what Spencer had told him. “Near an island,” she had said to him. Well, that wasn't difficult, was it? The
Anthea
had been in a part of the lake that had a number of islands, large and small, and an even greater number of shoals and bars. It wouldn't require clairvoyance to provide the insight that they might be near an island. He worried over “happy and safe,” for that was the part of her prediction that had seemed so miraculous. He wondered what she would have done if the bodies had washed up on some shore, or if no news had ever been received as to their fate. And then he realized that the prediction had been so vague that almost anything could have been read into it by someone anxious for explanation. If they had simply disappeared, never to be heard of again, the claim could be made that they were happy and safe somewhere and just hadn't informed anyone else of the fact. Even in the worst of scenarios, if the actual bodies were found, Mrs. Elliott could play to the expectation of an afterlife and claim that their souls had gone to heaven, a place that, after all, promised well-being and happiness. The outcome didn't matter, he realized; she would be seen as prescient no matter what occurred.

That still didn't explain what had happened to Nate Elliott though. Lewis resolved to study the question more closely when he had time, but he would never have time if he couldn't persuade Martin Carr's sister to come to work at the inn.

So he continued down to the planing mill, past the piers and the huge reels that were used to wind up the fishing nets so that they could dry. They gave the harbour an eerie skeletal look, accentuated by the hulls of ships that had been stripped of their masts and booms and hauled up onto cradles for the winter. The mill appeared equally deserted at first, for there was little call for finished lumber in the wintertime.

Lewis entered the first door he came to and called out. He heard footsteps clattering on a set of stairs and Martin appeared.

“Mr. Lewis, good day. What can I do for you, sir?”

“I'm here to ask if your sister would be able to come and work at the hotel,” Lewis said, getting right to the point of his visit. “We need some help, mostly in the kitchen. Can she cook?”