On the Head of a Pin (16 page)

He nodded, only half listening to her as she prattled on.

“They say Bill Johnston organized the whole thing, but now I've heard that he's given it up as a bad cause and skedaddled back across the river. Mark my words, they'll never take that one in, he's too canny.”

Lewis gulped down his poor meal, and knew that he must will his weary body to get up off the chair and walk some more. He had still to find a bed for the night, either that or go back to the garrison and crawl under the table with Spicer. The landlady noticed his distress.

“Have you a place for the night, Preacher?” she asked, and when he indicated that he didn't, she furrowed her brow. “Well, now, I'm pretty full, but I do have one pallet in a corner of one of the rooms. You'd have to share, but I won't charge you for it, seeing as how you're a man of the cloth and you've been helping the wounded and all. What do you say?”

He gratefully accepted her offer. The room turned out to be over the tavern part of the building, and there was a ferocious noise from the drunks down below, but it was reasonably clean, and there was a layer of blankets piled in the corner. It was better than Lewis had had for many days and he sank gratefully into them and slept. Lewis was awakened by heavy-booted men who reeled drunkenly into the room and collapsed three across into the two feather beds that were crammed into the small space. There were two other pallets as well, and their occupants joined the snoring and moaning of the others. His hips and knees were stiff and sore, the result of his long days of tending the wounded and long years of riding a horse in all weathers. He knew he needed to get up and shift around in order to get them loosened again. Gingerly he raised himself, not bothering to smother the moan that came with movement. There was no need; the other sleepers were insensible and would never hear. Several of them had not bothered to remove their boots before they collapsed into bed. He wondered how on earth the landlady managed to keep her rooms so clean.

He hobbled to the window and looked out on the moonlit street below. Even at this hour there were still many people about: drinkers who had not yet left off drinking; vagrants who had no place to go; cutpurses, he had no doubt, who would take advantage of a drinker's befuddlement to relieve him of whatever monies he hadn't poured away.

Across the street there was a figure huddled into the lee of a porch, asleep. Poor soul, he thought to himself. That's a sad place to spend a night. But whether he was destitute because he had no money in the first place, or whether he had no money because he had drunk it all, there was no way of knowing. Perhaps he was just too drunk to realize where he had ended up. The figure shifted, uneasy in the cold, and Lewis looked closer. From so far away it was hard to make out the features, but something about the man reminded him of another moonlit night when he had watched a figure scuttle around the side of a building. Could it be Francis Renwell shivering in the street? Drat the failing eyesight of old age. As a younger man his eyesight had been keen, and he would have been able to tell. Even as he squinted, he doubted himself.

What would Francis Renwell be doing in Prescott? And then the horror of murder came rushing back at him; the marks on the neck, the obscene slashes, the pins. Sarah, Rachel, the woman in the clearing not far from here.

He stumbled back to his pallet, looking for his boots, wishing he had followed the odious custom of his roommates and left them on. He eased his feet into the stiff leather and crept down the stairs. His room had been at the back of the inn and it took him a moment to orient himself, to discover where, in relation to the window, the figure was sleeping. But by the time he got there, Renwell was gone.

V

N
ear the end of the fifth day the stalemate at the windmill was broken.

Steamers with heavier ordnance had arrived from Kingston, along with more detachments of both British regulars and militia. The ships had moved within range of the windmill and begun their bombardment late in the afternoon. This had a far better effect than the previous attempts, shaking the tower and setting what was left of the outbuildings on fire once more. Then, as the sky darkened, a force of a thousand British soldiers began their attack.

Lewis had continued his round of cleaning and comforting, his ears alert to the rhythm of the battle — the pounding of the artillery, the volleys of musket fire. The Americans were no doubt desperate, their men exhausted, hungry, and without ammunition. They had never expected to be anything but instantaneously victorious. How could they withstand such an assault?

He had been changing the bandages on the raw stump of a soldier whose left hand had been shattered when the man suddenly shifted his head to one side. “Listen,” he said. “It's stopped.”

“What does it mean?” Lewis asked. “Is it over?”

“Aye, I would say so. They can't have held out against all that.”

Lewis and the others braced themselves for more wounded.

Soon they were elbow-deep in blood again as the casualties of both sides were carried into the makeshift hospital. The Americans were separated from the British and Canadians, who received medical attention first. It was bedlam as the doctor shouted instructions and the soldiers screamed. Lewis stayed out of the way as much as he could and tended to the neglected Americans instead, bandaging the bleeding and praying with the dying.

“I don't know about you,” he said to Morgan Spicer when asked what he was doing, “but I'm not sure I feel any partiality for any of them, British, Canadian, or American. As far as I'm concerned, they're all of one creation, and their blood has soaked the ground together.”

Spicer looked taken aback. “Why, they'd have made us all Americans. Our men fought for the glory of Britain, and they deserve commendation and all the care we can give them. These others can wait forever as far as I'm concerned.”

“The only glory worth fighting for is the glory of the Lord,” Lewis responded. “Anything else is vanity. Look at these soldiers, Morgan. They're nothing but boys, lured in with the false promise of worldly renown. Now they'll go home with their grievous wounds and regret the day they offered to fight.”

He might have saved his breath, for Spicer only looked confused and vaguely affronted. Still, Lewis thought, I suppose he deserves credit for all the help he's given here. It would not be enough to get him the appointment he craved, but it should certainly count as a mark toward his character, which he would be happy to attest to if he should ever be asked.

One of the Americans had overheard their conversation. “Are you a preacher?” he asked, and when Lewis replied in the affirmative the boy lifted the blanket that covered him. His left leg was a shattered mess of bone and sinew. He had been hit well above the knee, and the upper part of his thigh was little more than a clotting stew of singed flesh. “I know it's gone,” the boy said. “I just don't know how much they'll take.”

This was the fear with leg wounds — how far up the surgeon would go. Would it be only the leg or would it be necessary to amputate into the groin and destroy not only the means of ambulation but that of reproduction, as well? For a boy of sixteen, which is what Lewis judged this boy to be, it was a tormenting question.

“Would you stay with me during it?” the boy asked. “They say the surgeon is quick and that's a good thing, but I don't know what I can stand. It would help if you were there with a prayer, wouldn't it?”

When the British and Canadians had finally been dealt with, the doctor turned his attention to the enemy wounded, tending to the most serious first. Lewis kept an eye on the blanket in the corner, and when two soldiers joined the doctor to hold the boy down, Lewis moved to his side.

“I'm here,” he said, and grasped the boy's hand. “I'll pray.” This he did quietly, in a low monotone. The doctor's scalpel had been stained red from all the cutting and he found it hard to follow its course as the boy's blood stained it even more. The rumour had been true — the surgeon was very fast and took no more than a minute or two to saw through the bone above the wound. The boy moaned and screamed once, but it was soon over, the leg removed, and this time, everything else left intact. Lewis stayed as long as he could, murmuring his prayers, but there were too many others who needed attention, and he finally left the boy whimpering on the blood-stained blanket.

Worse was to come. Once all the wounded had been stitched and cut, bandaged and bound, if not comfortable then at least comforted, Lewis and Spicer were asked to go out onto the battlefield with a company of soldiers to help in the retrieval of the dead. Spicer was excited about getting so close to where the action had taken place, but Lewis faced the prospect with dread. He knew what they would find; he had seen the aftermath of battle before.

The field was littered with bodies, just as he had expected, some frozen as white as the snow that gently drifted down on them. He noted with disgust that they were naked. It was always the same after a battle — the indigent and the opportunistic move in, sometimes even as the fighting continues, and strip the bodies of any useful articles. The pigs that wandered at large in the nearby forests had been drawn by the smell of blood and were already feasting on the corpses. Lewis tried to chase them away, but they were belligerent and vicious, unwilling to give up their meal. The soldiers had to shoot them so they could get to the bodies.

The remains of the wooden buildings around the windmill were full of the dead, some of the corpses burnt black. Lewis and Spicer heaved countless bodies up onto the wagons, some almost unrecognizable as human. Spicer had vomited a couple of times early in the day when they had found a particularly fouled body, but they both soon became inured to the sights and smells of death. At last the field was cleared and they wearily followed the creaking wagons back to Fort Wellington.

The days of fighting had left nearly fifty dead and another ninety grievously wounded. The leader of the Patriot Hunters, a Captain Von Schulz, had surrendered when it appeared the cause was lost, and many American soldiers had laid down their arms with him. Others had escaped the battlefield, and it could only be hoped that they had found their way back across the river to the United States, and were not roaming the surrounding countryside.

Bill Johnston was nowhere to be seen. The rumour had been correct that he had had a hand in the affair, but as soon as it became clear that the Hunters would never get any farther than the windmill, he had sailed back across the river to Ogdensburg where, instead of raising reinforcements, he had spent the rest of the battle in the taverns. It would take more than a small invasion to bring the wily old pirate down.

Once the captured Americans had been marched to Kingston to await their disposition at Fort Henry, the town returned to something approaching normalcy. The families who had fled to the safety of the fort wandered home again, and Lewis was finally able to get the attention of the local constable. Patiently, he outlined the series of events that had led him to Prescott.

“Well,” the constable sighed, “I'll investigate, of course, but trying to sort it all out at this late date is going to be difficult. Are you sure it wasn't the Patriot Hunters?”

“Most assuredly not,” and he filled him in on the other deaths, pointing out the similarities in each.

“It may be you're right,” the constable said, “but even so, I have no jurisdiction anywhere but here. The other deaths will have to be sorted out by someone else.”

Lewis knew this, of course, but hoped there was something that could be done. He accompanied the constable back to the house in the clearing. The body was gone and the interior had been cleaned and stripped bare. There was nothing left to see. They backtracked to the man Lewis had sent to guard the body.

It was as Lewis feared. The neighbour had arrived at the scene of the murder just as the victim's husband had returned. The man assumed that Americans had attacked his wife, and that the countryside was full of “the murdering thieves.”

With the help of his neighbour, he had prepared the body and buried it quickly under an oak tree beside the tiny graves of three of their children. He had then packed up his remaining family and headed to Brockville, not wanting to take them anywhere close to the fighting. Whatever evidence might have been gleaned from the site was destroyed. The man was convinced that his wife had been murdered by the invading Hunters and apparently nothing could sway him from this opinion.

The constable shrugged. “There's not a lot I can do. There's no evidence left, and the family is satisfied with the explanation. Dredging it all up again at this point would do more harm than good. And he has a point. How do you know it wasn't a Hunter, a man who got separated from the rest of them and went murdering on his own? In any event, whoever did it is probably miles away by now.”

It would have been much easier for Lewis had his conscience subscribed to this theory, but try as he might, it wouldn't. There were too many similarities to the other deaths, and he had watched as the Hunters landed, well after the woman had drawn her last breath. He supposed they could have landed farther down the river earlier, committed the foul deed, returned to their ships, then headed for Prescott, but it made no sense for them to attack one lone house and move on. He knew there was a murderer somewhere out there — a murderer who killed for no reason, at least none that made sense to a rational person. He appeared to be the only one who understood this, and reflected on how, if he were not a travelling preacher, he would never have realized the connection between the events. It was only because he was in so many places on so many different occasions that he was able to piece together the details that bound the crimes together.

His thoughts turned again to Francis Renwell. Having murdered once, did he find a peculiar thrill in doing it again? Surely there was no such evil in the world, and yet he knew for a fact that Renwell had been close enough at hand for the first two crimes. But what about this last one? Had he really been in Prescott, huddled against a porch, or was that just who Lewis had wanted to see there? Apparently he had disappeared abruptly from Milford after Lewis had seen him there — packed up his belongings and decamped without a word to anyone, he was told by the carpenter. “Good riddance,” the man had added.